In surgery, as in anything else, skill and confidence are learned through experience — haltingly and humiliatingly. Like the tennis player and the oboist and the guy who fixes hard drives, we need practice to get good at what we do. There is one difference in medicine, though: it is people we practice upon.

And you don’t want to it to be you. You want to wait until your surgeon has honed his skills on other people and then have your appendix removed or your kidney transplanted or your hip replaced. Yet it is in our collective interest to have a new crop of surgeons every year, or we’ll run out of appendix removers, kidney transplanters, and hip replacers in short order.  And so the patient of the new surgeon makes a sacrifice to the common good – although, if the bargain were put to him in those terms, he might very well change his mind.

That essay has come to mind often, as I’ve done so many things for the first time over the last few years. Not many of them are physical skills like surgery, which require a very specific kind of learning, based on repetition, that hard-wires the procedure into your brain. But even more general undertakings – designing a hydroponics system, building a hoophouse, making a souffle – have a better chance of success when they’re undertaken by people with experience. The Internet will take you only so far.

As I venture out way beyond my comfort zone, I’ve been grateful that it’s not people I practice on. The soufflé falls, and the worst-case scenario is take-out Chinese. Nobody’s going to die on the table.

But livestock is different. It’s not people, and I am very clear on the difference. But it’s live. The animals we raise are sentient, can suffer, and are completely dependent on our stewardship. When we bungle it, nobody dies on the table, but it’s not take-out Chinese, either.

And bungle it we do. There’s no way to venture into taking care of animals without making mistakes born of inexperience. Almost all the deaths we’ve had around here could have been prevented if we’d simply been better at our job.

I’m not being hard on us here. I know that mistakes come with the territory, and you do your best and try and learn from what goes wrong. But I am responsible for our animals, and it sometimes feel like they got a bum deal being stuck with us instead of, say, Jen over at Milkweed & Teasel.

The issue at hand, this time, is our first attempt to hatch fertilized eggs. We bought six turkey eggs about four weeks ago and popped them under Queenie, our broody Buff Orpington hen. About a week before we were expecting chicks, we found one of the eggs cracked open, so we were down to five. We did, however, learn that at least that one egg was fertilized, so we had hopes for the remaining eggs.

Then, four days ago and a day ahead of schedule, we had an actual chick! It was peeping and eating and drinking, and Queenie was being very attentive to it. We were hopeful that the remaining four would follow suit.

Queenie, distracted

But then things went south. Queenie seemed to have trouble attending to both the chick and the eggs, and she abandoned the nest to keep the chick warm. We had set the Varmintcam up above the brooder, and we knew from the timestamp that the nest had been empty for at least four hours. Was the brooder too big? Did we put the food and water too far away from the nest? We didn’t know.

By this time, the full 28 days had elapsed, and we thought it was possible a chick might have survived, but didn’t have the strength to get out once it had gotten cold. So we tried opening one of the eggs. There was a chick, barely alive, and we tried to warm it and revive it, but our efforts failed and the poor thing died inside ten minutes. Was it a mistake to open it? We didn’t know.

Three eggs were left, and Queenie clearly wasn’t going to be able to keep them warm. But Kevin had the brilliant idea of putting them under Blondie, who was also broody and had hunkered down in a nest box in the coop. I also sent an e-mail to Jen, who assured me that chicks were sometimes much hardier than you think they’re going to be, and told me not to give up hope.

And I didn’t, but it was close.

After Blondie had been sitting on the eggs for a day, we checked on her. She was exactly where we’d left her, but she had moved two of the three eggs out of the nest, and had only one under her. We checked the two eggs she’d rejected, and they were clearly long dead. How she knew is beyond me – and I think she did know, because the one she was sitting on was alive. There was a little hole, with a little beak! And I heard a little peep!

We wanted to make sure the chick bonded to Queenie, so we gave it some help getting out of its shell and put it in the brooder with its little sibling and surrogate-mother-to-be. And Queenie took to it. She tucked it under her wing and kept it warm. An hour later, it was almost dry, and looked comfortable.

But by evening it was dead.

