Tales from the Farm

Rainy Afternoon Blahs

2010-04-22T14:57:00.007-06:00

I've been so busy lately not doing farmwork, and then this week I had three full days with no reasons to leave the farm. Oh, ecstacy! That's what I thought, anyway. Tuesday I really did get out and do some serious work, turning a bed I had previously readied for planting, and then actually getting to seed it with an unusual barley ('Montcalm Mutant' barley, from the wonderful late Robert Lobitz through Seed Savers Exchange) and red spring wheat at the other end. One never gets very many seeds from an SSE participant; that's sort of the whole point--to share a few endangered seeds that can be multiplied and then grown as an actual crop later on. I sincerely hope some of it comes up, as it's old seed, from 2005. But the other barley I got from Mr. Lobitz, 'Orange Lemma' barley, is just as old and is now nearly two inches high in the little bed back of the greenhouse. This is exciting, and I'm looking forward to being able to harvest enough seed to plant for several years, plus having the straw for the birdies. In the long run, it's all for the birdies.

The alfalfa is trying to come up in a couple of the beds, though it's very slow. So far there are only a sprinkling of cotyledon leaves sitting splayed on the soil, waiting for something to happen. Hey, leafs are supposed to happen! Maybe it's too cold still. Maybe they're afraid of the pigeons, which are always on the lookout for salad. Maybe they're just slow.

Meanwhile, some of the earliest iris are starting to bloom, though it's always iffy at this time of year. Right now most of the open ones are Miniature Dwarfs, including 'Pipit,' very tiny in yellow and brown, 'Crouching Tiger,' ditto, and 'Hidden Dragon' in purple. Those last two are actually species crosses and don't count as MDBs, but who's counting. Then there are several of my seedlings, Standard Dwarf Bearded to be precise, but they open early for me, plus 'Just A Croc' of Brad Kasperek's, which is supposed to be an SDB but is always very early and very short here, making me think it should have been registered as an MDB. Picky, picky. I would be doing some hybridizing with these little guys, but they're going to get frozen some time in the next couple of days, so there's no point.

Which is why I have the rainy afternoon blahs. Not that it's that rainy, but it's dark and cold with little spritzes, and it's of course snowing on South Mountain right over there. It's just a bit depressing; I recognize that when I can work with my plants, that's where all my creative impulses go, and if I can't, I get fussy. But then I remember, "Oh, yeah, coffee!" at which point things improve, if only to the point where I feel like writing. Now you can see why this blog tends to disappear between the months of May and November, which is a shame because that's the time when things actually happen around here.

Did I mention the range has (finally!) greened up, and that's followed immediately by sprinklings of large herds of cows--we don't want all that grass to get more than an inch tall, do we?

Baby Steps

2010-03-26T13:23:00.006-06:00

The problem with having to stay out of the growing areas in the early spring due to wet soggy conditions (see previous post) is mostly mental. Of course, it's also physical, being that I don't tend to excercise nearly as much as it would take to make up for the work I'm missing. Okay, I hardly excercise at all in the cold, wet, snowy, windy months. Which we are still in
But the soil is drying, just perfectly moist under the shallow crust, and my desire to go dig in it is immense. So this morning after taking care of the birdies (the many, many birdies), I grabbed a digging fork and rake and headed to one of the beds I mulched a few months ago for the corn rotation (see previous post "Reading Gene Logsden"). This bed's about 30 feet long, and I wanted to turn over about 20 feet of that, so I began digging. The day was increasingly breezy but sunny and not too cold, so it was nice to start with. However, by the time I'd covered about 8 feet, the breeze was getting noticeably stronger and my hat was flapping around my ears. By the time I'd gone another two feet, the wind was trying to scrape the hat off my head, though I had it tied on firmly, and my jacket was flapping so it was hard to control the fork. Of course, I wasn't surprised; I knew there was another storm passing us by just to the north, dragging the jet stream down to the ground (the forecast for the afternoon is "gusts to 60-65 miles per hour"). It's just so amazing how fast the conditions can deteriorate from merely unpleasant to untenable.
I quit at the halfway point, quickly smoothed out the bed with a rake, and sowed some old seeds to act as a cover crop until it's warm enough to plant corn, some time around late May. This is what I call a dump planting, since it doesn't take much effort to simply flick the seeds around and then cover with the rake. This time I used leftover seeds from 2007--lettuces, arugula, asters, cabbage, and a few other cool-season plants. Hopefully some of them ended up on the turned soil (I have a feeling a few flew off in the wind before I could cover them) and will germinate in the next month. It's always worth a try.
So it wasn't much, but it' a start, and in a few days when the weather's warmer and a little quieter I'll get back out there to continue digging, smoothing, and planting, and the season will go on from there..

Oh, and now, an hour after my attempt, the forecast is for "gusts to 65-70 miles per hour." I have to stop listening to the forecasts!

Mud

2010-03-18T12:31:00.006-06:00

There's an old saying that Eskimos have many names for snow; any Inuit will tell you that's vastly overstated. Still, when one becomes intimately involved with anything, a single name starts to seem insufficient. To me, a purse is a purse, something in which to schlep all my junk around in, but my neice can spot particular designer purses from a block away.
Paradoxically, considering I live in a climate where eight inches of precipitation in a year would be worth celebrating, I've become very intimately involved with mud in the eleven years I've lived on the farm. Now, if you are listening to somebody talk about mud, you can hear exactly what sort of mud is being discussed; it depends on the inflection, pitch, and facial expression (anybody knows that muuuuuuud is a different critter than mud). But in writing, it's not so easy, so I'm proposing a few terms to clear things up, as follows:
Glessip: A thin layer of melted mud on top of still-frozen mud. This is analogous to chocolate pudding on glass. It's difficult to drive on and nearly impossible to walk on. Luckily, traction can be improved with the addition of the tradional kitty litter, twigs, or chicken scratch.
Gluckit: Fully unfrozen, deep mud. This is the stuff that will keep you stuck at home until it either freezes or dries, because nobody's going anywhere in this. It will engulf small cars, front-end loaders, and the occasional school bus. It will also suck boots, and perhaps even socks, off your feet. Napoleon's army knew all about this one. Gluckit makes really fine adobe, particularly if it includes kitty litter, twigs, or chicken scratch.
Sklutch: Can be related to Glessip; it is relagated to dirt roads and may involve lots of water. The driving technique involves somehow getting into third gear and not slowing down, keeping in mind that the ditches bordering the road are always filled with Gluckit, and you're not getting out of that!
Splock: Flying Sklutch. This is what ends up coating the body of a vehicle, including the headlights, windshield, and roof rack. Not related to Commander Spock.
Congunk: Dried Gluckit. As any farmer will tell you, fields cannot be worked in the spring until they dry. The farmers know that a soggy field is just a soggy field; mud only happens as a result of interaction with somebody walking, slogging, or attempting to drive on it or through it. It's actually a physical change in the soil, and once made, it won't turn back into friable soil. Nope, once dried it becomes solid rocks, and you might as well forget about trying to grow anything in it. Congunk is also what ends up on the undercarriage of your car, adding several hundred pounds to its weight, as well as $10 to $20 extra at the car wash.
I'm sure there are several types of mud I'm missing here, so if anyone knows what they are, please fill me in.

At least at the melting of this snow, there are gifts. Crocus! Crocuses! Croci? And suddenly there are little green plants that weren't there Sunday morning before the snow fell. Gifts of spring indeed, freely given.

The Annual Mid-March Blizzard

2010-03-15T11:47:00.004-06:00

I'm so tired of white. I'm tired of taking snow photos. But most of all, I am Officially Tired of being cold all the time. Yesterday morning it was nearly warm, so I grabbed the opportunity to head down to the greenhouse wearing sandals instead of the usual socks and shoes plus a fleece cardigan instead of the down parka. I noticed the bank of flat gray clouds in the west (and besides, I follow the weathercasts religiously, so I knew what was coming), but I was in firm denial. After an hour or so of seed-starting (including the first of the tomatoes, now sitting cozily on the heat mat), I had to admit that my sandal-clad toesies were indeed getting cold and decided to call it coffee break.

