Denise Domning's Blog, page 36

Where this Chicken Angel won't tread

So Friday night before we left for Tom's memorial we dropped Sedona off with her Dog(as compared to God)parents next door.  Al and Elana have been God(as compared to dog)sends from the day we moved in, mostly because they used to be Sam's caretakers for the house and know most of the really quirky things about this place.  They also love Sedona.  About ten years ago they'd had a Red Merle Aussie named Coco and adored her.

Anyway, as we're sitting and talking…wait, I can't let you think that we were just "sitting and talking" like Ed and I had nothing else to do, because we did.  We needed to get home and pack, then get to bed so we could be up by 4 a.m. to do chores then on the road by 5:45 a.m.  (By the way, I got to watch the lunar eclipse in my passenger side window all the way from Cornville to Phoenix; it was stunning, especially as the sun was rising and the moon, fully in the Earth's shadow, was setting.)

No, the "sitting and talking" we're doing at this point is, I've discovered, actually a sort of currency unique to small town living.  Despite my love for the outdoors and the earth, I'm a big city girl born and raised.  Until I came to live up here full time I didn't realize there was any other way to pay for goods and services than with some form of monetary trade, such as credit cards or cash, or goods of equal value.   "Talk" never figured in my consciousness as something of value.

I only recently figured this out when we took Ed's pickup to Jim of Jim's Auto Repair.  He spent a whole day studying the problem, told us he couldn't fix it, then refused to charge us for his time spent in the engine.  Instead, we listened for forty-five minutes as he told us about the favorite muscle cars he'd owned.  Different sort of currency, but currency just the same.  All of a sudden I understood why all the contractors I'd dealt with insisted on chatting for so long after they were finished with whatever task they'd come to do.  I was paying their bill.

I have to say this isn't a currency I ever thought I'd use.  Never ever.  I'm a writer, and most writers write because we don't want to talk.  If we'd wanted to talk we'd be actors.

Now that you get the sort of talking we're doing, you'll understand how important this particular trade ends up being.  We'd been sitting around their tiny table in their kitchen, discussing the new water pan for the chickens (much easier than that tower thing) when I asked if they'd heard about Dudley taking off with one of the ladies; they know Dudley because he comes by to play with their two dogs, Honey and Cappuccino.  Turns out Ed hadn't shared the tale with them, which he then proceeded to do.

When he finished Al leaned back in his chair.  Al's a handsome man even in his Seventies, with tanned skin and that white-white hair that only graces the heads of people who'd once had black-black hair.  He's Latino, born in America of Mexican immigrant parents.  "My mom saved one of  my dad's chickens once," he says.

Currency is about to be traded here.  I'll add that I know Al's mom.  She's now ninty-three and can't weigh more than eighty pounds.

"My dad had expensive chickens, like $200 each back then," he says.  "You know, the fighting kind. That day the rooster was doing what he shouldn't, you know."  He looks at us; I'm pretty sure what he means but I don't want to interrupt the story to clarify.  "Mom was really good with rocks, so she throws one at him and hits him right in the head and he drops dead.  Well, Mom's frantic.  If my dad comes home and sees that…woo!"

Here Elana offers, "Yeah, all you kids were afraid of your dad."

Al nods.  "Yeah, especially when it came to his chickens."  He leans forward and puts his elbows on the table in front of him.  "So you know how to bring a chicken back to life?  They do it at the fights after their chicken is all bloody and half-dead, when they want a little more life out of the bird."

Innocents that we are, both Ed and I shake our heads.  Al grins.  "You blow air into the chicken's back end.  Wakes them right up and they back into the ring and fight some more."

We both groan and laugh.  The Chicken Angel looks at me.  "No way.  Not ever am I saving one of your chickens by blowing into its butt," he says.

"Yep, that chicken is headed for the stew pot," I agree.  Not a chance that's happening in my life.

Now that Al's suckered us into that, he leans back and finishes his story.  "So Mom grabs up the rooster and puts her mouth to its rear.  She blows and blows.  All us kids are watching.  Sure enough, its head pops back up and its alive again.  By the time my dad got home you couldn't tell anything had ever been wrong with it.  And none of us ever told him what she'd done.  But man, she had a good arm.  If we were doing anything wrong, she'd throw whatever she had at us–shoes, pans, rocks–and hit us too."

Payment made and gratefully so.

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Green Tomato Chutney, sigh

Sort of frozen green tomatoes

Here they are.  Fifteen pounds of the prettiest tomatoes I've ever grown.  It hit about 20 degrees last night and even with a double layer of frost cloth the poor plants couldn't take it.

