Tag Archive | peppertastrophe

Erosion

Aug27
Little erosion…
Medium erosion…
Big erosion…

I’m grateful for erosion. Without it, we wouldn’t have canyons. Imagine that. None of the drama, beauty, adventure; no more of the unique habitats, microclimates, and endemic creatures of canyons… like the adorable canyon wren with its unmistakable song (be sure to click ‘Listen’ in the link). No Grand Canyon, no Black Canyon of the Gunnison (pictured above), none of the other fabulous canyons around the world. Not that I’m a huge fan, and not that it will be feasible for much longer, but no hydropower dams which admittedly provide electricity and irrigation water to a lot of humans… Besides forming landscapes, erosion can also benefit the planet by distributing nutrients…

I realize that I’m in over my head, because as I search the internets for benefits of erosion, I find a 10:1 ratio of articles about “why erosion is bad and benefits of erosion control”: Not many specifics about why it’s good. It depends on your point of view, I guess. For certain, erosion doesn’t play nice with human efforts to control the environment, and the more intensely we have tried to shape the planet to our will, the more we have decided that erosion is a problem to be reckoned with rather than accepting it as a natural force of evolution. So I’m gonna be grateful for it anyway, because of canyons.

A peppertastrophe today as a result of yesterday’s deluge, perhaps. The main trunk of the huge, healthy scorpion pepper broke! None of the peppers have entered their final ripening stage, and they won’t ripen off the plant until a certain trigger point is reached with the perfect combination of daylight and temperature. I’m grateful for equanimity and ingenuity. I was disappointed but shattered as I might have been a few years ago, and immediately set about trying to salvage what I could.
After a few efforts to stabilize the plant in water I was grateful to find the perfect rock to hold it in a bowl. I’ll figure out something more stable and permanent tomorrow if it doesn’t drop dead, and try to limp it along hydroponically for a few more weeks until the peppers start to turn yellow.
And in kitchen successes, yesterday’s dilly beans above, and today’s bread and butter pickles below. I’m grateful for another precious day alive in this beautiful world.