Midway through this season, we lost our harvest of blueberries.

They fell off the bush, green and ripe berries, by the handfuls until there was nothing left, nothing for the market, nothing to eat. Even the birds got cheated.

We were short on water, and the plants couldn’t hold their fruit. The loss has been devastating.

We worked so hard all year—weeding, trimming, pruning and feeding—for this moment when these plants put on a display of berry production that boggles the mind but ordinarily lasts only eight to 10 weeks. The southern highbush varieties we grow are top performers not only in yield but in sweet juicy, flavor-rich berries.

Word spread quickly. Early May, our berries were among the first locally grown and the highest quality to hit area markets. Customers were raving about them.

“These are really delicious,” they exclaimed, “when can we get some more?”

After delivering to restaurants and markets, we brought some home. We made pies, smoothies, ate them like popcorn, put them on salads and desserts. They were fantastic berries, better than last year’s but we were having a hard time keeping up with the demand.

The season got off to a slow start. We’d harvest one day and then wait three or more days before there would be enough ripe berries to pick again. It wasn’t until the second or third week that we were able to harvest more than two days in a row.

Last season, we hit the ground running. We could have harvested every day had we been better prepared with more markets. We were oversupplied from the start.

This year, based on our experience, we were better prepared and lined up buyers from restaurants and local grocery stores. They were eager, especially after sampling, to purchase our fresh-picked fare. And it appeared that any day we’d be filling our haul.

Huge fat green clumps of berries seemingly popped out of nowhere, hanging like grapes in the lush green foliage that provides the berries with food, waiting for the magic moment when they would start to turn crimson, then darken to purple-blue. When the berry turns fully and evenly purple, it’s time to pick.

I began to notice, however, that green berries were falling off the bush in large quantities before they even had a chance to ripen. I noticed other problems too that indicated stress in the plants.

The earliest tell-tale sign of stress that I noticed was fruit cracking, which occurs when plants become dehydrated; the ripening fruit stops growing, the skin cracks, and develops a greyish-brown scar in the center of the berry. It’s not an attractive or marketable berry. Plus, it points to the more important matter of getting adequate water to the plants and protecting them from dehydration and fruit loss.

The summer heat hit us early, and the plants’ water needs were increasing and becoming critical.

“With the harvest coming on line,” I wrote in my field log on April 29, “we can’t afford to risk the [plants from] drying out in the hot sun. The plants definitely won’t fare well in this heat, not without water.”

Before noon that day, the temperature had reached 90 degrees and I saw obvious signs of stress in the plants—wilting, browning on the edges of some leaves, and more viable berries dropping to the ground.

All of my reading on blueberry plants suggests that the key to maintaining healthy plants and ensuring a plentiful harvest is to keep them moist. So long as we have adequate water, even with the plants in containers and exposed to the sun, it’s relatively easy to keep them happy and producing.

Without adequate water, however, it becomes nearly impossible to maintain healthy fruit, let alone healthy plants.

We’ve been allotted water three days a week from our provider, which has been fine during the winter months when there’s little demand for it from non-producing plants. But now, when temperatures get into the 80s and 90s, we need water two to three times a day.

We pleaded with our provider to increase our water allotment to more three days a week as early summer temperatures hit the 80s and 90s. I explained that in those temperatures, our containers, and the tender root systems inside, would cook without water to cool them.

He said he couldn’t help me because he had his own water issues. “I’ve got avocados falling off my trees,” he said. “What am I supposed to do?” When he told me this, I noticed that, not 20 feet from where we were standing, there was plenty of water flowing in the creek that passes his orchards and turns at the south end of our field.

“I’ll come out and water at midnight if I must,” I pleaded, “just work with me here. I’ve got viable, marketable fruit that’s falling off the bush.”

He suggested we get a water tank and stuck to the three-day water allotment. By then it was clear that we would not be getting any more water, that something had gone wrong in our attempt to work out an agreement, and that we needed to remove ourselves from our current location and find a new home.

A water tank is out of the question now but will be included in the plans for our next location.

By late June, all the fruit was gone. It fell and disappeared for lack of adequate water. We’ve gone into a triage approach, trimming the fat, lessening moisture demands as much as possible, leaving enough leaf mass to protect the containers from the direct sun, and doing our best to keep the plants alive and healthy through the summer, or until we can find a new home. §

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Stacey Warde writes from his home in Cayucos, Calif., where he tends a two-acre container farm of blueberries not far from scenic coastal Highway 1. He has received numerous awards for his writing and is a former publisher of the literary magazine, The Rogue Voice. He can be reached at roguewarde@gmail.com.

Bozo leans in close to show his affection and earn pat on the head. He nudges me with his muzzle. An enormously engorged tick, grey and egg-like with creepy little legs waving, and full of bozo’s blood, falls off and onto the table beside me.

Upside down, and weighted by its fluid cargo, the prehistoric creature’s tiny little legs scratch helplessly at the air.

“Jeez, Bozo, you’re swell company,”  I say, picking up the little blood-engorged egg with legs, tossing it into a thick stand of thistle just outside the fence line. “Every time I pet you, a tick falls off.”

It’s tick season, the worst I’ve seen in years.

Bozo belongs to farmhands who live a quarter-mile up the creek from our blueberry patch; he visits me every day and he comes loaded with ticks.

I started once to remove them and realized he had more ticks than I had time for. I just remove the obvious ones now—or they simply fall off.

He owns the fields out here—sort of. He’s a powerfully built pit bull and the sweetest dog I’ve ever met and he likes to run free at the farm, barking at cows and strange cars rumbling down the dirt road, and picking up ticks.

