23 July

Today I brought in our first figs. Which seems quite late, to me, although I only really have one season to go by. Seems to me the fig harvest had come and gone by this time last year, but I can't remember. Regardless of how early or late they are, the trees are full, and we should have fresh figs for a couple of weeks now. I never much cared for Fig Newtons or similar things, but a fresh fig and a dried one are about as similar as a grape and a raisin. Fresh off the tree, they're tender, sweet, and oddly cool in the middle, and as they don't keep well fresh off the tree is the best way to eat them.

It's a particularly hot and relatively dry summer so far, and although the beginning of next week now looks to have some chance for rain, showers have skirted us just about every chance they've had. In July we've received not quite half an inch of rain; combined with daily highs that have never been below 92 and often near 100, everything on the farm is dry. The "lawn" such as it is is quite brown; the vegetable beds get watered every day (way too often, frankly) so they don't dry out, but even at that our cucumbers and melons are showing the signs of water stress--fat on one end, misshapen and lumpy on the other. The cukes make fine pickles whatever they look like, but it would be nice to get consistent rain. Something about rain manages to keep everything watered and happy so much better than water from the hose.

Unfortunately with the heat and drought (a very localised drought; the airport up the road and the high school in town both have received over two inches of rain this month) the young trees are suffering, too. We lost the magnolia this month, and the Halesia (I can't recall what the common name is anymore, silverbell or snowbell or something) has died back to the ground--although it still has two live shoots at ground level so I'm holding out hope. I've built little earthen dams around the trees that are out of range of the hose (baldcypress and red maple), and both seem fine for now. The dogwood up by the driveway has been showing serious signs of stress but I water it most days now and it's looking better. To my great joy the two weeping cherries I put in for Smittywife both look happy.

A larger problem is the orchard. I can reach every tree in the orchard with the hose and water them every other day, which is acceptable but in the long run (that is to say, after this season) I need irrigation. Irrigation is expensive, and I'll have to do the work myself. I just need someone to donate some pvc pipe and maybe a well pump. I'd apply for a USDA grant... if I could figure out whether they even offer such things. Their website is a total nightmare. Perhaps I should just call the local office, if there is one. Or perhaps I should just stay out of the USDA's way; last thing I need is someone tramping by to look over the chicken coop and decree my eggs not clean enough to sell. (Good thing we give them away.)

Now it's off to cut back the flower garden (the cosmos have mostly flowered and died, leaving a forest of four foot tall sticks amid a riot of crabgrass) and try to find a long enough piece of 2x4 to finish the railing on the back stoop. Late shift tonight at work.

A thought

I want to have a blog. But I clearly have not been blogging (despite having one). I don't know why that is, or whether it matters. It's not that I want to be "a blogger," which I don't think carries any special cachet. It's more a case of, I want some place to dump comments about life, and maybe provide a public forum to motivate myself. If I say I want to do X, and I'm going to write about it on the blog by Y date, then I have that hanging over me. I can't let myself be embarrassed, right?

Then again, maybe motivation should be more readily available within than that. But if it isn't there's no sense throwing away an opportunity.

But I've also started writing again on two fiction projects, and I spend little enough time on that already. Part of my problem with blogging is that I spend so much time on a typical post it eats up time I could use more productively on other writing projects. This is all worth pondering. Fortunately I have a wonderful vacation with Smittywife coming up (starts tomorrow!), during which I can ponder all I like. And there will be pictures to post when I get back, so I can do that, and then see where it goes.

Lettuce!

Gardening is an activity requiring at times extraordinary patience. Really, growing anything requires patience, but sometimes it' tough to wait. We've had the pea plants in the bed outside since early March and only in the last two days have we finally gotten a flower. We'll probably be swimming in peas before too long, but it's already the latter half of April. We wanted peas last month. But we must wait.

That makes lettuce maybe the easiest and most fun thing to grow. Leaf lettuce in particular you can harvest a month after planting, sometimes sooner. Here is our first major haul.

We have three lettuce blends (they sell lettuce mixes in packets these days, which is nice, since there are about 100 kinds and you don't want to buy dozens of seed packets and try to mix them). One is still out in the pea bed awaiting harvesting (the arugula bolted to seed already, it's barely been out there five weeks), and this is our master chef blend. We don't know what's in it, but it's tasty. Made salad last night with a selection of leaves, and today, in order to resow our hot-season lettuce blend, we went ahead and pulled all of these out. Rinsed and stored in a plastic bag in the fridge they'll last as long as any salad mix from the store, but this here represents about a dime's worth of lettuce seed instead of two or three $3.79 bags of lettuce. Sweet!