If you had told me this story, I couldn’t have imagined being so sad about a three-ounce, just-born turkey, but I actually had to hold back tears. When we’d found that second chick alive, I’d been elated – yes, actually elated – that our chick would have a playmate, and that little death of an hours-old creature affected me as much as any livestock death ever has.

Partly, I mourned the failure. I suspect we made a number of mistakes, because all the eggs were fertilized and all had developed substantially. Was the brooder too cold? Did Queenie get enough to eat and drink? Should we have put the other eggs under Blondie as soon as we realized Queenie was having difficulty? Should we have watched more carefully so we could have taken corrective action more quickly? But, our role aside, I feel bad for this little chick. I don’t think animals, with the possible exception of cats, should be alone.

We will get more turkey poults from the feedstore when they get a batch in a couple of weeks, and I’m hoping everybody will be young enough for the flock to integrate successfully. And I am glad that we got at least one chick out of the effort – and a mighty cute little chick it is, too. But I wanted to do better. I really wanted to do better.

On the plus side, at least I’m not a surgeon.

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Overabundance, though, as we all know, is the mother of invention. Our hoophouse is bursting with radishes and arugula, and I managed to make a salad with them that is actually very good. The sweetness in the dressing balances the bite of the greens and the radishes, and the whole thing goes beautifully with a grilled fish or maybe a pork loin. Perhaps the strongest argument for it is that Kevin, who isn’t a big fan of salad (“this is the food my food eats”), eats as much as I put in front of him.

I’m guessing you may have some arugula and radishes too, it being arugula and radish season, so you might want to try it.

Arugula Salad with Orange Vinaigrette
(serves 2)

5 cups arugula, roughly chopped
4-6 radishes, sliced
1 oz. goat cheese, crumbled (or some shaved Parmesan, which Kevin prefers)

For the dressing:

1/3 c. fresh-squeezed orange juice (I strain the pulp, but you don’t have to)
1/3 c. olive oil
2 T. cider vinegar
2 T. maple syrup
salt to taste

Combine dressing ingredients in a jar and shake like the dickens to emulsify. Pour the amount you like over the salad (the recipe makes much more than most of us would want, but dressing is a personal thing).

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She’s got four more eggs to go (one broke), and we have yet to see whether she can teach them life’s basics, like eating, drinking, and avoiding being crushed by a well-meaning but clumsy mother surrogate.  But we have a poult.

We have a poult.

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We’ve got four overwintered collard plants that are ready for their Little Shop of Horrors audition. Every day, they send up seed heads in what I am trying to make a vain effort to reproduce. To that end, every day I go out there with my kitchen shears and cut off the seed heads. So far, the plants haven’t gotten bitter or woody, and I treat the seed head stalks like broccoli raab.

Feed me, Seymour!

But I know this is a battle I’m destined to lose, if not to the collards themselves then to the slugs who, unlike Kevin and me, seem more than happy to live on an all-collard diet. Before it’s too late, I have to harvest the leaves. Once I harvest them, they have to be washed, chopped, blanched, and frozen.

It is a job I dread, largely because washing greens is probably my single least favorite kitchen chore. I don’t know why I dislike it – there are a zillion jobs that are just as tedious or messy that I don’t mind at all. I’ll sit there all day taking crab meat out of crab bodies with a nutpick, but give me a lettuce to wash and I absolutely, positively, have a prior engagement.

That's a lot of collards

So you can understand that a bushel of collard greens is enough to chill my very soul.

Last night, over dinner, Kevin and I were talking about how to tackle them, and my first idea was to put them in the bathtub. Kevin thought that wasn’t much of a labor-savor, and might be a turn-off to anyone who’s ever seen our bathtub. And then he said, offhandedly, “Why don’t you just do them in the washing machine?”

The washing machine! Genius! Because what is a washing machine if not a salad spinner, writ large?

I went out with my kitchen shears. I cut a bushel of leaves. I ran the washing machine empty, once, to get rid of any residual soap, and then put in my load of collards.

And I checked the dial. There’s Permanent Press, there’s Regular, there’s Whites, but there’s no Leafy Greens cycle. Delicates seemed to come closest. Compared to, say, arugula, collards aren’t delicate at all, but compared to the frilly lacy things that I gave up long ago in favor of underwear that wears well and doesn’t show the dirt, collards are delicate indeed.

