The Year We Went Inorganic

I’m behind on everything. Chores have piled up in my distraction. Summer thunderstorms and bright sunshine have let the woods creep onto our property, and there’s more work to be done than seems possible.

Tonight, once I close the laptop, I’m going to suit up. Venturing onto the homestead to do the normal round of chores will involve swapping into another outfit, fueling up power equipment, and lots of hacking and slashing. My outerwear has been pre-soaked in permethrin to guard against deer ticks. I’m going to use a gas-powered “brush cutter,” a weed whacker that uses a spinning blade to pulverize plant matter.

It feels like I’m going to war.

In a previous essay, I described how ten years of homesteading had changed my political philosophy: I practice a sort of country bumpkin anarchism. But beyond the triumph of a suburbanite discovering the boondocks is a harsh truth: as we shape the land, the land can easily shape us. The romance of the countryside flees when it comes time to push back against nature.

It wasn’t always this way. My wife and I went out of our way to work organically. We did surprisingly well, at least until this year.

In this essay, I’ll talk about our history of using hand tools, organic pesticides, and other “natural methods,” what made us change our mind about using inorganic methods, and what I’ve learned about age, responsibility, and externalities.

Your skin, your bones, your virtue

The psychedelic retelling of a 14^th century story, 2021’s The Green Knight contains a haunting speech that I can’t seem to shake. Wondering aloud why the titular knight of the film is the color green, one of the characters launches into a chilling monologue that ends with the following:

When you go, your footprints will fill with grass. Moss shall cover your tombstone, and as the sun rises, green shall spread over all, in all its shades and hues. This verdigris will overtake your swords and your coins and your battlements and, try as you might, all you hold dear will succumb to it. Your skin, your bones. Your virtue.

Anyone who has ever lived at the edge of civilization knows the truth of this speech in their bones. It takes almost no time at all for nature to erase everything you’ve built. Sooner or later, the green comes for us. And no matter how much energy you have, the green has more.

Keeping nature at bay, through any means necessary, runs deep in our consciousness. Rattlesnakes are extirpated in my region because, as the more-than-90-year-old woman down the street tells me, they killed rattlesnakes on sight back in her day. My county and the state Department of Agriculture quietly dumps pyrethrin-based insecticides by airplane to kill black gnats, midges, and mosquitoes, all in an attempt to forestall outbreaks of West Nile and other diseases. Elk reside in Pennsylvania, but only in the far north central mountains of the state, even though their range included my southeastern corner of the state. Reintroduced after full extirpation over a century ago, these transplanted Yellowstone elk immediately left the mountains to level farmers’ cornfields. The Game Commission had to mediate the wildlife conflict battle. They won’t ever finish trying to keep the massive elk from eating crops and farmers from shooting them.

When my wife and I started our rural homestead, we were suburbanites with a lot of ideas. For one, we’d do everything organically. No question. Second, we’d endeavor to only use hand tools. Scythe, sickle, spade. We’d become experts in the old ways. And third, we’d limit outside inputs. Among other ethics we’d imposed on ourselves, these three were in line with the permaculture principles that guided our work. We thought it was our responsibility not only to our own land but also to our community and the planet: as landowner Doug Duren puts it, “it’s not ours, it’s just our turn”.

Nature humbled us. When we started our podcast to record our homestead adventures, we spent a lot of time recounting our failures: acres-worth of organic crops lost to pest damage, groundhogs digging tunnels under our outbuildings, and, probably the most notorious story around here, a mouse breaking into the garage to eat my wife’s tomato seedlings, just a few days emerged from the soil.

We kept on grinding. Ten years later, we’d managed to only use two gasoline-powered tools: a chainsaw and a chipper-shredder. Ten years later, the strongest chemical we’d used was Neem oil. And then, ten years after we’d started, we had our second child.

The resolve breaks

We love having kids. But as relatively old parents at 38, we did not know the blessing of time until we didn’t have any.

Prior to our second child coming into the world, we managed to keep a few parts of the homestead organic, using hand tools, and following those permaculture principles as best we could. Here are a few of the areas where our resolve broke.

Taming the Back 40: a scorched earth policy

Every homestead has a “back forty.” It’s the part of the property furthest from the living space, or the hardest to access. Where the wild things are, so to say.

When we had our firstborn in 2021, the back forty started to slip. We’d been controlling it with a scythe and a reel mower, and that worked, but only if you were relentless. Even then, weather and time might not cooperate. But worse were the invasives.

