Author: Robinne Weiss

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.

/ Robinne Weiss / 2 Comments

Spring is a season of contrasts. Not just the weather, which can change on a dime from cold and rainy to dry and hot, and then back again, but the spring gardening season has more ups and downs than other seasons.

Take the past two weeks, for instance. The fruit trees are in bloom, daffodils and tulips are flowering, the asparagus is up, and the berries are leafing out—the garden is green and lush, a real delight! The seeds I’ve planted over the past month are growing well, and I’ve begun planting out the frost-tolerant crops. The sun has warmed the soil, and the worms are going crazy, incorporating all the manure I added to the garden over the winter. It’s the best of times.

On the other hand, when I put the freshly sprouted peas in the greenhouse to grow for a week before planting them out, the rats and mice got into them and ate about a quarter of them. Disappointing, but to be fair, when it came time to plant them out, I had the perfect quantity for the area I had prepared, so no harm done. I set some rat traps, and planted my second planting of peas in a tray indoors.

Saturday morning, I set the new tray of beautifully sprouted peas in the greenhouse, just until afternoon when I planned on planting them out.

By the time I was ready to plant, a rat had eaten them all. Yes, during the day, while I worked just a few metres away in the garden. Gutting, especially after two weeks of having the sneaky rodent eat the bait out of my rat traps without getting caught. Grr! To add insult to injury, when I removed the pile of bricks I knew the rat was nesting under, I found a huge stash of peas and wilted pea sprouts—the little stinker wasn’t even eating them all—he was stockpiling. I have since ordered a DOC200 trap—I’m gonna get this guy one way or another before he eats more peas. 

On Sunday, we experienced a typical springtime nor’wester—warm dry wind racing across the plains at 100 kph or more. Just after lunch, a particularly violent gust blew two panels out of our new greenhouse, including one panel we’d lost in a previous wind and had reinforced so it wouldn’t happen again. Later gusts tore a third panel out as well. This greenhouse was advertised as being designed in New Zealand for New Zealand conditions. Clearly they didn’t test the thing on the Canterbury Plains. Arg! It’s the worst of times.

In spite of the delights of spring, it seems there’s always another pest, another problem to deal with. By summer, I know that most of the problems will be either solved, or abandoned as a lost cause, but in springtime, hopes run high, and disasters feel truly disastrous.

I complain, even though I know that the springtime garden disasters are fixable (for the most part). But I suppose part of why I enjoy gardening so much is the challenge. Outsmarting pests; growing crops out of season; battling poor soil, wind, drought, flooding … sometimes I think that’s half the fun.

So I look to the weather forecast for the next 24 hours—severe wind warnings and a high of 20 today, followed by snow tomorrow—and buckle up for the roller coaster ride.

Fatemaker is now available!

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I’m thrilled to announce that the third and final book in the Fatecarver trilogy is now available in both print and ebook formats!

Saving a people is hard enough. How do you save a god?

In the final book of the Fatecarver trilogy, Kalish’s magical power grows along with her influence. Her once rag-tag band of followers swells as clans fall to her mother’s strangling grasp. The rebellion she started becomes a full-scale insurrection bent on societal change. 

As the powerful Fatewalker leading the uprising, Kalish is treated like a god—revered, feared. Her role pushes her further and further from her heart’s desires—a normal life, a home, family. She dreams of a day in the future when she will live in peace, with love. 

But the god, Iskra, is depending upon her to save her people from greed—specifically her mother’s greed.

When her mother destroys Iskra’s last stronghold, Kalish must draw on every bit of her power to bring the god back. But her power alone isn’t enough, and resurrecting a god requires sacrifice. One that may cost her all her dreams.

Buy now!

Book Review: You Are My Sunshine and Other Stories

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This collection of short stories by Octavia Cade is a pull-no-punches imagination of a near-future Earth under the influence of climate change, as seen intimately from the eyes of individuals. It is an exploration of our connection to the other living things with whom we share our planet.