Delicates it would have to be, in cold water. I closed the door, turned the dial, and started her up.

Half an hour later, I had a bushel of clean collards!

I can’t say it worked perfectly. The greens got pretty bruised, but that doesn’t matter much for greens that you’re going to blanch and freeze anyway – don’t try this with that arugula. (At least there was no ring around the collards!)  The only other problem is that it left a lot of bits of green in the washer. I left the door open for a while so they would dry, and cleaning the washing machine wasn’t nearly as bad as cleaning the collards themselves.

Kevin thinks we can get it to work better if we just do a rinse and a spin, rather than an entire wash cycle. I think he’s probably right, but I have no idea how to make our washing machine do that. Even so, I will definitely use this method again, either for collards or kale.

Kevin and I may be walking around with little flecks of green, or maybe of slug, on our clothes for a while, but that seems a small price to pay for anything that gets me out of washing collards.

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So you will allow my a moment of pride in our hoophouse. It is full of leafy, bug-free greens, crisp, blood-red radishes, and tall, strong leeks. It has bushy, thriving herbs and a patch of lemongrass that looks like it’s going to make it.

It is a beautiful thing.

I know that it will last about seven seconds. The only reason it looks so good is that it’s too early for bugs and bolting, and only the most intrepid weeds (you know who you are, chickweed) have gotten a foothold. Come back in a couple weeks, and everything will be back to normal.

But, between the kale, arugula, and collards in the hoophouse and the overwintered collards in the garden, I harvested about ten pounds of greens in April. In April! I am pleased with myself out of all proportion.

Until I try and figure out what’s for dinner. I’ve made soups and stir-fries and creamed greens. There have been salads and frittatas and at least one pasta sauce that would have benefited from having fewer greens. I’ve blanched and frozen several bags of collards and kale, which I’ll be very happy to have in February.

Anybody got a favorite use for leafy greens? I’d be mighty appreciative.

Meanwhile, it’s time for my monthly check-in on our progress toward our 2012 goal of getting 20% of calories from first-hand food, and I’m very glad to have something to report other than eggs. Eggs are still the bulk of calories, but they have been joined by a significant harvest of leaves.

April greens

As in March, we’ve gotten about 18 dozen eggs, at 800 calories per, for 14,400. The ten pounds of greens were quite sturdy and dense (except arugula, which was a small fraction of the harvest), so I’m figuring they’re about 200 calories per pound, for 2000 calories.

I don’t want to forget my radishes, even though the 20 calories from the one large bunch are well within my rounding error.  But if I add in the sage, oregano, marjoram, and mint, I figure I can get that up to 100.

So the total for April is 16,500. Still not up to 20%, but we’re coming up on fishing season. I’m hoping for a very productive May.

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Mao, by Warhol

Now, I’m always game for a good argument, and zealot-twitting is one of my favorite sports. I was tempted. I really was. Nice to see you college students supporting the greatest anti-intellectual who ever lived! How ‘bout that Great Leap Forward? I refrained, although I don’t know why. I was probably pressed for time. Why Mao has never really taken his rightful place alongside Stalin and Hitler and Pol Pot in the Twentieth Century Genocidal Maniacs Hall of Fame I don’t quite understand.

It may be because China, to us occidentals, is a really strange place. The Chinese have had six thousand years to develop on a trajectory completely different from ours, and from here they look like a civilization of eccentric social customs, genius inventions, and truly outstanding vegetables. All this may color our perception of their occasional Genocidal Maniac.

In my ongoing effort to understand the inscrutable East, I’m listening to Wild Swans:Three Daughters of China. It’s Jung Chang’s story of her grandmother, her mother, and herself, and it’s fascinating. She came of age in Maoist China, when the Chairman was doing everything possible to ensure that he ruled an illiterate, dirt-poor population, thus minimizing the likelihood that his people could muster the resources to either understand or overthrow their Genocidal Maniac of a leader.

By the time Chang was a teenager, her schooling was limited to endless re-reading of the words of Mao, and it was standard procedure to suspend even that education and send children of intellectuals to farms in remote parts of the country. She left the city, and school, to do back-breaking work in far-flung rice paddies.

