When I Put Down a Book Now

I am not sure which blog this post merits. The topic concerns a YA science-fiction trilogy I dropped half-way through its second book. Yet the topic here is more about how we choose to spend our time, our slow, curated time. So I think the rural-life blog is the place.

A student recommended it, and I really enjoyed the first book of the Arc of the Scythe books. The first I found fresh: instead of the typical YA dystopia, we get a flawed utopia, a perfect world of immortal humans overseen by a benevolent and sentient AI, The Thunderhead. It's a place without war, poverty, or serious crimes. If you become "deadish" you can be brought back in most cases. Climate change has been solved. 

 For SF that would be a boring concept, and a good novel needs tension, so we have the Scythes, a secretive order beyond The Thunderhead's power, each of them tasked to "Glean" 200 people per year. This, in theory, reduces human population and also introduces uncertainty into a perfect world. 

I loved the concept. That said, I put down the second book unfinished. Reading the plot of it and the final volume proved interesting, but not enough to continue. Why?

Lately, as I enter my last 30 years on this rock, I decided to say "NO" loudly to most books, movies, or TV that people say I simply must experience. I don't get as many of these "must do" orders nowadays about books; in fact, too many friends have stopped reading books and that horrifies me.

Frankly, a good deal of what does get recommended bores me. Besides, I'm less interested in fiction now and more interested in knowing where we came from, who we were, and why we ended up the way we did. Thus, I read more histories and biographies of an academic and not popular sort. I've books on tap about the financial struggles of Mark Twain, the journal of Sir Ernest Shackleton (having read Endurance I want the man's own words), and works about America's Founding Fathers.

Yet I do continue to read fiction, including some SF. I'm in the midst of Ursula K. LeGuin's brilliant novella "Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight?" It's as fantastical  as the Scythe books: a child awakens from the crash of a small plane to find herself in the company of Native-American animal spirits who pose as human beings. The characters, however, are far from flat and their motives are not fully explained (a typical narrative device that annoys me about a good deal of YA I've read). 

Other fiction I've read recently has been by masters of concealment: Kazuo Ishiguro and Naguib Mahfouz. More Edith Wharton and Willa Cather (some of which I'll re-read) await me. I cannot wait to savor Cather's Death Comes For the Archbishop again; it's one of my all-time favorite novels.

My remaining years are too short to read all the books I want. If I manage one a month for the next 30 years, that's only 360 books. So it's time to choose wisely. No more fluff or formulaic stories.

What draws me to reading? The desire to learn first, or enter a fictional world where I feel completely immersed yet gets populated by characters I care about. That's where the Scythe books failed me totally. I felt no emotional connection to the good characters or the rather flat evil ones. An author can pull something off amazing by crafting a villain we find interesting. Some bestsellers do that, as with All the Light We Cannot See.

Compared to A Pale View of Hills or Midaq Alley, so many modern novels of a popular sort are like eating fast food instead of having a slow, curated feast. No more please.

 

Some Sad Thoughts About Using Roundup (And Why I Do)

A piece about weeds appeared in the New York Times recently and readers erupted when the article's author mentioned the usefulness of Roundup. Granted, many of the respondents are not small farmers; they only have to deal with pests like poison ivy on a quarter-acre lot. 

 Our fence-lines are full of the pesky plant, and we are taking over 1000' feet of fence and growing. That's small by most small-farm standards. Then we have invasive vines and other plants that become "Copperhead Road" in breeding season. That means getting things done before 8am many mornings. We work hard to keep the fences clear. Glyphosate-based herbicides like Roundup keep them that way for a few years, when applied correctly.

Beekeeping was long a concern for us as we battled weeds in the fences; we are winding that down because the summers are simply too hot and the miticides too potent to make us want to work hives in July and August. We'll keep our gear but our last hives will go to a younger beekeeper. For native pollinators we continue to plant for them, and our limited use of herbicide does not occur on plants they frequent.

As for the weeds, Hot water and other organic solutions won't work. A burning torch would, but not if it starts a wildfire. Reluctantly, I began to apply Roundup as directed on the bottle of concentrate, spraying the plants early in the day when the wind is still. 

I'd welcome other solutions that work on the scale of a small farm. Our extension agency was NO help, a biologist suggesting we spray a field we want for native plants with $10,000 worth of Roundup to kill everything and start anew. It would get rid of invasive Stilt-Grass all right, but the environmental and monetary costs are beyond our desire. Instead, we'll bring in Mountain Mint and other plants that stifle the invasive.

 And so it goes in strange times, ones likely to get stranger in years to come.

Image: publicdomainpictures.net 

Weeds And My "Carboard Hack"

One day a former neighbor came by to help with something. He said "I saw you out front weeding around your trees. I like your cardboard hack!" In short, I was putting broken-down boxes around our plantings and covering them with mulch.

