Agriculture: Blame Thyself

Prompted by reading my extended kvetch last week about rabbits eating my pea vines, lettuce, cabbages, brussels sprouts, and broccoli, my old friend Tom sent me the following message:

“Colin Thubron, in his little book on Cyprus (pre-invasion), writes about walking into a village that was said to be where broccoli came from. But he saw none growing. So he approached a little old [Greek Cypriot] lady and asked her where the broccoli was. She replied that the Turks had killed them all. He then explained that it was a vegetable he was inquiring about, and not a family. She nodded knowingly and told him that the Turks had eaten it all.”

Tom’s anecdote cracked me up, and not just because, like much of the best humor, it touches sensitive nerves about human prejudices and the ways we cover them up, or double down on them. I took it also as a gentle jab at my ascribing blame so universally for all my garden’s woes to one malevolent force, the rabbits.

The Greeks and Turks in Cyprus had ready villains to blame for everything that went wrong — each other. Why were things going haywire in Weimar Germany? Most Germans blamed the Jews. It is a natural human inclination to avoid blame for one’s own failings and to shift responsibility elsewhere. As my friend George often reminds me, if I break a glass I invariably report the event as “The glass broke.” I never say I dropped it. By using that passive voice I leave open the possibility in the listener’s minds that it wasn’t my fault, it just kind of jumped off the counter.

So much as I’d like to blame the rabbits, I think it’s probably time for me to take some responsibility. When growing things, you have to be prepared, you have to protect what you grow, you have to constantly monitor conditions and respond to situations as they arise. And I have to acknowledge that I haven’t always kept up in that regard.

Take my peach trees. The oldest and largest of them was so laden with fruit that about three weeks ago one of the biggest branches cracked right off, taking about a quarter of the tree (and the fruit) with it. I knew I should be thinning the fruit, but in my mind that failure to do so would simply result in smaller fruit, not to a disastrous branch crash. I would like to think I would have done better as a director of the condominium building that collapsed in Surfside, Florida, than those who occupied those offices, but I’m not so sure. You almost never envision the worst consequences of ignoring a problem.

Indeed, even after being alerted to the overladen peach issue, I would not give my response particularly high marks. I took to fairly aggressive thinning of the fruit on the remainder of the tree whenever I walked past it. I would select and pull off 10 or 12 peaches that were rubbing against other peaches, or had imperfections, or were placed where they wouldn’t ripen as well, and carried them to my bucket of pig slop, and fed them to the pigs.

But the emphasis is on “whenever I walked past it”. I did not put aside a couple of hours to focus on thinning the fruit. My efforts worked well on the branches closest to my daily chore route, but other branches around the back did not get that attention, and lo and behold, at the end of our several inches of rain this week yet another branch, with another quarter of the tree, cracked and crashed down.

“Blame thyself” may be a dangerous road to travel but perhaps the world would be a better place if we all took a detour down it now and again. This has occurred to me lately as I have found myself increasingly angered by our sliding back into an apparent fourth wave of the COVID pandemic — one that we, through vaccination, could avoid in a way that most of the world cannot.

It angers me when I read, as I have in the last week, that there has been a 54% uptick in COVID cases in the U.S. in the past two weeks. It angers me that Columbia County, more than most of the surrounding counties, is now considered moderate rather than low risk for transmission to the unvaccinated. And it angers me to read as I did this week that “A new Washington Post-ABC News poll this weekend showed 93 percent of Democrats say they’ve either received a vaccine or plan to, while just 49 percent of Republicans say the same.” Sure, such resistance may lead to better (from my perspective) election results in our closely divided country, if the correlation between political party and vaccination leads to fewer surviving voters on the other side. But that shift will come at too high a cost, if it helps keep the virus circulating and mutating and setting us back.

It used to be so easy to shift the blame for COVID’s tenacious hold on us. I used to just blame it on Donald Trump. But now, half a year after his departure, I’ve come to think that those who always said he was a symptom rather than the cause were right. Vaccine resistance comes from right but also from far left, from whites but also people of color. And it seems to come from a deep distrust of any state or elite that tells people it knows better than they do what they ought to do. From a sense that we have the god-given right to “do our own thing”.

How did we get here? As a child of the sixties, I wonder whether I and my generation are not to a significant extent to blame. Weren’t we the ones who legitimized following our “feelings” instead of established knowledge? Didn’t we up-end the governing authority of expertise, with our democratized teach-in approach to education in which everyone’s insights, regardless of their foundation, were equally valuable? Don’t we have to own those members of our generation who denigrated expertise to govern by their gut, like George W. Bush (who saw by staring into his eyes the decency in Putin’s soul) and, yes, Donald J. Trump (whose gut told him COVID would just disappear).

I may be a traitor to my generation, but I wonder whether restoring respect for the authority of experts is a long term answer to resolving the mess we are now in.

What’s New This Week

Gooseberries, black currants and red currants, all plentiful.

Some “plumcots” (purple spotted, but taste like apricots)

Purslane

WHAT’S AVAILABLE THIS WEEK

Black currants, $8/pint

Red currants, $8/pint

Gooseberries, $6/pint

Rhubarb $4 a lb.

Mint $1 a bunch

Dill, $1 a bunch

Lamb’s quarters $2 a bag

White oasis turnips, $3/lb

Shiso leaves, $1 for 10

Sorrel, $3 a bag

Purslane, $3/bag

Garlic chives, $1/bunch (flat leafed)

EGGS: $5/doz

CHICKENS: They were quite uniform in size, all just around 6 lbs, a few under. These freedom rangers have been what you want them to be, deeply flavorful. $6/lb, frozen.

FARM PICKUPS:

Email us your order at [email protected], and let us know when you’d like to pick up your order. It will be put out for you on the side screened porch of the farmhouse (110 Lasher Ave., Germantown) in a bag. You can leave cash or a check in the now famous pineapple on the porch table. Because I’m now here full time, we’re abandoning regular pick-up times. Let us know when you want your order any day between 10 and 5, and unless there are unusual circumstances we’ll be able to ready it to your convenience. If you have questions, don’t hesitate to call or text at 917-544-6464 or email.