State of the Farm, October 2026

It’s the waning time of the year. We’ve been harvesting, processing, storing, and eating what we sowed back in May. We’ve had considerable successes, notable failures, questionable results, and object lessons and now is the time to consider all of them and get ready for next year.

 

Now, just to be clear, the harvest isn’t all in and won’t be until late in October. But most of the crops are done in one way or another and I think we can read the writing on the wall.

 

It was a strange year in terms of weather. We had a fairly warm spring—good forties weather as early as the end of March. I was able to get the peas out quite early. It stayed warm throughout June and got downright brutal in mid-summer. We had a few days above a hundred in early July. Rain was quite sporadic. We would have a space of a day or so where we might have a full inch over a couple of days and then two weeks of nothing. This was during that heat wave.

 

The combination was hard on some things, good for others. We had melons for the first time in years. 

 

The new soil in the garden was also a challenge. We filled the main garden to a depth of about 18 inches (about .45 meters) at the deepest point. The remainder we used to top off the raised beds and mixed in with the soil in part of the east garden.

 

The composted soil had two qualities we didn’t care for. The first was it was, essentially, black. In the heat wave, the soil got quite warm. Several of the plantings didn’t take it well. Second, the soil had a strong tendency to clump when it dried. It made it hard for delicate new growth for crops like carrots. Where it was mixed in (such as in the east garden) what we planted did better.

 

That’s the general issues. Now for the details. We’re going to proceed east garden, main garden, raised bed, and fruit.

 

East Garden

There was little in the east garden this year. We planted potatoes, some adorable tiny tomatoes, volunteer squash, a few cold crops, and experimental barley. 

 

The potatoes did okay. Not great. We got about fifteen pounds worth—which, if you’ll recall previous harvests, is pretty pitiful. The volunteer squash did quite well and we pulled in several good-sized gourds: spaghetti squash and what looks like some kind of butternut. Volunteers may or may not be identifiable. We compost our kitchen waste and that is probably the source for most of the volunteers. 

 

The asparagus did very well with six-foot, feathery stalks by the end of the summer. I expect many good meals come next spring. We also planted groundnut next to the bed and we had groundnut vines twining through the feathers. Glorius.

 

We tried barley in the bed next to the asparagus and something grass-like came up. But it was indistinguishable from a grass weed so we’re calling that a failure. That’s the problem with the grass family: they all look alike until they seed and then it’s too late.

 

The cold crops didn’t do well at all. That corner of the east garden has gotten too shaded by the adjacent maple. We’re just going to have to either cut that branch or give up on the space. Wendy thinks she can make the thornless blackberry work over there. I’m dubious.

 

So, I wouldn’t say the east garden was a failure but neither was it a resounding success. Put it in the “questionable results” category.

 

Main Garden

We were very ambitious in the main garden, what with the new areas now available for cultivation and the increased depth of soil. Probably too ambitious. If we took one object lesson from this year it’s to concentrate the effort on less variety and increased commitment. We just planted too many different things.

 

I put up a map of the main garden earlier in the year. (See here.) We haven’t harvested the giant Japanese carrots or the sugar beets yet. We’re giving them as long as possible. So, we’ll talk about them at a future date.

 

The carrots and beans were my biggest problems this year. I’ve talked about this before. I just could not get a good bean crop going before the rodents got them. I did, finally, get a crop of pole beans and bush beans but not enough to eat. Just enough for next year’s seed. If we can get the plants more than a foot high, they seem to be safe. But until that time, the voles and mice think of them as smorgasbord. 

 

We’ve been considering different possible solutions for this, including growing them in the greenhouse and planting them when their big enough. We need an outdoor cat. But the fact that the previous two cats we had that spent time outdoors did not come to natural ends gives us pause.

 

The carrots just did not like the new soil. Whole sections didn’t germinate at all. Those that did, didn’t do well. We got a crop of Danvers 126 once they got going but there weren’t many of them. We have some ideas on how to handle this next year.

 

We also didn’t have much luck with the cold crops. It was just too hot, too long. The early crops didn’t have a chance. I tried some late planting and, it must be said, they’re doing well but it is October and we don’t have a lot of time. 

