Ploughs in Tucson

The corn shucker. If you look inside, there are some really nasty
metal teeth. Maybe it makes corn flakes or corn meal.

The Binghamton area, by the Rillito River just below where we live, used to be farmed by Mormon settlers until the 1930's when the water table had dropped and Tucson was growing. The area where we live, on San Simeon Drive, used to be a cattle ranch named, oddly enough, San Simeon.

So it is apropos to have some reminders of those earlier, pioneer days. At least something more attractive than the ubiquitous broken bottles and other trash -- some of it possibly quite historic -- that one can find lying around.

That's also a part of Arizona tradition: chucking empty whiskey bottles from stage coaches. The local cowboys weren't very ecologically minded either. Their genes live on in the people who chuck trash by the side of the road. But I digress.

We lucked out. Our neighbors decided to move to Scottsdale and were willing to let go of some of the old, rusty, and really keen farm implements they had on display by their driveway.

Some sort of cultivator.

Shari thought we'd buy one and display it in the otherwise somewhat barren center of the roundabout at the dead-end of San Simeon Drive. I shouldn't describe it as barren. The ocotillo there is stunning. But since we neighbors got together and cleared it of chollas and trimmed the blue agave leaves, there's not much to catch the eye.

We got eight old relics: one corn shucker, three wheels, and three ploughs/cultivators and a potato harvester.

One of the big wheels is earmarked for the dead-end circle. The other seven are way too cute for me to leave them out-of-sight from the front door.

I started putting them by the driveway away from the house. But I liked them too much. I wanted to be able to see them sitting in front of the house. I moved them way closer.

Somehow, simply seeing some old farm implements on the property brings back a bit of the old settler culture. Or so I'd like to flatter myself. At minimum, they remind me of outside work, so they invite me to step outside and do some gardening.

I wonder where we can find more of these rusty rural relics.

Say, are we going native? Not if I have to keep a horse or a donkey to pull these things. Guns and horses are big in Arizona, but I'm not going there.