State of the Farm: April 2026

We are just getting going on the farm. 

 

(Picture from here.)

 

There are two things going on. 

 

First, and possibly more important, is that I have sprouted peas in quantity for the first time. 

 

I planted them a month or so ago and they are growing in the cold. We’re supposed to have a freeze tomorrow night and I have hopes they will survive.

This is a big thing for me. I’ve never had a successful pea harvest. I always planted too early or too late. This year is a big maybe. But I’m hopeful.

 

The second is much more of an effort. 

 

The main garden is on a fairly steep hill on top of fairly shallow ledge. This has been a problem for years. Things just can’t get much of a foothold. Anything that needs root depth is stunted. 

 

This was brought home to us last year when we planted the same sweet potatoes in the main garden and in the raised beds. The beds are about three feet deep—plenty of room to grow down. The sweet potatoes in the beds grew well and we harvested them. The sweet potatoes in the main garden didn’t do well.

 

There were (as always) confounding factors. 

 

Our soil was old and we hadn’t amended it in some time. So, we actually ponied up and bought what we were told was composted horse manure. It was dirt. I’ll give it that. It was also nearly nutrient-less and full of cutworms. Areas we put the soil on actually did worse in the garden than where we didn’t use it. 

 

But we used the same soil in the raised beds. It wasn’t great but, still, crops in the beds did better than the main garden when both crops were the same.

 

We’ve decided to terrace the garden.

 

We have about an 18 inch drop east to west and an even larger drop north to south. The plan is to use stones we pulled out from another project—a project of some bitterness that I will discuss at a later time—as the southern base. Then, use other stones or blocks to build up the side. This will give us an increasing depth as the garden proceeds north to south—we have more depth of soil on the north side of the garden. The idea is that at the end we will have significantly deeper soil overall.

 

This is a big job. The stones we’re talking about range up to about four feet long and eighteen inches tall—probably a couple of hundred pounds or more. Too heavy for us to handle by hand.

 

Enter the Mini Skid Steer. (See here.)

 

The plan is to use the MSS to move the rocks into place and then move the purchased compost material into the new garden area. There are rules for renting these things so there are a lot of moving parts. I have to get the temporary license, get the dirt, and then rent the unit all within the required time frame. 

 

This might be fun.

 

If it works, we’ll have a new garden.

 

 

Cheese Ends 2026-04-06

I haven’t been doing these for a bit because the news is so depressing.

 

I mean, I tried. I must have gone over sixty or seventy articles. One after another, they ranged from this is interesting technology that can have a profound effect on cancer treatment—oh, yeah. It’s been cut by NIH under direction from the Orange Voldemort. To remember those studies being used to determine how bad the coming catastrophic weather events will be? Gone. (See here, here.)

 

But, hey: writing a blog post is sometimes about sharing experiences. Thus, my pain is now your pain.

 

You’re welcome.

 

As you know, Artemis II is on its way to the moon. As of this moment (Sunday, 4/5/2026), Artemis II is 59,141 miles from the Moon. But let us enter the twenty-first century. That is 95,178 kilometers. Artemis II is supposed to come within about 4000 miles (6537 km) of the surface before it begins to fall back towards Earth. Here’s a very good visualization of the orbits of Apollo 8, Artemis I, and Artemis II.

 

Artemis II launched on 4/1/2026. On 4/3/2026, Orange Voldemort proposed a 23% decrease in its budget. The intention is to shift away from science missions and go to an all Moon/Aal the time NASA.

 

There’s always a lot of talk about how we throw money into space when we should use that money to solve problems at home. I think this is a silly dichotomy. Still, those who think this way might want to question the budgetary priorities since the science aspect, in the form of Earth observation, is astonishingly valuable.

 

Personally, I like all of the science missions. Especially Juno, studying Jupiter. The source of all that amazing material about Jupiter that’s come out in the last few years? Juno. It’s on the chopping block, too.

 

The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) is the home for climate and weather research. If you’re going to understand weather and climate, you have to study it, right? This means you go where the science leads, rather than where someone’s ideological agenda wants you to go. And the science leads to human-based, fossil fuel-burning climate change. Sorry, folks. That Chinese hoax is so powerful it’s changing the climate. So, if you don’t want climate-driven catastrophic events rammed down your throat without warning, you might want to study them. Right.

 

OV tried to shut it down. And it’s suing about it. Good luck.

 

But the OV likes coal. He wants the plants to stay open even if they aren’t running. Yay. Of course, OV isn’t above paying wind farm developers billions to stop construction and reinvest that money in oil and gas. Exxon thanks you for your support.

