Trauma Farm (29 page)
GOOSE AND DUCK, TURKEY
and chicken, and guardian cats and dogs. These are all stories on a mixed farm, the digressions and “teaching tales” we’ve been telling ourselves since that first seed was kept over winter and the first goat corralled—each story a part of another history—all intertwined and endless. Our minds can’t encompass the multiplying intersections of a farm’s diverse interactions: it’s a mystic star map whose interconnections are larger than human imagination and certainly beyond the reductionist mind trap of the logic that led to the thrills of gobalization. You can live well among those mystic connections only by using equal parts of tradition, intuition, and science as guides, along with a good dose of common sense. But my chickens are shut up for the night and the dogs sprawled on the deck, keeping their nonlinear guard, and for now I can sleep with that story.
W
EEDS ARE EVERY
gardener’s nightmare. One way to avoid weeding is to eat the weeds. Your weed is often my salad—dandelions, miner’s lettuce, purs-lane, chickweed. Then there’s steamed pigweed: delicious. Nettles make a stunning pesto. Eat them if you can’t beat them. Wilding—eating the native plants and fungi—has always been an important pleasure of rural life. After I talked Sharon into her first suspicious sampling, she turned into a real weed eater too.
Apart from never having enough time to weed, we long ago learned that the best pest control, apart from eating the weeds, is usually another pest, or providing the environment for every inhabitant to fulfill its natural inclinations. Weeds can also be homes for beneficial insects, such as lacewings or ladybugs. The greater part of farming is weighing the scales of harm and help. Too many weeds will suck up the life of a plant and leave it stunted—a target for predatory insects or disease. Besides, there’s a reason why we say, “They’re spreading like weeds.” Weeds invariably reseed at alarming rates, so they’ll drive you twice as mad next year. That’s why I constantly remind myself of Voltaire’s aphorism: cultivate your garden!
THE GARDEN IS RICH
and vibrant today, the longest day of the year, lush and overgrown with weeds—pigweed, buttercups, Queen Anne’s lace, thistles, nettles, chickweed, burdock, and others. This abundance is not due to any calculated effort on our part. There are so many it can be depressing if you let it get to you, but it’s merely a symptom of traditional farming: “When’s the best time to weed?”
“When you have the time,” says Mike. He has the same advice for pruning, chopping firewood, seeding, and most any other farm task. Weeding is not a duty; it’s a way of life—a practice, like meditation. If you have a goal in a garden, you’re doomed.
I WAS HAULING SOME
bags of apples into Mike and Bev’s cooler one autumn evening when I noticed a humongous wasp nest in the rafters of his covered deck. “Whoa,” I said, “look at that mother of a nest!”
“Don’t go messing with them or you’ll regret it,” he said needlessly. This comment made me remember back to my university days. A friend had a massive wasp nest on his third-floor apartment balcony. Since I had a reputation for being hard to intimidate back then, he asked me if I could deal with it.
“Sure,” I said. “Where’s your hockey stick?” He handed it to me, and I told him to stand behind the sliding door and slam it shut as soon as I leaped back inside. Then I stepped onto the balcony and drove the nest with an overhead slapshot out to the lawn far below. I nimbly stepped inside while my friend slammed the door shut. Not a wasp followed me. We cockily observed a mass of them banging against the glass, and congratulated ourselves on that excellent solution. It was time to celebrate with a drink.
Then we heard a crash from the apartment below and a lot of screaming and thumping. With horror I realized that the occupants beneath us must have had their windows open. Since there was nothing we could do we just sat down and were very silent, pretending that nobody was home, while the crashing and banging carried on for several minutes until it finally died down. Since then I’ve never messed with wasps unless they messed with me first, though I have to kill them if they get in the house because Sharon is allergic. But I was surprised Mike would leave a nest in his carport through which his entire family, including his grandchildren, passed regularly. “Why don’t you spray it?” I asked.
“You crazy?” he said in his usual blunt way. “That nest is cleaning out every aphid within a half-mile.” Mike is old school. Rather than destroying the beneficial nest, he figured children soon learn to keep away from wasps.
Until then I’d never thought much about wasps feeding on aphids, but of course they do. Now I’m happy to watch the wasps hunting our garden like gunslingers, cleaning up insect pests better than any insecticide over the long term. We even plant nasturtiums every year, which aphids prefer, creating a permanent feeding ground that maintains the wasp population. There’s much truth to the folklore of companion planting, where you grow different plants close together. Some companion plants attract beneficial insects, while others repel noxious insects. Nature is always creating checks and balances, feedback mechanisms, and if you follow its teachings, you will do well. We used to be religious about intermingling companion plants with our produce, but we’ve grown lazy and tend to merely stick them in where there’s room. That often works, and when it doesn’t we eat fewer cabbages or cucumbers. Acceptance is the hardest work of a gardener. The second-hardest work is learning to recognize that pest management is relatively simple: don’t ask how to eliminate pests—ask why you are attracting them.
