This
entry is part one of a series to follow. I have meant to address this issue
over the years, but alas, time elapses so quickly I have not been able to keep
up with it! However, as things have developed in 2012, the issue has arisen, once again, and it seems appropriate to
address it now…
To
begin, Nev-R-Dun Farm’s base is an old plot of land on which resides a pre-20th
century house, along with a barn and many other “out” buildings, such as a
“summer kitchen” and a “wagon shed” to mention a few. While my farming efforts
stretch back only over a decade or so, the buildings relay a much longer tenure
than I can even really envision. That said, the indigenous creatures,
especially those of diminutive size, have long foraged in the immediate area,
and whereas the house is relatively vermin free, the outside area around the
house is seemingly a plush resort for some of those aforementioned critters.
After countless years of furrowing and foraging, there are tunnels just about
everywhere around the outside buildings, and that leads to this entry…
Most of
the cleaning of the produce is currently accomplished on the back porch of the
old farm house. It is outside, albeit shaded by the house addition above. It is
a great place to spend a hot
afternoon in the middle of summer, washing lettuce mix, for example. I have
mentioned the cleaning of lettuce mix many years ago in these Tales, and it is
not the issue to be addressed here, so the description of the process shall be
brief.
The
cleaning of lettuce mix is a laborious process whereby lettuce leaves, which
have been cut from lettuce plantings in whichever of the over one hundred rows
of produce we grow, are brought to the back porch in five gallon buckets and
submerged in water. Then, each leaf is sifted through in a three stage process
to pick out weeds, bad leaves, etc. As the lettuce proceeds through the
process, each stage has a fresh water bath, so that the leaves are at least
triple washed by the time the mix is spun dry and bagged for the eventual
consumer.
This
process takes hours, and during this time, many, many, many creatures hail
their existence to the somewhat stationary salad washer. There are a horde of
insects, from bees to beetles to flies that constantly flitter about the
concentrated worker. Birds twitter and tweet and sing from nearby tree
branches. Occasionally a deer snort can be heard, which immediately makes this salad washer determine the deer’s
location, to make sure it is not in any field with, for example, salad mix
growing in it! And then there is the general scurrying about of such small
creatures as those that are the focus of this entry… chipmunks!
Earlier
this year, I was showing Stephanie the process of cleaning the salad, and those
pesky chipmunks started darting about in their frenetic fashion causing me to
react in my normal fashion… “Damned
chipmunks!”… and Stephanie reacted with, “Aww, they’re so cute!!!” A
description will follow of these “pests”. But to start, while some people might
view certain creatures as “cute”, they are all out for… something, usually in
the form of food, and whereby they may appear as “cute”, as in their movements,
etc., the reality of the situation… over years… that is, to a frustrated
farmer… they are nothing close to “cute”! Before moving on, however, as
Stephanie watched the chipmunks scurry about, she became quickly endeared to
them, and promptly named the two that currently seem to “own” the place. The
two chipmunk’s names from here forth in this entry shall be “Arthur and
Finnegan”, or as Stephanie has truncated their name’s, “Artie and Finnie”. But
enough of that!
As for
the chipmunks’ actions thus far this year, they have not been incredibly
harmful. Since they are so familiar with the back porch area, they scurry about
at their frenetic pace like humans do on highways, only they do not adhere to
lanes and such. They scamper wherever they want and whenever. As we wash the
lettuce mix, those small, reddish-brown furry creatures with black and white
stripes scurry on ground level all around the varying obstacles on the porch,
from our cleaning station to the numerous rack trays to whatever else is
standing about… including out feet! (Once, and this is absolutely true, while
standing up and sorting lettuce mix, I shifted my right foot and stepped on one
mid-scurry. If I had known I would step on a chipmunk… Alas, it got away
unharmed…) But these rapid movements are part of what endeared Stephanie to
those foul creatures. They were seemingly at play as they chased each other
around the porch area. “They’re sooo cute!” Egad, it is time to relay one of
their past sordid escapades to escape from these “cute” ramblings, and the
fact, that the scurrying is most probably less due to play than… foreplay…
which only leads to more chipmunks… egads, again…
It was
in 2010 that I finally recognized chipmunks for the malevolent miscreants that
they are. Please forgive the human analysis of this, but I am, after all,
attempting to earn enough off of my labors to make a living in the human world,
as absurd as all that is, but I digress. Anyway, I have been attempting to save
seeds from the crops that I grow for many years in order to, first, control the
source, and second, to improve upon its regionality genetics. (I will not
attempt to explain that here.) So, in 2010, I harvested a few pounds of pea
seeds for seed saving. This entails allowing the pea plants to “dry up”, then
picking the dried pea pods. I did this and put the dried pods in a five gallon
bucket. The next step is to shell the pods to extract the dried pea seeds.
