State of the Farm: October, 2025

I like my life. I like what we do in the garden and the orchard. But the house gets dirty coming in and out with chestnuts, pawpaws, and the like. But I’ve always heard the best things in life are dirty.

 

We are nearing the end of harvest and it’s time to take stock.

 

It’s been a… strange year. Some things came out wonderfully. Some things didn’t for understood reasons. Some things didn’t for less understood reasons.

 

Let’s start with the main vegetable garden.

 

We tried several varieties of tomatoes—which, unfortunately, I don’t have all handy. The big winner was a red paste tomato that produced fruit shaped like a butternut squash. It made the best tomato sauce. I’ll put up the name of the variety if I can find it. We’re saving seeds from that. We had a Purple Boy tomato and a set of cherries. The Purple Boy didn’t produce. It seemed more resistant to fungus than some others but it didn’t taste that good. The cherries were adequate.

 

We had problem after problem with the beans. Some I’ve mentioned before: severe rodent damage. But the rodents left the bush beans alone. We had two varieties, a purple and a normal and neither produced much. I much prefer pole beans—if I can get them past the rodents. We had a single bean plant that survived and it gave up a half pound of dried beans. If I had had a hundred…

 

Zucchinis came in. We had some nice melons for a bit then some died and another just… disappeared. I mean there was nothing left. We tried golden berries again this year and they were quite nice but I’m not sure what to do with them. There’s a bowl of them on the table and while I like them in small bits, a hundred or so is a bit much.

 

Carrots did well as did celery. The squash did really, really well for some varieties and not so well for others. The cushaw did very well but only produced one squash. The spaghetti squash and butternuts did very well. We had a good crop of lettuce and there’s a patch of kale waiting for me to harvest.

 

We planted four varieties of radishes: normal red, Daikon, a French red, and a German giant. The reds did great as did the Daikons. The French reds look good but we haven’t harvested them. The German giant only germinated one plant. We ate the reds in the early summer. I dried the Daikons: 10 pounds of radishes -> 1 pound of dried material for soups. Or just chewing on. They taste pretty good.

 

Over in the raised beds, the new strawberry patch did well as did the basil, potatoes, and sweet potatoes. The tubers are still out there waiting to be brought in. We had a volunteer tomato that is still producing. We don’t know the variety but it looks something like a beefsteak.

 

We planted the same sweet potatoes in the main garden and in one of the raised bed. The main garden produced zip but the raised bed did quite well. There were a number raised bed plants that did better than their counterparts in the main garden. Wendy is convinced that it’s the depth of soil. The raised beds are about three feet deep but the garden is on ledge. She wants to terrace the main garden. Hm. 

 

I don’t know what our yield is going to be for the tubers but I’m expecting 30-50 pounds total. I may be disappointed. We will see.

 

Moving on to the grapes. We got zip. I’m having a problem with grape black rot. This winter I’m going to spray them within an inch or their life and we will see.

 

Not much in the way of apples, either. We got rid of the trees that had the biggest reservoir of cedar apple rust but I still haven’t controlled it in the remaining trees. Basically, we’re down to two producing trees and they’re not producing much. 

 

The pears did well. We harvest probably 10-15 pounds of them. We would have harvested more but we left for WorldCon right when they were coming in. When we got back, we had lost a fair amount. Next year WorldCon is in Los Angeles a couple of weeks later so we’re talking about it. 

 

We had a good harvest from the quinces this year—the first year of real harvest we’ve ever had. On the order of ten pounds. Quinces are strange. They aren’t really edible off the tree. They come off like a brick and if you take a bite your mouth puckers like they were unripe persimmons. But, if you slice them then and layer them into a jar with sugar, a miracle happens. First, a water that seems nearly the same volume as the fruit appears. Then, after a couple of days you take them out and dry them into the nicest dried fruit you can imagine. They’re not even that sweet—most of the sugar ends up in the water. But the astringency turns into just a little tang. 

 

The big winner this year were the pawpaws. We have five trees and they’ve produced a few. Last year we got a dozen. Well, the trees decided they were ready. We have harvested close to a hundred pounds of pawpaws. The picture above was just a small part of the harvest. There are still fifteen or so pawpaws on the tree as of last night. Each pawpaw is between a half and a pound. We’ve started extracting the pulp and freezing.

