The Living Low approach to seed starting, part 1

Almost a year ago I promised a post on low-cost, low-resource ways to start and grow any seeds that you have determined will do better with an early start under controlled conditions. Now that seed starting time is approaching for those of us who garden in the St. Louis area or other places with similar climates, here is that post, the first of however many it takes me to give you the information I would have liked to have when I began.

I’ll be starting onion and leek seeds this week (crops I didn’t discuss in my earlier post on direct sowing versus starting seeds inside, but they are also good candidates for indoor starting and transplanting because they take a long time to sprout and grow and need to be planted early to grow well, in late March to early April around here). Some other seeds, such as cabbage family plants, can be started within the next few weeks. So purchase your seeds if you haven’t already, and start collecting materials you’ll need for growing them.

In order to start seeds early, you need these things (besides the seeds, of course):
1. A suitable environment in which to grow them;
2. Soil or a soil-like medium in which the seeds can germinate and grow; and
3. Containers to hold the soil and seeds that will fit into the environment in which they will grow and not cause damage to anything you care about in that environment.

I will deal with each of these in turn, emphasizing using what you already have on hand or can obtain free or at low cost. This post discusses the environment seeds need. I’ll discuss the next two issues in the next post, planned for later this week (if needed I will continue into a third post next week).

A suitable environment is one which can be kept at the temperatures at which your seeds germinate and/or grow best (these are not necessarily the same), has sufficient lighting for good seedling growth, is not damaged by water leakage from the containers, and is easy for you, the gardener, to work in. Very generally, you want an area that you can keep above freezing and not so warm it cooks your seeds or plants (40F to 90F works for most seeds and seedlings; some seeds need 70-90F to germinate but the seedlings grow best at somewhat lower temperatures), is lit brightly by sunlight or artificial lighting, and is protected from water by some means or will not be damaged by leaking water.

If you want to start seeds early and you don’t have any space except a windowsill, first make sure that you have a suitable window. Seedlings need a lot of light to grow well; that means a south facing window or at least whatever window faces most nearly south that you have. That window should not be shaded by outside plants and you should be willing to not cover it during the day. If your windowsill is very narrow, place a shelf or a small table (a tray table works well) next to the window that extends out from the window about two feet at most. Any farther from the window than that will not have enough light to grow seedlings well. You’ll want to turn your seedling containers every few days to keep your seedlings growing as close to straight up as possible, otherwise they will lean in toward the window and their stems will elongate as they grow. They won’t grow as stocky as will plants grown on a sun porch or in a cold frame because of the dimmer light even a south facing window has, but they will do OK. Since your south facing window real estate is limited, decide what is most valuable to grow as seedlings based on your gardening goals and what will do best in the conditions inside your living space. Often this will be tomatoes. They are a good choice for windowsill growing because you don’t need many plants to get a lot of tomatoes, they grow well inside most peoples’ homes in March and April, and you have a much wider choice of varieties available from seeds than from started plants. However, you can as easily start lettuce or cabbage or many kinds of herbs or annual flower seeds, for example, on your windowsill. Make sure that any water draining from the containers will not damage the windowsill or any extensions out from it and water the containers as needed. You’ll need to harden off the seedlings (acclimate them over a week or two to outside conditions by putting them outside for an increasing number of hours each day, then bringing them back inside for the rest of the day) before planting them. If you don’t, they will sunburn and dry out in the wind and may die from too-rapid exposure to harsh outside conditions.

If you want to start lots of different kinds of plants from seeds, you will likely need more space than a south facing window provides. If you have a glassed-in porch of which the longest wall faces anywhere but north, you have an ideal setup to raise a lot of high-quality seedlings. Most such porches will stay within the 40F-90F range without your attention during March and April except on the warmest days when you will probably want to open up the porch anyway. (If you do open the porch windows, be sure to close them again at night if the temperature will drop below freezing!) To start seeds like peppers that need more constant warmth than a sun porch provides in winter to early spring, you will need to use a heat mat. A heat mat is a rubber or plastic sheet with a wire embedded in it that is connected to a plug; electricity traveling through the wire heats up the wire and thus the mat. Containers with seeds are placed on top of the mat so they are heated from the bottom. A heat mat requires a fair amount of electricity (though much less than heating the whole porch!) so you will want to limit its use to just those seeds that most need the extra warmth for good germination (peppers, eggplants, maybe tomatoes, and certain herbs and flowers) and just during the time that you are germinating the seeds as the seedlings prefer growing on at ambient porch temperatures. Keep an eye on all the containers, especially any containers on a heat mat, to make sure they stay moist enough, and water as needed. If you are just beginning to raise plants from seeds, choose one or a few types of plants to try while you work out your system. If your porch has large air leaks to the outside, fix those before starting seeds so you can keep the environment more constant. Your plants will do better the closer you position them to the glass, but you won’t need to turn your plants often if at all and you can grow farther back from the windows than two feet because most porches have a lot more light entering than does a lone window. If you open your porch windows when it is warm enough, your seedlings will not need to be hardened off. Now that I have a south facing glassed in porch, I start almost all seeds on it except for the ones that need exposure to winter conditions to germinate.

If you don’t have a porch but you do have a reasonably flat and sunny space outside, you can build a cheap and effective cold frame for starting seeds. A cold frame is a bottomless box on which the top face is angled away from the horizontal (the north end is taller than the south end to catch low-angled early spring sunlight) and covered with glass or plastic. The cold frame becomes quite warm on sunny days and stays warmer than outside conditions at night. Below is a picture of two cold frames we used to have. Our current cold frame is located behind our garage and is about the same size and shape as the front frame in the picture.

Each cold frame in the photo was about ten feet long by three feet wide. On the frame in front the rear side was about eighteen inches high while the front side was about six inches high. The rear side of the frame in back was about three feet high as it was used to overwinter tall crops. The frame in front was only used for seed starting so it is closer to what you might want to construct; our current cold frame has its rear side about two feet tall, which I think works better. We constructed each frame from scrap plywood and 2x4s and salvaged glass windows and screens, so the openings fit the windows we had on hand. In order to hold the windows or screens on the frame when it is windy, I use salvaged bricks as weights, placed near the corners. You will find lots of design ideas by doing an internet search or looking at gardening books. The frames last a few years before the wood rots if you do not use any wood preservatives. Linseed oil might make a good nontoxic preservative, but I have not used it so far (maybe on the next one I will). If built from a rot-resistant wood the frames would last longer but we did not have any on hand when we built any of our frames. You could use UV resistant plastic instead of glass if you don’t have access to salvaged glass; check local gardening supply stores or catalogs or building salvage yards for this. Some gardening catalogs sell cold frames but you can make your own for a lot less money. Size it to fit the space and materials you have on hand and the number of seedlings you want to grow. A frame the size of ours holds a lot of seedlings (I grow about 300 seedlings each year). Build a one window frame if you are just starting out and expand as needed later on.

