Joni Mitchell: "We've got to get ourselves back to the garden."

     “I want death to find me planting my cabbages, neither worrying about it nor the unfinished gardening.”
        Michel de Montaigne, French Renaissance philosopher, 1533-1592

Another vineyard post today

An owl oversees the work at my farm.

I realize there are a dozen pressing political topics worthy of a blog post:

     --- Trump's shakedown of the "60 Minutes" owner, Paramount. Trump is using the threat of the FCC refusing to allow a sale to extract a settlement on a thoroughly ridiculous personal claim by Trump.  Ka-ching!

     --- Telling intelligence officers, in writing no less, to make the false claim that the Venezuelan gang, Tres de Aragua, is an agent of the government of Venezuela. That claim would justify using the Alien Enemy Act of 1798 to round up people to send to foreign prisons without legal process.

     --- In a 7-2 vote, the Supreme Court shows they think Trump will frustrate justice and ignore the courts, in a case relating to citizenship under the 14th Amendment.

     --- Oregon Governor Tina Kotek is in town describing her effort to stop Trump from kicking Oregonians off Medicaid.

I could go on.  But, instead, I will defer to the insistence of my farm. Certain jobs need to be done at the right time. Melon seeds don't germinate unless the ground is at least 75 degrees.  Plant when the forecast is for five days of 80-degree weather. That time is now.

Last month was the time window for stripping the sucker canes at the bottom of the grape vine and tying a strong cane to the cane wire. I showed a photo of a finished plant on April 27, the cane wire tied, the suckers still still to snap off.

A week ago the plants looked like this:

Yesterday they looked like this:

So now there is a new job I need to do, which I can do myself. Before the vertical canes get any longer I need to insert them between two parallel wires one foot and two feet above the cane wire.  The two wires are on either side of the post, about two inches apart, and it makes the plant tall and thin. That allows them to be pruned into narrow hedges and leaves room for tractors to travel between the rows.

The challenge is that the fastest-growing canes are just barely flexible enough for me to bend them into the space of the two wires. They are already grabbing onto the wire for support. I am late to this task.

The other pressing problem involves the puncture vines, also known as goat-head weed. It has been cool and wet, but long May hours of sunlight got green growth to emerge in the past ten days, and some of them are already the size of a salad plate. I will be out early this morning, applying Roundup along the road where the nasty seeds came off of car tires and onto my farm and in an area where cannabis growers brought seeds in five years ago in the pots that contained their cannabis starts. 

Here is puncture vine: 

The puncture vine seeds look like these below. The plant makes seeds almost immediately, and two weeks after emerging they are already forming. They are hard and prickly so they attach to tires and the soles of shoes.  The seeds spread the plant. A nasty weed.

There are lots of songs, literature, and philosophy about the mental health one gets from a garden. I feel it, too.

But I don't romanticize the farm. The farm is work, and most jobs have demanding time windows. I need to spray for the puncture vine right now, in the early morning when there is no breeze that would cause spray to drift.  And right now I need to be training the vines into the space between the two wires. And I need to weed the entire vineyard right now. Three jobs, all right now.

Everything starts moving quickly when we get warm days in May.

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