Mostly, when I’m in the field taking care of the blueberries, he stays with me. He follows me down the rows of plants, sniffs at gopher holes, or wanders away to another part of the farm, only to return to hang out in the shade or lay in the grass.

“Oh, he loves you,” more than one visitor has observed.

When I cross the bridge to the farm each day, he sprints ahead of my truck, charging full speed to the gate where he waits excitedly until I jump out and say hello and open the gate to let him inside.

I think he would come home with me if he could. One late afternoon he followed me more than a mile down the road as I drove away to go home. He just kept coming and coming and wouldn’t turn back. Finally, he tuckered out and stopped and stood still in the middle of the road until I passed out of view.

Occasionally, when cows graze nearby, lingering outside the fence, he bolts from the enclosure to chase them down. He charges up one side of the fence line and down the other. Little calves skitter nervously up the hill, as the mature cows, unfettered by Bozo’s charging presence, continue to chew grass.

One cow turns to face him as Bozo zeroes in. Bozo stops in his tracks, turns tail and comes running back. He’s not a fighter, nor is he much of a hunter, but he’s sweetheart.

He tries hunting gophers and field mice but isn’t very good at it. I’ve watched him stare curiously—ears perked and head tilted—at a gopher hole as the gopher pops its head up and quickly ducks back safely into its hole.

He creeps up to the hole close enough to kiss the gopher but never seems to catch one.

“i wish you were a better hunter, Bozo,” I say.

He’s not like Zsu Zsi’s dog, “Sniffer,” who once nabbed three gophers inside of five minutes of his arrival, but not without tearing savage holes into the lines that irrigate our plants.

“It’s great to have him out here and catch those guys,” I say to Zsu Zsi, “but someone’s gotta stay with him to make sure he doesn’t break into our water lines.”

She decided it was too much trouble, and put her dog into the back of the truck. Sniffer doesn’t come out much any more.

Bozo digs for gophers too but not as fiercely or with as much drive as Sniffer. He gives up quickly, which is fine with me because it means fewer repairs.

While packing up for the day recently, I heard Bozo crunching on something hard with his powerful jaws and worried that he was chewing on a rock or bone or something.

“Whaddaya got there, Bozo?”

He looked content and the crunching continued. I stepped closer to see what he had in his mouth. He let it drop and out came the mangled corpse of a gopher, the one he’d been staring down, the one he could have kissed.

“Nice, Bozo. good job.”

It’s the first time I’ve ever seen him catch one and now I have a better idea why his breath sometimes reeks.

I’ve found ticks on me nearly every day for the last week. I’m guessing that most of them found their way via Bozo the carrier.

It pays to be vigilant. Fortunately, I get the creepy crawlies easily. The slightest twist of a hair out of place sends my hand scratching. Sure enough, I’ve found ants, beetles, dirt and ticks.

Lately, I’ve gotten into the habit of frequently peeking inside my shirt and scratching behind my neck.

Ben, our new hire with plenty of field experience and a hard worker, has been laughing at me. “Are you feeling ticks everywhere?”

“Yeah, every little thing, every little speck of dirt, gets under my skin right now,” I say, scratching and brushing off.

Bozo plops himself down on the grass beside us as we work on the plants. “Plus,” I add, pointing at Bozo, “this guy is full of them. i think he comes over here just to share them with us.” §

Room to grow: It’s time to transplant our berries

More than one person has asked: “Why don’t you put your plants in the ground?”

Under the right conditions, that would be ideal.

There are a number of factors that have made it easier to keep our plants in 5-gallon containers, at least until now.

The most important factor has been the level of control the bags give us to keep the acid-loving plants healthy in an otherwise hostile environment.

The heavy alkaline clays in this area make it extremely difficult to grow these plants in the ground without significant amendments and controls. Irrigation water drawn from the nearby watershed also registers high in alkalinity.

Treatment is required to bring the ph level in the soil and water down. We tested the water once at 8.0, which is closer to the top of the scale for alkalinity. Blueberries thrive in soil that registers between 4.0 to 5.0, in the acidic range.

By keeping them in bags, and treating them with N-phuric to bring the alkalinity in the irrigation water down, our plants seem to thrive; they can more easily take up nutrients when the ph level is properly adjusted this way.

This is just one reason growers complain that blueberries are “high-maintenance” plants, and may also explain why they can be so expensive in the market.

I know one farmer in the area who has essentially given up on his blueberries after nearly 12 years of growing in the soil because, “it’s just too damned hard to grow them here.”

At least in the ground, they are. It’s a little easier to grow them in containers. Still, as the grower who gave up his field also said, “Blueberries are one of the most demanding crops to grow, no matter what.”

They are demanding but they are also supremely responsive to good care. They’re not like citrus crops, which can be handled with a little less care, it seems.

Once, while I was pruning a line of blueberry plants, carefully trimming away the dead and excess growth, Farmer Jim, the citrus grower, stopped by and said: “You don’t have to make them look pretty!”

“I’m not trying to make them look pretty,” I said. “They need this. It’s good for them.”

The bags were supposed to last 3-5 years. We’ve entered into our third full season with the bags, which have begun to disintegrate, tearing at the slightest touch, and basically just coming apart.

I’ve patched dozens of them with duct tape, which worked OK in the beginning. Now, it’s a fruitless task. It’s time to transplant our little container farm of 1,500 blueberries into larger containers.

We probably should have started transplanting one year ago, when some plants—about 300-400 of them—began to show signs of stress. The leaves on these plants never quite turned green, bearing signs of disease or mineral deficiency, and the fruit didn’t ripen to a full flavor.

