2024 Garden

Now that I’m starting to plan my 2025 garden, it’s not a bad idea to reflect on what went well for my 2024 garden, and what can be improved on. I have a regular sized City of Albuquerque lot (⅛ - ¼ acre?) and pay for residential water. My yard was sand, covered by gravel when we moved in. I had a garden on a large portion of the backyard last year, and established a beachhead of grass for the kids to play on.

Below are some pictures and videos of what things looked like throughout 2025.

We had a lot of picnics outside.

This was a pretty tall water slide the kids really enjoyed.

Our kids loved the inflatable pools we purchased.

We had to find shady places for a lot of the things we set up in our yard.

This was an early spring picture. We moved our chickens, and the grass filled out more later in the year.

In total, I documented producing 305 lbs (138) of vegetables and fruits. Likely, the total was slightly (5-10%?) higher than this, since occasionally my documentation wasn’t great. I ate a lot of cabbage greens, and didn’t record them, and my wife was inconsistent with recording tomatoes she grew in raised beds along the side of the house.

This was slightly down (9%) from the 335 lbs I grew last year, but the 2023 garden was dominated by pumpkin and zucchini, which my family doesn’t like to eat. This year, there was a significantly greater percentage of tomato and cucumber, both of which my family eats a ton of.

In 2023, I kept totals, but did not spend the time performing this relative distribution analysis. Here’s the 2024 tabular data of the aggregates:

Unique Types	Weight (lbs)	Relative Percentage
Apples	11	3.60%
Cabbage	0.75	0.25%
Cherries	3	0.98%
Cucumber	46.24	15.15%
Pepper	2.5	0.82%
Pumpkin	75	24.57%
Round Zucchini	21.5	7.04%
Tomato	77	25.23%
Zucchini	68.25	22.36%
Total	305.24	100.00%

Table 1 - Aggregate date

Figure 1 - Pie chart from above aggregate data

If you’re interested in the raw data, it’s available here.

Pumpkin + zucchini + round zucchini (squash?) made up 54% of my garden. With what insane producers they are, this isn’t really a surprise. The pumpkins were mostly an accident, which came up from compost from the previous year’s crop.

The lone pepper plant still produced a decent amount of peppers (2.5lbs) which was interesting because that was the only one. It came from a gift of Babarba Dawson, owner of Purple Mulch, and a fellow 1,000,000 Cups supporter. She also gave me a number of my tomato seedlings, which were a nice addition to the ones I started.

Overall, I’m generally happy with this composition. We were able to avoid purchasing tomatoes and cucumbers for probably ⅓ of the year, and our processed tomato sauce lasted about another two months. I suspect to fill my family will need approximately 4x the tomato harvest (300 lbs) to last us an entire year, and it will take up substantial space in our freezer or panty. Likewise, I think we’ll need a similar increase in cucumber (4x, 200lbs) to grow all our own cucumbers. With both of these, the addition of dill and garlic will allow us to pickle any of the excess. The high acidity of tomatoes make me not particularly concerned about botulism if I attempt canning - my inexperience there makes me hesitant in anything low in acid.

We fed all of the inedible plant scraps to our chicken, and will compost her crap to turn it back into rich soil for the garden.

Future Improvements 

Create Additional Space Under Cultivation - The garden was pretty cramped, and difficult to work in. The lack of space did not noticeably impact yield, with the exception of non-optimal squash bug management, since my extremely rich compost lasted most of the year, and I slightly used liquid chemical fertilizers to augment. However, it was extremely difficult to navigate between plants for manual pest removal (squash bugs.) My squash and zucchini harvest could have easily been 2x, with better pest management. The intense New Mexican sun means that there isn’t as much competition for sunlight, and my drip irrigation system supplied ample water. The biggest issue here was the lack of maneuverable space for the gardener (me.) My solution here is to increase raised beds from 1 to 4+ along the side of our land, to cultivate additional space along the border wall of my property, and to build 1-2 large raised beds in the front of our property for squash and pumpkin, which should isolate them (and the squash bugs they attract) from the rest of my garden. This should provide a lot more arable land, and not result in a corresponding increase in plants, thus decreasing the density. My goal here is to construct wooden raised beds along the entire side of my house. This will be approximately 15 beds. I don’t believe this is realistic within a single season, but I can likely create 2-4 more for 2025, and 1-2 for the front.