Not much had happened by mid-afternoon, so I went into Edgewood for a meeting of the Cast'N'Knits (really, it's not my fault; I only just joined), the local knitting group. I've only just begun knitting, so I wasn't sure I was up to the level of most of these ladies, but that was before I found out that most of them are also beginners, as the old pros tend to wander off to other groups. We were having fun, and Bethe was happily showing off her stash of amazing yarns (well, she's the owner of the yarn shop, so she should have a great stash), when the blizzard arrived, announced by several loud claps of thunder. That was enough to break up the meeting, and we left in a bit of a hurry, every one knowing what a blizzard can do to the roads out here.

I have to say it was one of the least fun drives I've experienced lately. The worst part was in the Smith's store parking lot, where nobody was quite sure who was backing out, since in the driving whiteness it was hard to tell whether those were headlights or backup lights. I wouldn't have gone there, but I knew we deserved a bag of chips to go with Gloria's homemade salsa from the Saturday market, and an avocado sounded absolutely essential, too. Back on the road it was almost as bad, as the road surface was disappearing rapidly, and the SUV I was following for a good way home turned out to be lost. He finally pulled over to let me pass and then followed me instead. He was probably really disappointed when I turned off onto my dirt road. With any luck he made it to where he was going, but I'll never know. For myself, the four miles of dirt road turned out to be the easiest part, but I was delighted to get home.

We made guacamole with the avocado and salsa and watched the snow fall for hours. Today revealed the most snow cover we've had all season, so nobody's going anywhere for at least a day.

The Sky on Fire; More Snow, Rain, Wind

2010-03-10T09:49:00.005-07:00

Ah, March. The violence of March surprises me every year, even as my brain is readying itself for the shift to spring. It seems to be one round of wild weather after another, interspersed with isolated calm(ish) days with sun and crocuses.

In March our average lows are still below freezing, though on nice days the afternoons can be warm enough to ditch the heavy coats, the gloves, the head wraps and mufflers. Of course, the next morning it's back to cold-weather gear, especially if the wind is up. Today the wind is blowing at 35 MPH or so, and the local weather guy is promising gusts this afternoon around 55 MPH. Great. Out here in the plains there is nothing to slow these winds down, so we spend all winter into spring under a great river of fast-moving air. This is one of the things that keeps this area from being heavily populated, even though we are close enough to Albuquerque to commute (if you want to). I've seen many nice houses built just this side of Edgewood over the decade I've been here; usually people build in the summer when it's hot and the breezes keep things cooler, then they enjoy the lovely autumn, and learn to hunker down for the winter. Then spring with the wild winds arrives in March, and by June a lot of those nice new homes are up for sale as their owners pack up and head back to Albuquerque, defeated by the incessant winds.

Some of us learn to live with it (though I wouldn't mind a few quiet hours of stillness now and then). We do spend some time picking up things which took off from the porch in the night. A windstorm like this one can leave pieces of plyboard, tin roofing, market baskets and coolers, the occasional hat or glove, and even a small table or two scattered for about a half mile down range. Not to mention all those feathers, though those are biodegradable and could probably be considered fertilizer (which means we are responsible for a Good Thing!).

Last week, though, we had a snowfall with paradoxically no wind at all, and it was the most beautiful snow I think I've seen. In the morning every item, even the thorns on the locusts, bore an inch of soft, fluffy snow. The bird pens were all tented in white, and the turkeys spent a while tilting their heads to see what was different about the sky. That afternoon was in contrast very warm, and the snow was nothing more than a memory by evening. The next day, we were back to winds, rains, hail, snow, and a winter rainbow.

By the way, I didn't photoshop the photo at all or even auto-

correct it. The light and dark contrast was intense, and I

wouldn't have been surprised if this storm sprouted a

tornado. Luckily, it didn't.

Waiting for Spring

2010-02-19T13:49:00.002-07:00

There comes a morning in February when you can step out on the deck in your nice fleecy robe and not have your ankles freeze immediately. Instead, there's a friendly little breeze from the south insinuating itself under the edge of the robe.
You know that it's the advance warning of another storm coming from the west, but who cares? Right now it's a little thought of spring, and you nearly run out in shorts and sandals. Nah, we're not that silly. It's still socks and mud shoes, heavy sweaters and coats, and sometimes gloves.

Still, things have changed since early February, when the last snow covered everything in marshmallow. We've been through a couple of weeks of mud season, and the snow is finally completely gone (except for the patch on the north side of the house. That's where the dogs come and go from inside to the back yard, so it's been covered in mud and is therefore, like permafrost, insulated from the warmer air). The mud is still making oozy puddles here and there, but we get around it. In the shade house, where it was the worst for a while, we tiled the path in excess cardboard egg boxes (I always tell my customers at the market that, yes, we do recycle the boxes, but I don't always tell them how we recycle them).

It's now fruit-tree pruning time, so I took my pruners and

loppers in to be sharpened by our wonderful knife-sharpener

at the market last weekend, and I've begun making inroads

in the apple trees. Not all at once, of course--my winter-flabby muscles aren't up to it all in one day. But it's a start.

And last night, just for the heck of it, I took a digging fork and tried digging up some of the Jerusalem artichoke patch, thereby making a big discovery. All these years I've thought if the compost pile was frozen, the ground must be also, so I never tried digging this early. Hah!--another incorrect assumption! The soil at that end of the garden bed was not only not frozen, it was easy to dig, deep and dark, moist without being muddy. And the artichokes were big, supremely crisp, and sweet.

Today I finished with the part of the artichoke patch I'm going to harvest this season, and I ended up with two whole gallons of the knobby things. There they are in their bucket inside the cooler, waiting to go to tomorrow's market in Santa Fe. I hope my customers are as thrilled as I am, particularly since, as much as I enjoy them, there's no way I can eat 2 gallons of them by myself, and I know from experience that the turkeys won't eat them.

Speaking of the turkeys, suddenly all the birds are displaying for all they're worth, and the morning is full of the sounds of turkeys, guineas, geese, and of course the peacocks trying to attract as much attention as possible from the opposite sex. Harriet the goose is looking for a future nest site, and I'm trying to make sure I know where it is. We won't let her raise her own babies--we really don't have the proper conditions for a goose to hatch eggs--but I can sell goose eggs 'til the cows come home. And since we don't have any cows, we keep selling them until Harriet and Beanie get tired of laying them, sometime in the summer.

But best of all, while I was taking a breather from digging up the artichokes, I heard something like a turkey comment, but fainter and coming from a long distance, and I looked up, trying to focus on what I knew should be there in the sky. It didn't take long--there was a large skein of sandhill cranes high up, heading due north. These weren't the few birds that have been visiting the Moriarty fields from over the mountains to the west, where they spend the winter in the bosque along the river; these were a very large crowd starting a serious journey, all calling goodbye for the summer. How wonderful! How wild!

Meadowlarks in the Snow

2010-02-03T12:21:00.005-07:00

Yesterday was of course Groundhog Day, and I forgot to send out my Groundhog Day cards. Here as elsewhere, the day was bright enough for the large rodent to see its shadow when dragged out from its comfy den into a shockingly cold morning, so it's another six weeks of winter, weather fans. But Groundhog Day is merely a demeaned version of what was once an important day, one of the four cross-quarter days which filled out the calendar of the year; it's called Candlemas in the Christian calendar and Imbolc in the druidic one. In a lot of cultures it was considered the first of spring and was celebrated as a time of quickening, with fire and water. The signs are subtle--the trees are beginning to awaken, though they won't be in leaf for a couple of months yet. I see the buds on the trees beginning to swell, though it's not as obvious as last year due to January's colder weather this year. If we raised sheep or goats (thankfully, we don't) we would be expecting lambs and kids soon and having to bring them into the warmth when it snowed again (I've never understood why sheep breeders don't keep the rams out of the flock until later so that the lambs would be born in warm weather, but then I don't raise them, so there!). The little birdies are twittering as they start jockeying for mates and breeding sites, and the chickens are starting to lay more and more each week (good thing, as my customers have been clamoring for eggs for a while).

