State of the Farm: November, 2024

 

The harvest is in. It’s time to take stock with regards to our experiment in self-sufficiency.

 

The total harvest of any nutritional substance (in pounds) was the following:

• chestnut flour: 28
• beans: 10
• potatoes: 20
• paw paw: 25
• kiwi: 0.3
• persimmon: 20
• Total harvest: 103.3

 

This is a nice garden harvest. Some of the harvest material—such as beans, potatoes, and chestnut flour—can be stored. Kiwi and paw paw cannot. We’re experimenting with drying the persimmon and using it later.

 

For purposes of argument, we’re going to look at all of them as a whole.

 

The total calorie content of the above is about 76,000. For an adult using a 2000 calorie/day input, that’s thirty-eight days. We’ve worked hard to live a little over a month. The daily requirements for protein, carbohydrates, and fat is similarly dismal. A yearly calorie requirement of 2000 cal/day for a year is 730,000. We’ve missed our requirements by about a factor of ten.

 

This means that we would have to increase our storable output by a similar amount. Total beans, chestnuts, and potatoes was 58 pounds. We would have to increase our output to a combination of 580 pounds. We could probably double our chestnut harvest if we just worked harder to protect it from the squirrels. We have a single tree that supplies the majority of nuts with two other trees coming online. So, let’s say we add additional third to about 144 pounds.

 

Right now, we’re using three hundred inches of trellis space to grow our beans. Increasing that to 3000 inches is not reasonable. But increasing it to a thousand inches might be. So, let’s say we can increase that by a factor of three to get 30 pounds.

 

Beans grow vertically. Potatoes grow horizontally. An increase in potatoes means an increase in geographic commitment. The good news it increases to the square. This year we used about 40 square feet so we had a yield of about .5 pounds/square foot. Not great but we had some issues this year that were unusual. Let’s presume we can get 1 pound/square foot if we’re paying closer attention. That would give us 40 pounds as is—or 1 pound/square foot.

 

40 square feet is essentially a 10*4 area. A 10*8 area is 80 square feet. So that would give us 80 pounds. Our total is now 254 ponds and 308197 calories—we’re closing in on half of what we need.

 

The chestnuts are a constant. They take a long time to mature and we don’t have the space. That means we have to look at the beans, potatoes, and possibly corn.

 

Corn has 360 calories/100 grams versus potato’s 93 calories/100 grams. (Both are dwarfed by chestnuts.)

 

Adding a hundred pounds of corn and doubling again the amount of potatoes and beans now gets us to 518,000 calories or close to two thirds. It also makes our total yield 464 pounds of material.

 

At this point we have two problems:

1. We’ve run out of available geography for the garden. To increase this to scale requires we dedicate much more of our property to produce. It’s doable but not without a change in approach.
2. The labor is now significantly increased. Not only is the labor of tending the garden increased significantly, the cost of processing the harvest has increased.

 

To lean on this last point a bit, let’s talk about chestnuts. A chestnut comes in a burr that is very spikey. Different varieties have different approaches to the burrs. Some chestnuts open the burrs and drop the chestnuts when they are ripe. Others drop the burr when they are ripe. Some blend the two. The squirrels love the varieties that drop the chestnuts to the point we’ve never gotten a good harvest. Instead, we tend to rely on the hybrid chestnut that leaves the burrs closed for a bit. This gives us a chance against the squirrels.

 

To process the chestnuts, we have to remove the chestnuts from the burrs, peel the nuts, and dry them for storage. We have techniques for this but they don’t scale well.

 

Potatoes are a bit easier. They need to dry a bit—they need to be “cured.” Then, it’s a matter of finding the right storage area. There’s a reason the potato had such an impact on Europe.

 

Beans have to be pulled out of the pod and dried. Again, individual labor procedures don’t scale well.

 

My point in this analysis is not to say this is a fool’s errand. We’ll never get more than 10% covered by our efforts and therefore we shouldn’t try. There’s more to the process than calories. We know where we get at least 10% of our food and 10% ain’t nothing.

