State of the Farm, Spring, 2022

(Almond tree from the back porch.)

It has been a long winter.

 

Not in terms of temperature. Not in terms of snow. The winter was relatively mild in both cases.

 

That said, this winter has been mired in external things: the state of the country, the fear of infection, the loss of contact with coworkers, friends and family. Over this winter, we have grappled with how to have a meaningful, fulfilling conversation, delving into matters of conviction and humor, over zoom.

 

I attended the February Boskone in person. That was—to me, at least—a nightmare. Not because seeing people wasn’t welcome or spending time with actual human beings wasn’t something I craved, but because I had to do it with all of those same issues: fear of infection, wearing a mask, limiting social distance.

 

None of that has anything to do with the farm. But it serves as a context within which or farm activities take place.

 

Let’s see.

 

We’re worried about upcoming food issues. Notably drought in the Midwest and far west and the war in Ukraine. While Ukraine’s wheat mostly supplies Africa, nothing in the modern world is unconnected. It’s not at all clear how the food production industry is going to respond. Does that mean as wheat consumers we’re now competing with Africa? Will compassionate wheat supply drive up prices here at home?

 

The percentage of allowed ethanol in fuel has now been increased—which, again, puts food and fuel in competition with one another. I have thought this was a problem since day one. Ethanol as a fuel supplement: good. Ethanol production from carbon intensive corn such that the ethanol is carbon positive: bad. Putting farmers in a position of getting more for their corn as fuel than as food: bad.

 

For a while, we’ve been trying to bring in enough calories from our meager acreage to make a difference to our bottom line. We do fairly well producing crops that don’t have a strong impact on our caloric intake: fruit from trees, greens, etc. We had a significant pollination problem last summer and didn’t get any Cornelian cherries or persimmons at all. The Marechal Foch grapes did well but the Concords caught a fungus I’m still working on. Apples have always been a problem. But we did well with bananas, peaches, and pears.

 

Calorie crops have been a more troubling matter.

 

Our main caloric successes have been corn, squash, and potatoes. We’ve done very well with corn and squash. Potatoes have been variable. We were doing quite well a few years ago but in the last two years, when we lost our outdoor cat, we’ve been overrun by rodents and bunnies. Last summer we tried to increase our bean harvest and lost it to the rabbits. The potatoes were lost to mice and and the strawberries to the chipmunks.. I could strangle Chip and Dale with a clear conscience. We did well with corn and squash, though. We’re finishing leftover squash and still have jars of dried corn.

 

So, what are we doing this year?

 

Let’s start with the fruit.

 

You may recall how we lost all of our plums a few years ago to black knot. This left one of our espaliers completely vacant. We’ve been letting it set fallow all that time, though we did plant strawberries in the space. (See my murderous plans for Chip and Dale above.)

 

I’ve been experimenting with quinces that last few years. We had a quince that came with the house and the original produced fruit regularly. But, since it is in the potential lead field of the century+ old house, we haven’t eaten any. So far, transplants haven’t wanted to reproduce. We did get some success with a pineapple quince I planted about six years ago. It produced very tasty fruit.

 

The quince is a strange fruit. Many varieties are picked hard and left to soften or are cooked. They have quite a nice taste. Best of all, they are immune to most of the diseases of apples, pears, and plums. So, this year, we committed to repopulate the espalier with four new, and reportedly tasty, quince. I planted them yesterday, bare roots and all. We will see.

 

We have four grape arbors. The Concord and Marechal Foch arbors are on the middle to north part of the property and the other two arbors are on the southern part of the property, down closer to the road. Except for the Concord fungus, the northern arbors have been rocks. The vines are thick and woody. However, I’ve had trouble with finding the right variety to fit in the southern arbors. We have two seedless varieties down there that are… okay. They are still young but not producing much. We will see.

 

I also tried Einset grapes—a seedless grape that has wine capabilities. It seemed to die back two winters ago and then came back aggressively last spring. That struck me as odd. I tasted the grapes and they tasted mysteriously like Concords—not the described Einset flavor at all. When we bought them, they were listed as zone 5. Subsequent investigation on other sites has them listed as zone 7. We are zone 4-5. My suspicion is they are a grafted grape and the winter killed the Einset part and left the graft base to grow—which, I think, is a Concord variation. I was going to pull it up—I have a Concord—but the fungus has given me pause.