Spring!

Spring is, apart from the clouds highly allergenic pollen, a glorious time of the year. Though my favorite season has always been autumn, it's tough to find much bad to say about spring. This year we've had some lovely flowers--including the forsythia that has become the new top image. I thought I'd just go post a whole bunch of flower pictures, because who couldn't use some color?

Early in the spring we get these little flowers in the yard. All over the yard. What they are I can't say, as it's difficult to even identify the plant they're coming out of. But they are rather charming.



Most years, daffodils (and jonquils, which I cannot tell apart) are one of the harbingers of spring. These here grow in the ditch down by the road, oddly enough, though some folks have them all over the yard. This year everything bloomed almost simultaneously, so the daffodils had to share the spotlight.



Last year I dug up a wild violet that was growing in area I wanted to till up for the garden. I planted it in our flower bed by the house. This spring it was one of the first plants to flower, and what do you know, it's a white violet. How cool! It's one of only a couple in the yard.



Most violets are, of course, violet. These are growing on the hillside between the fig tree and the car ramps. There are violets all over the yard, as they like the shade, but last spring (2008 was very dry) most of them didn't bloom. This year we were treated to a real show.



We bought some native blueberries this year, and--hooray!--they've bloomed. Such cute little flowers, though I do wonder how they get pollinated.



Parts of the yard are full of wild strawberries. They have very cute little flowers, but I have no idea whether we'll get fruit from them. Still, it's nice to have the chance.


In a normal year, these crocusses (or whatever they are) would bloom earlier than most other flowers. This year, they're one of the latest things to start blooming. Early or late it hardly matters when you get these little stars coming up in the yard for free.



This is a native columbine Smittywife planted last year. We got a bloom or two out of it, but wow is it happy this year.



This is a wallflower. We put two or three of these plants in the flower garden last year. They were nice--the flowers open creamy yellow, and as they age they go through peach and pink to lavender. That in and of itself is fun enough, but the plants just took hold and grew all year, and the one of them, this year, is huge, and covered in blooms. We keep meaning to buy more of these because they clearly like it here. We bought two of the multicolored one here, and they've been blooming for almost a solid month now--and should continue right through summer. We also bought one bright orange one, which I like, but which isn't as healthy. However, through some quirk of genetics, there is one bright orange flower on this plant.


Right now, the stars of the yard are our azaleas, which ring an old oak stump next to the driveway. And of course, the two happy dogs, they're stars, too.



The pink azaleas bloom a week before the white ones. Who knows why? But it does mean that there's only a matter of a few days when you get both in bloom at once. Aren't they nice?




What more is there to say? I'm tragically allergic to azaleas--I mean, really bad. But even I would gladly take more of these.




I close with this close-up of the flowers. Such beauty in such profusion--and for such a short time. Part of why spring and fall are such wonderful seasons is their fleeting nature. Just for a couple of weeks we get display, but it's worth waiting the entire rest of the year for.

A Period of Time

Okay, let's see here.
I got sick and wasn't able to go to a checkride.
I decided I needed to take time off to figure out what was going wrong viz flying.
I dived into garden/farm work, building vegetable beds, sprouting seeds, tilling the orchard by hand, planting roses, all sorts of things.
I realized that was really all I wanted to do anyway, but you can't earn a living doing it.
Then spring came.
We put all the seeds out, and I spent the next week trying to save them from the hottest spring on record (highs approached 90 in the days after the seedlings went into the ground). Nonetheless many of them scorched badly, and we lost several, although those have since been replaced and the ones that survived seem to be doing well enough.
I continued building additional vegetable beds until I ran out of compost and topsoil, and we still have several plants that I haven't put in the ground yet for lack of a place to put them. (More work is required here.)
I sought help for my self-sabotaging ways.
We acquired several baby chicks (mostly Ameraucanas) and continue raising them.
I agreed to re-interview for a job I was offered two years ago; the interview in a couple of weeks.
We went to the zoo on a day off and had a lovely time.
We joined friends for a fun night out ruined by incompetent restaurant management.
We watched some people on Spring Break decide to slide down a waterfall, nearly break bones, and then try to avoid getting arrested (only unlike when something similar happened to me several years ago, the signs prohibiting this were clearly posted).
We reveled in the beauty of Spring.

