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.

 

Cheese Ends, 2026-05-04

Let’s see if I can do this without depressing myself.

 

(Picture from here.)

 

Neanderthals have been prominent in my fiction since the very beginning. In fact, one of my first stories, A Capella, involved Neanderthal and human interaction at the very late end of Neanderthal occupation of Europe. 

 

This came from a lecture by a docent at the Museum of Science in Boston. He was talking about the cave paintings at Lascaux in France. “Who made these paintings?” he said. Then, he held up a Neanderthal skull. “Not Neanderthals.” He said it in such a contemptuous way I went home and wrote the story.

 

This is the thing about humans: we always want to be the best of the best. It’s not enough that we’ve taken over the world. We have to have always been the best. We were in Neanderthal Country and they died out? Clearly because we outcompeted them. 

 

Rizza. Razza.

 

Anyway, Neanderthals have gotten a bum rap for well over a century. 

 

This started to change as more and more evidence started to show up saying it ain’t necessarily so. 

 

They had glue. They carved objects of arts. They had rope. They used ochre. Like humans, they ate anything.

 

And, of course, they interbred with us. That, by itself, was enough for us to elevate their standing.

 

The final nail in this particular coffin was a recent study comparing brain casts. These casts fit nicely within the human range. There was, some time back, an attempt to determine brain organization from such casts and the conclusion was that Neanderthals were stupid. It was not the case.

 

Neanderthals and modern humans are hypothesized to derive from Homo heidelbergensis. Neanderthals lived from 400 thousand years ago to about 40 thousand years ago. Evidence suggests the lineages diverged somewhere between 650 and 500 thousand years ago. 

 

It’s my opinion that they must have shared a lot of traits including big brains when they split. Otherwise, we’re in the position of trying to explain two organisms evolving essentially the same brain mass separately. I think that’s a stretch.

 

It’s been gratifying over the last forty years or so to see the world to come around to my point of view.

 

However, I will point out that Neanderthals coexisted with megafauna for a couple of hundred thousand years. The megafauna didn’t last 10k once humans came on the scene. And we wonder why Neanderthals disappeared.

 

Speaking of megafauna, there’s a new apex predator on the late Cretaceous block. One that had guts but no backbone.

 

Enter Nanaimoteuthis haggerti, a 19-meter (62 feet) octopus that swam with the mosasaurs.

 

What makes this interesting to me is that you’d think that an octopus this big would be a good meal for something like a mosasaur. But it’s just too damned big.

 

Consider sperm whales whose favorite meal is giant squids. Sperm whales top out at 16 meters (52 feet.) Giant squids top out at 5 meters (16 feet.) That’s a rough whale/squid ratio of 3/1. Sperm whales often show significant wounds from the squids showing it wasn’t just a clambake for them. 

 

So, with our 19-meter octopus, and our completely speculative pseudoscientific analysis, we’d have to have a 57-meter predator to reliably prey on it. Not bloody likely.

 

Coupled with the idea that an octopus is really, really smart. A very big, strong, fast, smart predator with the octopus ability to camouflage itself. Okay. Yeah. I can see the apex predator. 

 

Something a little sad: Voyager 1 has had to shut off another instrument to conserve power.

 

Voyager 1 has been the little spacecraft that could. Since it would never be able to generate enough solar power in the outer solar system, it uses three small nuclear generators to keep going. These used plutonium-238’s fission to produce heat and from that electricity. But fission comes from degradation of the material and the plutonium is producing less and less heat over time. Which means less and less power. The half life of Pu238 is about 87 years and Voyager 1 has been out there for 49 years. We’re coming up on the Pu 238 having exhausted half its power.

 

NASA has suggested Voyager 1 will no longer be able to power any instruments after 2027. After that, it will still send us a signal until, finally, in 2036 they will be out of signal range. 

 

Goodbye little prince.

 

Staying in space, the Roman telescope is now ready for launch. 

 

That doesn’t mean it’s on a launch vehicle with the countdown commencing. It means it’s been assembled and tested and is ready for its September launch. Of course, these days, it’s not launched until it’s launched. And even then, at any moment, funding could be pulled to monitor it. 

 

Which brings us to the Orange Voldemort firing the entire National Science Board. The fact that the members were planning to release a report that the US was ceding its scientific leadership to China (It is. No. He is.) had nothing to do with it. It’s not enough that he is trying to stymie the most efficient energy resources (losing this in court) or illegally keeping less efficient power plants in operation. No criticism is too small to be overlooked, no action too petty not to be indulged in.

 

Remember Project 2025? The guidance OV said he knew nothing about and instantly tried to implement the moment he took office? Factcheck.org put together a status report on how much he’s actually managed to ram down our throats. See here. 

 

Completely unsurprising and worse than I could possibly have imagined.

 

 

State of the Farm: April 2026

We are just getting going on the farm. 

 

(Picture from here.)

 

There are two things going on. 

 

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

 

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

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

 

The second is much more of an effort. 

 

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

 

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

 

There were (as always) confounding factors. 

 

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

 

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

 

We’ve decided to terrace the garden.

 

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

 

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

 

Enter the Mini Skid Steer. (See here.)

 

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

 

This might be fun.

 

If it works, we’ll have a new garden.