This past weekend, at our house, we staged a re-enactment.

When we moved here from New York, we gave away a lot of books, but still had about fifty boxes left. We have limited shelf space in our house, which is very small, and most of those boxes have been in the garage all this time, gathering dust and getting moldy.

I have resigned myself to the fact that books are over in this, the digital age. While I have some sniffling regrets about that, I have always thought that it is the words, and not the paper or the bindings that make books important. The words live on, but the paper and bindings are has-beens. I get it.

Still, it’s been hard for me to tackle the boxes. We need the space for Kevin’s House of Engineering Marvels, but I’ve been putting off the culling. For almost four years now. On Saturday morning, though, Kevin made me a deal. We’ve got two yards of pig poop that need to be combined with leaves and grass clippings to make a compost pile, and we’ve got thirty boxes of books in the garage. If I tackled the books, he said, he would tackle the poop.

Deal.

I spent the morning going through a half-dozen of the boxes, and earmarking about 100 books for donation to one of our local thrift stores. There was history, there was science, there was drama. Politics! Medicine! Animal behavior!

And there was my 1973 Encyclopedia Brittanica.

I know I’m not the only one with an unreasonable nostalgic fondness for an encyclopedia. I grew up with a ’63 Britannica, and it was a staple of my primary-school research-related enterprises. It was also the Google of the day. My parents were constantly telling me to look up things I asked about, and I can still hear my father saying, “Use the index.”

The Britannicas up to 1973 (after which they changed the format) were outstanding works of reference. Many of the articles were smart, and interesting, and well-written. But a reference work that’s forty years old is of limited utility. Sure, lots of things happened in the six thousand years of human history prior to 1973, but we’ve also learned a lot about those things since 1973. If you read something in an old Britannica, you always have to double-check. With Google.

I can remember using my Britannica only once since we moved here, in a futile effort to understand the causes of the Crimean War. With that track record, I couldn’t justify the space it took up. I boxed it up and put it in the car with the other books.

But it turns out I’m not the only one acknowledging the limited utility – okay, the complete obsolescence – of the old-school encyclopedia. The thrift store wouldn’t take it. The Book Donation box at the dump wouldn’t even take it – there was a big sign saying “No Encyclopedias.”

And so I recycled it. I tossed it, a couple volumes at a time, into the big bin with the cardboard boxes, old newspapers, and junk mail. It was no fun. No fun at all.

When I came home, Kevin had gotten a start on the compost pile, but there was still a lot of work to be done. I picked up a shovel and started shoveling. We had mismanaged our pig poop, and unloaded in a place from which we would have to move it again – a decision that gives new meaning to ‘rank stupidity.’ I filled the wheelbarrow over and over, and Kevin carted it to the compost pile and mixed in the browns and greens.

Over and over. It took most of the afternoon.

I know that the fact that I threw away books and shoveled manure doesn’t make this a Maoist experience, but I do have a persistent sense that agriculture makes you stupid. I’m in favor of getting exercise, and tilling soil or building a chicken coop or shoveling manure – even for the second time – is certainly a constructive way to do that. But it often seems that the amount of time I’ve spent doing those things, reading about doing those things, planning to do those things, and doing those things again when I do them wrong the first time is absolutely unconscionable.

Part of what I like about our taking up this enterprise in middle age is that Kevin and I are doing a lot of new stuff – demanding, complicated stuff – at a time in our lives when lots of people are pretty much all settled in. At the same time, I miss reading. Reading something that isn’t by Eliot Coleman, or Storey.

I miss history, and science, and drama. Politics! Medicine! Animal behavior! (Okay, I get some of that last one.) Although I listen to books as I do some of that tilling and building and shoveling, it’s a slow way to go. I can read a book in the fraction of the time it takes to listen to it, but that means sitting down and doing nothing else. It’s still a little jarring to realize I live a life – voluntarily! – in which settling in with a book and a cup of tea is a luxury.

Mao More than Ever!

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No, strike that, my favorite video of all time is the one of the crow snowboarding. My second-favorite, though, is the otter and the dog.

