The original garden stakes may have been strong enough somewhere else. But out here in this open field, with no trees or shrubs nearby to shorten the fetch, air velocities off the lake apply direct force. The support either holds or it doesn’t.

With my back to the west-southwest, I set the five-foot length of forged steel within inches of the sapling’s trunk. The heavy driver covers the white end, and with my best sense of plumb, I slam the cylinder down. Metal clangs against metal, my body vibrates. With the first few strokes, I wish for any tunneling animals below the sense to evacuate.

The sandy soil gradually accepts the post and its arrow-shaped anchor plate. I feel resistance from rhizomes and the occasional stone. Each T-post goes in to a target depth, marked against my torso. Some ground takes more strokes than others, and some posts stand truer than the rest. But when I finish, none of them will budge.

Thick steel where thin aluminum had been. The protection steadied. The orchard stopped flailing.

The Iron Stake, a Ground of the Knots

Today, 80 fruit trees are taking root in that southeast corner. The wind still blows, and iron holds the orchard in place.

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First to arrive was a 16-by-8-foot tool shed, set firmly on a gravel pad not far from the road. Later that same day, 40 bare-root apple trees arrived in a box, along with plastic tubes and zip ties. We only needed to supply stakes to complete the kit. By Friday of that week, we had all the trees standing, their protective tubes secured to garden stakes.

After that trip, Sarah and I felt a growing sense of accomplishment. We had researched, planned, and followed through with starting an orchard in the southeast corner of our parcel.

With another 20 apple trees planned for the first week of May, we returned to find that the orchard we had left standing looked vandalized. Our first thought was ATVs. Had someone driven through and done donuts? But after surveying the damage up close, we realized it was the wind.

The prevailing wind off Lake Michigan had bent every garden stake to some degree. The tubes flailed on their bent anchors, the stakes stirring in the loosened soil. The wind’s force had exposed the weakness of the material.

One Gala sapling was finished. Its thin trunk had snapped near the root flare. Sarah wanted it not to be. I could see from the break that it was gone. We had 39 trees to save and 20 more on the way.

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Instead of leaving you with a blank space, I’m sharing something from Middleholding AI, where I write about technology from a non-technical perspective. Different topic, same guy typing it between shifts. If that’s not your thing, no hard feelings.

Here’s a previously posted essay featuring an LLM prompt to examine or try out for yourself:

MiddleholdingAI

Talking with the Internet

The First iPhones…

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a month ago · Adam of Middleholding

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“And with the dawn I’ll wake and yawn

And carry on to water.”

Bob Nolan, “Cool Water”

Lifting the handle on the frost-free hydrant at Middleholding, you’ll hear a brief whoosh, and then water surges from the pipe. A submerged pump feeds the household pressure system, but up here at the wellhead, a five-gallon bucket fills in seconds.

Less than a mile to the west, and sixty feet below our elevation, lies the shore of Lake Michigan, 1.3 quadrillion gallons of fresh water resting 577 feet above sea level.

Between our home’s foundation and the water table below, a continuous hydraulic connection ties our land to the lake through the sand. Deposited thousands of years ago by retreating glaciers, this coarse outwash material drains rapidly.

Five miles south, the Black River empties into the Great Lake. Eighteen miles north, the Kalamazoo River does the same. Both mouths run unnaturally straight, the mark of nineteenth-century engineering that allowed adjacent ports and downtowns to persist and prosper.

We average about three inches of rainfall each month on this side of the lake. A productive vegetable garden anywhere needs roughly an inch of water each week. And for sandy soil, that inch is better received as a pair of half-inch soakings, not a single downpour.

So with loamy sand underfoot and all this water surrounding us, a market garden at Middleholding will still depend on groundwater directed, slowed, and held at the beds to make up for any rainfall deficit.

At this stage of building out the farm, after hauling water a furlong to plant trees, and now with a well but before irrigation, we’re designing to keep water just long enough for beauty, protection, and vitality to compound and accumulate.

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Anchored to the earth in this way, the more we grow and the farther we extend from that point of connection, the more force is placed on our supports.

A climbing tomato has no tendrils to wrap around a string the way a pea would. It can only continue upward if something outside itself provides the next point of support.