At their core, these stories are about the losses we will suffer as the full effects of climate change take hold. In these terse and well-crafted stories, personal loss and environmental loss are mirrors of one another, and sometimes it isn’t entirely clear where one leaves off and the other begins. Some, like You Are My Sunshine and Gone to Earth lean towards horror, with characters whose relationship with the world around them veers into the surreal waters of mental health crises. 

I read this book slowly, needing to pause and digest each story before moving on to the next. I will admit that the drumbeat of despair in the first half of the book made me almost dread what fresh pain the next story would reveal. But the second half focuses more on hope—the hope of those who have felt loss, the hope that we as a species will recognise our place on Earth as kin to all the other living things on the planet, the hope that we will change our ways and create a better future for all life on Earth.

Science is at the core of the book, and the sea is a recurring theme, almost a character, in some stories. Many of the stories are set in New Zealand and draw on places, people and events in New Zealand, but the experiences and emotions of the characters are universal. They will surely resonate with people everywhere. 

If you are looking for a vivid and personal exploration of our possible future, or an examination of loss and the recovery of hope after loss, these stories are a must-read.

From the book blurb: 

Sometimes change can hurt. This collection of short stories traces the growing pains of a new world, beginning with the death throes of our current way of life and ending with a world transformed by science and technology, and by grief, hope, love, and humanity’s will to transform. This is a collection that will both tear you apart and tend to your wounds. Cade’s beautifully wrought stories are informed by science, tracing the biological and emotional threads that bind us, human and non-human alike. Containing a brand new novelette in the Impossible Resurrection of Grief universe, You Are My Sunshine and Other Stories is a promise of what worlds are possible if we allow ourselves to change.

To be released September 2023. Preorder here.

Pest Management: Control

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Yesterday I wrote about strategies for preventing pest problems. If you’ve taken all the measures you can to prevent pests, but the pests arrive anyway, there are different questions to ask:

Centipedes are predators of many garden pests.
  1. Do I need to worry? Low levels of pests aren’t a big deal. A few aphids, a caterpillar here or there, the odd bite out of a leaf—these things aren’t going to have a big impact on the quality or quantity of your harvest. Just keep an eye on them to be sure the problem doesn’t get worse.
  2. Can I physically remove them? I’m a huge fan of squishing and hosing pests off plants. For example, I have problems every spring with aphids on my roses. If I do nothing, the plants become completely covered, and the blooms are destroyed. So in spring, I keep an eye on the plants, and once the aphids start reproducing, I hose the plants down once a week, knocking off most of the aphids. Usually I only have to do this about three times before the aphids’ natural enemies build up enough to keep them under control without my help.
  3. Can you disrupt a critical part of your pest’s life cycle? Is there a life stage that can be easily killed, or has specific requirements you can disrupt? For example, I keep a close eye on my brassica seedlings, looking out for cabbage white butterfly eggs on the undersides of the leaves. All it takes is a quick swipe of the thumb across the bottom of each leaf to squash the eggs and eliminate future problems with caterpillars. Another example is my recent problems with slaters in my greenhouses. Discovering that the slaters are congregating between cement blocks stacked beside the greenhouse, I’ve started regularly checking and squashing all the slaters in those blocks. (I could also have moved the blocks, to eliminate the slaters’ shelter, but since the population was quite high, I thought squishing a whole lot of them would be more effective for now. Later I will probably move the blocks to make the area around the greenhouse less attractive to slaters). 
  4. Can I make use of them? Pest-covered plants, grass grubs and slugs all get thrown over the fence to my chickens, who turn them into beautiful eggs for me and save me from the disgusting task of squishing the bugs. 
  5. Can I pull out badly infested plants? If there’s a couple of plants badly infested, but the pests haven’t spread much, rip out those infested plants and destroy the pests on them. You’ll lose a few plants, but you’ll protect the rest of your crop.
Pest-gobbling chickens.

