State of the Farm, May 2025

The Radishes are coming! The Radishes are coming!

 

It looks like a cold and wet spring. There are several days in the coming week (just before Memorial Day) that in the forties and one day that NOAA says will be 39F. Of course, with all the cuts at NOAA, who knows if that’s reliable? It’s not like the weather service isn’t a vital service the government supplies, is it?

 

Regardless, we have many sets in the greenhouse ready to come out but we’re holding off until the weather warms a bit. We did put in the tomatoes as can be seen in the picture. Look along left side of the curved arbors on the right.

 

The potatoes have come up. (See several of the raised beds in the background.) We’ve moved the strawberry bed and it’s all coming up blossoms. The grapes have sprouted but they are having some caterpillar issues. I usually spray some kind of diatomaceous earth on them (product name Surround) but it washes off readily and—as I said—it’s a cold and wet spring. 

 

Go global warming. 

 

But that doesn’t stop us from having radish salads.

 

You may notice a curious absence inside the garden but beyond the arbors. That’s because I finally got around to taking down the Granny Smith apple tree. You can just barely see the wood and brush outside of the garden. It has been plaguing me for nearly thirty years. Always growing out. Sometimes it had blossoms that would then furl and die. Sometimes it would actually present apples which would curl and wither. Sometimes it wouldn’t present any blossoms at all. We decided to take it down over the winter and I got to it yesterday. Now I have a lot more applewood to work with.

 

(I plan to do an entry on my wood preparation saga but it’s on hold along with Many Other Things.)

 

Regardless, this is a significant expansion of the garden’s square footage. This year, we’re planting squash and pumpkins there. They will do well in mounds of rich soil rather than having to cover that space in manure. It’s never had much in the way of soil there. 

 

The quinces are fully covered in blossoms so I hope for fruit. The pears, paw paws, and other fruit look promising. As I mentioned previously, we had to take down a chestnut that had proven not to be resistant to blight. More wood as mentioned above. We planted a peach tree near the stump and there’s a wee peach waiting to ripen. 

 

I cleared the east garden where we’re going to try 2/3 of a three sisters approach. Corn with pinto beans. We tried pinto beans last year and had limited success. The pintos we bought were reported to be bush beans but instead really, really wanted to vine. This year we’re giving them corn.

 

I do like growing corn. 

 

The fava beans are in and looking good. We’ve gotten spears from our asparagus patch. I like asparagus but not the after effects. It is interesting that the ability to smell asparagus pee is genetically determined. See here.

 

The rhubarb is doing well. 

 

We tried growing peanuts last year and but they didn’t take this year. So, no peanuts at this point. 

 

One problem I’ve been having is gourds. I’ve been trying to grow birdhouse gourds and in the last three years, the seeds have just not sprouted. Not sure why. I’ve made a couple of birdhouses out of gourds past and the wrens like them. I’d like to make some more. 

 

We have several experiments going on. We’re trying sugar beets again. Last year they didn’t take. Also, trying amaranth and sorghum. We did sorghum last year and got a good set of heads but we didn’t get very far with it.

 

We’ve increased the potato and bean crop. As I’ve said before, we’re moving towards food self-sufficiency as much as possible. Given the current political conditions, that’s more important than ever. A great deal of American food is imported and that is clearly at risk. Squash, beans, and potatoes are reasonable calorie returns on investment. Adding in the chestnut flour, I think we’re approaching a 50% sufficiency. That said, it’s mostly carbohydrates. Beans have good protein. Squash has some. But potatoes and chestnuts not so much. We used to get a fair amount of protein from the chickens, both in meat and eggs. But we’re not doing chickens these days.

 

The banana harvest has been good. We grow these small, very sweet bananas. In fact, when I finish this missive, I plan on going down and making a smoothie. 

 

That’s about it for now about the garden. But I thought I’d include an article from the Guardian regarding the demise of the National Park System. See here.

 

 

Destroy All Assets

A few weeks ago I received a pleading letter from the Charles River Museum of Industry.

 

(Picture from here.)

