The Sweet Sticky Harvest

In my morning walkabout through my garden the other day, all was pretty much normal.  I knocked back some of the wild grape that's tangled throughout my sunflower patch, snipping away the choking growth.  I checked in on my butternut squash, which is starting to cure on the vine, the soft wan green tanning to faint yellow.  I watched bumblebees noodle about through the wildly abundant, sweetly pungent basil, which...as we're getting into August...I'm now allowing to bolt to flower.  No flower means no seed, and as I'm two years into basil that I've started myself, I'd kinda like to keep that pesto-fountain going. 

Finally, I went around harvesting okra pods with my best sharp steel scissors.  I've got two four by eight beds dedicated to that traditional Southern crop this year, and the pods are poppin'.  They sever with a satisfying snap, as real force is required to get through the thick stem.  The yield has picked up as the season has progressed. There's a nice fat gallon bag filled in the freezer, with far more yet to come.  Batter fried okra and bhindi masala awaits.

But as I moved to the second of the two beds, I noticed a shadowing on the leaves and flowers a single one of the plants.  Uh oh.  Okra is pretty resilient, but the truth of gardens is that everything in the world wants to eat them.  As I approached, my fading middle aged eyes only saw a dark stippled fuzz.  Fungal growth?  Perhaps.  I couldn't tell without my reading glasses, so I used my other senses. I reached out and touched the greyness with an index finger.  It was sticky.  I held my finger to my nose, and sniffed.  Sweet.

Not fungus.  Aphids.  Drat.  

I went and grabbed my glasses from inside, then peered at the leaves to confirm.  Yup.  Black Aphids, a great bumper crop of them.  They were sucking the life from the flowers, and were a grey living hoarfrost suckling on the shaded underside of the leaves.  

I'd had another species of aphid devastate several kale crops a few years back, but hadn't had these particular little devils about yet.   As I mused on how I might destroy them, I noted that the aphids weren't alone.

All across the thickly blighted leaves were hundreds of small black ants.  They streamed up and down the stalks.  They moved delicately across the dense masses of feeding aphids.  Ahah, I thought.  Farmers.  

Ants are remarkable for many things, and one of the peculiar outputs of their distributed social intelligence is insect agriculture.  Aphids poop out honeydew, a sweet sugar-rich byproduct of their digestion, and so ants will gather and tend herds of aphids.  Think teeny weeny dairy herders, and you're not far off.  They'll eat some of the aphids, too, and while I can't confirm they use aphid leather as clothing, I wouldn't put it past the industrious little beggars.   I'd never seen it in action before, not that I can remember.    

It's cool if you're an entomologist, but rather less so when you're a gardener.  

The more I looked, the more I discovered the aphids, dense on the flower clusters, or squirreled away by the veins of a leaf.  Everywhere, they were tended by ants. My early fall okra harvest was under threat.  I mixed up a spray bottle or two with a mixture of soap and water, which weakens the aphids.  I doused every one of their colonies, and let that set for a while.

Then out came the garden hose, set on "Riot Suppression."  I revisited their leafy pastures, and blasted the aphids bodily from the plants.  It was rather satisfying.  

Ants are great pollinators, and generally garden-friendly, but once they've brought their livestock to feed, they've crossed a line.  They're not working with me, but against me.  The plants so carefully placed will wither and perish under that excess burden.  In pursuit of their sweet honeydew harvest, ant and aphid alike are taking more than the garden can give, and no gardener is obligated to tolerate that.

As I rewound the hose, I found myself musing on the ramifications of that idea.  I glanced for a moment skyward.  Nestled in the sprawl of the 'burbs, where all is steel and concrete and sticky sweet hyperabundance, I looked at the August sky, the blue tinged by the haze of far-off wildfires.  I considered how much more we take than can be given.  How much more we have than is mindful.

For a moment...in my mind's eye, and all...I visualized a great nozzle in the heavens, clicking the nozzle to "jet."

It wouldn't be the first time.

Beans and Berries and Sweat on the Brow

This morning, as the sun crested the small rise to the East, I was out in my garden picking the last of the blueberries. 

 The day was going to be fiercely hot, stinky sticky smothering hot, with humidity in the eighties and real temperatures potentially cresting one hundred degrees Fahrenheit.  It's the sort of day when spending time outside is best done early, the sort of day when the heat doesn't dissipate with the setting of the sun. 

The last of the succulent deep-purple berries hung fat on my bushes, though, and my greenbeans were poppin', so there was harvesting to be done.  After walking the dog, drinking my coffee, and attending briefly to the daily mess of world news, I took a couple of shiny metal bowls out into the yard and started picking.

I'd already pulled a gallon and a half worth of berries off of our two bushes, and so there wasn't much left worth plucking.  Just about a cup of ripe fruit remained, the berries perfect and ready, popping off their stems with only the very lightest of effort.  The dull faint tink of each falling fruit against the bottom of the stainless steel bowl was pleasing to the ear, chiming to mark the sultry end of my blueberry season.  

