Posts from — October 2010

Back in the day, when spring was surging, I would go on a field walk every morning, just to see what kind of visitors I was getting. I knew exactly when the cucumber beetles showed up on the tomatillos – they were slow and stupid in the cool hours after night, and I would pick them off with ease. I knew where the rabbits were coming under the fence, and what they liked to eat.

These days, my hours are irregular, and I get surprised easily. I didn’t realize I had cabbage loopers on my red russian kale until they’d munched through the lower quarter of the row. I couldn’t figure out what was pooping in the tomato haus until I randomly caught the neighbors guinea hens in there at dusk a few days ago – they honked in alarm and doddered off down the rows when I closed the door behind me.

The visitors I’m really concerned about are the mice. Up until this point, they’ve been happy to colonize the compost pile outside the garden fence, and I’ve been careful to keep feed out of my greenhouses, and we’ve enjoyed a relatively harmonious detente. But yesterday I caught this absurdly cute bugger while I was stacking pots in the seed starter. He was really too pathetic to smoosh (I relocated him, which is technically illegal) but an obvious harbinger of things to come – as the seasons change, we’re all looking for shelter. I’m going to put off trying to kill them until they actually start eating things I need. Perhaps the detente will stand.

Ditto the black swallowtail butterfly caterpillars on my bronze fennel. They are basically my favorite bug in the world. I feel lucky to have like five or so of them. They will probably eat all the fennel by the end of the month. I don’t really care. I didn’t have plans for the fennel. In a life that is so much about production, about the physical objects I bring to the table, to let some of them go is a small, necessary extravagance.

September was like endless summer here on the island – hot and dry. This rainy first day of October is the first good soaking we’ve had in weeks. The tomatoes are still flowering, and there hasn’t been a single night chilly enough to required row cover on the field crops. All the trees have full green foliage. Walking through the rows, it’s hard to believe sometimes that it’s ending. I got the fall kale and turnips and lettuce and beets started late, but the indian summer is carrying them through.

In farming as in baseball, there’s always next year, and it’s the dreaming that keeps us moving forward. But it can be hard after the rush of august to focus on the here and now of cultivation, the daily grind of field chores once the almighty tourist dollar has past. I’ve had a little time to swim, to cook, to see friends, to remember what it feels like to just be a human being for a while, and for the first time on my own farm I’ve had trouble clicking in to the task at hand. I just want to lay down in the between the rows and look at the sky.