Ephemerality – Tales from Easement Acres

January 21, 2026January 8, 2026

Choke on Polysaccharides

About two years back I planted sunchoke tubers in the forage patch. I caught on to the idea after reading some random gardening article during the height of the Ohio winter season and thought that they sounded like a good idea: native, low-maintenance, pretty flowers, edible tubers, perennial. What’s not to like?

Forage Patch

They were also amusingly absent from any commercial catalog, so I had to source some from a fellow gardening nerd. They cleared postal inspection, unlike the black bean seeds my sister tried to send me, and I dutifully plopped them into the ground come early spring. A few plants grew, but I decided to wait an extra year for them to fill out before attempting a harvest.

Choke on This

After two years, they had spread quite nicely.

Hop and Choke

Now that the growing season is concluded, I wanted to try them. So I shoved a gardening pitchfork into the partially frozen ground at the edge of the patch and ripped up a mass. A surprisingly large mass, in fact. It would seem that they spread quickly.

Internet knowledge states that they can be cooked like potatoes. So Liz roasted them. And they were tasty – like an earthy parsnip. But, there were consequences.

Sunchokes store their energy in a carbohydrate very different from potatoes, specifically inulin – a polysaccharide. Polysaccharides cannot be digested (a notable exception being lactose, a disaccharide, though we all know isn’t a universal exception). Potatoes, on the other hand, consist of starch – also a polysaccharide, but upon cooking, breaks down into amylose and amylopectin, which are easy to digest. Inulin, however, does not fully break down into monosaccharides upon cooking, resulting in a food comprised of indigestible carbohydrates.

This leads to large amounts of food for gut bacteria, which ferment inulin into….gas! Lots and lots of gas!

So some more cooking research is needed to work around this better. Or…we eat them raw and have a juvenile fratboy-themed competition on the deck!

–Simon

January 16, 2026January 7, 2026

Snowflake

I don’t want to post pictures from the holidays. I’m done with the holidays and want to move on. I’m middle-aged now and don’t find much magic in the rituals anymore. Any joy I had left was by proxy: watching my daughter enjoy them. But she’s a teen now and wants to distance herself from anything family-oriented. Plus it’s the age at which being overtly happy about anything just isn’t cool. It’s cool to be a cynic and hate.

So I’ll pass on the tree and house light photos this year. Instead, here’s a brief reflection on one of my own moments of lost magic. Here is a single snowflake, captured poorly with my aging phone camera:

Contrasted nicely against the lid of the recycling bin

It was cold enough that individual crystals were falling without clumping together. It reminded me of when I learned what they actually are.

Another consequence of a Texan upbringing, I didn’t see much snow. Some light dustings here and there, but rarely anything of consequence. So I knew snow mostly from movies. And there’s a particular scene in Disney’s Fantasia with fairies dancing in snowfall, using individual snowflakes as dresses. Granted I’d never seen a fairy before either, but my assumption was that they’re 6-12 inches tall. Representations in various media confirm this, probably because that’s a good size to work the physical world around. Any smaller and our existing environment wouldn’t scale well to make understandable films, any larger and they’re just small people. Ergo, I made the connection that a snowflake dress, presented as being as wide as the fairy was tall, would therefore be around 6-12 inches in diameter.

So you might understand my disappointment when, on a rare day of Texas snow, when my mother exclaimed “Snowflakes!” when glancing out the window, that I was greeted with the sight of tiny specks of white, and not gargantuan plates of ice crystals, floating gracefully to the ground. Such is life.

But still, on a micro level, individual snowflakes are pretty cool to look at.

–Simon

January 14, 2026January 6, 2026

Hoard a Cord (pt.3)

At last, with the holiday break, I was able to revisit the firewood holder. The warping OSB was concerning, but ultimately proved not to be an issue once I started attaching the metal. First though, I had to measure and cut it.

Sawing through metal paneling such as this was a new experience. It was too tough for any of my originally-planned methods, but with some protective gear and strong nerve on my part, the miter saw ended up suitable for the job. The screeching of metal on metal was horrendous, and the saw’s reach was insufficient, forcing me to make multiple cuts on each section. And no doubt the blade’s completely shot now and I’ll need to replace it. But, it did eventually work.

And by good fortune, full panel width almost lined up, with just a couple inches of overlap, so I didn’t have to attempt a longitudinal cut. Sometimes, I do luck out.

But as these were not full panels, they lacked the undercurve. They’re designed to hook under the eaves so no hardware is exposed skyward, but as I didn’t have 15 full panels to work with, that wasn’t an option and I had to screw them directly in. I wasn’t concerned. It is just a wood pile. Even if they leak over time, it’s a non-issue.

However, I did still use proper roofing screws – the ones with that synthetic washer that self-seal.

First though, I slid a drip guard under the downward edge, more for aesthetics than concern of water infiltration. I mean, I didn’t install felt or insulation between the metal and wood. I draw the line at overkill somewhere. But either way, it’s an improvement.

Then I added flashing at the peak, this time because I was concerned with water.

And lastly, I spray-painted all the metal parts that weren’t black, to make a nice purdy finish.

I have yet to see anyone else in the neighborhood with a custom-built firewood holder in their backyard, or a metal roof on their house – much less a custom-built firewood holder with a matching metal roof. I guess normal people spend their time and money elsewhere.

But I’m not a normal person, and I have an awesome firewood holder now. Ten years in the backlog and two months in the making. At last!

–Simon

January 9, 2026January 5, 2026

Rabbits and Rednecks: Addendum

Wanting to have more fun with the Thanksgiving hunting incident, I decided on a more tangible method of memory preservation.

Rabbits and Rednecks

Specifically, my dad likes shadow boxes. And if memories are more important than possessions, it makes for a perfect Christmas gift. Plus, I had a lot of fun with it: