One Tomato, Two Tomato...

We're finally harvesting some ripe tomatoes, but the numbers are disappointing. I wrote earlier that pollinators are curiously absent from our garden this year, and we were hitting the tomato stakes to loosen the pollen so our 56 tomatoes could self-pollinate. A few bees have arrived since but not enough to make a big difference to our garden, so we continue to try imitating the vibrations of wind or of bees by tapping those tomato poles. 

The tomato in the photo is probably from one of our German Johnson plants. We ate two tomatoes last night--our first harvest--sliced and lightly salted. Tom also picked some lemon basil for the marinara sauce I made to serve with pasta. I had to use canned tomatoes and tomato paste for the marinara sauce, as we don't have enough ripened tomatoes for more than a sandwich or two.

But the garden delivers other delights, as the photos below illustrate.

Green spider with prey--This is probably the same spider I photographed previously on the mountain mint.

I think this is an assassin bug. It was trying to hide from me, with its catch, under a leaf. I've turned the photo horizontally.

Purple hyacinth beans and morning glories now cover the bamboo trellis I built.

The blue-black salvia is blooming profusely.

Prison Labor Then and Now

Yesterday I read an article about United States federal prisoners who make parts for Patriot Missiles. These prisoners are

paid $0.23 an hour to start, and can work their way up to a maximum of $1.15 to manufacture electronics that go into the propulsion, guidance, and targeting systems of Lockheed Martin’s (LMT) PAC-3 guided missile, originally made famous in the first Persian Gulf conflict. (source: "Why are Prisoners Building Patriot Missiles?," by Justin Rohrlich, Minyanville, March 7, 2011.)

I had located the article about this prison labor via a link in another recent article in The Atlantic about a Sesame Street feature titled "Little Children, Big Challenges: Incarceration." This latter article reveals that the feature's main sponsor is BAE Systems , "[t]he British contractor, whose U.S. subsidiary is one of the largest suppliers to the Department of Defense, [and who] depends — like many other defense contractors — on the low-overhead labor of prisoners incarcerated at for-profit facilities." Now, I have no issue with BAE Systems' sponsoring a Sesame Street feature that is directed toward children who have a parent in prison, but the article reminded me of how huge our prison-industrial complex is and how much money corporations such as BAE Systems can make by hiring poorly paid prison labor. For-profit prison corporations have increased exponentially over the last ten years (See Appendix Table 2 in the Bureau of Justice Statistics' report of December 2011). These for-profit prison corporations lobby against reducing penalties in order to keep their prisons full and profitable (See "War on Drugs: How Private Prisons are Using the Drug War to Generate More Inmates"). It doesn't take too great a leap to see how for-profit prison corporations and corporations looking for cheap labor might have some common goals, however unacknowledged and disputed.

Since reading about black prison labor in the South in the early twentieth century, described so thoroughly in Douglas Blackmon's book Slavery by Another Name, I have been particularly interested in this issue of prison labor and its opportunities for corruption.

Under Jim Crow laws in the South, black men could be arrested for a number of reasons, for behavior that today we are appalled (one hopes) was ever considered criminal in this United States. Among these was the law against "vagrancy," a law so "vaguely defin[ed] ... that virtually any freed slave not under protection of a white man could be arrested for the crime" (Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name, p. 53). At the close of the Civil War, Mississippi immediately passed a law requiring African Americans "to enter into labor contracts with white farmers by January 1 of every year or risk arrest." Other states began to pass similar laws.  African Americans in the South were not free to seek employment wherever they wished, whenever they wished. They could not leave employment without permission from their employer. If they were caught without a signed discharge paper, they could be arrested.

And they were arrested. No black man walking alone without employment papers was beyond fear of being arrested, imprisoned, and fined for any number of reasons, fines that enriched local law enforcement and prevented prisoners from being released to freedom--because they were unable to pay the fines. Then local sheriffs began loaning prisoners to mining companies or brick-making companies or turpentine camps, where the living conditions were abysmal, even though on paper companies were required to provide the prisoners with adequate food, clothing, and living quarters. For instance: 

In the first two years that Alabama leased its prisoners, nearly 20 percent of them died. In the following year, mortality rose to 35 percent. In the fourth, nearly 45 percent were killed. (Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name, p. 57).