Well almost.  There were still some thriving leaves on the massive Cherokee Purple growing out from under the equally massive lavender plant in the corner of my upper garden.  That tomato is so well rooted that I couldn't yank it out of the ground like I did the others.  Instead I buried it in a layer of properly poopy chicken straw.  Who knows?  It might actually survive the winter.  Tomorrow I make Green Tomato Chutney.

Why tomorrow?  Because Ed's in Phoenix all day.  He cannot stand the smell of this stuff cooking.  He claims it stinks like old sweaty tennis shoes.

Funny how something that smells that bad can taste great and so completely differently than it smells.  This chutney is great on mild cheeses, good on pork roast  and makes a really great pan-cleaning sauce on sauteed chicken.  The original recipe came from the Moosewood Cookbook, one of my mainstays while I was vegetarian.

Green Tomato Chutney (makes about a quart or 4 8oz glass jars worth)

2 lbs green tomatoes, chopped
2 tbsp fresh ginger, peeled and chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 tsp mustard seed
1 tsp ground cumin (the source of the tennis shoe smell)
1 tsp ground coriander
2 tsp salt
1 cup honey
1 cup apple cider vinegar
1/2 cayenne pepper (or other spicy pepper), minced and seeded if desired

Combine all the ingredients in a pot and bring to a boil.  Reduce heat and simmer one hour stirring occasionally.   Open the windows while it cooks or your eyes will water.  This is chutney.  The high acid content means that it will keep in a glass jar in your refrigerator for a very long time.  To store it outside of the refridge, process it in a water bath, keeping it at boiling for about twenty minutes.

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Chicken Angel

Sedona has a friend.  Dudley the Beagle belongs to our neighbors to the south, the people who own Oak Creek Winery.  (I know, perfect neighbors for us.)  Their property had also once been owned by Sam Frey and, like ours, is one of the original ranches on the spring.  When they bought the house they had in mind to grown medical Marijuana but the opportunity to do that fell by the wayside here in Arizona.  Since then their exterior remodeling has the look of a potential B&B to it.

Anyway, Dudley free ranges and in his travels he stops by to make Sedona crazy.  How, you might ask?  Simply by running.  That dog is amazingly fast.  He quite literally runs circles around my Australian Shepherd pup.  She ends up howling at him to "Please slow down so I can catch you!"  (This is important for the forthcoming story.)

So the other day I took Sedona to her first vet visit.  It was time to get legal.  The Rabies vaccine.  A license.  Things cat owners don't usually worry about.   Our new vet is close, just down at the end of the road.  And nice, or so Sedona believes.  Then again, she was convinced that all four people in the office (two owners, one tech/receptionist and the vet)  had all come to this new place to see HER!  How amazing is that?  She wiggled and smiled and tried to jump and wiggled some more.  (One thing I really like about her is that she doesn't pee when she gets excited, thank heavens.)  She even smiled as she got her shot, then wiggled some more at an old and sick Shih Tzu while I arranged for her spay as well as the neutering of Billy and Burtie last Friday.

Meanwhile back at the ranch Dudley had appeared, looking for Sedona.  Instead, he found chickens.  I'd left the orchard gate open for the girls to do their own free ranging, which that day included the first three ladies getting into my artichokes again.  Some of other flock had followed them out to scratch away near the barn.  That's where Dudley found them and being a Beagle he did what Beagles were bred to do–he chased down and took his prey.

(A note:  this is Ed's tale, not mine.  I'm so sorry I missed this.)

At that moment Ed was installing plastic on the greenhouse which is above the field.  (This is so appropriate.)  Upon hearing Dudley barking and much excited squawking, he starts down the narrow stair to the lower field in time to see Dudley heading home with one of the Australorpes in his mouth.   "Hey, dog! Let her go!  Stop!  Come!" he says he shouted (although I'm guessing there might have been a few bluer words in those commands), as he reaches the equally narrow bridge that crosses the Ditch and leads to the field.

Dudley, burdened by a limp chicken in his mouth, is moving slower than usual, a fact for which Ed is grateful.  My husband sprints across the field, leaping over the makeshift irrigation ditches we dug into the sod this summer and avoiding the numerous gopher mounds that dot our landscape.