So yesterday I didn't celebrate by lighting candles or washing my floors with salt water (though lord knows, they could use it, I'm sure!). Instead, I started some seeds I specifically chose for this day, Angelica archangelica and woad seeds. These are in a flat which I've placed out in the shade house, where they can be snowed on and be treated to alternating cold and warmer conditions. Then they'll come back into the warmth of the greenhouse at about the time of the Solstice, and they should hopefully be sprouting a few weeks after that.

Wendy says she celebrated Imbolc by going to Sam's and buying in bulk.

Today certainly doesn't look like spring, no way. It started snowing around 8:00 this morning, and it's been heavy and steady since then. It's a very wet snow, accumulating fast, and falling hard enough that you can hear a continual hiss as it lands. We took the sled full of warm water down for the birds, and by the time we were done--about 45 minutes, we were totally soaked and cold. But this snow is what we've been waiting for, and we don't plan on going anywhere today or tomorrow. Just as well, as the local Interstate highways are being closed as they get truly nasty and start producing really bad accidents. All the schools are closing early, and I don't expect them to be open tomorrow.

But the signs are still there. Earlier I heard the clear notes of a meadowlark's song, and just now when I was watching the snow fall, suddenly there were a dozen or so of them, sporting their bright yellow vests with a black necktie. I think these are males arriving early before the girls show up in a couple of weeks, and most of them will probably not be staying. Still, that brilliant yellow flash in the snow is a cheering thing.

The Tiny White Van

2010-01-23T12:58:00.006-07:00

It occurs to me that I never wrote about the tiny white van due to the fact that I wasn't writing during the summer, and that's when the TWV happened. It was during the Cash for Clunkers program; in fact, it was due to the Clunkers program.

What we'd been driving to market for about nine years was a silver Chevy Astro van. I know, I know--Consumer's Reports hated the Astro, but for us it was a logical thing. It carried a lot of cargo (I used to have my two display tables in there, set up, so I could carry flats of plants on top of the tables as well as underneath, thereby doubling the useable space) and was easy to get into even for people with ageing knees (unlike the previous Toyota pickup, which was cute, but difficult to maneuver things in and out of). But over the years the Astro became, well, terrifying to drive. It always did drive like a very large box, and after the accident involving the snow and culvert, the box became slightly skewed due to the bent subframe. The alignment in front was tricky, and our mechanic kept saying, "It's as good as we can get it, but..." And it was expensive, with an MPG of 16, and power windows, locks, and all that. It was never made for driving dirt roads, so all those power goodies had a habit of breaking and needing repair on a semi-regular basis. I thought of trying to sell it, but it was evident that all the little and not-so-little items that needed fixing would cost a lot more than we would ever be able to sell it for. I wasn't sure what I was going to do; I'd been looking at various delivery/market vans, but what had been available was oversized, overpowered, and most of all, overpriced. Even used ones were clearly out of our price range. So I just kept plugging along in the Astro, trying to be grateful that it was still getting from point A (the farm) to point B (anywhere else) and almost always back.

But in early August the rear latch lock (part of the electronic locking system) broke again, and I was forced to take the van in to the local Chevy dealer to have it repaired, again, to the tune of $380+ dollars (I told you it was expensive). Meanwhile, Wendy had to go to Edgewood, 10 miles up the highway, for something or other, and when she came back to pick me up, she said, "You HAVE to come see this!" So without telling me what "this" was, she drove back to Edgewood and to the Ford dealers' there, and there was the Tiny White Van esconced on a little rise by itself. It was tiny, with about 2/3 of the Astro's space, but it was clearly built for delivering cargo, very square inside, and almost tall enough to stand upright in. And with doors on both sides in back and a double door in back, you could reach everything inside without having to climb in unless you really wanted to. Plus, it was rated at 25 MPG due to the fact that the engine was 4-cylinder, no frills, basic. Basic, basic, basic. No electronic locks to break, no power windows to fail (have you even seen a vehicle with old-fashioned crank windows in a couple of decades?). Automatic transmission, though (works for me), and all the standard safety features. And cute--European style, the sort of small van you can see anywhere around the world except for here, where we've been buried under a glut of monster gas-guzzling vehicles for 'way too long. In fact, the Ford Transit Connect, which this is, is built in Turkey, though Ford is making noises about starting to make them here.

So we went home, took a close look at our personal and farm finances, took a close look at the Clunker program, and took a deep breath. Two days later we went to the Chevy dealer, paid for the brand-new lock, and drove the Astro to the Ford dealer, where we clunkerized it, new lock and all. Poor Astro; I really felt sort of bad for it.

Not that bad, though, and with the money for the Astro, the cost for the Transit was under $19,000, far less than any of those used vans I'd been looking at.

Six months later the Transit begins to look like it lives on a farm, what with the mud and all. There are a couple of drawbacks to it (aren't there always?). The biggest is that it's front-wheel drive rather than all-wheel drive, so it fishtails in the mud and I'm less willing to take it out on really bad days (which ought to save me from getting stranded quite as often, anyway). And when I park it somewhere and want to lock it, that involves walking all around it so I can lock all five doors, and then walking all around it to unlock all five doors. I do sort of miss the electronic locking system, the digital thermometer readout, and the power rear-view mirrors. But I can live without them just fine. I love parking the TWV at the market, and I love my fellow marketeers admiring it (there are now three more of them at the market). It's fun to drive. I can fit 14 bales of straw in it. Even though it doesn't do jack-rabbit acceleration (in fact, I once saw a review that characterized the acceleration as "glacial"), it does get there. It has a good heart. For us, it's nearly perfect! We still love it, mud and all.

When People Need Help

2010-01-20T21:32:00.004-07:00

We're in the storm track from California right now, and we have a parade of storms passing through in rapid succession. It's been one of those days when the weather can turn on a dime. One minute the sun is shining, and the pigeons are cavorting in the dry grass here in front of the house. When I look up the next minute, snow is screaming by horizontally and the pigeons are streaking for the safety of the Roofs of Home, where they can slide under the eaves into the chicken barn. After a few minutes of whiteout, the sun emerges again, the drift-rags melt, and the wind pelts us with a few more flakes. It's not weather conducive to working outside, and it's not much fun even in the greenhouse, as there isn't enough sun to actually warm it up.

Instead, I am doing a flurry of housework, and computer work, and cooking beans and making bread. But mostly I am feeling introspective and spending a lot of time thinking about the Haitian earthquake and its ramifications. I've sent off little bits of money, what I could afford, though I am shamed to think of how much I have in comparison to what the people of Haiti have lost (or never had in the first place). I know that what I have done is appropriate, but it still seems little enough.

I am utterly appalled at some of the things that were said about Haiti by those who are politely termed "professional partisans," and who in reality are simply thugs on the media--I'm referring specifically to Rush Limbaugh and Pat Robertson, though there seem to be a lot of their ilk. I know this is old news, but it's still bothering me, so that's why I'm writing now. As far as Pat Robertson goes, if I could talk to his face, this is what I would say: "Pat Robertson, you ignorant little slimey toad (with apologies to all the real toads of the world)--get off my planet! Go back to the pit you crawled out of!" That is all the consideration I will give to him. Rush is another matter, as he loves people talking back to him. But there is a way to get this parasite off the air and television. Find out who his sponsors are and let them know that until they stop paying for him to pander to the basest yahoos of this country, we will not buy any of their products. If enough people boycotted the sponsors, they would have little choice but to drop him like a rotten tomato. The biggest problem I can see with this plan is that one would have to listen to his "program" to find out who the sponsors are; I don't think I'm brave enough for that.

Well, I feel a little better now that I've gotten that off my chest.

The thing is, when people need help, they need help! You don't help them because they deserve it, or because they subscribe to your political views or religeous credos, or because they look like you. You don't help them because you think it will get you ahead in your business or to curry future favor in Heaven. You help them because they need help. That's all. That should be enough. My deepest thanks to all the people who are actually out there helping.