Our yard used to be covered in gravel. We shoveled it all into a gigantic pile to be able to cultivate the rest of the yard. We got rid of this pile finally. This was the first step in having space under cultivation. After washing the kids' car seats, the gravel pile made for a nice drying rack.

This was an early picture of establishing a garden bed along the perimeter of our property. This bed was pretty productive after getting established.

After shoveling all the gravel, we basically had sand. I worked in compost, and grass seed, to work on the lawn.

My prospecting classifiers work well for sifting down compost, sand, and other material, in order to build soil for grass, and my garden.

These are the types of raised beds I'd like to build to grow along this wall.

Nadya built this first one.

Our kids liked picking tomatoes from the raised beds. They didn't quite learn to only pick the red ones, yet.

The raised beds produced for about an extra two weeks. They were shielded from light frost, and lasted until we had a hard freeze, with snow.

Improve Plant Selection and Placement to Minimize Squash Bugs - Squash bugs are a constant problem, and basically impervious to poison. The only thing poison does for them is disrupt beneficial insects (spiders which eat them, ants to manage aphids, and bees as pollinators.) Due to the inefficiencies here, I went full organic and hand removed squash bugs. This was the biggest, consistent, use of my time in the garden. My plans for 2025 involve planting squash bug resistant squash, and placing two new raised beds in the front yard, far away from the back yard. I’ve also read about sacrificial crops that can be used, and heavily managed, to draw them away.

Improve Water Collection and Retention - I think I saved money by gardening, assuming the value of my time is $0.00 / hour, since I think it’s a fun hobby. However, our increased water bills were real and significant. It’s difficult for me to compute how much of this was garden related, versus grass yard establishment related. I believe the two improvements I can achieve here are better mulching, and beginning rainwater catchment systems. I first need eves on my buildings to direct the flow of water. These are basic carpentry, and/or metal work projects, and I can likely begin on them with a few simple tool purchases. The mulching should be cheap, or free, depending on my available materials. Rainwater collection can be a larger capital expenditure, which I am not sure about the break even time on. However, basic eaves should be relatively cheap and easy to construct and will be a good start.

Start Earlier - I got all of my plants into the ground before the end of April, with about half of them in by April 14 (about 50% probability of frost), and the rest before the end of April. Albuquerque’s last frost (around 10% probability of frost.) I believe I could have overplanted the seedlings, started them earlier inside (tomatoes for 40 days in advance, cucumbers, squash and pumpkins about 21 days in advance) and put 100% in around April 7. If a large number of them die, then I can replant seedlings, by planning 175-225% seedlings. This step is not very time consuming, as compared to preparing beds and (re)building irrigation systems.

Chickens - Our chicken needs additional security measures. We had three chickens, and something (a raccoon?) killed two of them. I believe the one chicken is a nice improvement, and I enjoy the garbage-to-eggs service the chicken provides, but chickens are supposed to be happier with a flock. I think we can support up to six chickens, with our household garbage, supplemental feed, space concerns and not being too annoying to our neighbors. This should also up my produce count, but likely not until the winter months if we get chicks in the spring.

Roosting on the fence was not a viable survival strategy

Our kids are pretty good with the chickens

Fruit Trees - Our fruit trees are the lowest labor producers, after they become established. If we’re able to border the entire perimeter of our property in fruit trees, we’ll be able to have fresh fruit harvests with minimal work. I’ve had the best luck with apples (they seem super hardy) and I’d like to get another apple tree and a peach tree in the ground.

Our apple tree produced about seven apples. Most of the apples we grew this year came from a rental property my family owns, that I planted 8-10 years ago.

This was an early spring picture of a fig tree we planted. We had about four figs this year. 

This is the same fig tree, but later in the season, surrounded by bigger pumpkin and squash.

Overall, I’m happy with how our 2024 garden turned out. There is always room for improvements, which need to be balanced against their costs and benefits, but I’m happy with how our backyard is transforming from stone, sand and plastic into something alive and productive. My goal for 2025 is 400 lbs, with no more than 40% of this coming from squash.

Below are a bunch more pictures.

We planted a blueberry plant, and had a few berries this year.