Dudley isn't giving way.   He's caught that chicken and, by George, he's keeping it.  (Only a beagle named Dudley would say "by George".)  Running faster than a man his age ever thought he could (Ed's description), Ed charts a diagonal course across the field, and, catches the dog just before Dudley hits the big Sycamore.  Rather than let Ed catch him Dudley spits out both chicken and feathers, and hightails it home.  (We haven't seen him in a few days. Any dog who would say "by George" knows when to lay low.)

Here's how it went down. Click for a better view.

The newly freed hen staggers around in a circle then falls into the irrigation ditch.  Ed says he followed her as she stumbled up its length until she reached the rocky hollow below the irrigation value where she promptly inserted her head into a gap in the rocks.  At this point she collapsed, butt out to the world.

Figuring she's done for, Ed lets her be as he chases the other ten birds back into orchard.  Once they're safe behind the closed gate he returns for their fallen sister.  Figuring on blood he says he hesitated before picking her up.  To his surprise once he lifted her she looked up at him, eyes still rotating in her head I'm sure, but very much alive.

"Hmm, not too bad," Ed says he told her.  Carrying her back to the orchard fence, he set her down to open the gate.  She looked up at him,  cocking her head one way than the other, then strode into the chicken Green Zone on her own power.

Inside, all the other girls were no doubt discussing as only hens can how dangerous it was to leave the protection of their fence.  "Now girls," I think Big Red (otherwise known as Gigi) would be saying, since she's the bully of the group and the most vocal, "we must all take a lesson from our dear sister's sacrifice.  We must never leave this space," she no doubt lifted a wing at this point to indicate the area inside the fence, "unless, of course, I see some decent grasshoppers out there in which case you should all stay here so I can have them and you can't."

Somewhere in the middle of her speech, their not-so-fallen sister strutted up to the back of her flock.  All the others would have turned at that point, staring in amazement.  "Oh MY GAWD!  We thought you were DEAD!"

By the way, for me chickens always speak with a really broad, very nasally Chicago accent.

Ed the Angel

"I WAS!" I'm sure she told the others.  "I SAW the light, I swear I DID!  And then it was there, that big THING with the gray feathers below its BEAK.  It's a MIRACLE!"  At which point she must have paused.  "Funny, I always thought angels would look more like us."

Heavenly interest in the chicken coop?

By the time I got home from the vet I couldn't tell which of them Dudley had taken.

Ed says what surprised him most about the whole adventure was that he wasn't the least winded after all the running.  "Farming life," he pronounced to me, "is really getting me back in shape!"

 

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Gluten-free Blueberry Pudding

I'm adding this recipe here because on my recent trip to Seattle for Thanksgiving I forgot to bring it. Now I can find it when I need it. This is one of these really great, you-can-substitute-anything recipes that transfers to gluten-free without a hitch. I got it from a cooking magazine years ago…I can't remember which one.

Blueberry Pudding

2 cups fresh blueberries, picked over and rinsed
1 tbsp fresh lemon juice
pinch cinnamon
4 tbsp room temperature butter
2/3 cup sugar
1 1/4 cup gluten-free replacement flour mix
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
pinch of salt
1/2 cup milk (or soy milk or other milk-like product)
1 cup boiling water

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. In a oven-proof bowl or souffle dish (something at least 8 quarts) toss the blueberries with the lemon juice and cinnamon and set aside. In a mixing bowl cream together butter and sugar for 5 minutes–NO SKIMPING! 5 whole minutes. With a whisk mix together flour, baking powder and salt, then add to butter/sugar mixture. Beat for 30 seconds or so until it's crumbly looking. Add the milk and continue beating, scraping the sides of the bowl, until the mixture is smooth. Using a big spoon drop the batter on top of the blueberries so they're more or less covered by clumps of batter. Pour the boiling water over the top. If your bowl is deep enough you can slide it into the oven as is. If the batter is crowding the top you'll want to put the dish on a cookie sheet to prevent spillovers. Bake for one hour, rotating your bowl once.

This is a great basic recipe to experiment with. I tried it with Rhubarb:

4 cups of Rhubarb cut in 1 inch pieces
1 1/2 cups sugar (or more to taste)
1 sweet orange, sectioned and seeded
zest of the above orange
pinch of cinnamon

In the baking bowl or dish, mix the Rhubarb and sugar. Let stand 10 minutes. Add the sectioned orange and zest, and cinnamon. Make the batter as listed above.

Be sure to let the rhubarb stand for that 10 minutes in the sugar, otherwise you get sour rhubarb and crusty sugar in two distinct layers.

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Root Beer

While we were in Seattle for Thanksgiving–prime rib, butter-steamed potatoes, asparagus with Hollandaisse sauce, salad and gluten-free blueberry pudding, not traditional but pretty darn delicious–Justin took us out to the Root Beer store.