They still produced but not as well as the other plants in the field.

Finally, out of curiosity, I began to pull random plants off the line, removing the bags and looking at the roots. Clearly, they had become root-bound and needed releasing.

We talked about what to do early last summer—should we put them in the ground, or into larger containers?—but we were in the middle of our harvest and all our time and attention went into that.

“After we’re done with the harvest, and the plants start to go dormant, we’ll begin transplanting.” That was our plan—until we got consumed with pruning the entire field, something that we had never done. It took weeks, and now finally we can address transplanting.

For now, we’ll keep them in containers. It appears at this stage to be the best way to do this, at least until we can find a suitable field. Healthy blueberry plants of these varieties are supposed to live between 10 and 20 years in the soil and grow up to 10 feet.

We’ve purchased 400 used, heavy duty, 15-gallon containers that will hopefully provide enough new room for the distressed plants to recover. Eventually, we’ll transplant the whole field.

The sickly plants worry me more than Zsu Zsi, who says that as soon as we get them into their new homes, they’ll spring back to life. “They are like weeds,” she says.

In some sense that’s true, but for them to have any chance we’ll need to do a really good job of trimming the roots and branches, and finding the right soil mix that will provide them with the most ideal growing conditions, before they can be transplanted.

Our initial planting medium, a mix that we came up with on our own, although not ideal, worked beautifully up to this point. The plants, removed from their 1-gallon nursery containers and into their current homes, took off. Now, they need a new home.

This time around, however, I want the soil mix to be the best we can make it. An ideal growing medium, by most accounts, will have 20-40 percent organic material such as peat moss or shredded coconut husks, which we didn’t have last time.

We’re in the midst of experimenting with new mixes that we hope will be economic and work well enough to give our plants the best shot at growing to full maturity. Soon, we’ll be pouring close to 30 cubic yards of the stuff into these 400 containers, giving our fruiting shrubs some room to grow. §

As I scrape my shovel into the mass of weeds rising up and around our grow bags, I see earthworms slither away from exposure to sun and burrow down deeper into the wet earth.

The soil contains life, lots of it. Some you can see, some you can’t. At the simplest level, we know that healthy soil is key to growing healthy crops. Even a small handful of healthy soil is packed with billions of microorganisms, some that we know little or nothing about, that make plant life possible.

I love the sweet-smelling aroma of moist soil rich in microorganisms and nutrients. It’s a fragrance that is fecund, teeming with life, not foul and devoid of life. The soil that works best for me smells like a rose when I put it to my nose.

Bees and butterflies arrive with the warm sun. Ladybugs crawl up and down the stems of our blueberry plants, which have begun to produce a fine array of blossoms, the promise of a fruitful harvest, which will begin in earnest in late April.

Spiders creep along the ground and form webs in the leaves.

On warmer days, even during winter, an occasional lizard or snake will slip away into the weeds that seem to grow inches every day. Frogs croak from their hiding places throughout the field.

Birds, which can be a berry grower’s nightmare, also alight in the field, foraging for worms and seeds; no berries yet.

The ranch dog, the sweetest pit bull I’ve ever met, which lives near the blueberry patch, arrives each day to visit and spend time with me in the field; he sniffs the ground for squirrels and gophers, growls at the cattle lumbering in the hills nearby.

He chews grass and sticks his muzzle into the burrows made by underground critters, getting his nose full of dirt, sometimes pulling up a prize. He hangs with me as I weed and prune.

Or he runs off to sniff about, covering a lot of ground, including the test plots where I have sprayed organic and non-organic herbicides.

Our small two-acre enclosure teems with an entire universe of life, except for the small patch of grass where I test-sprayed Monsanto’s herbicide Roundup®.

My neck and shoulders ache from shoveling away the weeds that grow between the bags. It would be so much easier to spray the entire area with an herbicide and be done with it. But I can’t do it.

I’ve thought about it and even felt good at one point spraying a square patch of bermuda grass, one of the most difficult weeds to control by hand, to test-drive Monsanto’s popular weed killer.

In another area of the field, I tested an organic spray, Burnout®, in a different square patch of bermuda grass.

In earlier entry, “To spray or not to spray,” I indicated an interest to find an efficient method for controlling weeds.

I had by then wearied of the constant rush to control the weeds by hand, mostly with shovel and mower. The weed-whacker works fine along the edges of the field but not so well between the bags, which tend to get sliced too easily from proximity to the cutting edge of the weeder.

So I’ve had to manage the weeds between the bags pulling them up by hand, which is easy to do when the soil is moist and the weeds haven’t rooted. The problem is that by the time I get to the weeds at the other end of the field, they’ve rooted and become more difficult to pull.

That’s when I use the shovel, which is fine until the neck and shoulders start to hurt, which is what originally got me thinking about sprays.

The results of my test plots were crystal clear: Roundup® effectively killed the weeds while the organic Burnout® didn’t perform so well. In fact, Monsanto’s herbicide worked so well there’s nothing but a dry patch of weeds and dirt remaining.

It unnerves me to look at it, a small square brown patch of dead grass surrounded by a sea of green that didn’t get sprayed. I don’t see any insects or worms crawling in the brown patch. It’s a dead zone.

Hundreds of studies have been conducted on Monsanto’s Roundup® and on specific ingredients in the mix. The reports vary from benign to dangerous impacts on the environment and aquatic life forms.

The EPA estimates that 100 million pounds of Roundup® are used each year in farming and home use applications. That’s a lot of stuff getting tossed into our fields and yards, and draining into ponds, streams and rivers.

