We've had a couple dry days here...been a wet, wet, wet stretch. After a warm partly cloudy day it built up again and we're getting scattered showers. Not uncommon, though uncommon for the wind to be pushing the clouds from a direction that I can hear the rain falling before it gets here. Tonight as I was tucking my daughter in to bed I heard a dull roaring rush outside...like coming from the entire valley. Too loud to be wind...then it got slowly louder and louder and drops began pattering on our roof. Ahhhh, the sound of rain.

Back when we lived in town on the lake I went for a canoe paddle during a gentle rain; hard to find times when there's precip and no lightning. Anyhow, I thought it would be so soothing to hear the sound off all those countless raindrops splashing onto the lake. Nope. Imagine the sound of a million shards of crystal shattering all around you and that's more like it. Loud. Piercing. Not at all soothing. Needless to say even without the lightning I didn't stay out for long...

My wife is the main architect of our gardens. She took off for a much-deserved 5-day break and trip away. With her gone I took the reigns of keeping things sort of in shape and spent an entire day tooling around.

By the end of it I'd harvested (from only 1/3 of the plants) a full wheelbarrow load of cucumbers, (from about 1/3 of our beans) 3 gallons of green beans, and thinned a few chard plants to get a plastic shopping bag full. Tomatoes are starting to ripen, which will soon turn into a massive onslaught as well. Got some late strawberries ripening, which will be awesome if I can get the chicken gate fixed (my 2 year old tore it off the hinges by hanging on it) so they don't eat them. Come the 15th the 23 or so meat birds will be making the transition to our freezer, which should mellow things out substantially on the chicken front. Oh yeah, also pulled some shallots and onions and squashed a bunch of potato bug larvae, gross little things that they are. Many toads have been spotted hopping around in the garden, which is a good sign indeed; also spotted a lot of non-pest insects around the place

Also made a couple treks down to the neighbors' fields for blueberries. Got 2.5 gallons in the freezer so far with a total goal of 12 gallons so we'll have a gallon per month. All the fields we have access to this year are conventional, which is kind of a drag, though with a thorough washing the berries are just awesome.

Cherry tree has pretty much been picked clean, apples are ripening nicely, and the mystery stone fruit (think it's a plum) is coming along as well.

Hard to believe that we're still in the beginning of the harvest...

Livin' the dream...while sipping my first cappuccino of the day this morning I remembered all the ripe blueberries out in the orchard. Grabbed my bucket, put on my straw hat and with daughter in tow out into the warm sunny morning we went.

Not a great pick as the berries haven't been maintained at all so are quite a bit more sparse than the commercial fields, though 30 minutes if picking still yielded a quart or so of berries. Pretty much all of 'em got devoured by us when I got to the house.

I love starting the work day outside

OK, I got so involved in my last Beat Farmer update I kinda left out the "Beat" part So a couple months ago I picked up a Hercules RMX USB DJ console. Pretty sweet rig. Anyhow, over the last 8 or so years I've been sort of collecting tracks, though this summer I've really started actively casting the net. Been spending a lot of time on Beatport finding artists and tracks that I really like, and sifting through even more than I don't.

Tomorrow night I'll spin my first live set at a full moon dance party up in Belfast. I've had the set list picked out for about a week and have listened to it several times through; I may tweak it here or there, though all in all I'm pretty stoked with it.

So on one hand, I live on 27 acres in rural Maine with an eye toward experimenting with permaculture and self-sufficiency. On the other hand, I love electronic dance music, and make a living as a programmer telecommuting to Silicon Valley every day It's a pretty interesting split personality thing

Anyhow, the gardens are doing pretty good. We managed to get through the Cucumber Beetle infestation though I can't count how many of those little black and yellow beetles we crushed in our fingers. Have seen and done the same to the few Japanese Beetles that have come around.