He did this because of Barq's Root Beer. Okay, cute website but they add caffeine to their root beer, albeit not much, just 22.5mg of caffeine per 12 ounce can. That's not enough to make you coffee drinkers out there even lift an eyebrow (not to mention you Espresso drinkers) but for me it's a problem. Even that little caffeine can make my heart beat out of rhythm–which is why I drink green tea. Okay, I know there's more caffeine per pound in tea than coffee, but it takes less tea to make a cup than it does coffee. And, green tea hasn't been fermented, which means there's less concentration of caffeine. But even with all that if I drink a cup of tea after 5:00 pm I'm up all night listening to my heart race.

The Barq's issue came up because I insisted on going to Pikes Place Market immediately upon arriving in Seattle on Tuesday morning. I love that place. It's the farmer's market to beat all farmer's markets. We stopped at Pike Place Market Creamery, where we bought eggs (Bought eggs! Who does that?), and raw milk. That milk is delicious, a whole lot grass-ier tasting that what I can get here in Arizona, where grass is in short supply. The prime rib came from the butcher's store nearby. The vegies and fruit came from one of the farm stands. I splurged on the asparagus, even though I doubt it's local in any way; asparagus is a spring only vegie and the only place it's spring now is South America. Hey, I'm a Locavore most of the time but once in a while….

With shopping done it was time for lunch so we stopped in at Uli's Famous Sausages

for lunch. That's when the Barq's appeared. Ed and Justin were both drinking soda. I don't usually but tea and bratwurst just didn't cut it. All they had was Barq's. When I complained about the caffeine, Justin's eyes lit up. "If you want root beer, there's a root beer store in Redmond," he said. "I saw it on the Food Network."

The Food Network is one of his favorite channels, not for the cooking shows but for the travel shows. We'll take off somewhere with him and he'll announce, "I saw this place on Diners and Dives…".

One corner of the store!

So after dropping off our food at his condo and greeting our grandkitties, Nola and Dexter, we headed out for Redmond and the Root Beer Store. We stepped into the door of the little strip mall store and stared at 187 varieties of root beer.

Holy smokes! Where does someone start with so many to choose from? Well, with a four pack bottle holder and a husband who really gets into buying soda. I let him chose. All of his choices were corn syrup free; Justin is allergic to corn. Here's what we came home with:

Fourteen was the wrong number. (Ed and Justin each drank one in the car.) I guess I shouldn't have been surprised. Although I love the taste of root beer I'm really not a soda drinker. We ended up taking four bottles over to Justin's aunt's house as a gift when we visited early Thanksgiving Day.

So, of the ones I tasted, Faygo was my favorite. (Wow, their website has its own anthem!) It tastes like Root Beer should, sweet, sassparilla-y but with a little bite to it. Frostie, which the proprietor said tasted like what was left at the bottom of your glass after you've finished a root beer float, had too much vanilla taste for me. The Squamscot Maple Cream was a huge hit with Ed and Justin. There's no accounting for people who like those Maple Bar donut things. I hated it. It was so sweet it made my teeth ache. Zuberfizz Creamy Root Beer had that root beer flavor but with a molasses aftertaste that I wasn't fond of.  Maybe I should have gotten their Key Lime Soda instead.   I like Key Lime Pie

Then there was the Baron's Boothill Sassparilla. I liked it better than Justin, who said it had a medicinal aftertaste to it. I agree, it did have a bit of a bite to it, but I like horehound. Actually I thought it tasted like those little root beer candies, the ones that look like little kegs. Sprecher Root Beer had a real root beer taste to it but it was strangely flat and when it first poured had an odd oily smell to it. We changed glasses to make sure it wasn't something left in a glass, but the oil smell persisted.

Finally, we tried the Caruso's Legacy Cream Soda and it turned out to be really good cream soda…vanilla-y and tangy all at once. (Hey it can't all be root beer.)

And that's when I started singing that "sugar beet" song from Sesame Street. I think I'll stick to wine from now on.

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Carrot and Coriander Soup

Michelle and her granddaughter cheating with frozen yogurt before dinner

Today my friend Michelle Legler was here. She is theMosaic Queen, and her work is amazing! Check it out.

She came up to decompress after a busy art show season. It was, she said, the first drive to Northern Arizona she'd ever made on her own. She is directionally impaired and until the advent of GPS wasn't sure she wanted to venture out on her own when it was possible she might not make it home again. So, You Go Michelle! And thanks for coming. As always, having time to share with another gardener is really precious. We're even thinking of creating our own shared blog and forum–a self-help system for those of us addicted to growing things.