Experienced gardeners know this trick, but if you don't, here are some pointers I learned. I did this because 1) I have a lot of Chewy boxes delivered 2) I'm a cheapskate and 3) It saves work.

Here are the basics:

1. break down your large cardboard boxes and remove as much packing tape as possible. Don't fret if you miss some. It will come up to the top of the soil later and you can dispose of it.
2. One layer of cardboard works great. If you have wind, weigh down the corners with old bricks or stones until you have the mulch on.
   
3. Spread your mulch of choice. For ornamental plants up front, that means pine-bark mulch. In the garden? Straw, hay we cut, even dried-out weeds that have not set seed.
4. We go a few inches deep in mulch. Here's an area we covered up a bit late, after the weeds had gotten really tall.

This system really cuts weeding in our humid, hot, and too often like this month, smoky summers. You can safely go in and weed around the cleared area. Copperheads often rest in tall grass and weeds near mating season (August in our part of the world). So bring a hoe to check the area first.

The cardboard will be saturated with the first rain and in time becomes permeable. It cools the soil under it and retains moisture. You can get clever and arrange the pieces to channel water into row-crops and other plantings. I just use it to give me paths that are weed-free, so I don't step on a Copperhead. Here's an ideal finished area.

 In the cool months, or when the garden goes fallow, we let in the chickens. They demolish mulch and cardboard in a few days, eat any remaining bits of plants, and they hunt for bugs. I don't even have to clean up. Any leftover tiny cardboard scraps, save for stray packing tape, disappear after 8 months or so. 

You can find expensive and labor-intensive alternatives. Weed-block fabric works fine for a year, but we'll never use it again. Wire-grass and some other invasive weeds set their runners into the fabric, locking it in place. I had to use a reciprocating saw to cut it out. Black plastic is not permeable but it does block weeds. We have used it in a few spots and covered it with gravel. 

Cardboard does not have the problems outlined above. Give it a go, and save yourself a recycling trip in the process.

 

 

And Just When It is Ready for the Scrap Heap...

I wrote earlier this year about how badly a GE refrigerator had behaved. We were on the cusp of buying a new Bosch refrigerator when, suddenly, the old unit stopped leaking water into the lower compartment.

It remains a mystery. There is a device called an evaporator coil that I'd considered replacing; it's an easy job for that appliance, within the reach of anyone with a screwdriver and some patience.  Perhaps--a big perhaps--the evaporator began to work normally again. 

Rather than throw $150 at the old icebox, we did throw $60 in its direction to replace the utterly cheap plastic holder for the two produce drawers. This supports a piece of tempered glass which serves as the machine's bottom shelf. It had cracked across in several places.

I love shopping locally, which is how I got the door gasket for the GE before; this too, may have fixed the problem. But when I called the out-of-state company that bought out our local parts provider, they quoted me a cost higher than GE would charge to sell me the shelf-holder directly. I told them this politely, and looked elsewhere, as I'd use two gallons of gas to pick the part up.

I was already looking at Amazon, where I got the OEM GE part cheaper still, with free delivery. It's in the refrigerator today.

We will use the money we saved to install another garage-door opener, as my wife can struggle with the large commercial doors we have on our building. We have one opener that we got fixed for free, and the company was ready to install another but the German supplier's parts have doubled because of the stupid tariffs from Washington.  We found a US-built option that is not as fancy, which is fine, but reported to be durable and comes with a warranty.

Anything but the planned obsolescence we see in modern appliances, particularly those built in the US or sold by US firms. The not-very-old GE hums on, meanwhile.

Image: Creative-Commons license, spares-direct-oldham.co.uk 

Time for Aesthetics

 

We don't live by bread alone, and most people I know don't live to work, either, but some jobs make leisure more pleasant.
 

We began our farm adventure in late 2012, and we spent a large sum of money and quite a bit of time renovating the farmhouse to look and feel like us, while retaining the characteristics that made it charming as the childhood home of my wife. The next several years saw us put in a fenced garden, planting shade trees and ornamental plants between us and a busy road, keeping bees, raisng chickens, adopting and working with livestock dogs. We've been here long enough to bury two beloved dogs and two house cats. We opened new pasturage and began managing a field my in-laws own, across the street from us. We repainted the entire house once and most of the out-buildings while building an equipment run-in. We continue to rid our property of scrap metal and other useful salvage.

That's only part of 12+ years work, but finally, and after much learning, we began to make things pretty in the areas where visitors most often want to visit, our garden and hen-yard. Little children love this part of their trip to our end of the county.