Then it was on to my four by eight bean patch, where I squatted and plucked again, pinching beans from stems with thumb and forefinger.  My trusty old bush beans, seedsaved for nearly a decade, were starting to produce.  

As I picked, the heat continued to rise, and sweat prickled across my forehead beneath the shade of my hat-brim.  I felt the effort in my middle-aged thighs as I squatted, moving counterclockwise around the raised bed.  I peered into the dense interwoven foliage, gently parting it with my hand, eyes moving from bean to bean, my mind sorting between those that are ready and those worth leaving for another harvest later in the week.  About a half-gallon of beans today, filling my larger bowl.

It's simple work, physical and wholly engaging.  For forty five minutes or an hour before the heat of the day becomes too much, it's no great burden.  But for a whole day?  For eight hours, even with breaks?  It would be utterly exhausting, and the endurance required to work in the fields seems...to my flaccid suburban flesh...herculean.

Gardening, I reflected as I popped plump beans into my bowl, is a good reminder of what it takes to bring food to our tables.  It's the most fundamentally necessary labor, but also the labor that we've chosen to ignore as a society.  It's viewed as unworthy of our effort, as the most menial and lowly of tasks, to be performed by those at the very bottom of the economic food chain.   It is the work of migrants and the imprisoned, not that there seems much difference between those two categories in America these days.

That such labor is disrespected is an abomination.  That it is a thousand times less lucrative than dooping around with some AI-enhanced blockchain folderol seems a perversion of the order of things.  It's an inhuman and unnatural misvaluation.  As a substantial portion of our culture turns snarling against those whose sweat and strain feeds it, this seems a form of madness.  Is it seething resentment at our dependence, that we rely utterly upon the work of others, and that our "superiority" is nothing but a mask for our weakness?  Perhaps. 

Or perhaps we're just fools.

Perhaps we are as brimming with hubris as the Spartans, who imagined that their monomaniacal worship of Ares made them stronger than their slaves.  For without the humble helots who grew the crops and tended the livestock, all the martial disciplines of Leonidas wouldn't have kept him alive for a week.  Or are we like Midas, perhaps?  Are we about to break our teeth on grapes gone hard to our touch, feeling our thirst rise as we peer down at the unquenching metal of our Mammonists desire that now fills our glass?

A little less time in the false halls of golden delusion might clear our addled minds, and return us to right appreciation of the things that matter.  

A little more time in our gardens, with the fruit of the earth before us and sweet honest sweat on our brow. 

 

Blueberries and Catbirds

As the first wave of summer heat spools up, my little garden is almost ready for the second wave of harvest.

Asparagus is the tip of the spear, rising when spring first whispers at warmth.  Those delectable first fern shoots are now long gone, allowed to grow to their natural man-height, a riot of delicate whiskers and poisonous berries.

This week, I'll be gently digging out my overwintered garlic.  Their great-great-grandmother bulbs were Trader Joes organics, which I bought five years ago to plant rather than eat.  They're an indeterminate softneck variety, which I plant copiously in early fall.  Last year I got 25 bulbs, and as I'm of the "triple the garlic" persuasion in any recipe, they go to good use.  This year, I'm hoping for thirty out of two four-by-eight beds.  It's the most I've ever grown, and I may even try intercropping this year, as Nosferatu's Bane seems to ward off early season deer depredations. 

While the garlic hangs dangling in the shade of our carport to cure, I'm also turning my attention to the blueberry bushes in front of my house.  They're a twelve year old planting, and at this point every year they're fat with bunches of ripening blueberries.  Hundreds of berries hang heavy on the bush, and as they blush green to pink to lavender, I'm always convinced we'll maybe this year have enough for a pie.

Until the grey catbirds arrive, that is.  Unlike the local mockers that have taken up regular residence in one of our boxwoods, catbirds aren't seen much around my garden most of the year.  But when the blueberries arrive, it's a catbird feeding frenzy.

Now, I don't mind sharing.  Setting aside something for our avian friends is a fine Mary Poppins thing to do.  For a few years, I'd tried putting "bird netting" over the bushes.  But "bird netting" required building a frame, without which the mockingbirds and catbirds just ate the berries right through the mesh.  Then I tried putting small fine mesh bags around individual bunches of berries, leaving others for the birds.  This worked for one half of one season.

But unlike our fractious, combative, disposable sparrows, who'll also feast upon the berries but were clueless about how to circumvent the bags, catbirds aren't morons.  Like their mockingbird cousins, they're inquisitive and adaptable creatures, and they quickly figured out how to pull those mesh bags off. 

For the last few years, I've gotten no more than a couple of handfuls of berries, and the catbirds have feasted.

So this year, I tried a new tack.  I covered three quarters of my plants with some drawstring fine mesh bags large enough for me to stand in.   But not all, never all.  

Do not harvest to the edge of your fields, as the Law puts it, and that applies to humans and catbirds alike.   That, I thought, will surely do it.  They'll go for the easy pickings, and we'll be copacetic.

After putting the nets on, the very first thing that happened?  

