Epitaph for a Peach (15 page)

The foliage continued to drop and I wanted to correct my mistake but couldn't. I would be forced to wait out the season in order to determine how badly I had burned my peaches and if there was permanent damage. After one month of waiting, I hooked up a tractor with a small disk and turned in the leaves. I couldn't stand to see them on the ground. Fall colors don't belong on spring earth.

With the summer heat, my worst fears were realized: some of the dangling fruit began to yellow. At first, I hardly noticed the change on the tiny, green peaches. They were only about the size of a quarter. A few had adopted a lighter shade of green, bordering on yellow. After three days the trees aborted the weak fruit, the bodies collecting around each tree.

I rationalized that fallen fruit would only help the remaining peaches grow even bigger. Bigger usually meant better prices. I began to avoid the fields again, busying myself with the grapes, which suddenly demanded my attention. When Dad asked if I had seen the fallen fruit, I could no longer deny the loss. Within hours I disked in the evidence.

Still, I couldn't measure the extent of the damage. Despite the recent shoot growth, I hoped to see the trees flush with foliage. The yellowing leaves and fruit drop had stopped. Would there be a second round of defoliation with the next heat wave? My biggest concern lay with spotting of the remaining fruit. If the droplets of the foliar feed spray could burn holes in leaves, would each particle burn a tiny spot on the surface of each peach, a tiny spot that would grow and swell as the peach grew and matured? Spotting may not become evident until a few weeks before harvest.

I wanted the trees to tell me what was happening. Were they recovering from my spring assault? Why was I unable to decipher the extent of damage? I couldn't distinguish if the source of my frustration lay with my fear of the uncontrollable or the unknown.

I felt helpless, a parent with a sick infant. Despite all my efforts, I still witnessed more pain and hurt. Hugs help with my children—would they help my peaches? Over the next few weeks I added new meaning to the term
tree hugger,
which is usually reserved for a radical environmentalist.

Dad caught me out in the fields as I wandered from tree to tree, worrying about the upcoming harvest. He told me a story about June drop. In the past, it was common for trees to abort some of their crop with the first heat wave. One year all the growers experienced a June drop, with tons of fruit tumbling to the ground like hail from a thunderstorm. “Farmers grumbled and bitched all through summer and harvest and all the way to the bank,” Dad explained. Nature took care of itself, aborted a potential oversupply of fruit, and produced a nice balance between supply and market demand. It was a good year.

I appreciated his story but realized that only my orchard had experienced this June drop and the peach market would not miss my fruit. I could identify with his reference about the grumbling and bitching, though. In spring farmers may see glasses half full, but by harvest they begin to look half empty.

Summer commenced with a ritual of pessimism. The temperature was either too hot or too cool; the crop was too heavy, stressing trees and vines, or so light that it was “hardly worth farming.” Each cloud loomed darkly on the horizon. I constantly monitored my fields for damage until I found something, then proclaimed, “Why do I always find a problem on the very last tree?” At gatherings of farmers, conversations began with fish stories about the one that got away—who had the worst bird damage or water-stressed orchards or invasion of mysterious fungi.

I expected the worst because I live with uncontrolled risk, a self-defense compromise when working with nature. The cynicism helped remind me I am only human.

Over the next month, my peaches at times appeared fine, then a week later I would see potential disaster. I experienced wild mood swings, my emotions soaring with the scent of approaching harvest, then crashing with the sight of more withering fruit and dried branches. Even the day before harvest, scars from my spring spray were still evident: leaves with holes, seared shoots hardened into dead wood. Nature takes time to heal.

 

B
Y AUTUMN
I can finally see the complete contour of the trees. Leaves begin to fall naturally and limbs become silhouetted against the pale blue sky. My orchard is exposed and naked. It has taken months for the trees to reveal the extent of their injuries. My foliar spray did indeed scorch many lower branches, but new growth has pushed from latent buds, a characteristic I notice in older varieties like Sun Crest. Many newer varieties don't seem to have this trait, the tree bark is smooth and uniform, and new shoots emerge from uniformly spaced buds. Old varieties like to twist and turn, with bud wood pushing from the gnarled burrs and pruning scars. They have an ability to rejuvenate themselves, regrowth emerging in the crotch of a cut branch or limb.

Fortunately my trees grew new shoots, the peaches did not have spotting, the harvest went smoothly, and I received good prices. I can relax now, the crisis resolved.