 

But I do want to demonstrate the level of effort between producing a food supply and getting food in a store. There is a lot of work in between and some of it is not compressible. The world was lucky in the green revolution back in the twentieth century. New varieties of wheat and other crops increased yield. New farming techniques were able to get more crop out of the same acre of land. However, that effort was fueled by fossil fuels and fertilizers.

 

On our little plot of land, we try not to use much of either and rely instead on hand techniques. As I said before, these don’t scale well. Without mechanization people were dependent on large families and village approaches. Without artificial fertilizer people were depending on whatever the river floods brought or using manure and compost from whatever sources they had—including humans. It is certainly possible to be self-sufficient on a given plot of land. Five Acres and Independence is about just that. But it’s a full-time job and represents a great deal of risk. FAAI was written in 1935 in the middle of the Depression and the Dust Bowl.

 

It also means those indigenous peoples had to work damned hard to keep their village in food.

 

In my workshop, we talk a lot about worldbuilding. One of the considerations I have is how food is produced and how it gets to market—often not terribly well thought out in many worlds. That market in Central Idon’tknowistan has a whole lot of people behind it.

 

Looking Up

 

I’ve been doing a little astronomical photography. My success hasn’t been great—which is why I haven’t posted about it. But the Aurora on 10/10/2024 was such a gift I have to share.

 

Let me be absolutely clear. I am not a great photographer. I used my Pixel 6 phone with a longish exposure and a prayer to the gods my hands were steady enough. The aurora was sufficiently remarkable it overcame my inadequacies. 

 

A quick rundown on an aurora. Solar storms produce charged particles of various sorts that roar towards earth far faster than a million miles an hour. They have a lot of energy. The Earth’s magnetic field grabs those energetic particles and draws them towards the pole and down into the atmosphere. When they hit molecules in the atmosphere, they make them glow. Oxygen gives a green or yellow color, normally. And auroras are most commonly green. However, if the storm is particularly energetic, oxygen can give out a red color. Nitrogen causes blue or purple. Neon is orange. (See here.)

 

The aurora started around 6:45 PM. It ran for about thirty minutes, drifted to the east and disappeared. It was no longer seen that night.

 

With that, here are the pictures. (Note: I'm not sure if the pictures will come through on the mailing list. If not, I urge you to look at the blog entry on a computer.)

 

As an added benefit, we went looking for the comet the other night. My Pixel failed miserably but Wendy got a couple of good pictures.

 

 

 

State of the Farm: October 2024

We’re now entering final harvest. Maybe a little good news.

 

But bad news first.

 

I didn’t do well with the squash. Part of it was a series of health issues. Part of it has been the continuing difficulties. I’ve spoken about the rain in the early summer and the rodents. We also had (and are still having) a drought. This means, of course, more issues with the garden. The squash was one of the casualties.

 

Ditto the cold crops—Brussels sprouts, kohlrabi, and the like. There are always bugs waiting to eat anything in the cabbage family and this year was even worse than usual. Lost a lot of that. We had some kind of disease hit the cucumbers. The melons were doing all right but they wouldn’t set fruit. When they finally did, the drought hit and we lost them as well. I wasn’t too broken up with the melons. They’re always hard to grow up here.

 

No grapes this year. The vines have developed a fungus. I have to cut everything back to the main leaders and spray them over the winter and see if that helps.

 

The sugar beets were a failure. We planted them in cocoanut fiber cups but they were never able to properly penetrate the fiber and didn’t thrive. We’ll try again next year.

 

The sorghum did do fairly well but we don’t think it was properly sited. That’s going to take some thinking.

 

But we did have good zucchini.

 

We had a good potato harvest. Not quite as good as last year but respectable. Good peppers. Adequate tomatoes.

 

Even with several false starts, the beans have been coming in. I’m a little surprised they took so long to set fruit. It wasn’t that hot and they were watered during the drought but the flowers just didn’t set until a few weeks ago. Now, the harvest is coming in. We did five varieties: Black Turtle, King of the Earlies, Pinto, white, and brown. (I’m frankly not sure what varieties the white and brown were but they were different.) King didn’t do well and we harvested what we could and scrapped the rest. I planted a fall radish in its place.

