Time, as it relates to everything Myrtlish...

"In fact, entropy can grow both into the far future and into the far past; the overall multiverse can be completely symmetric with respect to time. Think of two particles moving on straight lines in an otherwise empty three-dimensional space. No matter how we choose the lines, there will always be some point of closest approach, while the distance between the particles will grow without bound sufficiently far in the future and the past."
--Sean M. Carroll

The certainty displayed by advocates of religion and of politics have always been the starting point for a marriage of those two unhappy disciplines.  Most of the the world’s worst social experiments, and all of the world’s pestilential wars, have been brought about by people who just “knew” things that were so self-evident and “common sense” that anyone who questioned them was somehow deranged – never mind that such “common sense” assumptions are all too often utter poppycock.  How could it be otherwise when two opposing camps each describe their mutually exclusive ideas to be “common sense”?

Science, when done right, avoids this trap by insisting that no question is truly settled – even our most basic assumptions, that 1 + 1 = 2, that up is up and down is down, that day follows night and vice-versa, are falsifiable, and if and when evidence is presented which disproves our most basic of premises, we must change premises.

Time itself is a wonderful example.  California Institute of Technology physicist Sean Carroll argued in a whimsical essay entitled “What if Time Actually Exists?” that the notion that the universe has a beginning (and, specifically, time as an aspect of the universe has a starting point) is a product of our limited imagination.

For physicists, a “starting line” is a natural assumption based on what little we know with any certainty about how time seems to function.  Basically, we only know that time goes from past-to-present-to-future because the one measurable element we can observe is entropy – systems “move through time” by transitioning from a state of lower entropy to a state of higher entropy.

Think of a game of pool – the first player breaks the racked billiard balls, and from a state of having one ball at one end of the table and a bunch of balls in a tight triangle at the other end of the table (a state of low entropy), moving from past-to-present-to-future the game quickly proceeds to a state where all the balls are randomly scattered about the table (assuming the break is a good one, of course), placing the system in a state of higher entropy.

But this explanation is no explanation at all, because the physicists who advocate it have set up a circle of meaning – “entropy” only means something based on the idea that it relates to distribution of matter and energy through space and… wait for it… time.

Carroll’s solution to this problem is way over the head of most lay persons, and, frankly, is over the head of most physicists, too.  It does, however, lend itself on a very practical level to logical minimalists.  Carroll’s solution is to describe the universe as infinite.  Space and time, we know thanks to Einstein, are two different ways of looking at the same entity (“SpaceTime”) much as electricity and magnetism are the same energy described from different mathematical points of view.  An infinite universe, therefore, has space going on forever in all directions… and time going on forever in all directions, too.

If there was a state of minimum entropy at some point (the mythical “start of time”), then logically, before that point, there was a state of even less entropy than the state of minimum entropy.

How does that work?  Myrtle hasn’t got the foggiest.  She’s just a chicken, after all.  “Negative Entropy” would be a cool band name, though.  If we had to guess, they would probably end every show with the “One Note Samba”.  (Free eggplant to anyone who both gets that joke and thinks it’s funny…)

Moreover, this notion of eternal time lends some new piquancy to the question of “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”  In the context of cyclical endeavors such as backyard chicken raising, or gardening, or just getting through life, the most important step is always some combination of “the one you just did” and “the next one you have to do” – very seldom allowing you to concentrate entirely on what you might be doing at present.  The cycle may or may not have started at some point, but once you are in it, it hardly matters – the last thing you did leads to the next thing you must do, which leads to other tasks that seem to roll on forever, repeating themselves just the same way the seasons repeat.

In Myrtle’s case, the autumn harvest of velvet beans, pumpkins, honeydew melon, squash, jalapeños, fall tomatoes, etc., is also the time of planting winter vegetables.  Garlic, broccoli, fava beans, kohlrabi, carrots, spinach, quinoa – all go in the ground right around the time we traditionally think of as “harvest time”.

Samhain, the Celtic New Year celebration we have morphed into Halloween, marked the death of the old year and the birth of the new for the residents of cold, foggy reaches of ancient Europe.  They may not have grown as much in the winter time as we do here in Brazos County, but they had their own winter tasks which had to be performed if they had any hope of a successful garden the next Spring.  Garden beds need attention even (perhaps especially) when nothing is growing in them.  Weeding, mulching, turning in of compost – these are things best done well in advance of the season in which one wishes to grow tasty veggies.

The chickens, too, will soon be requiring some special attention.  We raise Barred Rocks for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that as a heavier breed, they are more winter-hardy than many of the lighter Bantams which have become popular in Texas backyards.  “More” however does not mean “completely”.  We will be adding new leaves as insulation, and preparing to enclose their coop with wind barriers, and should the need arise, we will have to put a heater in the coop – the girls don’t complain much about getting down into the 30°ish range, but 5-10° cooler than that (which happens once or twice a year), and we pretty much have chicken-cicles instead of egg layers, so that’s when the heater comes out.

And while we will be planting plenty of vegetables which thrive in what passes for “cold” in our part of the world – broccoli, onions, garlic, etc. – we will still have to tend to our perennials with some loving attention.  We will be mulching the fruit trees and berry vines, in addition to adding a new layer of leaf-mulch to our perennial herbs.  It is also prime time for cilantro/coriander in Texas, so we will have to work a few patches of less-deeply mulched soil in the herb beds, where this 2-3 month project can thrive at peak efficiency.  A winter garden is really a jigsaw puzzle of odd tasks like this – and in the context of a year round garden, that makes sense, because “the rules” only apply to a small portion of what we are attempting at any one point.

How far back in time the concept of a year round garden goes, is anybody’s guess.  Whether you are asking for the sake of asking, in the spirit of a good scientist, or whether you are asking because you want to know what to plant right now, in the spirit of an eternally optimistic gardener, you really ought to take a break, have a pumpkin pasty, and maybe a swig of some good hard apple cider.  Happy Halloween!  And…

Happy farming!