I wanted to make lunch for her, but we're leaving tomorrow for San Diego to watch the grandkids while my stepdaughter Amberly walks 60 miles over three days. That meant I couldn't make a run to the supermarket, so whatever I was making was coming out of the Fridge. And there were carrots in the crisper drawer. That meant: Carrot and Coriander Soup.

This was a soup I first tasted while in England. I'm pretty sure I had it in a pub in Windsor. I fell in love with it and, once I was home again, I hit my recipe book (Google) and started researching. This is the recipe I came up with, of course tweaking it for the gluten-free and cow's milk sensitive crowd. By the way, Coriander is the seed of the Cilantro plant.

Carrot and Coriander Soup

(makes about 6 small servings or 4 generous ones)

1 tbsp Olive Oil
1 medium Onion, sliced
1 clove of Garlic, crushed
1 tbsp basic gluten-free flour
1 pound 2 ounces (or half a kilo) carrots, peeled and cut in chunks
4.5 cups either No-chicken broth or chicken broth
pinch of salt
1 tbsp ground Coriander seed
1/2 cup goat yogurt
1 tbsp chopped cilantro for garnish if desired

Saute onion and garlic in oil for 5 minutes. Stir in flour until the veggies are well coated. Add the broth, carrots, salt and coriander. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer for 30 – 40 minutes until the carrots are soft. Cool slightly and puree, then return to the pot over low heat and stir in the yogurt. Ladle into bowls, sprinkle with cilantro and serve with grilled tomato and cheese sandwiches. At least, that's how I serve it.

And if I were Michelle I'd have documented this whole process with my camera. But I'm not. I'm a writer. I'm supposed to draw pictures with my words. Hope these words are good enough to eat!

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Autumn and Helpers

A foggy Autumn morning

This morning I awoke to a world swathed in fog. Arizona being generally a dry place, this isn't something we see often so when we do we all get very excited. Well, at least I do. Sedona and I took the long way down to the far field, me enjoying the quiet, cloudy world. It was so lovely. Still moist from the last two days of rain, the earth gave off that wonderful spicy scent of a dying landscape. A few of the native asters are still blooming, their vibrant purple star-shaped flowers rising out of a path deep in yellow and brown fallen leaves. This is Autumn the way I remember it from my childhood (spent in colder climes): radiating life even as everything settles into seasonal slumber.

 

The reason Sedona and I were on our way down to the far field was to make sure that Ed didn't miss any of my blueberries and strawberries with his new fencing.  Sigh.  He's fallen in love with the "Big Dogs".  That's what we call Trego and Miramee, the horses from next door.  In fact, he's so in love with them he can't bear to stake them when they're over here.  "If they don't wander," he told me this morning after I confronted him with the fact that one of his precious beasts had stripped a new blueberry of almost all its leaves AND torn up two strawberry plants, "they won't get enough to eat."

I rolled my eyes.  "Boy, I don't know what those horses did before you came along," I snarked back.  As if Al and Elana were purposefully starving their precious pets prior to our arrival?  I don't think so.  "You're a dead man if they get to any more of my berries out there," I added, giving him the Rambo squint.  Hence the fencing going up first thing in the morning in the fog…with the horses watching in interest (disappointment?) from a few feet away.

Sedona, reading my email for me

Once I'd given Ed's fence my stamp of approval I returned to the house to check email and such.  These days I don't do anything alone.  I have helpers.  The dog is always underfoot when she's not in my lap.

William (aka Billy) helping with email. He has the biggest nose I've ever seen on a cat!

Wilburt (aka Burtie) holding down his end of the couch

The kittens have a thing for walking across the keyboard.  Oy vay!  Ed has his big dogs, I get the rest.   Thank heavens for nap time!

(Theirs, not mine.  If it were mine, they'd surely join me in it.)

 

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What didn't get done over my summer non-vacation

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Read on to find out why we who push the forward edges of technology have this old technology in this post...

This is the adult version of the "what I did during my summer vacation" paper we all had to write that first week back to school each year.  For me, the paper's a bummer because very little of what we intended to get accomplished actually made it to "working" status.

Let's start with the Geothermal heating and cooling.  Well, it sounded great on paper even with the price tag at an enormous $38,000.  Here's how it was supposed to work:  Water was to be drawn from well #1, run through the condensing unit so it could either extract heat or chill from it, then run back down well #2.  With the water temperature at a pretty steady 65 degrees (supposedly) the heat pump wouldn't have to work as hard to heat/cool the house, thus using less electricity.