 

Both Black Turtle and Pinto did well but suffered for lack of a trellis. We harvested them for next year’s seed, separating the beans from those plants that seemed most eager to climb. The brown beans didn’t do as well as the white beans. We saved some brown for seed but we’re not sure if we’ll really use it yet. We saved the early ripening beans for next year's seeds and are harvesting the rest for eating. We won’t know the size of the harvest until everything is harvested, dried, and weighed.

 

We grew three varieties of large radish and have decided to dry what we don’t eat in salads. Tasty in soups and stews.

 

We tried peanuts this year and they did quite well. We’re in the process of handling the nuts and will know more in a week or so. Peanuts are interesting for a few reasons. For one, they are good eating. For another, they’re a good source of oil and don’t require a lot of processing to use.

 

(We’re not serious about true self-sufficiency but it’s interesting to find out what we can actually do versus what we might think we can do.)

 

We’re going to harvest everything (except maybe the fall radishes) in the next couple of weeks. Then, we’ll strip the ground of any weeds or other growth and cover it with horse manure. We’ll cover the horse manure with thatch. The plan next year is to tear holes in the thatch and plant there.

 

Most of the fruit is gone by now. Our apples are earlier varieties—though that may change. We’ve been having some difficulty with cedar apple rust and are investigating what varieties we can plant that are resistant. But there are some remaining tree products we’re beginning to harvest.

 

First are persimmons. This year we had such a good crop that it weighed down a couple of branches and broke them off the tree. The tree is still in good shape but we’re discussing how to prune it to its best advantage. Usually, we just make wine and persimmon pudding but this year’s crop is so abundant we’re investigating other ways to use it. That’s probably going to be an entry of its own.

 

The medlar went yellow this year. We’re hoping it survives but there is fruit on the tree. Medlars need to rot (“blet”) a little to be edible. But they are a late fall treat.

 

The two big winners this year are the paw paws and the chestnuts.

 

The paw paws started to ripen a couple of weeks ago. They are essentially a fresh fruit-to-be-eaten kind of tree. You can’t really cook them. The best you can do is pull out the pulp (which is like a wonderful custard) and freeze it. Since we’re devouring them whole, that’s not an option. We have gotten about ten pounds of fruit so far and there is still fruit coming.

 

And finally, the chestnuts.

 

Since we lost the hickory, we haven’t had as many squirrels. However, it’s not at all clear if that’s the sole reason for the reduction. They’re there—I see the chewed acorns and chestnuts to prove it. But there are not as many of them. Did they get hit with a disease? Without the hickory, is our yard just not as attractive? (Hard to believe with all of the chestnuts.) Is there a new predator or competitor entering the neighborhood? We’ve never had rats like this before and I wonder if there’s some kind of interaction.

 

Regardless, I know they’re not eating the chestnuts like they used to. This year’s harvest is one of the biggest I’ve ever seen. In the picture above, the left side is an image of the chestnuts in the burr. On the right is a picture of part of one of our trees. Every one of those spikey things is a burr and in almost every burr is between one and three chestnuts.

 

The chestnuts come down in different ways depending on the variety of the tree. One tree tends to open the burr and then the burr comes down. That tree also expels the nuts as well so there’s a mix. Another tree never drops a full burr but expels the nut first and then drops the empty burr. The third tree does both. Call them Grandfather, Grandmother, and Jumbo. Grandfather is a hybrid American and Chinese. Grandmother is a Chinese. Jumbo is an American that produces jumbo-sized nuts.

 

Grandfather and Grandmother are fully mature trees. They now often produce burrs with two or three fat nuts. Jumbo is still growing. It’s only produced in quantity for the last couple of years.

 

If all things work out, we might get as much as twenty pounds of nuts. Which we turn into flour or meal. Or we just eat the damned things roasted.

 

Not a great year but not a disaster, either. If we were trying to survive on our produce, we’d have a thin winter and an even thinner spring but we wouldn’t die.

 

I’m going to call that a win.

 

Arts and Crafts VI: A Tale of Two Dinosaurs

 

I’ve been doing a lot of experimentation in pottery.

 

Mostly, I throw circular objects like bowls, pitchers, etc. Sometimes, I blend handbuilt (working with clay directly) with things built on the wheel. I have a few things I’ll talk about at some point. But I don’t usually do straight handbuilt objects.

