Mirror, Mirror, on Your Wall

The two phrases, “Actions speak louder than words” and “Do as I say-not as I do,” both mean essentially the same thing. No matter how hard you try to use words to teach your children, they are going to “listen” more closely to what you do, than what you say.

Hammering home the dangers of alcohol, while keeping your BevMo! membership card current, sends a mixed message to kids. More likely the message that lands closest to home is the one that says, “like father-like son,” or “like mother-like daughter.” 

Or how about, “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree?”

My father never said the words, “You kids need to go to college in order to get a decent job,” but from Day One, it was always expected that higher education was the ticket. Himself, having never made it through high school and gainfully employed as a heliarc welder, at $7,000 per year, had higher expectations for his nine children.

Indeed, two doctorates and three masters degrees later, with the rest of us content to stick with Bachelor of Arts degrees, he had made his point. Included are a doctor, a lawyer, three educators, a couple of mental health workers and a couple of postmasters general. Nary a steel factory worker amongst us.

There is nothing wrong with being a person who works with his hands, if that is what he wants to do. Clearly, my father resented it but never varied from the path of what was required to put food on the table.

Every late afternoon, at 3:45, he would arrive home from work, exhausted, his hands grimy from a day of work in a huge steel building, that served better as an oven in the summer and a refrigerator in the winter. 

As I peeled potatoes and diced onions, under Papa’s supervision in preparation for the evening meal, I got an earful about awful work conditions, listening to him relay the day’s injustices to Mama. Over two cocktails concocted from your basic rotgut bourbon, the story would emerge, before the two of them tag-teamed to get dinner ready for the tribe.

I did not need any more motivation that that, when it came to deciding that my hands were better suited for pens, paper and ink, than grease, grime and cleansing powder. It was all about cause and effect: Because one goes to school, one increases one’s options in life.

Not only was my father able to cook, he could build a home from scratch, he could plumb it and do the electrical as well. He could work with concrete, including building fireplaces, and he could craft kitchen cabinets, fine chests of drawers, hope chests and any other kind of finish-work carpentry.

He never specifically “taught” me how to do anything, but I nonetheless learned a great deal being his helper. All of his sons were Robert’s helpers during their upbringing, sometimes individually, and sometimes as part of a work force.

Papa smoked cigarettes when I was a kid, but he quit in the late sixties, when awareness of the harms of tobacco were being heightened. I smoked tobacco recreationally when I was in college, but had my last ciggie in 1985, always aware that what I was doing was harmful.

Papa refused to call into work, sick, asking rhetorically, “Why should I stay home and be miserable, when I can go to work and be miserable, but at least get paid for it?” That way, when his friend Bob Kinney wanted to go fishing in the middle of the week, he could use his sick time to have some fun.

I am a pretty healthy guy, so that probably explains why, in sixteen years of teaching middle school language arts in the local school district, I never called in sick once. I did miss two days, one due to a toxic spill on Highway 101, and one to having such a heavy amount of snow on the ground, our 4WD Trooper bottomed out, wheels flopping in the breeze.

Maybe there is a connection between my father’s work ethic, and mine, and maybe there isn’t. Or maybe writing sub-plans and feeling guilty about leaving my kids with a sub, was enough of a reason to always answer the bell.

How about reading versus television? Do you want your kids to become avid readers for life? Read to them as kids and read yourself. Do you want your kids glued to the TV set? No? Then monitor how much time you, yourself, spend in front of the squawk-box.

And how about relationships, and respect for women? In this house, with three sons and no daughters, my boys were going to take their cues from me. Did they notice that I brought Gluten-Free Mama coffee every morning when I went to wake her up for the day?

Did they listen when I told them violence was unacceptable in any way? I wasn’t sure. Did they listen when I told them not to hit one another? Did they notice that I was willing to back up what I said by not spanking them?

And did they happen to notice that not only did I not lay a hand on their mom, but that I refused to even speak disrespectfully to her? Could that have been because that was the behavior modeled for me by my own father?

