Morning in the Gardens of Groundwell

"We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion year old carbon,

 and we've got to get ourselves back to the garden."

Joni Mitchell

Woodstock

7:30

I'm out in the rows of my garden, taking it all in.  The water drop call of the brown headed cowbird brings my attention to the drops of dew sprinkled over the leaves.  I notice that while some rows are impeccably tended

others are in deep need of some back work.

I look with pride on the work we have all done in staking up the tomatoes.

But mere observation is not why I'm out here nice and early.  I'm here to look at my cabbages.

There is evil afoot here. Evil in the form of cabbage loopers.  Loopers are little caterpillars, the offspring of the lovely white cabbage butterfly, who have the power to turn thick mighty cabbage leaves to fine lace in the space of one or two days.  So I come out every morning to hunt them down.  It's a tricky task requiring that I search the front and back of each and every leaf of each and every plant.  Because the little guys are the exact color of the cabbage leaf it is easy to overlook one or two tiny ones who can, in their turn, rapidly become huge devouring beasts.

So I patiently wade through, deeply searching, leaf by leaf finding caterpillar after caterpillar and squishing the guts right out of them.

It's gruesome work, but someone has to do it.

After the slaughter, I bring my mind back to the world of the living and am reawakened by lovely flowers.

Dew on the chamomile

Lavender ready to bloom

The first echinacea blossom

A fiery daylily

 Such is life on the farm, where life and death walk hand in hand.