To use a cold frame, put it down on the ground or on whatever other bottom surface you have, put your seed-starting containers inside, and cover the openings with glass or plastic or window screen as needed, held down against the wind. The pictured cold frames sat on the ground in our back yard. Our current frame sits on a blacktopped area behind the garage. I prefer the blacktop because it holds heat better and doesn’t get moles tunneling under it or have as much insect or disease pressure as might be the case for a frame sitting on the ground, but either way works. You’ll cover the frame with glass or plastic for growing most seeds, but if you are starting seeds of native plants that need cold, moist conditions to germinate, cover them with screens like the front cold frame in the photo and start them by early January. You should monitor the cold frame daily (unless you are growing native seeds under screens during winter; you can leave them alone until warm spring weather dries the seed starting medium enough to need watering). The need for daily monitoring is the biggest disadvantage to a cold frame covered with glass or plastic. On sunny days such a cold frame can get very hot, up to 100F or higher, if you don’t ventilate it. Temperatures that high will kill seeds and seedlings. To ventilate, I push heavy windows like those shown on the rear frame either up or down a few inches to expose some space at the top of one or more openings and at the bottom of one or more, which allows cooler outside air to enter at the bottom and warmer inside air to flow out the top. Or I remove the windows entirely and cover the openings with screens. Or I prop up either the low or high end of the window to leave space for air circulation. You will find ideas for props in cold frame design publications. You must pay attention to the weather and replace the windows before the outside temperature drops below freezing! It’s best to replace the windows before sunset but it can be done afterward. Usually by early April it is warm enough most of the time that I replace the windows with screens except when the occasional below-freezing night is forecast; in that case I put on the windows at night and take them off the next morning. I also cover the cold frame with a tarp to keep heat from radiating out through the glass. The other thing you need to monitor is the moisture level of the growing medium; water as needed for the kind of plants you are growing. Sunny days that heat up the inside of the frame will increase your seedlings’ need for water.  Currently I move seedlings from the sun porch to the cold frame as I prick them out into individual cells of a cell pack or into small pots. In this way I can control the environment better during critical germination and early growth periods, moving seedlings to the frame when they can better take the more changeable conditions in the frame and leaving room on the porch for other plants and seeds.

If your garden space grows beyond what you can plant with seedlings grown on a windowsill and you don’t have a suitable porch or space for a cold frame, using artificial lighting in a basement or spare room to grow seedlings can make sense. To do this cheaply, purchase or salvage a 4 foot long fluorescent shop light (far cheaper than the specialized lights the fancy garden catalogs sell for the purpose). Use one warm fluorescent tube and one cool tube in the light; the combo gives light close in quality to the expensive grow light tubes and costs a lot less. Plug the shop light into a timer and set the timer to keep the light on for 16 hours each day. Suspend the light over a table or shelf about 4 feet long and about 2 feet wide, the largest area one light can illuminate well enough to grow seedlings. We hung two lights on adjustable chains from the basement ceiling and put an old, fake wood rectangular dining room table covered with two 4 foot long and 2 foot wide trays (the kind sold for the very expensive grow light systems for sale in garden catalogs; you might be able to find or make something similar for less money) under the lights. You need to adjust the height of either the light or the plants so the plants are within a couple of inches of the light as they grow. You also want to protect the surface of the table or shelf from leaking water, hence the trays, and to supply the seeds and seedlings with the temperatures they need. In our unheated basement I could only start seeds preferring cool conditions to germinate without using a heat mat to heat the bottom of the containers. Those mats suck up a lot of electricity, as do the lights, so you will want to start no more seeds than absolutely necessary in order to minimize the material and electricity cost. You will need to harden off all the seedlings you grow under artificial light as described for growing seedlings on windowsills, and the seedlings will not be as healthy as seedlings grown on a porch or in a cold frame. I no longer start any seeds under artificial light because I have a porch and a cold frame that produce much healthier seedlings and lots more of them. But before I had either I started seeds under artificial light because I had insufficient window space for starting them.

More plans for 2013

In the previous post I described garden plans for 2013. In this post I’ll look at some ways that we hope to increase garden resilience to the effects of drought and reduce our usage of electricity and natural gas.

Reducing the impact of drought

St. Louis suffered from the drought of 2012; in fact, the most recent U.S. Drought Monitor continues to show the metro area in moderate drought. As I mentioned in this post, we used an excessive amount of water last summer compared to the same period in previous years. Even in a normal year we typically have anywhere from three to six weeks of hot, dry weather sometime in the growing season during which I rely on municipal water supplies to sustain my vegetable garden. That’s fine as long as the municipal system can reliably deliver the water and we can afford to pay for it, but we cannot count on either continuing to occur every year. Last year the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers from which most of our municipal water is drawn had good flows from sufficient rains in the previous few years. This year, however, both rivers are at low levels, and there has been little snowfall so far this winter in their watersheds. Should we experience drought this summer, we might be faced with water restrictions. I’d rather design the garden to need less water and meet a higher percentage of its needs through the rainfall we do get. At the same time, 2008 had the highest yearly precipitation total and 2009 the fifth highest measured in St. Louis, so whatever I do needs to be resilient for possible above-normal rainfall as well as drought.

While I haven’t taken a permaculture design course, I have tried to design our yard according to my understanding of permaculture principles. A permacultural viewpoint suggests increasing our ability to catch and hold rainfall where my garden plants can access it. Increasing the organic matter content of soils, mulching, and designing swales to catch and soak in rain that hits the ground are all included in the permaculture toolkit. Since the biggest need for municipal water during drought periods is for the vegetable gardens, I am considering how I might do a better job in all three areas.

With regard to organic matter, some complications arise from sustainability requirements. I could add more organic matter to the gardens than I have been doing, but I’d have to import it from other locations. I’m trying to use only what compost and other organic material I can make or have on hand. If I rake more leaves from the front yard to make compost, those leaves won’t be mulching my front yard plantings and they might need watering in that case. I do, however, have a pile of plant stems from past years’ herb and flower gardens slowly decomposing elsewhere in the yard. I might try to make more compost from the pile materials for use in the vegetable gardens, as the herb and flower beds require very little if any irrigation. I have also sown some of the vegetable beds to crimson clover for the winter, which should hold more nutrients in the soil (and hold the soil during windy periods). The clover can be dug in or composted before planting the next crop to increase organic matter content. In 2013 I plan to try interplanting each bed with crimson clover seed to further increase nutrient cycling, reduce weeds, and increase organic matter content over time. However, I will have to watch in case the interplanting increases water needs in summer; if so, I’ll remove the clover and compost it, then return the compost to the soil later on.