Studies on the toxic impacts of Roundup® have shown harm to worms, amphibious creatures, fish and a recent study even suggests harm to “human embryonic, placental and umbilical cord cells.”

The glyphosate in Roundup® helps to break down a plant’s enzyme system, attacks and eventually kills the entire plant. The weed killer works beautifully but does not discriminate; thus great care must be used to avoid contaminating the blueberry plants.

Environmental impacts from glyphosate have been the depletion of habitat for birds, and the die-back of trees. Glyphosate alone reportedly has low toxicity in the environment, but the surfacants used to penetrate the skin and membranes of a plant so the glyphosate can do its job are more toxic to animal life.

According to a 2009 report in Scientific American, “Weed-Whacking Herbicide Proves Deadly to Human Cells,” researchers claim that “Roundup contains an ingredient that can suffocate human cells.”

The surfacant “polyethoxylated tallowamine, or POEA, was more deadly to human embryonic, placental and umbilical cord cells than the herbicide itself—a finding the researchers call ‘astonishing,’” the article states, referring to a study led by Gilles-Eric Seralini from the University of Caen in France.

Inert ingredients in Roundup “amplify the effects of active ingredients by helping them penetrate clothing, protective equipment and cell membranes, or by increasing their toxicity.”

The argument in defense of the use of weed killers such as Roundup® is that when used properly no harm will be done. Looking at my little dead zone, I doubt that.

Not long after I sprayed my test plot several weeks ago, Zsu Zsi’s young son had come out to help us work in the field and asked: “What’s the horrible smell?”

“Does it smell like burnt oil?” I asked.

“Yeah! What is it?”

“It’s my test plot,” I told him. “I sprayed weed killer.”

“Yuck!”

I have to agree with him. I’d rather control these weeds without the spray. It’s not worth it to me to risk the life teeming in this field. I don’t want to worry about my friend the ranch dog, or wonder if the snakes, lizards, worms and bees will be at risk.

I’ll find another method that works. I’d rather have the fragrance of rose-smelling soil than a patch of dead weeds that smell like burnt oil.

Besides, I like looking under the leaves and watching the worms tuck themselves away deeper into the rich soil we’ve building around our blueberry plants.

In difficult economic times such as these I always look for the innovators.

Too often, I’ve noticed, stuck in our familiar, old and retiring ways of doing things, it’s easy to get lost in a labyrinth of uncertainty and fear as costs for gas, food and housing continue to climb.

Beset with worries over how to make next month’s bills, we might overlook the possibilities; our choices appear limited, solutions seem out of reach.

Bleak necessity, unlike any the nation has seen in decades, has many people wondering how they will support and manage their homes. How will we ever furnish our families with safe and secure households if we can’t pay our bills?

I hear these concerns voiced often in my daily runs through town, and in my frequent visits to the more populated California southland, a suburban landscape and auto-centric culture that in many ways got us into this mess of excessive consumer demand and limited resources.

The American empire was built on the belief that the earth will provide us with unlimited wealth, that we can mine the planet of its metals and fossil fuels and expand the nation’s needs and wants, its growth-based economy, without end.

It required massive infusions of cheap oil to build and maintain, and now it appears that we will soon have to look elsewhere to power those same energy needs.

More people have begun to acknowledge that there are limits, that conservation and protection of natural resources is a good idea, that the bottom line ought also to be calculated not just on how much money we make but on the quality and condition of our natural resources at the end of each business day.

As Bill McKibben writes in Deep Economy, it’s hard to create wealth, “at least for very long, by impoverishing the world around you.”

The recent economic dislocations that have occurred around the globe are likely the first rumblings of a shift away from fossil fuels. Writers like McKibben have for years warned that this was going to happen.

Some writers, such as James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century (published in 2005), take a less favorable view of the future. The challenges of “peak oil,” he says, meaning the world oil supply has peaked and we’ve entered into an era of depletion, will be far greater than we are prepared to meet.

As the extraction of oil becomes costlier and riskier, so too will the global economy be thrown into turmoil.

“What is generally not comprehended about this predicament is that the developed world will begin to suffer long before oil and gas actually run out,” he writes. “The American way of life — which is now virtually synonymous with suburbia — can run only on reliable supplies of dependably cheap oil and gas. Even mild to moderate deviations in either price or supply will crush our economy and make the logistics of daily life impossible.”

This is where the innovators come in. While Kunstler argues that no resource has yet been discovered that will drive the global economy the way cheap oil has, others have turned their attentions closer to home and to their local communities for solutions.

Permaculture
My first introduction to thinking differently about how to live came more than 10 years ago when I met a group of people who were experimenting with permaculture, an innovative design system to create homes and communities that work with rather than against nature.

Developed more than 30 years ago by Australian land-use pioneer and author Bill Mollison, permaculture brings together a number of disciplines, including sustainable agriculture and architecture, for example, in an attempt to build more ecologically sound homes, gardens and farms, which do not require enormous outside inputs but are capable of preserving, protecting and producing their own vital resources such as precious water and soil.

Each household system serves more than one function or purpose, giving maximum output with minimum inputs. The water systems in our homes, for example, need not go from faucet to drain to sewer system without first being used for other purposes.

We can harvest and store rainwater, in drier regions especially, to add to our short supply; we can run water through our homes for cleaning and laundering, and close the waste loop by filtering grey water through our gardens and landscapes. We can eliminate lawns and flush toilets, saving our precious water for more intelligent uses.

Indigenous cultures might look upon our practice of relieving ourselves in perfectly good drinking water as nothing short of insane, Mollison argues. This requires a new way of thinking.