Friend, enemy, or dinner?

We don’t have much cross-species success at our house. Our late lamented cat, Cat, never got on particularly well with the poultry. She investigated them in a rather predatory way when they were small, and ignored them studiously when they were big. Kevin thinks she wanted to make friends with them, but didn’t understand just how uphill a battle it is for a cat to make friends with a chicken. In any case, we didn’t get any cute pictures out of it.

Chickens? I don't see any chickens.

We did try one cross-species experiment last year. It just so happened we had a broody hen when we got our six Pekin ducklings, and we thought we could get Blondie to raise our ducks for us, but that was a non-starter.

This year, though, we’ve got another experiment brewing.

Our turkeys have a been a success two years in a row, and we’re planning to do them again. We were going to get poults from a neighbor who keeps a Standard Bronze pair, but her hen mysteriously stopped laying just as we needed her to step it up. We were just about resigned to getting poults from feed store when Kevin came across an interesting ad on Craigslist.

If you were out looking for fertilized turkey eggs, my guess is that you’d have to leave no stone unturned. But if you’re browsing the Farm + Garden section of Craigslist with no particular end in view, they’ll jump right out at you.

Turns out there’s a guy in Chatham who keeps a few turkeys – two hens and a tom – and he’s got eggs to spare. He’s not sure just what kind they are, but I don’t think that’s a problem. They look a little like our usual Standard Bronze, but a little smaller and a little browner (if you’ve got a guess, let me know).

And it just so happens that we have a broody hen. Queenie, a three-year-old Buff Orpington with a long history of regular broodiness, is just dying to hatch a few eggs.

Queenie's brooder. That's her, tucked away on the right.

I drove to Chatham and picked up a half-dozen eggs. We set up a brooder in the shed with plenty of hay and feeders for food and water. I was afraid Queenie might be suspicious of turkey eggs – they’re bigger and they might smell different – so I put her in there with some chicken eggs first. Once she’d settled happily in the nest, we subbed out the eggs.

That was two days ago.

A chicken doesn’t have a wide range of facial expressions, and I’m not at all sure it’s possible for a hen to look contented. I suspect Kevin and I are imagining, or maybe projecting, when we say that Queenie looks happy and fulfilled. I believe she’s one of those chickens that feels compelled to hatch eggs, and I hope that, by giving her this job to do, we’re making her life complete.

Don't you think she looks happy?

Turkey eggs incubate for 28 days, and we have no idea what to expect in 26 days. For all we know, the eggs will be duds and Queenie will want to sit on them until the world ends. If they hatch, I’m not sure she will recognize them as her own. If she does, I’m not sure whether she’ll want to – or know how to – take care of them once they start getting big, which is in about seven seconds.

But if we do end up with a chicken mothering a bunch of turkeys, I’ll make sure to make a video. Crowboarding, it’s not, but maybe it’ll give that otter a run for his money.

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The stragglers from the new colony making their way into the hive

None of this has looked like Colony Collapse Disorder, but losing bees for any reason at all is a double whammy. Not only do you have to contemplate your failure every time you look at your empty hive, you have a persistent sense that, given the plight of the honeybee, you’ve let down the side. The success of our food supply depends on our ability to keep these guys alive.

No pressure, though.

I know that the trouble Kevin and I are having isn’t all our fault. We just happened to venture into beekeeping at a time when the odds are stacked against us. But I’m going to go out on a limb here and admit that there’s something about this whole Colony Collapse Disorder thing that irritates me. Yes, I have a bee in my bonnet, and you’re going to hear about it.

Here it is. The investigation into what’s causing CCD seems agenda-driven, and I get the feeling that beekeepers everywhere want it to be the evil chemical companies that are killing our bees.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve got a whole skeleton’s worth of bones to pick with chemical companies, but it seems to me that the way CCD has presented all but rules out a chemical culprit. We’re losing bees all around the world. We losing migratory and stationary hives, from large commercial apiaries and small backyard amateurs. We’re losing them in warm climates and cold, in all different agricultural environments. The chance that every single hive is exposed to a particular chemical – like a neonicotinoid pesticide – is all but nonexistent.