 

The CRMI is a small museum in downtown Waltham—a place people might know by the old Waltham watches built by the Waltham Watch Company.  Massachusetts was a hotbed of industrial production and innovation during the 19^th and 20^th centuries. In the 19^th century it was manufacturing or precision instruments, textiles, shoes—pretty much everything. The US was worried that Britain would have a stranglehold on manufacturing forever. First the Embargo Act of 1807 forbidding imports from Britain and then the War of 1812 forced America into the industrial revolution. 

 

This is what the CRMI is all about: charting how the US (as shown in Massachusetts) navigated this period. The Museum has example machinery, some of the Waltham Watch Company’s original precision tool and dies, example looms. Every year it has a Model Engineering show put on by the New England Model Engineering Society where steam engines, Stirling engines, pulse rocket devices—all manner of precision-built machines shown both full size and in miniature. It’s a cacophony of hisses, thumps, and bangs showing the chops of 19^th century engineers.

 

I’ve been going for years. 

 

The message from the Museum was regarding yet another destructive executive order. This one to defund and destroy the Institute of Museum and Library Services. That order is here.

 

The IMLS budget is under 300 million dollars—.003% of the federal budget. You can see it here. About three quarters of its money is block grants to the states for library support. A little goes towards research. Nine percent goes to general museums. About seven percent goes museums for Latino, African Americans, Native Americans, and Native Hawaiians. Seventy employees distribute these funds. 

 

Three million goes to support libraries in Tennessee. Three quarters of a million went to libraries in Nebraska. Half a million went to support a program in the Children’s Museum of Kansas City. A hundred-fifty thousand went to a children’s museum program in Montana. Along with the Council of American Jewish Museums, the IMLS supported creating resources to help fight against anti-semitism. 

 

Libraries and museums. If we’re going to put money anywhere—if there is a common good to be supported by our common tax revenue—why shouldn’t that be libraries and museums. (Or cancer research. Or heart disease.)

 

We can’t afford libraries and museums but we can afford huge tax cuts for billionaires? We can’t afford cancer research but we can afford a bigger defense department? 

 

I’ve worked in government departments both large and small. I’ve worked in corporations both large and small. Business doesn’t pursue opportunities where there’s no money. Critical problems that can’t be solved by private enterprise must be solved by government. That’s why public service exists.

 

I have seen civil servants do miraculous things with vanishingly small budgets. I have seen them help bring bird populations back where they were lost, nurture the innovation of amazing general aviation instrumentation, and enable me to bury my parents in Arlington National Cemetery. All with grace, honesty, attention to detail, and respect.

 

There may be civil servants out there that don’t do any work or take home two paychecks but I’ve never seen them. I have seen civil servants hobbled by bad legislation and worse leaders and then vilified for nothing more than doing the thankless job handed them by political government. Vilified for things that are completely out of their control.

 

This isn’t about efficiency or budget considerations or the deficit. If it were about efficiency, why take down social security one of the most efficient systems on the planet? If it were about budget considerations or the deficit, we wouldn’t be getting tax cuts or shutting down the IRS—what businessman cuts his own revenue stream? I’ll tell you: a businessman who can’t keep from going bankrupt. This isn’t about truth—truth is what you need to know whether you like it or not. This is about people fantasizing about an imaginary better time. This isn’t fixing the system. It’s breaking the system and then saying we have to scrap it because it doesn’t work—while transferring our money into the coffers of the ludicrously wealthy.

 

This is insane.

 

America used to be a shining beacon of innovation, science, and technology. That came largely from the investment the United States government—as allocated by Congress—made in United States institutions.

 

Not anymore.

 

I had a blog entry written but it got a little angry. While I’m thinking about that, let’s talk about some interesting science.

 

(Picture from here.)

 

 

Mars magnetic anomaly explained

Mars’ magnetic field is… weird. 

 

There’s a lot of evidence that Mars had a symmetrical magnetic field like ours. Earth’s magnetic field protects the planet from getting its atmosphere stripped by the solar wind. Presumably, a Martian symmetrical magnetic field would do the same. 