Mollison’s permaculture ethos of “care of the earth, care of people” underpins all of the designs and practical applications that go into the building of sustainable homes and communities. Humans can learn to live in harmony with nature again.

Only a fool, he has said, would soil his own bed and sleep in it. So why do we build and live in homes and communities designed with little or no consideration for their impacts on the environment? Why not turn our homes into closed loop systems that have minimal, even favorable impacts?

People can learn to live more responsibly and independently by using natural systems to help them in their undertakings rather than using nature as a place to dump their excesses, he says.

Whole communities and villages around the world such as Crystal Waters in Australia have since grown up based on his pioneering ideas, which have subsequently been developed into more innovative and ecologically sound applications, a turn away from fossil fuel dependencies.

My own local community is fortunate to have in its midst one of the world’s leading experts on permaculture, Larry Santoyo of Earthflow Design Works, which offers course instruction and consultation in ecological land use and planning.

His own pioneering work has brought these sound principles of building and design to the attention of hundreds, if not thousands, of individuals seeking a better way to live well and with minimal impacts on their surroundings.

Ecological farming and community building
Another source of inspiration comes from an annual gathering of ecological farmers, which takes place near Pacific Grove, Calif., and has been going on for more than 30 years.

The EcoFarm Conference, to be held this year from Feb. 1-4 at the Asilomar Conference Grounds, brings together creative individuals, mostly farmers, ranchers, merchants and food handlers, who share a mutual interest in building, maintaining and promoting healthy, safe and just food systems based on sound ecological principles.

They share some of the same goals as the innovators of permaculture by developing strong local farms that produce not just healthy organic food but in an ecologically responsible way, which means improving soils, reducing outside inputs, and relying upon nature’s biodiversity rather than depending on chemically intensive, monocultural systems that destroy the biodiversity of healthy plant, insect and microbial life.

These farmers try to go beyond being simply organic and develop methods of farming that also take into account the area’s ecology, have low impacts, which means they don’t bring in a lot of fertilizers but build their own soils through the use of green manures, composting and mulching.

They try to develop balanced miniature ecosystems, including the use of home-brewed biofuels and technologies, to keep their farms operational. They’re independent thinkers and tinkerers eager to share what they’ve learned.

The conference features workshops and discussions with updates on the latest farming issues and legislation as well as methods for improving life on an ecological farm.

One of the speakers for the afternoon plenary session on Thursday, Feb. 2, “Organic Agriculture as a Strategic Tool for Global Change,” will be Dave Henson, a founding member of the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center in Northern California, another fine example of forward-thinking individuals and organizations seeking a way through the challenges ahead.

The center similarly provides education and hands-on examples of alternative, low-impact measures for creating healthy communities based on vibrant ecosystems, thriving watersheds, sensible housing and food production. It also provides workshops in deep democracy  and building community based on the center’s more than 17 years of working through communal issues.

Finally, there’s a wealth of resources and information from the Bioneers organization, which also meets annually and brings together the brightest minds and innovators who see the future as an opportunity to live well and simply.

If necessity is the mother of invention, now is the time to think creatively, to venture into new territory, to think differently about how we’re going to live.

These are just a few examples of the individuals and organizations that not only know how to think and work outside the box but respect the environment and future, who seek creative ways to reduce their impacts while bringing about positive change.

There are solutions, plenty of them. We just have to know where to look. Hopefully, some of these outlets will be a good place to start. §

Unwelcome weather events hit us hard this year and closed out 2011 with a battering in early December of fierce winds—and later—biting frost and rain.

Weather challenges from sudden spikes or drops in temperatures to high winds, heat and frost put us on guard for most of 2011.

It was a bizarre weather year throughout the U.S. by most accounts, with heavy snowstorms, record-sized tornados and floods, and a one-year drought that cost Texas $10 billion in crop losses.

Losses from weather-related disasters can be devastating for agriculture, especially small farmers, adding “up to an annual economic impact of as much as $485 billion in the U.S.,” according to the August 2011 issue of California Farmer.

We made it through the year with a few minor scrapes and setbacks, mostly from winds, which easily topple the container plants that haven’t been secured with stakes. Some winds have blown so hard that even staked plants have fallen.

Altogether, though, we’ve been lucky; others have not been so lucky.

December started with windstorms that, according to one report, blew gusts up to 125 miles-per-hour in Colorado, sending semi-trucks scuttling off the highway, tearing mature oak trees from their roots throughout old neighborhoods in Pasadena, Calif., throwing heavy limbs into homes, power lines and parked cars, cutting off power to hundreds of thousands, and creating misery for everyone, including farmers.

In our own field, the winds lifted an empty 55-gallon drum and tossed it into a hose bib, shearing the pvc fitting off the main line that enters the blueberry enclosure near the gate. I might have saved myself the trouble of a plumbing job had I secured the drum earlier. The best defense against the unexpected, of course, especially when it comes to weather and farming, is to be prepared.

When I arrived at the field to assess the damage, I worried most about how many of our container plants might have been similarly mowed down by the winds.

It never occurred to me that I’d have a broken main, at least not until I saw the gusher by the gate.

Next to the bridge that crosses the creek onto Farmer Jim’s place, fat limbs hung limply from towering cypress trees, clinging only by long shreds of bark and splintered wood, awaiting tractor and chainsaw. The place had literally been swept, shaken and shorn.

Around the packing house, the ground below row upon row of orange trees was littered with leaves, twigs and half-green, immature oranges. Farmer Jim’s fruit-heavy trees looked as though they had been shaken and cleaned out.

Until then, his trees contained more fruit than any time I’ve seen in the three years I’ve been coming up here. They were loaded, heavy with fruit; the trees remain full but definitely have been lightened.

