...Farmer!

Yesterday I discussed passing my thesis defense, and becoming in some sense a "real" (astro)physicist, thus fulfilling the first part of this blog's domain name. Today, let's talk about that "farmer" part.

For those who might not know me as well, the Berkes have been farmers in Nebraska for multiple generations, stretching back over 150 years to the mid-1850s. My dad got a PhD in crop breeding rather than more traditional farming, but was always growing things as I was growing up (especially after we moved to five acres in California when I was eleven, where we had several vegetable gardens and orchards of as many types of fruit trees as he could get to grow in the climate). I, on the other hand, have never had a green thumb (I once managed to kill a resurrection plant), and found myself drawn rather to the starry heavens than the organic. I picked up a lot of knowledge related to growing plants a long the way, but other than a few abortive attempts over the span of my life was never really interested in doing so.

At least, not until fairly recently. I'm not sure when it started happening, nor can I point to a specific day, but over the course of the past two years (and centuries months of lockdown) I found myself wanting to grow my own food. Maybe it was always latent, maybe it was triggered by a desire to see things green and growing again after so long cooped up inside (especially through two Australian winters), maybe it was playing Stardew Valley starting in 2018 with its idyllic view of farming and sharing your bounty with others, but whatever it was, by the time I moved back to Hawaii I found myself with a burning desire to see what food I could grow for myself.

Then, a bit of a reality check: for one thing, I'm in an apartment with no area to grow a garden outside, and for another, Hawaii has endemic parasites that cause angiostrongyliasis, commonly known as rat lung-worm disease. Put simply, parasitic worms founds in land mollusks like slugs and snails in the islands can cause some serious damage to the human central nervous system, so if you're ever eating fresh produce in Hawaii make sure you wash it really well. Unable (and somewhat unwilling) to start an outdoors garden, I had to think outside the box, or rather, inside the house; and that's how I became a hydroponic gardener.

Hydroponics is the art/science of growing plants without soil, with nutrients delivered to the roots by dissolving them in water. Some years ago (before I started my PhD) we took a family trip to DisneyWorld in Florida, where we went on a behind-the-scenes tour of some of the gardens that grew the food served at the park, including a large hydroponics section. That's the first large-scale exposure to the concept I can remember, and it obviously stuck with me for me to remember it now. Anyway, as soon as I knew I'd be moving into my current place I started doing some research and soon after moving in I put in an order for a Farmstand from Lettuce Grow, one of several companies making consumer-ready hydroponics systems.

Just under three weeks ago, on December 2nd, the seedlings I'd ordered arrived (the parts to assemble the stand having arrived a few days earlier), and with expectant anticipation I arrayed them in the little recesses provided for them and set up the water pump and LED grow lights (which work on a schedule). Here's a photo I took of the first seedlings all ensconced in their places (with labels so I could remember what was what):

Farmstand, assembled!

For this first trial I picked a selection of different types of lettuce, some herbs, celery, and a cherry tomato plant. My motivation was that I'd like to be able to grow my own salads and avoid having to buy them as often. Once cool part about the Farmstand is that it's expandable; I've got the minimum of two layers, but it can go up to six, and I can already see myself growing a larger selection of vegetables in the future.

Anyway, I was a bit worried for the tender seedlings the first few days as they all looked a bit under the weather from their short trip here by FedEx, but they all not only survived, but thrived. Within a few days I could tell that the fastest-growing among them were visibly bigger, and by the end of the week even the slowest were showing growth. At the two-week mark I was able to pick my first few leaves of lettuce to put in my sandwiches for lunch or add to the store-bought salad I was having. Over the weekend I had my first salad entirely from my own lettuce mixture. And today, one day short of three weeks...well, see for yourself:

The grow lights make it hard to get natural-looking photos after dark.

Every morning now I come down from my bedroom upstairs eager to see how my plants are doing and have been growing over night. The lettuces are prolific, and are starting to look like leafy explosions in slow motion. The herbs are a bit slower, but still busy putting out leaves. Just this past week I discovered that the crafty tomato plant (on the far side in these photos), though not showing much too much outward growth, had sent one long thin root all the way down into the central reservoir, so hopefully it'll start picking up the pace. It's an amazing feeling to be able to just walk over and pick a few leaves from various plants for salads or sandwiches, and I think it's safe to say that I've found a new long-term hobby.