Healthy plants generally don’t attract bugs. Unhealthy plants succumb to every kind of disease and bug passing by. If the plants are living in the mixed ecosystem of our garden, they have an excellent chance. But it’s not a perfect world, and strange insects and diseases come flowing over the hills. They arrive on the winds of winter, and my lovely pecan tree will suddenly wilt and die in the spring. That’s life in the garden of the world. Raging against disease can lead to raging against health, and if you cultivate a garden you can’t treat one illness in a way that causes other illnesses. You must learn to accept some losses rather than damaging the whole system. Our species has turned to chemical farming because we prefer impeccable fields and high yields rather than doing our best and appreciating the results. The compulsion to achieve perfect gardens is the real disease. I call it pest control syndrome.
Since Salt Spring Island is in the vanguard of the organic and local-food movement, almost all the gardens are organic—only a few chemical-using dinosaurs lurk among us. This means the wild flora and its fauna are stable, including the beneficial insects that regularly rescue us from plagues of harmful insects. We helped the process at Trauma Farm by planting bird-and-insect-attracting plants as soon as we arrived, so our ecosystem has many checks and balances. For instance, during the winter we often encounter woolly aphids in our houseplants introduced from florists, but once we put the plants out on the first of June, the young wasps and ladybugs soon clean up the aphids.
Knowing the tricks of the garden is what makes older farmers and gardeners important. They’ve been through the wars and have developed innovative strategies for survival. Just as the pen is eventually stronger than the gun, garden gossip with knowledgeable neighbours is stronger than herbicides and pesticides. For instance, we live in a region that suffers from carrot maggot. Because of our temperate climate overeager and uneducated gardeners plant their carrots early, during the rainy season, which washes the seeds away more times than not. If the rain doesn’t get the carrots, they begin maturing as the fly hatches. But we plant late, in May, and harvest before September, missing the two hatches of the flies, and our carrots are untouched by their maggots. If we want winter carrots, we mulch them heavily and don’t pick any from that crop until late October, when the flies are dead. Every time you pick a carrot you break hair roots. The fibres left behind release a scent that attracts the flies. If the ground is undisturbed, they don’t know the carrot is there. And as a last resort, if we’re greedy for carrots every week, we cover the row with remay cloth, a gauzy, tight-knit cloth that the flies can’t penetrate. But we have to bury the edges, as the sneaky little devils will crawl under the cloth.
The only sprays we use are lime-sulphur, mineral oil, and fixed copper, and maybe soap-water or diatomaceous earth for thrips on the gladioli and onions. In past extreme situations I’ve used “organic” pesticides—rotenone or pyrethrum—but I haven’t used them or copper spray for a decade. I’d rather the produce meet its fate; I know that by not interfering I am creating the environment for a healthier crop next year. We are also safe because we don’t plant too much of any crop, though we are growing dangerously close to having too much garlic. But then how can you ever have too much garlic?
In the 1990s, another blight appeared—a cross between the Mexican and Irish blights that was able to survive our mild winters. In our era of invasive diseases and species, these misfortunes occur more often than in the past. Tomatoes were once a fine Salt Spring crop, but this new blight ruined both tomatoes and potatoes. One of its parents, the infamous Irish potato blight, was responsible for the starvation of a million people in the mid-1800s—because the Irish poor single-cropped one variety of spud too extensively, and the loss of an entire crop in a year meant doom. This blight will flow down the vine and rot potatoes in the ground. When you dig them up, they will be mush. The first year of the blight was disastrous on our island—almost everyone’s tomatoes and potatoes were destroyed. The problem was magnified because casual gardeners let their tomatoes sprawl susceptibly on damp ground rather than staking them.
We were spared major damage because we grow our staked-and-trimmed tomatoes through holes pierced into black plastic covers. Not only does the plastic afford protection and heat for garter snakes, which are another living insecticide, it provides extra heat in the soil for the tomatoes during our damp springs. We reuse the plastic over the years until it becomes so shredded we finally have to recycle it. With the plastic the blight can’t bounce up from the soil during rains or when we turn on the big farm sprinklers. But I’m still trying to figure out a way of eliminating the plastic ground cover altogether.
Once a potato vine ripens and withers, it won’t transmit the blight, so if you plant potatoes early the tubers can store nicely underground until the cold, wet weather of late fall. Other islanders cloched their tomatoes and shifted to drip irrigation. Not a grower that I know took up expensive fungicides. Organic gardening is a delight and an adventure. It makes us think in original directions, as ecology itself does—and it’s smarter than the eventually ineffective, toxic chemical weapons that agribusiness puts its faith in.
In the late afternoon the garden is alive with bumblebees and birds and moths, and the wasps hunting among the colourful nasturtiums. If we are lucky, we will see the majestic sphinx moth in the larkspurs. The big bucket I use to soak my bonsais has mosquito larvae in it, and I’ll have to dump it. Usually I don’t worry about mosquitoes because my ponds contain fish and the larvae provide feed for them, but the West Nile panic is upon us. We work at keeping the local mosquito population down, not just for us but to avoid providing habitat for dangerous public health managers like the one from Victoria who, during the initial West Nile panic, insisted on spraying all the mosquitoes in southwestern British Columbia, because “they’re not good for anything, anyway.”
Not good for anything? My local bat, dragonfly, nighthawk, trout, and swallow populations would disagree equally with his pronouncement. Mosquitoes feed a myriad of wildlife—entire ecosystems, in fact, are based upon them—but we still have a colonialist, kill-them-all attitude toward pests. While it’s true that extreme health emergencies might need limited and intelligent reactions in special cases, the nature of the chemical approach inevitably leads to excess.