“You up for walking?” Pat Howerton asked, pressing up her glasses and gesturing toward the nearby field.
Taking care of pastures is a lot of work, she adds. “But it’s good exercise.”
Howerton has just been given the Grassland Award for prairie restoration, specifically for her pasture containing 41 acres of native grass and one containing 14 acres of red clover fescue.
She began the project in 2017.
Pointing south toward the field of golden-brown fescue, she explained how she recently built a pit pond so “that we can have cows in there part of the time.” Though, she adds “it was seven months before it got any water in it.”
Pat then led the way over the hill next to her home, and in accompaniment with the sound of soft wind, explained how the native grass there is comprised of six different species: osage, big bluestem, side oats, aldous, barton, and switchgrass.
She later retrieved a label to double-check each name.
“When you [grow] native grass, you have to sow it by hand,” Howerton explained. “You can’t run it through a seeder.”
Instead, she said, handing over a tupperware container full of seeds and laughing, “you pick a nice windy day, and you throw it up in the air!”
Another thing she’s done to support prairie restoration beyond planting grass is to clear trees. “I cleared all that out,” she noted, while gesturing to the north and northwest. She also said that the trees were “girded,” meaning that one “puts a ring around [them] and they’ll all fall down.”
She also makes room for prairie grass by letting folks clear out hedge trees so as to burn them for fuel.
Howerton explains that she and her husband, Loren, who passed away in 2013, had been in farming for about 50 years, and during that time grew beans, corn and milo.
Today, though, she mostly gardens.
“The main thing I like is cantaloupe and watermelon,” she said. Growing blueberries and strawberries has been more difficult of late.
“When we were farming, I worked in town,” Howerton said. She labored at the Miller dress factory in Iola for 21 years.
Having lived in Geneva Township for most of her life, she recalls when “there used to be quite a little town there,” featuring a blacksmith, community hall and grocery store.
She also remembers when the 1951 Flood took its toll on the region, washing away her then-home.
“Our house was down there,” she says pointing south. “It happened to be in the [Neosho’s] current area. … Our house went down the river.”
