Thankfully we got some good rain last two days. After 2.2 inches of rain (I think it was a record for this year) soil is moist and soft like a butter. I had to dig some of this butter after a surgery I did on pumkin vines. I had to cut and open several stems to take out squash vine borers out, nasty white worms which eat plants from the inside. They just chew on it from a bottom up. So after picking bugs I covered open cuts with some soil. Maybe the pumpkins will survive, who knows. I really hope so.

Good thing is that while digging I found some good worms in our soil, those which people use for fishing. This is a sign of a normal life comming back to this land we farm. I found more good worms later while weeding parsley. And there was even more waterworld today, a frog, which stopped while crossing a path dividing cabbage from broccoli. It tried to look dirty to make sure I wouldn’t notice it in the dirt. Maybe it went deer hunting? Or to scare some raccoons?

We are deeply in the harvesting stage. And it might take forever to pick something, or it can take 5 minutes.

When you pick potatoes, you have to exercise a lot. You bend to pull the plant, you kneel to pick the potatoes, than you stand to dig around with the potato fork, to find a red or yellow orb stuck deeper, you kneel to pick it and you bend to pull another plant and so on.

With vine crops there is a lot of break dancing around the vines, which grow in all directions. So what used to look like a neat path in between rows might be hard to find and walk through now. That’s why it is good to have some stretching skills and bones made out of rubber to avoid stepping on the stem and still be able to pick some cucumbers.

Zucchini is a different story though, you can basically load a truck of zucchini and not even pick a half of your small garden patch. My favourite to pick! It grows so fast that even squash bugs get confused and can’t recognize what they tried to damage yesterday, because today it looks twice as big. It’s like to go to sleep in Rhode Island and wake up in Texas.

Bush peas, it’s kneeling all day, like sinners used to do in the Middle Ages. Carrots: quick and easy pull, unless it’s too dry. Then you sell only carrot tops. Beets: fast, beans -sinners like the peas, unless they are pole beans. Tomatoes: small ones take a while, big ones: we will know soon. Bananas: we don’t grow them, yet.

Well, I cut our first cover crop. Using scythe which I bought at an estate sale, for 3 bucks. With a help of our neighbor, who showed up with the same kind of tool, never used before by him.

It wasn’t a brand new tool to be honest, speaking about my own scythe. But I sharpened it, and it even cuts weeds that look like trees.

I am sharpening it every 10 minutes while using it. Grandma Joie said that people used to sharpen them very often. And I don’t blame them. It is a good excuse to take a break, to take it easy. For me it was cutting a small patch, but people used to cut acres with it. At least in Poland in the 19th century.

Men cut the rye, and women picked it and put it together in some kind of standing piles. And they used to sing in the fields, or while transporting the rye on wagons pulled by horses. Songs were about love, sad, and with no happy end.

At least that’s what I read in my literature classes, I don’t know about a real life, but probably similar, maybe the sun was hotter and less singing was heard, but who knows.

One of my favourite scenes in Polishliterature takes place in Lipce, a small village created in a novel The Peasantsby Władysław Reymont.

The main hero, the richest farmer in the village, Maciej Boryna, gets to the end of his days. One day in spring, he wakes up before dawn, an old man in his night gown, and walks around his farm, checking on his horses, cows, and eventually he goes to a field. Something pushes him out there, he can hear some kind of voice, that “it’s time”.

He figured that it is time to sow. So he kneels and grabs a handfull of dirt, like he would have a hand full of seeds, and starts to broadcast it. And he is almost out of senses, but he still has this mythical instinct to sow, to put seeds in the ground.

And the dirt is all gone, but he is still sowing, like the author said, like he would sow himself to those fields of his grandfathers. And than he can hear a voice telling him “stay with us”, and so he stayed.

It was a death of a Farmer.

I really like staking tomatoes. After a day of pulling weeds, in the heat, it is a very relaxing job. Especially when a late afternoon storm is coming. You can see dark, heavy clouds in the west, and it is so quiet that you can hear bees in the tomato flowers. There is no other noise around.

This quiet and these tomatoes remind me of one poem by Czesław Miłosz, “A Song On the End of the World” where, in the final lines, an old man binds his tomatoes, saying that there won’t be an other end of the world, beside the one which is happening right now. No lightning, no archangels’ trumps will be heard. Just a normal, quiet, lazy afternoon, bees and the smell of tomatoes.

But today it will rain at least, hopefully. In such dry conditions I usually throw popcorn at the TV, when the weather guy sadly announces a chance of clouds and rain. And then he tries to raise everybody’s spirits up, predicting another sunny weekend afterwards. But he does not think about farmers by saying that. “There will be no rain this summer, let’s dance and clap, because drought will decrease the yield, and that will cause an increase of food prices; it is soo good.”

There won’t be an other end of the world.

I was at the county fair for the first time. Funnel cakes and lemonade I have seen before, in an amusement park I used to work at, in Denver. But the rest was pretty much extraordinary for me. Like all these tractors, Farmalls, John Deeres, Internationals, Allis Chalmerses, most of which made before I was even planned to be born, some were made before my parents were born.