 

There are some superlative handbuilders in the studio. If I squint hard enough, I can hold my own against the wheel people but I can’t hold a candle to the good handbuilders.

 

One day I had some idle time waiting for some material to get dry enough to trim and I had a bit of extra clay. So, I shaped a small Stegosaurus. That was cool. I got kind of into it and decided to work on something larger, a Brachiosaurus—Brachi to the right.

 

Putting him together was a challenge because clay is pretty plastic when it’s wet. This is why his legs are quite thick. I wanted to make sure he didn’t collapse while he was drying.

 

(Note the tiny stegosaurus next to him. That was the little guy that started all this.)

 

When he was dry enough, I trimmed and underglazed him. I did get his legs a little thinner but didn’t get the musculature quite right.

 

I went with the color concept for dinosaurs. The only living descendants of dinosaurs are birds and they make use of color all the time. Many modern reptiles such as iguanas and anoles use color as well. This can be for camouflage but also for mating purposes. Box turtles, for example, have red rimmed eyes for the males. Ocean iguanas get quite colorful in mating season. So, I figured Brachi is a young male on the prowl.

 

This came out pretty well in the final version. I’m not terribly pleased at how the underglazing turned out—the colors streaked some. Also, while the head came out fine, for one reason or another the outer True Clear coating didn’t take. Either I failed to dip it properly or it just didn’t stick.

 

Lophi was quite a bit more ambitious.

 

Lophi is a Parasaurolophus, a genus of the duck-billed dinosaurs. Though he doesn’t have much of a bill. The crest is one of the features that makes him interesting. It has been surmised that Parasaurolophus might have made sounds through it. In 1997, they managed to produce sound through a reproduction of a well-preserved skull. You can here it here.

 

Lophi was problematic in a number of ways. Unlike Brachi, Lophi’s legs were comparatively thin. Parasaurolophus didn’t weigh over five tons—compared to Brachiosaurus’ 28-47 tons. In addition, I had a much more difficult neck and tail arrangement and I wanted him to be more dynamic. Lophi is looking back over his shoulder at something.

 

All of this concerned me and so I built Lophi with braces as shown.

 

I was quite pleased how he held up. I tried to capture as much of the muscular anatomy as I could. Lophi is a juvenile—hadrosaurs have some evidence of rearing their young—so his legs are thinner than an adult. In addition, I didn’t get his feet quite right. Parasaurolophis has a sort of thick chicken foot and I have him here with a sort of hoof/pad.

 

Then, catastrophe.

While I was working on him, he fell forward onto that raised leg, breaking it off at the upper arm. With the help of several people in the studio, I reattached the arm and placed it directly in the bisque kiln. 

 

The path is green (uncooked) to bisque (chalk like) to glazed. Bisque fires at a much lower heat than glazed but it firms up the product. My hope was that the reattachment would hold through the bisque process and be strong enough to hold afterward.

 

It did. Unfortunately, I was in such a sweat to get him dipped and into the glaze kiln I took no pictures of him as bisque. As with Brachi, there was a problem with the underglaze streaking. I repainted him, dipped him in True Clear, and put him on the glaze shelf, hoping for the best.

 

Mostly, everything worked. There was a glazing mishap with his tail. I suspect Lophi fell against an adjacent pot. He is no longer able to stand on three legs and falls onto his raised arm. If you look closely, you might notice that his head and forward body are lower. He bent a little in the kiln. This is likely how he came in contact with another pot. 

 

I’ve been thinking if/how to repair this defect. I’ve been told Mod Podge can be used in some way to correct it. However, when Wendy saw it she made a different suggestion. What if a bird had landed on Lophi’s tail? I could construct a bird to sit on the tail. That would give something for Lophi to look at as well as weight down the tail so he doesn’t fall forward. 

 

I’ll have to think about that.

 

Cheese Ends, 2024-09-01

You can never have enough cheese.

 

(Picture from here.)

 

Matter has a problem.

 

We pretty much understand how nucleosynthesis up to iron happens in supernovae. Above iron there’s a phenomenon known as Coulomb repulsion, where the positive charges of positively charged nuclear protons resists inclusion of other positively charged protons. The number of protons—the atomic number—determines what element is represented by an atom. It’s the atomic number that determines where in the periodic table a given element is placed. Hydrogen’s atomic number is 1, a single proton. Helium’s is 2. Lithium’s is 3. Iron’s is 26.

