The World Is Bonkers — Shall I Laugh or Cry?

Last week I wrote about Bonkers, the revolutionary apple – but unknown to me – the Atlantic, two weeks earlier, published an article, Why So Much is Bonkers Right Now. The Atlantic mentioned at least ten references to this imported British word. For example, Mother Jones had recently reassured its readers: “It’s Not Just You . . . This Week Was Bonkers,” referring to the latest Trump charades. And Vox used the word to describe Netflix’s newest film, Okja: “a bonkers corporate satire staring Tilda Swinton and a superpig.” I saw a two-page spread advertising the film in the New Yorker magazine. The image, a young woman leading a giant creature with a factory building as its saddle spewing out pollution from one of three smokestacks, was so fascinating I looked it up on Rotten Tomatoes and found that it is a story of an extraordinary human animal bond threatened by capitalist consumers. 

The Atlantic article also mentions the word Bonkers’ first use on American soil in 1965, when an American film reviewer of the film Paranoia used the word to describe “Marcello Mastroianni as going slowly bonkers while sharing a bath, bed, and Bedouin with three co-stars.” In the 1980s, there was a candy named Bonkers. Its commercial takes the prize for worst of its kind, but you can watch it here. And there is a recent memoir by the comedian Jennifer Saunders, Bonkers: My Life in Laughs. What is the appeal of this Bonkers everyone is using? Zany, crazy, madcap, screwy, wacky? The Atlantic article ended with an appreciatory note, saying that this British word is “uniquely suited to this American moment: a time when news can be so often confusing, and overwhelming, and, all in all, a little bit bonkers.” 

Yet to describe our world as Bonkers doesn’t feel right. After the Manchester killings and the London Bridge savagery, the world is not Bonkers, but alarming. Withdrawing America from the Paris Climate Accord is equally horrifying. Bonkers is a non-judgmental adjective; it resists condemnation. Faced with the harsh reality of innocent lives lost, the continued devastation of people’s homes from war and terrorism, and the loss of species and habitat because of climate change, Bonkers doesn’t describe the depth of suffering in our world.

Yet, at the same moment that devastation is happening all around, I watch young children skip merrily before climbing aboard a big yellow school bus and bike down our street with fishing rods tucked under their arms, knowing nothing about the follies of their parents’ generation. I feel similarly protective of the spotted brown and white eggs in a small nest high in a branch of the Saturn peach. These birds will know nothing of the perils facing the earth. This contrast between the news and what is happening in my backyard does make me feel like this world is Bonkers.

Today, a friend came by and we spent several hours removing peaches from the Saturn peach tree. Last week it was pruned to about half its size, and now we needed to thin the heavy fruit set. Packed together on the branches like sardines in a tin, the tree had produced a crazy number of apples. When this much fruit grows tightly together, disease spreads, the fruit is small, and it taxes the health of a tree. I heard myself say to her the ‘B’ word, ‘The tree is Bonkers – it has way too much fruit.’

Suffering is all around us, but miraculous beauty is too. Maybe the gift of the word Bonkers is that it describes craziness without being judgmental. We can do so much more to relieve suffering in the world if we don’t wallow in judging thoughts, but take up our lives wholeheartedly. Whether we grow miraculous peaches, listen to another’s pain, or spearhead an activist role to clean up the planet, every day we have the opportunity to hold back our anger, yet take in the grief; to feel the devastation, yet fight for change. Maybe to declare that this world is Bonkers is to bring lightness to the seriousness of our situation, and to let laughter wash over our tears.

Meditator with Acorn, 2017, bronze, Sculpture LH

Natural Farming — Part 2 (continuation from last Sunday's blog)

The comfrey I planted throughout the orchard did not spread as I had been warned. We experienced our area’s driest summer in history. We don’t have clay soil like the Japanese farmer, Fukuoka, but quite the opposite; our orchard soil is classified as Hinckley, an exceedingly rocky, fast-draining soil. It is definitely not choice soil for an orchard. The young trees struggled just like the comfrey. Only the older trees, with deep roots, tapped into water. I realized that if I wanted to plant more herbs and wildflowers, and create a natural environment like Fukuoka, I would need to have some way of delivering water to all the trees.

We applied to the Natural Resources Conservation Services (NRCS) for a grant to put in an irrigation system, and our grant was accepted. They knew that with our Hinckley soils, the apple trees would surely benefit from irrigation. We installed the system ourselves, pumping the water from the surrounding wetlands. Now I could plant all kinds of beneficial and medicinal plants in the orchard—plants that would be good for our soil, and that might help with pest management.