I’m no virologist (and if you are, please weigh in!), but it seems to me that a pattern like that has virus, or maybe fungus, written all over it. It’s got to be something that can spread of its own accord, not something that humans must expose the bees to.

Nevertheless, when a study released a couple weeks ago purported to have recreated CCD by exposing hives to imidacloprid, a neonicotinoid pesticide used on corn, it was beamed around the world as the answer to the CCD puzzle. And not by some ranting blogger (um … not that there’s anything wrong with that), but by what is arguably our most august academic institution, Harvard University.

The Harvard press release, dated April 5, began: “The likely culprit in sharp worldwide declines in honeybee colonies since 2006 is imidacloprid, one of the most widely used pesticides, according to a new study from the Harvard School of Public Health.” Case closed! On to the next pressing public health issue!

The study in question was of twenty hives – five hives at each of four different sites. Each site had hives fed high-fructose corn syrup spiked with varying levels of imidicloprid, ranging from none (the control hive) to a lot. At the 23-week mark, 15 of the 16 spiked hives were dead, with the most heavily spiked dying first. The researchers report that the deaths looked like CCD, with empty hives and only a few dead bee bodies.

There are a number of problems with the study, including the short duration, the questionable resemblance of the deaths to CCD, and the fact that, according to a local beekeeper who attended the meeting where the study was discussed, two of the four control hives also died. But I want to focus on its main problem: It posits, as the near-definitive answer to one of the most intractable, complicated problems of modern agriculture, the simple solution of one culprit chemical.

The researchers focused on imidacloprid because it’s used on corn, and the authors claim that traces of the pesticide are found in corn syrup, so bees that live out there lives nowhere near a cornfield are exposed to it by their keepers, who unwittingly feed it to them.

There are a couple problems with this theory. First is that there’s no hard proof that there’s any imidacloprid in corn syrup, let alone at levels the experimenters fed their bees. Corn syrup, it seems, is too viscous to be tested; it gums up the equipment. The manufacturer, Bayer, points out that their product is used on less than one percent of corn, and the levels the researchers used don’t replicate real-world conditions. (Of course, there are other pesticides in the same class, all of which act on the central nervous system of insects, and those may act in a similar way. Or they may not.)

But the second problem is the real doozy. May I have a show of hands of apiarists who have lost hives to CCD despite never having fed them a drop of corn syrup? There, I thought so. If imidacloprid were the answer, it would mean that a hive that never came near the stuff (or a close chemical relative), would simply not die of CCD. And that just can’t be true.

I do not understand how smart, well-intentioned people can put their imprimatur on a hypothesis that is so spectacularly improbable.

As for what really does cause CCD, I think we beekeepers need to turn our focus inward. While it’s certainly possible that pesticides play a role, my suspicion is that the real source of the problem is the apian monoculture. We started breeding bees in earnest – and learned how to do artificial insemination (the imagining of which boggles the mind) – only in the last half-century or so. In that time, we’ve been focused primarily on docility and honey production, and disease- and parasite- resistance have not been front and center.

But the real problem is that only a handful of breeders have been supplying bees to vast numbers of beekeepers, and we have limited the gene pool and bred out hybrid vigor. We have millions of hives that aren’t as robust as they should be, all susceptible to the same organisms. Throw varroa into the mix, add a few pesticides (no, I don’t absolve them completely) to compromise the bees in yet another way, and you’ve got a situation just right for an opportunistic virus, fungus, or bacterium – or a combination of them.

It’s not always Monsanto.

We’ve created, if not a monster, a situation in which a monster is thriving. And my theory (which is mine) is that we can slowly reverse the process by doing exactly what the beekeepers here on Cape Cod are doing, and what I understand many others are doing across the country – breeding local queens, deliberately introducing varied genes, focusing on pest- and disease-resistance.

I’d like to try some of that myself, but first we have to manage to keep a hive alive for more than a few months.  To that end, we installed a new colony this past weekend.  Wish us luck.

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In fact, I struggle with the whole philosophy of planting more seeds than you need just so you can snip the life out of two-thirds of them just as the little proto-plants stretch their legs. Is there a reason we can’t simply figure out how many plants we want, and plant that number of seeds plus a couple extra for insurance? That would undoubtedly be the best use of resources, and would get around the whole thinning problem.