At his worst the best Papa could do to diss on Mama at the dinner table, was to comment that “the wall-paper paste [the pudding for dessert] was especially, well, wall-papery this fine evening.” He might even have hollered at me a time or two, but he never raised his voice to Mama.

Throughout their upbringing my three sons watched me and their mom, care for our aging parents. Gluten-Free Mama even did hospice care for her own mother in Willits, being there to usher her mama into the afterlife, all by her lonesome.

We all cared for Pauline up here on the mountain, from 1996 until 2011, after Robert passed. When it became impossible for her 89-year-old-self to remain up here without companionship, we moved her to Willits. The boys were all three a part of this process.

Now, when I am remodeling the bathroom and laundry room and HeadSodBuster fits time into his hectic schedule to bust out the plumbing and electrical, it feels good. When SmallBoy hauls off the detritus from the same remodel job, a pile of rubbish the size of Rhode Island, it feels good, especially when he makes a return engagement, to remove the dead refrigerator.

Finally, when Ben-Jam-In makes life a lot easier for me and GF Mama, by transporting a truckload of kitchen-sized firewood from up above, to the back of our house, and stacking it, it feels good.

You reap what you sow and whether or not your harvest is productive, may depend on what you see, when you look in the mirror. Do you like what you see? Because others see it too, especially your kids.

If you don’t like it, change it, the way my father did when he quit smoking cigarettes. Is that why none of my eight siblings smoke either? I can’t say for sure but the evidence indicates thusly. Sometimes a lesson is more powerful because it is based on a mistake or a poor decision.

Never mind that you made poor choices; we all do. Correcting a poor choice takes a lot of work and therefore makes a bigger impression on the ones doing the observing. 

Remember, little pitchers have big ears, so if you do not want to hear the f-bomb coming out of your child’s mouth, don’t put it there in the first place, by using it in front of her.

"I Am the Farmer I Want To Be"

“My farm is the size it wants to be; I am the farmer I want to be.”

Observing HeadSodBuster growing up was like watching a balloon being inflated to its greatest capacity, and then waiting for it to be released into the air without tying it off: If you see this guy coming, you better step aside. 

Of all of his ideas, plans and goals, the one which stood out the most was the one which also terrified me the most: “I am going to be rich,” he used to intone, as though it were as elementary as getting a high school diploma.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I would respond simply. “Money is highly overrated when it comes to being happy.”

“What are you talking about? If I had some loot, I could go out and buy a 4WD Yoda, instead of driving around in old Brownie.” Brownie was the early ’60’s model half-ton Chevy pickup, that HeadSodBuster had purchased from Jeff. Jeff was the son of the rancher, Jerry, from whom we had purchased our parcels of land, back in the mid-seventies.

I will state right up front that making money was the furthest thing from my mind when I committed to making $67.00 monthly payments, for twenty acres of rolling hills property, paid over thirteen years. Gluten-Free Mama and I wanted simply to get out of San Jose, an hour south of San Francisco, so that we could raise kids who roamed the hills instead of the streets.

GF Mama and I have purchased exactly one brand new vehicle in our 35 years together, a 1992 Trooper, also the first 4WD vehicle we ever owned. This came after living on Bell Springs Road for a decade with only 2WD whips to get us into the ‘Ville five days a week, to answer the bell at the start of the school day.

Nevertheless, the littlest sodbuster maintained he was on a mission, one which would make him a millionaire by the time he reached thirty.

“Why?” I asked him, and then again, “Why do you want to be rich? You seem to have this impression that having money equates to happiness, and I have to tell you Buddy, nothing could be further from the truth.”

“Easy for you to say,” he might have responded. I did not need a road map to follow the route his mind had charted. I mean, realistically, how happy can a school teacher possibly be, while making the salary of a second-class professional?

Teachers are expected to be professional on the salary of amateurs. Let’s see how many politicians, policy-makers or CEO’s would have the cajones to even stand up in front of a class of 35 eighth graders, let alone try to learn them anything in the way of grammar. 

You get your mama to diagram sentences, Mr. O… You know what I’m saying?