Dealing in Peacocks

2010-01-13T08:36:00.005-07:00

Pale January slumps onward. Something about this month always leaves me tired--it may be the post-holiday letdown, or the wan white light as the sun slowly remembers how to climb back up the sky away from the solstice. It's also the coldest part of the year, not that our record lows happen in January, but once it's cold, it stays cold longer, as I'm sure everybody has experienced in the past few weeks. And it may also be the dregs of the annual sinus infection; being under the weather will always color one's attitude toward life in general. Sigh.

But there is some color around, though it'll be awhile until the plants start waking. We have visiting birds once in a while, and some residents, though most of them are drab this time of year. Bluebirds, though, are like little flitting pieces of sky as they whiz over the roads. Yellow meadowlarks like to sit on fences and the tops of tall gateways adorning the suburban ranchlets over toward Edgewood. And our own birds still have lots of brilliant colors, particularly the little pheasants, the golden and Lady Amhurst, and of course the peacocks.

What an improbable barnyard bird! At our farm the pea people live in large covered pens, though, because they are strong flyers for short distances. But once out, they set down quickly, since there are no tall trees around (and in fact, no trees at all off the property), and they are unfortunately easily caught by the local coyotes or by our big dog Biff, who thinks he's a bird dog. The only time we've actually eaten a pea hen was one that Biff caught after she got out; we retrieved her just as she died and figured that we ought to roast her instead of wasting her. I have to say, she was truly delicious.

Somehow we seem to be turning into the local peacock dump, er, rescue site. There are an amazing number of feral peafowl in some areas such as parts of Espanola, and a few in the East Mountains (probably some in the South Valley of Albuquerque, too). And Wendy is always ready to trade for pea cocks, too. So we've doubled the number of birds here in the past few months. Last spring we only had two cocks, two hens, and then later in the summer the three babies hatched and are now sturdy youngsters. Then there is the new pen, with two pied cocks, one pied female, and Rain, the purple peacock. And in another pen, now we have two new India blue cocks, one of which came last night--this one was hanging around a house in the Edgewood area, and the homeowners really didn't want to keep it, exotic as it was. So that's, well, a bunch. People always ask us, "Wow. Aren't they loud?" Yes, they would be in a neighborhood situation. But to tell the truth, the pea fowl don't hold an auditory candle to the geese or the guineas, which are truly loud. This is not a quiet farm by any means.

And, look! Even just writing about the birds has lightened my day. It's time to go down and visit them, and then visit the greenhouse, which is the other part of the farm that keeps me going in the wintertime. I'm so lucky!

Blue Moon New Year's

2009-12-31T22:46:00.007-07:00

It's the end of Holiday Interlude Week, and the sun has gone down on another year; not a moment too soon. It's been a difficult year for a lot of us, though not so bad for us here on the farm. It may just be that we're used to not being to make ends quite meet, so being poor isn't that much of a big deal to us. And we don't expect anyone to hand us a job, or a handout, either. It would be really nice to have health insurance, though, and I'm pretty sure I'll be in debt for the rest of my life. Hey, I'm used to it. Somehow whenever one bill gets paid off, the Subaru needs new brakes and tires and a new windshield, and the water heater is throwing out pulses of what looks like black ink and is probably burnt sediment. Well, it is nine years old now, and its warrenty was only six years. I wouldn't mind if the Publishers Clearing House people brought me a bazillion dollars, but I'm not holding my breath. I did win $16 on a $3.00 scratcher ticket this week, though, and that's something.

Christmas is thoroughly over. I'm always shocked at how fast that happens--on the 26th of December it seems that nobody wants to linger in the Christmas glow. The soft rock station that played nothing but carols (mostly bad ones) since the weekend before Thanksgiving went back to soft rock on Saturday morning as if holiday music didn't exist. Me, I still play the occasional Christmas CD, though not so often. Sometime next summer we'll need some Tunes of the Solstice, and I'll be glad to drag them back out for a little coolness in the heat. The tree is still up, but soon we'll take its decorations off and take it down to one of the pheasant runs to give them another tree to hide in.

There isn't much heat at the moment. As the sun set, the beautiful round moon rose in the east, a magnificent blue moon for the new year. It's brilliant, and the little remnent snow drifts under the shrubs are luminous, though the ground is black and the shadows are sharp-edged. Last night's moon was nearly as bright but was caught in nets of drifting clouds and reflected in soft tiny snowflakes; the shadows were soft, and the very air appeared to glow. It was too cold to go walking in it, but it was magic. That kind of light only happens in a snowfall.

How Things Go in the Winter

2009-12-17T16:17:00.004-07:00

Every day this week it's been a little warmer, until we passed right through the average high temp (mid forties) and ended up higher than average, so nice that I got out and, well, more in a bit. The last snowfall was December 8th, when we were treated to an actual blizzard which left drifts that are just now finally disappearing, and even the muddy spots are drying.

It always amuses me when people say I must be taking it easy now that things aren't growing on the farm. They have obviously not had to take care of a large and diverse flock of birds. It's the hardest part of the cold months. Depending on how low the morning temperatures got, getting water to the birdies is either hard or really, really hard. When it's been 20 or below, I fill up all the water containers I can find with hot water and pull them down the hill to the bird pens. At the moment I have 9 gallon jugs, a three-gallon one, and an old 5-gallon thing. That comes to 136 pounds of water, which turns out to be just enough for each bird pen to get at least a full gallon or two of warm water, and the geese have a deep pail so they can wash their faces. They do enjoy the warm, clean water, and the hens in particular like sitting on the bowl edges with their toes in the steam.

If the temp is 21 or warmer, I can usually just break the ice in the bowls with a hunk of rebar and then come back in the afternoon when the hoses have theoretically unfrozen so I can fill all the water pails and bowls. I like that much more--it takes a lot less time, and it doesn't involve dragging water down the hill and then dragging the wagon or sled back up. But I can see the birds thinking, "Say. Where's that nice warm water?" My, it's a long time to Spring.

However, as I mentioned, today got really warm--51 degrees, which seems balmy at this point. So I celebrated by going out and working in the garden. Nothing major, really. I picked two bed sections that I want to put in corn in the spring, and I mulched with ashes, barn bedding, and old straw and then watered the whole mess so the wind wouldn't blow it away. Hopefully it'll get snowed on in a week or so, and I may add another layer of stuff when it melts. Then I'll dig it all under in March or April, depending, and if it's warm enough in May (always an iffy thing) I can plant corn there. In late summer or early fall I can plant barley or another grain among the corn to overwinter (if it will; I'm not convinced grain can overwinter here, but then they do it in the Midwest, and they have pretty severe winters). Then alfalfa for a year, vegetables for another, beans and garlic for another, and iris for two years before going back to corn. Keep in mind that I'm planning to do all this on beds that are about 4 by 50 feet. I will be doing the same sort of rotation in other beds so I always have corn, grain, a clover, vegies, and iris going in any given year. Blame it all on Gene Logsdon (see the second post back). I only hope that my physical strength lasts through at least one full rotation...

The Snowy Day Finally Comes

2009-12-03T14:51:00.004-07:00

Yesterday I was bemoaning the lack of snow, and somebody must have heard me. Today it has snowed since early light, and now at midafternoon it's still coming down. Big flakes pelting down, little flakes flung horizontally in a stiff wind, flakes hissing against one's coat, fat flakes clinging to the dogs' fur. The Stanley Homemakers Club meeting is cancelled for this afternoon; we have too many people who would have to drive snowy back roads, and a few others who would have to drive the even more terrifying Interstate. So it's just as well.

We need it, of course. November was just another dry month in a dry year (actually, November is more often dry here than not), and we've been impatiently waiting for the promised El Nino moisture. Five inches of fluffy snow is a start, though. The weather guys keep promising us "A Parade O' Storms." We'll see.