But being a good farmer, I find something new to worry about, thanks to Marcy's roses. A few years ago I tried a new method of weed control called “flaming.” A dense patch of Bermuda grew beneath her roses, and rather than using an herbicide or a shovel I tried an alternative method, which uses heat to destroy weeds. I read that the surface tissue layers of most plants are extremely susceptible to heat, so a singe will destroy cells and kill plants.

I lit an old hand-held butane torch and broiled the Bermuda. The method worked, the grass sizzled and curled, but some of the dried weeds caught on fire. I immediately doused the dancing flames and looked around to see if Marcy had seen the miniature wildfire. The overhead roses appeared fine, but a week later their blackened stalks dropped their leaves. For the next two seasons, few roses grew. I had damaged the subsurface flowering cells and sterilized the plants.

Since my spring spray fiasco burned so many peach shoots, will they not bloom next year? I can now worry all winter. I share my concern with Marcy, inadvertently reminding her of the roseless roses. After my long discourse about the dangers of heat damage to next season's fruit buds, she says, curtly, “I suppose you'll just have to wait.”

Seeking a sympathetic audience, I take Nikiko for a walk through the orchard. It's a brisk fall afternoon. I begin to show her the dead wood and try to teach her how to distinguish between a fruit bud and a leaf bud. She listens for a minute and then begins to run and skate across layers of leaves blanketing the orchard floor. Jake runs alongside her and I have to get out of their way.

Then it occurs to me that I may not know the extent of damage for years. Perhaps only the weakest limbs died this past summer. A year from now when I cut the dead scaffolds, I'll have new worries and concerns. I probably won't be able to determine whether they were damaged by the searing foliar spray or wood borers or old age.

Farming becomes a game of responding to nature. I will remove dead wood, knowing there will be more next year and the year after that. My collaboration with nature may be reduced simply to trying to get out of the way.

This I do know. The fallen leaves will become mulch, which I will eventually turn into the earth. I'll burn the dead limbs and use a scraper to spread the ashes throughout the fields. And an unused bag of fish foliar spray will sit in my shed as a reminder, every fall, of my burning leaves.

Changing Landscapes

When I left home for college, I sought to escape the provincial world of farmers, small towns, and country life. I longed for the excitement of the city, for the intensity that rural life lacked, for adventure beyond the horizon. I dreamed of exploring the city, living within a new culture and landscape, becoming part of the pulse of an urban jungle.

Yet some of my best times were driving home, leaving the city behind and slipping back into the valley. As city life faded and traffic thinned, I could see the faces of the other drivers relax. Then, around a bend in the highway, the rangelands of the valley would materialize, revealing a horizon of gentle rolling mounds. The land seemed eternal and permanent. I felt as if I had stepped back in time.

I took comfort in the stability of the valley. Driving through small farm communities, I imagined the founding families still rooted in their stately homes, generations working the same lands, neighbors remaining neighbors for generations. Small farms dominated the vista. I allowed familiar barn and farmhouse landmarks to guide me.

Close to home, I often turned off the main highway and took different routes, reacquainting myself with farms and testing my memory. Friends lived in those houses. I had eaten meals and spent time there; I had worked on some of these farms, lending a hand during a peak harvest, helping a family friend for a day or two. The houses and lands looked the same, and I could picture the gentle faces and hear familiar voices as if little had been altered. As I eased into our driveway I'd revert to old ways, becoming a son once again, a child on the family farm.

My feelings were honest and real. But my eyes deceived me, tainted by my longing for a touchstone—a land where life stood still and my memories could be relived. When I left the farm for college, I could only return as a visitor to the valley, a traveler looking for home.

Now the farm is once again my true home. I live in that farmhouse and work the eternal lands. My world may seem unchanged to casual observers, but they are wrong. I now know this: if there's a constant on these farms, it's the constant of change.

The keen observer will recognize the differences. A farmer replants an orchard with a new variety of peaches. Drip irrigation is added to a block of old grapes, so I imagine the vineyard has a new owner—perhaps a younger farmer with many more years ahead to recover the costs—or the farm is now part of a larger operation with capital reserves to finance the improvement. Occasionally the changes are clearly evident, like a
FOR SALE
sign. But I need to read the small print in order to discern if the seller is a bank that foreclosed on the farmer. Most of the changes contain two stories. One is the physical alteration of the farm, the other involves the people on that land, the human story behind the change.

I've been back on the farm for a decade and still haven't heard all the stories behind the changes around me. But once I add my stories to the landscape, I can call this place my home, a home that continues to evolve and change as I add more and more of my stories.