“The problem with being rich, is that then you have all this money, and you assume it will bring you happiness. The truth is that money can’t buy happiness-the most it can do is rent it for a spell. Happiness does not come automatically because you have money-it comes because you like what you are doing in life, and you like the people around you.

What if you had all the loot in the world, but you hated your job? Or the people you work with are a bunch of arrogant so-and-so’s? How happy can you be if a third-or more-of your life is spent doing stuff you hate?

There is nothing mysterious about it, except that there are no guarantees that money will make you happy. Mostly it’s the opposite because once you have some, you want more. And if you get it, then the feeling gets worse; if you don’t get it, then…the feeling gets worse.”

“Right, Dad. Still, I’m getting tired of driving a beat-up old wreck to school, when my friends are driving real trucks. It would be hard to guarantee that having a fire-engine red 4-Banger would bring me happiness, so let’s just call it a Science Fair Project, what d’ya say?”

Fast-forward to HeadSodBuster’s appearance before the California State Assembly February 20th, when he appealed to the state’s lawmakers to include small farmers and the cottage industry, clearly within their sights, while pondering the future.

To hear HeadSodBuster’s calm voice of reason, shouting his message to our state’s lawmakers, is to fill my heart with pure, unbridled joy. In the midst of folks all around “going big,” I hear him say the words, “Last year our three craft farms were the equivalent to three 2,500 square ft cottage licenses. 

We are very small, total vegetable cultivation of just over an acre between our farms. My wife and I each made $12,000 last year from the farm; we would have done more but the licensing and regulatory costs ate most of that up. 

I was lucky enough to find an off-farm job to make ends meet. I’d like to celebrate that I have a temporary state license, but I can’t do it because most of my community does not…” 

Finally came the words that brought me full-circle back to when he was a teen, and I was trying to influence him,

“My farm is the size it wants to be; I am the farmer I want to be.”

Words are only words unless they are reinforced with actions. Can a school teacher genuinely be happy, living on a pittance? I don’t know; can a farmer? I guess he can, if he is the farmer he wants to be.

Only the Bourgeois [Need Paint]

“Men are perfectly capable of carrying out simple household tasks; there is no need to remind them every six months…”

Texturing, or "How to Hide Your Imperfections"

One would have to allow seventy, six-month periods to elapse, before eclipsing my personal-best record for procrastination. Heck, this wasn’t procrastination-it was suffocation by default. Remind me to get it done every six months? No prob. Failing that, could we shoot for prior to the third generation arriving in March? *

The question is a reasonable one, after all, because I did sheet rock, tape and [primitively] mud the room. Why did I not follow through with at least a coat of primer? Gluten-Free Mama had made the bathroom look downright chic early on, but her poor half-sister, the laundry room, was left standing on the corner, lunchbox in-hand, the bus having long since departed.

Does saying, "It was better than
nothing," make it better?

Priorities, baby. HeadSodBuster was already three weeks old before we even got hot, running water in our little cabin, with the addition of the bathroom and hot water heater. You might take note that country-styled living lacked some of the glamor you have undoubtedly attached to it in the past.

I was scrambling to make ends meet, and working with Speedy Erection Construction Company, framing [mostly] small homes for those paying cash under the table. We asked no questions for the same reason that we forgot to post the county permits in plain sight, so that the inspector would not have to ask for it.

Rebels, every one of us.

Lo and behold! Along came Ben-Jam-In nineteen months after HeadSodBuster, and the price of poker went up. Through labor exchange, I had been able to add on a sizable, two-story rectangle, at minimal cost in 1984. We needed more room than a 16 by 20 cabin with a bathroom and laundry room attached. 

At that point in time, which would have been higher on the priority list, finishing the interior of the living room, pool room, boys’ bedroom, et al, or the-cough-laundry room? Put this way, where were we more likely to congregate? 

Even after priming it, I could have quit and been
ahead of the game, by 35 years.

Right, the only congregation going on in the laundry room, was a vast collection of dirty laundry, piling up, or congregating, as we liked to call it.

