Pesticides and Jesus

HomesteadingNon-Fiction
Written By Elizabeth Russell

I was only a few short weeks into homesteading when I learned why both pesticides and Jesus ended up on farms with such frequency. As I fought my own battle, I wondered which I would be needing on this farm going forward.

I learned about Jesus and pesticides on the very same day.  Well…maybe not about them so much as why both of them show up on farms with such frequency. 

My mother knew our grapes had issues at first sight. 

She hadn’t seen the spots and she wasn’t some sage with an eye for plant diseases. She had simply spent an entire childhood eating off of a concord grape vine in her neighborhood downstate and she knew — they just weren’t supposed to be that overgrown.

I had brushed off her concern with mild indignation. They were, in my mind, just prolific — a sure sign that they had a great will to grow, which I would harness the minute I got past the five hundred other things we had to do our first week on the property. I looked forward to the pruning, the curating, but this was the least of my worries.

I didn’t notice the spots until several weeks later. We should have started to have a crop by then and we did, sort of. We had many grapes — all tiny mummies, dead in their first weeks of life, dangling from their vines, small and hard like wrinkly peppercorns. Further inspection of the leaves confirmed — it was black rot, a fungus that caused excessive brown spots, and crippled fruit. It would kill the plant it thrived on and was highly contagious to any of the plants around it.

Our grape crop had barely started and it was already gone. 

I dropped to my knees and cried. 


The thing about hobby farming is that you’re rarely at the mercy of the land as much as the true farmers. Had I been a grape farmer, I would have lost everything that year — my income, my food, maybe the money I meant to use to pay on an overdue loan. Real farming, I could see, took grit.

Had I trimmed the vines when we first arrived as my mother had mentioned, I might have noticed the rot sooner, or even saved the grapes by removing the outer layer that blocked the sun, allowing the moisture on the vines to persist and cause rot.

Black rot unattended would kill these vines in place. Worse, it could spread to my apples, just 10 feet away; we could lose all that the previous owners had begun. We could be looking at starting over, and 3 years of maintaining virgin trees until they could bear their first fruits. The thought of it broke my heart. This was why we came here in the first place.

I dug my phone out of my back pocket and brushed away the lint. 

“Spots on grapes.” 

“Black rot on grapes.” 

“How to get rid of black rot.” 

I sat on the cracked clay soil and tip-tapped into my browser search, looking for hope, proof that it wasn’t so bad. This, I thought as I read, is why so many farmers pray.

But I hadn’t done that in quite a while.


The candles, the incense, the voice of the priest…I was usually in a waking sleep by the time the Intercessions were read each Sunday. And in my Catholic church in Austin, Texas, the brighter sunshine and warmer weather did nothing to change this for me on the day I quit church for good.

“For brother Josiah, that his doctors may comfort and heal him.” 

Pause.

“Lord, hear our prayer.”

“For the men and women fighting in our military, that the Lord may keep them and guide them.” 

Pause.

“Lord, hear our prayer.” 

The reader would drone. The reader would pause. And we — doleful sheep — would “Lord, hear our prayer.”  The pattern, its steady hum, would hardly interrupt my sleepy revelry.

Until —

“For the Defense of Marriage Act, that our brothers and sisters in Congress may fight to preserve marriage as being between a man and wife.” 

Pause.

I won’t claim much about the power of prayer. I’ve not experienced some massive prayerful awakening. I’ve not attributed it to any of my own ah-has. Did I believe? I don’t know. I was just raised to go to church. I didn’t dive into the details of it. 

But in that moment — during an Intercessional petition about gay marriage on a cold and sunny Austin day — I’ll admit that I genuinely feared it. As the “Lord, hear our prayers” whipped around me, I worried that it would work — that it might reach that other side, call this celestial power we called God. That those four small words — spoken together in an incense-filled room surrounded by candles — might just put the holy spirit right into Congress and condemn our fellow man to a life of lawlessness over pure love. 

Could I say it? Never. This wouldn’t happen by my hand.

But thinking about the possibility that the prayer may have some power — it shocked me into silence for the remainder of the service. 

“Wasn’t Father M____’s homily wonderful! He’s been really on lately!” 

My pew-mate was indelibly handsome — his hair a blond that women paid for, his eyes my favorite version of olive green. Had I been single, and free of my shock, I might have relished in his conversation as we side-stepped our way out into the church aisle.

Instead, I stared for a very long and awkward moment, my mouth opening and closing as if swaying along with an upward draft.

And then I turned around and left.

I often wonder what he must have thought of me. I wonder if he considered me uneducated. Unable to talk intelligently about Christianity. Unwilling to live true to its words. Or worse, I wonder if it was an attempt to hit on me. If he knew of his good looks and was used to women ogling at him.  I wondered if he saw the irony of trying to make a love connection while having just tried to prevent others from doing the same.

“Pesticides and Jesus — I was being exposed to a whole new perspective on life.”

It turns out I didn’t have to worry about Congress being empowered all that much. But I’ve skipped out on the church thing since then, just to be safe.

Sitting in front of my dead grapes, I’d learned that only two things would really work on black rot — an extreme culling of the infected plants, and pesticides. Well… fungicides really.

I knew that our vines had never been sprayed with anything. It was a point of pride for our sellers — that they’d kept the apples and grapes organic and enjoyed a perfect crop anyways. I had desperately wanted to keep that tradition going. I had read so much about a reliance on chemicals in farming. So much about how bad they were. So much about their poison.

I had never read a lot about why farmers used them in the first place. I began to wonder if I would be singing a different tune if they sat between me and feeding my family.

Pesticides and Jesus — I was being exposed to a whole new perspective on life.

I had once sat in on a speech given by a Haudenosaunee leader on a native corn farming project going on in upstate NY. Before he even began, he started with a prayer — a long one, dedicated to all of the elements of nature. I remember none of it, except what I would call the refrain: he’d speak of an element of nature and then say “We give thanks and now our minds are one.”

Paraphrased:

“To the earth that sustains us. We give thanks and now our minds are one.”

“To the Four Winds that cleanse the air. We give thanks and now our minds are one.”

I had cried then. This was a prayer I could understand. Gratitude. Oneness. How lucky the Haudenosaunee people were to have it.


I readied myself for the culling of the grapes by cleaning all of my tools with rubbing alcohol. I would be cutting into healthy flesh — far away from the rotten areas to ensure maximum effect — and I wanted to ensure I wouldn’t be the one to cause any more spread. I started fire in the outdoor pit to burn any infected vine or leaf — the only way to avoid having the plants sitting somewhere on the property where the fungus could take hold. 

We had opted out of fungicides for now, but between the acrid smoke and the sting of the alcohol, it still felt oddly chemical. 

I would take a similarly hybrid approach to prayer too. It wasn’t a Catholic tome, or a stolen line from a native people. But before I made that first cut, I threw out something like “no matter what happens, we’re o.k.” 

And the first trunk of vine thunked to the ground.

For more on faith and its varying forms…

This essay was created from a writing prompt from Illuminate, a writing program by The Kindred Voice. This month, I’m joined by the following amazing women, each of us writing about “faith” — sometimes in a god, sometimes in something else altogether:

Elizabeth Russell
Previous

Labors of Love
Next

feel free