The winds also knocked over 145 of our containers, 97 of which suffered broken emitters and connectors, not as many as in a previous wind storm in which I picked up more than 400 plants, many of which also had to be repaired, a tedious but important task.

It was after that storm in fact that we began to stake the plants on the perimeter of the field, hoping to stop the domino effect that seemed to occur each time the wind blew hard. It has worked well until this recent most significant windstorm to blow in the last ten years.

It’s worse when the plants are top heavy with growth and fruit. Once the wind gets hold of a plant, it whips the bag around and tugs on the line, breaking the plastic pieces that we use to run water to the plants. Fortunately, the plants were recently heavily pruned and trimmed and there’s not much for the wind to grab.

A friend suggested using rebar to stake the bags because it’s cheap and easy to work with and doesn’t rot in the ground like the wooden stakes we’ve been using. I chose the wooden stakes because they were easily available and, best of all, free.

We try to avoid expenses as much as possible and one of the things I’ve loved about working in the field is the opportunity to improvise and eliminate expensive overhead. Sometimes, though, trying to cut costs can be frustrating too, such as using less expensive garden variety tools for larger, more demanding agricultural applications.

The weed whacker you use around the house, for example, isn’t necessarily the one you want to use out in the field. For the bigger jobs, think heavy duty; it will save you a lot of grief.

One week later, just as our operation was up and running smoothly again, we were hit with a hard frost.

I had no idea that it was coming, no idea, in fact, that temperatures had dropped so severely the night before until one of the workers who lives at the farm told me he’d seen black ice on the leaves of Farmer Jim’s orange trees.

On the way to the farm that day, I noticed that the field of peppers, which had only recently been planted and staked across the creek from us, appeared burned and dead. I’d watched the field hands finish putting up thousands of stakes only a few days prior.
At first, I thought the peppers had dried up from neglect. It seemed like such a huge waste. Then, turning close upon the orange grove nearest the packing house, I noticed that nearly all of the trees’ leaves were turned up and appeared dry.

That’s when I realized harsh weather had given us another taste of the unexpected.

The farmhand said the oranges didn’t appear damaged but will need to develop more before it’s possible to really tell. After passing two fields in which mature fruit trees and tender new pepper plants had clearly suffered from the cold, I was certain that we would see similar stress and burns from frost on our own plants.

At the gate to the enclosure, however, the blueberry plants appeared fine, green and budding beautiful blossoms.

Our blueberry plants tolerate the cold pretty well, even though they’re a southern hybrid developed at a Florida university for warmer climates. They didn’t appear damaged at all. In fact, they looked vibrant and healthy and bearing an abundance of new blossoms.

Finally, we were hit with some rain, which usually isn’t a problem except for the fact that it produces a lot of weeds. As warm temperatures returned by the end of the month, the weed growth exploded, and that actually was the most difficult weather-induced challenge we faced as the year closed out.

Of course, there are no guarantees in this business of working with the elements, and I’m learning to always be ready for the unexpected, especially as weather patterns become more unpredictable.

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Stacey Warde writes from his home in Cayucos, Calif., where he tends a two-acre container farm of blueberries not far from scenic coastal Highway 1. He has received numerous awards for his writing and is a former publisher of the literary magazine, The Rogue Voice.

By Stacey Warde.

Three days of dry heat, wind and no water.

By Stacey Warde.

For three years, I’ve managed to control the weeds on our two-acre blueberry enclosure mostly by hand, without the use of herbicides.

I’ve learned that a shovel, hoe and rake can do a lot of damage to weeds, and it’s great exercise. A mower and weed whacker come in handy too, especially when weeds get out of hand.

Until now, these tools have been effective. Lately, however, I’ve been overrun by Bermuda grass, which has been appearing in patches throughout the field.

It creeps up and around the bags, slips its claw-like rhizomes through the drainage holes, and begins to pull the plants down, or tears the bags apart.

I’ve gone into a tug-of-war with the stuff while trying to pull the plant in its bag up off the ground. The grass clings to the bottom and inside of the bags; it even tugs back as I try to pull the plants away. It’s not good for the plants, or the bags, or me.

Additionally, blueberry root systems don’t compete well with other roots seeking water and nutrients. For that reason, we keep them as free from weeds as possible. Fortunately, the bags have been excellent weed suppressors. It’s hard for most weeds to get inside the bags.

Each day, however, another plant appears to have been taken down by the Bermuda grass as it quickly spreads to other parts of the field.

I’ve scraped at the stuff with a shovel and hoe, tried smothering it with layers of cardboard, and hacked and pulled at it to no avail. It just keeps spreading.

Lawn owners would probably be happy with how this grass spreads, and indeed it might look pretty after a good mowing but it’s become a total nuisance at the farm.

It’s time to spray. This has been a difficult decision. While detesting all chemical inputs that deplete the soil, I’ve found that in dire circumstances it can become necessary to take a “slash and burn” approach.

I first learned this while attempting to eradicate Cape ivy, also known as German ivy, from my backyard. Cape ivy is an invasive vine that has wreaked havoc along some of California’s riparian corridors, taking down native trees. No matter how I tried to get rid of it, little pieces of it kept popping up everywhere.

I researched the most effective methods for eliminating the aggressive ivy and the conclusion in most reports seemed to be that the only way to do it effectively was to spray with Monsanto’s weed killer Roundup®.

Fortunately, with help from a neighbor, I finally managed to get rid of the ivy without taking any drastic measures.

