The last cucumber and tomato sandwich of the year

When I was a kid, cucumber and tomato sandwiches on sturdy homemade bread were a staple of summer, and in these last few years of more serious gardening I’ve marked the turning of the fall season by mentally noting the last cucumber and tomato sandwich of the year – today was the day for 2023. We still have plenty of tomatoes, but only put in one batch of cukes, which moldered on the vine in the constant humidity of this summer. They don’t last long in the fridge, so this is the end of the line.

The summer squash are long gone, the last of the butternuts and spaghetti squash are cured and stashed in the basement, and in fact a large strip of the garden is given over to a newly-sprouted cover crop of white clover. It’s time to focus on cider and winter preparations.

Reflections on another year of serious gardening (2023)

Hello again world! With more time on my hands this summer (but operating solo now that KFK is afloat), I’ve been wrestling with the strange weather of this year to grow vegetables. Here are some notes so far:

• After a seriously dry spell in the spring, June and July turned stubbornly rainy and humid; this is the headline impact on Maine gardening for the year. The river which usually shrinks to the size of a small stream for most of the summer remained in spring-like torrent mode, with occasional bursts out of its bank in response to 2-3″ rainstorms. The grass was brown briefly in May, but has been as green as Ireland for the entire summer since.
• Naturally I was worried about the strawberries, especially since I didn’t manage to get straw under them in the spring, but somehow they put out a decent crop with only a bit more mold and mud than usual; we froze maybe ~20 quarts and jammed most of the frozen remainder from 2022, which was a more prolific year. With more time for diligence, I did manage to police the beds for weeds a few times, so they look pretty good for next year.
• Given family enthusiasm, this year I planted 3 different maturities of shell peas in addition to the usual sugarsnaps. Unsurprisingly given the weather they did well; we had fresh peas from late June right into August. Most went right down the hatch before even being cooked, including a consistent dose shelled fresh in preschool lunch every day, but I froze maybe a quart. We ate the sugarsnaps fresh as usual; I haven’t found that blanching and freezing them results in an appetizing product.
• Beyond the weather my biggest antagonist was a family of woodchucks; they hopped right through the holes in the cattle panel fencing on a bee-line and devastated the peas and brassicas early in the season. I fought a running battle stapling up 1″ chicken wire (“poultry netting”) over the lower half of the cattle panels; while I didn’t entirely encircle the garden, I started closest to their den, and it seemed to dissuade them – or other stuff sprouted in the woods that they like better. I am still working to gradually upgrade the entire perimeter by applying the chicken wire to each panel, such that if the panel is removed, the netting comes with it and the whole assembly can be transported/reapplied easily.
  • In the process of doing this fencing work I discovered hog ring pliers which take strips like an Arrow stapler; can’t believe I made it this many decades without realizing these were so handy.
• Given the damage from the woodchucks, my broccoli and brussels sprouts were a sad affair; I ended up buying a couple of six-packs from a nursery to patch in the ones that were too badly chomped. Finally here in September I’m getting some broccoli; it remains to be seen how far the brussels sprouts will get before the snow flies. I started fall broccoli which has hit the fast part of its growth cycle, so hoping to freeze a couple more gallon bags of florets for pizza before the season ends.
• Alliums were so/so. Garlic did its usual thing, producing scapes and then dying back for harvest in time for its bed to be given over to late broccoli and lettuce. I doubled down on leeks, planting approximately 70 row feet of a couple of varieties; they did fine but haven’t sized up that impressively given that I started them in the greenhouse early and gave them a couple rounds of compost. Onions were more disappointing. After a tremendous harvest of prime softball-sized storage onions last year that carried us right into the summer, I thought I had the recipe down: I planted individual seeds of a couple varieties (yellow and red) in individual 200-cell plastic trays, nursed them in the greenhouse with organic liquid fertilizer, and planted healthy starts on 8″ centers in a well-fertilized bed. I even collared each one with cut-up toilet paper roll tubes that I’d been diligently saving all winter, to keep the cutworms at bay. They appeared to grow OK, but didn’t size up nearly so well as last year – baseballs at best, which I suspect is just down to the weather. I think commercial onions are grown in the sunny parts of the northwest, suggesting that the cloudy summer may be to blame.
• Summer-bearing raspberries were OK; nothing spectacular, but Z ate plenty fresh, and I managed to freeze 2-3 quarts. I gave them a ton of composted manure and buried it with fresh sawdust from the bandsaw mill that we hired for a day this spring; next year’s canes are a good 18″ taller than this year’s, which may be related and a good sign. Fall-bearers are just starting now and look normal.
• Tomatoes have suffered badly. They appeared to grow normally, but were extremely slow to set fruit, and likewise slow to ripen. The tomatoes in the greenhouse have been marginally healthier/earlier, but not by any significant margin. This makes me think that they need sun more than heat. As of the first week of September I have perhaps only harvested 15-20lb total; they are starting to come in heavier now that the sun and heat have come on; we’ll see how much we get before it turns cold. Fortunately I overdid it last year and still have several quarts of diced in reserve.
  • Peppers and eggplants were likewise slow to grow and miserly with fruit (even in the greenhouse and hoophouse), again making me think that sunlight was the missing factor.
• Continuing in the theme of hot-weather annuals, basil is a commodity crop for us, and it did pretty well. I plant ~8 sq feet in the greenhouse and ~30 sq feet outdoors, and as usual the greenhouse patch was more rampant, but both produced respectably. I make large batches of pesto, freeze it in ice cube trays, and pop the frozen cubes loose into plastic bags, aiming to put up 2 or 3 gallons to make it through the winter. Often it starts to brown and dry up by now, but the late burst of heat and humidity seem to suit its continued growth.
• Squash family crops did relatively poorly; we got a good run of pattypans early, but the plants fizzled out (though that’s not unusual). I planted a couple hills of spaghetti squash, and they set and sized fruit impressively, but then the vines died before the fruit could ripen – we’ll get maybe a half-dozen big ones, and it’s not clear if they really matured. Waltham butternut did better; the vines still look OK, some fruit is mature, and some are still coming. I planted a couple of hills of Connecticut field pumpkins, and they made a good showing with several respectable jack-o-lanterns turning orange now.
  • The real standout of the squash family was the ‘Zephyr’ summer squash variety; it’s a yellow summer squash with a mildly crook-ed neck and a light green blossom end. Those plants are still kicking out fruits long after everything else has turned mildew-y and dried out. The flavor is fine and they are plenty tender if picked at a reasonable size.
  • I was able to grow a handful of really nice cantaloupes, mostly in the greenhouse. The eggplants and peppers I planted in there didn’t do much, so I let the cantaloupe vines run rampant to the point where they started to take on even the tomato plants.
  • Cucumbers produced respectably; we don’t make pickles so there’s only so much to be done with them.
• Potatoes look OK; they are taking their time dying back, but I don’t know if this will translate into high yield. The couple of hills of white potatoes that Z and I have dug up had some with internal voids (not rotten); hopefully this doesn’t extend to the other varieties.
• Carrots and beets have done their thing; nothing apparently unusual. I have tried to keep successions of carrots going, though the ones I overwintered last year ended up small and tough. I did get a good crop of parsnips this spring which lasted us for muffins most of the summer; this year germination wasn’t as good so I expect a smaller number of monsters come next spring.
• Greens were sufficient to our needs; by sporadic succession plantings there was always something to make salad out of. I had quite a bit of overwintered spinach that did well enough that we ate a ton of Greek omelets and and was able to freeze some early in the season; will try for this again by planting repeatedly as the fall progresses.
• Asparagus produced nicely, and put up a very strong stand of fronds, to the point where I wonder if I should be dividing the clumps or something – need to look that up.
• It wasn’t a big year for grain staples; we didn’t do field or sweet corn, and planted fewer potatoes. I did have about 1000 sq feet of fedco winter wheat I planted (with red clover) last fall on the patch that had grown potatoes last summer; the stand wasn’t particularly thick, and the wet weather of the spring didn’t seem to agree with it. I did harvest it (with scissors, not the grain cradle I improvised for rye the previous year, as it was thin and weedy) – it’s drying in the attic, and we’ll see if I ‘make my seed corn back’. I have heard that spring wheat is more common in Maine, so at some point I should try that, but so far corn and rye have been much more successful. The red clover has subsequently put up a nice stand so at least there’s the nitrogen gain from that.
• Total fertility input at this point has stabilized to 3cy of ‘Surf and Turf’ from Odonals each spring, plus the compost output from kitchen, yard, and garden. I spread finished compost and S&T by pailfuls onto the beds, fluff it in with a Johnny’s broadfork, and rake the beds smooth before planting. The small rear-tine gas tiller we bought used died years ago, and for the established beds I don’t miss it, though I don’t have a ready solution if it came time to turn over some stout sod.
• Weed control is fairly refined at this point between the BMX-bike-derived oscillating wheel-hoe, a long-handled Eliot Coleman collinear hoe with a 7″ blade, and a small Japanese hand hoe.
• Pest control consists of I’ve settled on 1, occasionally 2 applications of spinosad on the potatoes to control beetles when I first see the nasty grubs feeding, which this seems to do the trick, and 2-3 mistings of Bt on the brassicas, which keeps the green worms pretty much in check.