 

(We have a sort of reverse crop pattern. We get good lettuce out of the greenhouse hydroponics in the winter but not so much during the spring. Weekly winter salads are fun.)

 

The radishes tore into that soil like it was nothing. In fact, they were so efficient and grew so quickly that I’m thinking next year to use them to break up the soil, harvest them, and then plant more delicate carrots in their place. Not all of the radishes produced, however. We had very good production from the Soro and French Breakfast varieties and not much else. Not much difference in taste between any of the varieties: a radish seems to always taste like a radish.

 

Except, of course, for the daikons. The daikon in the picture above was small. We were in daikon and carrot salad all summer. There is one very large diakon left in the garden that we plan on harvesting in the next week for a grand farewell salad.

 

We read about a Hopi method of planting corn, squash, and beans in a modified three sisters method. The idea was to plant the beans and corn in small groups and then the squash nearby. The beans were supposed to grow up the corn in a sort of trellis and then the squash would entwine the area. 

 

We used Bloody Butcher variety of corn, which is quite tall. Planting it in small groups made the corn vulnerable to winds. We won’t do it that way again. The beans didn’t take—see above—but the squash did well. We pulled in several gourds. 

 

That said, this is a case where we planted too many varieties. We had five mounds of squash that pretty much went nuts. But because the planting was so dense, we had a numerous yield but not very many big fruit. The Lakota and cushaw did fairly along with the butternut and spaghetti. But the pumpkins never got very big. There just wasn’t enough room. Good but not great results.

 

It was pretty cool to see the squash grow over the trellises as if they were beans. It’s a jungle out there.

 

We had good luck with amara greens. We’re definitely going to do more next year. We tried purslane, as well, and liked the taste. But it got away from us. The amaranth just never did well. Tomato, zucchini, and celery did great, as always. But we had one—count them—one cucumber. Peas did well as I said before. Not a great crop but enough for seed.

 

And, as I mentioned, this year we got melons! First time in years.

 

Raised Beds

We had our now welcome volunteer tomatoes and they were doing great until we got an infestation of hornworms. We did get some tomatoes and seed. But those tomatoes had problems. Peppers and strawberries did well. This is the third year for the strawberries and they just didn’t look that great so we’re going to replant next year. 

 

We had very good luck with sweet potatoes. They grew quite well right until the deer decided that sweet potato leaves were just the thing for a late-night snack. We haven’t actually harvested them but I think we’ll do all right.

 

We did get some volunteer squash that, like they always do, like to grow over everything.

 

We have two sets of raised beds: birdy beds, that are about three feet tall, and regular wooden beds that range from 4-6 inches deep. We use the lower beds for onion family: garlic, leeks, onions. We haven’t worried about them because what wild animal is going to eat an onion?

 

Rabbits, apparently.

 

We have a huge crop of rabbits living on the property. And they reproduce like... well, rabbits. I’m guessing food was scarce when they attacked one of the onion beds. Not sure how we’re going to handle that next year.

 

We’re going to net some of the birdy beds to help keep some of the crop for ourselves. 

 

Fruit

We had a lot of success with the various fruits this year. We’ve rebuilt the blueberry house but didn’t finish it in time to keep the birds out. So, we lost that crop. Oh, well. But that was made up for by the quarts we got from the outside two bushes. 

 

On the apple front we just started harvesting them this last weekend. So far we have about a bushel from two trees and hope to get another before we’re done.

 

This year I got a dozen quince from my trees. That is more than double the harvest I got last year. That was about fifteen pounds before we cut them up and processed them—say an eight-pound yield. 

 

Quince are hard fruit and not so great to eat from the tree. Though, I do hear there are varieties that can serve in that capacity. Not mine. They also come off the tree a bit astringent.

 

I skin them and cut the flesh away into relatively thin strips. Then, I layer them into a crock laying down sugar between the layers. The sugar draws out the water and softens them. It seems to remove the astringency, leaving a sharp, delectable flavor. After a while, I pull them out and put them into the dehydrator. 

 

A few quarts of blackberries. But the drought seemed to have an effect on them.

 

We’re still harvesting pawpaws. Something on the order of forty pounds so far. So many that we’re having trouble figuring out what to do with them. We tried to make a fruit leather from about ten pounds worth. It came out all right—sort of a pawpaw brittle. I also made about ten gallons of pawpaw wine. We’ll see how that turns out.

