First of March, Mustard

Driving through Pajaro Valley, an occasional flashback. 

As of this year, the last tank house went down.  But there are still those old apple orchards with mustard, here and there, hanging on for a few more years, holding out against a newer, harsher, uglier agriculture.

At times like this I wish my camera still worked.  Range of blue-gray hills in the far distance, classical blue and cloudy, white sky above, and in the foreground a sea of field mustard in full, dazzling bloom, knee-high and more, the yellowest yellow there is, at once gentle and ecstatic.

And over it all, rank on rank of the finest, most tenderly cared-for, perfectly pruned OLD, STANDARD apple trees with their perfect, bare, gray branches making a lacework tracery of shadows on the mustard below, silvery on their sunny side and contrasting on their shady side, like fish upside down.  And each tree supporting its bundle of props, ready for the heavy-laden summer, another sign of care, pride, and artistry.

There are generations of care, pride, and artistry in these few remaining “traditional” orchards.  How much longer can it last?  It needs work.

But it looks worth any amount of work just now, and it will again in another month, when all those meticulous twigs are garlanded with the world’s finest tree-blossoms, pink-almost-red in the bud and snow white in the blow.

The crops of crisp, heavy apples to come in the fall are almost an afterthought, a tip of the hat to those who need something more . . . earthy, more practical, more the color of money.

But now, where this kind of orchard once was almost the only kind, innovations and efficiency, and capital is rearing its nervous head.  Crowded dwarf trees are replacing the stately standards, the ground is kept dead, free of mustard or any other kind of  “weeds”—it looks seriously sick, wrong.  And . . . hardware has come to the farm.  Wire cordons, the spiderweb gleam of wire in endless ranks down the rows of blackberries, raspberries, SEAS of glaring plastic over endless strawberry fields, rolling out to the horizon.  Plastic hoops and covers and structures making greenhouses over the crops . . . and poison.  Poison under the ground, poison on the ground, poison on the crops, poison in the air . . .

It all might as well be done in some factory.  “Factory farming” is no flight of imagination.