Hello, I’m Juan J. Morales, an assistant professor of English at Colorado College and a poet in Pueblo, Colorado, here for Poets on the Plains. Today, I’m thrilled to share with you a poem by Andrew Hemmert, titled, “After Moving.”

When homesteaders left their forested hillsides of the East and arrived on the treeless plains, they must have wondered what in the world they would use to shore up the face of a dugout, put a fence around their land, or confine a milk cow. With few trees in sight to be used for lumber and fence posts, the new arrivals in one area of Kansas looked beneath their feet and found unlimited resources in the limestone that lay just below the topsoil.

You can look forward to hearing music from iconic western movies and tv shows as well as a collection of orchestrated cowboy songs on the show this week!

Gardening on the High Plains can be a fun and rewarding experience, but let’s face it…we get some pretty rough storms, the kind that can leave some lasting damage. Some plans can recover fairly well from this damage, but in other cases, it can be wiser just to start over with a new plant and focus on its welfare. This week, we’ll talk about how to make those choices, and what other forms this damage can take.