New Year’s 2022; composting diapers

It’s been an indifferent winter so far, with just a day or two of snow suitable for skiing on the north side trails and a warm inter-holiday week, but a cold spell was forecast so I took advantage on the Sunday after New Year’s Day to string out the hoses and compost diapers.

Diaper consumption is gradually decreasing in preference to use of the potty, but still the compostable liners accumulate, and I have made a habit of slurrying them (yellow ones only) and mixing with diverse organic matter to make very nice compost for the garden. In the photo above, the right bin holds the last fall batch that has cooked down nicely, while I am layering and mixing fresh material on the left. I had to dig off a few inches of snow to get at the pile of leaves and garden waste behind the bins.

Building a kinematic solar chicken tractor (A Philosophy of Outbuildings, 2nd worked example)

In late 2019 I wrote a post called A Philosophy of Outbuildings, attempting to capture the lessons from 40 years of making and using utility structures on the land in Five Islands, and now a bit here in Gorham. In the summer of 2020, as part of our garden expansion I took down our oldest, smallest ground-mount PV array of four modules, which was mounted on a rack of untreated 2×4 that was rotting up from the ground. We needed a new rack for the PV, and we have also talked for a long time about eventually getting chickens here. I had already worked up a mostly-effective technique for using quality aluminum foil tape to weathershed the seams between modules on a ground-mount array, making a pretty nice garden shed that might become a third essay in this series. So a solar chickenhouse seemed like a decent idea.

One of the principles of the philosophy is that Small Outbuildings Should be Portable – because they can be, because it increases the value of the time put into building them, and because otherwise they often get in the way of bigger plans that come along later. In the case of grazing livestock, portability is a primary requirement, to expose the critters to fresh pasture, and the Chicken Tractor is at this point a classic DIY project. My parents have taken that concept to the extreme in Five Islands with two small barns for laying hens, built on the four-wheeled frames of retired haywagons from the Holbrook dairy operation in Woolwich. These are truly impressive structures, complete with large winch-up flyways, and those hens get moved every 2-3 days, but a conventional stick-frame rectangular building on a long, spindly four-wheel wagon will come under some pretty intense wracking strains when pulled over uneven ground, and indeed the first iteration ended up somewhat diagonal due to this fundamental challenge of kinematics.

The wracking of the four-wheel chicken tractors offended my engineer’s sense of propriety, much as an out-of-plumb outhouse grates on a carpenter’s, so I resolved that our portable solar chicken house would be kinematically correct, with a three-point stance to avoid wrenching when transported. This complicated things significantly, but the end result was satisfying enough to document in this post, with some lessons learned that could be useful in designing similar buildings.

The size of the building was roughly set by the four PV panels to be mounted, older 185W Chinese mono modules that measure a bit over 2×5′ each. To minimize footprint and provide a bit of standing headroom inside, I arranged them 2×2 in portrait format, leading to a collector a bit over 5’wx10’h, set at 45 degrees (we’re at 44 degrees north here), giving a right-triangular wedge for the main mass of the structure.

When tilted up, the run of the collector array fell just short of 8′. But for efficient use of materials, and to provide a bit more floorspace, I went for a full 8′ in the north-south dimension. To cover the gap at the north end I put in a small north-facing roof facet which I covered with twinwall polycarbonate to let in a bit of light; this also echoes the design of the (decidedly non-portable) solar garden shed that sits just to the north. In the end this resulted in a lot of picky carpentry; it might have been best to tilt the array slightly flatter than 45 degrees and deal with the reduced headroom, but I am happy with the result. With our without the north-facing rooflet, the north wall is the only one big enough to receive a door, and is also a convenient place to implement daylight/ventilation.

Inspired by a coop Gerry Carroll built in NJ, I was keen to try accessing the laying boxes from outside, and the building could use a bit more width to give it stance against blowing over, so I slung two rows of laying boxes on either side running north-south, designed to have hinged access hatches on the side walls and de minimis shed roofs to cover. I clad the laying box sheds with salvaged mobile-home skirting in a nice gray-brown faux woodgrain color, scored from Dave’s salvage collection. We’ll see how the external-access laying boxes work out if we ever get around to populating it with chickens.

The kinematic foundation is the most unique element of the structure, and fortunately I have some decent pictures. Because the shed would be located within our large fenced garden area, it would probably move relatively infrequently (on an annual or slower-than-annual rotation) to allow the chickens to fertilize a fallow area, so I decided to use skids rather than wheels. The kinematic principle could (and I would say should) be applied to a wheeled structure with minor variations. Like the portable tractor shed I built upriver, the skids are made of ordinary treated lumber, 4×6 flatwise in this case. Here are some shots of the substructure under construction, showing how the floor can pivot freely and be adjusted independent of the base:

Built upward from the skids are a front crossbeam (2×10, sculpted top and bottom to increase clearance) and a back crossbeam (C-channel construction of PT decking, similarly sculpted below for ground clearance), plus 2×6 diagonal braces to keep the substructure square. The front crossbeam has metal plates sandwiching it fore and aft, through-bolted (in this case the plates happen to be leftover tail vanes from a prototype wind turbine). The curved metal plates project well above the crossbeam, and form a trunnion that accepts one of the joists of the floor deck with a large pivot bolt. This gives the superstructure a roll degree of freedom relative to the substructure, which is key to preventing the building from wracking as the skids move semi-independently to conform to the surface contour of the soil. Additionally, the flex in the metal plates, the wooden joists, and general slop in the system allows sufficient pitch degree of freedom such that the floor can be leveled.

