State of the Farm, July 2026

Well, it’s that time of the year where we look at the garden and decide what worked and what didn’t.

 

First, let’s talk about the compost we used as a levelling agent. Recall that back in May we terraced the farm using compost. In June, we planted and I had some misgivings regarding the compost. Now, it’s mid-season and there are some issues.

 

The compost came from plant material that was ground up, sifted, and left to rot while being regularly aerated. After a time, the result was declared compost and we bought it. 20 yards of it.

 

The material is heavy is nitrogen, very rich, and fairly easy for roots to penetrate. It is also nearly black—so it gets hot. When it dries it forms a water repellent crust. Water tends to rest on the surface. I’ve had good luck with water penetration by disturbing the surface when I water. This has meant that I need to water often—especially in the heat we’ve had this summer. Any plant with strong roots such as tomatoes, squash, or corn, doesn’t have any particular problem. Their activity is sufficient to keep the surface broken up.

 

However, plants with weaker roots such as carrots, young beans, some melons, or cucumbers seem to have more of an issue. 

 

Ah, beans. Did I tell you about the beans?

 

A few years ago we clad the lower fence with chicken wire to prevent bunnies from entering. Voles and mice just consider it a fancy door. Chipmunks get in easily as well. They like beans.

 

Back in the day when we had Nadine, a small seven-pound hunting horror, the rodents, rabbits, and some foxes were terrorized out of the yard. She was backed up by Gus, a twenty-seven-pound menace. I would bet on Gus against a coyote. But after they passed and we lost a couple of cats to mysterious circumstances, we kept the cats in. The rodents took notice.

 

The most recent thing I’ve tried is pepper spray on the crops they liked. We’ll see how that works.

 

We also had a problem with germination from both the carrots and the beans. Since the only common denominator is I planted them and the soil, it’s got to be the soil, right? Well, maybe. The dark soil does get hot and there’s this problem with the waterproof shell. Beans were subject to something curious. When I planted them and watered them in, the soil seemed to push them back out. As an experiment, I planted pole beans in a set of peat pots. Sure enough, several beans were pushed out of the soil. 

 

I think the compost absorbs water and swells. If the “hole” is just pressed in, I think the swelling causes the planted bean to be expelled. I planted the peat pots that germinated back in the garden and they did really well right until the moment the voles got them. 

 

Curiously, the voles didn’t attack the peas. Secretly, I planted beans next to the peas and they beans grew up next to them. No vole damage. The beans that were without pea protection seemed to get eaten. 

 

Hmmm.

 

A few days ago, I harvested the peas and sprayed the now-exposed beans with pepper. We will see.

 

The tomatoes, celery, and surviving melons appear to be doing well. Tomatoes and melons have flowered. The sugar beets and daikon radishes are flourishing, along with a couple of types of greens. 

 

Carrots have been a real problem. Whole sections just didn’t sprout. I replanted with Malbec Red: nothing. I replanted that with Kyoto Red but this time we had some leftover loam from another project and I top dressed the soil and planted there. We will see. 

 

We planted four types of kitchen radish. All four seeds germinated but only two, sora and French breakfast, bulbed out. I harvested but left a couple of strips of sora and French breakfast to bolt and generate seed. Another experiment for next year. 

 

We now have a vacant strip where the unproductive radish were. I haven’t decided what to put there. I might wait a few weeks and then plant a cold crop like broccoli or Brussel sprouts. I like Brussel sprouts and damn George H. W. Bush.

 

The squash and corn are going nuts. We planted five varieties of squash and Bloody Butcher corn. We did plant beans in the Three Sisters method but, well, voles. Much zucchini. 

 

Outside of the main garden, we have volunteer squash in the East plots growing among the potatoes. The potatoes are—well, were—doing well. The potato bugs have been eating them. But they are getting to the point of harvest, anyway. I don’t like to spray if I don’t have to. The nearby asparagus bed gave us many spears this spring. We had peaches but... rodents. 

 

We do have a lot of upcoming apples, pears, and quinces. I could do with many more quinces.

