Country Roads

No Medals
Summer Olympics shouldn’t be held in summer. Who has time to watch television in August? Most of us are forced to keep track of track by hearing a few sentences over radio or witness a medal ceremony on television. To observe an entire event is nearly impossible.
Want to see equestrian events? Good luck! Unless beach volleyball is added to the dressage program and the riders change to bikinis it won’t be televised in prime time.
I was happy to see the 10K race where the silver medalist was equally as happy as the gold medalist. How refreshing to see gratefulness and joyfulness on the faces of two athletes, instead of the very unpleasant pouts of the second or, woe is me, third place finishers in other venues.
It is understandable that when you devote your life to a sport it becomes all important to you and your family. However, it should mean something that the training qualified you for the Olympics. That, alone, should give happiness. Unfortunately, our culture places the highest of praise and price on winners. The overused word, “awesome” covers even small children when they accomplish simple feats. Perhaps “awesome” isn’t a good thing to be – since it is nearly impossible to reach on an hourly basis.
Life doesn’t offer only gold medals. Every baseball player cannot make a major league team, let alone be an All Star. You have to love playing the game or training in your sport. Just to do your best should be the goal, not winning a prize, in my opinion.
Farming teaches you that you better like the ride because the destination may be really disappointing. You can put days and weeks into a product, in this case a plant, and the result may be terrific, just okay, really awful.
String beans are a good example. They need to be planted about a half inch into the soil, spaced about four inches apart and they need a trellis. Water and sun must be provided and protection from snails, birds, bugs. Then, when the beans form they must be picked before they get fibrous. If they don’t get adequate water they get dry. If they get too big they get stringy.
One year we had such great beans they grew beyond their trellis, reaching over the rows to form a tunnel of bean vines. The rows went the length of the field, nearly one hundred feet and provided fantastic habitat for white flies. Inside the tunnel it was warm, moist, and buggy. On a hot summer afternoon it was not fun picking beans. So, even a successful crop wasn’t appreciated. It became a major pain in the kazoo.
Now, we can’t grow a decent string bean though we try. We haven’t a clue why. We purchase Blue Lake, Kentucky Wonder and Italian Flat Beans from growers who are successful.
Farming isn’t for perfectionists. From seed to plate the young plant lives in peril continually. Is it planted too deep or too shallow in the soil? Is there too much or too little water? Too much sun? Too little sun? Who eats it before its time – snails, beetles, rabbits, birds? Who dumps it out of the soil – moles. Who pulls it down into its mouth – gophers. Who dries it out – wind.
Then there is the habit of consumers wanting to see perfect fruit, unsprayed. Lots of luck with that. There are diseases and pests which attack all the different fruit we love to eat. Fruit must be thinned carefully not one time but three, according to orchard grower Bryce Austin, otherwise the fruit will be undersized. (See our farm fruit.)
I hope that most of the Olympians find some time to grow a garden. It would offer a diversion to their intense and focused training. They would also see that perfection is rare and that mistakes, even failures, are our best teachers.
Mother Nature, the most forgiving of coaches, gives us endless chances to learn as long as we obey some basic rules:
A. get up in the morning
B. go outside and see what needs to be done
C. figure out what comes first
D. do it
And the most important rule of all:
E. don’t expect any medals.
Renee Kiff weeds and writes at her family farm in Alexander Valley.