My wife and I signed up to win a tractor. We bought a 1 dollar chance, so maybe, if we are lucky, we will drive a brand old Oliver in the fall.

We looked into an old schoold building, there were small wooden desks for each kid, with a hole for black ink I guess, and there was a recitation bench, which I passed with a thrill, even now, being a graduate.

And there was a small house from the 19th century. It smelled like old wood inside, old kitchen tools. It had one big kitchen slash living room slash bedroom downstairs, and two small bedrooms upstairs, with wooden commode by the stairs. Something new for me. It was a reminder that there was something before airconditioned, 3 garage houses around here.

It was a rodeo night and a guitar hero game night. But we never got to those attractions. It’s all because of a sheep. While we were oh-ing and auh-ing at those nice black and gray creatures in the county fair barn, one stressed out sheep just turned back and fetilze our clothes and skin. Maybe it was because of the shearing contest. Who knows. But we decided to see the rodeo next year.

“I’ve got blisters on my fingers” Ringo Starr said once after recording “Helter Skelter”, my favourite song of the Beatles. What a coincidence when I am saying that after picking and squishing beetles, cucumber beetles.

In growing vegetables organically it is not that easy with pests. In the conventional way there are many conventional weapons against insects that let farmers sleep tight. For us there is not a lot of that good stuff which “Kills’em all”, to use my other favorite band’s album title.

Beneficial insects could help, for example lady bugs. Although I have seen 3 lady bugs this spring so far, maybe even the same one 3 times.

So I am becoming a master of squishing the bugs, and I am getting more blisters from it, and in general, from farming. But when you think of people who get or used to get blisters on their fingers, beside Ringo, there are or were Kobe Bryant, Roger Federer, Brett Favre, Fryderyk Chopin, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway (if using typewriter). I am among the coolest then.

I used to say that my grandparents small village was the best place in the world.

I was about seven when I made this statement. It was probably a sunny day, I was sitting on the wooden bench outside of the summer kitchen waiting for a dinner, pork cutlet with breading fried too dark, so there was a pretty hard shell on the meat, there were potatoes on the side and salty pickles in a ceramic container. Of course, it was right after eating beet top soup called bocwinka, eaten in a big metal bowl with little black spots and an aluminium air-light spoon, hot from the hot soup.

The summer kitchen was on a hill and I was looking across the sandy road, towards the river, hidden in the trees.

My uncle was sitting on the step to the kitchen, smoking a cigarette after the meal. He was bare foot since his rubber shoes, which he used to work in the field, would be to hot to sit in.

His wife came out of the hot kitchen and smoke a cigarette too. Nobody was sitting inside of the summer kitchen during the day. It was too hot and occupied by hundreds of flies. My grandma and my uncle’s wife would only stand there cooking and drying forest mushrooms over the wood stove. On Saturday nights, when the flies were sleeping, kids would be taking baths there, in a small steel tub.

It was a pretty warm place even after dark. Next door, in a “steamy room”, a big special unknown and unexplained time machine was boiling potatoes with some kind of grain mix for supper for the pigs. We could ask my uncle for some boiled potatoes picked out of it, which were a very delicious night snack, eaten with salt.

So I was sitting there and made my statement, before my bath which would make my whole body itch and burn from all the bruises and scratches, especially if I had been running through the just harvested rye field, and before my pig potato snack, and before spending the next morning picking wild blueberries.

Blueberries grew in a far away forest and we could only go there with an adult person. There were wetlands and snakes there, but also plenty of blueberries and the biggest mushrooms – if you knew the secret places. And at the edge of this forest was the end of my shire.

Small farms in Poland used to look more or less like this one below.

These few acres below were my grandparents farm. You can click on the picture to enlarge it.

Working on the farm has something in common with the myth about Sisyphus. Especially when you have to weed. You start pulling small weeds in one bed and you are moving to another one. And there are bigger weeds there, some even called smart weeds. For me they are not smarter than a hoe though. But they are stubborn – not wanted; they come back, grow fast, strong and in big quantities.

On the other hand, Sisyphus had only one rock. Maybe big, maybe rough on the edges, but one, easy to control uphill, almost to the top of the mountain. Weeds are more like an avalanche of rocks. I think they actually like to be pulled out, so more can grow back. Cut one head and two will come up.

So I was pulling weeds, crawling in the hot sandy soil, like a lizard without a tail, and suddenly a tractor with a round-up tank passed by on the road. And I thought about this funny coincidence: two ways of approaching the same mountain. But me never getting to the top of course. And I found my useless, never-ending, nonsense job of pulling weeds with my hands, pretty meaningful.

In a bigger picture.

Garden of Eden was organic, but probably not certified organic.
The Tree of Knowledge between good and evil was spray free.
Can you imagine what kind of fruit it would bare if it wasn’t? Also, the livestock, which was created on the fifth day, was, as far as I am concerned, pasture raised, hormone free.
Food was locally grown in Eden township, and business was family owned.
Every fruit had seed in it too.

I have been told that America was a Garden of Eden.