The ability to level the floor is not necessary to the fundamental goal of a kinematically appropriate structure, and the chickens probably won’t care, but as the son of a carpenter I feel that certain standards must be upheld. So the north end of the structure is supported off the rear crossbeam by two salvaged scissor screw jacks from light cars, which allows the floor attitude to be adjusted, taking advantage of the roll and (modest) pitch degrees of freedom of the front pivot point described above.

Between the solar panel roof and the specialized kinematic base, I tried hard to keep the structure from getting too heavy. The floor is 1/2″ PT plywood framed with a 2×6 perimeter, but joisted with 5/4 decking. The wall framing is similarly light, mostly decking ripped in half lengthwise, and the side walls of the structure are diagonally planked with Hammond Lumber’s thinner, nicer-grade shiplap that is rough one side but measures an actual 3/4″ thick (where regular shiplap is actual 7/8″ thick). I also incorporated some hardware cloth and twinwall polycarbonate for light and ventilation. Here are some photos of construction:

We got an early snow in the fall of 2020 that then melted, and I took the opportunity to skid it into the garden to its final (for now) home:

The structure moved nicely, and it was almost a letdown how trivial it was to level it in place with a couple cranks of the screw jacks. Because the superstructure is intentionally built light, it is secured downward to the skids and the jacks with light chain and preloaded by turnbuckles left over from a fencing project. I bolted on the PV modules, and it sat through the winter and spring while other projects took priority, including growing and harvesting a nice crop of rye (which deserves a post of its own):

I finally got to ‘finishing’ it, roofing the laying box sheds with the trailer skirting and building a door on the north wall this summer. All in all, a satisfying project, currently storing gardening sundries and awaiting a shipment of chicks someday.

Naturally in the course of this type of exploratory project, I came up with some things I’d do differently next time. Most basically, the construction makes the superstructure a few inches taller than I think is necessary, and fitting the kinematic degrees of freedom into a shallower package would be cool. This might be accomplished by dispensing with the metal trunnion plates and fitting the front crossbeam between two closely-spaced floor joists. This would also require a more compact arrangement for the adjustable elevation on the north end, and while the scissor screw jacks were free from Dave’s dump collection and well-suited, they have a temporary, inelegant feel about them; in building another one I might try to substitute some stumpy homemade turnbuckles with welded end plates, fabricated from a couple large-diameter left-hand threaded nuts and bolts. This would obviously also provide downforce, eliminating the need for the turnbuckle/chain.

Reflections on another year of serious gardening (2021)

A post to capture findings from another year of trying to do a good job in the vegetable garden (last year’s post).

The weather was odd; spring seemed ordinary, then June was absurdly dry, then July was ridiculously wet right into August. then things seemed to even out, but I can’t remember a late summer period that seemed this green. We irrigated steadily early in the year, but never once after it started to rain in July.

Made an effort to drive up fertility with good effect; got the usual 3 yards of surf-and-turf in the spring from O’Donal’s, and probably made and spread nearly that much of our own compost.

Weed control was OK through most of the summer thanks to the hacked BMX-bike wheelhoe and a spiffy collinear hoe I bought from Johnny’s. Got sloppier late in the year as things turned rampant and other projects intervened.

Fencing is in good shape, thanks to big investment last year. No woodchucks in the squash this time; deer only got in when we left the gate open.

By crop:

• Brassicas: did pretty well in general; planted all in one row and sprayed 2 gallons of BT (organic-listed bacterium that parasitizes moth larvae) on the row 3, maybe 4 times over the course of the summer, which made a major difference – e.g. the Brussels sprout tops were getting skeletonized and recovered immediately right after I sprayed.
  • Broccoli: direct-seeded 2-3 fedco varieties, one or two failed so got a dozen starts from O’Donals. Couldn’t tell the difference between varieties; froze several gallon bags’ worth on cookie sheets, since we always use a lot. Kept producing off side shoots well into the fall.
  • Kohlrabi – grew for the first time after being inspired by a picture of Holly’s son with a huge one. His description was pretty accurate – like a giant hunk of broccoli stem. The root is functionally similar to jicama but a bit zippy instead of sweet, and makes pleasant fresh eating as a low-cal snack, or grated into a salad; I blanched and froze a few quarts to try in soup. Surprisingly good stir-fried with sesame oil and salt, per HG advice. Next year: attempt to succession-plant; start some late for fall.
  • Purple cabbage – I direct-seeded this early, and thinned/transplanted in the rows. They did well, but ripened while there was a ton of more compelling food in the garden. Plant late for fall/storage
  • Kale: didn’t plant kale early, and didn’t miss it much. Planted some late which is doing well now; seems like the right move. get some other varieties next year besides Russian
  • Brussels sprouts: still coming along – look pretty good.
• Cucurbits – very satisfactory this year. We experimented training cucurbits and tomatoes on the garden perimeter fence; the tomatoes did great but the squash got munched by deer – so in the future we should either string electric fence outboard or confine the squash to the interior of the garden.
  • For summer squash I started some early in the greenhouse in 4″ pots – Yellow crooknecks, the same anonymous green pattypans I bought in the spring of 2020 at O’Donal’s, and a green zucchini variety I bought from fedco without reading the description very carefully. These latter turned out to be zucchini rampicante, which are in the moschata family, and they worked really well – resistant to the bugs that eat the stems of other squash, long-lived, and prolific. They would have been even more impressive if the deer hadn’t decimated them where they climbed the fence, and if I hadn’t planted them over mowed red clover that came up pretty think and competed for light. The pattypans were OK but nothing like last year (maybe try a different variety next year), and the yellow squash faded fast but I planted a succession probably around July 4 that did well (and is still fruiting in late Sept, while just starting to get mildewed).
  • Cucumbers likewise we planted along the perimeter fence (as well as in the greenhouse). The deer got them, but still got plenty for salad and sandwiches (not sure if Kelsey pickled; I think we’ve had more in past years…) – Plant fewer next year, and succession-plant them
  • I grew a few pots of honeydew, cantaloupe, and watermelon. Got a few of each that were pretty good. They got a bit lost under the tomatoes that were also planted on the fence; in general I have a sense that if we committed space and babied them, we could grow some serious melons.
  • For winter squash I planted 3-4 hills of waltham butternut, and got about 120lb of fruits. This grew in an area about 15×20′; this represents a pretty decent people-feeding rate of around 4.5 people per acre, although at 200 calories per pound it would be tough to live on butternut squash…
• Tomatoes: did OK, planted mostly along the perimeter fence, and the deer didn’t touch them. Didn’t pay enough attention to varieties, and ended up with a bunch of sungold and small red cherries, and not so many large eating/canning tomatoes. The elongated red cherries were pretty nice for fresh eating, and overall we got plenty of fruit – I canned over 6 gallons of diced tomatoes in enriched sauce made by reducing mass quantities of the little ones in a crockpot and running them through Kelsey’s squeezo. The ones in the greenhouse did OK but actually came in later than the outdoor plants; the greenhouse seems less necessary for them than for peppers and eggplants. Plant more large ones next year.
• Basil: planted around 12 row-feet in the greenhouse, and similar outdoors. Both did great, made several ~quart batches of pesto and froze in ice cube trays. The outdoor planting started to brown pretty early in September; it definitely seems to be among the most sensitive to cold of the stuff we grow.
• Eggplants: did great in the greenhouse. Didn’t bother outdoors based on last year
• Peppers: bought some starts at O’Donal’s, mostly planted in the greenhouse where they did OK. Two plants outdoors kinda fizzled; not clear why
• Carrots: did a good job of planting successions, mostly of Yaya. Frustrating since the cutworms really like them, but still got plenty. Carrots seem happy in our soil; I definitely see the potential to grow an absurd amount by refining practices. Mark Fulford has done some experiments with intense organic cultivation of carrots that seem pretty impressive, yielding 54-65,000lb/acre in 70 days – equivalent to a feeding power of approximately 15 people/acre.
• Beets: got a couple meals from an early planting, but goldfinches have taken a liking to them and skeletonize the leaves (likewise of chard). Plant small successions of beets under floating row cover next year.
• Chard: Grew some; goldfinches ate most of it. Kelsey feeds it to her family and they seem to like it. One of those things where by the time it’s ready to eat, there are a lot of other tasty things to eat.
• Spinach: overwintered some and it was great to have in the spring. Got a good long row planted early, and ate heavily of it (plus froze some) despite heavy predation by cutworms. Later plantings bolted in the heat; Kelsey got in another good long row for fall that’s doing well.
• Alliums: not a fantastic year. I planted some yellow onion sets, and they got heavily munched by cutworms; the ones that made it looked good but started to rot quickly after harvest. Kelsey transplanted a small patch from seed that seemed to do better though they also got cutwormed. Maybe BT spray would help. We also planted leeks that she started from seed; it too got cutworms and struggled to get going. Definitely not as good as last year.
• Green beans: Kelsey planted a couple rows and they kept going all summer – seems like they liked the rainy weather.
• Peas: snap peas did OK as usual – great fresh eating right in the garden; I haven’t figured a way to freeze them that’s actually tasty. Also grew a couple types of shell peas, but they are a lot of work – seems marginal for to grow and shell them for storage. I did look online and it appears that one can make a homemade tumbler out of wood and hardware cloth to shell them automatically.
• Potatoes: did fine; crop seemed not-especially-heavy but quality was good. Picked a lot of beetles, plus one whack of spinosad when the picking got behind.