The beauty of the orchard delighted me as the summer progressed. Sunflowers, rudbeckia, mountain mint, asters, goldenrod, bee balm, and echinacea flowered and fed the pollinators. When Blase asked if he should mow in the orchard, I replied, “Not yet, no.” The Jerusalem artichoke flowers were six feet tall, and the valerian stalks were covered with delicate white flowers. A few weeks later, he said, “I really should mow the orchard.” Again, I said, “No mowing. Not yet.”

The orchard was beginning to feel like a natural woodland. The trees were loaded with fruit, and it seemed like an abundant crop. I finally asked Blase to mow between the apple tree rows to accommodate the pickers, but we left all the wildflowers and natural growth between and under the trees. We had a great harvest season, the farm quieted, and Blase and I turned to other pursuits.

Heavy snow fell during the month of January. The drifts were over three feet high, burying the lowest apple limbs. In early February, warmer temperatures brought a thaw, and I went for a walk among the trees. Snow melts first around the trunks, and my eye caught sight of gnawed wood close to the ground. It glowed a bright orange color. Shocked, I reached down and brushed more snow away. The gnawed wood went deeper.

Voles! They had scampered across the crust of the deep snow, climbed over the 18-inch high hardware cloth fence that encircles every trunk, and dropped down between the trunk and the protective screen. There they made soft, grassy nests, and ate and lived in the safety of their cozy burrows with a pantry of food close by. In tree after tree, especially in the back of the orchard, these rodents had eaten the bark, chewing their way around the base of the trees and down to the roots. Many trees were completely girdled. Girdling, when it is complete, kills the tree by cutting off the sap flow between the roots and the crown.  

Voles girdled this tree.

Voles even ate the lower branches because of the height of the hard packed snow!

I panicked and called in reinforcements. With a couple of friends, we started shoveling the snow away from every trunk.

Gabi White tirelessly shoveling snow.

It was exhausting work. There was no way we could remove that much snow from around every tree. When we were too tired to shovel, we stomped the snow down with snowshoes. It felt like a war zone. Our hats, coats, shirts, and gloves were scattered everywhere.

Gabi White — resting!

After a short break, we got back to work, shoveled more snow, heated up and stripped to tank tops, but it was too late. The damage was done.

Paige O’Brien, one of our farm workers, made a detailed map of all the injured trees and numbered them on a scale of one to four. One was one-quarter girdled, two was halfway, three was three-quarters, and four was completely girdled. We cut down the threes and fours, because they would either die or struggle mightily. A weak tree would attract more disease and pests. In all, fifty trees out of three hundred needed to be cut down. A saw blade to each trunk, and the task was done. Such quick work compared to years of cultivating growth.

Later, I learned it had been a bumper year for voles. Nature is like that—a bumper year for acorns, for apples, and now, for voles. Commercial growers knock down the vole population every fall with pellet poison. I had done the opposite. I had created a perfect vole habitat by growing delicious herbaceous perennials and cultivating long grasses and flowering plants. Following the irrigation drip lines, the voles had scampered freely from tree to tree.

So much for a wild orchard. I would have to rethink my approach and mow down all the perennials in the fall. Now, we mow several times throughout the season to dissuade the vole population from even considering making the orchard their home, but we leave patches of herbs and wildflowers growing between the trees. In preparation for winter, even these plants get mowed down to the ground. We also pull the drip lines away from the trees. In the spring, the hardy plants come back. I can already see the healing herbs like comfrey, valerian, and mountain mint unfolding their leaves. The orchard is not wild, but it’s not a monoculture either. We are trying to live peaceably with the other creatures who make their home nearby — definitely not offering them apples trees to chew — but encouraging a diversity and abundance of nature.

The challenge remains, however.  I check on trees that aren't growing as well as I would expect and discover they are partially girdled, and two days ago I cut down a Crimson Crisp, a three-year-old ready to take off, but completely eaten around the graft. I'm discouraged. Then I smile at a dove sitting on  a young tree as a blue heron flies by. I see pink buds on almost every branch of some eighty varieties of apples. I am blessed.

Natural Farming — Part 1

It may be that when we no longer know what to do, 
we have come to our real work
and when we no longer know which way to go, 
we have begun our real journey. 
            —Wendell Berry, Farmer, Poet, and Writer

In 2006, the once abandoned orchard at Old Frog Pond Farm received organic certification. But that didn’t mean I understood what I was doing as an orchardist. An experienced farmer tends the earth for years, season after season, noticing, altering her approach, and trying new ideas. I was following an instruction sheet that I only partially understood. In my search to improve my orchard practices, I came upon the writings of Masanobu Fukuoka (1913-2008), a Japanese rice and citrus grower, who discovered a way to farm that was in harmony with nature. His book, One Straw Revolution, published in English in 1978, became an underground manifesto for a new approach to agriculture: one that did no harm, that did not depend on chemical fertilizers, pesticides, or mountains of compost — one that emphasized ease.  

