F.A. Farm

Yesterday I had an epiphany. I like weeding. Now, you may think, "Well, he's finally cracked. I knew he would someday." Nonetheless, it is true. I discovered I like to get down and yank out the nightshade and pigweed and ragweed and thistles. Nightshade, ragweed and thistles - Oh My! (Sorry, Dorothy.) I have always looked on weeds as colleagues - sort of like competing for benchspace in the lab. Now I think of them as comrades who are giving up their lives so I can eat. They are vigorous subsoil miners and tilthers. [I am cribbing a term from Eliot Coleman here, but I bet he wouldn't mind.] When I grab a weed and lay it on top of the soil, I am also bringing up minerals and other nutrients so it can work its way back down to the plant root zone. Vertical recycling and integration, as it were. There is also a certain pleasure, as well as mulch value, to see the nice windrows of weeds piled up on the edge of the garden, or pitchforked into the compost pile, or just laid down between the rows.

Besides the farming value of pulling weeds, there is also a personal physiological value. I can just get down and root around in the soil and get as grubby as I want. It is kind of like playing football in high school. I was a starter on defense and rarely played offense, so I could just run around and knock people down. I loved it! In my forties, I tried slam dancing and it was fun, but I didn't have the aerobic capacity anymore. Now I can just pull up masses of weeds until I am tired. It is a good tired, sort of how you feel at the end of a long day picking apples or banging nails. There is a certain mental and spiritual value to working until you are exhausted. All the existential nonsense drains away and the sunset is rich in tones of color. It seems to me that in the coming years, more Americans will discover the physiological benefits of having to work in the soil for a living. Root Hog or Die (an old frontier saying first published in Davey Crockett's autobiography) is actually a good program for the future. The postmodern is actually premodern - What was old is now new  - Plus ça change, plus c'est la meme chose (the more things change, the more they are the same).