When considering buying a place in the country, I advise finding the nastiest-looking, trashed out, abused, scarred run down property you can get your hands on. Really, your only real requisite for land is that the neighbors be no fewer than 330 feet away (the width of a five-acre block). Not that there's anything wrong with having neighbors. HA! Just kidding! At any rate, abused property can be bought as foreclosures, or if not, at least at unheard-of low prices.

Then, have the scrap metal collector come out and haul away all the junk cars, old refrigerators, mattress springs, steel roofing, stoves and so on. After the scrap is gone, bring in a demolition dumpster and get after the acres of old carpet, brittle, UV-damaged plastics of various obsolete electronics, scattered plastic broom bristles (invariably of eye-catching color), vinyl-upholstered loveseats, foam padding, broken glass, broken glass, broken glass, old carpet, macabre-looking baby dolls half-buried in the dirt -- all that good stuff. When you have filled the demolition dumpster thrice or so, and finally gotten down to picking up individual things like bottle caps and cigarette butts, it's time to burn the rotted wood found in profusion around such places. After you have burned it all, use a construction-site magnet nail-picker-upper and your hands to pick up the burned out, rusted nail (after the coals have burned out).

Burn somewhere you're not worried about sterilizing the soil, but don't worry too much. Even if you sterilize the soil, you'll soon discover LAND HEALS! This is the point of buying sorry, worn-out property: you can put it back in balance.

The photo of the Monarch on the native blooms belies the dump that previously was our little homestead. It had been rented to the ranch help, who apparently used the entire property as a trash dump. After that, "friends" of the family left bags of divorce-discarded property, all seriously random, including a non-functioning Jeep pick-up. I do believe that it took me THREE construction dumpsters to get the land somewhere near clean, but the acreage was a gift from my father, so it was the least I could do for the entire family, nuclear and extended. But most of all, I did it for the land. The land gains a place in the family as a symbiotic protector and nurturer. Take care of the land, and it will surely take care of you.

Peace. Out.