The Bucolic Plague: How Two Manhattanites Became Gentlemen Farmers: An Unconventional Memoir by Josh Kilmer-Purcell Page A

lifted up one of the moving corners to investigate.
    “There’s a bird caught in the net,” I said.
    “I know. There’s one over on this end too.”
    I dropped to my knees and began trying to unravel the terrified sparrow. Each time I managed to free so much as a tail feather, it spasmed and flapped and became even further entangled. I shifted my position to get a better angle, and wound up kneeling on something soft. Moving my knee I found a corpse of another bird, this one long dead. It must have become tangled earlier in the week and starved.
    “There are dozens of dead birds!” I called out. Brent realized the same thing at his end. “Go get me some scissors.”
    The rest of the morning was spent creating a sort of triage on the yard. The dead birds were put in one pile, the mostly dead birds were wrapped tightly in kitchen towels so as not to further injure themselves, and the healthiest freed birds were set underneath the nearby mock orange shrubs with a saucer of water where they would hopefully recuperate from their shock.
    Bubby, of course, had to be continually shooed away. He and the other barn cats circled the scene like leopards at a watering hole.
    We finally extricated the last bird around noon. The few of them that had survived limped and flapped their way to their own private hiding spaces in the flower garden.
    Bubby, perhaps sensing our crestfallen exhaustion, moved in closer and rubbed against my shins while eyeing the bounty of the fallen battleground all around us.
    “Go on,” I tell him. “Just make it quick.”
    As Brent and I gathered up the netting to carry to the Dumpster, I realized that in pursuit of perfectly unblemished, Martha-worthy cherries, I’d murdered at least a dozen songbirds. This fact probably wouldn’t have bothered most farmers—like the one at Agway who’d originally given me the netting tip. I wasn’t naïve enough not to realize that death and farms go hand in hand. But what bothered me was that I would’ve been perfectly happy with a few pockmarked or missing cherries. I’d only been planning on using them in pies anyway.
    I’d been selfish. I hadn’t yet realized that the true goal of organic farming wasn’t harvesting crops in spite of bugs, pests, and predators. It was about harvesting crops alongside of them. It was about planting more than the amount we need. And it was about making sure there was enough extra to go around for everything that made its home on the farm. For every sparrow I’d killed, there would be millions of fewer seeds spread over the fields from their droppings and millions of uneaten bugs, which would in turn attack our vegetable garden. We’d be paying for our unblemished cherries in some way or another for the rest of the season. Sure, we hadn’t sprayed chemicals all over the cherries. But we’d been just as deadly.
    It took Brent and me the entire rest of the day to pick all of the fruit off the tree. We ultimately wound up with twenty-two full baskets. It was gratifying to know that after pitting and freezing our haul, we’d have our own fruit to eat all winter. But I cannot tell a lie. They tasted more bitter than sour.
    We spent much of the rest of the weekend pitting cherries and preparing for our picnic. My preference was still to host something similar to the Fourth of July parties of my youth, when someone in the neighborhood set up a buffet on a picnic table in the garage, and others would bring all manner of red, white, and blue–themed foods, generally involving Jell-O. But Brent was insisting on a Martha-style holiday with hand-cranked ice cream, meticulously “informal” floral arrangements, and three different varieties of lemonade. If we had an extra day to prepare, I was sure he’d have us taking trombone lessons for a parade in front of the house.
    Even though we had a long five-day holiday break to prepare for the party, we’d barely put a dent in the list of chores Brent had wanted to accomplish. The