I’m not really quite sure why my mind wanders where it does when I don’t try and guide it in any particular direction but frequently the subject it settles on is money. Don’t worry, this is not another economics rant. I want to be very clear from the get-go that I won’t be subjecting you to my vacuous ramblings about Gork and Nanu and how they invented money. I’ll spare you the nonsense about me becoming King and fixing all the country’s economic ills with a wave of my gen-u-wine bejeweled scepter – that’s a lost cause anyway as the next few years will prove.  No, gentle readers, circumstances of late have awakened a previously dormant interest in the unplumbed depths of the human psyche and why our minds place value on things at all.

For example: holes in the ground.

I reported last week that the micro-farm was in urgent need of fifteen holes in which to plant the orchard and blueberry patch. As I’ve mentioned, the pocket-sized plot is located on Bainbridge Island, just across Puget Sound from Seattle and that Bainbridge’s origin dates back some eleven-thousand years to the time when the retreating Vashon glacier dumped its load of sediment and then beat feet back into Canada. It is into this glacial till that the trees must go. The soil is composed of pebbles of various sizes within a matrix of finer grained sand and clay. I could bore you with the geological details but suffice it to say that nowadays this same mix goes by the common name of “concrete”. I discovered this to my amazement when, on the first overhead swing, the sharpened steel pick-axe hit one of the pebbles and bounced back clear over my head.

This was going to take a while.

I can hear the cynical among you thinking Maybe you should work out more. That was among my first thoughts as well but I tested the idea by asking the kid selling lemonade across the street to take a swing at it. She got the same result. Anyway, the consequence of all this is that the two holes (out of fifteen) which got dug this week took a very long time indeed.

During the time I was in the field listening to the monotonous ringing of steel on rock I had plenty of opportunity to think. In this period of reverie my mind wandered back to the distant past and my prior attempt to make something grow. This was, to date myself somewhat, about thirty-five years ago and my hole-digging and tree-planting efforts at that time were guided by an old expression: better a fifty-cent tree in a five-dollar hole than a five-dollar tree in a fifty-cent hole.

Oh, how quaint.

I’m sure I got the saying from Mother Earth News or some granola-head organic gardening tome from The Rodale Press but the whole point of the aphorism is that ground preparation is the key to successful gardening. Well, duh. As pebble-by-pebble I deepened the hole I began wondering, given the changes experienced by the economy over the past several decades, what these holes would be worth today. I came up with several answers.

First, I assumed that these holes were going to be gold-standard beauties. Plenty wide enough for the roots to grow easily outward, deep enough to allow the roots to anchor the tree into the earth, and filled with a nutritious mix of composted cow manure – something you so don’t want to get in your shoes – and the native soil. These would be, in terms of the gardener’s proverb, five-dollar holes. With the proverbial hole value set at five bucks, I could apply the relative rate of inflation to determine the actual present worth of the hole. I researched the cost of trees and found that it varied from about eight-dollars to about ninety-dollars apiece. Which showed 1) – that the ten-to-one price ratio from the old saying is still approximately true and 2) – that there are people out there who are stupid enough to shell out nearly a C-note for a mail-order tree. The assumption from the old adage is that the costliest trees have a worth equal to the best holes; so from this we can assign a value of ninety dollars each to the holes.

Next, I thought about what it would cost for a common laborer to dig the holes. This was a more complicated calculation than I originally thought, particularly as I was trying to multiply at the same time as I was digging. Given the current Washington State minimum wage of $8.67 per hour the cost of the hole would range from about $8.67 each if it were being done by a hole-digging pro to something on the order of $347.72 when being dug by me.

Lastly, I considered what the case might be if I were able to get my old job back at the salary which I would now be earning and then hire somebody to dig the holes. This was too depressing to consider so I hopped off that train of thought at the first station.

Something was still amiss. All of those analyses projected the value of the holes in terms of dollars and cents. But we don’t experience value in terms of money but rather the converse. (I’ll give you a second to let you get that sorted out. Okay?) When there is something we want to own or experience we weigh its perceived benefits against the cost for those benefits. If something has a very high benefit, real or imagined, we tend to go for it regardless of cost. If the benefit is marginal, such that we think the value received is roughly equal to the cost, we may ponder our choices more. Very seldom do we willingly pay for something which has a benefit less than its price; things like traffic fines and credit card late fees come to mind. And “cost”, as we know, is something not always measured by money. Somehow, as I swung the pick into yet another stone, I was receiving a benefit greater than the cost I was paying in blisters and sore muscles.

Ca-chink goes the pick.

Or so I led myself to believe.

From this point my mind decided to ponder the fact that in the world of pithy sayings there is no inflation. A five-dollar hole has been one since some clever gardener first applied the value. A penny saved has been a penny earned since before Benjamin Franklin Americanized what was already an old saying. However, I’ve just shown that good holes are much more valuable than a mere fin and we all know that a penny isn’t even worth bending over to pick up off the pavement. So why don’t we update the aphorisms to keep pace with what things actually cost? I couldn’t come up with a convincing answer but I imagine that sayings like these will still ring true long after the one-cent piece is retired from circulation and well after inflation – or hiring an ill-chosen digger – drives the price of a hole into the stratosphere.

From there, given the task at hand and the proximity of lunch-time, my ruminations shifted to the grocery store. Since when are apples worth a dollar, or more, apiece? I’m trying to remember back to the days before I went sailing and I seem to have thought that apples were too expensive then as well. After I made the switch back to the land everywhere I went fruit was insanely expensive. Nobody else seemed to notice. All the other shoppers were happily filling their shopping carts with fruit at three-bucks a pound. I mean, just yesterday, I saw strawberries for six dollars a carton – not even a quart, a one-pound carton. I’m betting that the astronomical price of fruit is just another one of those things that we get used to. Sort of like how you get velocitized when you drive on the highway and ninety miles an hour doesn’t seem so fast but seventy seems really slow; but with the exception that with expensive fruit prices there’s no place to go anymore that makes fruit seem cheap.

Well, okay, there is one place. There’s a farm-stand (not to be confused with a farmer’s market where ignorant yuppies clamber out of their SUVs and pay even more ridiculous prices than at the grocery) up the road in Poulsbo that gets all their stuff directly from a farmer and then sells it at a fair price out in the parking lot. When the supermarket was selling “organic heirloom tomatoes” for five-dollars a pound these guys were selling the exact same produce for a buck and a half. That means the other three-fifty is ending up in some corporate boardroom somewhere just like the damn health insurance companies. Oops. I’m sorry. I promised that this wouldn’t be about economics but we’re getting dangerously close to falling off that cliff. I better quit while I’m ahead.

Oh look. The hole is done. It truly is a thing of beauty: a nice circular shape – maybe just a slight tendency toward the elliptical, straight walls, and a mound in the middle so the water won’t puddle around the roots. It’s the right width and a perfect depth. The hole is ready for its new occupant: a Honeycrisp® (I kid you not with the “®” thingy) apple in this case. I step back and gaze at my concave creation with pride. The sun is shining; the birds are chirping; and I’ve had the priceless chance to spend untold hours in the fresh air getting great exercise while digging this hole. What great benefits, to say nothing about the potential for actual apples. For me it really doesn’t matter that the actual “cost” of the hole is pushing a grand because this, my friends, is a five-dollar hole.