June 18, 2009
Greetings!
With just under one week until our first CSA pickup, the garden is moving right along. Bright, beautiful lettuce heads are filling out, two kinds of kale, radishes, mustard greens tender and big for braising, scallions, and pea shoots will all be ready for munching come next Tuesday. The chickens are robust and hilarious as ever, and learning the new, fun game of Worm Rugby as they explore the delights of outdoor life. This week’s update is a two-for-one bargain to make up for last week’s (busy!) silence.
This year so far has been marked by the generous donations of time, muscle, and and tender loving care of friends from near and far, past and present. Visitors and co-apprentices from two of my previous farm experiences in Oregon have ventured easterly and brought with them their passion and pragmatism, helping to organize and harvest for the first Dorset Farmer’s Market, transplant veggies, and wreak havoc on the weeds (Hoe Fever!); a dozen college friends came to celebrate a Happy Dirtday party in May and help pick rocks out of the field and transplant over a dozen flats of onions; summer squash was moved out and covered with reemay, filled with updates from Peace Corps life in Kazakhstan and Liberia; winter den sity ledis and swiss chard were seeded by the tentative eight-year old hands of Green Peak Farm’s official Junior Rock Patrolller neighbor; nearly weekly photo-journal entries are snapped; plans are being made with a college/now Oregonian friend to snag her away from her new draft horses and milking goats in early August. Thanks to everyone who has invested themselves, in whatever and every way, for rounding out the character of this place!
This week Green Peak Farm has been host to my dear friend, Brian, who was a co-apprentice at Gardenripe Farm in Silverton, OR. Thanks to Brian’s tenacity and zeal for hoeing, we’ve managed to chase out a lot of the ryegrass, timothy, tap-rooted red clover, and other pasture plants looking to re-inhabit their one-time homes. Yesterday evening found us weeding the winter squash hills, which are just starting to be visible from the landing on Green Peak. As we made our way down the beds, the roar and tumult of our neighbors’ tractors came rumbling in to tet and bale the hay in the rest of the field. You can hear them coming from miles away. Zing! And they’re off! Roar and tumble around the field, round and around again; Brian and I paused in our hoeing and hand weeding, shot sidelong glances at each other, and couldn’t help but sit to watch for a minute to ooh and ahh over the speed and easy mechanization of the entire process. In the course of about an hour, sixteen round bales with a 4-foot diameter were deposited in the path of the machines, laid like golden eggs from the giant green oviduct of the racous JohnDeere-bird.
As we got back to the task at hand, Brian looked at me and said, “You know, they think we’re crazy, too.” And he’s probably right, and we probably are, but as I’ve had ample opportunity to work out The Case For Hand-Weeding, I’ll give it a go on you. For me the bottom line is the idea of simple tools begetting simple problems, which in turn beget simple solutions. Where is the nearest tractor supply store? The average in-transit shipping times for parts coming from Whoknowswhere? The cheapest supply for new 3-point hitch arms or welding tools to reattach them to my busted rig? How much is bulk fuel going for these days, and what sort of fuel buying club do I need to submit membership to? I’m happy not to know. Every time I pause to look down the row to see how much further there is to go, I think of all of the time and energy it would take to fire up the tractor, attach the implement, drive it down to the field, make one pass, drive it back up the field, park the tractor, and get back to where I was, remembering all along to not run over irrigation or dogs or pointy rocks, not to let the fuel level get too low, to drive wide around the corners so the rear hitch has room to swing. I love the quietude of the hoeing, quiet enough to open windows of thought or, as I’ve had the good fortune with this week’s visitor, carry on a great conversation about our national attitudes toward food and how short-term our concepts of health and value have become. My working knowledge of different stages of development for insects and plants, beneficial and otherwise, grows every time I plunge my hands into the soil. I like to think of the empathy my hands share with the roots of my plants, and small discoveries like the five degree temperature difference between the west side of the cabbage plants and the shaded east side on a hot afternoon get a chance to be noticed. Careful observation can only happen with time, observation pays off in the long run, and I do hope to be running for a long, long time.
Here’s a quote from Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim At Tinker Creek:
“Cruelty is a mystery and the waste of pain. But if we describe a world to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and light, the canary that sings on the skull. Unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitious. About five years ago I saw a mockingbird make a straight vertical descent from the roof gutter of a four-story building. It was an act as careless and spontaneous as the curl of a stem or the kindling of a star.
The mockingbird took a single step into the air and dropped. His wings were still folded against his sides as though he were singing from a limb and not falling, accelerating thirty-two feet per second per second, through empty air. Just a breath before he would have been dashed to the ground, he unfurled his wings with exact, deliberate care, revealing the broad bars of white, spread his elegant, white-banded tail, and so floated onto the grass. I had just rounded a corner when his insouciant step caught my eye; there was no one else in sight. The fact of his free fall was like the old philosophical conundrum about the tree that falls in the forest. The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.”
Have a great week!
Mego
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