Blue Heron Ministries

It’s now the third week of summer and the first seeds of some plants are ripe and

prime for picking. Seed collecting was today’s major focus. In the event of unrelenting rain, we would clean seed already gathered the past couple of weeks and stored at the barn. Some of the crew would work on equipment, some on cleaning and organizing

herbicide containers, others would stay back to plan future projects and write for this newsletter.

Aaaaand… if and when the skies clear, we’re back out to gather more seeds, the target plants identified in today’s morning meeting. Most of the crew left the office for the

barn and quickly divided into the seed sorting and cleaning tasks. The barn is not big and packed fairly tightly with equipment, supplies, chemicals, plant potting materials, and other items that cover our business over the year. The loft above has no hay, but shelving and racks for drying, separating, and storing seed.

Seed collecting begins in very early summer and progresses through late fall. Volunteer collectors and BHM employees will cut and strip plant seeds from a number of sites

throughout the region that offer pure and local genotype species. Enough seed was collected and on racks by July 10, BHM employees today were able to shed rain coats, don dust masks, and screen and bag pure seed.

Many proclaimed how great a Ziploc bag looks filled with pure seed. You could say you hold in your hand the efforts of one or more people visiting some of the most beautiful natural areas in northeast Indiana, collecting, laying out to dry, and now screen-cleaning the seed. In that bag is the sunshine of 2017 that fueled the process of soil, water and this unique plant to grow, flower and fruit. Though just pure seed, in that bag are also that plant’s, roots, stems, flowers, and fruits of many early summer rains for many years to come.

Think about that. A rainy day and Monday will never get you down.

Five scattered wetlands have been restored through a process of breaking drainage tiles and moving earth to create low dams.

Enter, Blue Heron Ministries. BHM worked with the Historic Site to develop a plan to re-vegetate the wetlands. The goal is to create a native wetland plant edge between the

open water of the wetlands and the adjacent prairie installation. In late June and early July, BHM made five trips with varying crew sizes to plant 2 x 2 inch plugs of native wetland species of sedges, rushes, and of course, forbs…nearly 30 species in all.

We procured over 4,000 wetland plant plugs from Heartland Restoration Services in Fort Wayne and another nearly 1,000 plugs were gifted by the Indiana Chapter of The Nature Conservancy, left over from a project they had completed. Thank you TNC!

Over the course of five days, crews of four to six made the trip to Rome City and planted plugs. The wetland plants were first separated into three zones, one out in the

standing water, one along the muddy edge, and one just a little higher above the mud flats. A gas-powered auger with a three inch bit facilitated the placing of plugs. In deeper water, the plants were cut in with long bladed planting knives.

While working, we encountered numerous side attractions which added to what could have been monotonous work of plugging plants. Leopard frogs were active along shorelines and bullfrogs were “baroooooming” out in open water. A harrier flew by giving its characteristic call note and that of a spotted sandpaper broke the silence and revealed its teetering poster across the water.

We’d occasionally chase a family of mallards around the ponds, not intentionally, but as we circled the wetlands with flats of plants, the ducklings and mama kept a safe distance going from side to side. The most unusual sight for me, a mammal checking out our freshly planted greenery, was an adult woodchuck! It allowed me to walk right up to it! A woodchuck in water might partly be like a fish out of water. It eventually had enough and exited the water and laid a soggy trail to some distant hole in the prairie.

The first man heard these strong words from his Creator as a result of his rebellion. And the world has never been the same.

I am often reminded of this part of the Story when we work to restore vitality, diversity, and beauty to wild places in and around northeast Indiana. Basically, the work of ecological restoration is to undo, bit by bit, the curse. Or as Scot McKnight writes in Blue Parakeet, “A Jesus community undoes the distortions of the fall because it seeks to live out the fullness of the Story.” Much of the work of Blue Heron Ministries is removal of weeds (or plants we deem unfit because they do not belong) from areas in which we want to see desirable or native plants and plant communities thrive.

So thorns and thistles are considered “weeds” in the garden we call “home.”

Late June and early July thorns and thistles abound. It is time to control Canada

Thistle. And we do. But it is also time to harvest berries. Black raspberries. Red raspberries. And gooseberries.

Black raspberry brambles have spread along the fencerow at the edge of our prairie. Red raspberry canes arch (and spread) over wire supports in our garden. We planted three gooseberry bushes in our garden twelve years ago after transplanting them time after time as we moved from home to home over the years…an original gift from a friend. It is a good year for berries. After a bad year for gooseberries last year, this has been a bumper crop year. But all three have something in common. Thorns! They grab and scratch and poke and don’t seem to let go. And yet, the work and the sweat do yield a wonderful prize. Black raspberries, red raspberries and gooseberries for fresh eating on summer fruit salads, warm crumble-topped pies, jars of sugary jam, and frozen for winter treats.

I enjoy the fruit of the scratchy, pokey, sweaty labor. I wonder if maybe the curse is lifting a bit. I wonder if sweet berries (yes, gooseberries are “sweet” if you wait to collect them when they are pink-to-maroon and ripe). I wonder if the death and resurrection of Jesus inaugurated the coming of his Kingdom on earth….such that we can see and taste some goodness in those thorns and thistles. And I look forward to the day when the curse is finally lifted for good. It might be a day when new and thornless varieties of my beloved fruit will abound. That will be a sweet day indeed!

Yet what we suffer now is nothing compared to the glory he will reveal to us later. For all creation is waiting eagerly for that future day when God will reveal who his children really are. Against its will, all creation was subjected to God’s curse. But with eager hope, the creation looks forward to the day when it will join God’s children in glorious freedom from death and decay. (Romans 8: 18-21)

And the one sitting on the throne said, “Look, I am making everything new!” (Revelation 21:5)