Epitaph for a Peach by David M. Masumoto Read Free Book Online Page B

always harvested in the heat of summer, his peaches well suited for the 100-degree days and the fine sandy loam of our farm. Dad knows the land and didn’t try to push mother nature.
    I ignored his advice and planted five acres of an early variety of peach called Spring Lady. They bloom in March and are harvested by May, seventy days to evolve from blossoms into luscious fruit. They challenge nature’s clock, genetic mutations racing against natural timelines.
    I tried to rationalize my decision to Dad. “Spring peaches may be unnatural for the valley, but people buy lots of peaches in May. They pay good prices.”
    He stood unmoved.
    I continued. “We’ll just be nudging mother nature a little. Besides, making money shouldn’t be an unnatural act for a farmer.”
    He shook his head and, like a good parent, left me to learn the hard way.
    My first error was planting the Spring Ladies in the wrong ground. This field has “light soil,” a euphemism for poor, sandy dirt. It will take years to build up the earth and enrich it with nutrients, organic matter, and humus.
    I shared my plight with one of my workers, an older Mexican fellow with more experience in the fields than I will ever have. His comments become useful in such situations. Shrugging his shoulders and raising his eyebrows, he said, “What can you do?”
    For the first two years of the orchard, I aborted the crop, channeling all the energies into growth. Without a harvest, I paid little attention to the young field, ignoring the weak trees. By the third year the young trees were flush with pink blossoms. Yet for some reason, many of the trees had trouble growing leaves. My other peach varieties rapidly grow with the first spring warmth. The fields change from the pink of blossoms to a pale green of fresh shoots. My Spring Ladies progressed from bright pink to a faded red of withering petals. Tiny oval peaches eventually emerged as the bloom fell and blanketed the earth with a sanguine hue. And yet, despite their beauty, there was a problem: how could peaches grow without leaves? A few weeks later a few shoots appeared and I began to relax, reassured Spring Lady was not some new leafless variety.
    Later in the spring I hired thinners to enter my orchards and destroy over half the Spring Lady crop. They climb ladders and knock off thousands of the tiny peaches with their fingers. The earth is covered with these little peach corpses, they crunch beneath your feet as you walk. The sound of a crew thinning peaches reminds me of a thunderstorm, the falling fruit knocking against ladder steps and pattering on the ground, building from a light tapping to a dazzling crescendo as the crew picks up speed.
    Good farmers don’t look down during thinning; the sight of the thousands of bodies would trouble their thoughts. Too easily I translate fallen fruit into lost profits and I’m tempted to leave more on each tree, which actually results in lots of small, low-priced fruit. Once, while thinning, a crew boss waved his hands upward and told me, “Look up! Look up! Good farmers look up!” He sounded like both a good manager and a good therapist.
    I shielded my eyes from the ground and concentrated on the Spring Lady thinners and their spacing of the fruit on a branch. I opted not to gamble and to leave only a single peach per hanger, or stem, about two hundred peaches per tree.
    Every year the beauty of spring is interrupted by the work demands of vineyards and orchards. Spring work envelops the farmer. We run from one job to another, desperately trying to keep up with the pace of change. As the weather warms, the weeds surge, mildew spores multiply, insects munch, and roots need water. Small weeds rapidly mutate into thickets that challenge my largest disk and tractor. Fungi spread throughout my fields, spores hope to avoid detection, and, if unchecked, they multiply geometrically. Weak soils refuse to help struggling