ISSUE 13

Alina Zollfrank

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Thwarted

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My forefathers and foremothers made it look effortless. All lush. All full. All real. Peach trees, laden, bowed by the weight of their velvet babies. Meadows of green beans. Hillocks studded with radishes. Cabbages rolling everywhere. Turnips poking out in between. Strawberries as far as the eye could see.

 

My parents labored after they came home from teaching all day. Yard work = yard love = self love was the message. A ring of gooseberry bushes around the perimeter of our garden. I waded in raspberries. A tin bathtub of golden pear Helene out by the fence so we could make some cash before the wasps stung us to it. Armfuls of parsley, witchily green. Carrots and radishes, straight from warm soil into drooly toddler mouth. I swam in red and black currants.

 

But here I am now. I effort. More, not less. I want food for my children. I want an oasis for birds, for pollinators. I plant and weed, collect and heed for years. And here we are. Sudden peach tree death. Then plums that bloom but don’t produce, although the trees have each other to tango. I thought blossoming romance would yield fruit. Yet, the lettuce a night-time meal for slugs. Worms sucking on peas; aphids chomping on leaves.

 

I feel inspired to rent Orchard Mason bees and sneak peeks when first the tufted males and, a few days later, the diligent females emerge. On the south side of our house, a black-painted wooden box with a nesting block has been installed. Its location and dark color help absorb the early spring heat and whip the bees into action. As soon as daytime temperatures hit about 55 degrees, and as long as there isn’t a strong rainstorm or hefty wind, these solitary miracle workers hatch and get busy. I stand there and quietly watch their coming and going. My metallic blue Masons, I have been told, are hardy and easily pollinate even the earliest blooms, like my Hollywood plum and Gravenstein apple. One bee can visit around 2,000 blooms a day, and the race-car urgency with which they approach the nesting tubes makes me think that we’ll be in for quite the harvest later this year.

 

These bees are not just pollinators; they’re builders, too. They fill the slender tubes with egg deposits and pollen separated into small cells by mud walls, and then they seal the tube with a lightly colored clay, a small puddle of which I keep moist in my yard. The clay dries and keeps predators out during winter while the pupae wait to hatch next spring. With all this hustling and bustling, I expect this season’s blossoms to morph into fruit overnight. I expect abundance. I’m so wrong.

 

Early fruit drop, one master gardener tells me with a solemn face when I complain about the shriveled, immature apples, plums, and pears surrounding the trees. And only one Mason bee tube gets filled by a busy mama, then glued shut with mud. I guard it in the daytime like I guarded my own babies. Across from the indefatigable mint by the strawberry planter, after days of watching and hoping, I find shrunken bodies of Mason bees. Cause of death: unknown.

 

I try hard. And harder. A gardener friend, to calm my frenzy, tells me: It’s not you. It’s the world. Apples actually get sunburns now, did you know? Did you know soil nematodes feast from below? That’s what got the peach tree. No supplement will fix this. You can cart in new dirt. It’s not good dirt. The old dirt was the good dirt. They don’t make dirt like that anymore.

 

Now what? Buy plastic-wrapped produce dragged across the continent? Teach the kids to identify food on screens? Feed them mass-produced energy bars with an ingredient list longer than the rake my parents stored in their shed? Tap-swipe before slicing and dicing? 3D-print produce? Then show the children warped photos with scalloped edges and explain: These orange things were called carrots, and your grandparents used to yank them out of the ground to make salads and soups.

 

I stare at my so-silent Mason bee box and the California lilac that died in last winter’s recordsetting ice storm. Rest my face in my hands. Springtime is for hope and growth, my people used to tell me. And in summer and fall you are rewarded for hard work with bountiful harvest.

 

Whatever.

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