The problem of ‘lifestyle’

I hate the word ‘lifestyle’, at least in relation to anything that matters, because it trivializes that which should not be trivialized. Much like Consumers, it is a word that slips in easily to replace something harder and more important.

Collectively, humans have colossal power – including the ability to defeat (or not) viral contagion and transform, devastate, or renew landscapes.  In the fossil fuel era, we have materially altered the temperature of the entire surface of the planet in a few short decades, and are creating in a century an extinction event that will be visible over the sweep of billions of years. We also have choices, and so we have responsibility for our actions.  “They” did not do these things, WE are doing them – you and I do them every time we pump gas, eat a steak, or step onto an airplane. While each person’s individual contribution is miniscule, they add up exactly to our collective impact – there is nothing else.

Engaging meaningfully with global environmental challenges requires scientific literacy and the ability to see past appearances.  Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, mercury in fish – these things are literally invisible, and undetectable without the tools of science.  And the chains of causation between my everyday actions and my infinitessimal contribution to them are invisible likewise. One must dig under the surface to understand them.  But Lifestyle is all about appearances.  It points attention at cultural signifiers, gloss, and status, not the sinewy reality of material and energy flows and actual impacts of behavior.

At some point in college I did a quantitative accounting of my carbon footprint, and on many fronts I did well – living in a cooperative community with nearly 30 other young people, eating a vegetarian diet, riding a bicycle as my daily commuter. But I was surprised to find that well over half of my impact came from frequent car trips to the White Mountains of New Hampshire to go hiking – despite driving a relatively efficient vehicle for the time. This took me aback, and got me thinking harder about actual impacts as opposed to easy perceptions of what constituted “environmentally-aware lifestyle activities”.

Often I have lamented here when the superficial gaze of the New York Times style page lands on rural life and finds improbably clean chickens clutched against pristine leather jackets. It’s not just that this is precious and inauthentic, it is actively leading us astray.  The combination of innumeracy and a focus on style over substance is the same instinct that causes people who travel by air to concern themselves with plastic soda straws.  A ‘rural lifestyle‘ that occupies prime farmland, consumes agricultural inputs, and releases agricultural methane without actually producing agricultural goods in a low-impact way is no more sustainable than flying across oceans to go hiking.

Much is written about the influence of money in our politics, and to be sure it is malign.  Apparently the 2020 election cost $14B, which seems like a huge sum, but in the context of over 300M people it is amazingly little – only about $40 each – the average American spends far more on energy every week.  Recent violent outbursts acknowledged, the abiding reality is mundane complacency, with smokestacks and tailpipes belching all the while.  In this context, how we use our dollars day in and day out is much more impactful than our voice or our vote. 

The pandemic has made it clear that there is a large class of people who are deeply, pathologically allergic to the idea that they are responsible for the effects their actions have on others.  But responsible they are, and responsible we are, the childish tantrums of adults notwithstanding.  Whether it’s invisible viruses spreading in close-packed rooms or ten-cylinder engines roaring freedom on a wide-open highway, we are bound together in the fabric of a reality much deeper than the gloss of fashion or the ring of tinny internet rhetoric. But “Lifestyle” says it’s all good – just a matter of freedom and fashion or personal taste.  Will it be “My lifestyle is to minimize air travel and grow vegetables”? Well then, good on you!  Or how about “My lifestyle is to jet-set around the world hunting endangered species”  Well then, good on you! If how we behave is just a matter of personal style and preference, these choices are equivalent.

These choices are not equivalent.  I believe we have a moral obligation to act as if our actions matter, and life should be about far more than style.  I want people to learn about the physical, quantitative effects of our choices, reflect on them, and change our lives so we have less negative impact on the planet, and more positive impact on our communities.  In doing this, and in keeping with the great coming together that is needed in the wake of the past few years, I hope we can pay less attention to “Lifestyle” and more to the actual gallons and miles and gigatons of reality.

The Innovator’s Dilemma: evidence from Richard Scarry

The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen is a classic of innovation literature. I was introduced to the basic ideas by Ely Sachs, inventor of one of the major types of 3D printing as well as two impressive kerfless silicon wafer manufacturing technologies, and I finally read it a year or two ago. A major theme is that established dominant market players are good at ‘sustaining innovation’ to incrementally improve their products in service to existing customers, but are lousy at ‘disruptive innovation’, applying new technologies to adjacent, emerging market segments. More typically a new technology is incubated by startups in adjacent markets until it matures to the point where it (and the startups pioneering it) rapidly crush and replace the older technology.

