Greetings. It’s been a quiet week here in Lake Wobegone. We took our usual walks. The highlights, such as they are, were a couple of visits to friends’ gardens. Last week we went to a tea plantation. The people also had a large garden. We picked stuff and had dinner and several kinds of tea in a semi-formal tea ceremony. It was an interesting combination of regular, informal, routine hanging out and some ritual. The ritual was basically limited to sitting around the woman of the house in a semi-circle while she carefully made tea in a formal way, except for the laughing and banter, then taking the tea with both hands oh so seriously. Yesterday we went to other Gyung Ja’s sister’s. They have a commercial Asian pear orchard and about an acre of garden. They grow many things, including peppers, lettuce, onions, a kind of leek, other greenery I don’t know the name of, chamay (a kind of melon), peanuts and several otgher things. This is harvest season. In fact, Harvest Day next Monday is a national holiday. It’s traditional for people with gardens to have everybody over to harvest and take home some of the stuff. It’s a big getting together time, not unlike our Thanksgiving though without the big feed. The whole harvesting stuff together thing is a lovely part of the culture, along with the extensive gardening itself. I didn’t bring my camera the other day, but did yesterday. We pulled up the peppers and separated the green ones form the red ones. Here, now you see pepper bushes and now you don’t. That’s Il Hwan in the first one. In the last one, we’re sitting in the shade picking them off the uprooted bushes and serarating them.
The agricultural sector here is actually having problems. As you can imagine, as the standard of living her improves, fewer people want to do hard farm work. They have few immigrant workers from nearby poor countries like the Phillippines. The work is done by Koreans and generally these workers make a living wage, but most of them yearn for better. The farming population is getting older and older. The days of the yeoman farmer are almost over here, as they have been for some time in the US. It’s an economic and cultural time of trial. They are hanging on by doing things the old way, picking by hand and involving the community and connections, but the prices are getting pretty astronomical. Rapid growth can handle this for a while, but without rapid growth and with that aging population of farmers, industrial farming is coming.
So much for my punditry. it’s still pretty nice now, even if things cost too much.
Be well, all of you.