Temperament

I’m not sure that I have a farmers’ temperament. I’m not sure that I actually know what it is, insofar as I’ve not known any real farmers since I was a teenager, and even then I just knew them in passing—someone’s dad. Reading novels gives me the idea that they are patient, enduring, adaptable, and accepting because their occupation is uncontrolled by them and uncontrollable by them. It usually rains after you plant seeds, but some years you plant the seeds, they germinate, and then you have a flood and they’re all washed away. Or there is no rain and they all dry up and blow away. I grew up in a high desert where there wasn’t much water and where winter wheat was the main crop. If you were going to grow something else, you had to irrigate. And that was before those big irrigation pipes that make the crop circles you see when you fly over southern Idaho, Utah, and parts of Colorado.

As a result, I’m an unlikely farmer in the Northwest where there is essentially too much rain and too little sun for my kind of crop farming. Mostly, I don’t do much growing of edibles because our schedule is too variable for me to take care of them. But when we bought the house next door, it came with a full farm—or maybe farmette: 3 apple trees, 3 plum trees, 2 pear trees, a huge cherry tree, 1 walnut tree, 1 fig tree, a grape vine, and a pecan tree. The last three don’t do anything reliably, but the apples, plums, cherries and pears provide us with a lot of fruit most years.

This year, though, I’m a little concerned and thinking about patience, endurance, and acceptance. Normally, the cherry tree starts first, blooming in the second or third week of April, quickly followed by the plums, and then the pears and finally the apples. There’s some overlap, but the entire process usually ends by mid-May. And with that length of time, there's bound to be at least one of the crops that gets terrific weather when it needs the bees. This year, though, it all happened at once, but not until the first week of May. And now, the cherry is already finished and the apples are going to be getting to that point within the week.

Fortunately, it started with sun, but by the time every tree was in full flower, it started raining, it got cold, and there was no sign of a bee for four days at least. It’s still too early to tell whether there was any pollination, but the cherries don’t look too promising. Here’s where I demonstrate my patience. By next week, I suspect I will be working on acceptance. And by August I’ll be full into endurance and looking to neighbors with different varieties who had different conditions than we did and thus have some fruit to share.

Nevertheless, a cherry tree in bloom, an apple tree in bloom, a pear tree , a plum tree in bloom: very close to being as much as you can reasonably ask for from a plant. How's that for adaptability?