 

We’re thinking next year trying to sell them. The problem is pawpaws are fragile and they’re not very pretty.

 

The big star this year were the pears. We got pounds and pounds of pears. We ate many of them fresh. Dehydrated pounds of them. And created quarts of pearsauce. (Like applesauce but better.) 

 

Didn’t get much in the way of mulberries—we were too slow. The birds got them.

 

In the next month, we have persimmons and chestnuts. Both are still on the tree. The persimmons are a little confused. They like an October frost and it’s not at all clear if we’ll get one. The chestnuts are the big crop for October and November. That’s our flour supplement.

 

We’re coming along on our farming experiment. We will never be self-sufficient. We don’t have enough space and New England isn’t the right spot. Even if all the stars were to align, no one can ever be truly self-sufficient on an individual level. Such a goal can only be attained at a community level and even in the best of times that hasn’t been the case. People have always traded for things they couldn’t grow themselves. 

 

That might well be our next step.

 

Los Angeles World Con, 2026, Part 2

When last we left our intrepid heroes, they had landed at Hilton Anaheim. Registration was accomplished. 

 

Well, not quite.

 

As my two readers know, I’m quite taken with pottery. In the process of getting some supplies, I ended up at the local El Super, which, until that point, I did not know existed. El Super is, essentially a supermercado—a Mexican department store, here instantiated as a grocery—transplanted into Southern California. The labels are in large Spanish letters with the English equivalent in small letters beneath. I had spent some time in Mexico and this felt like a homecoming of sorts.

 

Also in the El Super, was a collection of hand made (though I’m certain those makers were in a factory) Mexican pots. The picture above shows them. I took many, many pictures of them. Be forewarned, there are similar pots in your future.

 

I had five panels and a reading at WorldCon. I’m not going to go into intimate descriptions of what actually happened at the panels. Convention panels are an improv experience and trying to capture that after the fact is pointless. What I will do is talk about how I prepared for them and what sort of thing I did.

 

How to Change your Writing Process--When Pantsers have to Outline 

The description suggested a writer has to pitch an idea to an editor and the editor demands an outline. Oh! No! The writer is a seat-of-the-pantser and doesn’t do outlines! What to do?

 

I’m not really a “pantser” within this context. I write extensive notes and have a lot of sequences I write down. But I don’t outline to detail. I’ve found if I do that, I lose the joy of discovery and no longer want to pursue the work. 

 

I have written what I call “treatments”—though they don’t necessarily fit what the film industry calls them. They follow a three section format:

 

• Section 1: The Idea of the Story. Here describe the rough path of the story and what you’re trying to do.
• Section 2: The World: this describes how the world you’re writing about work.
• Section 3: Subdivision descriptions. I almost always separate parts of novels. It’s a thing with me. Here each subdivision (Part 1, Part 2, etc.) has a brief synopsis. Sometimes there are snippets of dialog or incidents.

I’ve written them for my own benefit and, once, wrote one out to describe a novel to an editor. They passed on it so I wrote it anyway. That novel is Smilodon Country. 

 

The treatment technique could also be useful in fleshing out a story where the author is stuck. I’m stuck right now. We’ll see how that turns out.

 

Science Fiction and The Economics of Technology 

Or, why did we get social media instead of five hour workweeks?

 

The obvious answer is we have five hour workweeks now. At minimum wage. It’s called the gig economy.

 

I came up with two examples. Star Trek, where automation is essentially complete and democratized across society such that money is not necessarily. Roddenberry’s idea of a post-scarcity economy. Star Trek doesn’t say what replaces money but the Ferengi explained that in terms of acquisition. Later in the series, money makes a come back.

 

Le Guin’s The Dispossessed is another. Again, technology is democratized but it is not at all a post-scarcity economy. Instead, scarcity is democratized along with everything else. 

 

One thought I did have is that “economics” as we think of it has no place in the natural world. There is a calculus that animals have to maintain. This predator has to decide if going for that prey is worth the risk. That herbivore has to balance its dietary needs against the risks of fulfilling. It is an economy of sorts. In fact, some of Darwin’s evolutionary theory was inspired by Thomas Malthus and Adam Smith. Darwin’s idea that animals competed against one another for survival and reproduction and their offspring inherited their success.

