Epitaph for a Peach Read Online Free PDF Page B

shimmer.
    Even the farmers seem to wear peculiar smiles. Through the cold winter season, they were confined to maintenance, repairing equipment, fixing broken cement irrigation gates, replanting lost trees and vines. Their hibernation culminates with a desk assignment at the kitchen table, where they sit surrounded by piles of papers, laboring on taxes (farmers are required to file by March first). After restless hours of poring through shoe boxes of receipts and trying to make sense of instructions written by IRS sadists eager to punish all of us who are self-employed, farmers long for a simple task outside. We are anxious to walk our fields, to be productive, to work our land. A full winter’s worth of pent-up energy is unleashed on the tiny population of weeds.
    Within a day or two, the genocide is complete. Fields become “clean,” void of all life except vines and trees. Farmers take no prisoners. I can sometimes count the number of weeds missed by their disks. “Can’t let any go to seed,” a neighbor rationalizes. Each seed becomes a symbol of evil destruction and an admission of failure.
    Farmers also enlist science to create a legion of new weapons against the weeds. They spray preemergent herbicides, killing latent seed pods before they germinate. Others use contact or systemic killers, burning the delicate early growth of weeds and injecting the plants with toxins that reach down to the roots. As spring weeds flourish between rows, a strip of barren earth beneath each vine or tree magically materializes from a spray applied a month or two before. At times I wonder what else is killed in order to secure the area.
    A weed might be defined as any undesirable plant. On my farm, I used to call anything that wasn’t a peach tree or a grapevine a weed. I too considered a field clean if it contained nothing but dirt, barren of anything green except what I had planted. All my neighbors did likewise. We’d compete to see whose field would be the cleanest. But our fields weren’t clean. They were sterile.
    We pay a high price for sterility, not only in herbicide bills and hours of disking but also in hidden costs like groundwater contamination. Some farmers can no longer use a certain herbicide because the California Department of Agriculture tested and discovered trace residues contaminating the water tables beneath their farms. It had been widely used because it kills effectively and is relatively cheap; for about $10 per acre it would sterilize an entire field.
    But signatures of a clean field can stay with the farm for years. Behind my house, I planted some landscape pines, hardy, cheap, grow-anywhere black pines—that kept dying. They died a slow death, the needle tips burning before turning completely brown, the top limbs succumbing first, the degeneration marching down toward the heartwood like a deadly cancer. Uncertain of the cause of death, I gave up trying to grow the pines after the third cremation. Staring at the barren area I at last discovered the reason: nothing grew on that strip of earth. The preemergent herbicide I once used remains effective and has left a long-term brand on the land.
    But I now have very few weeds on my farm. I removed them in a single day using a very simple method. I didn’t even break into a sweat. I simply redefined what I call a weed.
    It began with an uncomfortable feeling, like a muse whispering in my ear, which led to an observation about barren landscapes. It doesn’t make sense to try and grow juicy grapes and luscious peaches in sterile ground. The terms juicy and luscious connote land that’s alive, green most of the year with plants that celebrate the coming of spring.
    A turning point came when a friend started calling his weeds by a new name. He referred to them as “natural grasses.” I liked that term. It didn’t sound as evil as “weeds,” it had a soft and gentle tone about it. So I came to think of