 

We’re getting good blueberries now. We have three installations: a high bush in the southeast corner of the main garden and a low bush on the southwest corner. The southwest is pretty much done now but we got a pound or three. The high bush is ready right now so we have to pick.

 

We built a blueberry house a few years ago and then Wendy rebuilt it this summer. It’s a little too late—we’ve lost a fair amount—but there are still blueberries to be picked. 

 

The raised beds are all doing well. We got a lot of strawberries. Next year, we’re either going to move the bed again or plant a new one. Melons, basil, peppers, and sweet potato are all doing well. We had a volunteer tomato last year that we really liked and we saved the seeds. This year it’s doing very well. 

 

A garden is always a gamble. This year we gambled and lost on the beans and peaches. We won on blueberries and tomatoes. 

 

I’ll take it.

 

Consideration of Works Past: The Green Rain

I have several topics I want to write about but right now I’m under serious deadlines. So, here’s another Consideration to be considered.

 

(Picture from here.)

 

The Green Rain was published by Paul Tabori back in 1961. It's a short book-- barely 70,000 words, if that. It's premise is simple: there's a mistake with a chemical missile and something goes wrong. The chemical seeds the clouds. It rains and the result is that everyone caught in the rain turns green. General hilarity ensues.

Well, only if you count political destruction, death, and riot as hilarity. Perhaps I have a skewed sense of humor.

There were a lot of odd books written in the sixties and seventies, many of them better known. The Muller-Fokker Effect by John Sladek, for example. Adam M-1 by William C Anderson. Rally Round the Flag, Boys! by Max Shulman. Most of these works were fairly light even though they might be handling fairly dark material.

The Green Rain reads like a bitter, eloquent Ron Goulart at the height of his powers. It opens with a quote from one of the characters, a bitter old professor named Pelargus, who says "Something goes wrong. It always does." Then, it wanders over to a satyric biochemist who has created "chlorophylogen", a chemical precursor to chlorophyll. It has the property of generating plant like behavior upon contact with light. NASA (called the ISS in the book) decides to send a rocket to the moon to make it earth like. It fails in launch and returns to earth, seeding the rain with chlorophylogen. Something happens to the chemical in the return. It's no longer simple chlorophylogen, it turns human beings green.

You can't change the color of people's skin without dealing with race. Tabori does. You can't change skin color without political repercussions. Tabori gleefully traces the downfall of the cold war. You can't change skin color without religious overtones and you can't have a religion without con artists-- at least not in southern California. Tabori wanders over there, too.

It's a romp. Or, at least it is in the beginning.

Things go dark about half way through. It's not like Shulman or Anderson. There's no easy, happy ending. The bitter Pelargus may have the last laugh after all.

This is what fascinated me when I first read it long ago and it fascinates me still. Though the science is dated and the political world is different, there's a lot that still rings true in this book. There's a scene where a young actress discovers herself pure green and comes out screaming and then faints. When she wakes up her first words are "I'm going to sue for a million bucks!"

And we're off and running.

What's curious about this book, and some of the others mentioned, is how thoroughly vanished they are in popular culture. Certainly you can find them. All of the above books are mentioned in wikipedia and you can get used copies at Amazon. The internet never forgets anything.

The impact at the time of Shulman and Anderson was considerable. Tabori, less so, but he was well known. Almost none of these names are mentioned now.

It's what I call the Bret Harte phenomenon. If you've taken an American lit course, you've ran across the name. He was a contemporary of Mark Twain. However, now we venerate Mark Twain and Harte is barely remembered. Now, I'm not saying Harte was as good a writer as Twain-- he was not. But he was worth reading and popular for a time. You can make a similar statement about William Saroyan or my own favorite author, John Dos Passos. Both brilliant writers and rarely read these days outside of literature courses.

The Green Rain is a lovely little science fiction book that will make you think. Don't take my word for it. Go over to Amazon here and buy it. Read it.

We'll bring these guys back eventually.

