~Iris DeMent~
‘Our Town’
they sleep up the street beside that pretty brick wall.
I bring them flowers about every day,
but I just got to cry when I think what they’d say;
If they could see how the sun’s settin’ fast,
and just like they say, nothing good ever lasts.
So go on now and kiss it goodbye,
but hold on to your lover,
’cause your heart’s gonna die
Go on now and say ‘goodbye’ to our town, to our town.
Can’t ya see the sun’s settin fast on our town, on our town
goodbye.
This is a photo of the sun setting beyond our town, Nipomo Calif on New Years’ Eve We’re a very lucky little place, blessed with great weather, but sadly most of the town sits on a huge sand dune so most ag products will not grow well in the sand.
Yet we’re a little tiny agricultural town… but we don’t grow corn or rice here… our main ag products are nursery plants. Since the weather is so conducive to growth, and the highway 101 runs right through town, and there are natural gas pipelines nearby… there developed a greenhouse industry in our location. I don’t know how many acres are under glass and plastic here…. I know some operations that have hundreds of acres covered. so I’d imagine there may well be over a thousand acres under glass here. They grow seedlings for the farms in California and neighboring states. Seedlings are a very fragile little thing, and growers have much more success by having them grown in the tightly-controlled conditions of a greenhouse….. then enough tomato or celery seedlings for a forty acre field might fit into a tractor-trailer rig and get pulled to the Central Valley to be laid in that loamy soil.
The economy has hit this place like it has any others. But people still need to eat…. so while things are tough, and some homes have shuttered, things will go on. But still, this lonesome plaintive song by Iris Dement accompanied by Emmylou Harris is heart-and-soul of the nature of a small town…
Here’s two photos I took of the hillsides nearby the town. While most of the rest of the country is blasted by horrid temperatures, we’ve been basking in daytime temps in the sixties and low seventies. Most nights are staying in the forties.
Winter is the time that we have green hills…. by May the plants will be putting out seeds and drying up. All through the summer our hillsides tend to be parched and barren… tan tawny blankets piled high around one side of the town… the other side open to the moderating effects of the ocean… this keeps the town from getting too hot in the summer… and it helps keep it warmer in the winter.
This is the view I get every day! Our main cactus plantings are just up the hill behind me.
I think the cactus like the view, and they like the soils we’ve built up.
Happy cactus comes from California!