Denise Domning's Blog, page 34

Bring!

They cleaned the pond at my Scottsdale house and I came up here with lemon grass and watercress and two dozen iris plants to put in the ditch. "Bring, Sedona," I commanded when one iris started floating away, and she did. This morning, she brought me a clump of watercress. Oh dear.

Did I Mention Ed is Brilliant?

So earlier this month Kathy Klein of Danmala mentioned it was time to start tomatoes.  "How?" I asked.  "I thought tomatoes needed 70 degree soil to sprout."

"Oh, we keep them inside by our wood stove until they sprout.  Once they're up, you can keep them outside."

If you don't remember, Kathy and Dan are the people who live in the earthship.  Dan also happens to be the contractor-extraordinaire presently working on our remodel.  He, his dad and his brother built the waterwheel foundations.

It was made for English barges and takes a 6 " piece of wood. Tiny as it is, it'll make 400 square feet toasty

Back to tomatoes.  I don't have a wood stove.  Yet.  Ed has finished tiling the corner in our bedroom where our Hobbit wood stove will stand.  All that's left to make it work is the chimney connection.  But the tomatoes need to be started now so they're ready to into the ground next month sometime.  What to do when we keep our house temperature at about 68 degrees?

That's when Ed said, "We could use the shower in the laundry room."

Laundry Room Shower

What?  You don't have a shower in your laundry room?  We shouldn't.  There really isn't room for one.  Not to mention the toilet squeezed behind the laundry room door.  If I take clothes out of the dryer and put them in a basket I have to BACK out of the laundry room because there isn't room to turn around.  But I'm sure in Sam's thinking, he needed a place to come in all dirty from working on his farm/ranch (yeah, right) and strip off his dirty clothes, shower up and … what? run through the house naked to the bedroom to get his clean clothes?

tomato seedlings born in our laundry room shower

But Ed was right.  The shower was perfect for starting seeds.  He put a clamp lamp on the shower head.  With the shower door closed the temp in there stays a balmy 75 degrees.  When I water, the overflow goes right down the drain.  I'm on my second batch of tomatoes.  The first set were Striped Romans–the absolute best tasting roma tomatoes in the whole world, and yellow pears.  These are Arkansas Travelers, Cherokee Purples and hybrid determinate bush tomatoes.

Waterwheels coming soon

Ready for decking and the two wheels

Here it is. The new deck that will house not one but two waterwheels. Ed says he's going to cover this in the recycled plastic decking that won't rot then put two tandem waterwheels in the larger space. The wheels will be about six feet in diameter, and Ed's building them (after he finishes tiling the bathroom and building the vanity…so sometime before 2013). That is, unless the waterwheel guy suggests he build one, larger wheel. Either way, Ed is counting on the wheel(s) producing about a kilowatt of electricity an hour. Our first retro-modern Green power installation!

This year's marmalade

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Soon to become marmalade

The box of lemons and blood oranges is sitting on my kitchen floor. Right in the corner where I can't miss it…or ignore it. It's time for marmalade. Yes, but right now my hands look like the kittens got to them, all scratched and cut up. Peeling lemons just doesn't ap-peel (sorry) to me at the moment. It's going to hurt

A Book Signing with Monica

Can you believe she was a Heroin addict for 15 years?

I just wanted to let you all know that Monica Sarli and I will be hosting a book signing at Changing Hands, 6428 S McClintock Dr Tempe, AZ 85283.   The signing starts at 7 pm Monday February 27th.

She'll be signing and reading from her book (that I co-wrote), Men-ipulation, a memoir of addiction and recovery.  Of course if you have books of mine you'd like to have signed I'll be happy to do so!

Here's what other recovering addicts have said about this book:

"Your courage has given me the strength to share my fear/shame so that i can stop hiding from it."–J.K. "

… this was one of the best books I have read about addiction!"– S.Ann

The Pond Gnome

Paul and Barbi Holdemann of the Pond Gnome come today. They probably know more about Green water management than anyone else on earth. I want a duck pond that doubles for raising tilapia, the water from which I can use as fertilizer. I want aqueducts to move spring water into the field without turning on an electric pump. I want graywater DESPITE Yavapai County's backward ideas that it will somehow pollute the ground!

A biodynamic planting calendar

I bought a planting calendar.  I've thought about it for years but never wanted to be that structured about my gardens.  No more.  It really is time to get rigorous about what I'm doing or all I'll ever have is chaos.

But in all honesty I didn't expect this calendar to do the trick…especially after I opened it and drowned in astrological/astronomical symbols.  Must be my dyscalculi.  I'm not dyslexic, which is letters; my eyes play tricks with numbers, hence dys-calculi, calculi meaning numbers.  4s are Rs to me.  Until I discovered Lotus123 (I've since moved onto Excell) I couldn't add or subtract.

Anyway,  the biodynamic movement is about living into the wholeness of the natural world.  The idea of this calendar, not unlike the Farmer's Almanac, is to chart forces that affect plants, only the biodynamic people are a lot more detailed than just moon phases, including in their calculations all the sun, moon, planets, constellations and the etheric, or force of nature.  Or maybe they mean that weird, wacky force that no one can explain: gravity.  Actually, the ideas espoused in the calendar remind me of quantum mechanics, the whole being more than the sum of its parts.