As a young man, Fukuoka worked for the Customs Bureau’s Plant Inspection Division, having studied plant pathology at the university. His long hours led to a bout of acute pneumonia and hospitalization. He lay for days in his hospital room where a broken window let in cold and snow. He recounts that a nurse checked his temperature from time to time, but that was all. In the midst of this icy solitude, he started to fear death approaching. When he was finally released from the hospital, he fell into a terrible depression. The work that had fascinated him seemed useless. He could not sleep or focus on anything. One night on a hill overlooking the harbor, he collapsed with exhaustion. He woke the next morning at dawn, gazing over the water.  “Everything I had held in firm conviction,” he wrote, “everything upon which I had ordinarily relied, was swept away with the wind. I felt that I understood nothing.” The next day he handed in his resignation and began wandering, trying to explain to people he met what he had experienced. “I challenged a lot of people with my conviction that everything is meaningless and of no value, that everything returns to nothingness. But this was too much, or too little, for the everyday world to conceive.” He returned to his father’s farm resolved to live a simple life.  

I settled myself on the mountain and everything went well up until the time my father entrusted me with the richly bearing trees in the orchard. . . . My conviction was that crops grow themselves and should not have to be grown. I had acted in the belief that everything should be left to take its natural course, but I found that if you apply that way of thinking all at once, before long things do not go so well.

Fukuoka ruined the citrus crop and his father insisted that he leave and get a job and come back when his mind was right. Fukuoka left, and found a job as Head Researcher at a nearby agricultural research center. It was just when Japan was preparing for war and for the next eight years Fukuoka did research devoted to increasing the wartime food supply. Throughout this time, he was always pondering the idea of a natural approach to farming.  

Fukuoka returned to his father’s farm, convinced that a grower could trust nature and not use any chemicals. On a clay hillside above the farm, he decided he would grow an orchard of mikan, a Japanese clementine. “The red clay was so hard you could not stick a shovel into it,” he wrote. People had previously grown potatoes there, exhausted the soil, and abandoned the fields. His father thought he was crazy.

To improve the soil, Fukuoka first tried digging holes in the compacted soil and adding organic matter, a physically demanding effort that led nowhere. Then he tried burying straw and ferns that he had carried on his back from higher up on the mountain. But hauling ninety pound loads and digging trenches was exhausting. The trenches eventually caved in, and there was barely any organic matter. He thought of building organic matter in the soil with decomposed wood, but it wasn’t available nearby. This was his “aha” moment — he could grow the wood himself.

Among his citrus trees, he planted pine, cedar, pear, loquats, cherries, and other native trees. On the bare ground under them, he sowed white clover and alfalfa. After several years, the clover grew and blanketed the hillside. He planted daikon, the large white Japanese radish. With its deep taproot, the daikon opened the way for water and air to circulate through the dense clay.  The radish reseeded, softening the hard clay soil, and, after a few seasons, Fukuoka could plant root crops like potatoes and eventually more tender vegetables. He continued to sow clover, a nitrogen-fixing plant that returned more nitrogen to the soil than it used. The orchard soil became rich and dark, and the tall trees provided a windbreak protecting the smaller citrus trees. With the ground cover of nitrogen-producing plants, the orchard naturally had all the fertilizer necessary. With the diversity of plants and trees, insect pressure decreased, and he had no need for pesticides. 

In Japan, after World War II, there was a great rush to emulate the West and use modern methods, specifically chemicals for farming. At first these new introductions from the West meant less work for the farmers, but it took only one generation before the minerals in the soil were depleted and the crops became dependent on chemical nutrients. Fukuoka knew intuitively that there must be another way.  

Over the over the next decades, Fukuoka refined his approach to agriculture and called it natural farming (different from 'do-nothing' farming that had destroyed his father's citrus crop). He believed that farming should be pleasurable and in harmony with nature, not such oppressively hard work that the farmer is left with no time for other pursuits. “There is no time in modern agriculture for a farmer to write a poem or compose a song,” he would grumble. Fukuoka always sold his crops for less than chemically treated produce, because he felt natural food should be less expensive. “After all, natural food [is] easier to grow, even though it [is] more nutritious and tasty.” When Fukuoka learned that a distributor in Tokyo was selling his mikan for a high price, he immediately stopped selling to him.