Many whites profited from black prison labor:  local law enforcement receiving payment for the loans of prisoners, companies that profited hugely by having virtually free labor, and Southern families whose names are still among those of the elite. For example, the success of Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad was due largely to prison labor. In 1907, that company was acquired by U. S. Steel, whose founding chairman, Elbert H. Gary, was "quoted as saying he was outraged when he learned that the mines he acquired in Alabama in 1907 were using slave labor" (Blackmon,  p. 335). Gary thought to abolish such slave labor, but for four more years, deep in the mines of Alabama, slave labor for U. S. Steel continued:

[I]n correspondence between company executives and state officials, U. S. Steel made it clear that despite the chairman's discomfort with the system, it realized the benefits of a captive labor workforce, particularly in thwarting efforts to unionize local labor. It was in no rush to give up the prisoners under its control. (Blackmon, p. 336).

Joel Hurt, the very successful Atlanta businessman, well-known even today for his "signature developments" in Atlanta, such as the High Victorian Inman Park and Druid Hills and the firm he hired to complete these developments, the firm of Frederick Law Olmsted, greatly profited from forced prison labor. Finally,  public outrage over the horrible conditions in Hurt's brick-making business, Chattahoochee Brick, caused the all-white Georgia electorate to abolish the prison labor system in 1908. Other Southern states followed suit. However, across the South, the prison labor system was just too profitable and resisted consistent and continued reform; it was revived by law again or morphed into the chain gang. In 1928, "the fee system and its profit motivation to encourage sheriffs to make as many arrests as possible remained in force" (Blackmon, p. 367). In Alabama, one state prison inspector wrote, "'Our jails are money-making machines,'"(Blackmon, p. 367). The profitability of prison labor and the occasions of prisoners arrested on the most trivial of charges to supply a labor need is clearly supported by records of the times:

Two Mississippi sheriffs reported making between $20,000 and $30,000 each during 1929 in extra compensation for procuring black laborers and selling them to local planters. After a plea for more cotton pickers in August 1932 [the year my father was born], police in Macon, Georgia, scoured the town's streets, arresting sixty black men on "vagrancy" charges and immediately turning them over to a plantation owner named J. H. Stroud. A year later, The New York Times reported a similar roundup in the cotton town of Helena, Arkansas. (Blackmon, p. 377)

It wasn't until the onset of World War II that the federal government made a really concerted effort to abolish the corrupt prison labor system in the South. Efforts had been made in the past, laws instituted, but the recalcitrance of Southern states stymied any real reform. After Pearl Harbor, the federal government was gearing up for mass mobilization of its citizens to the armed forces, and President Roosevelt "instinctively knew the second-class citizenship and violence imposed upon African Americans would be exploited by the enemies of the United States" (Blackmon, p. 377).  From Georgia and Alabama to Texas, the full weight of the federal government descended upon individuals and companies that profited from what the government finally officially called "Involuntary Servitude and Slavery."

It took almost 100 years after the Civil War for African Americans to be free of involuntary servitude, of "slavery by another name," despite the fact that over those years efforts were made again and again to reform the prison labor system. The history of that system makes me wary of our prison labor system today, from which companies such as Lockheed Martin profit. Law enforcement, too, has profited from our prison-industrial complex which has expanded exponentially since the onset of the so-called "War on Drugs."

The War on Drugs introduced new disparities between the arrests of whites and blacks and other minorities. Over the years, studies showed again and again that African Americans and other minorities used crack cocaine more than whites, and whites used powder cocaine more than African Americans.  In the 1980s, "federal penalties for crack were 100 times harsher than those for powder cocaine, with African Americans disproportionately sentenced to much lengthier terms" ("Race and the Drug War, www.drugpolicy.org). As the ACLU reports, "[o]n average, under the 100:1 regime, African Americans served virtually as much time in prison for non-violent drug offenses as whites did for violent offenses." In 2010, the so-called Fairness in Sentencing Act reduced the ratio of crack cocaine penalties versus powder cocaine penalties--18:1. 

