What do you do when there’s so much fruit that you can barely hold still? A Bun Dance!
What do you do in anticipation of a Great Big Harvest? A Bun Dance!
What does Mother Nature create when you take good care of the land? A Bun Dance!
(This poem built from Brock Dolman’s original notion of A Bun Dance)
Abundance is what we have. Perhaps over-abundance. It is fruit thinning time. Apples, pears, and plums all make more fruit than their branches can hold or that the market can bear. People like big tasty fruit: thinning makes the few bigger. Our pollinators do such a good job, there’s too many fruit for the branch strength. The meditative stroll into the orchard to inspect, fix water lines, and bask in the beauty suddenly changes: SNAP! Oh Shoot! A quarter tree has broken off, the top tilts onto the ground, a big ugly splintery break shines bright with freshly exposed, blond wood. We don’t want to see that, and too often we DO – budding orchardists must get better at their thinning jobs, “For the Sake of the Trees,” so we can do A Bun Dance.
Heat and Drying
Suddenly, there was heat. The transitions between the seasons have been sporadic and forgiving. Winter faded into Spring with not a sudden cessation of rain but stops and starts of dry periods, rain storms coming farther and farther apart (“Sprinter”). Now, we have no expectation of further rain. Likewise, the transition from Spring into Summer brought us a bit of warmth and then really chilly, foggy spells (“Sumring”). This past week, we had Real Heat: up into the 80’s for the first time yet. The wind blew and blew from the East and then the North East – very unusual directions, carrying the dry Basin and Range or Desert air through to the Coast. You could almost smell the sagebrush and creosote bush (and sometimes you can). Just like that, things dried right up. The grass got straw colored, the soil got dusty, the orchard trees where the irrigation had not yet run started to wilt.
New Songs
With the onset of heat, still more migratory birds have arrived: the brilliant sky-blue lazuli buntings and red-marked black-headed grosbeaks have added their serenades to the morning air. The warmth also brightened the dawn chorus, now a melodious orchestra right at first light, nary a gap between song, bird talk filling the air, overlapping, notes complimenting and colliding, no conductor beyond Pure Joy itself. Windows open to welcome the cool night air, this chorus is made more clear and delightful.
The Struggle with Weeds
Farmers have planted the crops, weed battling commences. Some say that the great Central American civilizations collapsed because they couldn’t keep up with the weeds. A Monsanto representative who grew up in Sub-Saharan Africa argued with my opposition to Roundup herbicide, exclaiming: “What would you have us do…break our backs manually controlling weeds?!!? That’s inhumane!! That’s going BACKWARDS!!” Cheerful chatter floats up from the fields below as a crew with scuttle hoes carefully weeds between 2 Dog Farms’ just-germinating dry farmed winter squash. Organic farming shuns the synthetic chemical herbicides: not welcome, not allowed! The weeding crew here instead wields long-handled hoes with good posture and big hats, and they are full of conversation and laughter. At the same time we all get pumped to see the millions of weed seedlings quickly growing right next to the crops: time to get to work!
Grey Hayes 