In an IPM system, you don’t consider any sort of chemical control until you’d exhausted all the possibilities above. In practice in my garden, I almost never need anything else. Occasionally, if I’ve missed an aphid infestation on a crop that can’t handle a strong spray of water, I’ll use a soap solution to kill aphids. That’s the extent of my chemical control. But if you do need to resort to chemicals, it’s important to choose the right one. The more specific it is to your pest, the better. Many modern pesticides are narrowly focused, and target specific pests, and that’s great. With a narrow target, the pesticide is less likely to kill beneficial insects or harm people and pets. Stay away from broad spectrum pesticides. Also, if you do use pesticides, be sure to follow the label directions carefully, wear protective gear, and dispose of leftover product and empty containers properly. 

Pest Management: prevention

/ Robinne Weiss / 4 Comments

It’s nearly spring, so naturally my thoughts turn to the subject of pests. Our big pest-related project in the garden this year is bird netting a third of the vegetable garden, so we don’t lose most of our tomatoes and peas to the feathered rats.

Aphids–the one on the right is healthy, the one on the left has been parasitised by a wasp, one of the many natural enemies that keep aphids under control in the garden.

As an entomologist whose research focused on Integrated Pest Management, I always have a lot to say about pests. And it’s an important topic—globally, 30-40% of crop yield is lost to pests (interestingly, this figure didn’t change with the advent of chemical pesticides—insect pests are incredibly quick to evolve pesticide resistance). That’s a lot of wasted food!

For home gardeners, fighting pests is a daily task. Every place I’ve gardened has its own unique pest problems. Growing up in Lancaster Country, Pennsylvania, I remember the rabbits munching through the garden. In State College, Pennsylvania it was flea beetles that shot so many holes through my eggplants’ leaves they never had a chance to grow, and the squash bugs that clustered in masses under the leaves of my zucchinis. In Panama, leaf cutter ants could strip a plant bare in no time. 

In my first garden in New Zealand, aphids and rabbits were my main problems. When we first arrived on the property, there were so many rabbits I wondered if I’d be able to grow anything. A rabbit-proof fence was the first garden project there.

In my current garden, birds are my worst enemy—mostly English sparrows and European blackbirds. They strip seedlings bare, eat tomatoes, pull out onions, and scratch away mulch and soil, leaving plant roots to dry out (never mind the amount of chicken feed they snarf down every day!). 

Fortunately for me (and unfortunately for the pests), my masters degree focused on Integrated Pest Management (IPM), so I’m well-armed when it comes to tackling pest problems.

IPM is often called common sense pest control. In IPM, the goal isn’t to eliminate pests, but to minimise the damage pests cause, while choosing the most environmentally-friendly control methods that do the job.

To successfully use IPM, you must first know your enemy. What conditions does it like? What’s its life cycle? What are its natural enemies? How does it find your plants, and how does it travel? Books and the internet can tell you a lot, but careful observation of the pests in your garden is key. The particular conditions in your garden will affect how pests behave, and where their weaknesses are. If you know exactly where pests are and what they’re doing in your garden, you can begin to tackle them more effectively. For example, I know that in my current garden, there are particular varieties of squash the aphids like. By keeping an eye on those particular plants, I can catch aphid infestations early and deal with them before they spread to more plants.

Bird netting protecting pea seedlings

Once you know your pest’s habits, you can begin to consider control methods. Questions to ask:

  1. Can you time your plantings to avoid the damaging stage of the pest’s life cycle? For example, I don’t grow brassicas during the summer here—I have an early spring crop and a winter crop. By avoiding brassicas in summer, I eliminate bad problems with cabbage white butterflies, which tend to reach damaging levels around Christmas. I still have to be on the lookout for butterfly eggs on my seedlings, but once the plants are growing, they easily stay ahead of the caterpillars.
  2. Can you exclude the pests from your crops during critical time periods? For example, psyllids can transmit disease to potatoes and tomatoes, leading to poor growth and damaged tubers. By covering the plants with a fine mesh cloth, I can keep the psyllids out for most of the summer (until the plants are too big for the covers, by which point the psyllids don’t seem to be much of a problem). I do the same for my peas and lettuces—netting out birds until the plants are large enough to handle losing a few leaves. I also net my berry crops and olives before the fruits start ripening, so the birds don’t pick them before I do.
  3. Can you plant varieties the pests don’t like as much? For example, I plant mostly red varieties of lettuce, because the aphids take longer to discover them than they do the green ones. Usually, by the time the aphids find my red lettuces, they’re bolting and ready to pull out anyway.
  4. Can you plant a ‘trap’ crop that the pests like more than your favourite vegetables? I haven’t done this explicitly, but as I mentioned earlier, there are certain varieties of plants I know are particularly tasty to pests, and I closely monitor them and kill the pests on them before they can spread to other crops. A true trap crop is something you’re willing to pull out entirely when it is infested by your pest, in order to destroy the pest.
  5. Can you prevent pests from finding your crop? Interplanting different crops can help disrupt the spread of pests, because they struggle to find new plants to feed on. It can also help you make the most of the space in your garden. For example, I sometimes plant summer lettuces in the shade of my sweetcorn—not only does the shade help prevent the lettuce from bolting, it also seems to hide the lettuce from aphids.
  6. Can I encourage the pests’ natural enemies? Many pest insects are preyed upon or parasitised by the larvae of beetles , flies and wasps. The adults often eat pollen and nectar, so planting herbs and flowers is a great way to encourage many pests’ natural enemies.

All six of the questions above will help you avoid a pest problem in the first place. They are changes in the way you plant or grow your crops that make it less likely you’ll have pest problems. Tomorrow, I’ll look at what you can do once you’ve discovered pests in your garden.

Mt Richardson–a beautiful winter hike

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View across Lees Valley from Mt Richardson

Injuries and weather have conspired to keep me out of the mountains for months, but my husband and I finally made it to the hills a few weekends ago.

It wasn’t a big trip—just a little jaunt to the top of Mt Richardson, one of the foothills around Oxford.

At only 1047 metres tall, Mt Richardson doesn’t get above tree line, but a clearing at the top provides a great view of the ‘real’ mountains beyond.

The day we went was sunny and nearly windless. There was snow on the ground, but we ate lunch at the top in our t-shirts, enjoying the stunning panorama spread out around us.

I would say that the only things that diminished the perfection were the mud, the slip that took out a section of track (necessitating a bit of bushwhacking) and the washed-out bridge that meant wading through an icy stream, but those things only added to the fun. 

I look forward to better weather and more outdoor adventures as we head into spring.

Ready, Set, Plant!

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Looking forward to scenes like this in the coming weeks …

My seed order arrived last week, and I’ve stocked up on seed raising mix in preparation for this coming weekend.

The middle of August marks the start of spring planting, even though officially spring is still two weeks away (in spite of this week’s cold and snow).

This weekend I will plant hundreds of vegetable seeds—broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, lettuces, spinach, onions, peppers, eggplants, herbs—a combination of early crops that can handle the cold and slow-growing late crops that need a long time in the greenhouse or indoors. 

This weekend is always a bit exciting and a bit daunting. Daunting because whatever winter projects I had going are doomed to the back burner until next April. Daunting because of the vast amount of work to get done in the coming months. And exciting because of the pleasure I get out of growing delicious food, and the joy of trying out new varieties of vegetables each year (this year, I’m trying Bartowich Parsley for the first time, a purple snow pea, a new hot pepper, and a couple of new tomato varieties).