I netted a catbird.  Glancing up from my laptop "office" by the kitchen window, I saw a wild fluttering of grey wings inside the netting.  Rather than eating some of the dozens of ripening berries I'd left easily available, it set hungry eyes on the portion I'd set aside for myself.

The net being fine mesh, the persistent little critter wasn't tangled up at all.  It had just figured out a way to nose through the inadequately tightened drawstring opening, at which point it realized that getting out was going to be a little more challenging.  It flapped around in a panic, the berries forgotten.

I wandered out, and after opening up the netting, with some encouragement got it to fly away, meowing anxiously.

Don't get greedy, little birds.  Don't get greedy.

Why I Will Mow In May

Spring has sprung, and that means that the ground cover in my front yard is suddenly growing again. Grasses and chickweed, bugleweed and clover and dandelions, a wild heteroculture suddenly surging upward in a riot of green and ten thousand tiny flowers. That means that it’s mowing season again. 

Some folks don’t like mowing, viewing it as an onerous and pointless chore. But I’ve always liked it. As a teen, I looked forward to mowing the yard, because it was utterly satisfying. Sure, it needs to happen pretty much every week, but it’s one of those things that you do that has a definite result. It’s not abstract, not uncertain. It’s not a Zoom to develop a plan to create a task force to consider writing an overture to the General Assembly, as much as that warms the Presbyterian heart.

You do it, and it’s done. Like a made bed, or a sink emptied of dishes, it's as satisfying as a contented sigh.  

There's been a pushback against mowing lately, one of those earnest "well-actually" Newthinks that pop and meme about in our addled collective subconscious.  

Mowing is bad.  Don't mow.  Don't mow for the whole month of May!  No Mow May!  Let the pollinators pollinate!  Let the grass grow, man!  Let your freak flag fly!  It's habitat, too, bro, cultivate habitat, for our little crawly friends.

Which it certainly is.  Ever take a long walk through a field of tall grass at the height of summer?  Though I grew up in the urban megaplexes of DC and London and Nairobi, I remember doing that.  One particular afternoon hangs in memory, a hike near the rural Virginia home of a family friend when I was thirteen.  I remember how alive that meadow was, the slow windblown eddies across the surface of it, how the waving grass leapt and whirred with hundreds of grasshoppers.   I remember the brightness of the sun, and how alive everything felt.  I remember the tickle of the grass against my arms, against my bare legs.  

And after we got back, I remember not just the tickle, but the ticks.  The dozen-plus ticks I found clambering on my legs, on my back, in my socks, in my shorts, and squirming their way with thirsty intent towards my tender regions.  Even thinking about that now makes me itchy.  

Tall grass is habitat, without question.

That said, I'm no fan of the synthetic, lifeless monoculture of the American suburban lawn.  It's false life, with all the uncanny valley wrongness of astroturf or a reanimated relative.  It's why my own lawn is speckled with flowers and variety, all of which is evidenced here on this page.  But if you don't mow, you and your children and your dogs and neighborhood chipmunks will suffer.

Because mowing is not merely aesthetic. It serves a purpose.  That purpose, for me, goes well beyond reducing bloodsucking parasite populations.  

I am a gardener.  In my yard, mowing serves my compost piles, which I rely on to hyper-locally produce the earth that fills my nearly 300 square feet of raised beds.  For them, mowing is absolutely vital.

Back in the Fall, every single leaf that fell from the thirty plus trees that shade my back yard went into a pile, because, well, it’s compost. Six months worth of coffee grounds and filters, every peeled carrot shaving and bit of onion skin for half a year, all of it has been blended into that giant pile of dead leaves. It’s easy to look at that brown mound in winter and see nothing. It seems inert, lifeless, just a lump of matter. Which it is, right up until the moment you feed it with mowed greens in the Spring.

Because mowing a lawn is an act of harvest.  It's profoundly and directly useful, and I look forward to it as I look forward to collecting up fallen leaves in November.

All those lush green May clippings are rich with nitrogen, which is a veritable feast for the millions of teensy tinesy little microbes that have been sitting patiently among the leaves in one of the five by eight fenced compost piles in my backyard. Dump a couple of bags of cut ground cover onto the pile, give it a good oxygenating pitchin’ with a pitchfork, and the little microbiome of that pile comes to life. It’s no longer a pile of cold leaves, but teeming with life and the promise of life.

I go out, and I turn it on a wet day, and the pile smells good.  Not of rot and death, but sweet and alive.  It's warm, too, radiating heat as the energies of hundreds of millions of organisms thrive in the cuttings from my efforts.  Steam rises from it, filled with the scent of rich organic earth being birthed.  

My mowing last May is feeding my growing beans and tomatoes, my squash and my potatoes.  It will fill my table this summer.  The excess will go to the Little Free Produce stand of my church, joining with the outputs of other gardeners to feed those who have need.  That cycle of life and generous intent repeats, year by year, tied to the ebb and flow of life and the seasons.

So I will mow this May.  It isn't a drab and dismal duty.  It isn't a mindless, pointless ritual serving the cold demands of a soulless suburban deity.  

It's participating in the joyous bounty of creation.