 

The fourth slot on the southern arbors is vacant and we’ve ordered a Somerset to fill it. This is a grape hardy to zone 3 so we have good hopes.

 

I said we had four arbors. We had five but pulled the weak and spineless grape out from it. We’re replacing it with two vines: a Doctor Yao Climbing Yam Cinnamon Vine and the Eastern Prince Schisandra Vine. This is sheer whim. A hardy yam on one side of the arbor and a Russian sweet fruit on the other. What the hell.

 

We tried plums again on the other side of the property, far from the plum espalier we had to tear down. Both plum varieties were black knot resistant. Both of them got it so we pulled them out.  We replaced them with two jujube (Chinese date) trees. I had some jujubes in China and was quite taken with them. But we won’t be seeing any harvest for a bit.

 

Some efforts we’ve done in the past are bearing fruit. (Heh.) The new pears from a few years ago are showing flower buds. Last summer, we had a few fruit on the new peach but Chip and Dale got to them before we did. A self-fertile kiwi may be flowering this year—which is good news. Most kiwis are male/female. We planted a pair a few years ago and the female didn’t make it and the male likes to tear apart fences. So far, I haven’t been able to kill it.

 

We have a hardy passion fruit (Maypop) that is established. We have had no fruit as yet but we’re hopeful.

 

The rest of the fruit trees have blossomed or are about to blossom. The weather seems to be cooperative for pollination and we went ahead and purchased orchard bees. We’ll know in a few weeks. Last year we had paw-paws for the first time and they were fantastic. We have more flower buds this time between two of the four trees and the other two appear to be established. The paw paw fruit is fantastic.

 

We’ve planted sugar beets and peas already but nothing has come up yet. I’m a little concerned we either planted them too early or the seeds were bad. I’m going to take some sugar beet seed and plant them in peat pots and see if anything comes up.

 

The corn is growing in sets—we developed a technique for pre-growing corn a few years ago using peat-pots. The common wisdom was that you couldn’t transplant corn. But if you pre-grow it in a peat pot and plant the pot, the corn doesn’t seem to care.

 

We planted the carrots, turnip greens,  broccoli rabe this weekend.

 

We’ll be planting potatoes and corn, along with squash and beans. We’ve gotten some chicken wire with which we’re going to line the main garden and hope the bunnies will be kept at bay. We lost our beans to the bunnies last year. Bugs Bunny must die. My sympathies lie completely with Elmer Fudd.

 

We’ve purchased a very tall raised bet kit from Birdies which we saw being used on Self Sufficient Me. That is still a work in progress.

 

I tilled the garden this year and we plan to amend the soil with chips from a tree we’re dropping. We’ll be laying it out in the next week or so.

 

I’ve gone part time this year and so most of the garden burden will fall on me. Planting the quinces (and digging up the old stumps) was hard on me. I’m trying to figure out more efficient (and less taxing) ways to do things. It has been impressed on me that I’m not getting any younger.

 

That’s it for the farm report.

Disappearing Books

 

(Picture from here.)

 

One of the Boskone 2022 panels I was on was the Disappearing Books panel. These are books that were popular or at least well-known at time of publication but have since become relatively unknown.

 

This is a fairly common panel topic I’ve been on a number of times.

 

There are a number of ways books disappear. A more successful work or author overshadows those of lesser stature. (I’m looking at you, 13^th Floor vs The Matrix) Generational changes make works less palatable to the new audience. Random changes in the markets cause them to just disappear. The complete works of an author can essentially vanish.

 

That’s for good works. Bad works might persist or vanish for completely different reasons.

 

Older generations can be useful in bringing deserving past works forward. Or, they can berate the younger generation what they should be reading while that younger generation rolls their eyes.

 

This was brought home to me when I was trying to introduce my son to Heinlein via Red Planet. We were doing fine until Heinlein went out of his way to make the mother of the main character stupid. Ben saw through that immediately and has never read Heinlein again.

 

I have been tempted to edit Heinlein ever since. But that’s another story.

 

Anyway, as time goes forward, not all works stick with us. They fall behind with an ever-dwindling audience. I think some of these works should be reconsidered.