Running a farm isn't all that much fun in a snowstorm. If you have stock of one kind or another, they still need taking care of, and they need you out there. Normally we water all the birds in their respective pens and paddocks by hose, but in this weather the hoses are of course frozen. If the temperature had gotten above freezing some time during the day we could possibly have gotten by with breaking the ice in the water dishes, but not today. In the deep dishes the ice was several inches thick, and the smaller ones had frozen solid. So we filled gallon juice jugs with warm water and pulled them down to the birds on a new sled we bought recently for just this purpose. This was, of course, after dressing in long underwear, boots, gloves, furry hats or hoods--cold weather gets so complicated! But the birdies are all fed and watered and have enough shelter to be reasonably happy. Okay, maybe not happy. They won't be happy until spring comes.

Reading Gene Logsdon

2009-12-02T14:31:00.003-07:00

We are now safely past Thanksgiving, replete with the usual mashed rutabagas, a new and wonderful recipe for sweet potatoes, and a very tasty small turkey (one of our own, so yes, I'm bragging). Suddenly the weather has decided it's time to remind us what winter is all about, and the temps don't seem to want to get over 36 degrees today. And windy. No snow for us, though--just morning frosts to prove that there was some moisture in the air, diminishing as the days go by. There was supposed to have been a storm sloshing its way up from the south and meeting a cold front diving from the north, but the storm changed its mind and stayed down in Mexico before heading off toward Texas. So it's just cold.

I suppose I should be doing housework, or making bread, or making soaps, or doing something useful, but my favorite thing to do when it's too cold outside to make work seem like any kind of fun is to read. What I'm reading now is Gene Logsdon's Small-Scale Grain Raising. Sounds fascinating, no? Actually it is, because Gene is a good writer with a sense of humor which shines through like the sun burning off the early cold clouds. He really makes it seem important, and even fun, to get out there and plant some corn, milo, beans, peas, and wheat, even in small patches and rows. And then feed it to your turkeys/chickens/other livestock, as well as feeding yourself. Okay, we will wait until it stops being winter before we start planting, but I'm already designing a rotation scheme which will incorporate heavily fertilized (organically of course) corn or milo followed by a grain and clover, then vegetables, and finishing with iris for a couple of years before going back to corn/milo. This crop rotation would take 5 to 6 years, all the time building soil fertility better than my hit-or-miss methods. This could work! But oh, why didn't I understand this before I was quite so Old? I promise to report back on the results.
Here's a sample of Gene's writing (from the current second edition, published by Chelsea Green Publishing, for those of you who might want to look it up):
"Beans can be drilled carefully into finely worked seedbeds, no-tilled directly into mostly undisturbed soil following cotton or corn, broadcast by hand and disked roughly into the soil, even dropped on top of the ground from airplanes into standing wheat with no tillage at all. In all four situations the beans sprout and grow more or less successfully, although broadcasting them from airplanes is risky. The point is that if you make a mistake with soybeans or any dry bean, just say you did it on purpose."

Meanwhile, I had bad things happen with my computer last week, but I had a professional fix things for me (I'm a farmer, not a computer person). So far the only repercussions have been with this blog. I lost all the blogs I had been following, plus I seem to have lost my three deeply valued followers. Oh, no! Or perhaps everybody took issue with my last post, written in the pre-Thanksgiving dumps. Come back--it's safe now!

Mid November, and the Giveaway

2009-11-18T10:40:00.006-07:00

All the usual weather changes have gone on for the past month, but with a seeming vengeance. The last week of October was record cold, and the last outdoor market in Los Alamos was an experience I'd rather not repeat. Not without a down parka and gloves, long underwear, and insulated boots, anyway. As soon as Halloween passed, the next week had record highs, so it all averaged out to, well, average. The range, which had finally turned green at the end of September, is back to muted duns and yellows, stitched along the edges with silver winterfat, now rapidly disappearing as the seed heads crumble off or are eaten by the birds.

We've had a little snow, too, but not enough to cause any problems other than the continuing drought--we really could use a storm or two with a foot of heavy snow. We are prepared to be snowed (or mudded) in this winter, with nonperishable food stockpiled over in the shed, but we still need to lay in more bird feed and firewood before the middle of December.

What keeps us busiest right now is doing in turkeys for Thanksgiving. Wendy does most of this really hard work, with a little help from me, our wonderful neighbor Judy, and Wendy's sister Jane, and then Wendy and I will do all the deliveries next week (so let's hold the big snow storms until after that, please). I am also spending a lot of time making my signature rainbow soaps (chunks of transparent colors, glitter, and fragrance embedded in a soft white matrix) for upcoming craft and holiday markets. So we are forever fighting over the sink space, Wendy to clean out the birds and me to lay out soap molds; it's a time of year when the kitchen space is a little too tight.

We are still getting visitors to the farm as well. Last week it was a family from Zuni Pueblo to the west, desperately seeking bronze turkeys for a giveaway. I've known about the the traditional potlatch ceremonies of some of the Northwest coast Indians, in which people give away basically all their wealth, but I didn't know the Zuni people at least have their own equivalent. This woman's father is a member of the Mudhead Society, and every four years the family gives away things of value to each member of the Society--and in this case, that's 400 people! The goods involved are traditional, mostly livestock--horses, cattle, sheep, turkeys--and also blankets, pottery, jewelry and the like. The catch is that these days many of these people are no longer living as traditionally as in the old days, so they end up having to purchase most of this stuff in order to give it away. My brain, raised on western ideas of wealth and prestige, is boggled. In our culture it's the guy who manages to accumulate the most who ends up with the prestige, but with the Zuni it's the other way. It's the person who gives away the most who wins. And the culture itself ends up winning, as wealth is periodically redistributed, and the have/have not gap is narrow, and maybe doesn't even count. Nobody becomes rich, but nobody is absolutely destitute, either.

Maybe this concept is too foreign for our greedy, grasping culture. It seems once we own something we never want to give it up, and the richest of us don't seem to care a lot about how the less fortunate are doing. Right now our government is trying to level the playing field a bit, but I don't expect that to last any longer than the current administration. The vultures have been shoved off the field for now, but they'll be back.

Wonderful Blustery Fall

2009-10-13T14:06:00.001-06:00

I notice that the last time I made a post to this thing was August 25th or so. No!!! Cant be! Wasn't it just a couple of weeks ago? Well, evidently time is still running away from me, and I simply don't notice it.

Fall is always my favorite season, partly because it's a relief from the heat and nonstop work of summer. Not that there's any less work, really, but it's easier to do in the cool. I spend a lot of September into October planting the newly-divided iris rhizomes, and then if the weather's not beastly yet, I plant garlic and maybe a few flower bulbs in middle to late October. Then it's on to Turkey Season in November, plus the making of lotion bars and soaps for the holiday markets. Things don't let up much until January, when we might be able to plan on being snowbound for a little while, and then mudbound for a longer while.

This is also pretty much the end of produce season here (except that a lot of us now grow winter crops in cold frames or unheated greenhouses, so in some ways it never ends). Our first frost was September 22nd, and the first hard freeze was the next morning. The dynamics of the farm changed right away, of course--goodbye to the summer squash, and the beans, and the tomatoes. And the hens slowed down gradually, so that now we're only getting 4 to 6 eggs a day from our 50 or so chickens. That's okay--we believe our girls need a vacation, too, so we don't force them to keep laying all year (you can do that with supplemental heat and light, but ours need to make new feathers for winter instead of putting all that protein into making eggs). They'll start again, slowly, a couple of weeks after the winter solstice.

The apples have been terrific! I have one tree each of seven different varieties, and I'm finding that when I planted them ten years ago I cleverly put in apples that ripened sequentially rather than all at the same time. Too bad I didn't label them somehow, though, so I would be sure of which was which (I really thought I would remember, you know). I've now identified the Royal Gala and the Fuji, but I'm not positive about some of the others yet. Still, I know that I'm really lucky--we're so isolated that so far none of the usual apple pests have found us, and something in our soil or water or weather is giving us incredibly flavorful fruit, which has been a boon, as everybody has apples this year, and the markets are glutted (so are the turkeys, which no longer come running when an apple hits the ground).

So the adventure continues, in the wind, on the plains, in the Fall.

