Cleanup
07/26/2024
Team Blue,
How about a round of applause for these blueberry bushes? Day in and day out, they are focused single-mindedly on one task: to produce abundant and delicious berries for you, dear reader. They do this without a peep, without a whimper, with barely a rustle in the wind. They do it through the day and through the night; through rain and shine; through sleet and snow, should such a freak event occur. Even now, as the last berries ripen, they have already turned their copious attention to the berries of the year ahead, putting on new shoots to hold them, new roots to fill them, new buds to be them.
At this time of year, the blueberry must make a guess. Predictions, particularly about the future, are famously hard. They must make a guess as to how much sunlight, water, and nutrients they can plausible gather in the year to come, and set fruit buds to match. They must make a guess as to how far off the first frost will fall, how much further to grow with this new cane and still have time to harden it off for approaching winter. They stand, in undaunted awe before an unknown future, and say "yes" to life. They know no other way.
It seems impossible to imagine, here in the high season of late July, that winter is coming, that it will come. Those of us who have lived in warmer climes know full well that the human organism doesn't need winter. Physiologically, at least - I am open to a spiritual argument. But a blueberry bush needs winter - winter is the great regulator of its life. Yes, the high season is engaging and dynamic, as all of the cellular machinery of the berry bursts into action, as life's instruction manual is read and performed, cover to cover, once more. But winter is the context in which that instruction manual is written, the hidden and implied expectations imposed on activity by dormancy.
Were I to transplant a blueberry bush to a sun-drenched land, one that has only heard dull rumor of frost and snow from vagabond particles of light refracted from snowy peaks in the far distance, it would not long survive. Were I to pack up my car with a gift, a blueberry bush for my summer-born niece in Los Angeles, and plant it in her back yard, it would live - provided that it were well-watered - but as summer turned to fall, as the temperature stayed luxuriant (to inappropriately anthropomorphize), confusion would set in. Where is the great signal? When shall I bring back the nutrients from my leaves to be stored in swelling tissues underground? The plant would likely drop its leaves at some point, out of sheer exhaustion and confusion if nothing else, its instruction manual repeating haphazard loops as content tripped over context.
The great task of any temperate plant is to know when to wake up. To this phenomenon, our science has given the name Chill Hours. It is a clever self-imposed requirement of plants such as the blueberry that they must experience a certain amount of cold before they begin to think of waking up. This suddenly-Californian blueberry plant, sitting unceremoniously dormant between the lime and the avocado, would wait, day after day, for temperatures in a particular range, slightly above freezing, waiting for each hour to score a thin and thickening line in its genetically metaphorical protective casing. At some moment, evolutionarily calibrated for a region such as Wisconsin, this deepening groove would prick through, the latent pressure of life within would burst forth, and the machinery would begin in motion once more. But in Los Angeles, no signal will come. In Los Angeles, no such groove will be etched. Barely an hour will be spent in chill, grinding around the surface of life's protective sphere. The casing is thick enough to require hundreds of hours, lest unseasonable winter warmth fool the plant into an untimely and disastrous stirring from slumber. The signal never comes; confusion reigns.
This is a lot to think about, particularly for an organism with no fleshy brain that we can see. Therein lies the magic of deoxyribonucleic life, I suppose.
There's only one problem, for the blueberries in your humble patch; you may have noticed it: Competition.
Competition is all around us, in every aspect of the fiction piled upon fiction piled upon reality that is human civilization, and yet we resent it. Some may extol its virtues in the abstract, yet labor under its heavy yoke for all their days. Our re-creation of competition in the human social realm may seem unjust or unnecessary, but it is certainly not unprecedented. It is everywhere around us, to be found active and humming in every square foot of soil. Seed after seed, plant after plant, vies for this or that photon, stretching and spreading and tumbling over each other for each sip of light, snatching every mineral and molecule within hydraulic range of its roots, lest the other guy get it. The leviathanic war of all against all may be too pat a phrase, too seventeenth-century for our modern sensibilities, but there is more than a little truth to it.
Yes, modern ecology has complicated this story, beautified and beatified it, but not overturned it. Plants may coordinate and collaborate, nurture and shelter each other to some extent or another, in some contexts and for reasons both scrutable and inscrutable. But this many-splendored cloak of ecological public-spiritedness is wrapped around a rigid frame of material scarcity. Only so many photons will alight upon this particular patch of ground in a season; only so many molecules of water will find their temporary and cyclic residence in this soil; there are only so many building blocks of life, labile and scavengable, in a handful of earth.
Were I to plant one million seeds from one thousand species in a single square foot of earth, not all would live. Not all would germinate, not all would grow and thrive, not all would complete their life cycle. Not all would deem themselves as having lived. Life enables as much as it can, but it works no miracles.
I guess what I'm saying is, I need help weeding.
Rather, the blueberries need help, if they are to fulfill the promise that they have already made to you, dear reader, to supply you with abundant and delicious berries in the next year. They've already signed the contract; the annual and automatic renewal of their lease on life is on the books. They stand ready and willing to put on new growth, to harden off, to calculate their prediction for the year ahead, to enact that prediction and place their bet on the number of berries they will wager for the coming year.
What the blueberries need, at this moment, is confidence. This organism will take stock of its surroundings and situation, its past and present, its prospects and circumstances, and somehow incorporate all of that information, through no fleshy brain that we can see, into some number of buds for the future. If it senses that the year ahead will be filled with competition and strife, if its reckoning as to the quantity and quality of light, water, and nutrient that it can claim for itself is diminished, it will make a conservative wager. If, however, it senses that the world is its oyster, that the soil in which it has interwoven itself is a place of abundance and blueberry-luxury, it will make a confident wager. A wager that may lead us to gasp at its boldness, may cause us to doubt, with raised brow, whether any plant could possibly produce so many berries, may inspire us to imagine bounty.
If you wish the crop to be abundant, if you already dream of the berries of a year to come, if a thriving blueberry is in your interest, then you have a stake in their confidence for the future.
Join me, Sunday afternoon, to weed the blueberries.
Give back to the plants who have given you so much; give forward to the plants that offer to give you so much once more. In exchange for your help, the blueberries will provide you with a Pick Your Own Pound, to be harvested today or in the next year.
The pick has been paused for a week now, to allow the latter half of the late varieties to ripen. There are many berries to pick. Let's clean up the blueberry patch and then clean up the season's harvest.
If anything is left, public picking will resume on Monday.
To confidence in the year ahead,
Twin Crix
