No Mood
It’s Earth Day and I’m not feeling it. As a matter fact, I am downright disappointed in humanity right now, along with a little frustration at Mother Nature. Lately she’s been a hot mess with mood swings. In the mid 80s one week, causing everything to explode in a blossom and emerald glory and then dragging us back down into freezing temperatures to kill it all off. I am afraid to ask our orchardists about stone fruits this year. And even if farmers did manage to fend off frosts, to get their floating row covers deployed, and products picked prior to the freeze, last week we still had to deal with a drenching rain for nearly the entire market.
You know it’s bad when strawberries show up for the first time of the season and Agriberry was not sold out by the end of the day. That’s OK, because like any good businessperson, they’ve got a solid plan B. Speaking of Agriberry, I was missing a familiar face this year as Susan finally retired after 15 years of slinging fruit at the farmers market. Taking over is her nephew and now general manager, Pierson. Maybe a slower day was a gentler entry point than baptism by fire. I am certain he’ll get the hang of it, including queue control. Let’s cut him a little slack and not do our best imitations of Black Friday shoppers at Walmart.
While I am fortunate that my crop wears sweaters, the freeze warning had me rushing to cut all the blooms from the lilac bushes I transplanted from my parents' home about five years ago. This is the very first time they bloomed, and I was not about to let my beautiful flowers wilt brown from freeze damage for their first spring. I snipped a few nearly-opened irises as well for the vase. At least I will have a lovely bouquet for a while. My peonies weren’t so lucky as I awoke to all the fat round buds hanging their heads. It is as if nature is in mourning this spring.
I can not blame the Earth for being peeved. It’s frustrating to go out and work day after day at trying to make the planet a better, healthier place only to watch as the global unrest gorges on hydrocarbons and belches emissions. In the local news, my politicians try to tell me how wonderful all these new data centers are going to be as farmland gets stripped of its topsoil and turned into enormous, humming factories that gobble up natural gas and fresh water, steal our data, and churn out silly cat videos. Mention high voltage powerlines to Maryland farmers and get an earful. It doesn’t matter where you go these days, solar panels emerge across agricultural lands like invasive species. France is growing grapes under theirs, the Netherlands parks their cars under theirs (and charges their electric vehicles), but only a tiny fraction of solar projects allow for agricultural activities on their properties here in the US. Liability, of course.
Did someone say liability? And then Mother Earth says, “Hold my beer and give me a shot of tequila! We’re gonna have us a big ol’ El Niño this year.” Meteorologists are still only talking about it, no one has actually declared it; that won’t come until late June or early July. But this was the leading Earth Day story and so instead of celebrating, maybe we should be heeding the warnings. The El Niño of 2023-2024 is still fresh in this farmer’s mind. I don’t want unusual weather patterns and excessive drought or flooding, and please no wildfires, but the trends in this weather pattern oscillation have already begun. Me? I just want to go back to the days when we got a free T-shirt and planted a tree on Earth Day, but I am afraid that is not going to be happening anytime soon.