 

The good news is that some of these books have become more accessible in recent years via internet commerce and ebooks. Internet commerce have made used bookstores and their contents available to the general public. Amazon has helped here by creating a near infinite shelf space and enabling contact between consumer and storefront.

 

In addition, some of these disappearing books have been formatted into ebooks. I think there might still be issues of ownership—one of the main impediments of bringing these books to the reader—but some of these books are making a small comeback. I have included links where I found them. In addition, I put a “Discussed here” link where I’ve talked about these books before.

 

Another interesting sidenote is some of these books have been brought back into print in special editions. William F. Temple’s Shoot at the Moon were published a few years ago by the British Library Science Fiction Classics. SF Gateway brought out Colin Kapp’s The Dark Mind.

 

It’s possible the disappearing book list may, itself, disappear.

 

Here’s my list:

 

Works that have pretty much disappeared, given the above caveat

These are works that came and went. At least, whenever I talk about them, I get blank looks. They were good enough to get published but not popular enough to survive.

·         The Green Rain, Paul Tabori: the population of the world turns green. Hijinks ensue. (Discussed here.)

·         The Transfinite Man (AKA, The Dark Mind), Colin Kapp: The dark side of one man can change the world. (Discussed here.)

·         Shoot at the Moon, William F. Temple: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf goes to the moon. (Discussed here.)

·         The Revolving Boy, Gertrude Friedberg: deep, personal story of a boy marked by being born in space. (Discussed here.)

 

Works by well known authors that are themselves not as well known.

By this, I mean these authors are still known and there’s a population of people familiar with them, but these particular works theirs aren’t considered very often. Again, most of the time I get blank looks when I bring them up.

·         P. K. Dick: The Man Who Japed: religious dictatorships are held up by those who live in them. They have no sense of humor. (Wiki here.)

·         John Brunner: The Whole Man: crippled telepath searches for himself. (Discussed here.)

 

Works whose authors have fallen out of favor but are still worth reading.

The authors here have fallen out of favor often for good reasons. Their approach often clashes poorly with modern sensibility and the author doesn’t have enough of a following to be retained. Heinlein is a good example of a problematic author with enough momentum to be kept in print. These works, however, didn’t seem to matter so much. If they aren’t gone yet, they are disappearing slowly.

·         Clifford D. Simak (Discussed here.):

o   Goblin Reservation: SF treatment of mythological peoples (goblins, trolls, etc.) as lost indigenous people

o   The Werewolf Principle: search for identity by a shapeshifter

o   Time is the Simplest Thing: reach for the stars with the mind

·         T. J. Bass, The Godwhale (Discussed here.): man evolves into a totally urban being but some are left behind.

·         Robert Sheckley:

o   Immortality, Inc: The afterlife, and everything we associate with it, is true. (Discussed here.)

o   Mindswap: prefigures the idea behind Repo Man: everything that can be conceived of is true.

·         A. E. van Vogt (Discussed here.):

o   The Beast: What got human beings to civilization isn’t going to get them past civilization. (BTW: this is a recurring theme in VV’s work that I like, regardless how clumsily he pursues it.)

o   The Weapon Shops of Isher: The NRA if it worked for good rather than evil

o   Rogue Ship: another attempt at the same theme as The Beast.

Honorable Mentions

These are works that are either read outside of SF and fantasy, been tossed out for problematic material, or subsumed out of existence by bad adaptations. I’m only going to bother with two.

 

Rudyard Kipling, All The Mowgli Stories: (Discussed here.) I bring in this one because while it is often cited and made into media, it has yet to be brought in properly. Kipling’s work has been censored for the taint of white oriented, British Empire, colonialist approach—all of which are valid criticisms that apply to most 19^th century literature.

 

However, the Mowgli stories have been relentlessly mined with terrible results. The stories themselves bear almost no relationship to the media counterparts. Case in point, Kaa, the rock python, is one of Mowgli’s fast friends in the book and his dread enemy in the Disney films.

 

There is less of a relationship between the actual Mowgli stories and the movies or the public consciousness than there is, say, between Blade Runner than Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.

 

<*Ahem*> Speaking of Philip K. Dick’s, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep: I have it put on this list because Androids has been almost completely subsumed under Blade Runner. The vast majority of people who have seen the film have not read the book. (Unfortunately, the case for most adaptations like Mowgli above.) Go read this book and forget Blade Runner. The two are only barely related.