June and July Jam
June and July often run together. Both start with the same two letters. Both are four letters long. And both are hot, not as hot as August, but just enough to need to keep a hanky handy. As I look back over these two cyclonic months, I forget what happened when, especially since most of the time I’ve had my nose to the grindstone, and that grindstone is covered in a thick and quickly advancing mat of weeds.
This June and July we had heavy rains that alternated with sunny days bringing the perfect storm, forgive the pun, for weeds to pop up more quickly than they can be yanked.
There’s the ones that are prickly (horse nettle). They hurt. There’s the ones that propagate through an intricate underground system of runners. They suck, and it seems the only way to exhaust their hot bed of hell is by decapitating them, but I have a funny feeling it only makes them stronger. Of course there’s also the ones with the deep tap roots which are so satisfying when they wiggle out whole, yet so frustrating when they snap in the middle. “I’ll get you next time,” I say, because I know they will grow again out of that tiny piece of root.
And there’s the pestering weed of our political climate, which is supposed to support us and not beat us down, and is so full of anger and hard to avoid. And the weed of racism in our country, growing stronger instead of weaker, destructive instead of constructive. For this, I will happily rather dig my fingers into the soil, ridding my field of unwanted invaders until my hands are rough and cracked.
But then there are the bugs. They’ve made skeletons out of my eggplant plants (fun to say). They find their way around my carefully applied bug spray, through my clothes, and they sneak a nibble on me, a tiny prick of pain followed by a flush of itchiness that keeps me up at night.
Plus there’s the humidity. Gosh I really love the South.
I can say for sure that at least I am not alone, but I’m also not sure I like the company. These weeds and bugs, these little hitchhikers on my journey are pushy, persistent, and resilient, but so am I.
These pests are just part of the task list, and right now, they are taking over the whole book. Working on about 10,000 square feet, I have almost forty fifty foot beds that take about an hour each to weed. With a little simple math, I figured weeding would take the whole week, and literally run my potential farm business into the ground. I needed to find a new perspective.
So I slipped into my smart girl mode and started collecting data. I was already pretty good at logging my daily tasks, I just needed a way to zoom out and see the big picture. Because I knew from experience that memory and reality are often two different stories.
I first thought it would be good to walk the field every Monday and make a list. This worked for a few weeks, except it seemed to lack structure, and I was never able to look at a field block and see it complete. Plus, it put me in a reactive and not proactive position meaning I wasn’t addressing issues until they became a problem.
I decided to enter my daily tasks into a spreadsheet and I found that each bed was weeded approximately every two weeks. Well there you go, I could just split the field down the middle and alternate between the two sides every other week. This would bring my weekly commitment down to twenty hours, and I felt confident that eventually, I would gain ground and the weeds would be easier to manage. That is the dream so to speak. Nonetheless, I was also excited because working more systematically would allow me to see a bigger section tidy and organized, which was necessary for my sanity in the heat. Now, if I can only keep up with the pace.
Because I know that I have to move on to more important tasks like caring for the plants and getting them to market. If only I was more motivated to do these tasks, but the pandemic is taking a toll on my outlook for the future. And despite the fact that our money is running out, I find myself very unmotivated to support myself financially, which is ironically very strange.
Fear brings out the worst in people.
Earlier this year, before the pandemic, a friend sent me a care package from Arizona which included a single cotton ball, and I immediately pulled it apart to remove its seeds, which took way longer than I thought it would. And then I remembered learning in History class about Eli Whitney and the cotton gin and it was like I was hurled into the past. Except Eli Whitney (white man) was not the sole inventor of the cotton gin. He had help from a slave named Sam who provided the idea for a comb to more easily remove seeds from cotton which Whitney mechanized into a machine. I am not surprised that all along my people (caucasians) have been collaborating but then stealing the show.
I knew these cotton seeds in my hand were living reflections of unspent history, so I put them in soil and waited. When they sprouted, I had a moment of pure joy and became confident that I could grow almost anything. For me, growing cotton was a commemoration of bygone days that actually never ended.
There was this scene from a movie where an African American woman was harvesting cotton and accidentally cut her finger on the prickly bur of a cotton ball. Grabbing her finger watching the blood come out of it, she then glanced up at the blistering sun listening to the cicadas as they amplified the heat, wiped sweat from her brow, and then continued down the row. It was a powerful metaphor for the divisiveness between softness and sharpness and how there is often pain behind some of the most beautiful things.
Cotton is not just softness and baby bottoms. While the cotton industry may have given birth to the capitalist economy we now enjoy, slavery is at its unfortunate heart, and that wound is not so easily forgiven. And as I watch my cotton plant grow, I spend a lot of time remembering that history of pain, and I wonder how it could be avoided so suffering could be less.
And I search for other metaphors to help me endure the heat. To find beauty in the weeds.
Cotton has a magical flowering pattern. The flowers are yellow on their first day and pink on their second. They change. They evolve. They don’t stay the same. And, most importantly they are two different types of beauty.
Back to work. It’s raining now and it’s going to be a long week.