As I said, great in theory.  There were problems from the beginning.  First, we chose to work with Verde SolAir, whom we chose because our architect recommended them and they were working with AC by Jay/Geoasis who had done a stellar job on our Scottsdale house.  It sounded like the perfect combination, but I think Dave Meyers, the owner, may have promised something they'd never done before when he suggested using our wells as a heat source/heat dump.  He went away with our paperwork and a check for $19,000 after promising us they'd start work as soon as they had Arizona Public Service's approval, who would be footing half the bill for this.  We got the approval letter a few weeks later, then time ticked on.  One month, then two passed.  After a call to see what was happening, the company's engineer called.  Apparently Yavapai county was having problems with the idea of using wells this way.  Research needed to be done.  More (hot, steamy summer) weeks passed without a word while the old and highly inefficient A/C unit chugged away to the tune of hundreds of dollars a month.  Finally, I'd had enough (me being the only one living in the hot house–Ed's final day at work was September 2nd.)  We called to cancel the project, well on our way to becoming dissatisfied customers.   Just like that the company engineer appeared, did an assessment and disappeared.  Time again ticked by.  This time we didn't wait months only weeks before we called, ready to cancel the project.  The next day the well guys came with Verde SolAir's project engineer.  They worked for a week making a muddy mess out of the area behind the pump house (thank heavens this was pre-puppy!), and left their equipment here when they finally went away disappointed.  Apparently the wells were poorly drilled into some sort of choking gravel bed (by the way, the same company that originally drilled these wells was the company working on them now).  They couldn't get enough water movement in and out the make this system run.

Let me just say that Sam Frey got soaked by every contractor he worked with.  I'm not blaming them.  I have no doubt that Sam demanded complicated systems and guys who knew better simply shrugged their shoulders and said, "Whatever," then did what he asked because Sam liked paying for things.

This is how they left it

Back to the wells.  So, everyone walked away again for more weeks while they scratched their heads.  At this point they'd pulled all the piping out of the wells and left it strewn all over the pump house area.  Fun.  Trashy.  I love looking at it.

That's when we get a call from the project engineer.  They'd come up with the perfect solution.  To the tune of another $10,000 they would dig us two new wells down in the lower field where the water table is at a mere 50 feet not 200 they are in the upper area.  Hmm.  Now I'm not saying they fabricated anything here, but the numbers just don't add up.  There's only a 15 foot drop and a 50 foot distance between the upper area and the lower fields.  I know I was terrible in geometry but how can there be a 150 foot difference in the water table.  Doesn't water seek a level?

We are not Sam Frey and this was an additional  $10,000 going to a bunch of guys who weren't proving themselves either smart enough or reliable enough to get this job done before, say, Christmas. If at all.  On top of that, they couldn't put the wells just anywhere.  No, they had to be smack in the center of what will become in a year or two a field full of veggies for sale.  Moreover, to get said water to the heat pump so it could cool/heat our house required a veritable tangle of pvc and metal piping run on a loud electrical pump (energy savings?) that would need to be running day and night.  As if all that mess flying over the ditch where it couldn't be hidden wasn't bad enough that rat's next of technology would be placed right below our bedroom window.

I said forget it.  So, for a mere $10,000 or so Ed ordered a DC (direct current) heat pump.

the outdoor half of our new DC heat pump

This may have been the better choice after all because it's amazingly quiet, amazingly efficient and it will run off our someday-to-be-installed photovoltaic panels without transformers being involved.

We all know why America runs off AC (alternating current) right?  It's our own homegrown version of Capitalism at work in this story.  And, yes I understand that there are some safety advantages to AC, but at the base of it all is Thomas Alva Edison who wanted to make sure his version of electrical appliances and doodads didn't get cut out of the marketplace.

The indoor half of the DC heat pump. See why I was worried about a technology rat's nest?

By the way it still took these guys another month and a half to get that heat pump in place.  After announcing themselves awed by this new unit (another first for them) they disappeared, leaving behind two disassembled wells, all the well guy's equipment (we've made repeated calls without getting a response) and our old water heater.  We had replaced it with a solar water heater, which is undersized.  50 gallons!  What was Ed thinking?  That will never do if we actually ever get serious about turning this place into a bed and breakfast.