 

Consideration of Works "Past": Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

Usually I talk about works I read when I was younger now rediscovered. But in this case, I'm going to talk about something that I've read relatively recently—not the film version of Nausicaä. The manga. It’s a works past, of a sort. I mean, it’s new to me but it’s been out for forty years.

 

So sue me.

(Picture from here.)

Hayao Miyazaki is primarily a film director and animator and it's by his film work that he is best known. If you haven't seen a Miyazaki film, stop reading this blog right now and go rent one. Kiki's Delivery Service is a good one. Or Castle in the Sky. I have a weak spot for Porco Russo, since it's about seaplane pilots. Or you could go straight to the big guns and get Princess Mononoke or Spirited Away. Or, of course, you could also watch Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.

Oh, hell. They're all terrific. Go watch them.

The manga is in seven volumes. If you've seen Nausicaä the film, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the first couple of volumes are pretty much a recap of the film. There is more than one story about why Miyazaki did the manga. Miyazaki couldn't initially get funding for the film and so put out the mangas. Miyazaki couldn't get funding for a film that didn't have an associated manga. Etc. The mangas were written from 1982 to 1994. The film was made in 1984.

A thousand years before the story starts there was a terrible war fought, in part, by God Warriors: giant mechanisms with horrific weapons. Vast areas of the world are now filled with poisonous forests inhabited by giant insects. The forests appear to be fungal in nature and spread by spores, often carried by insects or unwary travelers. However, the poison is everywhere and people eventually die of it.

Nausicaä is a princess of the Valley of the Wind—the royalty component of the story seems to not have a direct connection to rule. Her father did rule the valley but there are hints toward the end that there may be other paths to being a sovereign than heredity. Regardless, she is looked up to and admired by the folk of the valley.

War breaks out and there are treaty obligations that the Valley send troops. Nausicaä goes with them. The war was between the Torumekeans and the Doroks. As she proceeds through the different convolutions of the war, encountering spiritual struggle, biological warfare, and enormous cruelty, she becomes more and more important. She is a force for good in an amoral conflict. Eventually, her influence, the power of the insects and the suffocating horror of the war all come together and she prevails.

I'm not going to get more detailed than that. The plot is intricate and clever but I think it is actually a side note to the issues Miyazaki is handling.

Miyazaki has always had environmental concerns. Pretty much every movie has some sort of component that can be construed to be environmental. Even Porco Russo, a story about a seaplane pilot who's become a pig, has a continuing discussion of the balance between selfishness and selflessness—which, I think, reflects Miyazaki's concerns with the environment.

In Nausicaä these issues are front and center. Humans have to live on a poisoned planet—poison that is of their own making. The poison is killing them. Yet they still war. Religion is a political means to an end. The personal and selfish pursuit of power is the source of the world's evil.

But it's not a screed. It's a story where these bits come out as important plot details. There’s no preaching here. Nausicaä never says "If only humans would somehow cease the immorality of their ways and learn to help one another. Ah, Atlantis." She does lament human behavior more than once but it's more in the vein of "Come on, guys. Stop hitting yourselves."

The film handles some of this but much of the rich and detailed tapestry of Myazaki's world is given only token treatment. The God Warrior is just a prop. The sword master Yupa a part of the chorus. This is the cost of compressing Miyazaki’s vision into a two hour film. The manga is much more detailed.

One of the interesting things in Nausicaä's character is her continuing avoidance of killing—not because she's a pacifist. But because she discovers early on the killing rage in her own heart and how easily it can be released. She decides that this is something she must control and from then on she keeps trying to find different ways to make things better. Ways that do not require homicide. Not easy in the middle of a war.

This continuing attempt to not kill anybody and to stop people from killing one another, coupled with her own forceful personality, begins to have knock on effects. People start to take her seriously and, in doing so, take her point of view seriously.

Nausicaä is, no doubt, some sort of Christ figure in this. But it's a Christ figure that we're not used to. Nausicaä is not passive. She's not going to volunteer for the cross. If she goes down she's going down trying to save everyone around her whether they want it or not.