And that's the "farmer" part fulfilled now that I've eaten my own produce, at least on a small scale. (Though I have...plans. Indeed I do.) It's amusing to me that it ended up happening so close to the "physicist" part, but this blog's domain name is now finally topical! And it only took almost a dozen years! I'm sure I'll have much more to say on the topic of indoor gardening in the future, but this post is probably long enough for now. There'll be plenty of time to talk more about my new hobby. A hui hou!

Edit (12/29/21): One thing I forgot to mention, for anyone who might be tempted to get their own Farmstand, is that you can use my personal referral code FRIEND-YKPW to get $50 off the price of a Farmstand. (It also gives me $50 in credit.) That said, Lettuce Grow is hardly the only company making consumer-ready hydroponic growing systems, so look around to see what's available if you're thinking of making the leap to indoor gardening.

Physicist...

When I first started this blog, almost twelve years ago now, I needed to pick a domain name to use, and after some thought I settled on "physicistfarmer". It wasn't, perhaps, the deepest of thought, but it expressed something of a dual nature: on the one hand, an aspiration to be a physicist, one who studies the deepest fundamental workings of nature, to answer that insatiable thirst to know why things work. And on the other, a recognition of the past and what felt like the present, the generations of farmers in Nebraska in my family and the feeling that, for all my newfangled learning, perhaps I was a bit out of my depth in college. (And also "physicistfarmer" made for a nice alliteration, though I have deeply regretted it many a time since when trying to point people towards this blog!)

Today the first part of that aspiration is finally fulfilled, as I passed my thesis defense this morning and feel I can finally call myself an (astro)physicist. Tonight it feels like I can finally let out a breath I didn't know I'd been holding for a long, long time, perhaps ever since I started getting a PhD. The process isn't completely finished yet, as I still need to make some minor revisions to my thesis and turn it in again, but those are formalities; traditionally, you're allowed to start using the title of "Doctor" from when the review panel gives you a passing grade.

I'm still struggling to process it all, in some ways. It was certainly an interesting, four-country Zoom call! Besides me and the coordinator from Swinburne, on my panel I had Dainis Dravins in Sweden, a well-respected stellar observationalist some of whose papers (going back to 1982!) I've cited and were instrumental in understanding some of the systematic errors we encountered in stellar atmospheres, and Susana Landau in Argentina, a theorist in the field of varying constants whom I wasn't as immediately familiar with but still recognized by name. They had some questions and some interesting suggestions related to my thesis and while I certainly found the entire affair rather stressful it went off without a hitch. I've spent the rest of the day coming down from the adrenaline high, and am still a bit exhausted, so I'll keep this post short.

Oh, and what about the second second half of that domain name, you ask? Well...keep an eye out for tomorrow's post to hear about some recent developments in the "farmer" area! A hui hou!

So apparently I'm a morning person now...

 ...and I'm not entirely happy about it.

For some context, I actually was a morning person in my teens (shocking, I know), and even up through college, where a combination of job shifts occasionally starting at 6 AM and having at least one class at 8 or 9 AM almost every semester enforced a certain "early to bed, early to rise" ethos. Over time, after college, this gradually shifted to being more of an evening person; this was in turn partly due to jobs (like working at the Visitor Information Station or as a telescope operator) that required staying up late, but even while working a desk job for the JCMT I found that my most productive time of day was typically in late afternoon to evening, and I would usually find myself getting to bed later in the evening.

Starting grad school, with the attendant need to conform my schedule to that of the morning train into Swinburne, represented a good opportunity to readjust my schedule slightly earlier in the day, though not terrifically early; I'd usually get into Swinburne about 9:30 in the morning. However, all that gradually eroded with the pandemic and the endless centuries months of working from home. With no need (or ability) to catch the train, it was only morning meetings or events that necessitated my wakefulness, and thankfully Swinburne was pretty good about not scheduling such things earlier than 10 AM. Over the course of several months, my natural sleep cycle settled on going to bed between midnight and 1 AM, and waking up between about 8 and 9 AM. (Setting your own work hours is the [very] double-edged sword of grad student life.)