We have a few pernicious invasive plants in Pennsylvania that seem impossible to manage. The species that gives me waking nightmares is an East Asian transplant called multiflora rose. Resembling a blackberry on steroids, multiflora grows fragrant flowers and “rose hips,” fruits around the size of a pine nut. Pollinators love the aromatic flowers and thus hundreds of fruits appear each year (a good time to plug my piece about the problem of invasive pollination). Cut the plant to the ground and it will spread by rhizome, shooting up in a dozen places. Multiflora loves to intersperse with useful species like mayapples, raspberries, and blackberries, making it difficult to extract. When you do go after it with a cutting device, multiflora seems to strike back at you: its thorns are fearsome and will go right through my heaviest canvas pants. The taproot, according to one landscaper I know, digs ten feet down. She ties a tow strap to large specimens and pulls them out of the ground with her truck on wet days. A scythe or a brush knife seem powerless against multiflora.

Another nightmare annual is stilt grass, also from East Asia. Resembling a tiny bamboo plant, it loves disturbed soil, shady spots, not-so shady spots, bad soil, rich soil, and long walks on the beach. I suspect that the seeds persist for years in the “seed bank,” the natural load of seeds within the soil system. I say this because my wife and I have pulled huge strands of stilt grass only to watch it return in the exact same place without hesitation.

The list of invasives goes on: Japanese barberry and Japanese knotweed from Asia, bitter dock and creeping jenny from Europe, and more. The 20^th– and 21^st-century invasives make dandelions, a colonial-era invasive, look like hippies at the blitzkrieg. New invasives now sit on top of 15^th-century European invasives and the combination levels everything intentional about the landscape.

2023 was the year I bought a commercial brush cutter, more or less an enormous weed whacker. It cuts almost anything under 3 inches and cuts my time spent on any problem in the yard. After using a scythe, the brush cutter feels like an extravagance. I’ve used it for about 20 or 30 hours this summer, and I still feel like I’m cheating at life.

I use trimmer line sparingly, since I figure it flings microplastics everywhere (there are some biodegradable options on the market I intend to try). But it’s hard to feel bad about that: I also learned in the last two years that children create microplastics almost as readily as drool. I’ve thrown out more sippy cups than I can count, and one giant plastic bouncing toy is probably worth a lifetime of trimmer line. I live with the guilt but continue to use the brush cutter against the relentless tide of green.

Beekeeping: Fighting an uphill battle against a pancake-sized mite

An old beekeeper told me that back when he first started keeping in the 80s, 5% losses, or one in twenty hives, was a dismal failure that would get you accused of being a neglectful beekeeper. Today, annual hive losses are around 50%. You will likely lose half your hives each year.

I read many beekeepers before I started, but Michael Bush’s work spoke to my permaculture interest: he believes in breeding better bees instead of using chemicals like acaracides. These mite-killing chemicals combat varroa destructor, beekeeping’s most pernicious pest. As an invasive from East Asia, it has killed countless honeybees and shows no signs of stopping. Think of it as a tick that attaches to bees and sucks their vital bodily fluids, while also passing on diseases. It’s one of the largest mites in relation to its host. Imagine a tick as big as a pancake attached to you and you can picture a varroa mite’s problem for honey bees.

And Michael Bush is right that better genetics are the only way out. But breeding is a labor-intensive process not available to most hobbyists. And I am not made of money. It’s $125 for a package of bees, and you need to buy at least two to have an apiary. I do not have the time or the money to breed better bees. I would be done with beekeeping if that was required of me.

This year, instead of using the many organic control methods—various types of organic acids including oxalic and formic, and, my favorite organic control method, which is doing nothing—I went inorganic. I used amitraz. There’s warnings all over the package about certain death from mishandling. But I have gone organic with beekeeping, and I have lost plenty of hives.

This is an experiment for me. For all I know, I’ll lose my bees again this year. But it’s worth a shot.

The Human Variety of Bloodsuckers: Keeping the ticks at bay

In 2022 I had both COVID-19 and Lyme disease: Covid in May and Lyme in July. I literally had “Corona with Lyme,” like some kind of walking, talking meme. It was an unpleasant experience and, given the option of getting one or the other again, I’d take Covid any day. Antibiotics cleared the Lyme up, thankfully.

My portion of Pennsylvania is ground zero for Lyme disease, and the ticks carry plenty of other nasty bugs. Deer ticks infest everything. This year was particularly bad, due to the mild winter, meaning we were seeing the deer ticks as early as March. Hot and dry weather seems to drive them off, but daytime temps in the 60s that persisted from February through May were perfect for them to run around. All signs point to Lyme disease becoming more prevalent (though I wonder if that is just an improvement of diagnostic criteria). Other tick-borne diseases are on the rise as well.

Stopping the little buggers seems impossible. Deer ticks can be as small as a poppy seed and attach anywhere from your hairline to your groin. Given the little kids in the house and the amount of outside chores I do, the trend has sent me spiraling into anxiety.

