DRY CRIK Journal

Centaury (Zeltnera venusta)
Dry Creek
May 27, 2010

Centaurium (formerly Erythraea) is a genus of 20 species in the gentian family (Gentianaceae), tribe Chironieae, subtribe Chironiinae. The genus was named after the centaur Chiron, famed in Greek mythology for his skill in medicinal herbs. It is distributed across Europe and into Asia.

Until 2004, Centaurium was given a much wider circumscription, comprising about 50 species ranging across Europe, Asia, the Americas, Australasia and the Pacific. However this circumscription was polyphyletic, so in 2004 the genus was split in four, being Centaurium sensu stricto, Zeltnera, Gyrandra and Schenkia.

Under the older circumscription, the common name for plants in this genus was Centaury. - Wikipedia

Medicinal Action and Uses---Aromatic bitter, stomachic and tonic. It acts on the liver and kidneys, purifies the blood, and is an excellent tonic.

The dried herb is given in infusion or powder, or made into an extract. It is used extensively in dyspepsia, for languid digestion with heartburn after food, in an infusion of 1 OZ. of the dried herb to 1 pint of water. When run down and suffering from want of appetite, a wineglassful of this infusion Centaury Tea - taken three or four times daily, half an hour before meals, is found of great benefit. The same infusion may also be taken for muscular rheumatism.

Culpepper tells us that:
'the herbe is so safe that you cannot fail in the using of it, only give it inwardly for inward diseases, use it outwardly for outward diseases. 'Tis very wholesome, but not very toothsome.'

He says:
'it helps those that have the dropsy, or the green-sickness, being much used by the Italians in powder for that purpose. It kills worms ... as is found by experience.... A dram of the powder taken in wine, is a wonderful good help against the biting and poison of an adder. The juice of the herb with a little honey put to it, is good to clear the eyes from dimness, mists and clouds that offend or hinder sight. It is singularly good both for green and fresh wounds, as also for old ulcers and sores, to close up the one and cleanse the other, and perfectly to cure them both, although they are hollow or fistulous; the green herb, especially, being bruised and laid thereto. The decoction thereof dropped into the ears, cleanses them from worms . . . and takes away all freckles, spots, and marks in the skin, being washed with it.' - Botanical.com

Interestingly, or coincidently, this large patch of centaury is found in our horse pasture next to the house, on the knoll, we have been told, that was a sacred healing place for native women.

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(Showy) Indian Clover
Dry Creek
May 27, 2010

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 6:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 27, 2010
Greasy Creek

Weaning calves this past week - bovine music at every corral, weather cool.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 5:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Dancing heel-to-toe
across the pen, he gets down
to face the music –

stop, pirouette and glide,
he has the moves
to change a bovine’s thinking.

Lucky-enough to be aboard,
to partner-up,
stay out of his way.

Your horse in the gloaming,
we savor the moments
with a glass of wine.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 5:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Beyond the stockade –
the global stage reset
for one more war as oil
leaks from the ocean floor.

Too big to fight, too big
to change, ‘let them play,
old violence is not too old
to beget new values’.

The earth quakes all over,
steaming Iceland,
spinning hurricanes,
demanding equal time –

listen to her, listen
to the old ways,
relearn the chants
of your mother tongue.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 5:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We start the week at 46 degrees this a.m. as the sun breaks the ridge beneath the clouds, less than a month from the summer solstice. Unseasonably cool, we know it will warm up someday. The Dry Creek neighbors met here Saturday for some grass-fed hamburgers as we approach the beginning of fire season - ample fuel after last winter's rains - and to update our contact list. Present were representatives from CDF and the Kaweah Delta Water Conservation District, coordinating water supplies from the Lake Kaweah Enlargement Mitigation Site on Dry Creek for fighting fire. Good to see everyone under relaxed circumstances, providing those within this twelve mile stretch of road an opportunity to get to know one another a little better.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 6:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

BREATHING, IN DUST. By Tim Z. Hernandez. (Texas Tech University Press, 2903 4th Street, Suite 201, Lubbock, TX 79409) http://www.ttup.ttu.edu/ 192 pp. Cloth $26.95

A generation between the author and I, Tim Z. Hernandez’s slice of time during BREATHING, IN DUST is quite different in this place where we both grew up, and in three decades Mexican-American families have displaced the remnants of the Dust Bowl Okies in the fields of the San Joaquin Valley, the kids of whom I went to school with and whose fathers were heroic examples of ingenuity and hard work, storytellers with a coarse and basic humor in the vineyards and orchards of my grandfather when I was a boy.