There. I blogged about it. Now, apart from the spring flower pictures, we can move into the present.

Spring has Sprung!

So much has been going on lately on the farm I haven't actually had time to blog! What kind of a farm blog is this, huh? But I have pictures and stuff, finally, and perhaps tomorrow or this afternoon I'll actually get some posts written. I promise!

Health Care Overhaul Passes; Glum Republicans Note Failure of World to End

Film at eleven.
I'm not exactly thrilled with the legislation, but it's a starting point. The next administration, perhaps, will take a better approach to reform, namely, fixing problems one at a time instead of trying to cobble together a massive bill that requires satisfying everyone in order to pass. We shall see.

This morning I went to purchase a monitor cable at my local electronics store. The sales clerk and a customer were having an agreement discussion. Both were clearly birthers. The customer even seemed to think the president was in fact the antichrist, though he was a bit confused about what all this meant. Clearly Obama was attempting to destroy the United States (really?), but he seemed to believe his election had been bought--by George W. Bush. Huh? To make himself look good, perhaps, but these people, sometimes they think Bush is Christ in the second coming, so maybe he funded the election of the antichrist in order to hasten armageddon. I don't know.

I love my farm. I like the area we live in, the neighborhood and the region. But there are some people here who I just wish would stay indoors, or better yet join together in a cult-commune and leave everyone else alone. It isn't that I don't like people who disagree with me; that would be most people. Disagreement is healthy. It's the people who are so full of hate and so desperate to justify themselves that they'll grasp at any ridiculous straw to validate their hatred. There seem to be more such people about these days than I'm used to, so I suppose the cult-commune would would have to be very large, but there are large tracts of open land in Kansas and Nebraska that are almost entirely depopulated. Loving County, Texas, has less than 50 people, that would be a great place for the commune. They could even secede, if they wanted. There are already buildings and stuff there, unoccupied. It could be the New Israel.

I think I'm going to go print up some brochures.

VI - Ain't That America

The foregoing fears aside, this is still America. We beat the Nazis. We beat the communists. People have been predicting the imminent doom of America’s global leadership at least since 1989, and certainly all through the Cold War before that. America is, as I said, an entrepreneurial society. We are terrifically well-educated (even if it is sometimes rational for voters to remain ignorant of policy) and creative, and we have solved a tremendous number of large, intractable problems in our nation’s history. If any country can get out of the mess I think we’re in, it’s us.

I don’t know how it’s going to happen. I expect to be surprised by it when it does. And I expect that it will involve sacrifice from all sectors of society, from everyone equally. I may take a dim view of the Baby Boom’s self-absorption, but I don’t think it’s a lost cause.

Still, I feel fairly specific about what’s wrong and what could happen if we do nothing. I have no specifics about why I still ought to have hope. But without hope we have nothing at all, a society around us full of sound and fury and empty of any definable meaning. And like I said, this is America. I hope we will be able to fix our problems—after all, it’s just debt. It’s just money, money we don’t have to spend, really. We can handle this one. But it’s going to require a lot of people to grow up. We need to find rational reasons for voters to pay more attention. We need to remind people that the stakes are very high for our government. And we have to get people to try to work together to solve this one overarching problem. And then, when it’s done, we can offer ourselves congratulations, slap each other the back, and go right back to yelling at each other on television. It shouldn’t be too hard.

Boy Choy! Garden beans!

That's it! I'm tired of waiting. The low Tuesday morning is predicted for 37, coldest day on the extended forecast. So once it warms up above 40 that morning, I'm setting the bok choy out in the garden beds. I don't know which bed, but I'm setting it out I say. And since it will be ready in about a month, I plan to enjoy delicious bok choy starting in May. It will be among the first things we get out of the garden (lettuce, and perhaps peas, will beat it to the table).

We are now looking into some shallot and garlic sets, because we can't find shallots anywhere in the entire upstate any more. If they do well, next year I'll plant a quarter acre of the things and sell them!

V - Fear of Inertia

What concerns me most is that on the small things, Congress seems able to pull together and pass legislation, but on major initiatives there are simply too many political points to be scored, and too many people will claim to be motivated by the pureness of their ideals which prevent them from supporting any form of compromise. And the things that matter right now for this country—the thing that matters—is so big, we’ll never find the collective political will to get it done.

