11 August 2010

A storm blew in last night, though not an especially violent one, with just enough rain so that the air was cool this morning. I collected peaches first thing and then gathered the pickling cucumbers that were ready to be taken off the vine. Then I helped Tim clear out some of the Patty Pan squash. This type of squash is shaped liked a ruffled mushroom cap and is white. The plant itself, though, was taking over its section of the garden, strangling the zucchini and other squash, so we ripped some of it up and tossed it in the compost heap. I tugged up daikons—a white Japanese radish—and scrubbed them free of dirt, all the while feeling rather like Peter Rabbit pilfering Farmer MacGregor’s garden. Then I spent the next three hours crawling through the cornrows pulling weeds by hand. Three hours. For four rows of corn. If I were a swearing person, those three hours would have gone something like this: Yank, curse. Tug, expletive. Weeding lends itself to that. As it was, I worked silently, listening to the honeybees hum overhead as they collected pollen, breathing a sigh of relief as a cloud wafted in front of the sun and a breeze rustled through the stalks.

I’m not sure how the idea of farming became such an idyllic notion in my head. The British poets of the Romantic era obviously never had to pull weeds under the high noon sun or battle hordes of mosquitoes or toil over prickly vegetables when they were writing their pastoral verses. The work on a farm—even a small-scale orchard—is hot, dirty, tiring, and backbreaking. And there’s never an end to the work, day in and day out. That’s not to say I’m not enjoying the work. I am, even though it’s exhausting. But these last three days—not to mention the next four months—have effectively destroyed that unrealistic fantasy in my head of life on a farm.

overlooking part of the orchard in the evening