So we threw the parts for sixteen of these diskhouses, and then put them together. If you’re willing to do the labor the whole operation is not that expensive, although admittedly we were in hock to our town co-op right to the ears. For the most part the assembly of the diskhouses was straightforward, indeed a great pleasure. Some parts just grew into place after we set the right cultures to work: Our toilets and sinks and bathtubs and tile floors, for instance, were all bioceramic and grew right into their places, essentially as a kind of templated coral. Really lovely to see.
Long before we had even started on the houses, however, we were out laying soil and planting our orchards and vineyards. We grew as much of our own food as we could in truck gardens around the tents, using complete soils trucked in, but our money crop, our contribution to the Jones economy, was to be almonds and wine grapes, both proven growers on that flank of the apron. The wines being made up to that point had a volcanic tang to them that I didn’t like, almost a sulfur touch, but that was okay; it left room for improvement. And the almonds were great. We prepped soil and planted three hundred hectares of almonds and five hundred of wine grapes, in broad terraces concentric to the rim far above us, the ag zones broken by ponds and swamps, and all of them widening as they dropped downslope, so that they made a kind of giant quilt, pendant on our little farm which lay at the top of the land in our care. It was our work of art, and we were very devoted to it. I imagine we were like first-generation kibbutzim in many respects. About twenty couples, four of them same-sex; eleven single adults; thirty-odd kids, later fifty-three. Lots of travel by all of us on the local cog rail line up to Jones, and also laterally to other farms on the apron, to socialize and see what other people were doing agriculturally, and in their settlement design. They were all artists too.
I was involved throughout with our enology, and we made a good fumé blanc eventually, but my field work ended up being mostly in the almond orchards, strangely enough. It happened because I got caught up in the nutsedge problem. Early on we found some sedge creeping out of a radial-strip swamp into the vineyards, and I had gotten rid of it by direct removal. So when the almond orchards were infested I was called on to do it again there. But this time it wasn’t so easy. Nutsedge is one of several plants I wish they had never introduced to Mars, but it’s good in wet sandy areas, so at first people seeded it to help build meadows. It’s a very ancient plant, coevolved with dinosaurs, I suspect, making it very hardy; and impervious to most attempts at eradication. In fact I’ve come to believe it regards such efforts as friendly stimulation, like a massage. But I only found that out the hard way.
I can’t tell you how many days I spent out in our orchards weeding nutsedge. We had decided to be an organic farm, no chemical pesticides, so it was a matter of either biological control or hand-to-hand combat. I tried both, so what I was doing was integrated pest management. But ineffective no matter what you called it. For many hours I sat on the low ground at the southern end of the young almond trees, in what was in effect a ragged lawn of purple nutsedge. Cyperus rotundus. If it had been yellow nutsedge there would have been people in my group encouraging us to harvest it and eat the nuts. But purple nuts are hard brown gnarled oblong fibrous tubules, white inside and ghastly bitter to the tongue. They lie about half a meter below the ground, connected to the surface blades of grass by thin shoots that break at the slightest tug, and connected to each other underground by wiry rhizomes that also break easily, leaving the nuts behind. At first I thought I was succeeding when I loosened the soil and sifted through it to get all the nuts out of it. It was slow but not unpleasant work, sitting on the dirt in the sun, getting dirt under my fingernails, looking at the friable soil for the dirt clods that were actually living pebbles. The blades above, stacked in triplet tassels, V-shaped in cross section and stiffer than grass blades, I pulled and composted. The nuts I ground up and tossed in the supercooker compost, feeling superstitious. Which turned out to be not inappropriate given what happened.
A careful sifting of soil to a depth of half a meter, throughout the entire region of its growth—and the next spring the precise region I had weeded sprang forth in a thick lawn of young nutsedge. I couldn’t believe my eyes. That was when I got serious about my research, and found out about the Sedge Grass Support Group, and learned from them that fragments of the rhizomes only five hundred nanometers long had been observed to regenerate the full plant in a single growing season.
Some other method was called for. And around that time I got to take a break to regroup as well, as our farm began full participation in one of the ag labor rings of the River League, which meant we went out on the road as nomad farm labor for two months of the fall harvests, moving from farm to farm in the ring as the various crops came ready. Other groups passed through our place while we were gone, with Elke and Rachel left behind to supervise their work. I saw nutsedge in many other places around Jones Crater, and began to exchange stories and theories with the people who had tried to combat it. It was a nice way to meet people. I noticed that quite a few of them had become fanatical on the sedge issue without actually conquering their infestation, which struck me as a bad sign. But I got home that 2 November and tried cover-cropping, on the suggestion of someone who had said, “It’s a long-term project,” in a way that made me think this was not a bad thing to have in one’s life. So it was clover in the fall and winter and cowpeas in the spring and summer, always thickly matted over the sedge, which as a result sometimes did not appear for years at a time. But then if I was late planting a new spring cover crop by even a week, a carpet of tasseled green little pagodas would shove through the dying old cover crop, and it was back to square one. Once when a cowpea crop got beat to the punch I solarized the ground with clear plastic sheets, and recorded temperatures near boiling underneath it. Some IPM folks looked at it and estimated that everything had to have been killed down to twenty centimeters; but others said two; and though the plant matter on the surface was indeed toasted by the end of the summer, the moment I took the plastic off the green carpet came shooting back.
Tilling and drying the soil for four years was my next option. But then someone visiting the farm innocently suggested a new chemical pesticide that had gotten good results for the Namibians to the north.
That provoked a controversy. Some were content to continue pursuing the various fruitless strategies of the organic battle. Others suggested we give up and let the area become a sedge swamp. But because sedge seed-disperses as well as spreading by underground growth of the rhizomes, little patches of it were springing up everywhere downwind of my orchard lawn. And the wind blows in all directions eventually. So leaving it alone was not really acceptable. Meanwhile, eight years of combat had only made the lawn more luxuriant. You could have played croquet on my patch at that point.