The meaty academic example he uses in the book is the hard drive industry, but chapter 3 gives much more tactile and approachable example, that of mechanical excavators. As the story goes, in the steam era an impressive industry grew up to produce cable-operated, forward-scooping excavation machines (‘steam shovels’) to serve the construction industry, and the leaders in this industry successfully navigated the transition from steam to gasoline to diesel-electric drives in the period from the mid-1800’s through 1950. Then, between the 1950s and 1970s they were suddenly crushed by the rapid emergence of new companies building hydraulic-actuated equipment. Hydraulics established itself in the niche of small, maneuverable tractor-based digging machines used by building contractors to do utility hookup work in the massive post-war building boom, and then quickly scaled up, switched to track-based drives, and grew to all but eliminate cable-driven shovels at the large end of the market. I remember as a kid seeing old rusting cable-driven shovels scattered around, and I remember in the early 1980’s that the cellar hole for my grandparents’ house was dug by a local guy with a yellow backhoe, and I remember tracked hydraulic excavators gradually becoming an everyday thing, but I never put it all together as an example of disruptive innovation.

One of the neat things about my mother being a kids’ book author is that she has an infinite collection of old picture books, and Z has been the beneficiary of that. One of his favorites is Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever, originally published in 1963. There’s not much electronics in it (he wouldn’t recognize the television set even if we had one, and we haven’t bothered to teach him what the telephones are), and the cars look a bit funny with tailfins and the like, but otherwise it’s surprisingly mostly relevant. So in light of the excavation example in Christensen’s book, I was interested to see how different things are on the ‘Work Machines’ page, showing construction equipment:

The cable-driven ‘shovel’ is the most prominent piece of equipment in the lower left. There is only one machine that’s clearly hydraulic, the clunky-looking yellow ‘tractor shovel’ in the upper right. The apparently chain-driven mobile ‘bucket loader’ on the right is a piece of equipment I’m not familiar with at all, and it’s not clear how the ‘tractor scraper’ at upper right is actuated. The most interesting thing to me is the bulldozer in the upper left, whose blade appears to be raised by a cable-pulley arrangement rather than by hydraulics. I can dimly remember from when I was a kid that bulldozers often had cable winches on the back, but I never put the pieces together that originally the winch would have been used to raise the blade, and when I asked my dad confirmed that this was indeed the norm back in the day. Having done a moderate amount of earthwork using small equipment, I can imagine how the inability to apply down-pressure using the blade would be a major limitation in the usefulness of a bulldozer, so hydraulics must have been a revelation when they came along.

According to wikipedia, the Fresno scraper was invented in 1883, and it was a major innovation – for millenia the state of the art had been picks, shovels, wheelbarrows, and carts, but in the fevered pace of the industrial era the Fresno quickly evolved into the tractor scraper, dozer, and other modern equipment. When I was a kid my grandparents had a small yellow John Deere bulldozer; it was kind of a joke that it belonged to my grandmother, because my grandfather got it for (himself for) her birthday. They used it for clearing and firewood-harvesting around the land, and it was generally underpowered and marginal for our needs. The blade angle was manual, and by the time I was old enough to run it one of the steering brakes had stopped working, so it was like one of those old cheap RC cars where the way to go left was to go backwards and turn. But the blade raise/lower was at least hydraulic, and on contemplating this history I have a new appreciation for it. It’s remarkable how much even a mundane-seeming area of technology can improve in a fraction of a lifetime!

2020 experiments with staple crops

As the spring of 2020 took its pandemic-crimped shape and grocery stores emptied of various basic items, I resolved to expand our plantings as a sort of Victory Garden for the times. In the previous post I described reclaiming a box of sprouted red potatoes from the basement in the early spring, which produced some good-sized tubers before the Fourth of July, and we had a good harvest of our main potato crop as well. I also experimented this year with other staple-type crops; results are summarized below.

The spot I used had been a chunk of gently north-sloping land alongside the driveway. Years ago I put up a sign at the end of the drive saying ‘wood chips wanted’. Nothing happened for several weeks, and then suddenly about 100 cubic yards of chips showed up one afternoon, from a crew that was clearing somewhere nearby. We gradually pulled from the pile, a wheelbarrow or trailerload at a time, to mulch the garden and other plants around the place, to the point where the piles diminished and rotted and started to grow up in weeds and sod, So this spring I spread the remaining chips around, tilled the area with a 5′ PTO tiller, and fenced it in, enclosing perhaps a thousand square feet or a bit more. The underlying soil is perhaps a foot of very finely packed silt overlying a prodigious depth of remarkably coarse beachlike sand.

Dry Beans

We’ve always gone through a lot of black beans, and I remember when I was a kid we grew dry beans of various types (including large spotted ones I remember as ‘Jacob’s Catalog’ beans), and even had an 8×8′ square room to hang and dry them in a shed that was known as ‘the bean room’, so on the spur of a moment I figured to give it a shot. For seed I used the organic black beans we buy in bulk, first soaking a small handful (maybe half a cup?); then I planted a 25′ row of newly turned ground. I didn’t have bean inoculant and didn’t think to put on the clover inoculant that I had, so they were on their own for nitrogen fixation. They didn’t grow spectacularly by appearance, but did set pods and dry down partially in the row. As they started to die back I cut them off with pruning shears to avoid pulling out soil and rocks (as suggested by Carol Deppe), tied them in bunches, and hung them under a porch to dry further. Later in the fall I thrashed/threshed them in a metal trash can, winnowed with a box fan, and recovered pretty much exactly a quart of nice black beans, weighting out at 716 grams. If the row spacing were 2.5′, this corresponds to 123 grams per square meter or 511kg/1100lb per acre. Online I see the label on a bag of Goya dry black beans, stating the energy content of black beans as 150kCal per 44 gram serving, and at this rate my little row turned in a productivity rate sufficient to feed 2.3 adults per acre. In a national comparison, it appears that the biggest bean-producing area in the US is in northeastern North Dakota, and this source shows ~1500lb per acre dryland or ~3500lb/acre irrigated in North Dakota (using narrower row spacings and presumably plenty of soluble Haber-process nitrogen). So 1100 lb/acre from a spur-of-the-moment experiment yielding subjectively scrawny looking plants doesn’t seem like a bad result for a first try. One of these cold weekends I’ll make a nice pot of chili using them and some of the frozen corn we grew.

Corn

The main expansion of our staple crops this summer was in corn. After a successful experiment several years ago growing fedco’s Wapsie Valley field corn in a patch inside the orchard fence in Five Islands, I resolved to plant a sizeable patch in the newly enclosed garden area of about 750 square feet. I also tilled and reclaimed our old strawberry bed, amounting to about 600 square feet, which had gone over to grass and weeds, and we planted this in sweet corn. Both sites sloped gently but consistently to the north, so we arranged the rows diagonally cross-slope with a gentle curve to match the lay of the land, which turned out to be a good move. I planted the field corn after soaking the seeds and letting them germinate a bit, and used a 32″ row spacing. I don’t remember the timing, but it was a bit after the oak leaves were the size of squirrel’s ears. When the plants were 8″ or so I thinned them in the rows, though perhaps not enough. For side-dressed fertilizer, an experiment I alternated rows between our own screened compost and ‘pro-grow’ commercial organic fertilizer; I don’t remember the dosing but I did read the bag and do some math. For the compost I put maybe a drywall bucket on each row. As the plants grew I ran the BMX-bike wheelhoe cultivator down the rows and raked the loose soil up around the plants in rows, which turned out to be a good thing.