 

We got an okay harvest from the persimmon but that’s mostly my fault. Right now, the area under the tree is my wood pile and that makes getting to the dropped fruit difficult. 

 

There are a lot of conflicting reports on whether one can cook with pawpaw pulp. There’s definitely a toxin in the skin and the seeds. We’ve been harvesting them when they fall and show they are ripe. This may be the defining characteristic. A semi-ripe pawpaw still tastes very good. Friends of ours made some cookies and it was tasty. I get a mild laxative effect from pawpaws but given that two fruit is about a pound of pulp, is that so surprising? Imagine eating a pound of peaches.

 

Finally, we just finished the chestnut harvest. We’re processing about thirty pounds of chestnuts. I bought some pure gluten so I want to try making real bread with 100% chestnut flour. We will see.

 

That’s it for now.

 

Although, here is an article on how Trump’s war on renewables is a huge gift to China. And how Orange Caterpillar gave 20 billion and a whole lot of perks to Argentine and Argentine then made a deal to sell soybeans to China. About have of the soybeans grown by American farmers have been destined to China until the tariffs. And a more general article on the Orange Assault on farmers.

 

The Channeled Scablands

Worldcon was, this year, in Seattle. We like to mix recreational and professional activities and, since Wendy and I are both rock and geology nuts, we decided to do something we’ve been talking about for years: visiting the Channeled Scablands. 

 

The scablands are an interesting combination in Eastern Washington and Oregon. To understand this, you have to go back about 14-27 million years ago. Then, a series of flood basalt eruptions roared up to become the Columbia River Flood Basalt Group (CRFBG.) These were big eruptions over the entire Columbia River area—thick to 1.8 kilometers (5900 feet) and covering a good chunk of both states. (Note the picture above with the added building for perspective.)  Some have attributed the eruptions to the same hotspot under Yellowstone. But that’s still debated.

 

One of the things that’s interesting is that this was relatively small and contained as flood basalts go. Both the Siberian Traps and the Deccan Traps were much, much larger. The Siberian Traps have been implicated in the Permian Extinction, aka, “The Great Dying”, where most species kicked the bucket. The Siberian Traps were implicated in the Cretaceous Extinction until the meteor hypothesis was more or less verified. Even now, there’s some evidence that the meteor might have reactivated the Deccan Traps, giving the world a sort of horrible one-two punch. 

 

The CRFBG didn’t affect the world as much as it’s two larger brothers, but it goes to show that these were big events. Even the smaller of them is enough to ruin your day for a few million years.

 

But the basalt cliffs in the picture above had many millions of years of getting covered with soil and sediment. It was largely buried until very recently.

 

Fast forward until only twenty thousand years ago when the Last Glacial Maximum—the last gasp of the Ice Age—happened. A set of ice sheets, kilometers thick, formed from the northeast corner of Washington all the way over Idaho and up into Canada. Glaciers melt back and advance with the seasons. Between 13,000 and 15,000 years ago, in the latter days of the Ice Age, these glaciers melted into Glacial Lake Missoula. Think of it as a Lake Michigan in Idaho’s back yard. These were all held back by an ice dam at a choke point of the Clarke River. Which gave all at once. 

 

The water tore down anywhere it found an avenue. It ripped over Dry Falls—I’ve heard it described as all of the waterfalls in the world times ten, but it’s a scale I can’t put my mind on. That said, that picture is just a little piece of it.

 

 

Some places, boulders got caught in place and spun in the current, causing potholes. 

 

 

Other places, it scoured out ripples from the stone. Or, in other places, it made gigantic sand ripples. Or dropped big, building sized boulders it had carried along. When it reached a choke point, and the water slowed down, it dropped sediment. This is why the Willamette Valey and valleys of Washington are so fertile. You can thank the Missoula Floods for your Washington apples.

 

This didn’t happen once. It didn’t happen twice. It happened in excess of a hundred times, at last count, from the ranger at Dry Falls park.

 

We spent several days in the area, looking at this stuff. Nothing like a good collection of geological features to make you feel small.

 

And, just to be clear that our executive thinks you’re too small to matter, here is a link on the current war on science. Or how He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named wants to control your universities. Or how Orange Voldemort isn’t interested in your dying in a heatwave.