Inoculants

I've been stalling on the purchase of an inoculant for our legumes the past week. For no particular reason, just not wanting to pay another round of shipping fees to Fedco or Johnny's, and wanting to get the story on the whole thing.

After talking to a nice man at Fedco Friday, I think we should get some, if only to maintain the pattern of dotting our ps and crossing our qs. But now I udnerstand more about what this inoculation is - just adding a bacterial boost to the root area of the peas and beans, which will help nitrogen uptake and/or download into the soil.

The word INOCULATE has been kind of perplexing to me since last year, when I learned of the MUSHROOM MAN of Sag Harbor selling inoculated logs. I always had associated processes of sterilization with "inoculation," due to my learning the work through vaccination-speak, which always had meant making you unable to get sick frmo certain things.

I mean, I understood/stand the process of vaccination, getting a little bit of the thing so you build up an immunity to it - but that's not how it's sold to people, really. I mean, if it were, wouldn't homeopathy be more popular? I think when we think of "getting your vaccinations," we think of it as a pharmaceutical barrier against smallpox, etc, rather than what it is - actually introducing ourselves voluntarily to smallpox.

This is all rather pedestrian. More recently, I've been thinking of how inoculated I tend to get by/to PEOPLE by way of the kinds of interactions/transactions I'm subsumed in while serving food to them. I have this immunity to them building up, which is sort of disturbing, but which is basically my involuntary response to so much exposure. I'M INOCULTED! perhaps better able to deal in the long run, but pretty mechanical and dull in the day to day workings...