Pond Refurbishing Labor Troubles

The lily pond in our garden is about 90 years old and as it was not constructed with any kind of circulating system, it had turned into a marsh dominated by sacred lotus. While a happy home to quite a diversity of dragon flies and amphibians, the annual spring visit by ducks three years ago had provided an example of plant dispersal by bringing in duckweed which rendered moot the presence or absence of fish beneath the green expanse, all of which resulted in the decision to rennovate the entire pond. Enter the Pond Lady, quite crazily obsessed by ponds. She and her older assistant probably have a total age of around 100 and a total height of about ten and a half feet, so they employ strapping young men to assist with moving the cinder blocks, rocks, old cement, sand, and soil needed for the project. Here's the pond as it looked this spring with a couple of pallets of cinder block waiting for deployment. Pond Lady has been through 5 or 6 young men this summer alone. The last one, new to the job Monday, left for lunch on Tuesday and never returned. He lasted half a day longer than one earlier this summer who simply said, "It (the work) is too hot and dirty." Assistant pond lady laughs, shakes her head, and says, "They just can't keep up with us. We're tough!" How true especially when compared to 20-something marshmallows (my preferred spelling). In spite of slower than anticipated progress due to these labor problems, new plumbing is now in place and the pond is once again filled with water, so in a couple of weeks the project will be done except for all the new landscaping required. Oh, yes, the lotus, being sacred, was preserved, but it will be confined rather than allowed to roam freely.

Growing Apples - Japanese style

Having grown up in the apple country of upstate New York, apple farming is something the Phactor is very familiar with, and it bears virtually no similarity to apple farming in Japan. The amount of hand labor used in Japan to produce big, perfect, pretty apples would price apples right out of the market virtually anywhere else. First you hand pollinate the flowers, than you cull the crop so the tree produces fewer but bigger apples, and then you double bag to flowers to protect from insect pests and damage, yes, that's right you bag each and every apple. Near the end of the season the opaque bag is removed leaving an innter translucent bag so that the cream colored apples with ripe into a uniform color. The only fun thing about this is applying an opaque stencil to the cream colored apples will produce a pale design in the apple's skin (image borrowed from the link above), and even this is done in the USA in a few boutique orchards, and as a special sales item. The apples produced by all this attention and hand labor are big, perfect, and beautiful, but is it really worth it? The Phactor wouldn't have time to do all this even to his mighty two tree orchard let alone hundreds of trees. So does this end up being decided by the consumer, whether you want to pay alot for a few perfect apples, or whether you'd want more apples for less money, and ignore the uneven coloring or a few blemishes? Even in Japan this may not be a sustainable form of agriculture.