 

After iron, the numbers go all the way up to Uranium (92) in nature. They may go a bit higher but those upper elements fission relatively quickly so we would never see them currently. 

 

The r-process (rapid neutron capture process) is the mechanism by which these heavier elements can be synthesized. In fact, these elements have been created in the lab and some in thermonuclear explosions. Neutron star collisions have been implicated as the source of the r-process in nature. However, there’s some doubt that such collisions are the sole source of heavier elements. Observation suggests the amount of heavier elements produced in these collisions is relatively poor. 

 

A new model suggests that a neutron star that has a red supergiant partner might have r-process capability. As the supergiant engulfs its partner, the neutron start reaches the core. This environment might be r-process friendly. Thus, the interesting matter—not that namby pamby light stuff—is created. 

 

This is an improved model in that neutron star/neutron star mergers are not common. It requires two giants both becoming neutron stars that then merge into black hole. However, supergiant binaries aren’t that uncommon and the idea that one becomes a neutron star that then is absorbed by the partner makes a lot of sense. Then, the neutron star jets start making heavy elements without a merger or collapse. 

 

That was the fun stuff. Now, I’m going to get a little political.

 

There’s a sort of “regulation is bad” mindset that is going around these days. 

 

I do not subscribe to this idea. I do believe that bad regulation is bad, just like I believe bad government is bad, bad medicine is bad, and bad marriages are bad. But if you have a bad regulation, government, medicine, or marriage that does not reflect on the institutional concept. It reflects badly on the implementation of an institution.

 

Recently, there was a massive recall of Boar’s Head products linked to a Listeria infection. Many people have gotten sick and several people have died. An investigation into the factory has produced some pretty horrifying results. Once the factory was examined, it was no surprise that’s where the infection originated. 

 

The problem here is that the FDA is underfunded and badly managed not because it is run by incompetents, but because it is bounced around as a function of politics. This is true of many of the agencies from the FAA to NASA. 

 

Boeing’s troubles with Starliner and  its aircraft are another example of regulation failure—not because the FAA didn’t do its job but because Boeing gamed the FAA system. I worked with both the FAA and NASA for some years. Their engineers and regulators were good to work with, knowledgeable, and knew their jobs. But we didn’t try to game the FAA process. Instead, we used FAA process as a tool to make our products better. Blaming the FAA is like blaming the cops when there’s a murder. Maybe the cops could have done more but they didn’t do the murder. Boeing is the expert here. If there is an engineering failure, it’s Boeing’s fault, not the FAA.

 

A good example of greed trumping good sense is the way Big Pharma works. Nowhere is this better shown than in a recent Eli Lilly decision. 

 

Eli Lilly has a popular weight-loss drug, Zepbound. It’s quite effective. They have been selling it in injectable pens for about a thousand dollars a month, if not covered by insurance. Recently, they announced they’d be selling in vials so that the patient can use their own syringes. Price? 5mg for $549. We can debate the price different of close to 50% for a delivery mechanism another time. We can even avoid debating the price of better than $6000/year for a weight loss drug.

 

However, in the past Lilly offered a “savings card” to buy a pen for $550 as a starter offer—I think of this as a sort of “the first one’s free” sort of thing. But that’s just me. 

 

At the same time, they announced the vial announcement, Lilly quietly raised that starter price to $650. In addition, another Lilly product, Mounjaro, is essentially the same drug packaged and prepared to treat type II diabetes. It also costs a thousand a month—here. In the UK it costs $485 and in Japan it costs $94. 

 

This is an example of failed regulation.

 

But it gets worse.

 

For the last forty years, courts have been instructed to defer to the expertise of regulatory bodies in lawsuits. I.e., let’s defer to the organizations that actually know something about the science behind decisions. 

 

This year SCOTUS rejected that, saying that the courts should have all power in this regard. 

 

So, we now have a regulatory process made already difficult by political interference to be bound up in courts run by judges that can barely use their phone, much less understand the intricacies of the scientific process. 

 

Boar’s Head is just the beginning.