Is it time to confess environmental crimes against nature?
I had decided to expand my pot patch into a new area in the back forty, a cute trick on just one acre, no doubt. I roamed across a grassy field wielding my loppers, creating spots along and behind clumps of bushes. As I got closer to the sunniest spot, a sizable copse of scotch broom and coyote brush on the edge of the field (the former invasive and the latter native), I heard a fox screeching.
Each day as I flattened the ground on the edge of the field with my pickaxe (the tool that made Humboldt famous) I heard its plaintive screams, or maybe it was just normal fox talk, but it seemed distressed. I didn't fucking care, I kept working and by the time I arrived to the sunniest location the screeching had stopped.
I am an artist, or was an artist. I was a camo artist with my loppers and pickaxe.
It was a very sensitive visual zone perched on the hillside just above the river and below our private dirt road, then up the hill was the county road. All of these points of view had to be taken into account including human activity on the river and the houses across it. The reality was that probably no one noticed or cared but I was careful to leave just enough vegetation so the plants were nearly invisible from those vantage points.
One exposure I didn't worry about were a couple turnouts up the steep cliff a quarter mile away on Highway 101. (Not “The” 101, I'm not from freaking LA.) From up there you could look directly down into the garden, an obvious bright green flag waving next to the yellow field, where I had artfully carved out spots for the plants. (I often thought about stopping at one of those turnouts to have a look myself, take a picture or ten, but never did.)
You might say that the fox got a modicum of revenge for being unceremoniously pressured out of its natural habitat and forced to find a new home for its family. (If I had still been any kind of a hippie I would've had a ceremony, but that ethos had long been subsumed by the quest for the Yanqui dollar.)
As to the fox's alleged revenge, that area became a horticultural disaster. Some bugs, virus, or unknown pests were killing the plants methodically. First the leaves curled, then one branch turned brown, followed by all the others until the whole plant became this disheartening brown skeleton. What was the problem?
Leafhoppers! Leafhoppers? They were hopping all over those green then dying plants and my research showed that they do indeed suck the moisture out of and kill plants. Have you ever looked at a photo of the head of a leafhopper magnified multiple times? It's a monster! (Note to Hollywood: “Attack of the Giant Leafhoppers!”)
What to do? I sprayed with Safer Soap but that didn't get any results. Someone said try diatomaceous earth and I went out there and dropped a handful on top of the plants and shook. Both the plant and I were covered in heavy white dust. This was too messy and I got one of those mechanical applicators that spray it on but that didn't work either. Late in the growing season I replaced a few dead plants and the new ones survived and thrived. Hmm, I had an idea.
The next year I grew up the starts three feet tall in three gallon containers, in preparation for hauling them an hour out to my cabin on the cliffs of Mendocino. In early June I crawled in the back of my pickup with black plastic bags and grey tape to cover the windows. (The metal bed was painful on the knees so I put down sheets of cardboard, problem solved.) I loaded the plants on their sides double stacked and secured with multiple bungie cords, some up against the cab and the rest up against the tailgate.
When I got out there I transplanted them into five gallon containers and grew them up on the big sunny deck, sometimes foggy and definitely pest-free. (I was going out there anyway twice a week to water my coastal garden, ie fog weed. When I moved twenty miles inland I finally realized what Humboldt weed was all about: solid and pungent sparkly buds.)
Toward the end of July I hauled the robust bushy plants back to town, hiked with them two at a time out to the fox's former home, then transplanted them into the waiting 65-gallon-containers in that sunny zone above the river. They all thrived and a healthy crop was harvested in the fall.
My neighbor always doubted my leafhopper diagnosis, on those many occasions when we bored each other with shop talk. Maybe it was rats nibbling at the base of the plant, instigating the death spiral of leaf curl, brown branches, and dead plants?
A couple years later I spotted a fox bouncing toward me down the driveway with a big rat in its mouth and it made me wonder: Did my thoughtless displacement of the fox and her family disrupt the balance of nature when I claimed the area, and then the rats took over with no fox left to control them?
Maybe, but I'm still blaming the leafhoppers.
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