Over the years, there was no lack of information concerning these disparities in arrests and incarceration. In 1995, the Bureau of Justice Statistics in the U. S. Department of Justice published a report that found a clear racial disparity in drug arrests:

Annually, the FBI compiles statistics on persons arrested for 'drug abuse violations,' a category consisting both of drug selling and drug possession,. To learn how many arrests there were for drug abuse violations, specially tabulated data were obtained from the FBI covering the three-year period 1991 to 1993. An annual average was then taken based on the three years. Based on these arrest records, blacks constituted an average of 40% of persons arrested nationwide per year for drug abuse violations. [my emphasis] (Patrick A. Langan, Ph.D., "The Racial Disparity in U. S. Drug Arrests," Bureau of Justice Statistics, U. S. Department of Justice, 1 October 1995)

Compare these statistics of drug arrests (40% African Americans) to the statistics of illicit drug use:

To learn how many people admitted to using selected categories of illicit drugs--drugs that, if possessed, potentially subject the person to risk of arrest--any time during the 12-months prior to their interview, specially tabulated national data were obtained from SAMHSA [Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration]. The data consist of annual averages based on three years of surveying households (1991-1993) [including college dormitories and homeless shelters]. These self-reports show that blacks constitute 13% of persons who admitted using (and therefore possessing) illicit drugs each year. [my emphasis] (Langan, "The Racial Disparity in U. S. Drug Arrests, 1995)

Eighteen years after Langan's Bureau of Drug Statistics report on racial disparity in drug arrests, the ACLU has published a report, titled "The War on Marijuana in Black in White," in which it claims that "a Black person is 3.73 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than a white person, even though Blacks and whites use marijuana at similar rates."  In 2009, Human Rights Watch released a report that concluded that "adult African Americans were arrested on drug charges at rates that were 2.8 to 5.5 times as high as those of white adults in every year from 1980 through 2007." In 2011, the U. S. Department of Justice released these statistics f0r 2010: 678 white people were incarcerated for every 100,000 U.S. residents;  4, 347 Blacks were incarcerated for every 100,000 U. S. residents ("Correctional Populations in the United States, 2010.") The Bureau of Justice Statistics "now estimates that one in three black men can expect to spend time in prison during his lifetime." 

According to The Sentencing Project, "[m]ore than 60% of the people in prison are now racial and ethnic minorities. For Black males in their thirties, 1 in every 10 is in prison or jail on any given day. These trends have been intensified by the disproportionate impact of the "war on drugs," in which two-thirds of all persons in prison for drug offenses are people of color. ("Racial Disparity," The Sentencing Project)

These disparities in incarceration rates of blacks and other minorities and whites indicate a real lack of justice in our justice system. Michelle Alexander connects the dots for us in her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. This mass incarceration of African Americans is another way of controlling Black Americans, much as the old Jim Crow laws did in the years following the Civil War and into the twentieth century.  People incarcerated for a felony (such as marijuana possession) leave prison with their opportunities and civil rights vastly curtailed:

[I]n major cities wracked by the drug war, as many as 80 percent of young African American men now have criminal records and are thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives. These young men are part of a growing undercaste, permanently locked up and locked out of mainstream society. (Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow, p. 7)

Put together the disparity between arrests of blacks and whites in the Drug War, the rise of the prison population (and particularly the minority population) as a result of the Drug War, the rise of private prisons, and the use of prisoners for labor, and you have a recipe for corruption no less worrisome than prison labor during the Jim Crow years.
--------------------------------


Oh, the victims of federally legalized pot, courtesy of Brian McFadden

See also: "Louisiana Incarcerated: How We Built the World's Prison Capital, at www.nola.com.

The Bees are Back (sort of)

honeybee on tomatillo flower

Tom and I have both noticed an absence of pollinators in our garden this year, so I've been keeping a sharp eye out for bees and butterflies. Today I saw a gulf fritillary on some of my zinnias, but when I went for a closer look, it flew away. We noticed a number of bees today, maybe five or six, steadily gathering pollen from the corn tassels, the blue-black salvia, the tomatillo flowers, and orange California poppies. However, I am still surprised (worried?) that our garden is attracting so few pollinators. The mountain mint continues to be free of bees. That's one of my biggest disappointments, as I had hoped that the mint would attract the diversity of pollinators we had encountered ten years ago when we planted mountain mint in our yard in Harris County, Georgia.

Tom noticed that our tomatoes are beginning to set more fruit. Perhaps our tapping the tomato stakes to loosen the pollen from the flowers is working.