The other element that can’t be ignored, is that at least the little room had been rocked, mudded and taped. It’s not as though the bare insulation was still showing. Not anymore, anyway.

Furthermore, and I am skating on thin ice here, the laundry room has always had a roguish swagger to its stride, or at least until that bong rip. Then it’s more of a stagger, praise be. With a rep to uphold, the laundry room was more than satisfied to assume an unorthodox appearance.

Far out and solid, Man. Who needs paint? Only the bourgeois…

Would you buy a used car from any of this trio?

When we went from being two parents with two sons, to two parents with three sons, with the thunderous entrance of SmallBoy, priorities shifted once again. Already low on the list, the laundry room was simply deleted at some unknown point, and the rest is history.

History is being redefined, even as we speak, with the impending addition of the next generation. Last winter’s inundation of moisture, to a bone-dry region, left our bathroom destroyed by a leaky roof, since replaced by a metal roof this past summer.

It was a package deal from the get-go: Whatever happened to the bathroom, was also going to happen to the laundry room.  If Necessity is the mother of invention, and Dancing Girl is mother of the next generation, then Necessity must be the one demanding that I invent a reason to upgrade the laundry room. 

No need to remind me every six months [anymore].

* http://markyswrite.blogspot.com/2018/01/ollie-mac.html

I better slow down or I will kill the job...

Excess Baggage

Three months ago, tomorrow, Gluten-Free Mama and I sallied into the Inland Mendocino County Humane Society facility, and waltzed out with sweet rescue dog, Ellie Mae. I always grace Ellie Mae’s name with he word sweet, because her sweet nature is what guarantees that I can never stay frustrated with her.

Friday's frolic in the snow; Ellie Mae loves this toy.

In some ways I have met my match: Like me, Ellie Mae has a streak of mania in her, that emerges possibly two percent of her existence. In the big picture that’s a pretty good rating. There are two areas of concern, one considerably higher on the ladder of stress than the other.

Ellie Mae has an unwavering desire to be a free spirit, a quality I myself possess, but then again, there is no danger that I will allow my free-spiritedness to goad me into killing eight chickens. Although I can admire this quality about Ellie, I have to stifle it, and therefore I spend far too much time monitoring Ellie’s whereabouts.

In a perfect world she could go outside with me every time I needed to bring in firewood, tend the chickens, and later on this spring, accompany me when I begin to till the soil, here on-farm. As hard as I have tried, I cannot do my chores and adequately keep an eye on Ellie Mae.

One of many exits I haveblocked

Friday, I actually caught her outside the fence, and on her way up to see her bff Emma. I hollered and she hesitated; I bellowed and she did a little stop-and-go cha cha cha; finally, I let it all hang out and she came right to the gate, her body language indicating that the message had been received.

Every time she disappears from my sight and I set up a clamor, I start to catastrophize. Several times I have actually stormed up to HeadSodBuster’s chicken coop, to see if carnage and mayhem have made a return visit, only to discover Ellie waiting back inside at the gate, smiling innocently at me.

I have always said that if you like someone or something, that person or pet can do anything on the face of the planet, and you will be OK with it. Conversely, if you do not like someone or something, and that individual so much as looks crookedly at you, you go ballistic.

I fit into the former category.

The other area of concern is that Ellie is over-zealous in her greeting of visitors. Though understandable, the situation is made worse by the fact that we have few visitors, but we see them frequently. Ellie is having a hard time distinguishing between a genuine need for barking, and barking for the sheer joy of it.

Her joy, not ours.

Prized possessions

Still, in the big picture, both past and present, this is pretty benign. Ellie Mae has had no accidents inside the house, she is sweet to Delta, Ben-Jam-In’s  German Shepherd service puppy, and she  does not have an aggressive bone in her body.

Ellie Mae had not destroyed anything after the phone charger cord, the second day she was with us, until the chicken faux pas. Of course, we furnished Ellie Mae with five key items to liven up her existence, and maybe mellow ours out a bit: a kong, upon which I frequently dabble almond butter, a chew toy, a circular, indestructible play-toy, and a ball. 