I used to get overwhelmed at this time of year by the sheer amount of work ahead, but I’ve learned to manage the work, and more importantly the stress, by creating a weekend-by-weekend to-do list that runs from mid-August through the end of November. The list includes all the annual garden tasks associated with spring—planting seeds, potting up seedlings, preparing garden beds, setting up trellises, cleaning greenhouses, maintaining irrigation lines, fertilising weeding, mulching … With everything on the list, I know I won’t miss any tasks and everything will be done on time.

Obsessive compulsive? Yeah, probably. But it means I can fully enjoy each and every task without stressing about the fact I’m NOT doing something else. 

So from tomorrow, if you need to catch me on the weekend, I’ll be in the garden. 

Planning the Next Novel

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While I wait for my beta readers to read Fatemaker, I’ve been planning the sequel to Demonic Summoning for the Modern Woman. I’ve spent a lot of time the past two weeks staring off into space while I think, researching really weird things, and taking long walks while I sort out ideas.

I do my planning on paper, with a pencil, because it helps my creativity.

I’ve learned a lot about planning a novel since I made my first, aborted (and truly dreadful) attempt at one. 

I’m definitely a planner, rather than a pantser when it comes to writing novels. I find writing the first draft difficult, and have learned that the better I plan, the easier the first draft is to write. I thought I had a pretty good system in place, but when I sat down to write Fatemaker I found my planning completely inadequate, because there were so many threads to draw together in the final book of an epic fantasy series. So I wrote a chapter by chapter plan of the book, summarising what had to occur in each chapter in order to wrap up everything by the end of the book. It probably took a week to create that summary, but by the end of the week, I had a detailed guide for my story, and I could focus on it chapter by chapter as I wrote, without worrying that I was forgetting something. I wrote the first draft in three weeks, rather than my usual six to eight weeks.

So I’m following the same process for the second book of the Rifton Chronicles, even though this book is not overly complex. Hopefully it will make the first draft fly onto the page.

My current planning process looks like this:

  1. Develop the basic premise for a book.
  2. Establish the world in which the story will take place. This includes creating a timeline of any historical events that impact on the story and details of any magic systems I’ll use.
  3. Develop the characters who are best suited to be my protagonists and antagonists. This includes not only their personal background, but also their ancestry, relationships, strengths, weaknesses, and habits. I never concern myself with physical characteristics unless they have a direct bearing on the plot. If you asked me what my characters looks like, I couldn’t tell you.
  4. Create a 1-page outline of the major plot points. Usually I do this in the form of a story mountain—yeah, primary school stuff, but it works for me. This outline includes key events—inciting incident, try-fail cycles, climax and conclusion, and puts them all on a specific timeline, so I know details like what season it is when I am writing.
  5. Determine the story arcs of each of the main characters. Usually this is a couple of paragraphs per character, which I add to the character descriptions.
  6. Write the blurb. I know this seems counterintuitive—how can you write the blurb before you’ve written the story? I used to struggle writing blurbs, because there were so many story details in my head, I didn’t know what to highlight in the blurb. The blurb needs to convey the genre, conflict, and just enough detail to hook readers into picking up the book. I’ve found it is MUCH easier to write this when that’s all I know about the book. When I’m not sick of the bloody story after weeks of writing, months of editing. When the story is still as shiny and new to me as it will be for potential readers. It also gives me a touchstone as I’m writing and editing—am I delivering what I said I would in the blurb? Is my story still conveying the awesome ideas I started off with?
  7. Write a chapter by chapter summary of the story. I know my books tend to run about 30 chapters, so I divide the story into thirty chunks, then start placing the major plot points and filling in the details. When I did this for Fatemaker, I had a couple of blank chapters near the end, but also had the feeling some of the chapters were going to need to be split into two once I started writing. In the end, I had 34 chapters, so it deviated a bit from my plan, but only in volume, not substance. For the second Rifton Chronicles book, I know I will have six historical ‘interludes’, so I’ve spread these evenly through my chapters, and am building the modern part of the story between them.

Oh, yeah, and there’s the staring off into space, researching bizarre things, and taking walks—those are critical components of every step in the planning process.