The fences need maintaining every year, but after several years, the old home-made gates needed re-hanging. I found that the strap hinges typically used for attaching gates to posts begin with a good deal of "play" and slowly acquire more, until we and our farm-sitter struggle to open them.

 While I've gotten more skilled at building gates, I discovered that I'd overbuilt mine. When it came time to re-hang them, I was able to shed some of the supporting boards on the biggest gate, replacing them with corner braces. And new hinges that are made for posts got the gates to hang true for a few more years.

 Then, it got to be time to finally add visual interests to our garden, beyond the chickens themselves who patrol the paths and a few pieces of statuary.  I used a solid-color penetrating stain I've discussed here before to add a vibrant barn-red to our center gate. The gates to the dog-run got stained a bluish green that I used simply because I had a can and wanted to use it up.  Some inner gates are getting the barn-red treatment as well. Staining the wood appears to deter carpenter bees and makes the wood hold up longer, overall.

I do not buy into the old-timers' maxim that if you are not working until you exhaust yourself, you are "piddling," and that includes painting for lots of old guys. 

The spaces we inhabit should look good if we can afford the time and money to do so. Staining and re-hanging gates cost little money and time. The reward? At sunset,  you look at the garden and feel more inspired. An wooden picnic table will be next.

Art museums always make me feel better about the human race. I can't fix our species but I can make my own corner of the world more pleasing to the eyes of all who stop by.

 Happy gardening this year. The corn is already knee-high! 

Recap on the Cheapness of Modern Appliances

Well, here comes refrigerator #4 since we moved to the country in 2012. That's one reason I've not posted for the month of May. We had a dryer die, too, but that's not the issue here. That dryer was past peak at about age 15. A different dryer I bought in December for our rental property? When I registered the warranty, the woman at Whirlpool advised me that she'd just been to a seminar on their newest models.

"Expect three to five years, if you take good care of it."

This is American madness. If our would-be King had not gutted our Consumer-Protection Agency, dealing with this new planned obsolescence should have been high on their list of priorities.

When I took a half-ton of steel pulled out of our woods to the scrap yard recently, I saw about 100 new dryers, washers, dishwashers, and refrigerators thrown onto the scrap pile. When I asked around the answer I got was "damaged shipping container." Even if these new devices last a few years, give them to Habitat for Humanity. They still had dealer labels attached. Easier to write off the loss, I guess. To me that's immoral.

It was not always this wasteful. To be honest, the original Samsung did not fail (though the French doors were extraordinarily flimsy and I had to repair them a few times). A lightning strike took it out. The no-frills Maytag (oh, repairman of legend, where are you?) died all on its own. The freezer worked, though I had to repair the silly ice-maker, but then the cooler below stopped working.

So we bought an even less frilly GE three years ago. I had read that the company brought refrigerator manufacturing back to the US, to assure better quality control. To avoid an ice-maker breaking, I used ice-trays. The shelf-brackets and frames (cheap plastic) broke over time, and I rigged repairs. Then water began to collect in the unit's floor. I've done all the things that service experts recommend: clearing the drain tube, checking the cooling coils for ice buildup, tilting the unit so it's higher in front, as this helps with draining into the bottom of the unit, where water evaporates in a pan. I found the door seal torn, so I replaced that. No dice.

This sort of refrigerator is a simple machine. Anyone with basic skills can make basic repairs, as I found when I downloaded a parts diagram.

I was about to get a new evaporator coil for the freezer, an easy replacement for a DIYer and about $150, until I realized for for $1000 more (I have a good deal of a credit-balance on my Lowes account and sales are coming) we could get a low-end Bosch, build like a Panzerkampfwagen IV from World War II. It has an ice-maker. From that failure of a Maytag I learned how to replace or repair them. Irony? That's about what we paid for the failing GE, the Maytag floor model, and less than we shelled out for the original Samsung.

When I talked to folks in the business the consensus was "expect at least 10-15 years, maybe more) out of the Bosch brand." Only Subzero lasts longer, but we don't have $10K or more for a refrigerator. I shopped around for deals and found one at Lowes. As soon as the July 4 prices drop, I'll pull out my %5 off card, use up the credit on our account, and have a Bosch installed. And yes, we'll pony up for an extended warranty at the end of the first year, which we get for free.

Our 2012 basic-model Bosch dishwasher is going strong, but I'm planning for a whole-house water filter system to keep calcification from well water from clogging up our appliances that use water. Folks in the business advised I consider that, too.

Onward. I will never own a "smart appliance" beyond the home-security system I installed. I don't need a refrigerator to tell me when I need to buy milk. I just want something that may work into my 80s. That's right around the darned corner.

