It’s 4 a.m.
No, really.
Not light enough to read by, but light enough not to step on the cat as I stumble across the room with my brain encased in an insomniac crust like a rock dipped in honey and rolled around in the litter box.
I hate summer.
Give me the rains of November; that sole time of the year where the weather lives up to its reputation. Give me December and its eight hours of watery daylight. Give me January; a time to sleep, perchance to dream.
Because all this light can mean only one thing:
Photosynthesis.
And that can lead to only one result:
Not that that’s a bad thing. Given my current mental state dealing with the weeds is about as challenging a task with which my intellect can cope. You know those warning labels on drugs: “unsafe to operate machinery…?” My calendar should come with them. But as the garden grows, so do the weeds; and the only thing standing between them and total global domination is me.
It is a calming, thought-clearing activity, though. My neighbor calls it a “Zen state.” In the way that most of the people who use terms like “Zen state” don’t have a freaking clue what they’re actually saying. Ripping native, natural, living, healthy beings from the soil so that plants from the Caucasus can grow in their place is about as much of a “Zen state” as clear cutting old growth forests to build picnic tables.
I apologize to those of you who cling to the misguided belief that “farming” and “nature” have anything to do with each other.
But spending a couple of hours a day on your hands and knees does free the mind to wander as I rip the screaming seedlings from the ground and toss them and their friends into the bucket to get summarily dumped onto the overflowing compost bin.
But natural is not in it.
We, on the micro-farm, “grow” two “native” crops: wild cherries which are truly local – I hope someday to get enough to make some jam – and blackberries, which are not really native but have taken over the planet with a brutal efficiency that would be the envy of European colonialists. Everything else got brung here by the aforementioned European colonialists.
If you’ll pardon the dialect.
Washington State apples? Originally from Central Asia. Washington State cherries? Europe. Asparagus? The Middle East. Wine grapes? Central Asia again. Our corn and potatoes? Central and South America. Bok choy? I’ll let you guess.
In fact, the only thing we even plan to grow that has its roots – so to speak – in North America are table grapes. Everything else has come from somewhere else.
Even the weeds.
Dandelion (Europe and Asia) grows rampant here. It’s okay because the bees (Northern Europe) can use it. Thistle (Europe) has a similar, though more aggressive habit. Dandelion we can eat – before it gets too bitter – but instead we plant lettuce (Africa) and then rip out the encroaching dandelion and thistle as the lettuce is too wimpy to compete with them mano a mano.
Once the weeding gets going the outlook improves, but unless the battle is joined within nanoseconds of planting what you want to eat, then the weeds will win.
So lately, in my sleep-deprived state that feels like an electric toothbrush just before the battery runs out, I’ve been dedicating an hour or two a day to deal with the weeds. I’ll go in, clean out a patch, and talk kind words to the feeble interlopers that we want to grow. Then I’ll go do something else.
Like weed some more.
As I told you about a while ago, we’re planning a vineyard. The vineyard is going into an area that before was paved with that most invasive of weeds: grass. Indeed the verdent meadow’s growth was so intractable that the heavy duty tiller I rented when we put in the stripes simply skipped off the sod like it was trying to dig through a linoleum floor. Bounce, bounce, bounce.
To get around this I recently initiated a slash and bury attack wherein I cut the grass down to the nubs, covered it all in cardboard courtesy of the local Ace Hardware, and then sealed the cardboard with straw to help hold the moisture in due to the arid conditions typical of the PacNW excepting November.
No, really.
Anyway, that was months ago and it’s now time to make hay – so to speak – and get a cover crop sown into where the grapes (Central Asia and North America) are going to planted anon.
So I bought my own tiller (China). An electric tiller. To do the work that the three-hundred pound mechanical monster I rented was unable to do.
Some might scoff at the idea that a thirty-five pound piece of plastic powered by a motor that I and my Zen-state neighbor swear sounds like it came off of a vacuum cleaner would be up to the task. But my fears were unfounded.
When I peeled back the layers of partially composted straw and cardboard, in addition to random strips of plastic tape, I found dead grass. The tops had been killed back to bare ground and the roots, quelled in their efforts to send up new shoots, had simply given up. They were dead. But they were there.
The soil strata were thus: a thin dusting of grassy-bits overlaying an intact – though deceased – root system, both draped over the top of the ten-thousand year-old rocky till left by the Vashon glacier as it retreated back to Canada.
The tiller I got, unique to its class of toy-like garden tools, had a ballast tank designed to be filled with sand bringing the weight of the thing up to about sixty-five pounds. Its above-referenced power source is actually a pretty freaking heavy-duty electric motor that puts out 96 ft-lbs of torque which when divided by the weight of the thing produce one of two behaviors: First, the weight and power were sufficient to tunnel into the ground faster than a gopher escaping a coyote, or two, the power was sufficient that when the tines impacted a clump of roots or (more often) a glacier-laid cobble the size of a cinderblock, the tiller was tossed several feet up and, usually, to one side or the other.
The work was – I would imagine – similar to riding a bucking bull by standing in front of it and holding onto its horns. Between trying to angle the tiller to get the tines to chop up the roots and trying to lift the thing out of the craters it dug itself into and trying to dodge the tater-sized chunks of Canada delivered by the glacier, it turned into quite the workout.
Indeed, I’ve had to limit myself to about 120 square feet of tilling a day. Anything more than that and I don’t have the strength to drag the tiller back to the garage when I’m done.
The vineyard is getting put in right next to the stripe that the chickens live in. While I’m out tilling I let the chickens out of their enclosure and they follow along pecking at the chopped up bits of worms that the tiller leaves in its wake. Once I’m done they swarm over the area scratching and pecking and leaving a seed bed as smooth as a billiard table and screened of rocks and grassy bits ready to be planted with the cover crop.
I’ve chosen field peas as the cover crop as they’re reported to be good at upping the organic and nitrogen content of the soil and also at smothering competing growth with their snaking tendrils. Plus, they’re pretty good in a stir-fry. At this point though, the jury’s still out. In the first area I tilled and planted the peas are starting to germinate and some have grown up to three inches tall. The dead grass, however, has Lazarus-like sprung back to life and towers over the diminutive pulses. In the second area I planted, the seeds sprouted in mere days. Only they’re not what I planted. I know they’re not peas but they look just like baby dandelions.
It’s now 5:15am and all hope of sleep is gone. The sun is already clear of the trees to the east. I guess it’s time to head outside. And get back to my roots.