This is our compost setup.

The yellowing of the leaves I attribute to squash bugs.

We also planted grapes, but since it was their first year, didn't get any grapes. I'm happy they didn't die. We need to build trellises. 

These tomato worms can strip a plant in a few days. We found the few that made it into our garden pretty quickly.

Zeely Waste of Money and Time

Today we experimented with Zeely, which is a magic AI-powered tool that is supposed to generate sales, somehow. We saw an advertisement for it and figured we'd give it a shot.

Everything it gave us was crap - like garbage made up by AI that didn't even work. We paid $25 for nine leads from this - one was a wrong number, one was a call that could not connect, and the most interesting was a Spanish speaker:

     "Hola!"  (Hello)
     "Hola. Betty?" (Hello, Betty?)
     "Si."  (Yes) 

     "Did you fill out our contact form, looking for programmers?"

     "Lo siento, solo hablo español." (Sorry, I only speak Spanish.) 

     "¿Necesitas programadoras?" (Do you need programmers?)

     "No." 

     "Gracias, adios." (Thanks, goodbye.)

I called all nine of these leads. My wife emailed six of them, and I emailed the last three from her account. Interestingly, only one of the emails had any kind of bounce. 

If you look at what Zeely states they are offering, they said they would provide an "AI Powered Sales App" which they did. They sales app they provided worked, for lead collection, and the AI agents they used to populate it, really provided AI power. The value of the AI power was negative -  if I have an AI routine generate realistic-seeming data, from AI-generated leads, when I call those people they will have no idea what I am talking about.

Zeely did not actually do anything different from what it promised. After our credit card company flagged it as a fraudulent charge, we authorized it. I believe they sold us what they said they would, but what they said they would was not particularly useful.

AI is not magic. It still requires a human to understand, and validate, what is going on. 

It's also not a good idea to do business with someone with an F rating with the Better Business Bureau either.

MacBook Pro Replacement Screen Project

Today I replaced my MacBook Pro 2015 retina screen. My wife dropped her cell phone on the glowing apple on the back, and that's BARELY a piece of very thing glass onto the liquid crystal display. So, the glowing apple advertisement for Apple was a weakness in the design, that resulted in needing a screen replacement.

This was how my screen "worked" after barely hitting the glowing apple on the back.

Apple wanted $700 for the repair, and I bought the part off eBay for $263.99. At a savings of $436.01, it made sense for me to do this repair myself in two hours. None of our contracts are are $200 / hour, and I didn't want to deal with the hassle of a new laptop and setting everything up. I figured the repair would be quicker, and cheaper, than a replacement. 

This took some tools from ifixit, which I already had for cell phone screen replacement, and this really helpful guide.

The weirdness part about this repair was how many missing parts my computer had, before beginning. Apple was the only company to work on this (before me) so it's not like I took it to some sketchy repair shop operating out of some guy's van on Central Ave in Albuquerque.

This was the most interesting thing, an extra screw:

I studied computer science, not electrical engineering, but I can tell you a screw connecting two leads like this is not how to design a circuit.

In addition to the "extra" screw, there were some screws missing which hold the case together: 

Granted, the two on the bottom are different size than the other eight screws, and it can be really difficult keeping all your screws together while working on a repair.

The last interesting missing part was ONE plastic cushion along the hinges, the other was there: 

Image from ifixit. I didn't take a good picture of this.

None of this missing pieces were actually super important for the continued operation of my computer. It was just bizarre taking a look at Apple's handiwork, and seeing where they weren't actually any better than one of the sketchy repair shops.

The most uncertain part was the disassembly. I was concerned I'd break a connector, and then either have a much bigger repair job, or my computer would end up as junk. That's why I took a backup first, and decided I'd spent $263.99 on this, but $700 would be better spent on a new computer. After disassembling this successfully, I was pretty sure I could put it back together without breaking anything. Whenever I was unsure, I just kept going slower. That's why this took two hours, instead of the one the ifixit guide recommended. 

This is what it looks like after disconnecting your screen from your 2015 MacBook Pro.

Then, you have to send your wife a thumbs up picture after you're pretty sure you didn't destroy anything.

After following the guide in reverse, and putting everything back together with the new screen, I powered it on, and it worked. It's also amazing how scratched, dirty, and generally abused, my old screen had become.