There are many ways of accomplishing this task that are easier than the way I
approached, but I chose the more difficult path in order to learn from it. (I
always seem to choose the more difficult path in order to learn from it… and I
am not sure that I have learned anything… I have digressed again.)
Over a
week or so, I worked through the bucket of dried pea pods and seeds, and put
the shelled peas into a round plastic container that fit inside the five gallon
bucket on the front porch of the farmhouse. I normally worked on this while
eating a sandwich for lunch, so the process was in stages. About a pound or two
of seeds had been extracted from the pods and placed in the plastic container,
then the container was placed in the five gallon bucket on top of the remaining
“to be shelled” dried pea pods. Once again, it was a slow process, but the
effort was for next season anyway.
Then,
one day shortly thereafter, I walked by the five gallon bucket and looked
inside to view my efforts of pea seed saving… AND THERE WERE NO PEA SEEDS IN
THE PLASTIC CONTAINER! WHAT THE…? Oh, I know what the… “WHAT THE…?” was!!! It
was those damned chipmunks!!! Every time you leave something out in the open
for just a minute too long… (or a week)… those little, nefarious, “cute”, furry
creatures will disparage ALL of your efforts! ARRGH!!! How frustrating they can
be!!!
I was
not immediately aware of this at the time, BUT, I had that creature surrounded,
if you will. You see, that furry culprit was actually still inside the five
gallon bucket scavenging seeds from beneath the plastic container inside the
bucket. Again, I was not aware of this immediately. I was so angered by the loss
of my efforts that I did not analyze the situation clearly. It was only when I
thought about moving the plastic container to see how many pea pods were left
that I realized the culprit was… in the cookie jar, so to speak.
What
clued me in was that the empty plastic container actually moved, as in,
something beneath it moved. And so, brilliantly, and quickly, I devised my
attack. With my right hand, I reached into the bucket and snatched the plastic
container, then, I attempted to thrust my size 11 boot into the five gallon
bucket in order to smash the culprit. Unfortunately for me, and fortunately for
the chipmunk, a size 11 boot does not fit very squarely into a five gallon
bucket, or even roundly. After I had jammed my boot into the bucket, I had no idea
as to whether I had harmed the culprit or not. There was only one way to find
out. I removed my boot encased foot from the bucket.
Perhaps
a second elapsed, perhaps two… And I have to pause here. Have you ever heard
the squeak of a chipmunk? It is more like an “eek”. Years ago, I intended to write my first
chipmunk entry entitled, “Eek, a human!” But that never happened, and as
whereby I have digressed greatly once again… A very loud “EEK!!!” was let out
by the trapped chipmunk, as it propelled itself like a rocket out of the five
gallon bucket… And I mean this literally! I removed my boot… Then there was a
loud “EEK!!!”… Then, a chipmunk shot out of the bucket as if propelled by a rocket
engine! It landed a foot or so away from my side of the bucket and scurried off
the front porch in extreme rapid fashion.
Whether
that chipmunk was Arthur or Finnegan, or even some past relative is not the
issue. As mentioned above, there are more entries to follow on these “foul”
creatures. As cute as they may appear to some, their actions quite resemble, at
least in my opinion, the pernicious greed so prevalent in our current stage of
global consumption in the United States of America. I know, I know, it is quite
ludicrous to equate the “natural” activities of such cute, furry mammals to the
activities of our voraciously idiotic furless species, but, once again, this is
only part one of these chipmunk stories…
No comments:
Post a Comment