Coming Back

2009-08-25T15:45:00.004-06:00

Ah, this is what it takes to make me come back to writing--three drizzly days in a row. This is all the monsoon we've had this year, and we need every drop, so it's welcome. But it's so unusual to not be able to go out and plant/dig/weed, so my creative energy needs this outlet. The alternative is house-cleaning, and I'm not that desperate yet.

It's been four months since my last post, and the sad thing is that this blog was meant to be a chronicle of life on the farm out here in the dry. Well, I've been busy. And it's not that things don't happen, or that stories don't enter my head as the weeks go by; they do, indeed. A friend once asked me, "How do you write?" I had to think awhile before I could say that stories show up in my brain, title and all (and in fact, sometimes the title shows up first, and then I have to find the story to go with it). Then it's just a matter of cleaning things up a bit, adding a few things here and there, and of course searching for the appropriate photo. Or taking the appropriate photo.

Here are a few of the titles to stories that never got written down:

Pooping Season (a philosophical discussion of manure and composting)

Meet the Dogs/Cats/Birdies

Antelope Butts in the Dawn (wildlife on the roads)

Cows (more wildlife on the roads)

Weeds and Their Friends (don't give me that "a weed is a flower in the wrong place" stuff)

Where Is My Monsoon?

Fog on the Barrow Downs (oops--wrong book--should be Fog on the Plains)

The Coming of El Nino (getting ready for winter)

Clunkerizing the Astro Van

Two Squashes and a Cucumber, and Lots of Sunflowers

If any of these appeal to anyone, let me know and I'll take a stab at filling in the story. Plus, I have pictures for a lot of these, too. I will make the effort to come up with new stuff, too. It's nearly time to get the rest of the irises planted, the garlic in October, and then time to watch all this glorious green turn to withered memory.

From the farm in the middle of nowhere,

Barb

Colors of Spring: Eclipsing Venus

2009-04-22T08:56:00.004-06:00

This morning's sky was practically apocalyptic. I've been watching Jupiter, the crescent moon, and Venus for several days now, getting up in the dark pre-dawn, checking out their changing positions in the east, and then hopping back into bed before it got cold. But this morning was the moment it's all been building up to. The moon's been sliding down the sky toward the sun from Jupiter's position a quarter up the sky since Sunday, and now it reached Venus--what a show! When I first saw the moon and Venus rising through a band of haze, they were brilliant but rusty, quickly changing to a pure white crescent with Venus' bright splinter about a moon's width below and to the left. Over the next hour the moon sidled closer as the sky lightened and the multitude of stars vying for attention faded (if you ever find yourself needing to know the time, and you can't see your watch, watch the moon--it travels about its own width eastward in around an hour. Of course that's approximate, but most people using the moon for time don't need things to be all that precise.) The low band of cloud on the horizon caught fire, and the two were close enough to kiss, and then as the first rays of the sun speared into the sky, the Venus splinter, much brighter than the now fragile-looking moon, suddenly was gone--blip! Show over, back to bed long enough to warm up the feet.

As if all that wasn't enough, the Lyrid meteor shower supposedly peaked at around 5:00, when the constellation Lyra was directly overhead. But I'm never good at meteor showers somehow. Oh, Lyra was lovely, and I think I saw a satellite, but never a meteor. Maybe it's just that they're so quiet.

I did try to take some photos of the moon/Venus conjunction, but here's where these little digital cameras fail totally. It's always interesting how something that can look big and impressive to the eye, but the camera shows how tiny in the face of the universe things really are; I suppose it's a matter of attention. I imagine real astronomer photographers have taken lovely photos, and they will appear shortly. But I'm including a couple of mine just because they are interesting in their own funky way

Colors of Spring: The Return of Peeping Season

2009-04-10T10:09:00.003-06:00

Things are getting busy on the farm, even with the usual questionable spring weather. Our batch of new chicks arrived in the mail about a week ago, so we have now around 75 baby chickens in the brooder in Wendy's bedroom. There were 150 when they arrived, all yelling at the top of their little lungs (and you wouldn't believe how loud one chickie can be). It took them several hours to realize they were now in a warm place with food ("What's that?") and water ("What's this?"), and the noise level dropped by several decibles. Of course it went back up when we turned out the light for the night ("Oh, no, the sun exploded, and the world is ending!"), leaving them in the dark on their their heating pads. We have farmed out, so to speak, about half of them, and the ones we have left seem happy and are growing. They still object to the disappearance of the light at night, but in about half an hour they've all dropped off to sleep, with the exception of the one that gets lost and can't figure out how to find its friends. Peep, peeeeep, peep! Peep.

The weather is, yes, questionable. We've been getting one or two storms per week, mostly wind and mostly dry. The routine is to get temps in the low 70's the afternoon before, then wind, wind, beastly wind for one to two days, then clearing at night so there's nothing to hold in the heat, followed by mornings in the teens and cold breezy days. This is hard on the plants which are trying to come up, and of course the blooming trees have quit blooming and are thinking hard about whether it's worth trying to put out leaves. A few of them just give up ("No, I can't go on, call me when it's June"). The chickens and other birds look like feather puffballs in the wind, but they do okay, and the pigeons like to do wild pinwheels together in the gales. I'm glad somebody can enjoy this, because we humans tend to get depressed on really windy days.

Others have it worse, I know. These storms come down the western side of the Rockies, hit us here at the end of those mountains, hang a sharp left and barrel out into the plains, where they run into warmer, moister air and then all Hell breaks loose. No use feeling guilty for living where those storms whip around the corner, gaining energy, and you people out there in the midwest know about the tornadoes, so just a warning: Hunker down, and may you come safely through.

Colors of Spring: Return to Winter

2009-03-27T10:31:00.005-06:00

Snow! Glorious wet snow! Well, you'd be excited about snow, too, if you lived somewhere in the grip of a deep drought. My brain is delighted, for in March the snow won't stay long, and instead of subliming as it can in January or even in February, it will actually melt and soak in. This really isn't much, but it's four to five inches of moisture-laden snow, already melting as the temps climb up to 40 degrees or so. It will be muddy later, of course.

My heart is conflicted, though. Snow and cold in late March can do really awful things to plants just coming out of dormancy, and in other places than out here in the middle of nowhere some of the trees have begun blooming--the apricots in particular. Here nothing has been blooming yet other than the crocuses, though my lilacs and golden currants have started leafing out. But this kind of thing can damage the fruit crop in the northern part of the state along the river valleys (last year most of the apple farmers were completely wiped out). We'll have to wait and see if it warms up quickly and then doesn't freeze solid again.

Two days ago I had to go into Albuquerque for an Herb Growers Association meeting and was struck by how much more color there was there already than here. It's a short distance by Interstate over the mountain pass, but it may as well be a different world. Trees were blooming all over the place--the pale pink of apricots and the purple plums, and along the Interstate where they've been landscaping lately, there are what I think are crab apples in profusion. They are a particularly bothersome shade of deep mauve pink, guaranteed to clash with the orange barrels. One would think highway landscapers would understand about the persistance of orange barrels, but maybe they're not from around here....

Some of the larger trees are leafing out, too, notably the cottonwoods and Siberian elms. The elms are covered in chartreuse green blobs, rather as if a child stuck handfuls of green on with glue, but it's a cheat--these aren't leaves out, but the billions of developing seeds soon to be released on an unsuspecting world. In a couple of weeks these trees will appear to have succumbed to this March blizzard, but it's just that the mature seeds with their wings will have turned tan, the better to blend in with garden dirt, where they will sprout. After that the leaves will show up and turn the trees deep elm green. And gardeners all over Santa Fe and Albuquerque will begin cursing the elm sprouts.

Okay, this is Spring

2009-03-18T20:42:00.003-06:00

It must be Spring, because I'm wearing shorts. My pasty white legs have a slight pink glow, the precursor of that dark tan I'll have by the end of summer (some of that will probably be dirt, though). Yesterday I actually planted some sugar snap peas, along with a "dump planting," in which I clear a small patch of ground, spread some mixed old seeds, and hope that something might come up. Occasionally something does, and I end up with a bed of arugula with sprinkles of beets and green love-lies-bleeding. That's really pretty attractive, and I can always sell the arugula.