Here’s a photo of the field corn at about the point where it was emerging; the salvaged potatoes are in the foreground along with some extra broccoli in pots, and the single row of beans is between the potatoes and the corn. The sweet corn is in the lower bed hidden behind the near solar panels. The window sash tents have summer squash under them.

Kelsey planted a big crop of sweet corn in the lower bed, three different maturity types that I bought at the feed store in Windham. She used perhaps a bit wider row spacing and leaving the plants closer together within the rows, and it worked out fine. I believe I dosed the sweet corn with both compost and pro-gro, though not a particularly heavy dose of either. It was all knee-high well before the fourth of July, and as needed I irrigated both patches overhead using the oscillating lawn sprinkler arrangement I described in the previous post. Here is the sweet corn from the north, with the field corn between the solar panels and the back of the greenhouse; the tall stakes that accept the oscillating sprinkler setup are visible in this and the previous photo:

While overall the summer was dry, sometime just as the sweet corn was starting a tropical storm blew in, with several inches of heavy rain and a strong southeast wind. Here the differences between the field and sweet corn became apparent. While a handful of stalks of the Wapsie Valley corn were leaned over into the neighboring row, the stand was largely intact. On the other hand, large swaths of the sweet corn was lodged almost all the way down in a chaotic mat, though the plants gamely re-oriented their tops vertically and still produced a decent crop. There were a few small washed spots from the massive flow of rainwater, but nothing a shovelful of soil couldn’t patch – all in all the terraced rows did their job and preserved the soil. I thought I planted plenty deep enough, but the field corn put out weird alien-like root fingers just above the soil even though I hilled it up substantially with a leaf rake a couple times; it occurred to me that if I had planted in slight hoed depressions those strange root things might have taken hold and further stabilized the stalks.

Like strawberries, over the course of the harvest the sweet corn went from a revelation to a treat to a bounty to a chore; To Everything There Is a Season. We ate plenty right out of the pot, kept cooked ears in the fridge for a snack, and froze several gallons of cut kernels for winter. As each variety wore itself out I cut it down in place (using a sharp chef’s knife as a machete; though I lived in fear of hitting something hard an nicking it, in practice it worked well) and raked up the pieces for the compost pile. As summer went on the field corn started to brown up and the ears to dry; at some point Z and I started harvesting a row at a time into marked paper bags for the fertilizer experiment. I dried the ears on the attic floor, and cut and piled the stalks so I could replant the area in rye and red clover. Chopping them became a chore; I ended up laying them in the back of the truck with the thick ends backward and attacking the pile with a brush knife on a Stihl clearing saw. This turned out to be loud, heavy, nerve-racking work, as I was loathe to hit the bed or tailgate with the spinning brush blade so I had to repeatedly pull the mass of wet stalks backward out of the bed once I’d cut it off short. It would have been preferable to either chop and rake them in the field like the sweet corn or get a functional chipper/shredder (more petroleum, or maybe REbus?), but I got it done, and it did result in a large compost bin that steams on frosty mornings from the life within. Here we are gathering the knife-cut sweet corn, headed for the compost:

Regarding the fertilizer experiment, at one point when the stalks were around head-high there appeared to be a visible difference in height and color between the compost and commercially-fertilized rows, but this became less apparent later on. It was more apparent in the crop yield, where particularly in the middle of the bed the ears seemed smaller and wimpier in the compost rows. After leaving the ears to dry in the attic until early January, I reassembled Holly’s antique cast iron corn sheller to the pedal power stand and shelled out the corn, one row at a time so I would have some datapoints to compare the compost to the ProGro. One problem with the sheller is that kernels fly off at high speed in every direction; in contrast to the hastily-assembled setup we used at Cider several years ago, I put a bit more time into it. I used a thick flitch of applewood for the structure, and made a decent see-through enclosure using scrap 8mm twinwall polycarbonate left over from the greenhouse project. (The grain mill is in the foreground; the idea is that the plywood platform can be slid off the T-slot frame and reversed to mill flour, but in the end it’s kind of cluttered so I will probably make a separate plywood base for the grain mill)

The new setup allowed me to capture the grain from each row and clean out the sheller between rows. I then weighed using a kitchen scale and put all the data in a spreadsheet. The overall yield of the plot was 28.1kg for 729 square feet of garden area (plus 1kg of chicken-grade grain and 6kg of cobs). The yield of prime grain corresponds to 1680 kg per acre overall; however there was a marked difference in yield between the compost rows and the ProGro rows. The rows were not all the same length, so I normalized per foot of row, and calculated on an area basis (the row spacing was 32″). The compost rows yielded an average of 1250 kg/acre, while the ProGro rows yielded an average of 2120 kg/acre. According to a Bob’s Red Mill package, cornmeal yields 140 Calories per 38 grams; at this rate the corn plot grew food at a rate sufficient to feed 8.5 people per acre; the breakdown was 6.3 people per acre for the compost and 10.7 people per acre for ProGro. It appears that the national average corn yield (heavily fertilized) is around 180 bushels or ~4600kg/acre, able to feed 23 people per acre (if people ate corn rather than pork and whatnot).

The difference in yield between the compost and ProGro rows is clearly visible in the graph. (The rows run more or less east-west and the first row is to the south; the 10th short row got both compost and ProGro). There seems to be a general trend of lower yield in the middle of the bed for both fertilizer types; this could be related to the soil, which was not entirely uniform, or possibly greater sunlight at the edges, though the first row to the south had nearly the lowest yield. That row may have been competing with the dry beans and some sunflowers the kids planted to the south, or it may not have been sufficiently reached by the sprinkler, or who knows what. There were a couple rows in the middle where the yield on the compost rows was noticeably poor; many plants did not produce an ear and those that did were gimpy and weird. Given that this was unimproved soil that had been under a giant pile of woodchips for a decade, I am going to assume some deficiency in the soil that wasn’t compensated by the fertilizer. I shelled out the corn on a rainy day so the weights above are before winnowing; on the other hand I went at each ear pretty scrupulously with a spoon gouge (hi Brandon!) to eliminate any partially chewed or moldy kernels, so there’s probably another kilo or two I still need to sweep up off the shop floor and grind up coarsely for the neighbor’s chickens.

I thought perhaps I didn’t thin ruthlessly enough given the limited fertility; however there’s no sign of this in the data; if anything yield seems to be higher with more plants per foot in the row, though if you squint at the data you could imagine that row 10 was spaced too tightly.