Now, it appears, I’m faced with a similar dilemma. Most conventional farmers wouldn’t give spraying Roundup®, popular in both agricultural and home-garden use, a second thought. It’s relatively cheap, effective and, according to the EPA, impacts on the environment are much less harmful than other herbicides.

One landscaper friend told me: “Roundup® is a landscaper’s best friend. When nothing else works, Roundup® will.”

The farmer next to us sprays his orange orchards with the herbicide. It smells bad and acts quickly but doesn’t affect the trees. Yet, I wonder: What are its impacts?

The data, depending on who’s offering it, can be contradictory. Monsanto, and farmers who use its products, argue that Roundup® weed killer is completely safe and does not affect the environment the way previous generations of herbicides have.

Organizations such as the Organic Consumers Association, however, say just the opposite: “Monsanto’s advertising campaigns have convinced many people that Roundup® is safe, but the facts just don’t support this. Independent scientific studies have shown that Roundup® is toxic to earthworms, beneficial insects, birds and mammals, plus it destroys the vegetation on which they depend for food and shelter.”

I can’t bear the thought, silly as it might seem to some farmers, of destroying or potentially harming the microbial life of the soil as well as neighboring insects, reptiles, amphibians and birds. I keep worms at home to eat my organic scraps and they give me nutrient-rich castings and tea for my plants.

The thought of putting poison on them, or on any of the beneficial critters that frequent the field, makes me feel uneasy. While pulling back the grass to get a closer look, for example, I spotted a frog and a lizard scooting to get away from me. How could I spray poison here?

In my own circle of friends who grow organically, I’ve heard many negative remarks about Roundup® and about the company that produces it. “It’s the devil’s juice,” said one, a landscaper who builds food forests into his landscapes so that customers can enjoy healthy organic fruit trees and vines in their home gardens.

I asked him what were the long-term effects of glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup®, and he said: “It depletes the soil and shrinks your testicles.” (A study is alleged to have shown that rabbits exposed to glyphosate saw a 50 percent reduction in sperm production.)

Many green advocates and organic farmers view Monsanto, which began marketing its popular weed killer in the 1970s, as a devil-like incarnation of pure greed, which is attempting to consolidate and control the world food market by patenting genetically altered plants and seeds.

Any purchase from that company, I’ve been told, is a flat out bargain with the devil. I’m between a rock and a hard place.

I want to argue that in this case, which could become extreme if I don’t get a handle on it quickly, a bargain with the devil is better than partial or total crop loss due to invasive weeds.

The alternative, however, isn’t much better. Organic herbicides don’t always work as effectively as nonorganic. In a paper, “Weed Management for Organic Crops,” published by the University of California’s Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources, the authors conclude: ”Currently, the efficacy in these organically acceptable herbicides is marginal at best.”

I’m not a purist in the strictest sense of the word; I try to be practical and make decisions that will do the least harm to the environment. Yet, and I know this is true for farmers of all stripes, when pests, disease or weeds become a threat to our crops, or our livelihoods, we’ll do whatever it takes to protect our investment.

Shall I use Roundup® or an organic alternative? I have to do something quickly, time is running out as the grass begins to spread.

When another friend discovered that I had been considering selectively and carefully spraying limited amounts of Roundup® into patches of the Bermuda grass growing in our field, he said: “If you spray Roundup® on your plants, I won’t eat your berries.”

I won’t be spraying the plants. They, too, of course, would die. Yet, I hate to lose a customer.

I’ve given this one potential buyer’s concern some thought. Instead of diving fully into a potentially “devilish” bargain, I’ve decided to compare the results of a popular non-toxic spray made from plant oils that is supposed to be safe for animals and plants with tests of Roundup® on the noxious weed.

We’ll see which works best. I know that it’s not an ideal solution, but it’s also no longer possible to manage the Bermuda grass by hand. All of this, of course, gets back to the bottom line of how we manage our fields. Well-managed fields, it’s said, don’t have problems with weeds.

Up to this point, we’ve done OK. We’ve had our share of weeds but none that couldn’t be managed by hand.

If I had my way, I’d put our blueberry plants into the ground and follow the no-till philosophy of Japanese farmer Masanobu Fukuoka, author of “The One-Straw Revolution,” who argues that nature is the best teacher for learning how to grow food and how to keep everything, including weeds and pests, in balance.

In a balanced system, Fukuoka argues, chemical fertilizers, fungicides, herbicides and pesticides become totally unnecessary.

We can avoid the ruin of good soil and earth by eliminating disruptive chemical inputs, he says. In fact, the soil, he argues, is best left alone, not even tilled. There are better, healthier and more effective farming methods, he adds, but most modern farmers are stuck, conditioned by an industrial approach to farming that requires a heavy hand and heavy chemical inputs.

Stacey Warde writes from his home in Cayucos, Calif., where he tends a two-acre container farm of blueberries not far from scenic coastal Highway 1. He has received numerous awards for his writing and is a former publisher of the literary magazine, The Rogue Voice.

By Stacey Warde.

In the United States, climate change has become one of the most politically volatile issues of our day, pitting business and political interests against those that claim humans have dangerously altered our planet’s biosphere, threatening our very survival, potentially destroying life as we know it.

Amid ominous signs of radical changes in weather—supercharged tornados, hurricanes, floods, and extended droughts, just to name a few—debate around the issue has itself also become supercharged, leaving little room for informed discussion.

More often, when the subject comes up for consideration in our public discourse, parties tend to divide themselves into extremes.

One extreme, for example, claims that climate change is a hoax while the other extreme argues that humans have irreparably damaged the planet, and now natural catastrophes never before seen have begun crashing down upon us.