The fifth was a cool toss-toy that lasted a week before she got the best of it.

The ball we gave Ellie Mae is not a tennis ball, but the indestructible kind that proved its worth, for all of the years that we had the bulldog. When we first got Ellie Mae, as unthinkable as it is, she had no frame of reference for a ball. When I tossed it to her, it would bounce up against her, she would look at me, and then shrug her shoulders, metaphorically, and leave it.

If she would leave the chickens the way she ignored the ball, there would never have been an issue. Who could imagine a three-year old dog, who had no idea what a ball was for? I have kept this fact registered in my little pea-brain, ever since I made this connection.

The good news is that Ellie Mae barely ever flinches anymore, when I bring my hands to her ears to scratch. She does not start at the sudden sound of a hose being turned on, and she does not skulk away when I pick up sticks to place in the wheelbarrow.

Who can imagine what kind of excess baggage Ellie Mae brings to the table? The bottom line is that HappyDay Farms is the train depot, where there is a special room for all excess baggage.

The only baggage Ellie Mae needs now, is her travel bag, the one which contains a water dish, thermos, toys, blankie and organic dog treats. 

I never forget to bring the dog treats.

The Kids

I began high school in September of 1966, and graduated in June of 1970, a period of time which coincided with the height of the “police action” in Vietnam. Already I was no stranger to peaceful protest, having watched my friend John wear an armband throughout his senior year, in support of Caesar Chavez and his efforts to attain fair wages for farm workers.

When I was drafted out of Cal Poly, Pomona, in January of 1972, I was  dead certain that I was on my way to The Nam.

Word

An interesting side-note is that I had already participated in peaceful demonstrations against this war, and here I was on my way to boot camp in Missouri. I was not so much scared, as I was going out of my freaking mind, missing my friends and family. 

Having applied myself voraciously to the battery of form tests, that we took a total of five times my first month in the service, I achieved enough success to attract the attention of the brass. Why waste my talents having me tote a rifle doing guard duty on the DMZ, when I could be working in a personnel office, doing things that required a higher degree of intelligence than guard duty?

See, there was method to my madness in applying myself to those tests, as tantalizing as it was to make cool patterns with the answer sheet, as some of my 11 Bravo, DMZ-bound buddies were doing. Hey, some of us were not here because we did all that well on tests back home.

When I got out of the service and moved to the Bay Area, I attended San Jose State University for the next eight years, including my masters work. During this time I protested alongside my brothers and sisters, advocating solidarity for human rights, women’s rights, gay and lesbian rights and whatever else I could jam into my work/college life.

I watched with infinite pride as members of my first middle school homeroom ever, seventh graders they were in the spring of 1991, marched out of my classroom after returning from lunch break, and took their actions uptown. They stood on the corner of Branscomb Road and Highway 101, and waved their signs at passing vehicles, protesting the presence of The United States in The Middle East.

I participated in a July 4th protest a few summers ago, in conjunction with a nationwide effort to raise awareness of GMO’s and the death-grip that Big Agra has on this whole food atrocity. We stood out on The 101 and tried to get folks to honk in support of our efforts. Imagine a culture in which the government espouses a carcinogenic replacement for organic food. 

Why? The government is controlled by those with money, and there is plenty of money in Big Agra. Growing organically costs more and therefore is counterproductive to the overall goal of making money. Besides, the cancer rate is soaring with the consumption of all the poisonous GMO’s, and that’s good for business with Big Pharma.

Gluten-Free Mama and I journeyed over to Sacramento thirteen months ago, to march in support of women's rights, but I am no longer able to make that long of a drive. My protesting days may rely more on my fingers than my toes from here on out.

That being said, I have been rejuvenated out of my political malaise, by the essence of that which makes our country great. This is the news that out of the ashes of the horrific and habitual assaults on school kids, will march a completely fresh and potentially lethal political force: The Kids.

The Kids were there in the sixties marching against The War and they were there in the seventies, protesting for human rights; they have been there expressing themselves against poison in our food, and now they have taken up their own cause: The Kids are tired of seeing other kids being used as lethal shields for the National Rifle Association.