The First Support, a Ground of the Knots

Left alone, the vine begins to bend. Sometimes it recovers and hardens, or runs along the ground, forming new roots. Other times it crimps enough to restrict the flow of water and nutrients. And if the stem snaps completely, the encounter with physics has ended that particular path.

Sometimes the difference between collapse and harvest can be as tiny as the click of a plastic clip applied at the right moment.

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Spring 2024, I picked up a few tomato plants without knowing their variety, along with a beef tenderloin and some vegan kimchi. The plants looked healthy and were priced well enough that I figured we could make them work in the boxes on our apartment balcony.

They began not much thicker than a pencil, with a handful of leaves and maybe a yellow blossom or two by the end of April.

They spent the season in potting mix above a reservoir that wicked water upward as the medium dried. After the first foot of growth, we could guess at their growth habit.

Indeterminate tomatoes do not stop growing. They keep climbing, sending out suckers and clusters of fruit until frost finally ends the season. By late summer, ours had reached the balcony floor of the apartment above us.

Nearly everything we eat has been shaped across generations to suit particular hands and particular tastes. This tomato, domesticated, selected, and refined, it’s adapted for this kind of reaching.

As the plants stretched upward, each new length received a plastic clip, clicked into place and secured to the rail or netting, keeping the vine from collapsing beneath the weight of its own ambition.

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Breathe in the smells of field and soil, breathe out willing this heavy fork up down and back. It should get easier after this first pass.

Aeration is an exchange. Like inhaling oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide, ideally it happens naturally without much effort and thought. But sometimes it takes work.

Sometimes crust needs to get broken up to let air in, tunnels drilled for water to infiltrate, and a just violent enough disturbance to unsettle the old and hard for something new and fresh to thrive.

The Harrow’s Gift, A Ground of the Knots

This summer we’re making our first few hundred feet of permanent raised beds at Middleholding. Without a rototiller or tractor to help with the tillage, we’re getting the feel for building soil by hand at a slow but steady pace. After clearing brush, hoeing the lines, and broadforking deeply, we carted over nine hundred shovel fulls of compost and topsoil for each fifty foot length. First cover crop sown on that newly bare area is buckwheat.

Robins feasted on an ant colony’s larvae hidden in the crumbles, Little Yellow butterflies mud puddled the water we sprinkled for the just buried grains. But before any of that, the earthworms and toads emerged.

How would you react if a toad jumped out of the ground you just pierced with seven 12 inch long tines? I took a picture, of course.

With the little big one levered out and exposed under the morning sun, I apologized for interrupting its summertime nap. I think finding a toad under a few inches of loamy sand may be a good sign for initial soil health here.

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The invention of this hand tool and the design evolution that produced the version we use are surprisingly recent developments in the history of agriculture.

It’s safe to say that forks and shovels are as old as blacksmithing and metallurgy, but this particular forging traces back only a few generations from today. From Andre Grelin in Chambery France in the 50s, to Elliot Coleman in Cape Rosier Maine in the 80s, to now in my mid 2020s Instagram ads, gardeners and small scale farms have been using the leverage of an upright human to prepare soil for growing vegetables.

Brevet Invention De La Grelinette

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Step on the crossbar, sink the tines deep, and then pull back on the handles. You can hear the earth sigh as the compaction breaks. You hear the pop-pop-pop of roots snapping. And when you step off, the bed is an inch taller and breathing again.

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The Unbound Wing, A Journey of the Trees

Sarah and I are Middleholding. The Threshold Deck is my personal offering. And sometimes I have to catch myself, wings beating against something invisible, flying hard toward the bright thing, convinced that’s where the sky is.

Is this flashy nature writing or romantic homesteading content? I love that stuff, and will click my hours away if I’m not careful.

The bright thing looks like virality. Like subscribers flooding in from unpredictable directions and the Philippines. I see that hunger in those weird faces influencers make for their video thumbnails. If that algorithmic influence ever arrived at our farm, I would die of embarrassment. The scrutiny and lack of privacy seem exhausting. The fame we are lured toward may be a ceiling, not sky.

My mentor pays for a monthly subscription to this Substack. My brother, and also my father-in-law, pay for founding membership. They may not catch every post, but that’s not really the point of their pledge. They put money on the work and aren’t paying for performance. They are paying for the thing itself.