 

I did have a discussion once with a friend about the apparent dichotomy in Firefly where we had spaceships and maglev trains along side brutal hand mining. His point was this was unlikely. My point was it’s happening right now. Why shouldn’t it happen in the future?

 

Time: Do People, Animals & Aliens Experience it Differently? 

This one was easy. I was the moderator. All I had to do was crank them up and let them go.

 

I did have some thoughts, though.

 

Time is incredibly mysterious in that we can measure time’s passage but we can’t see time itself. We have direct evidence and theoretical explanations of the three of the four forces. The fourth, gravity, has a theoretical base in the geometry of space-time. We can only perceive gravity in its effect, not in any direct sense. So, time and gravity have similar qualities.

 

One thing seems to be true: the perception of the passage of time seems to be intimately connected with something resembling consciousness. That is, without the individual subjective experience, we can’t perceive time’s passing. Animals can respond to time but it doesn’t seem that they experience it. Of course, how would one test this?

 

Also, most “conscious” beings we know of on Earth appear to be vertebrates. This could be pure chauvinism. Until we understand more about the other consciousness on the planet, the cephalopods, whose neurology is distributed across its body as opposed to being centralized in a brain, we don’t know anything.

 

It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's the Superman Panel! 

I probably shouldn’t have been on this panel. It was mostly populated by fanboys of one kind or another. I was pretty much the sole critic.

 

And I am critical of Superman—and superheroes in general but given Superman was our first Guy in Spandex, he gets most of the credit and the blame. 

 

My feeling is that Superman remains in print because he makes money. He makes money the Superman metaphor seems to satisfy something deep in modern humanity. Even when the execution of that metaphor is flawed or even just, well, bad. 

 

The first criticism I have is a moral one. This is a godlike being. What the hell are the writers doing having him fight gangs and space pirates? I mean, they set him up as godlike and they want physical conflict so the villains have to have guns just as big. But why isn’t he out in Africa using his amazing abilities to get rid of landmines? He has future technology in his Fortress of Solitude. Why doesn’t he release just a tiny bit of it? Or submit himself to research?

 

Now, I know why the writers don’t do it. Because Superman in a lab coat doesn’t sell dozens of comics per year or generate an audience for blockbuster films. (Kudos to James Gunn for getting Superman to be just a little political.) 

 

Which brings me to my second criticism. Superman has been doing the same kind of stories for over ninety years. Some variation here. Some variation there. But, like the Stations of the Cross, the Superman metaphor has a collection of characters and events that are necessary to the myth. 

 

I don’t necessarily have a problem with that directly. Zeus has his Prometheus, after all. But after all this time, the most interesting Superman stories are those that depart the metaphor. Even then, it’s often just redressing the same image in new clothing.

 

The Reading 

I was originally going to read from the book that’s coming out next June. But it was pointed out to me that 1) this was a book that no one could by. And 2) I just released the last volume of the Brother to Jackals trilogy in June and the omnibus version was coming out in December. So, was I an idiot? 

 

Bowing to superior wisdom, I read from Brother to Jackals.

 

It was well received. One listener bought the book right after I was done.

 

Writers' Co-Ops: Book View Cafe

This was the last panel I was on. It was also the least structured, since we just showed up and talked about ourselves. It was fun. I won’t go into it as I have no notes. You can read about us here.

 

We finished up and flew home. The garden had turned into a jungle. The cat was unforgiving. Nothing had changed.

 

This gluing of vacation to WorldCon appears to be working. Next year’s WorldCon is in Montreal. The year after it is in Brisbane. 

 

We shall see.

 

Los Angeles World Con, 2026, Part 1

It’s hard to justify going to an exotic place (like L. A.) for world con.

 

I know that many of my friends make this as a sort of pilgrimage. I don’t have that desire. To me, WorldCon, while fun, is part of the business. I don’t say I don’t enjoy it. I say that travelling three thousand miles and spending a thousand dollars on hotel bills isn’t sufficient justification for me.

 

A couple of years ago, my wife suggested we glue a vacation to an adjacent locale along with attending WorldCon. This tipped the balance in WorldCon’s favor. 

