Post date: Mar 28, 2015 7:52:50 PM
One feature of most true communities is the community shared work day.
This is the first time I have been able to participate in a work day at Valverde Commons (VC). (The past three years of my membership I was in Seattle.) We have two kinds of work days here:
The irrigation ditch gets choked with weeds during the year. So early each Spring all the participants are required to clean the ditch. Today is ditch cleaning. This supposedly only takes three hours.
Last Saturday was VC monthly work day. Last month was clean-up in the barn. Members had been donating tools and equipment for months and it was totally disorganized and hard to navigate. Clearly much better after the work.
This month our VC work involved collecting the tumbleweeds into piles, so that they could be burned on Monday (which we did). Our land is in an old river bottom. This land is only good for grazing, and over the past couple hundred years it has been grazed heavily.
This grazing has removed the grasses and forbes (flowering plants), leaving the local tumbleweeds (introduced Russian Thistle). It is not so bad here as in Clovis, but we would like our 5-acre common park to be populated with native grasses and flowers.
Of course the common name “Russian Thistle” does not really tell me which of the six species of invasive thistle this might be. There are four Centaurea species and two Cirsium species with “thistle” in their common names, none ‘Russian’.
The ditch work consisted of maybe 20 of us with shovels, rakes and loppers, cutting the shrubs and cleaning out accumulated vegetation and occasional dirt that blocks free passage of the water. We started a bit after nine and ended just before noon, so it did take less than three hours.
At the end of our work morning we gathered at the diversion dam on the Rio Pueblo and opened the gate. I didn’t follow the water down, but supposedly - not too far from my house - I will be able to see water in a ditch.