Neither here nor there at the moment.  I needed rigor and HERE IT IS! The calendar tells me when to do what.  And, it has a space beside each day where I can log what I've done….WOW!!!

Yesterday was a Leaf  day.  Leaf means anything that has leaves we eat, such as lettuce, spinach, herbs, asparagus (actually I guessed at that one, but it is the stem and unfurled leaves we eat).  So, I potted up spinach seeds like crazy, along with parsley, watercress, and specialty lettuce.  The 12 6-packs of asparagus–72 squares of soil with multiple plants in each square; not quite sure how I'm going to thin–I bought last week went into the ground.  I put them on the wild side of the ditch, which meant me sliding down the steep hillside into dirt so soft and black I just sighed.  Great stuff.  Leaf day also meant it was time to harvest the leaves we eat.  So I thinned the cold frame that plays host to my favorite Romaine varietal, Freckled Lettuce and the Pagano Winter Giant Spinach I planted in December.  I hadn't tried them yet and was a little disappointed because although the leaves were beautiful the taste was far more mild than I expected.  Ed, on the other hand, loved it.

Today is a fruit day.  Actually all of today is a fruit day along with all of tomorrow and early Sunday.  Fruits are tomatoes, peppers, and anything else that turns a flower into something we eat.  I'll be popping more tomato seeds into pots and putting them into the shower in the laundry room.  (Ed had a brilliant idea to turn that unused shower into an incubator.  He put a clamp light on the shower head and,  with the shower door closed, the enclosure maintains a nice 75 degree temperature!)

It's a lot bigger than it looks in the photo...off to buy straw!

As for the peas, fava beans,  peppers, eggplant, they'll go down in the new lasagna garden, the one I have to build today!

Signing off so I can go buy straw now!

 

Happy Birthday Pets

Happy birthday to my puppy and kittens. Sedona, our red merle aussie pup, is officially 7 months old today. Wilburt and William (better known as Burtie and Billy–we have a "W" theme for cat names going on) are 6 months old. So far Sedona is much better behaved than the kittens. She sits, stays, comes (sort of), drops her toys on command and occasionally herds the chickens. She is still afraid of the dark and not certain she wants to bark at things that might bark back. The kittens on the other hand do not sit, stay, come (okay, they will run if we shake the treat bag) or herd the chickens. On the contrary, they slip through the fence to spend their day chasing chickens. It's fortunate for us that neither of them has figured out "kill" yet. As for the chickens, they don't consider the kittens much of a threat and simply squawk and flap their wings at the pests.

Spring?

Not quite blooming. It's a good thing they don't taste good to javelina

It's too early for Spring to start but tell that to the birds, plants, bugs and other critters who have decided otherwise.  I saw my first lady bug two weeks ago.  The bees are busy buzzing but what are they eating?  Okay, the peas in the greenhouse are blooming, but the door and/or walls aren't always open for them.

I'm taking my cue from nature because it means getting tomatoes (okay, I'm cheating by starting the tomatoes a whole month before their time) and spinach in earlier than I expected…and NOT losing them to cold.    I hope.  Does this mean we'll have a longer, hotter summer?  That's not a pleasant thought so I'm not thinking about that either.  Instead, I'm building gardens.

I have plenty of seeds to put into the ground: spinach, broccoli, cabbage, lettuce, parsley, arugula, mustard greens, beets and the list goes on.  What I'm out of is garden space in which to plant them.  So I'm converting the field between the barn and the orchard to various shapes and sizes of lasagna gardens.  Once they're built and planted we're going to have to protect them because the girls (who gave us nine eggs yesterday) want to run free like the wild chickens.  On their way to feral chickendom they've been pausing in these new gardens beds to do a little scratching and pecking.  They like them so much it took forever to chase them back into the coop this afternoon.

Here are the new gardens I'm laying out. Click on the picture to see a larger image.

Well, I chased all of them except Big Red.  She's decided I'm her very best friend and likes it when I carry her.  "Whoop, woop, towoop, woop," she coos to me as I tote her around under my arm.

Lordy, lordy.  What am I going to do when it's time for chicken stew?

 

Valentine's Day

Here we are in Greece just before the orchard incident...

Happy Valentine's Day to everyone, but especially to my own precious Valentine. Thanks -for coming into my life, making me move 11 times in 13 years, letting me live in The Netherlands and Japan, getting me lost in a Greek olive orchard, running me down a hill in Brazil (at the bottom of which was a man with a gun), dragging me out to swim with the sharks in Tahiti, teaching me to pull sharks' tails on the Great Barrier Reef, throwing me into a jungle river in Belize, and letting my son spit off the top of the Eiffel Tower (the wind blew it back into his face).

Thank you for introducing me to solar power, geo-thermal, and water wheels.  I hope you are as happy to learn about Permaculture, bio-dynamic farming and organic growing practices.  I'm so glad you love Mother Earth News as much as I do.

Thanks, too, for not getting too angry when I brought home the dog.  Really, she herded the chickens right back into the orchard the other day after she thought the kittens had tortured them long enough.  She even barked protectively at something the other day.  Surely that makes up for the dirt and mud she brings into the house after swimming in the ditch.

And thank you even more for turning around when I told you "If you want that place (meaning Green Acres) we need to turn around now and buy it today."  If you hadn't listened to me, we wouldn't be living into our future on this almost farm and loving our life together more than we ever have.

Twenty-five amazing years and many more to come!  My life would be so empty without you.