But growing up in the fictional town of Catela (an alias for Cutler, California, named for my maternal great great-grandfather), Tlaloc manages to dodge the bullets of poverty, drugs and gangs, taking risks with ample introspection and serendipity, yet choosing his own path towards manhood. Hernandez develops unforgettable characters with heart, with a pathos that permeates this timely and exciting odyssey. This is not a read for the squeamish or easily offended, nor are his explicit descriptions inserted for shock value – ‘it is what it is’ – his each vignette is an original and artful perspective full of both hope and despair, a deep vulnerability that enriches humanity and connects us all.

         There is a bullet hole in my fence that stares at me every time
         I walk up the driveway. A hole, where every year around Thanksgiving
         a family gathers and brings flowers and candles and sits around and talks
         until the pigeons fade into darkness. I’m left to watch these flowers dry up
         and flake off. Left to dream about that hole, time and again. Sometimes
         I fall into the hole and can’t get my footing. Other times, my right eye is
         the hole looking out over the front yard, and my body is the fence post, and I
         feel as if I’ve seen more than I care to.

It’s easy to ignore Catela, to ignore what the other Valley farm towns like Cutler have become, to avoid a part of what our big cities have become as well, and leave it all on the morning news. But within their tragic squalor and drug-infested gang wars, within their core are the innocent whose only shortcoming is that they are poor.

On my California bookshelf, I’d have to place BREATHING, IN DUST alongside Didion’s WHERE I WAS FROM, Arax and Wartzman’s KING OF CALIFORNIA and Steinbeck’s GRAPES OF WRATH. This is a courageous book that has no ending, really – a spellbinding story of one man’s reach for something more.

- JCD

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 5:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Indian Clover
Dry Creek
May 8, 2010

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 7:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Rock Lettuce
Dry Creek
May 8, 2010

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Ripening with time, I paint a face
that scorned the sun, that grinned
into the blaze of the San Joaquin

like Icarus from Crete. A daub of
grease between the gray smeared-in
the skin, remembering make-believe

I miss, mythologies I crave now,
before I leave this planet in revolt –
these displeased gods with clever

schemes of their own. Time, perhaps,
to listen to the Aztecs, Yokuts and
the Greeks, time to learn their songs.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 5:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

No call to make –
no waiting until you awake,
we are freed from holidays,

you and me. Each busy signal left
on the answering machine,
I think of you as still

in the ‘museum’
as if it were jail,
as if it were penance

or punishment – your end
of days – final payment
for a practical life.

‘No services –’
you said, seeing beyond
the last drop of morphine

and the cemetery boxed
on top of Robert – just
the thought made you uneasy.

Few friends left,
the rest would come
from obligation.

Your last gift to Robbin,
no preparations
for the gathering after –

for the small talk and all
the emotional complications
you understood and hated

to endure. You are free
at last, I pray, from these –
we are not.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 6:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Twining Brodiaea
Dry Creek
May 8, 2010

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 7:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

White Owl's Clover (Valley Tassels)
Dry Creek
May 1, 2010

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Elegant Clarkia
Greasy Creek
May 6, 2010
Genus named (Clarkia unguiculata) in honor of Captain William Clark, Lewis & Clark Expedition (1804-1806).

Bob and I ran across a hillside full (south-facing) on the way up Greasy Creek to fix fence and replace a gate the bulls demolished. Neither of us can remember seeing it before - wet spring.

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Off the mountain, the stone turns round –
sheds it edges and rests between pools,
between trees, between the floods

with nothing left to prove. It has not
taken long to fall from steep ideals,
far peaks like teeth tearing at the sky.

A steady roar of news pushes upstream,
ruffling willows, oaks and sycamores,
yet much is lost along the way here –

like the petty and picayune that don’t
sell much for long, or the slow drums
of the ever-fearful souls determined

that the world has gone to hell with hate.
What genius lets these molten fires explode,
leak out to cool beneath the ice, to create

these ever-changing clouds of steam
at Eyjafjallajokull? And we so pleased
that it’s not the end of a work in progress.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 5:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We're getting ready to wean and ship our Wagyu cross calves to Snake River Farms http://www.snakeriverfarms.org/ in the next ten days. Check out the archives in the sidebar to see these calves in August and October 2009.

We're pleased with this experiment with our first-calf yearling heifers. The calves average about 550 lbs.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 4:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)