As for mulching, I use mulches (wood chips, autumn leaves, and/or a living mulch of violets and other groundcover plants) on the herb and flower gardens, but mulching doesn’t work in my more traditionally managed vegetable garden, which I cultivate with a broadfork or shovel and weed with a hoe. The crimson clover interplant may, however, act as a living mulch if I can plant it at the right density. Permaculturists look askance at digging for its disruption of the soil’s mycelial network, but a traditional vegetable garden in full sun might be best viewed as a disturbed meadow which is prevented from succeeding to forest by further disturbance. In this case a mycelial network does not form. However, if I can get a crimson clover living mulch established in the vegetable garden, I might be able to reduce or eliminate digging and weeding and also increase the capacity of the soil to hold water.

While I have been collecting information on designing and digging swales, so far I have not put this information to practical use. I will be looking more closely at the situation this year.

A different approach to decreasing irrigation needs is to increase spacing of the plants in the vegetable beds to be more compatible with available rainfall. While Ecology Action claims that closely-planted beds actually require less water on a square foot basis than traditional row-based spacings and that small amount of water can be supplied through irrigation in many cases, Steve Solomon claims that it is better to space plants much more widely if one is relying on (possibly insufficient) rainfall. The wider spacings mean each plant will not be competing for others and will thus yield more food than the same number of plants grown at closer spacing. A compromise position, one that Steve himself suggests, is to start with the closer spacing but then remove enough plants to create the wide spacings he recommends if rainfall proves to be insufficient and irrigation is not available. This approach makes sense to me. I should have done it last year, but I could not bring myself to rip out plants after I’d put so much effort into them and since we were not under water restrictions. This year I will do it if we get hit with water restrictions, and I will consider doing it if the Drought Monitor shows us at severe or worse drought and the weather patterns suggest that insufficient rainfall is expected to break that drought for a few weeks or more. If I am in the mood for a real scientific experiment, I can increase spacing for a portion of one of my crops and keep separate records of yields for that portion compared to the normal spacing, watering them (or not watering them) the same amount. 

Last month our new tool shed, shown in the photo at the beginning of this post, was installed where a dying silver maple tree had been removed last spring. With the tree gone, the vegetable gardens receive more afternoon sunlight and suffer less competition for nutrients with the maple roots. The tool shed is located closer to the gardens than the garage and the basement and has enough room to hold all the garden tools and supplies that used to be scattered across those two locations. A further benefit is that the tool shed is located at the highest point of the yard. This year we will add gutters and downspouts to the shed roof and direct the rainwater from the roof into a 500 gallon plastic tank. From there we can gravity-feed collected rainwater onto the gardens when needed and direct overflow to mulched garden paths or, if I get swales dug in time, to the swales for infiltration into the soil. The stored rainwater should replace a portion of the municipal water we’d otherwise use for irrigation.

Reducing use of electricity and natural gas

Mike and I cook on an electric stove, cool with a central air conditioner or electric fans, obtain winter heat from a forced-air natural gas furnace that requires electricity to operate the thermostat and the igniter and to power the blower, heat water with natural gas, keep foods cool with an electric refrigerator, and wash clothes with an electric washing machine. Through means such as setting the thermostat to 60F most of the time in winter and 82F for air conditioning, setting the water heater to 125F, insulating the hot water pipes and adding insulation to the walls, attic floor, and basement ceiling, sealing air leaks, and replacing inefficient old appliances with very energy efficient versions, we have reduced natural gas consumption by about three-quarters and electricity consumption by about 40% compared to what we used for a comparably sized house in 1990. However, we’d like to reduce consumption of each further and to be prepared to do without each for periods of time. Our biggest vulnerability is winter heating; our only backup source of heat at this time is a small kerosene heater. We use heat most days from November through March. While we use air conditioning for many fewer days than heating, it accounts for a considerable fraction of our total electricity use and cooking accounts for some of the remainder, so we need to work on these as well.

Our house was built in 1928, when coal-fired furnaces were very popular in our area. Our house has a round platform on the basement floor that supported a coal furnace and an opening in the basement wall through which coal was loaded into the basement. Coal furnaces typically burned hot; I’ve heard most people with coal furnaces kept at least one window partially opened in winter to balance the heat from the furnace. With that kind of heat fireplaces weren’t needed, and our house has none, so we do not have an easy way to add a source of wood heating. The chimney is on the east wall of the house outside of the kitchen and has a double flue. One flue would have been used for the coal furnace. We believe the other was used for a coal or wood stove in the kitchen for cooking; the chimney’s location and double flue suggest this possibility. St. Louis regulated the burning of high-volatiles coal in 1940 to reduce its smog problem; as a result households gradually switched to natural gas, oil, or electric furnaces and cooking stoves. The previous owner told us the house had an oil furnace when she and her husband purchased it in the early 1960s, but she’d replaced it with a natural gas furnace in the 1970s when oil prices rose drastically. We replaced that furnace with a 94% efficient unit that vents into a pipe through the wall. The natural gas service was not extended to the kitchen, so we cook on the electric stove that came with the house. The house had an electric water heater in the basement when we bought it. We’ve since replaced it with a natural gas water heater that vents through an insert in one of the two chimney flues. Nothing vents through the other flue at present. 

For short term electricity outages we can cook on a camp stove and a fire pit, bake with a solar oven, and use flashlights, oil lamps, and a solar lantern for lighting. When we are not using heat we do not find going without electric service to be a burden, especially if we have some ice available so we can hold refrigerated foods in coolers (in the winter we can keep foods cool in our cold storage area). However, lack of electric service in the winter means no heat. For a few days we could use the kerosene heater, but that is a short-term solution at best. If we had a wood-burning stove that we could heat and cook on, we could better handle short duration electric outages and, as we accumulated a supply of wood, gradually reduce use of fossil fuels for heating and cooking. I wouldn’t want to cook inside on a wood-burning stove during the summer, but if we had a summer kitchen set up in a shady location, we could shift some of our summer cooking outside, reducing excess heat in the house.

For 2013 we will concentrate on providing ourselves with a shady sitting area that can double as a summer kitchen. We already have a patio on the east side of the house with a structure on which we can suspend a tarpaulin to provide shade. However, the cheap plastic tarps we’ve used in the past don’t last more than one summer. This year we’ll purchase a canvas tarp that should prove to be more durable. We’d also like to add an awning extending out from the north wall of the house to cover a larger area that would eventually become the main area for summer cooking and other activities. I am planning to build a small rocket stove to see how it works compared to the Weber kettle and hibachi that we already have for summer cooking. I’ll keep you posted as the summer sitting area and kitchen develops! I don’t want to consider replacing the electric stove with a wood heating and cooking stove until we have a summer kitchen set up that we actually use, so this will be the focus of our efforts in 2013.