The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.  
                   —Masanobu Fukuoka

I aspired to Fukuoka’s ease and trust of nature. Having no idea what I would do, for several weeks, I carried around his book, as if the spirit contained within it would infuse the farm. My first real step was to plant comfrey throughout the orchard, a plant that also has a long taproot. People told me that I was really foolish, because comfrey spreads its seeds and will take over gardens, fields, and even orchards. The comfrey didn’t turn out to be a problem, because the deer kept it in check. But what happened next in my desire to create a natural orchard in the spirit of Fukuoka was devastating.

                                               Natural Farming: Part 2 will follow next Sunday.

Soil Redemption Song

Michael Phillips, author of The Apple Grower and The Holistic Orchard, now has a new book, Mycorrhizal Planet, just published by Chelsea Green Publishing. There was some disagreement between Phillips and the publisher about the title for the book, so he conducted a poll asking friends for input. A cattle rancher, a regional publisher, a permaculture guru, a biodynamic herbalist, an academic, and an orchardist/artist, among others, all weighed in on which of three titles they preferred. I voted without hesitation for Mycorrhizal Alchemy, but Chelsea Green decided to go with Mycorrhizal Planet (Mycorrhizal Pathways was the other choice). Alchemy suggests transformation, mystery, and ancient practices, all of which I am drawn towards. It’s a little like taking old found objects and making them into art.

Linda Hoffman (left) and Madeleine Lord working on Belle the Bird in Hoffman's Studio, 2009

In the painting, The Alchemist by Cornelis Bega, a hunched figure sits in a cave-like room, intent on what is happening inside a glass jar. Books, notebooks, and earthenware pots surround him, suggesting a lifetime of mixing substances and studying their reactions. The alchemist is grounded and humble in Bega’s depiction. It’s a lonely art, much maligned as a materialistic quest to turn ore into gold; when, in fact, alchemists made considerable contributions to early science. 

The Alchemist, Cornelis Bega

I think of Michael Phillips like this alchemist, studying the threads of life in the soil, appreciating them, and sharing their magic. Mycorrhizal fungi form a fibrous network stretching throughout the soil, attaching to roots, and connecting plant roots to each other. These fungi process minerals and feed them up to the plants, sending up just what is required. They will even provide storage for a plant’s bounty until leaner times, or pass on needed nutrients to other plants. It's a hidden world that scientists are only beginning to explore.

Photo courtesy of Larry Petersen, University of Guelph

“Each and every Mycorrhizal pulsating with nutrient flow, [is] making our lives possible,” Phillips writes. I consider Phillip’s passion to understand soil devotional.

Interestingly, Buddhism conceives of our world as one in which everything is interrelated and interdependent; nothing is separate in all of existence (or non-existence). Buddhism uses the analogy of the jeweled Net of Indra to describe this global interconnectedness. Imagine a vast net spreading out infinitely in all directions. At every crossing point in the net is a reflective jewel, and each jewel contains the reflection of every other jewel. If I were to put a mark on one gemstone, it would appear on every other one. How we treat one person ripples across the entire world.  

The world under our feet is no different. Trees even share nutrients through Mycorrhizal fungi attached to their roots with trees of different species. It’s a little mind blowing — this network of fungi in the soil supporting the cosmic connection between all beings throughout space and time.

Phillips told me that he actually wanted the title to be Soil Redemption Song, inspired by Bob Marley’s haunting Redemption Song.

[…]
Won't you help to sing
These songs of freedom?
'Cause all I ever have
Redemption songs
Redemption songs

Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery
None but ourselves can free our minds
Have no fear for atomic energy
'Cause none of them can stop the time
How long shall they kill our prophets
While we stand aside and look? Ooh
Some say it's just a part of it
We've got to fulfill the Book

Won't you help to sing
These songs of freedom?
'Cause all I ever have
Redemption songs
Redemption songs
Redemption songs

Michael told me that as he pondered the lyrics of this song, he wrote, “Healthy plant metabolism begins with a molecule of water, a breath of carbon, and light energy from our nearest star. The tangible science behind all this unlocks the righteous way to farm and garden, give honor to trees, and plain do right by this earth. Nothing has ever excited me more.”

Mycorrhizal Planet provides practical information for the farmer, gardener, orchardist, and forester, as well as inspiration for all of us who have temporarily lost heart from following the daily news. If you’d like to order the book please go to Phillips’ website. He’ll sign a copy and send it to you.

Listen closely when you next walk among the trees. You might just hear the great alchemist Bob Marley singing — transforming our pain with his courage. Listen!