A poet returns to the valley and proclaims, “How closed-minded you all are.” He comments about the lack of interest in the arts, in social and environmental issues, in the poverty and inequality of our life. “Little has changed in the valley.”

He was born and raised here, which supposedly grants him license to criticize and lecture us. Yet he speaks for many who think they know the valley.

How differently would others think of us if they knew the stories of a raisin harvest in a wet year or a peach without a home?

Risky Business

“Those who take risks are those who can afford to.”

I wish I could take credit for this saying, but it belongs to anyone with the experience of making a living while raising a family. Farmers who try new methods, who change the way they farm, who can gamble to save a peach—we can experiment only because we can afford to. We are the elite.

I've become friends with a Hmong farmer from Southeast Asia. He and his family are political refugees of the Vietnam war. We convinced these peasant farmers to fight for the United States against the Vietnamese. Now we have an obligation to them. Vang Houa and his family have resettled in the Fresno area and are raising vegetables and strawberries.

Watching his family farm is like stepping back in time and seeing the ghosts of my immigrant grandparents grapple with a new land, a new language, and a new way of farming. Vang Houa's entire family works the land: children, grandparents, cousins, uncles, and aunts. Everyone has a job in the fields, weeding, irrigating, and harvesting. They have pooled their greatest single asset, their own labor.

Vang Houa's first-year strawberries are sweet but small and unmarketable according to today's standards. Later, a light spring rain almost destroys the crop when mold and rot march in. Vang Houa then discovers fertilizers and fungicides and how the established American farmers grow big berries and escape pest damage. He vows never to farm without some “protection” for his family.

I cannot blame him. His livelihood as well as that of his family and his extended family depends on the farm. Their dreams are built on those strawberries. I don't talk much with Vang Houa about my peaches and natural grasses and new farming practices. His future is too precious to gamble on good weather and riskier farming methods. Risk takes on new meaning when hunger and hope are factored in.

People sometimes wonder why farmers don't like change. After all, in today's economic system, those who take risks and make changes are the ones who tend to prosper. But a lot of farmers can remember the days when they were like the Hmong refugee. They still carry the burden of protecting family dreams on their shoulders.

I'm the product of a lineage of good farmers. I've inherited their success, which was anchored in hard work. I've been born into the gentry of the landed, a class of elitists who can afford to take risks like trying to save an unwanted peach. My status poses some ethical and political contradictions. Environmentalists may applaud my natural farming but they have trouble believing that some of the most innovative and risky alternative farming practices are being undertaken by some of the largest and wealthiest farmers.

Supporters of “environmentally friendly” agriculture encourage us farmers to talk with our neighbors and tell our story. What can I say to the Hmong refugee family if they lose both a strawberry crop and the ability to put food on the table? I refuse to become a missionary. I simply want to remain friends with my neighbors as we share common ground.

 

O
RPHANED BY THE
end of autumn—my numerous calls have not been returned, and I suspect there's a problem. Finally comes the answer about next season. “We will not be needing your peaches.”

I am stunned. I was proud that my peaches had become organic baby food. I supported the product. I sponsored a fruit-tasting and passed out samples and shared my story about finding a home for my peaches. I even fed the baby food to my son.

Once again I will have to look for a market for naturally grown peaches with a wonderful taste. My Sun Crest peach is without a home.

I can respond in two ways. I can blame the nature of American business and its short-term, restless character. A baby food company buys too many peaches, changes a processing formulation, or consolidates and closes its West Coast operation. They try to console the farmers: “We'll be back in a year or two.”

“But my peaches can't wait a year or two,” I snap back.

Or I can go out and work in the fields. Such an option may not solve marketing problems or address fundamental issues about business, but it has therapeutic value: I can be productive.

Fortunately I have brush to shred. Even though leaves still cling to the branches, I decide to prune a few rows of my Sun Crests earlier than usual. I hire some workers looking for fill-in jobs. (Pruning the rest of my farm will wait until winter and a hard freeze.) Following a few days of pruning, tons of clippings from the trees lie in rows, ready to be chopped and shredded. Some of the wood is thick, the size of a finger or thumb.

My shredder is a violent machine. Metal flails swing on a rotating drum, smashing and splintering wood. The steel arms spin at hundreds of RPMs and strike the brush with the velocity of a gladiator's spiked ball. The cracking sounds echo over the fields. The tractor engine roars, the flails whine, and the clippings snap and shatter, splinters exploding out from under the machine. I wear a thick jacket but I can still feel chunks of wood bouncing off my back—and occasionally my head. Sometimes I glance back and test my reflexes as a blurred scrap of peach wood hurtles past my face.