Garden Plans for 2013

Now that the new year has begun and we are in the middle of winter, I have time to plan for this year’s garden and also to make plans for becoming more resilient overall. Here is a look at garden planning for 2013 at Living Low Acre.

Recently I created a spreadsheet of the highest yields I have obtained on a square-foot basis over the 12 years I have kept detailed records for each crop. For each crop I listed the variety, garden spacing (in one of three different columns depending on whether I used the square foot method, Jeavons’ triangular spacing, or Solomon’s row spacing for that variety), sowing and transplanting (if applicable) dates, the measured yield in pounds per 100 square feet, and a code of L, M, or H to indicate the correspondence of my yield to what is claimed in the 8th edition of How to Grow More Vegetables. My intention is to better understand the factors that affect yield in my growing conditions. For certain varieties of tomatoes, for instance, I can exceed the best yields in HTGMV by a factor of 2 in the best years. For most of the crops that prefer cooler growing conditions, on the other hand, I have found it difficult to obtain high, or even medium, yields. You can see the results for yourself in the two images below. (I had to print out and then scan each page of the spreadsheet because I don’t know Blogger well enough to determine if I can upload the spreadsheets directly. The column headings for the second image are the same as for the first image. The backgrounds are different colors because I printed each page on the back of previously used paper and the two sheets are of different ages.)

The only crops that met or exceeded my expectations for yield in 2012 were tomatoes, garden peas, blackeyed peas, leeks, and carrots. Tomatoes and blackeyed peas loved the hot, dry summer, and the blackeyed peas matured earlier than the Black Turtle dry beans, thus avoiding fall rains that caused some of the bean crop to mold or germinate in the pod. Garden peas do surprisingly well here, although I have not tried to save seed for them, which would reduce yields as I’d have to leave some of the patch unharvested until the pea seeds matured and dried. I think my success with leeks and carrots had much to do with my planting them at the right time and, in the case of carrots, leaving them to grow for the entire season instead of harvesting them in midsummer and then trying to sow them again in late summer for a fall crop. The carrots that I left to grow all summer long and harvested in fall grew quite large but still remained crisp and flavorful. Leeks continued to grow throughout summer and fall, unlike the onions which had to mature during much hotter weather than they prefer, lowering their yield.

As I looked over seed catalogs and pondered how to improve my garden, several things struck me as worth trying in 2013.

1. I’m going to stop trying to grow kale and collards as a spring crop. We didn’t use enough of them in spring and early summer compared to bok choy, cabbage, and broccoli. Once July hit, a combination of heat and harlequin bugs killed all of the kale and most of the collards. What I plan to do this year is to grow a spring and early summer crop of bok choy, cabbage, and broccoli.  All of these will be harvested in June through early July. Mike will turn much of the cabbage crop into sauerkraut for eating through winter. Then I will remove all brassicas from the garden until I direct-seed for fall crops in an effort to reduce the harlequin bug population. In the fall I’ll try growing bok choy, turnips, rutabaga, storage radishes, and very cold-tolerant varieties of kale, collards, tatsoi, arugula, and mustard greens. I’ll harvest the bok choy, turnips, rutabagas, and radishes before winter and leave some of each of the others in the garden, uncovered, to see if they will overwinter for me. Last winter the low never dropped below 10F at our house; varieties that are supposed to survive to 6F can be found here.

2. I plan to grow more carrots, beets, and parsnips in 2013. I’ll sow all of these in the spring and leave all of them (except for the Cylindra beets) in the ground until after the first fall frosts. My observations from 2012 suggests this should increase the weight harvested per unit area and allow me to store more food for eating in winter and spring of 2014. The Cylindra beets are fast-growing so I hope to get two crops, a summer and fall crop, out of them; if that doesn’t work, I’ll drop them and grow only the sugar beets after this year.

3. With the weird, changeable weather we get it’s hard to know whether to grow Irish potatoes or sweet potatoes. I like Irish potatoes better, but they prefer a longer stretch of cool weather than we get here in the spring or fall. It’s hard to store potatoes during our hot summer weather. Sweet potatoes grow very well during hot summers, but the year we got 12 inches of rain in October, the entire crop rotted before I could dig it up. While they store very well during the winter and I have been able to use stored sweet potatoes to generate the next summer’s crop, I don’t like them as well as Irish potatoes. This year, I’ll try both again, planting 75% of the space to Irish potatoes and 25% of the space to sweet potatoes, and let them fight it out for yield, storage, and kitchen use qualities. May the best potato win ...

4. I used the spreadsheet above to set up my garden calendar and garden plan, in an effort to obtain more-consistent yields from every crop. At the end of next year we’ll see if I was successful; I’ll refine the plan each year so I can provide more of the food we eat every year.

5. New garden crops I’m trying this year include tomatillos, ground cherries, rutabagas, parsnips, and peanuts; two new varieties each of tomatoes, eggplants, and cabbage; and one new variety each of sweet pepper, dent corn, lettuce, Irish potato, and sweet potato. I also plan to try a different trellising system for cucumbers, melons, and squash in hopes of increasing yields for all of these. I’ve set up two new garden areas in which I plan to try some perennial vegetable crops such as scorzonera, Siberian pea shrub, daylily as a food plant (flower buds), perennial onions, and chicory as well as add space for growing pole beans on trellises. I plan to try a few new herbs as well. Finally, I will try again to grow tea (Camellia sinensis) on the east side of our house in place of the bridalveil spiraea shrubs currently in that area. Wish me luck on the last; the tea plants I have in containers suffered from the heat in the summer, but I hope that their roots might stay cooler if planted in the ground on the shadier east side of the house. I’ll put a wind barrier up to protect them from winter winds. The tea plants I ordered are reputed to survive Zone 7 winters, a criterion St. Louis has met for the past 12 years.

I’ll put the rest of the plans in a second, hopefully shorter, post next week. After that I plan to (finally) write the post on low-cost ways to start seeds and then continue the series on how I got here.

2012 retrospective

Hey, it's the end of the year, everyone else is doing it, why not me too?

Garden-wise, 2012 was a surprisingly good year. As other folks who live in the US Midwest have noted, the decreasing polar ice cap seems to have affected the usual march of weather systems. The jet stream locked itself into unusual flow patterns for weeks at a time. In St. Louis, the result was an abrupt end to winter on March 12. I worried when the fruit trees burst into bloom before the spring equinox, but as it turned out our last spring frost was on March 10 and we had high yields of bush cherries, plums, peaches, pears, and American persimmons as well as a few apricots and apples. We also had an early and excellent spring strawberry crop. With all the different fruits available in sequence, we stopped buying fruit in late April and didn't buy any more fruit until November, other than some local peaches when I happened to find myself across the street from one of the orchard's outlets. We also had a good year for nuts: we harvested quite a few black walnuts courtesy of the neighbors' tree that overhangs our back yard as well as some chestnuts from our chestnut trees (young and just starting to bear) and some American hazelnuts from the various shrub borders.