I think I remember Gene Logsdon’s book saying that 100 bushels per acre was a reasonable goal for open-pollinated organic corn, and we’re at 66 average on the first try. Given that this was raw soil and we haven’t done so much as a single soil test or cover crop, I’m not going to feel too bad about the subcommercial yield here. Pretty much every part of the process of growing field corn is fun, particularly the shelling, which is amazingly easy and satisfying – I’m confident that with one person to pedal and one person to feed, the bike-powered sheller could process well over a ton of grain per day. I expect I’ll come back to growing field corn from time to time and keep puttering with the techniques.

Winter Rye

In another unplanned staple crop experiment, after having some grading and smoothing work done around the yard the previous summer, I planted rye and clover in the fall of 2019 to stabilize the soil for winter. There were two small plantings, one of southerly aspect but heavily shaded by trees, and the other more open but steeply sloping to the north. I had meant to mow down the rye in the spring, but as the events of 2020 unfolded with flour shortages in the groceries I decided to let it grow, and at least in some places it made a nice-looking stand, though thin and weedy in others. After it browned in midsummer I cut it down with my grandfather’s scythe, and gathered the cut stems in a large tarp which I wrapped and hung with light rope from the porch ceiling like a giant lumpy slug.

Over the course of the summer and fall I tinkered with a pedal-powered threshing contraption, consisting of a horizontal shaft oriented concentrically inside a 5-gallon bucket, with various choppers and flails on the shaft, vaguely inspired by this farmhack video. While we demonstrated the possibility of pedal threshing, in these socially-distant times I soon resorted to a fractional-horsepower 1800rpm induction motor borrowed from a wood lathe. The thresher did function ok, separating the grain with good yield, but it was slow, cloggy, and not entirely satisfactory overall. I was keen to have a continuous, flow-through process rather than batch mode, but with the horizontal shaft there was little (besides the pitch angle of the internal wooden beaters and the draft angle of the molded bucket) to progress the grain and chaff through and out. I think if I were to incline the whole flow arrangement at 30-45 degrees from the horizontal it would feed better, perhaps at some cost in grain yield. The fundamental issue seems to be that I am relying on a statistical process of chaotic whirling around as opposed to a systematic scrubbing or shredding action to reliably separate the grain from the heads. I’ve since done some online research into what the innards of an actual threshing unit look like, and the rotating part is surprisingly crude – variations on a theme in a rotating drum or cylinder with metal pegs or bolt heads sticking out. The subtlety seems to be in the ‘concave’, a slatted metal screen that envelops the cylinder and disposes the stems and heads against the cylinder while allowing the threshed grain to escape through the screen as it is threshed. The flow is sheetwise circumferential around the drum for a fraction of the circumference; there also seems to be subtlety in the airflow and various recirculation mechanisms to give partially threshed material a second pass through the threshing mechanism. For my purposes, it would seem that axial flow would be easier to tune in a hack-y development mode. Anyway, here are views of the inlet and outlet ends of the bucket mechanism I used:

As with the beans, I winnowed the rye using a window box fan and screened the remainder to get clean grain. All in all I extracted about 8 pounds of rye grain from what appears on google maps to have been around .05 acre, with perhaps another 2 pounds in a contractor bag of unthreshed grain that I saved for future experiments. This amounts to a pretty thin harvest on the order of 200lb/acre; in the plains it appears that 20-40 bushels per acre (1,100-2,200lb/acre) is typical for rye, though it appears to be considered something of a marginal crop there and may not get much attention. I won’t beat myself up too much over this unintentional crop on poor soil, but it would be interesting to see what can be done with reasonable effort. As noted above I planted the field corn patch to rye and clover after the harvest, and the area is now a cheerful low mat of green, so we may get a better experiment next year.

At some point Z got his hands on an ear of dry corn; he was really excited about it so I didn’t take it away from him; for anyone concerned about data integrity, the data points for row 10 should be a touch higher…

New Year’s Day 2021; composting diapers

On Friday the 1st the temperature briefly crept above freezing, and I took advantage to compost the diapers that have been accumulating since we shut off the irrigation system in the fall. Somehow it often seems convenient to do this process on holidays; I wrote about it last summer on July 4. In winter this involves stretching out about 200′ of hose from the utility sink in the blue room, and then quickly draining it afterwards before it gets too cold. Anyway, here’s the setup:

The wooden double compost bins were inspired by Holly’s much more elegant system in Somerville; I made these from untreated pine boards Dave had sawed in Five Islands. The near one has two 4′ boxes and is our general household and garden compost; the far one is a bit smaller and I use it for the brown diapers and only spread that compost under trees etc.

The process is pretty simple; I throw some dirt or aged compost in the brown trash can, start the hose running in the can, and dump in the liners a few at a time. Then I mix the contents with a pitchfork (we rip each liner lengthwise when we put them in the cat litter buckets, which allows the dessicant to flow out easily when mixed). I then bail the resulting slurry into the compost bin using a drywall bucket, stirring and mixing in layers with typical compost makings, including fallen leaves, garden cleanup rakings, and household scraps. The resulting pile cooks down quickly, fills with legions of vigorous pink worms, and becomes nice compost in just a few weeks of non-freezing weather.

Unfortunately the company that makes the liners (g-diaper brand) seems to have succumbed to the pandemic global logistics chaos, and is no longer distributing in the US. AC laid in a store early last year, and hopefully they last us until Z is out of the diaper stage, but there are other systems that appear similar. 18 months in I still strongly recommend this system for folks with big gardens who would otherwise buy in soil fertility.

On the use of land: A second look at Second Nature

At some point in college I came by a copy of Michael Pollan’s first book, Second Nature, about gardens and humans’ relationship to the natural world.  I may have stolen it from my parents’ coffee table, or found it lying around the cozy, fervent MIT cooperative where I lived.   Having been raised by former NOLS instructors on tofu, Thoreau, and Edward Abbey, and on the other hand undertaking at the time an intense education in technology, quantitation, and innovation (electronic paper, 3D printing, underwater drones, implanted medical devices…), the book stuck with me (‘planted a seed’, you might say), and played a part in leading me to these apple trees, this blog, and this post.

Briefly, ‘Second Nature’ presents contemporary environmental thinking about land as a sort of absolutist madonna/whore dichotomy between a few remaining preserved gems of ‘pure’ wilderness and the surrounding matrix of ordinary, ‘degraded’ territory, and Pollan pronounces this absolutist distinction barren – both literally and conceptually.  As an alternative he sets forth the garden as a more fruitful metaphor, both for feeding ourselves and for thinking about interactions between humans and the natural world.  Re-reading after over 20 (!) years, the book is thoughtful, engaging, and still has a good argument to make, one that resonates with my life.

Certainly Wilderness was a guiding star of my youth.  Though my parents were raised in or near cities on both coasts, they met high in the Rockies as mountaineering instructors, and mixed in among the ordinary homesteading tools there were strange artifacts about – wood-handled ice axes, oval carabiners, and hanks of rattle-stiff old goldline. Practically before we could walk, my sister and I had full-sized Kelty framepacks waiting for us, and I remember the pride of finally being (marginally) big enough to carry mine.  Many summers we road-tripped to Wyoming to hike high into the mountains, disappearing across the continental divide where sometimes we’d go a week without seeing another party.