Oh, I know we'll undoubtedly have more cold weather before it finally warms up and settles down, some time in May. Or June. Spring in New Mexico is always the proverbial crap shoot. You know there will be some sun, maybe a lot of sun, some hail, lots of wind, a couple of dust storms, and if we're really lucky, a few raindrops. This is a La Nina spring, after all, meaning warmer and dryer than usual for us. It's dry, all right; yesterday the weather guy on the local station said we are "the dryest area in the entire nation." I knew that. Our total moisture so far for the month is six hundredths of an inch. Sometimes we can see rain falling, but it evaporates on the way down, creating gusts of wind and dust. The prairie grasses should be greening up some, but they aren't stupid, so the pastures are brown and yellow, dry, dry, dry. But I'm watering my beds, and the golden currants are leafing out over the crocuses. I thank the homesteaders who tried to make a life here early in the last century and left the well that supplies our water. They are gone, for the most part, but they left their names and stories, and the well. They were brave, and maybe foolish, to try to grow beans without rain here, and maybe we are foolish to try to live here, too. But as long as we can get water from the well, we'll raise our tiny amounts of fancy produce and our heirloom poultry. I do wonder what I will leave here when I'm gone.

Suddenly Spring

2009-02-25T11:59:00.004-07:00

......One of these days I have to get my photo on this thing. I have a good and even recent one taken by my friend Isobel, but I need to figure out how to move it around enough to make it accessible.

I've been meaning to write for three weeks now, but I suppose I've been waiting for spring (I think it was Garrison Keillor who once said Minnesota has five seasons: Winter, Ice-breakup, Waiting for Spring, Mosquito Season, and Fall). Here in New Mexico we don't have to consider Ice-breakup; instead, we have the Winter Dries. After those record warm days in the last week of January, we went back to reality, meaning highs in the 40s-50s and lows in the low to mid teens. There were tiny red noses poking out of the ground in some of the beds for weeks, and I could commiserate--my nose was pretty red, too. But all of a sudden the past three days have been outrageously warm--I mean, one day the low was 15, and then the next morning it was 36!--and the highs have been 66-70. This is April weather, not February, and we've been setting temperature records all over the state (I apologize for those of you in the northeast, where you're having just the opposite). All those little noses popped up and became tulip leaves, now about four inches tall. The rabbits are very happy about that; evidently tulips are delicious. Yesterday morning I heard the first meadowlark saluting the rising sun with its lovely, happy song. Welcome, my little friend (not that the meadowlarks actually leave, but they stay pretty invisible all winter, and they don't sing then)!

The drawback to all this is that it's as dry as I can remember here. We haven't had any measureable moisture since early January, and that was only three inches of snow. I don't generally have to water the beds before March or April, but here I am with the hose, trying to provide enough water for the irises and garlic (and the tulips)to stay alive. Between the cold dry and now the warm dry, the soil is so dry that it has no cohesiveness, and when the wind blows, so does the soil. In the afternoons I can watch dust clouds rising thirty to forty miles away as the gusts drop off the Manzano Mountains. It's going to be a bad and very early fire season, though the volunteer fire people are ready. Still, there's a lot of country for a few fire guys to handle, so it could get to be a little exciting around here for the next few months. I'll let you know how it goes......

Imbolc, and the Waking of the Trees

2009-02-02T16:10:00.004-07:00

It took me years and years to figure out why we have Groundhog Day. It was always obvious to me that no matter what the stupid groundhog thought he saw on this morning, it's still six weeks until the spring equinox, and therefore six weeks until spring. Isn't it? But the more time I spend on the farm, the more in tune I become with the natural cycle of each year, and I know why the old pagans (Pagan=Roman for "somebody living in the countryside") celebrated this time and gave it to the goddes Brigid.

February can be truly dismal, of course. But winter is beginning to loosen its grip, and a lot of the dismalness is due to the mud. Which we don't have here this year, as we're having a La Nina winter and spring. I know mud is happening elsewhere, though, as the snow and ice begin to melt, and the rivers begin to overflow their banks (another thing we never get to see here). Here, the little sparrows are suddenly filled with the urge to throw themselves into the air with all their friends and prospective lovers, twittering madly. The hens in the barnyard are starting to lay now, giving us the best eggs of the year (they really need that winter rest, so we do not give them any extra heat or light to force them to keep laying through the dark). And the hardiest of the native plants are showing a hint of green, the fringed sage in particular. It's a subtle grey-green, invisible to eyes that are attuned to emerald hues, but it's there, and it happens seemingly overnight at the end of January. But best of all, the trees are starting to wake.

I used to think of trees as passive, sporting leaves when it got warm and losing them when it got cold, and a lot of biology classes reinforce that idea. But the trees are awake a long time before they put out those first golden leaves of spring. In late January I become aware that the upper branches of many trees, like the willows and cottonwoods in the village of Galisteo north of here, begin swaying in the wind, not stiffly but with a live suppleness, and if you look closely, they are blushing with a gold just short of green. There will still be very cold weather for the next month or so, and we tend to get more snow in March than the rest of winter in a dry year, so they are not foolish enough to put out those tender leaves yet, but they are thinking about it. The buds are visibly bigger, pointy on the cottonwoods and small, round, and black on the Siberian elms (okay, those are the flower buds, but same idea).

So welcome the first inklings of Spring! Light a candle for Brigid and go gather eggs. Myself, I celebrate by pruning the apple trees, reminding them that this year they are supposed to produce fruit!

I prune conservatively; I know the rule about "leave enough space to throw a cow through the branches," but hey, I can't even pick up a cow.

Seeds

2009-01-30T10:34:00.003-07:00

Photo: what the greenhouse usually looks like in April. Or so.

It's seed catalog time on the farm! Every year I promise I won't spend quite so much on new seeds, and each year I end up ordering more. I once told a friend I wasn't addicted to anything other than food and sleep, but thenI realized that what I'm addicted to is seeds. And how can one not be, when these technicolor pictures of plants you've never grown before show up in the mail? All my seed catalogs (and there are many) are dog-eared by now so that I can easily pick out the packets for plants that caught my eye (the new beet, the brilliant pink gazanias, the white corn with the purple cob, and on and on) on the first perusing of each one. After that first look I let them sit and ferment for a couple of weeks, and by the time I'm filling out an order I have a better idea of what I (really) need and what I can do without. I still end up with too many. But, hey, it's a farm! It's a business expense!

Mostly I try to order seeds for open-pollinated and heirloom plants. Why? Because those are older, time-tested varieties, and more to the point, I can save the seeds from them. This doesn't keep me from trying some new hybrids, but I try. Some of my favorites come from the Seed Savers Exchange, and they are really old. Maybe the oldest is the Dewing's Early Blood Turnip, which comes from the early 1800's, when beets were actually referred to as blood turnips. Some of my irises (grown from rhizomes, not seed, except for my own hybridizing) go back to the 1600's and are undoubtedly older than that. And I have other vegetables and flowers which came to this country with immigrants from all over the world in the past couple of centuries. These seeds are history you can hold in your hand.

I'm not sure why we don't consider seeds sacred, because I believe they are. Sure, as a botanist I understand the mechanisms of seed formation (which are pretty amazing in their own right), but it's more than that. Each tiny seed, a dusty brown bit, contains a future plant--a stately blue delphinium, a broccoli, an oak tree. All it needs is to fall on the earth in the right place, or be planted at the right time. Each one is a minor glimpse into the future, weeks from now when the onion hairpins slide into the light, or months from now as the corn tassles. What a blessing in a tiny package!

I'm off to mail some orders for more tiny blessings--may everyone have a lovely day!

How Did We Get Into this Farm Thing, Anyway?