And then there were the never-appearing microhydro turbines.  By mid-summer we'd given up on that newfangled technology.  I was bummed for a while.  It didn't look like anything green was going to happen here.  Then in September Ed had a brainstorm.  We were looking to the future when what we needed to be doing was looking

this is the version we'd use

into the past.  We needed. . . waterwheels! And now we're on course for that.  The energy isn't as efficient but it's a lot more charming.

Finally, there's our nemesis, the pump house.  That thing gobbles power like nothing I've ever before seen.  Guess what?  Every drop of water we use on this property goes through that pump house, even the flood irrigation for the fields. Talk about working harder than necessary.  The spring runs above the fields.  All it should take for flood irrigation down to the field is a channel from the spring down across the ditch and into the field.  Let gravity do the work!  And that's where we're headed now, using another ancient technology: aqueducts.

I can see this running from the hillside over the ditch and into the field! Okay, a little smaller scale.

In this case, what's old is definitely new again as far as going green up here goes.

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Garden One through the Summer

This is how hard the ground is when I start working it.

I promised updates on the gardens and here's the first one on, appropriately enough, my first garden.  This garden is a semi-circular plot of land extending from our useless garages.  Why useless?  Because the garage doors parallel the road.  To get my little Focus into the garage I have to drive into the driveway, back up to a 45 degree angle, drive forward a few feet, back up again to a 90 degree angle, then carefully maneuver the wheels back to a 45 degree angle as I guide the little car into the middle of the 2.5 garages.  Ed's massive Cowboy Cadillac cannot make it into the garages.  Oh, and the 2.5 size for the garage?  That's because Sam put in a specially made garage door/bay for his golf cart.  It's the .5.

These guys were my buddies all summer

Back to the garden.  The previous winter I'd worked this space–which is about equal to all three of my medium-sized raised gardens back in Scottsdale–adding a wheelbarrow full of horse you-know-what and four or five wheelbarrows full of autumn leaves.  This all rotted over the winter.  Spring came, the javelina ate the tulips (I wrote that story a while back), I added my herbs, which was always my intention, sunflowers and, way too late in the season, tomatoes. Way too late, dang it.  (The sunflower in this picture came out of this seed package.)

Here they are the day before the storm

The "normal" sunflowers grew and were gorgeous until late August when we had a killer storm that knocked them all down.

After that storm, and the hail and rain that came with it, a whole new batch of sunflowers appeared.  That's when I remembered having planted Mexican Sunflowers.  (That's my biggest failing in the garden.  I love to plant but hate to document what seeds I've thrown where so things just show up.  This is not going to work if I'm farming as a business.  Ed has promised to get my my own iPad on which I will document what I'm doing when I'm doing it.)

 

Here are the Mexican sunflowers in beautiful bloom

I love Mexican sunflowers.  They're usually only about 4 feet tall and they have velvety smooth bright orange blossoms that make great additions to cut flower bouquets.  These just happened to come up with a new crop of lavender and purple cosmos.  Go Suns!  Oh wait, I'm not a Suns fan (team colors=purple and orange). Once again I managed to take this picture the day before our first frost which slaughtered them.  At least I got the picture!

Here are those tomatoes the day before the frost

Growing beneath the sunflowers and looking more beautiful than any I'd ever before grown were those way-too-late tomatoes.  The Cherokee Purple tomatoes were (actually still are) covered in tomatoes the size of small boulders.  I was on my toes for the frost and protected them; the sunflowers were too tall to cover.  All I need is a week of days in the 60 degree range and those tomatoes will ripen.  I hope.  If not, it's green tomato chutney all around this Christmas.  (Recipe coming soon.)

Now, I'm planting in the winter veggies.  A dozen lettuce plants went in as has Bull's blood beets, which are grown more for their greens than their roots.  The herbs, being herbs, will stay put and hopefully survive the winter.  I'll be adding more broccoli soon and a thick line of Fava beans and peas.

But not until the very last of those gorgeous tomato plants gives up the ghost and dies.

 

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Planting a Lasagna Garden (belatedly) and apple cider vinegar

Okay, this is only three month's overdue.  I've had it as a draft since August.  Why didn't it get published?  That has to do with our water up here.  It turns out it's very Basic–the pH runs somewhere between 10 and 11!  Of course I didn't know that in August.  I did know something was wrong.  By late August–just before 22 of the 23 members of my family showed up for my mother's 80th birthday on Labor Day weekend– I started to feel really run down.  I instantly knew it had to do with our water.  I don't know why I knew, I just did.  But, when I get rundown everything except the most vital tasks go by the wayside as I do the Aries thing and put my head down to ram my way through life.  There was still so much to get done with Monica's book, and the gardens,  Then I got the puppy, and Wilma, the mama cat, was turning out to be a real teen mom.  She wouldn't stay in the box with her kittens and when I'd force her in the box, she wouldn't lay still long enough to feed the kittens.  She eventually just cut them off at 6 weeks.  So I was feeding kittens and dealing with the puppy along with everything else.  You know, the usual chaos of life.

