We are having crispy fall color this autumn in Platte County due to drought. If the trees are suffering in your yard or neighborhood, here’s a tip, considering watering, and to catch some color take short rural road trips on the county’s blacktop and gravel roads.
Here and there will be patches of good color to see on the trees. The color change feels rustic and for me a pleasant feeling of olden times. One way to experience that is visiting some of the smaller towns in the county’s north such as Dearborn, Camden Point, and Edgerton. How many of you have ever been to Ridgely, Iatan, or Farley?
Bill Graham
We have a lot of growth in Platte County, especially in the south, and I bet many newcomers have never seen some of these little towns or been down the rural backroads.
This has been on my mind because I made a backroads drive to Dearborn recently. I played music as part of the entertainment for a Saturday evening fall festival hosted by Central Bank. It was nice to run into some old friends that I hadn’t talked with in years, and I met some new folks. The old houses and small brick building business district in towns like this have a quiet charm that I like, especially in autumn.
It may take a bit more looking around this fall to find the autumn charm because of drought. Much of Missouri was terribly dry all spring and summer, but Platte County was blessed with rain. Until, in the middle of August the rain stopped. My rain gauge had one inch of rain in late August and one inch in late September and none since. The soil is sun dried daily and despite cool nights the days are quite warm.
When you drive the rural roads it appears that the dryness has allowed the corn to be harvested and soybean harvest is also well along. Those crops likely had enough summer rain to make it a profitable year for our farm families. But if you were trying to grow a fall garden, you needed to have the water hose hooked up. It is bone dry.
Trees common in the county such as hackberry, walnut, and honey locust started dropping leaves in late August and were mostly done by the end of September.
Here we are in the normal peak color time, and many tree limbs are already bare. Hickories and maples are holding leaves, and the maples are turning crimson in many yards. But the hickories are mostly brown and dull yellow. There is still hope for bright color in the oaks. Many of them are still green. But they need some of the rain forecast for this week.
If it doesn’t rain this week, watering valued fruit or shade trees is advised. The soil needs to be damp down to the length of a six-inch screwdriver underneath the whole limb canopy, a Missouri Department of Conservation forester once told me. Use the screwdriver poked in the ground to measure dampness.
I always feel like if I decide to water it will then rain later, but if I don’t, it won’t rain. That’s a very unscientific approach but it works. Maybe by writing about how dry it is I’ll make it rain.
Sometimes you can find benefits from a bad weather pattern. For those of you who enjoy watching birds at feeders in your yards, a good trick now is to keep water sources for birds handy. The bird bath in my yard is currently more popular than the bird feeder. Once I started keeping it full of water, suddenly for the first time I had bluebirds, a few wrens, lots of robins, a gorgeous pair of flickers, the first juncos from the north, and some downy or hairy woodpeckers that had been absent for a few months.
The normal visitors such as goldfinches and black-capped chickadees have been drinking heartily, too. In normal times, they can drink from creeks and small wetlands. But this autumn, creeks and wetlands are dry, even ones that normally have a little bit of water all summer and fall.
Even a dry autumn, however, has color that reminds one of nature’s constant changes. Beyond our human clocks and calendars nature passes time in its own way, one beyond our control, ways that affect us.
If you decide to take a drive in Platte County to enjoy color, here’s a few suggestions. Missouri 45 between Parkville and Iatan is a good route. You pass through some hills in the south and the Missouri River bottoms in the north. Theå river bluffs are mostly timbered and often showy. Northwest Waukomis Drive in the county’s southeast corner is nice from Riverside up to Barry Road, as it passes through the Line Creek Valley.
You can get on the Interurban Road off Missouri 92 and take a leisurely blacktop drive north past Camden Point and on to Dearborn. Check out the North Platte Historical Museum and Cultural Center there. Of course, Weston and old downtown Parkville are the well-known autumn destinations. They have old trees, interesting houses, and Victorian business districts.
These are high-stress times with war afoot in the world and threatening to expand, and a painfully divided America careening toward one of the most important election days in history. But finding a way to enjoy autumn brings a bit of peacefulness. Take a drive in the country, turn down a gravel road you’ve never been on. Finding new places and things to see brings hope and reassurance that we will be okay.
Bill Graham is a long-time commentator on Platte County and its history. He lives in the Platte City area and can be reached at editor@plattecountycitizen.com.