That’s what ventilates this tunnel. Not advice or encouragement. Just three people deciding the work was worth supporting, waiting for me to find my way to an exit that was already there.

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Since then, each year around this week in June, we have the first sighting. It takes a moment for small black eggs to be deposited on our potted plants, and soon we have caterpillars competing with our kitchen to consume the culinary herb.

It’s our tradition to rescue some of these insects from being bird lunch by bringing them inside to complete their metamorphosis.

From worm to wing, our cat Boba roosts over their enclosure like a proud father. Sarah’s daughter Sophia does the release after they emerge from their pupae. Some chrysalises skip the season and overwinter to break out the following year.

Not all of them can fly away. Some emerge with wings that never fully open. We leave those on the parsley and tend them until they’re done. Boba sits with the ones that linger.

Every single time, our participation in this cycle is the reward. Less parsley, more wisdom.

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“Nature abhors a straight line.”

—William Kent

“Out of the crooked timber of humanity, nothing straight was ever made.”

—Immanuel Kant

Perfection is the enemy of done. That’s what Sarah says when she wants me to hurry up.

Last year, on May 31st, we woke before dawn and drove from Chicago to South Haven with 139 bare root willow trees. By the end of that manic day, all of them were in the ground.

For the eighty willows marking the southern edge of the orchard, we set a string line between two corners. Somewhere during ground prep the line lost tension. I kept hoeing along with the McLeod without looking up, following the slack, and the row started to drift into a gentle curve. Once we noticed it, we couldn’t unsee it. We stopped, retightened the string, and redrew the line before continuing.

We were in a hurry, but not so much that we couldn’t straighten things up.

Tender Foundation, A Ground of the Scales

I mentioned earlier, when introducing this series, that we don’t farm in perfectly straight lines. Curves, corrections, and the slow human drift born of fatigue are inevitable when you are holding a hundred small things in your head at once.

So now I periodically look up from my work and check the corners of the field to get my bearings.

It’s just a string. But the whole season follows it.

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When Sarah and I began formalizing our roles at Middleholding, we chose titles that described our responsibilities on the farm. Sarah is the Chief Seed Collector and Head Creative. I am its Steward and Principal Dibbler. Silly as they sound, I take the roles seriously.

A line of string stretched across the land helps me hold that seriousness in practice. It marks the boundary of where I should and should not be. It guides repetition. If I’m tooling around making holes in the dirt, it’s much easier to place them, keep track of them, and come back to them when they follow a straight path.

The feral vegetation is relentless out here. Goldenrod, vetch, milkweed, ragweed, and prairie grasses will quickly take over without intervention.

With only hand tools and limited time, efficiency becomes a form of care. A straight row lets me aim precious water where it needs to go. A defined edge makes weeding easier to stay ahead of. Maintenance takes on a rhythm when there’s a clear line to follow.

The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. But throw in some contours, strong wind, the zip tie sound of a sandhill crane in the brush, a mole run underfoot, or a deer breaking at the treeline, and what you usually end up with is something closer to “straight enough.”

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He read the sandy soil the way he reads every property. Then he looked where I wanted the load and said: if I start sinking, I’m gonna stop.

Seven cubic yards of compost blend. Half topsoil, half composted material. He could not precisely list what it was made of, but he knew it was heavy. He was right. That load weighed somewhere between four and six tons depending on moisture.

It did not change the elevation of the field in any visible way. It only added a mound beside the shed, staged and ready to be spread.

That’s the thing about material at this scale. The trucks arrive and disappear. What they leave behind becomes the farm.

By the first of May, more than thirty thousand pounds of material had crossed onto Middleholding.

The deer exclusion fence accounts for most of it. 2,200 linear feet of eight-foot woven wire, one vehicle gate, four man gates, H-braces at every corner. The wire weighs several tons. The round timber posts, set twelve to sixteen feet apart around the perimeter, add several more.

Seven to nine tons of fence, total.

Then the wood chip mulch left by the local arborist. The gravel the excavator laid for the driveway. The river pebbles Sarah and I are placing along the foundation for erosion control.

None of this changed the horizon line.

Six-point-seven acres absorbs thirty thousand pounds and looks almost the same from the road.

Field Note 1 widened the temporal aperture.

This note widens the physical one.

The work is heavier than it photographs.