We had enough rain through early May but then very little rain until August. It was hot, very hot, all summer long. Did I say HOT? 2012 will end with the highest average temperature on record for St. Louis, beating the previous hottest year by nearly a full degree. We smashed the old record for days with highs of 105F and higher and set several other records for number of days with a high of various temperatures. Over half the days this year had a high of 70F or higher! With the combination of heat and lack of rain, we spent most of the summer and fall in one degree of drought or another, from as high as extreme drought to the current moderate drought. In some ways that made it an easier summer for growing food. The high humidity of the past two summers was very hard on my pepper and tomato crops of each year. This year, by contrast, peppers did reasonably well and tomatoes were superb; the low humidity cut down on disease problems I can have with these crops. I also had good crops of cucumbers, zucchini, dry beans, garden peas, blackeyed peas, edamame-type soybeans, and popcorn, but almost no squash due to planting too early and thus attracting too many squash bugs. Spring greens generally bolted early due to the heat and drought in May and June, although onions, garlic, broccoli, and cabbage all did well. We also had an early and productive asparagus crop. The potato crop was very poor. On the other hand, fall greens and root crops yielded pretty well because Isaac brought us about 4 inches of rain in early September and the rest of that month and October were cool and moist.

With the very hot, dry weather I had to water a lot. I limited watering as much as possible to the vegetable gardens and newly planted trees, shrubs, and herbaceous plants, but that still meant hours of moving a garden hose around the yard from late June through early August. As a result we had by far the highest water bill ever for the three months including May, June, and July, using about 3 to 5 times the amount of water we have used during the same period in previous years. St. Louis had plenty of water, this year, as the rivers were at reasonable levels over the summer. Now both the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers are near historic lows. The latest prediction is that drought will hang on in most of the Missouri River's watershed for at least the next three months. I don't think St. Louis has ever restricted water usage, but if the drought continues, it wouldn't surprise me if 2013 brings water restrictions in the summer. With this in mind, I am planning next year's garden to be more drought tolerant than this year's was. Our big garden purchase this year was a 10 foot by 12 foot garden shed with a metal roof. Besides holding all the garden tools and supplies in a central location, it will have gutters and downspouts added to the roof to feed into a 500 gallon water tank. The shed sits at the highest spot in our yard, so we can gravity-feed water collected in the tank to the nearby vegetable gardens. This will supplement the rainwater we collect off the roof of the house, used to water containers and the plantings in the front yard.

The very warm weather this year meant a lower than usual use of natural gas, the fuel that provides our household heat. The glassed-in front porch contributed a little solar heat as well, especially in late winter and early spring and again in October and November. The lower humidity this summer, combined with being out of town for 12 days during the hottest part of the summer, reduced our use of air conditioning to only 16 days in 2012 and thus meant a lower than usual use of electricity in 2012. The glassed-in front porch also provided an excellent place to keep our collection of subtropical and citrus plants over the winter; our rosemary plants bloomed from November through March!

This is long enough now, and we have neighbors due to come over soon to eat blackeyed peas and cornbread, the traditional Southern foods to bring good luck to the new year. May all of you enjoy the best year possible in 2013! I'll be back soon to continue the series that I interrupted for this post.

Part 3: Starting to Wake Up

After marrying Mike, my performance at work began to improve. Part of it was that after five years at the company, I had a better idea of what was expected of me and how to meet expectations. A larger part, I think, was that I now had a good life outside of work. Besides being happy within our marriage and home life, I was also learning to play the mountain dulcimer. I’d wanted to learn to play the instrument since shortly after moving to the St. Louis region, when I first heard it at a re-enactment of pioneer days at a nearby Illinois state park and loved the way it sounded. Taking up the mountain dulcimer was the first thing I’d done that had no connection whatever with trying to get ahead within an empire since college. I’d played the clarinet from fifth through eighth grade and enjoyed making music within a school band, but I had stopped playing after leaving eighth grade and had not taken up any other instrument until I chose to play the dulcimer. I knew how to read music, but making music on a woodwind instrument is sufficiently different from making music on a stringed instrument such as the dulcimer that it was almost like starting to play music from scratch. Nevertheless, I persisted with it and though I did not practice often enough to make rapid progress, I did make slow progress and more importantly, mostly enjoyed the effort, even the recitals (after they were over and my shaking stopped). All these things helped me devote some energies that used to be wasted on feelings of unworthiness and unhappiness back toward my job, and not surprisingly, improved both my performance and, according to management, my attitude as well.

I was also learning a number of useful skills in my volunteer projects. For three years I was a demonstrator in the small auditorium at the St. Louis Science Center, putting on gee-whiz science shows for audiences of all ages. As a demonstrator I received free training on how to do the best job at it and plenty of exposure before audiences, some of whose members then asked me to prepare and offer talks to other audiences. The result was that during a five year period I prepared and presented talks on laser science and on opportunities for women in chemistry to audiences ranging from 1st graders to adults aged 50 and up, learning by doing how to tailor presentations to the needs of the audience. During the seven years I volunteered with the local section of a society for professionals in chemistry and chemical engineering, I worked as newsletter editor, chair of one of the committees, secretary, and a member of the board of directors, honing my administrative skills in this friendlier environment and gaining experience with writing and editing, skills that helped a lot with the written communications I had to make for my job.

Though I’d been trained as a physical chemist, within the company I was more useful as an analytical chemist, in particular a thin film analytical chemist. This was a field I could understand and I formed good working relationships with scientists elsewhere in the company who operated the instruments that provided results that I could not obtain on the lower-tech instrumentation I had available in my lab. My stock at work rose along with my effectiveness level and end of the year results review, though I still spent Sunday afternoons and evenings dreading the Monday morning return to the lab.

Up to this point, however, I’d held myself aloof from the economic aspects of working, and indeed from economics in general. I’d developed a dislike for economics during the introduction to accounting course that I took my senior year of college. It wasn’t the accounting for actual monies earned and spent that bothered me; I could readily understand the value in that. It was all the approximating that went into, for instance, assigning values for depreciation. It didn’t make sense that a piece of equipment could be assigned a useful life of, say, five years and zeroed out on the books at the end of year five when, one day later, it still worked perfectly, in fact might still be in use. It seemed to me that by the time the various sorts of approximations required to develop a balance sheet or profit-and-loss statement had been made, the numbers on them had only the most tenuous connection with reality. As a experimental scientist, I dealt with numbers all the time, with plenty of institutional checks to ensure that the numbers I measured and reported were both precise and accurate. I didn’t see any such commitment to physical reality in what accounting did. And they called it a science? As usual in the courses I disliked, I made sure I learned it well enough to get an A and as a result I could read and understand balance sheets and had a nodding acquaintance with economic terms, but I avoided any further engagement with a subject that seemed to me so riddled with subjectivity as to be nearly worthless. At work, this meant I tuned out during meetings as soon as economic concepts were discussed. I knew we were supposed to be helping the company make a profit, but that was all I felt I needed to know. Let the folks above me determine how to make that profit; it was their job, not mine.