This year, I brought out the big guns. I maintain an outdoor outfit sprayed regularly with Sawyer’s permethrin and then given a good shot of DEET as well. I wear rubber knee-high boots everywhere, also treated. I have let as much light onto the ground as possible and kept grass short, to not give the ticks any place cool and damp to hide. I’ve thought about buying “bait stations,” which are food dispensers equipped with permethrin brushes, designed to inoculate animals like mice and deer that carry ticks. You could say I’ve made dealing with them a minor obsession.

But as someone who cultivates pollinators, the exercise depresses me. I’ve prided myself on maintaining a property that pollinators love. We’ve never done a survey, but I swear I see a new variety of bee or wasp every year visiting our Mountain Mint or monarda. But if this homestead is to continue, I cannot afford to have it be dangerous. I am hoping that recent efforts like vaccinating mice and a Lyme vaccine candidate in the works can put a dent in this problem. I’m crossing my fingers and hoping that within a decade, this disease is not the problem it’s been.

Keeping the Cool: The Year We got Air Conditioning

When I used to tell people that we lived in Pennsylvania without air conditioning, I got one of two responses: incredulity, or sage nods. The latter group was usually older and remembered a time when air conditioning wasn’t available to them. Most people just thought we were crazy. Pennsylvania is not a southern state, but the heat and humidity are no joke. It’s not just us: At the Constitution Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, Pierce Butler’s wife went home to South Carolina saying that Philadelphia was too hot.

We thought living without climate control in the summer honed our edge. Air conditioning made you soft, and believe it or not, you do adapt to the heat after a while. Otherwise, how did homo sapiens ever get out of the African continent? How did anyone live in New Orleans before the 20^th century? And the energy savings were obvious. For ten years, we did our part for the environment.

This year was different. The summer has been mild, by all counts. As I write this in August, we’re hovering in the low 80’s during the day, which is unheard of for late summer in PA. But one event screwed it all up: the Canadian wildfires.

Suddenly, and in a smelly, obnoxious way, keeping the windows open wasn’t an option, especially with two kids under two in the house. Without the open windows, the house started to turn into a furnace. I dusted off a window unit we had in an old apartment some twelve years ago and installed it, cooling things down and getting us through what seemed like endless smog alerts for the East Coast.

We have a real problem now, which is that our young son thinks he’s a popsicle: he loves the air conditioner and will lay in his room with it on full blast, airing out his armpits. We’re all addicted now. My edge is long gone.

Inorganics, the solution I didn’t want

In economics, a “death cross” is a phenomenon in stock trading where the short-term price falls below the long-term average price. On the chart, you see the two trendlines cross one another. It’s usually a signal that bearish times are ahead.

My “organic homestead death cross” looks like this:

When thinking about the four problems from the last section, pictured with the blue line, there’s a clear trend. Two of the issues deal primarily with invasive species, namely invasive plants and varroa destructor (honey bees are technically invasive, but I like honey). The third, ticks, could be said to be a matter of invasive species given that ticks are expanding their native range and some of the new diseases found in the ticks seem wholly original. The fourth, the Canada wildfire smoke, also feels like a Canadian invasion. When it comes to the orange line on the graph, having two kids under two seems impossible even without the homesteading, and my time has evaporated.

So as you can see from this incredibly scientific chart, my spare time has decreased significantly, while threats and invasive species has climbed over the same period. And here I am.

What I’ve realized is that the problem inherent in keeping an organic homestead are competing externalities. In the case of my missing time, the externalities include the hidden costs of being a good parent. There is a cost to being attentive and caring, at least by 21^st-century standards. The “hobby farm” is the first thing to suffer.

The other externality is age. I simply do not have the shoulders to swing the scythe like I used to (specifically, my left shoulder, which has decided to become high maintenance). I figure that, if I had followed the nominal biological clock and had kids at 18, at 38 I’d have several adult children who would now be homesteading. I’d be in the management role, rather than still doing the bulk of the work.

There are further externalities to the inorganic methods I’m deploying to solve the other issues. Amitraz, which I’ve used on the bees to fight varroa mites, has been found to persist in beeswax. I have no idea how amitraz and other chemicals I’m using persist, and they’re likely taking some invisible toll on the environment and our family. The brush cutter that shoots microplastics everywhere is incredibly noisy and burns fossil fuels. And my popsicle-impersonating child is siphoning energy off the grid, though I can’t complain because I love air conditioning now as well.

Part of me recognizes that this piece is a list of excuses and rationalizations for what a future version of myself, or my children, might consider crimes against the planet. Or against myself. These are the compromises I’ve made to pursue a thriving homestead given my limited time and energy. They may not be the right compromises, but for now they are staving off that pervasive, inevitable green.