I've read this series twice now and this aspect of Nausicaä's character is what stays with me. She's like the members of Doctors without Borders, going out there and working until they drop to save people's lives.

The work has its limitations. There is little introspection regarding motive—people just do, knowing what they must do instinctively. In my experience there's just a little consideration of what must be done. The ending is a bit abrupt. It feels wrongly shaped—I think everything happens that has to happen but it seems clunky in execution. Miyazaki did all of the drawing in pencil and the artwork is wonderful, but it’s a little opaque at times. Sometimes, you want to just see the precise definition of ink in some of the action sequences and instead there’s a blur of motion.

But these are quibbles. It's a terrific read rendered by a master storyteller at the height of his powers.

 

 

State of the farm, June 2026

Well, the new garden is planted. The map is shown here.

 

It’s still early days so we haven’t had a lot of seedlings. Radishes, certainly. And the sets we put out are firming up nicely. 

 

It’s worth discussing a few entries.

 

We’re putting in corn this year. We haven’t planted corn for some time. We like Bloody Butcher as a variety of hard corn. It has a meaty flavor when we make corn breads or other corn based meals. It also grows to eight feet tall with big ears. Bloody Butcher is more of a statement than many other varieties.

 

We’re also trying the three sisters method as we saw it practiced by a few Native Americans on some videos we saw. In the past, we grew in rows. This year we’re trying small groupings interspersed with squash. We will likely add in some beans but we haven’t decided what. We have four squash planted: a pumpkin, spaghetti, a butternut, and a cushaw. 

 

We tried cushaw squash and very much liked it. We only got a single fruit but it was huge. It tastes well and gave good seeds so we saved them and planted them this year.

 

We went all in on carrots this year: Atomic Red, Danvers, Yellowstone, and Dragon. I like red carrots. We’re also going to try a very large carrot from Japan known as Manpukuji. These carrots grow as long as five feet. We planted them in the very deepest part of the new garden. We don’t expect five feet—the soil just isn’t that deep. But it might be a fun experiment. It’s a 120 day carrot so we don’t have high expectations. 

 

We also have another couple of code tolerant carrot varieties that we’ll be planting later in the summer to harvest in the fall.

 

We’re going to try sugar beets again this year. I put them in a fairly deep area of the garden with the hope they’ll grow better. I’m still figuring out how get at the sugar in the sugar beets in a home garden sort of way. We’ll see how that goes.

 

We went in hard on radishes, too. We planted four varieties: French Breakfast, Sora OG, Cherry Belle, and Round Black. I like radishes. Sue me.

 

The final experiment we’re trying in the main garden this year is gungo or pigeon peas. 

 

These are a perennial pea in many of the areas where it’s grown. That, unfortunately, is not an option for us. We could possibly grow it year round in the green house but there is always a winter pollination problem. Regardless, we’re trying it in the main garden first.

 

These peas are small—say, half the size of a regular pea. They don’t like overwatering or cold—again, this is a “we’ll see” sort of planting. Usually, with peas or beans, one soaks them first and then plants them. I’m not really sure that’s the right thing to do here but we did it anyway. It’s supposedly a quite prolific.

 

Pigeon peas and regular peas are both members of family Fabaceae, but different genuses. Pigeon peas are genus Cajanus and regular peas are genus Lathyrus. Pigeon peas are a perennial—often grown as a short lived shrub. I did read it can be grown as an annual but I’m not sure if that’s really viable. If we get germination, we may end up putting it in a pot—something I also understand is definitely viable. We could pollinate by hand. If it was good enough for Mendel, it’s likely good enough for us.

 

I’m happy with the garden so far. Here’s a good little picture of the current situation. Notice the corn in the background and the wee radishes growing under the hoop houses. 

 

This is a good thing.

 

It’s been our intent to grow as much of our own food as possible. The original idea is that this way we know the content of our food as well as what varieties. There are environmental ideas as well—food we grow and preserve don’t make CO2 the same way as buying produce and other things. That said, we still go to the grocery store so maybe it’s just a wash. 