It was the summer of 1990 during an offsite departmental meeting at a conference center in a rural area when I first realized what growth in profits actually meant. At the time, team-building exercises were popular management tools, the theory being that if a group of people could solve a made-up problem that had nothing to do with their work, at someplace that was nothing like their workplace, they could somehow translate that into effectively working together on real problems in real workplaces. (During one such activity we were to allow ourselves to fall over backward from an elevated platform into the supposedly waiting arms of our colleagues. I was the only person who refused to participate in this activity; it struck me as not just pointless and an opportunity for my male colleagues to touch me in inappropriate places, but possibly dangerous as well. In fact, they didn’t fully catch one of my colleagues and she tumbled to the ground, but luckily she wasn’t visibly hurt by the experience.) It was at the concluding meeting of this exercise in money-wasting that either the second or third boss up from me was giving us the standard pep talk including the usual 15% return on investment company goal. (If that sounds absurdly high, remember that this was 1990 and it was a common expectation in the industry at a time when oil was far cheaper than it is now.) Perhaps because I was so miffed at my colleagues and the entire corporation, I didn’t tune out of the discussion. For the first time in the six years I’d been working, I suddenly grasped that this was exponential growth we were expecting, for as far into the future as anyone expected the company to be around.

My first reaction, I admit, was grim amusement. This was because Mike worked for a bigger and meaner multinational corporation than I worked for. In my mind’s eye I saw my company grow, and his, and eventually both grow to the point that they were the only two corporations left on Earth ... and then his company swallowed mine up with a smack of its lips and a burp. I liked watching my company get what I thought was its just desserts. But now his company can only grow a certain amount more, I saw, because after all, Earth is finite; obviously the company can’t grow larger than the Earth itself. As soon as I grasped that I realized that what my hypothetical exercise meant was that profit growth has a finite lifespan, at my company or any other. I didn’t know how long that lifespan was or what might replace profit growth as an economic driver, but as soon as I grasped that profit couldn’t grow forever, I couldn’t help wondering why seemingly no one else, in a roomful of people practically every one of whom knew exponential functions inside and out, had picked up on this basic absurdity. In brief, I began to wake up. And once I woke up that much, I knew that I couldn’t stay at the corporation for all that much longer, that in the long run whatever I did for money had to made sense on a finite Earth as well as be something I actually enjoyed doing.

After the meeting, Mike and I discussed what might happen at whatever time I chose to leave the company. We decided to dedicate as much of my income as needed to remodeling work on our house and to save some of it toward whatever period of time I would be out of work while deciding on my next career. Although Mike earned less than I did, he felt he could support both of us for awhile while I looked for different work. I got busy on interviewing and hiring companies to do landscaping work and to remodel the kitchen, bathroom, and back porch. Knowing that my time at the company was finite, that I wouldn’t be there for the more than twenty years I needed to reach early retirement age, freed up more energy that I could put into doing my job well during the time I had left. I finally figured out that I not only had a budget at work that I was supposed to stay within, but that the goal was to get the maximum amount of analytical work done while staying within that budget, and I dedicated myself to that effort. My supervisor was delighted with my newfound enthusiasm for staying within budget, and I turned out a competent body of analytical research over the next two years. During this time the period of employment to be vested in the company’s pension plan changed from ten to five years. Now that I was vested in both the pension plan (a plan in which I could receive a pension as early as 55 years of age) and in the 401(k) investment plan I was also taking advantage of, all the financial barriers to resigning ended. It was just a matter of knowing when the right time to leave would be. I trusted I would know when that was and continued to work while I waited for whatever sign would let me know the time was right.

By spring of 1992, I’d had enough success at work that I’d been invited to one of the monthly luncheons the CEO held to meet a cross section of people from throughout the company and a similar luncheon that the president of our division, four levels above me, held to meet people in our division. The luncheons, I knew, were supposed to reward me for good work and encourage me to devote even more effort to the company. However, other events suggested the time to resign was approaching.

A few months previous during a department-wide meeting, the manager three levels up from me had told the department that we had about a year in which to develop at least one product which was deemed sufficiently good to begin the steps toward commercialization. No such product had yet come out of our department, and upper management was clearly becoming impatient with us. Awhile later came rumors of a departmental reorganization. I’d been through enough reorganizations by that time to suspect that this was the prelude to a big shakeout, though I wasn’t sure how the process might play out.

Part of our yearly results review involved identifying a long-term career path for each of us. I had not responded with any real enthusiasm to the long-term career path that had been proposed for me. On the surface the path made sense to the various managers who had signed off on it. It acknowledged my lack of interest in what they called exploratory science, meaning that I wasn’t any good at inventing the new products that the company needed to keep its profit increasing. In contrast, I was pretty good at what they called explanatory science (I could clarify questions about and identify problems with something someone else had invented), plus I had good communication skills. Combined with my history of work on one of the products made by the division’s plant in Massachusetts, a plant I’d visited numerous times over the past several years, that suggested a transfer to the analytical department at that plant with a potential of rising to supervisor of the analytical department. But I didn’t want anything of the sort. I hated that plant. During one visit I’d gotten sick on the odor it generated. (I got no sympathy from my colleagues at the plant, one of whom commented that it smelled like money to him.) I’d lived on the east coast during high school and college but didn’t like it much; nothing about the town the plant was located in suggested I’d find anything about it to like. Mike is a lifelong resident of the St. Louis area and most of his family is here; I had made a home here as well and intended to stay here the rest of my life. On top of that, I’d had plenty of time to observe colleagues at levels ranging from technicians to the CEO of the company, and my observations had taught me that any supervisory post meant changing one’s values to those of the corporation. At my level I could still resist most of the pressure to conform at the cost of hiding aspects of myself, but I saw that those just one level up faced far more pressure to conform than I did, and the process of value change was complete one level above that. Even at my level I was having some health issues related to the mismatch between my values and the ultimate corporate goal, and I knew they would only get worse the longer I spent with the company. At home, the landscaping and remodeling work had been completed and we’d put some money aside toward the several months to a year I thought it would take for me to determine another way to earn some money. I was finally ready to take the first big action of my life that would not mesh well with the goals of empire.

