Each Season Different

This year's been an odd one in my garden.  Some of my old stalwarts have struggled, and promising new growth has been unexpectedly stunted.

The butternut squash which flourish with wild abandon most years haven't sprawled across my yard.  Their great glorious golden flowers and fattening fruit have been half of a typical summer's production.  

My okra, now in its third year, are yielding but dwarfish, standing thigh-high where last year they were now already towering over my head.  It might be the heat, and that we're still a bit behind on rain for the year is likely a factor, my regular watering aside.  Or it might be the soil, particularly for the butternut, where the hugelkulture beds that have always shown the greatest production probably needed a refresher of decaying wood prior to the start of the next season.

My trusty bush beans have also struggled, although that's more a factor of my taking an unexpected nine day vacation right as they were starting to produce.  That first wave of beans was missed entirely.  I don't mind that they went to seed, though, because last year's seed crop was devoured by marauding deer...again, when I was on vacation.

Even the sturdy sunflowers seemed slow to get going, although they're now once again feeding pollinators and beaming down beneficently at passers-by.

The majority of my efforts haven't been optimal.  But there are exceptions.

I cut my tomato planting by 60%, as I was convinced that the bed-density of earlier years had contributed to fungal blight.  Only four plants went in, and they've done wonderfully.  Pico de gallo and caprese and bruschetta have been present in abundance lately, and I'm enjoying regular vegetarian BLTs with sweet slices of those homegrown 'maters.  Also abundant: my basil, which started slow but has rebounded, contributing to multiple rounds of pesto and the aforementioned bruschetta, both of which also draw on my copious garlic harvest.

In all of this, I'm reminded that I am just a suburban gardener.  A weak year for me isn't a threat to my livelihood, and it doesn't carry with it the fear of famine.  It's simply a thing to observe and learn from, part of the wild and joyous variety of God's complex and unpredictable creation.  

The Reflecting Pool Emergency

The area around the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall is one of the most hallowed public spaces in the United States.  It's a place of singular beauty, mirroring the stark presence of the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial, catching the light of the sky.  It's a short walk from memorials honoring America's war dead, like the Vietnam Memorial, where as a teen I was humbled to find that a soldier with my name died in Vietnam the day before I was born.

So when...with no discussion and no input...our president invoked emergency powers to declare it was going to paint it a light powderpuff blue?  I'd thought it was just going to be embarrassingly tacky, conferring all the dignity of a putt putt golf hazard in Ocean City.

But the cerulean he wanted first wasn't patriotic enough, and so what we got instead was a deep, dark blue, so blue it's almost black.

My second thought, having seen the images of the "New and Improved Pool," was that the color was far more elegant and way less tacky than I'd feared.   

"American Flag Blue" now covers every inch of the seven acre concrete rectangle of the pool, which is now being filled.  Millions of gallons of water will be poured into it to fill it, at a shallow depth of 18 to 30 inches.  It will look striking.  Very very dark, but striking.  From my own subjective aesthetic standpoint, I think it's going to be attractive.  

But that was my second thought.

My first thought was: Wow, that's going to get hot.

Very hot.

If you paint a surface a dark color, solar energy isn't reflected, but absorbed.  If you then cover that surface with a shallow layer of water, the combination is going to act as a heat sink.  It'd be like making a baby pool out of asphalt.  The water is shallow enough that it doesn't cool, but absorbs energy all the way down, and then continues to heat up.  That's the exact principle of any garden variety rooftop solar water heater.  

That, in effect, is what the Reflecting Pool has become.  A seven acre open-faced solar water heater.   

This will have two effects.  First, radiant heat will make the ambient temperature around the pool considerably higher, possibly as much as 10 to 20 degrees warmer on a hot day.  Second, at the height of summer that heated water will evaporate far, far faster than previously, shedding as much as an additional 100,000 gallons a day in evaporative loss.  On a day with still or modest breezes, that will supercharge the humidity right around the Pool, pushing the hyperlocal wet-bulb temperature to dangerous levels.