One of the most vocal critics of climate change is Republican Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe, who is the ranking member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. In a July 28, 2003, floor speech before the Senate, Inhofe claimed that the threat of catastrophic global warming was “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.”

The resulting public outcry, Inhofe said later, proved that indeed environmentalists who claim the inevitability of global warming were basing their views more as an “article of religious faith” rather than as sound scientific reasoning.

Furthermore, Inhofe said correctly, scientists who challenge the tenets of global warming “are attacked, sometimes personally, for blindly ignoring the so-called ‘scientific consensus.’”

On the other side, respected scientists such as Robert Ballard, a professor of oceanography and explorer of the Titanic, argue that we’ve gone past the point of no return: “If you want to know the truth: it’s too late. All the ice is going to melt. There’s a lag and it’s already in the system.

“Sometimes I see this tombstone that says, ‘The human race came and went, but it was politically correct,’” he said.

We can’t seem to find the middle ground to proceed, framing a debate that will protect business and economic interests while also lessening our impacts on the environment. [See Environmental Defense Fund’s “We believe economic prosperity and environmental stewardship go hand-in-hand.”]

The debate on global climate change, in fact, often approaches the absurd, especially when so many people engaged in the discussion have already made up their minds without really reviewing the evidence.

In fact, one of the more telling and less reported facts about the debate is the scientific literacy, or lack thereof, of individuals who have taken a position on the subject. The lack of scientific literacy is a problem on both sides of the debate, with individuals basing their positions more on personal preferences, political alliances, hunches (or, as Inhofe put it, “religious faith”), rather than on actual review of the scientific data.

The Political Game
The real hoax, if there is one, however, may be in the way we have let the mass media frame the debate by making it into a battle between political parties instead of turning it into an opportunity to educate and inform.

If probed, ask yourself, how much do I really know about climate change? Where did I get my information? What science have I depended upon for my position on climate change? More likely, we’ve relied upon news that likes to make a fetish out of conflict rather build an informed and fresh perspective on events in the world.

In the emerging era of digital information overload, it gets more challenging to sift fact from fiction, and nowhere is this more telling than on the subject of global climate change. It also gets more difficult to develop an informed rather than impassioned opinion on the topic. Polarization and paralysis take hold. Nothing gets done, only talking heads.

In his Oct. 4 Time magazine column, “Going Green,” for example, blogger Bryan Walsh took to task GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry for this recent comment to New Hampshire voters: “I don’t believe man-made global warming is settled in science enough.”

In the article, titled “Who’s Bankrolling the Climate-Change Deniers?”, Walsh next points out that in 2007-2008 nearly 50 percent of Republicans polled agreed that the effects of global warming were already being felt; 70 percent of liberals and Democrats agreed. In 2010, less than 30 percent of Republicans agreed; the figure for liberals and Democrats remained the same.

“That’s deeply troubling,” Walsh went on. “It’s one thing when people disagree on the effectiveness of different approaches to fix a problem; it’s worse when they refuse even to believe that a problem exists — despite an overwhelming scientific consensus that says it does. One of America’s major political parties has, in effect, adopted denial as policy. How did we get here?”

How did we get here? Partly, because no one’s listening, and it’s hard to create well-reasoned and effective policy when people are screaming at each other.

Perry didn’t say a problem doesn’t exist; he said the science isn’t settled enough. So why not, as Perry and other climate change skeptics request, review the data more closely?

Believers seem to assume, for example, that no sensible scientist, at least none who aren’t part of the lunatic fringe or funded by the fossil fuel industry, would dare challenge the scientific data that suggests alarming trends in global temperatures and changes in weather patterns.

It’s one thing to deny climate change, the way the media likes to put it, and an entirely different thing to challenge the data, to question the consensus. And there’s plenty of room for debate in the scientific community.

The argument, of course, is that those who question the science advocating global warming trends are mere shills for the fossil fuel industry, which is unwilling to lose profits by re-tooling and shifting its focus to more sustainable energy uses. That, also, is partly true.

But not every politician or scientist who challenges the data is necessarily denying that climate change or global warming is a concern.

Basically, the debate can be broken down into two camps: Climate Change Believers and Climate Change Challengers. Both sides seem to want to frame the debate so that there is no middle ground, only fruitless attempts to cancel each other out.

For one example of how the middle ground gets lost in extremes, note how quickly a Climate Change Believer will label anyone who doesn’t agree with the “scientific consensus” on climate change as a Climate Change Denier.

Words tell all. If you’re a labeled denier then, as Inhofe claims, you must be a heretic or an imbecile, and thus there’s no room or opportunity for you to make a vigorous and studied challenge to the consensus. Of course, there are some who, against the evidence and apparent sound reason, deny any possibility that climate change is a factor.

Indeed, there is a third group, the Climate Change Deniers, which seems to get all of the attention when it comes to not only discussing the issue of climate change but also in forming policies that regulate industry guilty of adding daily tons of carbons into the atmosphere.

The believers seem to have the upper hand at this stage but that appears to be changing. The challengers and deniers are fast picking up the pace, and that worries a lot of people. Too bad, because there’s plenty of wiggle room for debate, if only the involved parties would square off and really evaluate the data with dispassionate, scientific skill.

Unfortunately, the “science” appears to get lost in the name calling. §

Next time, we’ll look more closely at the discussion of global climate change within the scientific community, and how scientific literacy has helped shaped the public discourse.

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Stacey Warde writes from his home in Cayucos, Calif., where he tends a two-acre container farm of blueberries not far from scenic coastal Highway 1. He has received numerous awards for his writing and is a former publisher of the literary magazine, The Rogue Voice.

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