 

But Mars’ magnetic field is decidedly not symmetrical. It has only remnants and they are concentrated in the southern hemisphere. 

 

Plaintively, we ask why?

 

One hypothesis is that the core of Mars was never a solid core like Earth’s but liquid. This allows the asymmetry.

 

Can we make water on the Moon with solar wind? Maybe.

The Moon is dry. But it does have hydrogen and oxygen, mostly in the form of OH groups in the first few centimeters of soil. The oxygen is inherent in the regolith in the same way Earth has oxygen: it came along with the material. But hydrogen can hit escape velocity easily and leave unless it’s captured.

 

The solar wind is mostly protons—hydrogen without the electrons. Consequently, it can bind with the oxygen on the lunar surface to produce said OH. Add another hydrogen to that OH and you get H2O. 

 

But any hypothesis needs to be tested and a team at NASA Goddard did exactly that to see of lunar soil could produce water when struck by solar wind. 

 

They think it did.

 

Solar panels from Moon dust

One of the reasons humans were able to colonize the New World twenty thousand years ago is they were able to live off the land. On the Moon, there’s not a lot of land to live on. Just dust, vacuum, and radiation.

 

Still, one of the needs for a lunar base is power and no one wants to send hundreds of tons of solar cells to the Moon if they don’t have to. 

 

Well, maybe they don’t have to.

 

Scientists at the University of Potsdam were able to fabricate the glass portion photovoltaic cells from glass generated from melting moondust—moonglass. This reduced a payload of solar cells by up to 99.4%. All we have to do is ship up the non-glass material.

 

AI has actual use: gravitational wave detector design

Gravitational waves are distortions in space-time caused by gravitational events. LIGO does it by having two laser beams interfering with one another over four kilometers. The idea is that once these detectors are stabilized so they don’t dance every time a truck passes by, they will respond to a space distortion. Since this would hit one arm of the detector before the other, the interference pattern changes with the distortion.

 

The Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light (MPL) trained up an AI algorithm called “Urania” to help them design better detectors. Sure enough, Urania was able to design detectors with better theoretical sensitivity than current design. 

 

Go girl.

 

Another way to determine alien life

There have been a lot of attempts to define life in some rigorous way that we could detect at astronomical distances. Life, shall we say, has found a way to makes its definition more philosophical than sciencey. It’s there because we can see it but damned if we can define it.

 

Akshit Goyal and Mikhail Tikhonov thinks we have been asking the wrong question. Instead of trying to define life, define what it does. And what it does is manage energy.

 

Organisms use high energy compounds and break them down into smaller compounds for use. This gives them an energy gradient that can be detected—maybe not at astronomical distances but at least in a way that may be more or less independent of life on earth. 

 

The idea that a stratification of resources might be found in geologic formations like, say, on Mars.

 

(I recently saw a definition of life that described it as a chemical system that operated in terms of evolution. Try seeing that with the James Webb Telescope.)

 

Paleolithic Tools in Ukraine

Archeologists have uncovered an inscribed ivory tool in Ukraine that is about 400,000 years old. The article seems to presume these were Homo sapiens but doesn’t bother to actually state that. If verified, that has two interesting features: Homo sapiens were in Europe a long, long time ago and co-existed with Neanderthals for hundreds of thousands of years and they were inscribing ivory with mammoth pictures.

 

Ivory isn’t a good tool material so the authors seem to think it might have had some symbolic value rather than a real tool. 

 

Regardless, mammoth scrimshaw is cool.

 

Climate Change will make rice toxic

Turns out increasing the temperature and CO2 of rice in a paddy increases the uptake of arsenic. 

 

Yay.

 

Rice is the world’s most consumed grain. Increase of toxicity of even a small amount will result in a large number of people getting sick. 

 

It’s the scale problem. If, say, 1 person in 100,000 people get sick now from arsenic poisoning in rice, that’s 10,000/billion people. If it increases to 4, that’s 40,000/billion people. If it becomes sufficiently toxic that it puts people off eating rice, that’s billions of people with a reduced food supply.

 

Aaaand I’m back to being angry again.

 

Better luck next time.