We must reform the entitlement system. We have to, because if don’t, it will bankrupt us. And if it doesn’t bankrupt us, it will be because the few remaining workers in this country—my generation and the next one—are being taxed at 80% of their incomes to pay for them. Neither of these options is acceptable.

If the United States defaulted on its sovereign debt, it would plunge the globe into complete economic chaos. If we decide that we’re just going to pay out social security as planned to every baby boomer starting when they turn 65—and they’re all going to live into their 80s—we simply can’t come up with that money. I’m fairly certain global financial entities would prevent an actual sovereign default, but at severe cost both to the United States and to the global economic system. And who would stump up, anyway? Europe has the same pension and health care funding problems we do, and China already funds much of our sovereign debt. They may not want a default but at what point are the Chinese (and others) going to decide, okay, we’ll bail you out, but you have to do give us something in return? What would that something be? That’s what I fear.

I often think the nation-state model of global political organization is going to fall by the wayside during my lifetime—by the time I’m retiring I suspect the notion of a “distributed republic” won’t be a cyberpunk fantasy. The collapse of the U.S. government over failure to meet pension- and health care-related debt obligations would probably help push the nation-state model over the edge. I’m not sure that’s a bad thing, but for me personally and my family and friends, who live here, that’s a bit of a concern.

I just don’t know where the political will is going to come from to confront legions of social security and medicare recipients who grew up in a country that assured them they’d have a golden retirement parachute and tell them, you know what, we screwed up and we can’t pay you what we said we would. But it’s what we have to do. Social Security was supposed to be a safety net to prevent indigence among the elderly, particularly those elderly without other family who could support them. Instead it has become a guaranteed income—an income that most recipients think should be bigger, not smaller. The notion of families supporting elderly relatives has fallen entirely by the wayside, except in those cases where an ailing parent needs full-time care. Time was old folks lived with a child or other relative. Of course, people also didn’t live to the age of 85, either. But then, when Social Security was enacted, it was assumed that most people wouldn’t actually cash out of it—most workers would pass on by the age of 70, and those few who lived beyond that age would be balanced out by those who didn’t live to collect anything. The system no longer works that way, but then again, the system doesn’t work.

But this demographic time bomb has been ticking for thirty years, and the generation that stands both to benefit most from, and bankrupt the country from, the entitlement system has been in control of the levers of power since at least 1994. Not only has nothing been done to reform the system, the one time an attempt was made it was by a president who had no political capital to spend and couldn’t even get his own party to put a reform idea on the table, much less vote for one. (It’s the only thing I respect George W. Bush for, floating the idea of entitlement reform in 2005. It took guts, but he had very little to lose at that point; when he took office his popularity was already below 50% and voters were suffering buyers’ remorse.) If any one group deserves significant blame it’s the late 1990’s Clinton administration and GOP Congress, who had the best of times to work in—fat corporate profits, rising GDP and wages, the appearance of being able to accomplish major political action—and did less than nothing, didn’t even discuss the notion of entitlement reform. If we couldn’t find the will to start talking about it then, why would anyone think we’ll be able to deal with the problem in harder times?

I fear generational conflict—not so much armed conflict, though criminal conflict is possible, but a genuine political division between those benefiting from the entitlement system and those paying for it at tremendous cost to themselves. Any reform of the entitlement system is going to mean significantly less benefits for my generation and those to follow; that’s a given and one most of my generation accepts. So, since we know what the problem is, and we know we’ll have to sacrifice to fix it, the question is, will we be able to convince the baby boomers to accept any sacrifices themselves. Because if not, we’re doomed to fail. If the baby boomers won’t let us reform social security and medicare and cut their entitlements and the benefits they’ll receive, we will not solve this problem. The government may not fall—forces around the world would work to stop that—but that list of things I said I think government should be doing? Those will all fall by the wayside. Every dime spent will have to go to pensions and health care, and then, when my generation finally retires to a lower standard of living than our parents, the country will still be so mired in debt it will take at least another generation before we can start spending money on actual appropriate government activities again.

The entitlement system may not actually bankrupt the United States. But it will cause the U.S. to lose its position as the leading power in the world. I for one think we need to be fighting to keep that position, for our own good as well as the world’s; that means we have to fix our debt problem; and that means, like it or not, we have to cut middle class entitlements, cut them now, and cut them deep. And that, my friends, I don’t believe will ever happen.