I pulled out of one of my 8'X8' beds lettuce that was going to seed and red poppies that were past their bloom. Then I added composted horse manure to the bed, being careful not to disturb the plants remaining--bird-eye pepper plants (chili pequins), serrano pepper plants, and a zinnia plant or two. After I had worked the compost into the soil, I planted a package of Genovese basil and lettuce leaf basil. Since I usually plant all my basil seeds earlier in the season, I will be especially interested to see these seeds germinate and grow.

The garden plants and flowers along the perimeter of our property (gardenias) are blooming, but few pollinators are visiting. I will continue to monitor the presence of pollinators in our garden.

First red salvia blooms

Green spider on mountain mint leaf

spider and egg sac on blue-black salvia blooms

probably a shield bug (stink bug)

Tom among the tomatoes

green tomato

Garden Visitors

One of the few visitors to my garden this year--is he eating a pollinator?!

As I've described in previous posts, pollinators are sadly missing from our garden this year. I have seen only the occasional bee, and the mountain mint, which attracted such a wonderfully diverse group of pollinators when we grew it ten years ago in Georgia, has abundant flowers but few visitors to those flowers. St. Tammany Parish has a mosquito spraying program; I hear the truck at night sometimes, going up and down the streets in our area, spraying pesticide. I wonder if the mosquito control program is affecting more than mosquitoes. We also had a late freeze in March.

I like to walk around my gardens to see what kinds of pollinators I can observe and photograph. The most I've seen so far this season are a few dragonflies, some unidentified spider-like creatures, a few pesky worms on my tomatoes, and the rare bee. I'll be recording my observations here in the months ahead.

I think this is a harlequin ladybird in its larval state. I discovered it skittering on a spade I had left on the patio.

What's It Worth?

A recent trip to Target with my daughter reminded me of how abysmal the retail shopping experience can be. My daughter had recently moved into another apartment and needed a toilet plunger. We quickly located the bathroom wares: there were two choices of plunger, all plastic or some kind of plastic-y material. None had the substantial wooden handles we had come to expect in a toilet plunger, and one choice of plunger, the laughingly named Evercare Toilet Plunger,  was like a cartoon idea of a plunger: the suction cup was flaccid, almost flat, with no suction strength at all. I laughed out loud when I picked it up, brandishing it like a [useless] weapon. Where was it made? In China. We chose the other one, the Clorox Bright Blue Toilet Plunger, made in Italy of Chinese components--or something like that. I'm still waiting to hear if the thing works.

More and more of the products displayed in our retail stores are crap [pardon the pun] like these plungers. Tom has frequently moaned about his inability to find a workable replacement for the blade in his bow saw. All the hardware stores now carry cheap, thin blades made in China. We have noticed over the years, also, how gardening tools have decreased in workmanship and quality.

Americans have become accustomed to cheap products made by poorly paid workers in Bangladesh or Sri Lanka who operate in appalling conditions. The availability of these products has affected our attitudes toward workmanship: we expect all products to be cheap and readily available, and we give little thought to the people slaving away in factories to provide us with those products. We have forgotten the time and effort that go into making things, especially those things that are hand made.

I have had first experience with this coarsened attitude toward hand made, crafted material. For a few years I have made things to sell at craft festivals, and I have had very different experiences. At some festivals, those attending seem to appreciate the time, effort, and creativity invested in a well-made item, and they are willing to pay appropriately. At other festivals, folks seem to think the hand-made items for sale should be as cheap as the products on the shelves in Walmart.

At one local festival, a man came by my booth to look at some scarves I had crocheted. Every scarf was different, and I had incorporated unique hand-stitched designs with buttons and felted wool in the one which interested him. He didn't purchase anything, but he returned to the booth hours later as we were packing up to leave. He picked up a scarf we had already taken down from display in order to pack it. He held up the scarf which had taken me hours (several days) to make and offered $20 for it. When I politely refused the offer, he threw the scarf down and stormed off angrily. "You could have made a sale," he sneered.

I later sold the scarf for $35-40 at another festival, in another state.

Of course, calculating the price of one's crafts by determining the hours one has spent making them is out of the question. I recently made some coasters out of beer bottle caps we had saved over a couple of years. I crocheted them together in a unique design. Perhaps someone else has come up with this same idea, but I haven't seen it. As the author of Ecclesiastes says, "There is no new thing under the sun"; crafters often come up with similar ideas independently.