I was in the first generation which had to learn to live
under the threat of nuclear war. I was ten years old
The Bay of Pigs confrontation occurred.

The recent lockdown of Leggett Schools due to shots fired in the vicinity of the Ropes Course, and the drama from Willits several nights ago, emphasize the fact that people are sick and tired of it, and getting punchy in the process. We are tired of seeing profits take preference over life.

As a society we are sick of having assault weapons thrust down our collective throats. The original intent of the Founding Fathers had nothing to do with having the right to mow down forty or fifty kindergartners, scattering for cover. It would seem imperative that the NRA has a lot of bullets-quickly-in order to kill small things scurrying around in terror.

Now, after the pace of school shootings has exponentially rocketed, The Kids have had enough. I never met a kid in my life that didn’t have some punch in him or her, so I know that if you put them all together, they’re going to do some serious damage in an area where we adults have simply floundered. 

Flounder all you want if you are a fish, but the time has come to assert what we as a culture actually want, and that is to be free from the yoke of the NRA.

The author of Mark's Work in Sacramento

Bottoms Up!

I won’t do it, no I won’t

I don’t want to-so I don’t.

Talk to any 45er’s,

‘Cause they’re blind, deaf and DUMB.

Of the hundreds of memes I examined, this one is tops.

Though I have always thought of myself as the great communicator, I will not engage in dialogue with 45er’s, or those folks who still support the “fraudulently elected President.” I was taken to task by a former friend of mine for referring to the jaboney in office as “fraudulently elected.” I did not read past the opening salvo of his post.

I am the kind of guy who unfriends another for posting pro-45 anything. You may support an orangutang for President, if you so choose, and I will not care one way or the other, as long as you do not do so, on my wall.

Those with no integrity, (L) and those by whom
the Standard is set. (R)

Therefore, when I refer to the current occupant of the White House as a fraudulently-elected President, if you do not like it, take it up with someone who is still willing to talk to you.

I won’t. I won’t talk to a person who still supports this abomination of a human being. Even as his family engorges itself on the misery of other human beings, illegally, unethically and immorally, this individual continues to spew hatred and indifference to those who deserve it least.

It is not sufficient that he has orchestrated a tax break that dooms millions of Americans, those who are old and sick, to an early, miserable death, he wants to torture them before he allows them to die.

Can we add compassion to the list? Lots of money-
no compassion.

45 has the oratory skills of a thug, unable to articulate his scrambled thoughts in any other manner than that of a petulant, narcissistic, self-centered fop. He lies, he scorns and he simmers in his own fetid stew.

45’s hypocrisy defies historical context, as does the behavior of the entire Republican Party. This bunch of liars and thieves make those who were associated with the previous standard for corruption, The Teapot Dome Scandal, or Watergate participant, Tricky Dick, seem like paragons of virtue.

No Sir, Bub, if you want to lecture me on why it’s not right to refer to the fraudulently elected President, as a fraudulently elected President, then you’re just going to have to face the fact that I do not have enough respect for you, to listen. 

You represent a small minority of people, people who are steadfastly determined to prove true what the majority of us believe to be false, that color of skin determines worth. You support a bigot, a racist, a misogynist, a repulsive, self-centered, worthless man, one who has a date with Karma, the Mistress of the Universe.

If you support 45, then your date with Karma, the Mistress of the Universe, also lies in wait for you. 

Bottoms up!

A racist President. Appalling...

Hypocrisy abounds!

The Skin of Our Teeth

Gluten-Free Mama was feeling reasonably chipper the other day, so she asked me to round her up some cold-pack tomatoes and marinara sauce, so she could whip up some pasta sauce. This would be the same tomatoes and sauce that I was posting photos of, and prattling about last September and October, when I set personal records for quantity of food put up for the upcoming winter.

Our crockpot

I can’t imagine farming on a big scale; the issues I contend with on a small level defy comprehension. That being said, the rewards for the level at which I function, are tremendous. HeadSodBuster and BossLady took both cherry and Ace tomatoes to market(s) all season long, and we enjoyed freshly harvested tomatoes at table from July through November.