 

Last year, WorldCon was in Seattle and we spent a week prior going through the Channeled Scablands—which I talked about here.

 

This year, WorldCon was in Los Angeles. I was born and raised in and around Los Angeles. 

 

Southern California has a lot to offer and we had to pare the trip down from what could easily have been a month to only five days. 

 

We flew into Fresno on Friday and were tired we didn’t do much. So the trip really began the next day.

 

Saturday: This had to be Sequoia National Park. My family rented a cabin there when I was six or so and some of my earliest memories was of the trees. Wendy had never seen them and there was a lot of talk of fires, Sudden Oak Death Syndrome, and the like that suggested they giant trees were not long for this world. So, we took a day and hiked as far as I was able.

 

It’s hard to get across the scale of these monsters. I mean, humans can look at a night sky, or a mountain, or the sea and recognize something greater than themselves. But these are not living things. A whale is about as big, I think, as a human can grasp that this is a living thing. And I’m not sure even that works with something like a blue whale. 

 

(Not that it kept us from killing them.)

 

But these make whales look tiny. 

 

They’re old and they look it. Many of them (like several in this picture) are scarred from fires. Some, like the one on the right died of one. But that even exemplifies their age. The dead stump on the right had clearly been consumed by fire. But there was no fire sign around it. There were some others that faced it that showed burn marks—implying the it did not survive but they did. Then, there were other trees with a different burn mark pattern—implying a subsequent fire.

 

And then there is this grove, near the burned ones, that has no fire marks at all. 

 

I think, in this area, there were (at least) two big fires. The first consumed the stump and burned its neighbors. Then, there was another fire that scarred some of the other trees but either skipped the older, burn victims or where the damage was not great. And since then, this other great grove has grown.

 

Sequoias are interesting in several ways. First, the bark is not hard like an oak. Instead, it is fibrous—feeling like a substantial short fiber carpet. Then, in the burn scars, pitched has been exuded and hardened. Some parts are as hard and shiny as obsidian. 

 

We hiked around the are for several hours and found, in that time, two young trees. We were happy to do so. We had seen many, many great giants and middle-aged giants—sequoias don’t taper much as they grow so these are much bigger for the same height than other trees. But we didn’t see any babies. We were getting a little despairing when we found first this one:

 

I think this is only a few years old.

 

 

 

 

Later we found this one. I expect this is less than two years old.

 

The future of the sequoias may not be bleak.

 

Sunday: There were two big reasons we flew into Fresno. The first is that it was only an hour away from the park. The other is Forestiere Underground Gardens.

 

We found this on YouTube about a year ago and was fascinated. Baldassare Forestiere immigrated here from Sicily in the early part of the twentieth century. He wanted to raise fruit trees. He bought some land in Fresno to do that very thing but found it was covered in hardpan—soil with a lot of embedded sedimentary rock. He could not grow a thing here. 

 

Fresno is hot in the summer. Brutally hot. It was over a hundred when we were there. It felt like being in an oven. Forestiere couldn’t farm his land so he had to hire himself out to make a living. Remember the brutally hot part? Now, imagine digging ditches.

 

The nights weren’t much better so Forestiere built a small cellar to escape the heat. Then, he extended it. Lo and behold, once he dug down a half dozen feet or so, he found topsoil. Well, he says to himself. I have water. I have soil. The heat is bearable. All a tree lacks is sunlight. So, he opened up a skylight and planted a tree. Which, over a hundred years later, is still there.

 

The gardens are still there. And it is somewhere between 10-15 degrees cooler. Forestiere worked on the place his entire life and, it is estimated, he may have dug out as much as 20 acres of underground garden. But he left without heirs. His brother finished some of the work Forestiere left but he could not maintain such a large structure. Over time, different sections were sold or filled in. Now, there is a bit over three acres left. It is still in the family and tours are given.

The entry walks you underground and you can feel the temperature drop. Then, they take you carefully through several different rooms, galleries, and tunnels. Here are a few highlights.

 

This is a sort of cathedral room. It has several fruit trees and one, great, grape vine. I couldn’t fit the room properly into a picture but I think this gives the sense of the thing.

The pattern is tunnel through an arch, then a growing space with a skylight or a functional room.

 

 

 

Some of the spaces were large enough to be actual courtyards. 

