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| Staying dry by planting lettuce under greenhouse tunnels we built. |
By my estimate, we have something like 1200ft of radishes in the ground, which is a bit insane considering that's just one crop out of the 50+ that we grow here. A common radish task is to thin them once they start showing their first true leaves (about an inch tall). In practice, this involves going down rows of plants and murdering them. Tiny ones are plucked out of the soil in favor of the bigger stronger radishes that must be spaced 1-2" apart. Simple. Except sometimes you have a big radish that's just too close to the other guys and now it must join your pile of corpses. It lived better than any other radish and certainly is superior to the scraggly radish left behind several feet ago, but it was born in the wrong place. It was born in the wrong place. Something that it couldn't control and now it must die.
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| My boss chillin' |
In the past couple weeks, I've come to peace with the radishes and cozied into my home for the season. Today, instead of changing into sweats and researching plants in the comfort of my room, I decided to enjoy a bit of the rare evening sun, tidy up our overflowing compost, and map out an outdoor mushroom bed for one of my experiments. A pile of rocks by our fire pit was prime pickings for the border of the bed, but I was worried it was a small pet cemetery or someone's sacred collection of rocks. It turned out to be a communal rock pile. My coworker mentioned that the fire pit always tends to get stacked and re-stacked by its many visitors - something I found terrific and ceremonious.
Anyways, the stones weren't claimed and the pit already had plenty of them, so I started placing the excess in a bucket until I got swept up in mixture of sadness and guilt. These aren't my rocks. These are everyone's rocks. Did I really not just get my own rocks because I'm a lazy piece of shit? Yes. Definitely yes. I decided to replace the rocks after finishing up the border because it felt like the right thing to do. We had joked about harvesting rocks in the field since Washington has such rocky soil, so it felt silly-in-a-good-way to actually be doing that now. I walked down the edge of the garden beds as the sun was setting, putting rocks in my bucket. And as I was adding rocks into the communal pile, I thought, "Oh shit this is what it's all about." Using collected rocks that came from other people to build something new and then adding your own rocks back.
I'm sure there are much more straightforward, less rock-centric and radish-y ways of coming to terms with the good and bad aspects of life, but that's all I got. Toodles.
