Pondering Life and Death

There is a baby vole in the hole where the hose connects to the city water supply. It holds very still so I won't see it, but when I move away, I hear it peeping and squeaking, crying and shrieking, "help me, help me, help me!" If I were to decide to rescue it, it would try to escape me, and probably bite me. If I were to succeed, we would be trying to kill it in a few weeks (they grow fast), because they eat the baby plants growing in the garden and steal the food from the chicken coop. We have killed several this year. (I say "we," but Ray and my Dad have been the ones to carry out the deed, I am ashamed to say.) It is a dilemma for me to consider: what right do we have to kill them? The alternative, though, is to give up on gardening entirely, and depend on others far away to raise my food as they see fit, no doubt killing some creatures in the process.

There was a toad in the same spot earlier this week, about the same size, big for a toad, small for a vole. We needed to move it to turn the water on, to displace it from its wallow, hoping it will stay around and eat insects--just bad ones, of course (by my definition).

Who am I to decide which life to allow and which to snuff out? I pull up weeds with no qualms...I have had several tick bites this spring...nasty things that are hard to remove and leave itchy scabs. The Johnny-jump-ups in the garden I leave unless I need to plant something right there. We planted them years ago and they come back. I leave clover for the most part, on the grounds that it is good for the soil. I pull grass enthusiastically, while I bemoan its absence on the other side of the fence. I have a hierarchy of weeds...lespedezia is an invasive that grows everywhere at Kenney Ridge, displacing the native plants. It doesn't care about water or soil or heat...just grows energetically. It is probably my number one enemy weed.

There is a large peach tree in the corner of the garden. It is a volunteer. I suppose there was a peach pit in the compost that grew up along the fence and managed to escape being removed as a weed. Two years ago, I tried to pull it up but it was too well rooted. I meant to cut it down before the next year, but before I did, it had produced about a dozen lovely peaches. This year it is as tall as a one-story house and had many beautiful blossoms early in the spring. It has as many as 100 baby peaches on it--really!

There are two ironic things about this. I bought and planted two peach trees in my "orchard" about five years ago. One was doing well the first year, until the deer went crazy as the peaches ripened and knocked down the fence to get to it (a lesson for me in fence-building). Neither is much taller than me or has produced more than a few peaches each year. This volunteer is twenty times as productive, perhaps because of the work we have done on the garden soil...although its roots must go much deeper than anything we have done.

The other thing is that the tree now shades about half the vegetable garden. We are unable to plant anything in that corner, out about eight feet. Cilantro grows wild there, reseeding itself continually, like the Johnny-jump-ups. I have set in a couple pumpkins at the edge of the shady patch and we will see how they do.

When I water the plants, I am helping them to live, as well as when I add manure or compost or mulch and pull the weeds around them. I am the Mistress, the Goddess, the One Who Decides who will live and who will die.