And since my parents ‘settled down’ pretty far off the beaten path, my sister and I grew up two miles from the nearest other kids, as part of the broader back-to-the-land movement which was in conscious opposition to the industrial practices of modern life.  Growing up this way I came to see wilderness as Real, bracing and constant against the artificiality of television, plastic toys, and social cliques.  The mountains we trekked through offered arresting beauty in reward for skill and hard work.  The rock is enduring, the weather uncaring, the alpine trees strong and patient. Wilderness offers a tough but objective test – you either keep your gear dry or you don’t, you make it over the pass or you don’t, and the consequences flow directly from the nature of unvarnished reality. In wilderness it’s clear that the universe doesn’t care about you, but it’s fair and its rules are legible – in that way it’s far superior to junior high.

But, you can’t cultivate a rock.  You can’t eat a view.  As a species we are 7 billion people, ten thousand years down a one-way experiment in intensive food-making, culture-building, and technology-refining, and we’ve been pretty darned sophisticated at it for thousands of years.  For who we are, wilderness is an education, perhaps a vacation, but not a career – while it’s certainly a nice place to visit, we just can’t live there anymore.

Where we live is the industrial economy, and how we live there is mechanized agriculture and massive flows of energy.  The surface experience of modern life in the developed world often obscures this – our skills are transferrable, our communities virtual, our finances digital.  But this is, if not an illusion, an epiphenomenon of the stability, specialization, and efficiency of the underlying physical systems.  Until we upload our consciousness into silicon (as the Singularity squad devoutly wishes), we remain stubbornly physical creatures – to see this clearly look no further than last spring’s run on toilet paper.

The toilet paper thing is a sort of nervous joke, but I mean this in a broad and serious way. We don’t actually have a post-industrial society; we just got so efficient at manufacturing buildings and cars and appliances and electronics that as a society we have enough bandwidth for many of us to toodle around with apps and stuff. Nor in physical terms do we actually have a post-agricultural society – we just got so efficient at agriculture (efficient in economic terms, by using a ton of fossil energy) that we had enough extra wealth/calories to build an industrial society.  The foundation of the information age is hyper-efficient manufacturing, and the foundation of industry is hyper-efficient agriculture, and the foundation of all of it is cheap energy. And the fact that the environmental impact of our lives is largely hidden by offshore manufacturing and high-voltage transmission lines does not make it go away.

Grappling in a real and quantitative way with human environmental impact seems to be what Second Nature is missing. Published two years before Pollan’s book, Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature introduced the US mainstream to concrete and present reality of global warming.  But Pollan doesn’t engage materially with climate change, or really with other large-scale environmental problems. Perhaps this is because he leans so heavily on the crisp dichotomy between wild and impacted land, which was at the very moment of his writing being ruptured by the all-permeating reach of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Pollan was right that wilderness is not a solution for sustaining 7 billion people, and that necessarily the way forward is to thoughtfully cultivate our world (enough of it to live on).  But his book has precious little to say about actually producing sustenance. After a promising beginning among the truck farms of Long Island, the book takes long excursions into the social class implications of rose varieties, the moralistic overtones of compost, and the excesses of seed catalogues, and in the end seems to be more about aesthetics than substance, more about landscaping than actually producing food, fuel, or fiber.  His primary concern seems to be how a well-read suburbanite can display his good taste.

This disappoints me because I believe that the actual physical substance of how we live matters.  To be sure, what we feel and proclaim matter also – aesthetics, symbols, and statements move minds, but minds are also subject to myopia, hypocrisy and wishful thinking.  Rock-bottom physical reality matters at least as much, because all the while as we think and symbolize and post and upvote, inexorably we eat, we heat, we travel (or used to), we buy, and we build, and the effects are real, quantitative, physical. Our microprocessors require electricity, our fingers quit typing much below room temperature, and our lofty professional and aesthetic goals are stubbornly dependent on a pound dryweight of bread, butter, and beans, daily with scant interruption.  We remain tied, physically and therefore ethically, to the land.

Where then should we live, and how should we live there?  Where? There’s no point getting prescriptive about it; we are 7.6 billion now, we take up a lot of space already, and this Covid time is no season to encourage folks moving around.  We should live in our communities.  Urbanites have their own clear paths to low-impact living: density, bicycles, and a thoughtful diet go a long way. For those of us who live in the countryside, the risks and possibilities are broader.

I live in Maine.  Because our state has the lowest population density east of the Mississippi, many of us live on sizeable chunks of land.  While most people in the developed world externalize the environmental impact of their lives, still land and sunlight are the ultimate sources of our sustenance, and the impact does not go away just because we can’t see it.  So for those of us fortunate enough to own acreage, it’s worth thinking about how our land could sustainably produce some of the basic stuff of human life.

I have written much here of my frustration with the consumer model of citizenship. Not that I want to live as a survivalist, guarding a field of turnips with an assault rifle, but nor am I satisfied to be merely a specialized cog in the global industrial machine. Because my life impacts the planet, because land and nature are the ultimate source of our sustenance, and because I have land, I am interested in stewardship.  Because the path humanity is on is not sustainable, I am interested in experimenting and modeling other paths – ways to be productive, physically, of vital goods in a sustainable way and at a meaningful scale.

I say ‘experimenting’ because generally this sort of project won’t make a whole lot of conventional financial sense; it’s more like a hobby with a larger purpose. Why? Food is cheap, real estate is expensive, and the cash economy is lucrative. When a small buildable lot of an acre or so sells for $50-$100k,  basically nothing (except cannabis) can be done agriculturally to match the economics of development.  Still there is a sadness in old farms going to forest or to subdivisions. To be sure, when the railroads spread across the nation, it made economic sense to move production of grain and beans from rocky New England farms to Ohio, Illinois, and Kansas, but nothing came to replace the vitality that went out of the places then. But should the gods of the market dictate next that the staff of life should move on further, to be produced entirely in Brazil or Mongolia, will we then clothe Iowa in condos, and keenly await the grain ships as the Romans did?

In this modern first-world life, our food, shelter, warmth, transportation, and electricity all come from the global economy, which is 80% fossil-powered.  Our land lies fallow as we heat our homes with petroleum, eat supermarket food grown with Haber-process nitrogen, and build with lumber trucked in from Canada or beyond. Those of us with the freedom to choose should contemplate instead how we might do better by thoughtful use of our land. What practices can I take up, such that if if my neighbors and my bioregion followed suit, the result would be a stronger community, a more vital countryside, and a gentler impact on the broader world? What sustenance and beauty could we bring forth, and what might that do for our health, our communities, and our planet?  

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One interesting consequence of the intersection of ubiquitous internet search and ubiquitous aerial imagery is that it isn’t hard to go looking and find places that would previously have remained literary abstractions.  So without much effort I was able to find the western Connecticut property that was the centerpiece of Pollan’s book.  And in 2021 only the barest hints of the hardscrabble dairy farm he describes are visible.  From the air and the street we have what appears to be a typical high-end exurban home in the woods, with more-tasteful-than-average landscaping.  The only hint of anything out of the ordinary is a few raised beds, heavily shaded by large trees. Like so many former New England growers, Pollan has picked up and moved west, and the forest has largely reclaimed his efforts.