 

But we’ve been seeing a lot of stories on food insecurity lately. It’s not only because of Orange Voldemort’s war (See here and here.) and his policies (See here, here, and here) but those on the margins are being forced into hardship just by the rise in costs.

 

There have been some ongoing food issues we’ve been concerned about for some time. Rising drought problems in areas that depend on fossil aquifers is one. The way industrial farm practices seem to innately ruin the soil where they used—causing an increase in those same destructive farm practices. But it has seemed that those issues were far enough ahead of us we might be able to prepare for them.

 

We didn’t expect to have a president that would destroy those mechanisms of government that might execute that preparation or create a world economic situation that would bring those issues home immediately. We were thinking we would suffer benign neglect rather than malicious malfeasance. 

 

But, at least, more people are gardening.

 

New Release: Brother to Jackals book 3, Appalachian Winter

 

Appalachian Winter is book 3 of my trilogy, Brother to Jackals. 

 

This book has been a long time coming and I'm happy to see the last book coming out.

 

It's scheduled for release on 6/16/2026. Links to this book, and others, are on my website as available.  The Universal Book Link is here.

 

Enjoy. 

 

Here is the back cover copy:

  

The world has finally seen Lethias as the gorilla he is and it wants him gone.

With zealot Melissa Adenour ascending to the Vice Presidency and the Oregon Initiative becoming law, Lethias wants only one thing: to return to the island. To return to his people. To return home. But standing in the way lies hundreds of miles of back country and a land that has decided who he is and what he deserves.

As LeRoy Parkin's company, LifeWorks, where the apes were created, crumbles under legal assault and the island's location grows harder to protect, a scientist's impossible physics points toward solutions no one anticipated. The gorilla, Jefferson, has taken these field equations further than any human can follow. And a mysterious being called Arthur has been waiting—patient, enormous, purposeful—for exactly this moment.

The final volume of the Brother to Jackals trilogy brings its characters to a reckoning that is by turns heartbreaking and triumphant, asking what home truly means when the world you were born into no longer wants you.

Some journeys begin as exile. Some end as legend.

 

State of the Farm, May 2026: Behold, The Terracing

You may recall that we were planning to terrace the garden.

 

It took a lot of planning and a week and some fairly hard work but the project is (or will be shortly) done. Here’s the blow by blow.

 

What we had to start with was the garden first pictured above. The soil was fairly tired out to begin with. This garden space has been in use for about thirty years. We’ve added soil and manure over the years but there is ledge under that there ground and we never were able to get much more than about six inches of topsoil.

 

We were... unsatisfied with the result.

 

Meanwhile, we recently had constructed a solar carport to increase our solar power. (More on that another day.) When they built it, they excavated these rocks. These are not small. 

 

In addition, we purchased an enormous amount of compost to act as soil. 

 

We thought long and hard about this. For one thing, we needed significant quantity. In terms of nutrients, the biggest bang for the buck is compost. However, compost is not dirt—though it will become soil in time. It’s fairly coarse. We also considered a soil/compost mix. We decided to use the compost as it was, hoping over time it will degrade sufficiently to become proper dirt. We might have to add sand or clay at point. We’re hoping not.

The tool we used was a Bobcat mini skid-steer, MT 100 which we rented for one week. Win, lose, or draw, we needed to be done one week after delivery.

 

We received the MT 100 on Friday. The plan was to take the weekend and do the rocks together. Then, during the week, I would take over and move the dirt. Our friend William (He Whose Name Must Be Praised) would come over to help on Saturday. Sunday, Wendy and I would finish the job and put mortar between any gaps where the compost might leak after a rain.

 

Before we started on Saturday, I experimented with rocks.

 

I picked what I thought was the biggest rock (a bit wider than the bucket) and moved it successfully to the corner without mishap.

 

 

Now, I was fairly confident this would work. I spent the rest of Friday moving compost into the various raised beds around the garden. I learned two things: 1) the MT 100 tore up the grass something fierce and 2) be very, very careful with the raising, lowering, and emptying of the bucket. It moves faster than you think.