Somewhere in that mess Ed finally got a water test kit.  Our water, which comes from Page Spring and has been deeded to this property since 1887, is perfectly safe to drink, just really off kilter in the pH department.  I guess that shouldn't be a surprise given the limestone in these hills.

The minute I realized that it was the pH–that my body's pH had been altered by the water–the Braggs Apple Cider Vinegar appeared in the house by the gallon.  I'm filling pitchers of water to which I add about 1/2 teaspoon of cider vinegar.  This brings the pH of the water to somewhere between 7 and 6.5, or around neutral.   I started feeling better almost immediately.  I've been doing that for over a month now and I'm feeling like my usual hyperactive self again.  Oh, a little side effect of the vinegar is that I've been losing weight without trying.  I'm almost into my size 10 jeans again!

So, now that I'm on kilter again…or as close as I ever get to being on kilter…here is my August story about my new lasagna garden.  The south facing one I was going to use for winter gardening.  The one that the javelina  got to a few weeks back.  The one now protected by birdblock.  The one that's going to supply me with Fava Beans!

The Story:

So here it was, the middle of August. Monica's book had just published on Kindle and I needed a break. It's time for a lasagna garden!

I'm the only one I know who considers working like, well, a farmer's wife to be a "break". But, according to my Yavapai county planting list August 15th through the 31st is the time for planting fava beans, carrots, beets, cabbage, broccoli, and peas.

Since our field has yet to be prepped for planting and I didn't have time during my break to hand work another section of the upper hill, that left only one sort of garden to build: a layered garden.

I love those things. Simple and instant. You start with a layer of cardboard on the ground, or in my case on our useless concrete driveway in front of the garages. On top of the cardboard goes a layer of newspaper. On top of the newspaper (at least in my case although this isn't necessary) went a layer of 3 month old horse manure and a good sprinkling of bone meal and blood meal. Then I added about 3 inches of Alfalfa hay and about 9 inches of straw. I say "about" because those bales had been sitting under the willow tree for a couple of months just waiting for this moment, and the weather had softened them. Fresh bales will split perfectly in 3 inch segments. This stuff just fell apart.

Didn't matter. I piled it up on top of my horse poop, pushing and prodding the slippery stuff in place. Then, on top of that I added the final layer: purchased compost. Mine's nowhere near ready to use yet. In this case I ended up buying Kellogg compost from Home Depot. I chose Kellogg because 1) Ed and the pickup were with me–the bags were 3 cubic feet, which means they weigh in at about 50 pounds each and that's about 10 pounds more than I can carry, 2) I like the idea of Kellogg using their leftover grain stuff to make compost (I'm probably making things up about that, but still…), 3) it's OMRI listed–okay, I know that this may mean nothing more than a bunch of big manufacturers got together and decided to certify their own products, but with all the worry about sewer sludge and all the toxic chemicals and pharmaceuticals getting into manufactured compost, it seemed like a better choice and 4) it was actually a little cheaper than the bag half it's size.

Here it is piled up and waiting for more compost

We bought 12 bags on the first run. I knew it was a long garden, but I figured 12 bags would at least go halfway at a 3 inch depth. Not. I went back and bought another 18 bags.

 

 

At the end of two days this is what I had:

Then my friend Sylvia came up. Now Sylvia is no gardener but she'd like to be, so she suggested helping me seed the garden. We were practicing Yoga the whole way–stretching over the two foot width, balancing on one foot to reach the farthest corners, and planting, which Sylvia, a Yoga teacher, assures me is very much Yoga.

What did we plant? Seeds Trust seeds.

The newest of my gardens

I couldn't believe it when I discovered the Seeds Trust people here in Cornville. It's so great walking into their repository of seeds,  I've had their catalog for years but never got around to buying anything because it was easier to pick up a package at Whole Foods or the Desert Botanical Garden. Well I've fallen in love with the old couple who grow most of the seeds they sell.  Now that's buying local!

 

I'll be adding more garden photos over the next few weeks.  I managed to get pictures of each garden the day before some calamity did terrible damage…!

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