Upon getting the job offer with Gemini, I contemplated using the move to reset my schedule forward a bit again. This was partly because, due to the time difference between Hawaii (Gemini North) and Chile (Gemini South), events scheduled for both locations have to happen in the morning in Hawaii (which is afternoon in Chile). The flight from Melbourne to California was enough of a time difference that after three or four days of heavy jetlag I completely readjusted to Pacific time during the week I spent with my family. Then, upon moving to Hawaii, the jetlag from traveling west manifested as being (to me) a very early morning person, waking up at 5 or 6 AM and getting tired by 9 PM.

I was far too busy taking care of things upon my arrival to pay too much attention to my sleep schedule, and it was only some time later that it slowly dawned (no pun intended) on me that I was still waking up with the Sun and getting tired at what felt like a very early time of night. I think I've well and truly switched my chronotype to morning person at this point, and I'm not sure how to feel about it. As a former evening person, it feels like I'm now permanently jetlagged. I start getting tired after 9 PM, when before I would sometimes start creative projects (sometimes pretty hefty ones) at that time of evening due to being awake and alert and creative. Even if I'm up later than usual some night or don't have an alarm set the next day I can't really sleep in, forcing me to get to bed far too early from my point of view.

That said, I'm not entirely unhappy with it, nor am I in a huge hurry to change it. (Partly because it's not obvious to me how I would even go about doing so, since I don't understand the change in the first place.) It's useful for waking up for early morning meetings at Gemini, and I don't actually mind being awake soon after sunrise; I do enjoy the early morning feel, especially with how it's not ridiculously cold at that time of day here in Hawaii. From lockdown I got used to making breakfast at home rather than getting it somewhere on my way to the office, and this lets me enjoy a relatively leisurely breakfast before work. We'll see how it goes; perhaps old habits will reassert themselves over time and I'll shift back towards a later chronotype again, but for now I'll enjoy the post-dawn feel in the air when I wake up. A hui hou!

Back to nā mauna!

It had to wait a few weeks since arriving back on the island for me to sort out various things, but I've finally been back to visit Mauna Loa and Maunakea! The first weekend after I got my car I went for a drive up to 11,000 feet on Mauna Loa where I used to operate the Yuan-Tseh Lee Array. I didn't stick around at elevation very long (since just by driving to the Saddle I was already higher than the entirety of the continent of Australia), but now that I have an all-wheel drive SUV I felt (a bit more) comfortable about exploring some of the side roads off the main, paved access road. One of them—which I'm pretty sure goes to the NASA experiment where they put people in a simulated Mars camp for months at a time—was closed off, but I got a pretty neat photo of my car with Maunakea in the background.

I thought the colors worked really well in this shot. You can just see Maui in the background.

Then, this past weekend I took my new AWD capability for a spin up to the summit of Maunakea. Now, I've been up there probably a few dozen times as part of my volunteering and later working at the Visitor Information Station, but I honestly can't remember if I ever drove up there or not (as part of the guided summit tours, that is; I certainly never took my two-wheel drive car up there). If nothing else, this was certainly the first time I drove up there in my own personal vehicle with no demands on my time, and I found myself loving it. I felt a strange joy welling up upon arriving at the top and driving around the familiar telescopes that left me positively giddy, though that might've been the altitude, it's hard to say.

It was a beautiful day while we were up there.

I took along some fellow new coworkers from Gemini who moved here about a month after I arrived and haven't yet experienced the sights. It turns out we got up there just in time, as a mere two days later the summit was covered in snow and ice, and we've had a blizzard warning for the past few days (apparently Hawaii has now received more snow this season than Denver). We spent a few hours up there hiking to the physical summit and staying to watch the sunset, then leaving immediately afterwards because the wind came up an hour or so earlier and it got cold.

I always love seeing the shadow of the mauna projected on the sky like this at dusk.

I'm really glad I was able to get back to my two favorite volcanoes, even if just for relatively brief periods of time. Expect to see more photos in the future as I continue to settle in and reacquaint myself with some of the places I enjoyed visiting before. (There are a number of fellow Gemini employees new to the island, so I've got excuses for organizing day trips and hikes!) Now that I've got a GoPro, one of the creative projects I've wanted to do for literal years—making timelapse videos of some of these amazing hikes and experiences—is finally within my grasp, or at least it will be whenever my desktop computer finally gets here for doing the editing. In the meantime, you get these photos, and I get to enjoy the experiences anew. A hui hou!