191

I counted this morning. There are 191 seedlings in the house. Of course that includes some flowers and herbs, not just vegetables, but still, that's a lot of plants. And there are seeds, too--carrots, parsnips, and beans--that will be sown into the ground directly.
I'm targeting next Saturday as planting day. Smittywife will be home, the weather should be nice, and the extended forecasts will go through April 5. If there's no frost on the horizon then I think we'll be ready to plant. These poor seedlings, they're so ready to go outside! All 191 of them!

Hard Work

My goodness I'm going to be sore for the next few days.
So we have an orchard, out back behind the garage. I call it an orchard; right now it's actually only seven trees, five apples and two peaches. I call it an orchard as a sort of inspiration; in three or four years' time I see twenty plus trees extending down the hillside from the current orchard. But there's a lot of work between now and then.
When we bought the property, the land that is now the orchard was completely overgrown. A large nearby pecan tree had spread pecan saplings throughout the area, and those were mixed in with an assortment of small junipers and scrubby deciduous trees, one large old Bradford Pear (aka the Chinese Stinking Pear, Pyrus calleryana), vast stands of pokeweed, and a dense collection of broadleaved weeds, and the whole thing was overgrown with vines of all kinds: honeysuckle, poison ivy, greenbriar, and some sort of bramble that doesn't seem to produce actual blackberries. Last spring I rented a huge brushmower and, together with some friends, we cut all this crap down. There was a black willow back there, the only willow on the property, and we cut down trees and mowed weeds and hacked through brush until we reached the willow tree. This gave me about enough room to plant seven trees.
Of course we didn't cut down all the pecans, because we weren't sure what to do with the area yet. And those we did cut down sprouted from the stumps--as did the horrible pear, which was covered in half-inch thorns, more like spikes than thorns. I tried to keep the area mowed down to a reasonable level with my brushcutter, but it was a war of gradual attrition and I was never going to get ahead of the vines. The weeds and such I could handle; the vines I wanted gone, but a brushcutter won't cure that problem.
Then this December Smittywife and I broke down and bought six fruit trees: two peaches (an Elberta and a Belle of Georgia), two Yates apples, and two Arkansas Black apples (my favorite variety, although the Yates are terrific). They were five bucks each so it was tough to resist (we bought two blueberries at the same time, but they're in a different part of the yard). I planted all six trees in what I've begun calling the orchard (later we picked up a seventh, an Ein Shemer apple, which is an Israeli variety bred for drier weather), and mowed the area down with the brushcutter. But all those vines were still there.
Now it's getting to be time for us to set vegetables out, and despite having built six garden beds I've realized we don't have enough space to set out all our seedlings and sow some vegetables from seed, in particular bush beans (which I would like to have a lot of). I thought, why not till up the soil in the orchard and plant the beans in between the trees? Beans are good for the soil, and there's no soil in this yard that couldn't use some help. But oh, the vines. As soon as it warms sufficiently (it's already started), the honeysuckle will take over back there, and the poison ivy and bramble won't be far behind. Then there'll be the late-summer explosion of Sida rhombifolia, a weed which wouldn't be that bad if there wasn't so damn much of it.
The only way to handle this is to get rid of all the vines, which means pulling them out by the roots. This is hard under any circumstances (especially with bramble), but even tougher in heavy clay soils like we have here. And no matter how hard I tried I wouldn't get all of it. The only thing to do is till.
A tiller, however, is not something I own. Nor is it something I care to rent for the price they charge, and buying one, at over $500 (it has to be a rear-tine tiller or it will just skip off the clay), is out of the question. I have a pickaxe, though, and I've used it to plant most of the trees in the yard, and some of the roses, and to dig up the flowerbeds we put in last year. The flat blade of the pickaxe really breaks up the clay, and cuts through any roots or vines in the way.
And it only weighs about four pounds, so it's not heavy.
Until you've swung it for an hour straight into heavy clay and tree roots. I'm finally getting through all the roots from those pecans (and the evil pear) we cut down, so maybe they won't sprout again this year, but that takes some doing. And being sure I've cut through all the vines down to the roots, that takes some doing as well.
In three days I've managed to get about a quarter of the orchard tilled, maybe a third. It will be next week before I'm done. I may need more Aleve.
But you know, there's something wonderful about wearing yourself out doing physical labor. I feel so much better at the end of the day, even though I also feel worse. Either way, I'm not sure there's anything I'd rather be doing.