 

A little good news. Remember, I talked about the Federal Judicial Center caving to pressure and removing the climate science section from its Reference Manual for Scientific Evidence? Well, the National Academy of Sciences hosts a copy in its library of publications. OV decided that the NAS needed to cave, too, accusing the NAS of hosting a chapter on “climate science that is not based on balanced or sound science.”

 

The NAS said no.

 

Let’s not forget the OV loons that are in charge of health care.

 

We haven’t had a measles problem for years. Until now. While I don’t completely blame the OV for this—there’s enough stupidity going around these days—he’s more in the line as enabler in chief on this one. No more spotty outbreaks for us. No. Now it’s circulating.

 

This is proceeding to the point of absurdity.

 

Each year, we get a crop of interesting science in the form of the Ig Nobel Prizes. Curious research projects that sound ludicrous but actually illuminate a small piece of the natural world. This prize has blessed us with (from the list here) determining if ingestion of alcohol will impair bats’ ability to fly, whether cows painted with zebra striping can avoid being bitten by flies, if ingesting Teflon can successfully increase food volume without increasing calorie content, and for showing that drinking alcohol sometimes improves a person’s ability to speak in a foreign language.

 

The answers to these questions: it does, they will, it does, and it does.

 

For thirty-five years, this ceremony has been held in Boston. Not so, this year.

 

Many of the participants come from other countries, including those that the OV particularly dislikes. To the point that the organization behind the Ig Nobels has decided they cannot come to this country safely. The ceremony has been moved to Zurich.

 

If you read some of these articles, they’re often from the proposed budget. Congress doesn’t always listen to the OV. Not always. They restored NASA’s budget last year. They may do so again.

 

That said, the OV believes in impoundment, when the executive withholds funding or does not act on a given program that Congress has funded. (See also here.) My understanding of the government was that Congress appropriates the money, which is then spent (under the legislative rules) by the executive. That’s what “power of the purse” means. It’s right there in Article 1, section 7, clause  and Article 1, section 9, clause 7. (See here.)

 

If Congress appropriates money and the executive, on a whim (and it sure does look like these are whims), decides not to spend it, then the “power of the purse” doesn’t mean much.

 

So even if Congress puts back the money, there’s no guarantee that money will be spent where it is supposed to go.

 

All right! All right! Give us a break! Cry out my two, loyal readers.

 

Okay. My heart won’t take any more anyway.

 

The Perseverance rover (remember Perseverance? We dropped it on Mars?) has been scouring Jezero Crater for evidence of life and water. A dried-up lake bed is there. The rover has been investigating the Western Delta that was deposited by a river billions of years ago.

 

Well, its surface radar has found evidence of another, even older river delta underneath the Western Delta. If I were a betting man (Hey. I’m a father. Of course, I’m a betting man.) that’s where I’d look for fossils.

 

Going further with that, we’ve been seeing DNA base pairs in asteroids for years. Sure enough, another such paper was just released. DNA uses guanine, cytosine, adenine, and thymine. RNA replaces thymine with uracil. Every living thing on this planet uses these same nucleic acids. Where did they come from? Did they (literally) drop from the sky?

 

We don’t know where or how life originated on this planet. We just know it had an origin—either colonized from elsewhere or locally grown. It was unclear if the nucleic acids were somehow formed in the reentry or were native to the asteroids. The material returned from Ryugu and Bennu showed that nucleic acids were native to the asteroids examined—though, interestingly enough, not in the same amounts. Bennu had all of them but Ryugu was deficient.

 

This paper shows a thorough investigation of which nucleic acids were found in the sample asteroids with much higher resolution and sensitivity. They found a correlation between the amounts of ammonia present in the asteroid and the concentration of the nucleic acids. (Which suggests to me that the nucleic acids are created on the asteroid in some nitrogen-limited reaction rather than relics of life. Sorry, aliens.)

 

Finally, actual good technological news.

 

We typically run into two types of energy storage devices: batteries, which store chemical energy, and capacitors that store charge. Supercaps—capacitors with great storage capacity—are useful all over the place. Now, supercaps can be made from bourbon.

 

Okay, not quite.

 

Bourbon is distilled from alcoholic mash. That distillate (called charmingly “white dog.”) is aged in charred oak barrels. The material in the char is what gives bourbon its flavor. The bourbon is drained from the barrels and bottled, leaving behind a watery “stillage.” This is a byproduct of the process. Sometimes it’s sold or otherwise discarded.

 

So, Josiel Barrios Cossio of the University of Kentucky thought he might be able to get useful carbon compounds from this remainder. From this, he created a hybrid carbon-lithium-carbon material that stored 25 times the energy/kilogram than normal supercaps.

 

That’s going to have to do you until next time.