As a rule, I’m not one for conspiracy theories, but it seems to me there’s no other explanation for the overseed-and-thin planting approach that permeates our gardening culture. Where do you find out that you’re supposed to plant three or four times the seeds you need, and thin them as seedlings? That’s right. On the seed packet.

Yeah, you see where this is going. Who is it who’s telling you to use three or four times the amount of their product than you would otherwise need? That’s right. It’s the seed companies.

So go ahead, plant four times the seeds you need.  And, while you’re at it, lather, rinse, repeat.

I suspect some of you are going to come to this strategy’s defense, and tell me that you plant WAY too many seeds because some won’t sprout, and some will be anaemic. But, if that’s the reason, where are all the protests about seed companies selling us crappy, non-sprouting, anaemic little seeds? If that were the case, we’d never have enough grass on that knoll to … Oh, never mind.

I want desperately to have the courage of this particular conviction, and plant only as many seeds as I need. Instead, I spend some time being suspicious and resentful and end up assuming, not unreasonably, that I really don’t know very much about gardening and I’m better off taking the advice of people who know a lot about it, even if they are selling me three to four times the number of seeds I need.

So what I end up doing is a namby-pamby, split-the-difference kind of sowing, in which I plant more than I need, but not as much as the seed packets say. Which probably gets me the worst of all possible worlds, because I set myself up for whatever those problems are that seed companies are guarding against by telling you to overplant, yet I still have a thinning problem.

My friend Christl has tried to teach me about thinning. Christl grew up in Germany’s Black Forest during and just after the Second World War, when food was not plentiful and nobody had the luxury of being sentimental about things like seedlings. “Tamar,” she says, with her slight Teutonic accent, “You must be ruthless!”

Christl is a very small person and, because I am large, she comes up to a little past my elbow. But, watching the two of us deal with a row of radish seedlings, you know who’s tougher. I am convinced that a good part of the reason the plants in Christl’s garden grow big and healthy is that they’re simply afraid not to.

When Christl’s not around, Kevin tries to do her job. “Tamar,” he says, and I will admit he says it in his best approximation of both Christl’s fierceness and her accent, “You must be ruthless!”

But he knows it’s hopeless. The collard greens in the hoophouse are way too close together, and I can’t bring myself to uproot them now that they’re so leafy and green. The radishes have needed thinning for a couple of days now, and I keep putting it off. Kevin is now threatening to do it for me, and he has no trouble being ruthless.

My friend Amanda has floated what I think is an excellent solution to what I suspect is a near-universal problem: Neighbors should thin each other’s gardens. If they’re not your seedlings, you can determine the optimal density and simply start snipping. Nobody’s judgment gets clouded by romantic notions of seedling survival, and everybody’s garden flourishes.

I think this is a genius idea. The only problem is that my neighbor, Mike, has the kind of gardening skills that make you suspect he sold his soul to the devil for a lifetime of perfect vegetables. He knows how I garden, and he wouldn’t let me within ten feet of his seedlings.

Amanda, besides being my friend, is also my web designer and all-purpose tech consultant. When she’s not having genius ideas about gardening, she’s trying desperately to drag me out of my old-school print journalism shell and into the brave new world of online media. (She told me, for example, that if I worked an Octomom reference into my thinning post, it would be great for my SEO, which she is trying to get me to A) understand and B) work on.)

So Amanda will be pleased to know that it has not escaped even my old-media notice that the pressing problems of the day are being solved by a technique called crowd-sourcing. According to Wikipedia, crowd-sourcing is “a distributed problem-solving and production process that involves outsourcing tasks to a network of people.”

This sounds suspiciously like “post your problem on the Internet and let other people solve it,” which I think is an outstanding use of online media. Projects that have been crowd-sourced include transcribing the hard-to-read handwritten documents of Jeremy Bentham, finding lost people after Hurricane Katrina, and designing a new armored vehicle for the Department of Defense. Oh, and Wikipedia.