 Creative-Commons Image: https://www.publicdomainpictures.net/en/view-image.php?image=22055 

  

Slowing Down To Do Better Work

When my childhood friend Dominic made a heroic decision to try organic farming after a layoff, just a year after Nan and I moved to the country, I paid close attention. He stayed at it for the better part of a decade, using antique equipment. His experience taught me a few things that I have brought to my own gardening and tending rural land. 

Of all I learned, one lesson stands out most, a principle I call “slowing down to do better work.” I wish that Dom and I had read Wendell Berry’s essays sooner. Berry’s thinking about local culture, agrarianism, and the proper use of tools would have saved us time and money while adding pleasure and better stewardship of the land. The scale of Berry’s economic model maps well onto my personal belief that Distributism can replace corporate capitalism in a century that will see, thank goodness, declining human population.

First, though, some specifics before thinking big and long-term. Central Virginians, save during drought, must mow grass close to the house weekly all Spring, Summer, and most of the Fall. Fields get fewer mowings. Dominic noticed how the old-timers near him in Hanover County would mow their fields slowly with the throttles set high. This burns more fuel but means cleaner cuts when creeping over the fields at the pace of a slow walk. We have here the antithesis of “mow blow and go” suburban lawn “care,” nearly always farmed out to a company these days. I see the kids who do this on zero-turn mowers that race over a yard. I suppose the homeowners are too busy after work to tend the yard, off playing golf or chauffeuring the kids (who would be better off in a neighborhood pickup game) to kid-sports events.

Many suburban lawns are often a toxic nightmare, anyhow, so let’s move on to something sane. Most of us are not Berry with his horse-drawn equipment yet the same philosophy can guide our work. For the rural mower who aims to protect and improve the topsoil, the slow-speed, high-rpm method means that grass and weeds are cut cleanly, not torn by the blades (assuming the blades are sharp). Yes, it takes longer but when I gathered and stacked the hay, I found it clean and superior to what I had formerly done in haste. The hay goes to our garden or chicken run, where the birds scratch it around and eat the seeds.

Berry writes about this philosophy of farm work in his essay “Horse Drawn Tools and The Doctrine of Labor Saving.” He decided to forego the purchase of a used 8N Ford tractor and mow with a team of horses and an International horse-drawn mower. He found that his equipment made better hay than did his neighbors’ tractors. His story will perplex those farmers who consider even the 8N a bare-bones machine as outmoded as a horse and best seen in a museum. I can attest that my own 1952 8N is a bulletproof, simple machine that has needed nothing in the 20 years it has been in the family, beyond fluid changes, fuel, two tire tubes, some paint, and a few sets of spark plugs. I learned to plow and mow on the machine and it still does useful chores, including cutting where we gather hay to stack in our barn after it cures.

While I have no plans to farm with horses—we raise chickens, not row-crops—some of Berry’s ideas have influenced me deeply. We looked at expensive hay-baling gear for small square bales. For now, it saves us money to buy straw and store just enough hay that we can manage raking, tedding, and transporting manually; we might get a dry stack the size of an SUV in a good year and need 30 square bales of straw as well.

I contrast this to what our Deere dealer talks about: air-conditioned cabs, round bales so huge we would need hay spears and plastic wrappers to move and season them. No thanks. The last thing we want is more complexity and more unsustainable materials on the farm or going to the landfill. Speed breeds those things, and Berry rightly sees the debt-trap they set for a small farm. 

Some expenses are inevitable, of course. When Dominic was still farming, I encouraged him to find one reliable modern diesel tractor in place of his handful of sometimes unreliable gas-powered antiques. But even with new or nearly new equipment, a farmer should start small. A dealer often tries to sell “just in case” power and attachments. They can be added later. I did recently spend $500 to set our utility tractor and implements up with Deere’s iMatch hitch, so I can hook up the rotary mower in a minute, then drop it to get a different implement. As I age and have arthritis in my left hip, such accommodations have proven to be a godsend.

Yet I waited 14 years to upgrade the tractor, after 600 hours of service. We might all apply Berry’s philosophy that way. It works off the farm too. We are today using AI to enable us to do more work in a shorter span of time, but what gets lost in all that haste? How much poorly-conceived “good enough” work, like poorly-mowed fields, gets completed as a result? Berry states that instead of building good soil, hasty farmers impoverish the land. With generative AI and other purportedly labor-saving technology, what are we doing to improve our minds and spirits? What are we doing to make our clients’ lives and our work better?

The next time you are asked to hurry a job, reply that you want to do good work.

When drafting this post, I wrote it first by hand. Checking Duck Duck Go, I verified the location of an e-text of Berry’s collection of selected essays The World-Destroying Fire, then used that e-text to help me find and annotate passages in my paper copy. No contradiction here at all. Using the technologies of print and Internet together led me to work methodically and do better work. If you want to see what Berry advises, you can find the essays here.

I turned off the AI assistant too.