Anyhow, the peas are pretty much done for now, as are the radishes. Lettuce is still strong. Strawberries are finally all weeded out and some blossoms are on the plants again; perhaps we'll get a few yummies in a few weeks. Beans are all starting to climb their poles, squashes and melons are growing like crazy and have small fruits growing. The cucumbers and tomatoes are also growing strong though we didn't give them any trellace or cages to climb, so we'll probably lose a lot of those crops to ground-dwelling critters. The initial 6 plants of broccoli were awesome, so we've started 3 more trays of seed to plant for a big fall crop. Also need to get the fall carrots and beets in, though the pea beds need to be prepped for that first. The beets that are in are doing well, as is the chard, turnips, and potatoes. Brussles sprouts are also strong. And then there's the orchard. While the birds ate every one of the small number of sweet cherries, they don't have the same affinity for the sour ones. Wife and kids are out there now picking them to make a cherry cobbler or something. Blueberries are coming in nicely, though we haven't really done much to take care of them. Perhaps a nice mowing this fall. Apple trees are all heavy with fruit, though most got stung by wasps that lay eggs in the young fruit. By the time the fruit is ripe the larvae are long gone and the inside of the fruit healed, though the skin retains a blighty scar. Anyhow, we're in for another great apple fall.

Now, if it would just RAIN again. Last summer we had an awesome cycle of thunderstorms and sun. June was like that though we've seen not a drop for a few weeks here and have resorted to rain birds out in the gardens. The trees will have to fend for themselves yet again.

I'll wrap it there, could go on and on though certainly have plenty else to get done here

So been pining about my local wi-fi setup. To make a long story short, my old access point could send signal all the way out to my "Summer Office" in the uninsulated, unheated barn. Over the winter, that hardware died on me and I replaced with an Airport Express, which doesn't have the same range. So when I moved back out here this year I threw another Express into the mix and configured the whole thing as a Wireless Distributed System (WDS). Should have done some homework; here's the basic downsides as nicely listed by http://www.dslreports.com/faq/13697:

If you decide to go this route, there are some gotchas:
*1 Throughput drop: A single-radio repeater has to get some signal to work with. Usually it is located at some midpoint where it's signal is not 100% either. Now it has to spend half of its time repeating a degraded signal. Your reception of this repeated signal may be less than 100% also. So the net is that by the time it gets down to real numbers you can lose 1/2 or more of your throughput.
*2 Interference: Both WDS units must operate on same channel; there will be increase of interference and hidden-node issues.
*3 Setup: Assuming you get two devices which both support a compatible version of WDS, you then have to set it up. This setup is going to vary quite a lot by firmware. No firmware I have found, has a simple "find partner and link-up" button.

So who knows, back to the drawing board I guess as it's about like having ISDN out here while the house gets a solid 3 megabit up/down...

Well it's almost officially summer here in Maine. Though we're currently in a cool and wet spell, it's been plenty hot. The gardens are looking less like patches of bare dirt as the various crops push toward the sky (along with the weeds).

Some beds have gotten a thorough weeding and mulching even!!! We'll see how things hold up through the summer; if things continue on we should have an awesome harvest and be able to put by substantial potatoes, onions, leeks, beets, carrots, and turnips for the winter.

In the orchard the fruit has set. Early apples are *heavy* and will need some thinning. While the pears and later varieties of apples had some heavy thunderstorms and wind while in bloom, so there was a lot of blossom loss and days the bees couldn't be out and about. On our stunted pear trees there are all of 3 little pears growing; hope they all make it The mystery tree has turned out to be some sort of cherry; will be interesting to see what kind as there aren't many sweet varieties that will thrive up here.

Though we'll have loads of apples again; soon will be time to get a grinder and press to make cider. I'm especially happy that our golden russets will have a good year again. Those puppies are sweet and crisp with a pleasant astrigent tang that makes for wonderful eating and even better cider. They also hold well and I've read that if stored properly they can last all the way through until May!!!

Anyhow, so the gardens and orchard are plugging away. On the beats side of things, I've finally after many years of waiting, gotten a DJ rig. Back when I first started thinking about spinning the route was either invest several thousand dollars in turntables and spin vinyl, or invest several thousand dollars in pro-level cd decks and spin cds. Since then there has been a groundswell evolution of consoles to interface with the massive storage capacity of hard drives and use a laptop and specialized software to do all the heavy lifting of buffering and calculating how sound files should be modified according to DJ input. Needless to say, the latter class of devices seriously undercuts spinning physical media; for a few hundred bucks, less than half the price of a single full-featured pro-level deck, I'm in the game.

That's the easy part, now it's on to learning my music collection at a whole new level, and learning just how far certain tracks can be sped up or slowed down without making them sound too bad...hopefully I'll post some mixes here once I get a clue what I'm doing