If every season must have a disaster, then we have arrived at this season’s disaster. While we were all away working farmers markets on Saturday, we had a day long power outage that ceased the operation of the tomato/cucumber greenhouse ventilation during a heat wave. The greenhouse proceeded to heat up to 140 degrees, which, as it turns out, is simply too hot for tomatoes and cucumbers.
I’ve surveyed the wasteland. It’s a total loss. “Well,” Jason says with a shrug of his shoulder, “that’s twenty five hours of labor we get to spend on other things.” I let the loss wash over me. I double over with it. I’m not ready for the silver lining yet. It’s been a rough week full of complicated and intense human psychology and emotion that I found myself to be unprepared and unqualified to handle. This, though, this is farming. This is my familiar. Disaster. Scrambling. Recovery. Twenty years and we’re somehow still kicking this same dirt around. Okay. I shrug my shoulders. Bring me the silver lining now.
It's there, of course. It always is. But sometimes it takes a little digging through the rubble to get to it. So after I picked myself up from the sucker punch and dusted myself off, I could see that Jason was right: the field tomatoes and cucumbers will get all the love they need now, we’ll catch up on things we never imagined getting to, and, perhaps, we even manage to kill any disease or insect build up in that greenhouse to better future production. See? I can do it too! I’m not saying this isn’t going to hurt for a long time, but, if you look hard enough, you can start to see the little sparkle of silver amongst the wreckage.