Toward the end of May, I resigned effective the last business day in June, a couple of weeks past my eighth anniversary with the company. I handed in my resignation just a day or two after the reorganization plan was announced that made it clear I’d picked exactly the right time to resign. When my shocked boss asked me why I was resigning, all I could say was that I was tired. If I’d been able to tell him why I was tired, I would have said that I was tired of the endless pressure to conform to the corporate imperative to grow that was at odds with the Earth’s very real limits; I was tired of pretending I liked the work; I was tired of having so much of my energy sucked up by work and work-related volunteer activities; above all, I was tired of the feeling of dread that crept up every Sunday afternoon. With my resignation handed in, I put one last burst of effort into writing reports and cleaning up my laboratory and walked out on my last day with a huge burst of relief and gratitude. During those last few weeks I noticed the difference in how I was treated once it became widely known that I had resigned with no other job in line. If I’d resigned to take a better offer someplace else, or because my spouse was relocating and thus I was as well, I would have been congratulated in the first circumstance, wished well in the second. Resigning without a job in hand, though, intrigued and challenged my colleagues. A few of them told me confidentially that they wished they could do the same but that they had families to support, that I was fortunate to have a husband to support me. I agreed with them, of course, but they did not know that our household income would drop by close to two-thirds when I quit. But I felt I’d challenged them enough as it was so I kept that last bit, as I had kept so much else over the years, to myself.

Once I walked out of the building that last time, I faced deciding what to do next, a process I hadn’t had the energy to deal with while I was working for the company. The story will continue from there, though I may make an unrelated post first to sum up 2012 here at Living Low Acre. May you all have a happy New Year, and see you here again about then!

How I Got Here, Part 2: Crisis

In part 1 of this series I described how it was that I came to obtain a PhD in chemistry despite my neither liking chemistry much nor being all that good at it. I’ll pick up the story with my job search and its results.

1984 was a good year to graduate with a chemistry PhD; all the major chemical corporations were hiring, courtesy of Reagan-era easing of pesky “restrictions on the productivity of business” that had lifted the US out of an energy-related economic recession at the cost of many working-class jobs. As a woman seeking a research position I had an advantage: businesses were under pressure to increase diversity among their workforces. Since the percentage of women working in research positions was still low, I could provide them not only with the research to help them keep the new products and higher profits coming, but I could also make them look as if they were socially responsible while doing it. I still had to get through the hiring process, however, which included a presentation on my research project as well as personal interviews. Fortunately my research director had been an avid debater in high school and college, learning through debate clubs and meets how to make effective presentations. I’d never been interested in debating myself, but I do enjoy speaking in public. That trait, combined with my director’s instructions on how to prepare and make an effective presentation, helped me make a better impression than my level of understanding warranted. What helped me with the personal interviews, in addition to decent social skills, was my pride in the work I’d done, not so much for the sake of the work itself but because I knew I had helped my director get a lot of research done when it needed to happen for him to get tenure. (He did in fact receive tenure a couple of years later.)

I wound up with job offers from three of that era’s major chemical corporations as well as an offer to do a postdoc with a well-known research laboratory, the offer my research director wanted me to accept, as much because it would look good for him for one of his students to be working there as it would be beneficial to my career. I didn’t take the postdoc offer as I had no desire for an academic position, something I’d taken care not to reveal to him until then because I thought it might lessen what he was willing to do on my behalf. All that remained to do was choose which employer to chain myself to. For various reasons I picked the one headquartered in the St. Louis area, moving here in June of 1984.

Making the change from student to corporate research scientist proved quite difficult. For one, I wasn’t working in a field I had training in (I started out working on catalysts while my training was in spectroscopy), so I was immediately faced with learning the field on top of learning how to work within a corporation. At least I was working in the corporate research laboratory so I didn’t have too much product pressure on me, but the goal remained to make the company money, a goal that I soon learned didn’t mesh well with my own motivations. I still don’t know why the company kept me on past my first year or two, though it might have had something to do with a management potential they saw in me based on the volunteer work I was doing with an internal organization helping young scientists like myself get acclimated to the organization and also for the local section of the American Chemical Society. (I’d joined the latter because I realized that building a network of colleagues would be essential to my obtaining another position should the company come to its senses and get rid of me.) I think it also had something to do with the wealth pump of empire still being functional at that time. They could afford to keep me on while they and I figured out what kind of research I could do that would benefit them, even if it took a few years. I was at least improving their workforce diversity, if nothing else. 

A friend of mine within the corporation had told me early on that one of the big hurdles facing many graduating students upon entering the work force was finding a goal to strive for. During our student years we didn’t have to think hard about what our purpose was, as the degree we worked toward provided an obvious goal. Once we began paid employment, however, we were faced with finding motivation within ourselves and setting goals based on that, not always an easy thing to do. He was right. The only thing motivating me for the first few years was keeping enough money flowing in to afford the trappings of a middle class lifestyle. In due course I had a car and a condo as well as the job and the volunteer work. I’d achieved everything I had worked for to that point: I was supporting myself. Problem was, I was miserable. Besides not enjoying the work and not doing an especially good job at it, I hated being inside an office or laboratory for so many hours. Though I endeavored to spend as much time on the weekends as I could with friends, at area gardens and parks, or riding my bicycle in the nearby river bottomland or on day tours, I could not get away from the knowledge that I’d have to be back in the lab come Monday morning. My life was dominated by paid employment and the extracurricular activities I had to engage in to keep that employment, activities which were increasingly at odds with anything I found meaningful or even enjoyable.

It was a setup for a crisis. That crisis hit when I turned thirty. While it was precipitated by a series of poor relationship choices, the problems went much deeper that that. By that time I was far from living in alignment with my values. To get back on track I needed help from a therapist to see how a deep sense of not being “good enough” propagated into my choices in all of life. I was grateful to be earning enough money to afford the therapy and in enough of a crisis to be willing to do the personal work needed to face some of my shadow aspects. During the course of the therapy, I met the man who was to become my husband at the home of mutual friends. The connection was instant, but it took the insights I gained through therapy to not screw things up when the relationship got serious fast. We were married eight months after we met.

Mike’s background is quite different from mine. While I grew up in a solidly middle class household, Mike comes from working class stock. Though his high school counselor wanted him to go to college, Mike had had quite enough of formal schooling by the time he graduated from high school. After a few years of working for small camera stores, he went to trade school and got a degree as an electrician, turning that into a factory maintenance position with an even larger multinational corporation than the one I worked for. Mike had the good sense to not get his identity tied up with his job. He put in his time at work and did a good-enough job. His off-work hours were spent on his varied personal interests, including music and reading (he’s always enjoyed learning when he can choose the subject). He’d bought a small house in the North County suburb where he’d grown up, only because he was tired of continuous increases in apartment rents, not because he had a big desire to own a house. The house came cheap because it needed a lot of cosmetic work. Mike had gotten the required work done to bring it to code but didn’t have sufficient motivation to do the cosmetic work. When we became engaged and started to discuss where we were going to live, Mike proposed a deal: I could decide on whatever kind of work I wanted done on his house if I would be willing to move there. He had no interest in living in my condo in West County, a much too middle class area for his taste. Generally in a situation like this both parties sell their respective dwellings and buy a different house together, but we knew his house would not sell quickly or for much money while my condo was nearly new and much more salable. I liked the idea of moving into his house, not just because of the chance to take charge of the details of the cosmetic work and because I could finally have a small garden of my own, but because living in Jennings would be a chance to get out of the middle-class rut I’d gotten myself into. The decision to sell my condo and move into his house was to have much farther reaching consequences than either of us could have guessed at the time.