 

One interesting thing about the place is it didn’t smell musty or feel dam. Forestiere understood drainage and saved the water. He built a fish pond inside. 

 

I could go on for hours—I have on the order of a hundred pictures or so—but I have other things to talk about. 

 

We left Fresno and went west. The plan had two Spanish missions on it and we didn’t want to miss either one.

 

The missions were established between 1769 and 1833. There were 21 of them. Each of them was a city in and of themselves with churches, slaughterhouses, crops, etc. Pretty much all built on the backs of indigenous slave labor. 

 

I’d been to San Juan Capistrano when I was a child but that was too far away for this trip. Instead, we planned to visit San Miguel Arcángel  and La Purísima Concepción.

San Miguel Arcángel was our first stop. It is an actual, working church. The parking lot was filled with parishioners which we carefully avoided lest we give offense. This is a model of the place. 

 

Most of the mission was closed to the public. The church was occupied with a baptism. Almost all of the buildings were occupied with people on retreat. So, while we did spend a fair amount of time there, we don’t have a lot of pictures.

 

On the way to Cambria—the next place we were staying—we did run across an oil field. It was fairly large—perhaps 10 acres or so. It reminded me of when I was a child in Long Beach. These donkeyhead wells were everywhere. The place smelled like my childhood.

 

Monday: We spent the next morning looking for rocks on Moonstone Beach. This is a beach that appears dominated by Scotland: a cool, wet, foggy beach while we were there. People’s pictures of rocks are of no interest to anyone but themselves, so I won’t bore you with them. We did find one moonstone, we think, and some other interesting specimens.

 

But this was one geological feature that we saw over and over. This is called tafoni and the geologic origins of this is unclear. I thought I had stepped into a Roger Dean painting.

 

 

From Cambria, we proceeded south, stopping where we will.

One beach, of sorts, we found about half way to our destination of Goleta.  This layered rock was all over, and eroding mightily. We found bits everywhere. 

 

It was eroding so much that there had been some problems with the cliffs falling down. This was remedied by vast slabs of concrete. Which had been scored to look like the underlying rock.

 

 

 

 

 

Tuesday: It was on this leg of the journey that we stopped at Mission La Purísima Concepción. 

 

This is not a working church but a museum. The mission has been well restored and it is huge. Several vast buildings, major areas given over to crops and gardens. A tannery. A slaughterhouse. Stables. Paddocks. Corrals. Various church spaces. At its peak, there might have been better than two thousand people—mostly indigenous, and mostly slaves. 

 

I found this map here. It’s not a great map. Each of the buildings had a chapel. There was a lot more than weaving in the first building. We found a leather shop, carpentry, several kitchens, several meeting rooms, a library, and much else.

This is that first building.

 

This is the chapel in the first building.

 

 

Then, we visited the La Brea Tarpits on our way to Santa Monica—our last stay before Los Angeles.

 

Unfortunately, the museum and much of the park was closed. 

 

But we still could walk around the main pond. It bubbled and stank, as I remembered as a child. 

 

Wednesday: We had three Stations of the Cross I wanted to visit before we reached WorldCon.

The first was the baptism in the Pacific Ocean.

 

 

 

We hadn’t had much chance to just walk in the ocean since we got here. We had some time before the other two Stations, so we walked to the beach and just, well, walked in the water for an hour or so. I have some video but few pictures.

 

The second was the Autrey Museum of the American West. This was not because I had any love of cowboys but because the Autrey Museum had acquired the Southwest Museum of the American Indian. I’m very interested in indigenous pottery and this promised to be interesting.

 

I have to say I was disappointed. Several of the galleries were closed. The remaining ones that did have indigenous art was mostly modern with very little history of any depth. And, as I said, cowboy culture isn’t what I was interested.

 

The last Station was the Griffith Park Observatory.

 

When I was very young we lived in several parts of the L.A. area: Santa Monica, Long Beach, Anaheim, Thousand Oaks, etc. Going into L.A. was always a treat and going to Griffith Park was a special confection. I don’t have many pictures but I do have some video.

 

And with that, we drove down to WorldCon in the home of Disneyland, Anaheim, California, not a mile from where I had spent five years as a child.

 

But that is another tale.