Shredding is good work for frustrated farmers. A destructive child in us surfaces, and for some warped reason surveying the scattered remains of pruning brush feels satisfying. I finish the entire field in a record two hours.

It crosses my mind that I should market this brush-shredding work as therapy for overstressed managers, “a time share guaranteed to relieve anxiety.” With the power of a revving machine under your control, frustration is released when the brush is mangled and crushed. Cold morning's could be perfect, the wood brittle, snapping with loud cracks that resonate over the fields like thunder. My advertising slogan could be “Tranquillity, let the wood chips fly.”

But shredding orphaned peaches is evidence of a major flaw in my business plans. Having already pruned the trees and invested time and money, I'm committed to the coming year. We farmers have lousy business strategies; we start working and planning for the next year before we sit down and contract our crops. We raise produce on good faith that someone will want to buy it. We make the mistake of believing in the coming harvest.

Sometimes while shredding brush I wonder if there's not a better use for the wood. I've seen vine clippings advertised for barbecues, promising real country flavor as the special “aged vine-wood smoke curls around your steak.” They get a couple of dollars for a small bundle of sticks, bound by twine. I could probably bring in millions of dollars with what I shred, providing there are enough barbecuers desperate for country flavor.

But I find comfort in returning the wood back to the soil, part of a natural cycle of farming. The woody fibers add organic matter, which quickly decays and becomes food for worms, microorganisms, and other wonderful creatures I can't see. It takes only a few months before there's no sign of them in the fields except the rich smell of earth.

Most farmers shred their pruned brush, although recently another option has been created. A new co-generation electricity-producing plant has opened nearby. Promoted as a recycler of agricultural waste products (like peach prunings and brush), the plant burns wood to produce electricity, which it sells at an extraordinarily high price. Power companies are mandated to buy this overpriced electricity because it supposedly comes from recycled materials and fosters a new renewable source for our power. It makes wonderful business sense. (In the last ten years, dozens of these plants were scheduled to be built in the valley but were rejected by the various communities. It's my feeling that they do not better the environment but, rather, deprive farmers of their shredding therapy!)

My shredding machine sometimes breaks. Belts snap, metal bars bend, flails freeze in place. I stop my work and fix the machine, it's part of my off-season work rhythm. Shredders I can fix, but the problem of homeless peaches is not so easily remedied.

I live and work with a paradox. On the one hand I no longer compete with nature in a game of winners and losers. For a year I have been working with nature on my farm, and I sense that something is beginning to work. A quiet voice whispers, “Natural forces are taking over and the land is beginning to take care of itself.” Mine is a strategy of collaboration, not competition.

Yet I still seem to stumble, wondering if anyone wants to hear my stories, walk my fields, or taste my peaches. In the world of business, I need to look out for myself. If I don't win I could lose the farm. Maybe I need solutions that make good business sense, like building a co-generation plant.

I've spent the year building a home, a habitat, a place for my family and tens of thousands of other living creatures. The new farm year begins with pruning and brush shredding, returning wood back to the earth. It also starts with orphaned peaches. I have lived a wonderful year of discovery only to return to where I was a year ago, looking for a home for my produce. I again begin to imagine an epitaph for my peaches.

Porch Spiders

Every morning I stand on the porch and peer over the landscape. I am overwhelmed by the rapid pace of change.

I monitor the grape leaves withering and dropping off the vines. The pace is slower than watching corn grow but the change is cumulative; each day you see more that was hidden. The green cover crops poke through the scattered leaves, the different seeds race to establish themselves before the first frosts. They claim territory and position themselves for survival. I have yet to decipher the meaning of wildflowers beating white clovers or the fact that crimson clovers bask in the remaining autumn sunlight while vetch seems to thrive in the dark shadows. I realize why they call it the
Old Farmer's Almanac:
when it comes to prognostications and predictions you have to have notched many autumns in order to interpret what you see on the farm.

With fewer leaves to hide them, I can see small animals scurrying as they prepare for winter. A quick jump and a rustling sound means a field mouse is at work, burrowing in the undergrowth, made anxious by the sudden openness of defoliated vines and trees.

On certain fall afternoons, the temperature warms enough for insects to fly their final dance before the cold kills them or their metabolism alters for overwintering. I can see swarms take to the air and hover around the remaining leaves, crowding together for a final gathering on the last cellulose in my fields. They seem to take flight for no apparent reason and partake in an aerial party, as if sensing the end is near.