Meaning, simply, that on days exceeding 90 degrees, the human beings who spend considerable time around the Reflecting Pool and the nearby Memorials will be hotter, and it'll be so much more humid that the air won't take up more moisture.  Sweating won't cool them off, and shade won't help.

It's likely to mean more heat-related illness for anyone who spends any significant time around it on a hot summer day.  

Particularly on the Fourth of July.  Especially on the Fourth of July.  The Mall typically sees four hundred thousand visitors that day, folks who settle in and linger for hours to wait for fireworks.  On a typical Fourth, that won't be too big a deal, because temps usually are in the 80s.  People will just be a little more uncomfortable, and the pool will be like bathwater. 

But if the temperature is in the mid to upper 90s with clear skies, especially if that's been the case for several days?  You couldn't design a more effective heat-stroke hazard if you tried.

Here's hoping I'm very wrong.  And if not, that the Park Service and local hospitals are prepared, or that the 4th is unseasonably cool with high clouds.

Because what an absurd emergency that would be.

Work Breaks, the Law, and Sabbath Imperatives

It was Monday, and May-warm-lovely out, so it was a day for chores, both in the yard and in the house.

I don't mind them, to be honest, as they're just part of caring for one's little patch of land, but they do take energy.  I trimmed back bushes, cut back ivy, and cleared away the clippings.  I edged and mowed the front yard.  I emptied the kitchen compost bin into the compost pile, which I had turned with a pitchfork prior to burying that mess of semi-decomposed waste deep in the warm steaming pile.

It was the labor of an entire morning, and as I was my own boss, I took it at my own pace.

Being deep into the creaks and groans of middle age, that meant taking a pause every half hour or so.  I'd pop in the house for a sip of water, or to sit for a moment.  It'd be a minute or two or five, and then I'd bop back outside to get back into it.

That morning, I worked for about three hours.  I took at least three breaks of varying lengths.  When done, there were chores in the house...attacking the pile of dishes, vacuuming up the endless stream of hair that flows from our dog, walking said dog, feeding said dog, making dinner...and by the time the hour struck ten, I was ready to sleep.

Physical labor requires physical rest.  It's a basic reality.

Which is why I find myself fuddled by the latest kerfuffle coming from the big dangling nether states.  Texas and Florida legislatures have both recently made it illegal for counties to require water and rest breaks for farm workers.

Here, I confess to being of two minds.  Most of the souls whose hands and backs bring us our food are Latino, and many work here without the protections of citizenship.  There's a strong profit motivation for unscrupulous growers to take advantage of that status, knowing that people who fear summary arrest, detention, and deportation are far more likely to endure abusive work conditions.  Protecting those human beings would be best and first accomplished by providing a clear, sane, and open path to citizenship.  

As a still yet more important matter, ensuring humane working conditions seems necessary if you're not, well, evil.  If you can't run a business without inflicting harm on your workers, then that business is an abomination in the sight of the Lord.  Biblically speaking, I'm on solid ground here.

But...then there are the regulations being proposed.  'Cause the county regulations in question seem insufficient.  In Florida, they mandate one ten minute water and shade break every two hours.

This is...peculiar.  I mean, isn't it?  Am I wrong here?  I work outside in the summer on the regular, and that's just not quite enough, bro.  The hotter it gets, the more true that becomes.

Field work is physically intensive, and when temperatures rise into the 90s and 100s  (that's in the thirties, for the rest of the world), you've got to have water available all the time.  You've got to take shade breaks whenever you're feeling pressed.  When it's humid out, that gets even harder.

An employer who didn't provide access to water and shade as needed in the conditions that will increasingly become the norm in the American South wouldn't be doing their workers any favors.  With temperatures rising due to climate change (words redacted for Florida readers), any farmer or rancher who worked to the rule would find their workers struggling.  

Sure, the argument that county-by-county regulations are too scattershot might have validity.  But is it a real argument? Are the folks making that argument arguing for clearer federal and state level regulations, or suggesting that business should be utterly free?  Are they arguing that the biblical injunction to give adequate sabbath to laborers and to never ever oppress or profit maximize doesn't apply, because Reasons?

Then something rather different is at play.