Each of these coasters takes me hours to make. I first crochet around each of seven bottle caps, taking 30 minutes or more for each cap; the time depends on whether I am also watching programs on Netflix, which I often do while I am crocheting. I add a crocheted edging on the top of each cap. Then I crochet the bottle caps together. Finally, I glue a cork backing to each separate piece of the coaster. I estimate that it takes five or six hours to make each of these coasters. No one is going to pay me a minimum hourly rage to create these--the price would be exorbitant. I enjoyed making them because I get a real kick out of coming up with ways to recycle material that we usually throw away. Yet if I do try to sell these coasters at a festival, I will have to come up with a price that honors my work while also recognizing what a customer might be willing to pay. It's a delicate balance.

That balance is more difficult because we've all become used to cheap products at cheap prices--cheap products on which retailers can slap a big mark-up price because those companies aren't paying American minimum wages, aren't providing workplaces that follow OSHA regulations, and aren't paying for health insurance for their workers.

American workers' wages have remained stagnant for the past two decades, but cheap products have obscured that fact for many Americans.

Trouble in the Garden

flowering poppy in my garden

Last June (2012), my garden was being visited by a few pollinators--butterflies and bees, primarily--but I noted that the clover, the mountain mint, and my zinnias weren't attracting the pollinators I expected. Over the summer, I stalked the pollinators that appeared in my yard, taking photos to document their presence. This June, the garden is preternaturally silent of buzzing insects except the occasional wasp or tiny iridescent fly. The birds have been singing, but the pollinator harmony is missing.

Tom and I became especially aware of the absence of pollinators when the numerous flowers on our tomato plants didn't seem to be setting fruit. We were so excited that this year so many of the tomato seeds that Tom planted in February sprouted and thrived. We imagined a bountiful harvest, and Tom added composted horse manure to the garden to help the tomatoes continue to thrive. Many of the plants are now above my head in height. But the lovely growth will be for naught if no fruit result.

In all our years of gardening, we have not had such problems with barren tomato flowers--pests, of course, by the multitude. So I did a bit of quick internet research to find a remedy.

mountain mint--usually attracts a great diversity of pollinators

Tomatoes are self-pollinating but require some encouragement to shake that pollen loose. The vibration of bumblebees helps do that. The bees aren't required to spread the pollen around, just to loosen it. Wind will do, and also a little gentle shaking. One gardener describes using an old battery-powered toothbrush, held gently against the top of the flower to recreate the vibration of a honeybee. Some gardeners suggest transferring the pollen with a paintbrush; others say a gentle shaking will do.

Heat and humidity can be a problem, too. One website claims that daytime heat above 85⁰F can be a problem; another website sets the high at 90⁰F. Well, heat and humidity certainly are a faithful couple in southeast Louisiana in the summer. This has been an especially wet spring. The ground has stayed wet from February through this first week of June, and forecasts predict scattered thunderstorms for today.

Heirloom tomatoes, I've learned, can be especially problematic, some dropping their early flowers but setting fruit later in the season. One of the heirloom tomatoes we've planted, Brandywine, is among the varieties that takes the longest to mature, up to 90 days for fruit to ripen. I'm just hoping that later flowers will appear and produce. German Johnson, another heirloom tomato in our garden, is supposed to be more suitable to areas with high humidity, but its North Carolina "home" (where it was introduced by immigrants), surely doesn't hold a candle to southeast Louisiana when it comes to humidity.

Growing a garden reminds us that there still remains in Nature outcomes that we have little control over. I cannot keep the rain from falling or the heat from rising. I can plant flowers that encourage the presence of pollinators, but large scale destruction of habitat and agricultural industrial use of pesticides overpower my small efforts. Reducing the impact of habitat destruction and pesticide use calls for large-scale public push-back, and so far, the destroyers are winning--and not enough people seem to care.

banana flower in our garden

hydrangeas blooming now

For now, Tom and I are going through the garden, tapping on the tomato stakes in order to gently shake the pollen loose. We're still waiting for the pollinators to appear in larger numbers. This year, we may be even more disappointed than last year, as bumblebees and other wild and domesticated pollinators are declining in numbers across the globe.