2009-01-25T11:46:00.003-07:00

Maybe it's my fault. I was always jealous of kids who got to go visit their grandparents on the farm. Not that I actually knew any friends who had farm-owning grandparents, but Dick and Jane did, and so did all those other children on TV and the other children's books. Clearly, grandparents were meant to live bucolic lives with tractors, baby chicks, and apple pies. The fact that all of my grandparents were city people who had reached these shores from Europe as youngsters didn't impress me. And growing up in Los Alamos, a weird but beloved little mountain town with no farmland within fifty miles, lent the idea of farms a touch of the exotic, too, even though trips to the valley tended to show farmers as relatively poor people with weathered faces. The closest thing to a food garden was the little corn plot tended by a neighbor lady down the street, an oddity in a community of lawns and mixed borders. At least it was the first inkling that food wasn't just something that magically showed up at the grocery stores.

Mom had a nice garden (tulips, forsythia, columbines, sweet peas, delphiniums, and the like), but we kids never really took to it, and we were encouraged to go into professions that were'nt involved with the land. So I spent a decade or so in California being a Medical Technologist, something worthwhile one could do with a Bachelor's in Biology, and Wendy, also from Los Alamos, ended up as a statistical analyst. But that's where I discovered Horticulture, taking courses at the community college in Monterey. And more courses. I was a course or two shy of a degree in horticulture when we decided we'd had enough of California and wanted to come home to New Mexico, trading the ocean and fog for mountains and snow and summer thunderstorms. And I discovered I had to relearn everything I thought I knew about growing things--this is dry hardscrabble land which has to be irrigated, and if the frosts don't get you, the grasshoppers will. But you learn, and you can still grow things. I kept working in various medical labs for another decade and a half, but the more automated Med Techery became, the more high-pressure and the more boring it became. So when it dawned on me that I was avoiding continuing education in the lab field but was still taking every horticulture course coming down the pike (and look at my library--two books on laboratory technology, and four shelves on gardening, composting, plant propagation, and landscape design), I finally decided it was time for a major life change.

Wendy, meanwhile, had been teaching statistics and other math and science courses at two of the colleges in Santa Fe, so it didn't seem that dangerous from a financial point of view when I tried making a living as a gardener. But I have to say that the profession of gardening is for young men, or at least somebody with a large crew of young men, and that wasn't me. So when Wendy decided that her jobs were driving her crazy and suggested we buy a farm and try that, I was game.

Of course the land around Santa Fe, expensive as it is, isn't really suitable for farming, and the best farms were already taken anyway. We kept looking farther and farther from Santa Fe in hopes of finding some land that was in our budget (i.e., cheap). It wasn't until we looked at the prairie around Stanley that we found it--25 acres of grassland which had once upon a time been part of a homestead and still had use of a nearby well. I wasn't keen on it at first. Too open, too flat, too windy. Too many cows. Too windy. Too cold, too hot, too windy. But we could afford it, and we took a deep breath and put down all our money. And had a farm. There we were, two single middle-aged ladies on the verge of being dirt-poor and just beginning to learn what farming is all about. But still, it's our farm!

New Snow on the Farm

2009-01-10T08:43:00.004-07:00

Saturday morning, and I'm missing the farmer's market. Actually, I'm still on vacation and have been since Christmas, but there hasn't been much going on in the greenhouse, and of course everything outside is frozen. But I'm getting anxious to get back, so I'll probably cut tiny amounts of chard, sorrel, and mizuna for next week.

I had wanted to post a couple of photos for the last post, but not only was I unable to find the ones I wanted, I had trouble with uploading them, and I was also not able to edit my draft post. Oh, well. So here are a few I took from the house this morning before the fog rolled in. We had about three inches of surprise snow overnight, and though snow always makes more work for us, it's good to see it. We need whatever moisture comes, however it falls.

South Mountain is our iconic horizon feature in any season. We are about six miles east of it, on the north edge of a large draw. So while a lot of the area is mostly flat, we have the benefit of slopes and gentle hills, and we don't notice too many of our neighbors to the south.

The righthand photo is of the little front garden with its birdbath, with bird pens and barns in the background. The left one is the back yard from my bedroom door; how charming the weeds are with snow on them! Later on when I steel myself to go wondering outside I'll take a picture of the house itself--it's also charming in snow.

Wild Winter Winds

2009-01-07T15:01:00.003-07:00

In the plains we can get heavy-duty weather any time of the year, but the winter winds seem the most notable, at least as long as we're in winter (In spring, of course it's the spring winds, in summer, the rampaging gusts that come with thunder storms, and in early fall, it's the little proto-tornados that show up a bit before Baloon Fiesta). Today's winds are no exception. These are jet-stream winds, rattling in from the northwest, and out here there's nothing to stop them. At least we haven't had any new snow in the past week, which is a really good thing! Two years ago when we had a lot of snow between Christmas and Martin Luther King Day, winds like this could spin eight inches of snow into ten-foot drifts. That year the winds tried to fill up the Galisteo Basin with flying snow on an otherwise clear, sunny-but-cold day, and the state troopers had to close the highway from Santa Fe to Moriarty, plus all the little dirt roads off the highway. I live on one of those dirt roads, and it took me two days to get home. Even at that I had to leave our market van stranded a half mile from home. All that was the inspiration for Tales from a Frozen Driveway, which I sent out by email to all my friends and acquaintences, and which lead slowly but surely to this blog.

Well, this year is not like that, for which I am grateful. Still, it's enough. The dead blue grama grass from last season is flattened and flailing like fur on some shivering beast, and stop signs bash themselves about as if they are trying to fling themselves out of the ground. The roads all become byways for herds of hysterical fluttering tumbleweeds, and one can tell who overgrazed their pastures by how many big tumbleweeds are clinging to the fences (the amount of tumbleweed is inversely propotional to how much grass is left); some fences look like long furry hedges. The greenhouse heaves under the wind's onslought, and I'm always afraid to watch it, much less work in it on a day like this; the plastic covering makes groaning, snapping noises, and there's always the chance the wind could find a tiny spot to dig into and the whole thing could come off. That would certainly ruin my afternoon. But we never worry about the house. We had an inkling of what the weather could be like before we built our house (though an inkling and the truth are sometimes miles apart), and we built a house with seventeen sides and a conical roof rated for hurricane-strength winds. That was in 2000, and it's still holding up fine, even though its deck is getting a little ratty. So let the winds blow, and whistle and scream--we're okay here.

Post-Holiday Reflections

2009-01-01T19:08:00.000-07:00

Something about the beginning of a new year, especially after such a roller-coaster year as 2008. Oh, I understand about the arbitrary assignment of the January 1 date; I live too close to the land and to the natural rhythms of the year to think that there is anything inherently important about this date. It's not like it was the solstice, or the first intimations of the breaking of winter in February, or Midsummer's Day. But still...

Those days between Christmas and New Year's have colors all their own: golden honey and a sort of sepia. I suppose it's the low light that makes the golden color, and the sepia must come from the weight of memory of all the years since childhood. All my childhood was spent in one house, a house now lost forever except in our memories ("our" being myself and my sisters). I can picture the setting sun in late December filtering through the snowy pines, striking through the dining room window and lighting up the aquarium with its little fishy denizens. I look up from whatever book I've been reading and watch the gold shift to blue as the sun drops below the mountains, cozy and warm with my family as the evening cold settles in.

Much later when I worked at the Genzyme lab in Santa Fe, that same golden light speared down the long hallway in my building at sunset during those same late December days. Not being on idle vacation, I used to make sure I was able to take a break at about 4:15, though I never told my coworkers why. They may have wondered why I took my coffee out in the hall to gaze out the glass doors on a winter evening, but they were generally too busy to ask.

Now, of course, I can watch the sun sail into the end of day all I want, and I still love that low, honeyed glow sliding through the windows all around my round house, gilding the walls and all those dusty knick-knacks. At the solstice the setting sun paused on the tip of one of three low hills to the southwest, and now it has begun its long slow trek up the edge of the western horizon. And now that it is January, the subjective color changes.

The color for New Year's Day is, and always has been for as long as I remember, white. Too bright, too featureless, as we venture into a year we haven't quite invented yet. As always, it's a year of promise, more so this year than most, but also of fear. On this one day, though, we can hope that the promise will outweigh the fear, that we can be happy in whatever situations we find ourselves in, that we can always begin anew again. So although we watch the January colors change to silver-blue and gray, may we keep a little of that golden light that graced the last of the year.