It looks like I’ll need more than three parts to tell this story and that it will drag on into January. So be it. I remember I promised to discuss low-cost ways to start seeds and it’s about time for that post as well; if need be I’ll interrupt the ongoing story for the seed-starting post.

How I Got Here, Part 1: Accommodation

Jason Heppenstall, who writes 22 Billion Energy Slaves, is currently writing a series of posts he calls The Great Escape, an exploration of the path he’s taken through life and how it led him to an understanding of the serious problems we all face. Inspired by him (thanks, Jason!), I decided it’s time for me to explain how I diverted from the conventional life path I followed before age thirty to the low cost, low energy life that is likely to be in store for a lot more of us as we work our way farther into a post-peak world. Perhaps it might help some of you who are struggling to make similar changes in your own lives.

I grew up in the Space Age 1960s. Since the US was flush with cash at the time, the beneficiary of its imperial wealth pump and its fossil fuel lottery winnings, it not only had plenty of money to fund the space program but it also had plenty of money to invest in basic scientific research and in science education. It was a good time to grow up for anyone who found any aspect of science or technology fascinating. I was one of those children. Early on I found and read my grandparents’ popular field guides for wildflowers, trees, and birds, using them to teach myself to identify by common name many of each. I was also fascinated by weather, a fascination aided by living in the US Midwest, a place of changeable and sometimes awesome weather phenomena. The feminist revolution ongoing in the 1960s made it an especially good time to be a girl interested in science. No one told me I couldn’t, or shouldn’t, pursue a scientific career. In fact, they encouraged me to do so, now that women with scientific and technical degrees were not only tolerated but actually sought out and courted. The only decision I had to make was which branch of science to pursue. Here my practicality, my sense of how to position myself to take advantage of the opportunities the wealth pump brought to my doorstep, asserted itself. I loved plants. I had a strong interest in environmental matters, courtesy of the growing awareness of ecological problems during the 1960s and 1970s and being a teenager and young adult during the energy crises of the 1970s. I considered a career in an environmental field and in fact wrote my college admission essay on environmental matters. But I attended and graduated from college in the late 1970s, during an energy-related recession, a time when economic issues were beginning to trump environmental issues. My major scientific role model was Marie Curie, a chemist. I did well enough in chemistry in high school and college to consider it as a potential career field. Job opportunities at that time were better for graduating chemists than they were for biologists or environmental studies majors, and better for PhD graduates than for BS graduates. So I did the logical thing: I got a BS in chemistry in 1979 from a good private college, leveraging that into a PhD in physical chemistry in 1984 from a top-ten university. The fact that I didn’t much like chemical research, already evident in college and even more obvious during grad school, was something I considered irrelevant. I needed a good job to live according to prevailing middle class standards; corporations were very eager to hire a woman with a PhD in chemistry to further their attempts to “diversify” their workforces; thus I set my sights on a research position with a large corporation.

Now I don’t mean to imply that I was only looking out for Number 1, in the phrase of the time. I tried to do right by other people, to be a good friend and a good family member. I tried to live ethically to the best of my ability, an effort made easier by having little disposable income during my college and grad school years. I vowed that I wouldn’t take a job whose purpose was to make it easier to kill more people faster, thus leaving myself out of consideration for jobs in the defense industry that could have been mine given my grad school work in laser spectroscopy, a field of considerable interest to the industry. But I also had a strong desire to live on my own as soon as I could, and within the ethical constraints I set for myself I was determined to succeed at it. Since I lived in an empire, that meant collaborating with the empire enough to obtain my goals. That in turn meant getting a good job with a major corporation.

I showed astuteness in choosing my research director and jumping through the hoops grad school set in front of me. As soon as I entered grad school, I made friends with a few older students who were more than happy to tell me how to succeed. Take the offer to teach the physical chemistry laboratory course rather than the first-year general chemistry course, they said; it’ll be more fun and less work. I did; listening to my classmates describe their experience with the general chemistry course I knew I’d made the right choice. Don’t make the mistake of studying for the monthly exams (we were required to pass at least six out of the eighteen it was possible to take by the end of our second year), they told me. You’ll do better to go to all the seminars, since many of the professors like to draw questions for the exam from the seminars, and to be as relaxed as possible before taking the exams. I followed their advice and passed the needed six before the end of my first year (aided by the laboratory course mentioned above; some of the questions drew on knowledge I’d acquired from teaching that course). Pick a research director as soon as possible, they counseled. Each can only take a limited number of students. Once you choose one, you’ll get office space and attention that will help you get through the grad school gauntlet. I listened carefully and spent what little time I had after coursework and teaching responsibilities interviewing potential research directors and talking to their students. In the process it became clear to me that if I chose to work for a tenured professor, I’d be expected to take a lot of initiative in deciding on a project and conducting it, a prospect I felt decidedly uncomfortable with after my experience with research in college. Most tenured professors had large enough groups that they spent little personal time with each student; some came with reputations of being extra hard on women students. So I made an early and brilliant choice in a newly hired faculty member fresh out of grad school, less than five years older than me. He’d have seven years to prove himself worthy of obtaining tenure. I’d be there about five years, during which time he’d have to get most of the work he’d be judged on for tenure done. Thus I’d receive a lot of attention and direction from him, much more than I’d receive from any other faculty member. This is exactly what happened, and exactly what I needed in order to get the PhD. I’d long ago figured out how to overachieve myself into As in coursework and grad school coursework was no different, but physical chemistry research was another matter entirely. Despite my research director’s best attempts to teach me how to choose and solve a current research problem, I wasn’t able to figure it out. Contemporary physical chemistry was too far above my mathematical ability for me to quite catch on to it. Fortunately my research director was good at choosing and solving problems and (mostly) patient with my slowness, as well as willing to put in the time to direct me and to promote me to those who might hire me. I was (barely) able to do what he needed me to do and I was willing to work long hours to achieve my and his goals. What got me through, besides the PhD payoff, was knowing that I was helping him to build a laboratory and a good research program - and knowing that I’d only be there five years.

I’ll stop here for the moment. What I have in mind is a three part series, with the remaining two parts to be written and posted before the winter solstice. We’ll see if that’s how it turns out!