It's alive!

I really, really like ifixit. They try and combat the throw away culture of making everything un-repairable, and the assumption that people are incapable, and/or unwilling, to understand how something works well enough to repair it.

* Despite that, I am not opening up a hardware repair shop.

Eagle Nest Lake

I had a fun time at Angel Fire with my family this weekend. It's way, way, cheaper during not-ski season. My son kept saying "catch fish" for like two days before the trip, despite the fact that I suck really bad at fishing. We had a good time, even if the ONE fish I caught was ridiculously small. We went to Eagle Nest Lake.
Everyone there knew Caleb Brown. They all went to high school together, and he worked every job possible in Red River, Angel Fire, and Eagle Nest, from probably 8-18 years old

Administrative/Executive Assistant Reading List - Book One

I haven't written a blog post in a while about anything other than rental property, or IT documentation. I  married a wonderful Belarusian woman, had a kid, and am trying to push my software company more into intellectual property development. So, I'm not dead, and didn't give up on blog posts.

A huge part of my job as the CEO of Noventum Custom Software LLC consists of reading and responding to emails, scheduling meetings, looking at project status notes to determine if someone is stuck and needs some sort of direction, talking with leads, talking with clients, and general management tasks. A large portion of these tasks could be handled by a capable assistant.

A general policy of hiring a person needed with very limited guidance on what they will be doing, how they'll be evaluated, and what their expectations are, isn't a good. I'm trying to systematize job descriptions, responsibilities, expectations and evaluations as my software company, Noventum, grows to get more into repeatable hiring outcomes and to have good hiring policies and practices. This also helps people feel better when they know, clearly, in writing, what's expected of them. I've avoided a number of potentially disastrous programming hires by following these (generally accepted for the past fifty years...) human resources simple steps. It's more difficult for me to apply them to non-programmers, since it requires flexibility on my part, and empathy, especially into a discipline of which I am ignorant.

Part of expanding on my flexibility is reading to try and learn about executive and administrative assistants. The first book in my reading list is The New Executive Assistant by Jonathan McIlroy. I recommend this book to anyone capable, high level, and finding themselves spending three hours a day sorting emails instead of doing whatever it is they are awesome at.

The first thing to realize about this book is that it is written in Australian. I used to think that both Australian and American were dialects of English, but I'm not sure anymore. While reading this book, please realize that "diary" is Australian for "calendar" in American. It is not the case that Australian executives go around, writing in their journals/diaries every day about their inner feelings and dreams, and their assistants help with this. I believed that was the case for about the first fifty pages of the book, until finding this helpful Australian/American dictionary after realizing that there was no way such a situation was possible. There are other confusing Australian terms throughout, that only minorly hamper an American's understanding. 

My ignorance before reading this book was such that I lacked basic vocabulary to describe anything related to an assistant. After reading this, the author made sure that everyone was on the same page when it came to vocabulary describing the executive/assistant partnership.

Another thing to realize is that the book is very much written for, and from the perspective of, the assistant. The author does generally keep this as neutral as possible, but his background, experiences, and general tone of the book, make it so that most of the focus is spend on actions the assistant can take to make this relationship work. As a capable person, you can infer what actions an executive should (probably) take to hold up their side of the relationship, but this is not explicitly as clear for as it is for the assistant.  

After reading this book, I believe I now have the ability to write up a job description for an assistant that is more along the administrative assistant grade, with the potential to grow into an executive assistant. I feel like I can explain, delegate, and measure performance on, tasks to delegate to this assistant. In short, I feel like I have some hope of hiring someone to fill this role without learning through mistakes. 

Overall, I think this is a good book.

I'm not going to move forward with any additional hiring until my state relaxes our COVID-19 lock down. Complying with all of the constantly shifting requirements is not helpful for business stability. My next steps will be to continue reading books and articles about executive, and administrative, assistants, and to work on a job description, performance evaluation templates and descriptions of the tasks I'd like to delegate. In short, I'll continue to prepare and learn, without taking any concrete action, yet.

Send me an email, give me a call, or leave a comment below, if you're interested in this book, or talking about hiring an assistant in general. I plan on writing at least two more blog posts about the additional two books I purchased on this subject.