Country Roads

Sharing our bounty
It’s Mary Oliver time. Her small book of poems, “Why I Wake Early,” was given to me by a market friend named Laurie Woods; earlier I was introduced to her writing by  neighbor-farmer Joey Smith of Let’s Go Farm at the Windsor Market.
Her poem: Song of the Builders – “On a summer morning / I sat down / on a hillside / to think about God – / a worthy pastime. / Near me, I saw / a single cricket; / It was moving the grains of the hillside / this way and that way. / How great was its energy, / how humble its effort.”
Working is endless on the farm in midsummer. If one could only see the world as Mary Oliver sees it, it would bring some clarification, some peace to the mind of the farmer. Before our eyes, feet and hands, construction and destruction is occurring spontaneously, but it is solely in the eye of the beholder.
As we reach for a ripe peach to box, our hands feel the soft, squishy mould that recent, unexpected rain brought. The result is the end of selling the peach; the beginning of the need to cut it up, out and boil in a pot for jam or something resembling it.
The zinnia, so lovely and sturdy from afar, upon closer inspection for cutting into a bouquet, is riddled with cucumber beetles, madly consuming whatever they consume, anything yellow.
In the ground our dreadful triumvirate of nasty weeds: Bermuda grass, bindweed and stinging nettles will encircle, entangle, and continue to slow us down as long as the vegetables and flowers grow.
Nectarines, etched skin deep by the tiny teeth of thrips when the fruit is so small one needs a magnifying glass, lay in their boxes awaiting customers who are searching for flavor, not perfect beauty. Often finding insufficient numbers of buyers, the fruit is thrown to the chickens.
Apples, hanging so very long on the tree, from pollinated blossom to bite-into readiness, are always a surprise. Will they be sweet? Will they be juicy? Will they already house an unwelcome visitor who has chewed and excavated tunnels good enough to rival a miner (or an escaping drug lord) – and the little worm is only using his teeth?
And what about the rodents? Underground they are searching, of course, why not, for food and water. It should be no surprise that they are eating healthy, often healthier than us. They love their root vegetables, leaves and all. We have lost all of our cucumbers, many of our melons and string bean plants to those incredible diggers who know and recognize good soil when they feel it.
Then there are the night eaters. Mysterious, stealthy, surprising – often they can only be detected by a surveillance camera and Tom Kiff just happened to place one at the melon patch on the property adjacent to us where we farm.
The melons were visited by (caught on camera) rabbits, deer, a neighbor dog and multiple coyotes. It was the coyotes who decided to rip up the drip lines watering the young melon plants. Not only that, they dragged the hoses down to the berry patch, about 40 yards away, leaving them in a tangled, bitten heap, unusable ever more. They determined that those pesky planters were not going to repair their uninterrupted, single minded attack on modern irrigation.
We can’t forget the tree climbers. Remember Bryce Austin’s discovery that a porcupine was harvesting the hanging fruit? And a customer told me at last Saturday’s market that foxes had gathered the peaches in her tree. She had witnessed them.
“Foxes climb trees?”
“Yes, I saw them.”
Also, possums, raccoons, and the entire spectrum of birds, of course – all awaiting the arrival of their favorite fruit.
“But why do the birds peck so many peaches? Why don’t they just eat one at a time?” I inquired of orchard advisors near and far.
“They are searching for the sweetest one,” was the reply.
Sigh.
We’ll let Mary Oliver close this column, continuing her poem: “Let us hope / it will always be like this, / each of us going on / in our inexplicable ways / building the universe.”
Renee Kiff weeds and writes at her family farm in Alexander Valley.