And I think thinning is the natural choice for the next pressing social problem to be solved by crowd-sourcing. I clearly have too much invested in the radish seedlings in my hoophouse to make rational decisions about which should live and which should go into tonight’s salad, so I am turning to you for help. Below are three pictures, each of about one foot of a three-foot row of radish seedlings. All the seedlings are numbered.

What I ask of you is that you submit a comment with the numbers of the seedlings you would take out. These are ordinary red radishes, so space appropriately. Vote off any that are too close together or look suspiciously anaemic, and I will do the deed. Either that, or I’ll ask Kevin to.

May the best solution win.

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Yesterday, Kevin and I forgot it.

Because we’re thisclose to getting pigs this spring, we went to visit a local pig farmer, Bob from Ten of Us Farm. Bob has piglets that are very small, piglets that are medium-size, just-weaned piglets, and piglets due this week. He’s been breeding pigs for some thirty-five years on his small farm, and he gave us a tour of his place.

I was doing my best farmwife imitation, with my overalls and my muck boots, but when we went in the barn to see the sows with their litters, I gave myself away as a pathetic city slicker.

“Piggies! They’re so cute!”

Oops.  I tried to recover by turning to Bob and saying, “I guess you get over the cuteness factor, eh?”

He paused for a second. “Nope.”

What we noticed most about Bob’s pigs is that they’re very, very clean. It’s weird how clean they are, since a big part of the outdoor enclosure they were walking around in was very mucky, and I’ve been given to understand that pigs love muck. But upland from the muck was sawdust, and next to the sawdust was a big field of grass dotted with pig shelters. And all the pigs were clean. It’s as though Bob had just gotten them, fresh from central casting.

Pigs weren’t the only animals in evidence. There were also sheep, goats, guinea hens, and one lone peacock, who did us the honor of opening his tail for us. Wandering around the yard was a flock of chickens that seemed to consist mostly of roosters. (“People bring ‘em here, and I take ‘em in,” Bob said.) Several of the roosters approached us with menace in their eyes, crowing like they owned the place. Among them was one tiny bantam with a comically high voice and a villainous swagger who puffed his wings out like a comic-book tough guy. Although I was warned not to turn my back on him, I couldn’t take a two-pound bird seriously and I walked away to go visit the sheep. The bantam flew at my shins, kung-fu style, spurs out, with a viciousness that surprised me. He was way too small to do any damage, but I will be more careful around roosters from now on.

Although the piglets were pretty irresistible, we weren’t ready to go home with them yet. Since we want to slaughter in the fall, we need to wait until at least next month to bring them home – they’ll probably take five or six months to reach market weight. But farmers who sell pigs also sell pig manure, and since we’re expanding our garden, we thought we’d bring home a trailer load.

Bob had a huge pile of manure down behind the barn. By “huge” I mean a hundred feet long and fifteen feet high. Mount Pig Poop.

It had been sitting there for quite some time, and looked to be well on its way to being fertilizer. We lined the landscape trailer with a tarp, and Bob pulled up in his Bobcat with its bucket attached. Five or six scoops later, we had almost two yards of it. As he loaded it, we could certainly smell it, but it wasn’t overwhelming.

The overwhelming part didn’t happen until we got it home, and started shoveling it off the trailer on to the top tier of our garden, where we figured we’d keep it until we were ready to put a layer in the bottom of our raised beds and the rest out back somewhere to continue to break down.

Sorry, no piglet pictures yet

The more we shoveled, the more obvious it became that it still had a lot of breaking down to do. By the time we got half of it off, we should have realized it, changed the plan, and dumped it as far away from the house as possible – somewhere it could sit for a good year. But we weren’t thinking very clearly. Maybe the fumes got to us. And we now have two yards of hog manure decomposing about fifty feet from our front door.

There goes the neighborhood.

“This was a big mistake,” I said to Kevin as I shoved all our clothes into the washer and set the dial to “Manure Cycle.”

“Nah,” he said. “It was only a small miscalculation.”

Hah! Small miscalculations don’t affect your property value. I can only hope we can move the pile far enough away from our house that we don’t have to live with the smell morning, noon, and night until the composting process can work its magic.

And it will. The giant, smelly heap will at some point be crumbly, nutrition-rich fertilizer. Right now, though, it is pig shit.

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