With the Heinz tomatoes, I processed vast unlimited quantities of catsup, sauces, hot sauce and salsas. I made sure that all farm-dwelling folks knew that those processed goods were available at any time, all the way up until the point they were gone. 

By that time we will be getting close to harvest time again.

Finally, now when the temperature outside will not crack forty all day long, even with the sun shining, it’s the perfect time to dice up some onions, mushroom, and peppers, and get a pasta sauce simmering on the kitchen wood-stove. We don’t need to add basil or garlic because I included those in the processed marinara sauce last summer.

We just think of the wood-stove as our go-to winter crock pot, since it goes around the clock when the temps drop down this low, and there is snow on the ground.

GF Mama had to ask me to rustle her up some of my concoctions, because they are scattered around the pantry and kitchen storage areas like Easter eggs hidden in the flower garden in the side yard. You have to hunt for the goodness in order to enjoy it.

Luckily, I have a photographic memory when it comes to my tomatoes; I know them and they know me.

They know I watched the gophers attack in the early going, last June, and that I got a little panicky there for a minute or two, when the two hundred-plus tomato plants just did not seem that interested in playing ball. I was slightly taken aback, having prepped the nine rows in the orchard, and Tomato Terrace, in the back yard, which housed 44 Ace tomato plants.

Originally, quite by accident I can assure you, I ended up with 45 Aces in Tomato Terrace, but I certainly could not abide with that, so I transplanted one out to the orchard, and felt much better. We all have to do that, which allows us to continue to hang on by the skin of our teeth, until our ship comes in this November, and we can breathe again.

My tomatoes began life in soil amended by my own home-prepared compost, gathered over the previous year from dead organic plant material, and heavily supplemented by both chicken and rabbit manure. Soaked and tarped throughout the summer, fall and winter, I turned the whole pile over by hand in late February, and distributed it in May.

Summer on simmer...

Still, those early weeks had me so nervous that I hit HeadSodBuster up for some technical advice.

“My little tomatoes are not happy. They should be going off like gangbusters, and they’re not. And the gophers are having a field day.”

“Why don’t you hit them up with some fertilizer?” he asked, “I’ll bring you a fifty pound sack of the pellets. They’re organic and what you do is put a little pile of the pellets next to each of the emitters, so that the  water dripping out every six inches along the line, will come into contact with the pellets.”

It all sounded so simple.

“How much is a little pile?” I inquired.

“Maybe a quarter of a cup?” 

“And I spend the pellets out every six inches along the emitter hose?”

“Yup. You’ll see. The pellets will slowly dissolve into the soil, spreading all of those necessary components to where they can do the most good.”

When all was said and done as Reggae on the River approached, towards the end of July, I was still uneasy. I asked HSBuster to walk out into the orchard yet once more, to assess the situation. 

“Why are my Heinz tomatoes looking like cherry tomatoes, instead of regular-sized tomatoes? I should have triple the size from what I’m seeing. I’m baffled. I mean, more so than usual.” 

“Why don’t we increase the water?” 

Magic words to my ears, I restrained myself admirably from doing a cartwheel, and leaped instead onto his suggestion. Immediately, the entire orchard came to life, to the point where I had to actually reduce the water because the ripening tomatoes had begun to crack.

With this formula firmly staple-gunned to the interior of my cottage cheese brain, I will be ready for next spring’s foray into the world of tomatoes. I am planting fewer Heinz tomato plants, but counting on getting an even greater yield out of them, now that I have ironed out a few of these minor details.

My compost pile is a third again bigger than last year’s, my ground-cover crop is flourishing and I am itching to get out and start pitch-forking. It’s good for the body and good for the soul, and results in the best dang salsa and hot sauce on the mountain.

Popping open the seal on a quart of cold pack tomatoes, transports me back to summer more effectively than even the smell of barbecued chicken. Heck, anyone can fire up a barbecue and grill chicken, but not everyone can recapture summer with the smell of home-grown tomatoes.

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