And it all settles in.

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The Scar’s Wisdom, a Ground of the Scales

The wound is not the whole story.

The lunaria asked only for witness. We watched the shape change and the cycle continue.

The browsed trees asked for structure. We built it. The Ward posts tell that story.

The cherry saplings from Grandpa’s Orchard arrived already topped. That cut was made on purpose, the orchardist’s shears directing the tree’s energy outward before it ever touched our soil.

The question this card asks is not whether the wound happened. It is what care, if any, it now requires.

Read the scar, don’t look away from it. It marks the place where hidden strength entered the system.

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In the flower bed beside the shed, a stand of lunaria came through winter browsed to stubs. In early March we saw pale stems and dark leaves flat against the soil. The plants had been gnawed here and there but we left it alone.

By mid April, new growth emerged. Different from last year. Bushier and more established. The root responded to nibbles with new geometry.

Toward the end of April, it flowered. Pink-purple blooms with volume. With or without our new deer fence, the lunaria endured to continue its two year cycle.

This is the response of one plant to wounds without dramatic intervention. What is still alive below the broken stems and chewed leaves?

For the life that wears it , a scar is not the end of the story. It is a place where the story changed, evidence that a trial has been endured.

And sometimes, if you just let it be, that life becomes the most interesting thing in the bed.

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The cage guards one tree. The deer exclusion fence guards the future.

Where the cage is tactical, the fence is strategic. Wind passes through. Birds cross. Light enters. But the browser stops at wire.

Walk the fence line at Middleholding and the land feels contained.

Inside: protected ground.

Outside: relentless deer pressure.

Not every heir needs the same ward.

A swamp white oak asks for wise siting and patience. It is a hundred-year decision made once.

A serviceberry fears rabbits and voles more than deer. Its protection is drainage pipe fit around its base. The Ward is not one object. It is discernment shaped to species and threat, structural care fitted to the vulnerable heir standing in front of you, ruptured right now, in this season.

Build the perimeter.

Tend the heirs.

Keep the promise.

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“Of all the crop loss I have experienced, none is more severe than that caused by deer.”

Daniel Mays, The No-Till Organic Vegetable Farm

The deer is the forest’s editor. It selects the tender, the valuable, the next thing coming.

Left unchecked, it will browse a young apple or oak to a stump, season after season, until the tree quits.

Seven eastern white pines still live at Middleholding because their first years were spent inside wire cages. The cages are good and practical. Beauty was not the assignment, and yet somehow…

Each one bought a season, then another, until the trees rise above five feet. Above that line, deer pressure is less fatal.

The Ward, a Crown of the Trees

One Kerr crabapple was browsed the day we planted it. Its terminal bud cut clean, we call it the Wounded Knight, a silly name for a tree that has more than earned it. We photographed the wound, set the tube, kept faith.

By fall it was one of the strongest trees in the orchard.

The Ward is not sentiment. It is structural care for a vulnerable heir, the decision not to leave survival to chance, to build the boundary, to hold it until strength arrives.

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The Seed’s Armor, a Journey of the Mirrors

This card asks us to pause and look at what still defends. The armor that carried us through winter, does it still protect potential, or has it become the shell that now traps the sprout?

We arrived at Middleholding carrying many seeds of possibility. A Christmas tree farm. A blueberry patch. A butterfly sanctuary. And of course, honey bees.

Each idea carries its own conditions, its own demands on time and soil. Not all of them can break open at once. Some must wait. Some must be composted.

The Christmas tree idea was prominent in the early days. It felt safe. Evergreens are forgiving. They grow slowly. They do not demand intensive daily care. The roughly 8’ x 8’ spacing we laid out became the grid that gave the whole property its first shape. That grid still holds.

But seeing this moment exactly as it is, that original plan may not survive. The acre we once imagined for Fraser and Korean firs will likely become pasture instead. Green manure to feed the flowers, vegetables, and fruit that now feel closer to what the soil is asking for.

The armor must crack for anything to grow. Yet if it cracks only partway, the shell clamps down on the emerging sprout. The cotyledons cannot unfold. The plant struggles inside the very structure meant to protect it.

We needed the Christmas tree idea to get this far. The grid it created still serves. But conditions have changed. Other seeds are breaking open now and taking root.

The armor served its purpose.

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