The Forager

So many rules to break, but I know how to break them better than anyone I know.

by STEVE SPRINKEL

One rule was: no hot peppers in the box. Well, the Hellapainyos are in there, so keep your toddler out. sorry, it is not sufficient. Hot peppers in box!

Another rule is: “Never run out of Swiss chard.”

Swiss chard, even in the Panini Plains of Ojai, can be made to provide leaves year-round. And yet, we laid off the chard for half a year. Some may want to know why, and there could be a nice hard why in here somewhere. Maybe we, no, I, got so “over it” when the last beds of yummy chard got flailed in May that I didn’t want to stoop over it nor send anyone else to stoop over it. Good thing we over-planted it, because only half was usable, what with the X, Y and Z of wildlife depredation visiting the beds daily. You cover it for the birds, and the gophers havoc it under cover of night. The squirrel chaws a nasty nibble on the edge and then one day says to herself, “Why, I think I am just going to cut me out a nice burrow in here so I don’t have to travel so far for my salad.”

Another nice rule is Radish, 2.0. I discovered some time ago that radish will flourish well from April through fall, and nearly year-round. But, no, Mr. Fat Bean ran out of radish seeds and failed to order. Jolly Bean ran out of a lot of seeds. He planted a lot of early pickling cucumbers that were not really a big

hit on El Roblar Drive, and then when it was time for Round Two, he planted them again because that was all he had in his moldy old seed box. He was in a hurry when he did not have to be, but he was rushing a transplant order down to Suncoast in Carpinteria and Beany said “ Screw it.”

Getting new green American Slicer seed would have only set the old Frijole back ten days, but he walked away from reason. Ever done that? Just traded idiocy for deliberation like it was Rubles versus Bitcoin? I shortchanged the whole community because I failed to plan and then failed to react to my sloth, my indecision, leaning instead on my awesome capability to ignore that stark truth once learned and now oh, so easy to accept the alternative.

Why is that? It’s kind of Covidee. Or Covidy, as it’s spelled on the East Coast. Covid’s skewed shit up real bad. It’s one thing for Geezy McBean to be bored with the pandemic, but just open up the chatter to Generation D, as in DENIED, and get their earful. I can wrassle hope to the ground because I did Cold War, Chernobyl and got a couple nice droughts under my expansive belt. Generation D got their driver’s license right when the Big Orange walked right out of a Marvel Comic book and started stomping democracy to death. Gen-D barely had bandwidth for the dark portent of Kremlin Krazy when the virus dug in.

Covid stole their youth and turned off the spigot on their bubbly hormones. They can’t go nowhere, kiss nobody or even share a damn beer. They were not terribly sure of how to be anyway and now there’s all kinds of oppositional truth-talkers telling them what to do. Shame if you do, shame if you don’t. They’s young enough to not even know what smallpox was. We killed it in 1980. How? Let’s see if you can answer that question with another answer. How are we going to stifle Covid so we are not afraid of each other any more? Cue: not with dewormers, zinc or masks, though masks be good.

Speaking of rules, let me break another one. Stop arguing about vaccinations. One thing we have learned is that it is nearly impossible to convince anyone to get a vaccination through debate or the piling up of facts. When the Orange started spouting about alternative facts no one would have imagined that controlling an epidemic would be made so confusing through the adoption of subjective facts.

When Attila come up on a fat walled city he did not want to waste time with a long siege. He catapulted a dozen smallpox victims over the wall and poured another cup of tea.

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