 

I only slightly crunched one of the raised beds.

 

Come Saturday, we moved rocks around the main garden area to create a terraced rock wall. On Sunday, we used small rocks and mortar to complete the job.

 

 

 

All through this, I was gaining facility using the MT 100. The controls are fairly simple. The lever on the left controls the treads. Pushing directly forward has both treads going forward in unison. Pushing directly backwards has both treads going backward in unison. Moving the lever to the left or right cause a partial difference. For example, moving it to the 11 o’clock position going forward causes the left tread to retard slightly from the right causing a leftward turn. You get the idea.

 

The right lever controls the lifting arm and the motion of the bucket. Moving the lever forward causes the arm to lower. Move it backwards causes the arm to raise. Moving the lever to the left rotates the bucket up and moving the lever to the right rotates the bucket down. 

 

This is all straightforward until, of course, you get tired and a little dyslexic and rotate the bucket when you want to turn the machine or the other way. I got extremely careful moving rocks with William and Wendy in the area.

 

On Sunday, Wendy and I did most of the remaining work by hand. We didn’t use the machine much. It was all place the rocks and mortar the holes. But it was successful by the end of the weekend.

 

Now, it was up to me.

 

The MT 100 was good a moving rocks but would never equal the facility of a backhoe. Rocks sometimes had to be tilted into the bucket. Once they were dumped, they had to be situated correctly by hand. Often, the MT 100 was useful in pushing heaving things into place once they were properly oriented. But it was a clumsy process.

In the moving of dirt, the MT 100 shone. It was clearly what the unit was designed to do: pick up a scoop of something, carry it to the location, dump it in place, and (maybe) trim the location a bit. 

It took a good long while (two person-days) but that was just the time it took. In point of fact, we ran through one delivery and had to wait for a second and a third. The actual time of loading was less than the wait time. 

 

In the above pictures, you might notice two bare sections. One runs down the center of the hoop house and the other is between the far end. This was intentional The hoop house has peas growing on both sides and we decided not to put any compost in there lest we interfere with their growth. Instead, we put four buckets at the end of the hoop house to move inside by hand after the peas have finished. 

 

The other is just to define two disparate areas. There’s another hoop house to go in one section and the other will be corn, squash, and beans. 

 

The main garden was finished by Thursday afternoon. We got one more delivery on Friday morning. Four buckets ended up holding down the dirt on one end of hoop house as described before. 

 

What’s left to do is to put up the hoop house that we needed to take down for the work and restore the fencing around the whole garden. I’m writing this on Friday and we’ll do that this weekend.

 

And, here’s the finished product.

 

 

 

 

This was astonishingly straightforward and without much drama. I managed the MT 100 pretty easily despite having stitches in my left hand—another story for another day. Let’s just say be careful with your glass shower doors. They can explode. 

 

I rented the MT 100 from Koopman Lumber in North Grafton, MA. I can’t recommend them enough.

 

In point of fact, I more or less accidentally rented the MT 100 from them. I looked around several different places and most would only rent dingos to people like me. The better units (and, interestingly, better pricing) was to contractors. When I talked to Koopman I misheard the price. Better machine for the same price? Sold!

 

But TANSTAAFL. The rental price was significantly higher. That said, the MT 100 was more than twice the machine as the dingo. I don’t think the dingo could have handled those rocks. Not all who wander are lost. They may think they’re someplace they aren’t and are better for it.

 

We’re going to let the compost rest for a couple of weeks and then plant around memorial day. Then, we have to care for it. We don’t really know how water works with this stuff. When we water is it just going to go right to the bottom? Will it stay around the plant? We don’t know. Will there be enough strength in the compost to support a growing plant? We don’t know. How will the compost fare over the winter? Will it compress? Will we have to add some kind of soil to make it work better? We don’t know.

 

We’ll just have to find out.

 

However, we do know that the climate catastrophe is coming. We know it increases our allergies. We know it is causing fjord tsunamis. And we know Orange Voldemort is against any possible fix to the problem, including wind.