Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Cockleburs, Beans, and Crops

It's so fun to be rural America. Really, it is. I love hearing these people talk about what it's like in these corn and bean fields in rural Iowa.

Back in the day, before farmers relied solely on herbicides in their Iowa soybean fields, the preferred method of weeding was “walking beans”. I've never done it in Iowa - but I did do it in south Missouri. My wife is a native of Iowa and she tells me she has done it in these fields. Maybe you have, too. It was always a quite predictable summer job. You’d get your crew together, spread out and walk down the field getting rid of the weeds that grew. Each person would be responsible for the two rows on either side of them. Sometimes you carried a hoe. Sometimes a corn knife, the Iowa farmer’s equivalent of a machete.

The type of weed determined how you killed it. Corn, milkweed, lambs quarter, pig weed, and water weed could all be chopped. Nightshade had to be pulled. As did velvet leaf, a.k.a. “button weed”. One button weed could have a hundred seed pods, each containing at least 700 seeds. When it’s ripe it explodes, sending on the wind a “be fruitful and multiply” scenario that anyone in a John Deere hat cringes to see. So you pull the button weed to make really sure it will die.

One thing I didn't like in some of these fields is cockleburs. Sometimes there were huge patches of cockleburs growing in the soybeans.

You need to know that cockleburs definitely fell into the “pull” category. Only they weren’t as easy to pull as velvet leaf/button weeds. Some things are like they sound. Velvet leaf is soft. A warm fuzzy in the weed kingdom. Pulling cockleburs is like grabbing sandpaper. Itchy. Scratchy. Irritating.

On some of this "walking the beans" stuff, I'm told that sometimes the cocklebur patches were so thick you had to get down on your hands and knees to look under the soybean plants to be sure you got them all. When you're doing that, you aren’t walking beans. You are crawling them.

Sure enough, under the leaves are small cocklebur plants that, if someone had not looked, would have grown up to mock the "walkers" as they drove by the field two weeks later. And when it comes to weeds and cockleburs, just when you think you've got them all, you find some more.

Lately I’ve been thinking about how I, and some others I know, live the Christian life. Some weeds are easy to see. And because they are easy to see they are relatively easy to get rid of. Walk and chop as you go along. An obvious unkind word? Yank it out. A little short-tempered and make a fool of yourself? Whack it hard and it probably won’t come back. It’s not hard to walk along and get rid of the weeds you see.

More difficult are the weeds growing underneath. The cockleburs of an arrogant spirit. The velvet leaf of pride that, left to grow to maturity, will explode into seeds of destruction.

The only way to find them is to get down on your knees. It’s awkward at first. You even resent the fact that you’re having to kneel. It seems so, well, beneath you. But once you’re down there, the more you look, the more you find. And when you find, you have to pull. Don’t chop at it. Small weeds, left to grow, will later mock you.

It's always disconcerting and even embarrassing to drive by a field and see one lone button weed, five feet tall and waving at you in the breeze. You have to go back and kill it. But this time the stalk is an inch thick and the roots are set. Much harder to pull out. A back breaker.

If only it had been pulled out when you were down there on your knees.

As we walk, look back and look under to see what we’re missing. Time spent on our knees pulling weeds makes for a cleaner field.

A cleaner field makes for a better crop.

A better crop makes for a great harvest.

Praying for you as we pull together. “He who wants his garden tidy doesn’t reserve a plot for weeds.” - Dag Hammarskjold

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