Not Without Its Disappointments

It's not all good health and happy talk, you know. Raising organic crops is no different from most endeavors. Disappointments appear unexpectedly, like your cousin Ted, who knocks, uninvited, on your front door, with sour breath and a sad tale that culminates in his need for a place to crash.

You may recall that at the beginning of the summer, I planted one tiny cantaloupe vine, as an experiment really, to see how it would fare. For much of the summer, the little vine grew and grew, sending out long shoots and broad green leaves. The cantaloupe's vines entwined themselves wherever possible, circling around adjacent plants. At first, only a few flowers appeared, and no real fruit developed from these blossoms. But the vine looked healthy and was visually pleasing, so I left it alone.

By early September, things changed. Dozens of delicate, white flowers developed, from which a few tiny cantaloupes began to grow. I had the audacity to hope and found that the cantaloupe was now engendering warm, smile-inducing feelings in me whenever I checked its steady progress. My giddy reaction was reminiscent of the best days of the Obama campaign, and I liked how it felt.

By the time the new flowers appeared, however, the vine had grown exponentially from its humble beginnings, taking up scads of ground and encroaching on the neighboring herbs. An intervention seemed appropriate. What kind of gardener would I be if allowed the cantaloupe to push everyone else around. So, I gingerly redirected some of its shoots toward a less crowded space in the planting bed, and inserted a tomato cage upon which they could climb. That was it. I swear.

Although I don't know when or how this occurred, my brown thumb must have inserted itself. Within 12 hours of my so-called assistance, the cantaloupe vine was a limp and lifeless corpse. Clearly, I had made a huge mistake, although I'm still not sure what I did wrong. Eventually, I removed the detritus and threw it into the green waste bin. Did I unwittingly uproot it when I redirected a few of its shoots? How delicate can a cantaloupe plant be!

This was not the summer's only disappointment. Remember the grape vines, from which I hoped to make grape jelly. Long story short, the grapes suffered from dramatically poor timing. Unfortunately, they came of age at exactly the same moment that the Station fire erupted just north of our house, the largest fire in L.A. County history. Our local air was so polluted and the temperatures were so high, that we didn't dare venture into the yard for several days. When we finally crept outside to assess the damage, ash covered everything, including the clumps of purple fruit, some of which were already drying on the vine. Since the newscasters were warning us of how damaging the ash was for the paint on our cars, ingesting traces of soot clinging to a bunch of grapes seemed imprudent, at best. I eventually clipped off the entire crop of grapes and tossed the fruit into the bin, leaving my new jelly jars standing empty and idle in the pantry.

Some produce is destroyed by insects and other pests. Other times, human error brings destruction. And, occassionally, mother nature sends in a flood or a fire to devastate what we attempt to grow. Imagine if your livelihood depended on how much and how well your farm produced. It's probably a good thing that I live in the city, where fruits and vegetables are stacked neatly for sale and groceries grow on shelves.