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New beds

Friday, April 27th, 2012

We’ve spent a lot of time over the last two weeks on gardening. We dug two new beds and expanded the one in front of the greenhouse. This involves not only digging but filtering all the dirt (we estimate the soil here is about 25% rock) and enriching it with compost.

These beds have been planted with edamame, anaheim chiles, beans, and cucumbers. (This is in front of the two allumium beds.)

This bed (covered with a garden blanket) is half tat soi and half lettuce.

Brad also made these ingenious little circles for planting squash and melons. Half have been planted and half are still to be done. Drip irrigation all around.

This area is behind the batteryhouse by the solar panels. We've christened it "squashville."

In the greenhouse, I still have greens growing, which we have an overabundance of right now. We also have herbs and green onions there, and the first of the tomatoes have been transplanted from the house. I hope to have them all moved in the next two weeks.

The first baby tomatoes in the greenhouse

All in all, we now have about 375 square feet under cultivation, up from under 200 last year.

And the cactuses? Well, we’re still waiting eagerly.

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Tags: garden, greenhouse

Spring can’t be far away now

Saturday, January 28th, 2012

Maybe 6 weeks? Stay tuned for lots of tomatoes.

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Tags: garden

Fall harvest

Saturday, October 15th, 2011

Today was fall harvest day for the squash.

The big green striped squash are Sonoran squash. Believe it or not, we didn’t plant any. We planted all butternut. But the butternut these came from were growing close to Sonoran squash, and I understand that they can cross-breed. I guess this is evidence of that.

After harvest, we put in a second bed of garlic and shallots for next year. Brad is getting very good at the alliums.

While we were planting, we heard the first sandhill cranes of the season flying overhead. A definite sign that fall is here!

Our tomatoes are still producing prolifically, and I have fall crops of lettuce and spinach coming up.

It is also apple time.

We’ll be making lots of apple pie filling, applesauce, and hopefully apple butter in the next week or two.

That’s about it from here on the homestead for now! :)

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Tags: garden, greenhouse

My first watermelon

Sunday, September 25th, 2011

There are lots. Stop by if you want one.

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Tags: garden

A chance of rain

Wednesday, June 29th, 2011

It’s hard to believe that it’s almost the beginning of July, but here we are. I’ve been traveling a lot this month, which has meant not a lot of big work on the house, but I’m now home for a long stretch. With some big work projects completed, we are now full steam ahead on the house.

After two months, the fires are now finally safely far from us, though our thoughts are with those who are now affected by them. The firefighters’ camp has moved north. It was strange to see them all cleared out in just 24 hours.

Just as the fire updates stopped coming, we began getting warnings of impending flooding. It’s a little hard to think about that since we haven’t had rain since last year, but the big monsoons are due any day now. In fact, I am writing this on a plane going back home and heard from Brad yesterday that we got our first sprinkle of rain. (I was in Philadelphia, and it rained there, as it often does. I had an overwhelming urge to run into the middle of the street and dance in the rain.)

The weather has been extraordinarily hot at home, hotter than it ever got last year. It has been between 105 and 110, and even the evenings have not been as pleasantly cool as they usually are.

The garden is thriving in the heat, except for the eggplants. The more I read about them, the more I think they don’t thrive in any conditions we are likely to have; they seem to be very sensitive to heat, cold, wind, and other variations. Ours are doing ok, but not exactly thriving. The tomatoes, on the other hand, are going crazy. At last count, there were over 50 fruits. I think we will be canning sauce and salsa soon. Brad has put in another bed for more garlic, and I look forward to having an even bigger and better garden every year.

The deer around the house each evening are getting more numerous and less shy, especially as it is so hot and dry, and we have water for them. Brad has won the latest round of battles with the bees in the front tree, but the war remains in question. (Any suggestions on getting bees out of a tree are welcome.) We have not seen even one rattlesnake this year. In fact, my only snake sighting was a very small garter snake that was nearly on top of my shoe one morning we went walking. Both the snake and I were quite startled by each other.

When the first rain comes, we will anxiously scout about for all the wildlife that seems to appear at that prompting. velvet mites, our lovely turtles, frogs, and whatever else might spring from the ground. It’s an exciting time that first rain!

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Tags: garden, weather, wildlife

Garden update

Sunday, June 12th, 2011

Things are growing like crazy in this heat.

Brad harvested his garlic. (This is only about a third of it.)

We’ve been eating lots of peas.

The tomato plants have about 20 small green tomatoes growing.

And there are 5 or so little eggplants.

We’ve planted beans and cucumbers, which are growing great, and melons and winter squash, which aren’t up yet. We’re still cutting lettuce and wondering if it will ever stop growing or get bitter.

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Tags: garden, greenhouse

Quick update

Wednesday, May 18th, 2011

The fires are still burning. We’re up to almost 800 firefighters and 30,000 acres, but it is 25% contained which is good news. From our house, the fire doesn’t look as bad as it did, though we can still see flames at night. The research station has been evacuated, but no structures anywhere have burned (with the exception of one trailer that was not wildfire related). It is very windy today with the same predicted for tomorrow.

As for my garden, the volunteer cucumbers bloomed, revealing the fact that they are not cucumbers at all. They seem to be some kind of squash, probably butternut from seeds in the compost. I transplanted them to outside the greenhouse. If they don’t get obliterated by the wind, we’ll see what they turn into.

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Tags: fire, garden, greenhouse

The fire and our garden

Thursday, May 12th, 2011

The fire has now burned over 13,000 acres and more than 560 firefighters are here. This fire burned more in 24 hours than the fire last year did in four weeks, due mostly to high winds. Strangely, even given that, we are feeling more secure personally. No homes have been burned, and we have heard that the firefighters have a “high degree” of confidence that they can prevent the fire from getting out onto the flats where we are. Still, seeing the smoke all day and the incredible flames every night is depressing. And we have not yet unpacked our “evacuation box” (pictures, records, a few other things we wouldn’t want to lose). I’m sure we’ll be fine though, so don’t worry!

On a brighter front, the garden is fabulous. We have moved about 14 of the 20 tomato plants outside. We saw the first actual pea-sized tomato today. The eggplants are thriving, and the peas are taller than me. We have edamame coming up, and there are so many volunteer cucumbers from last year that I may not even plant any new ones. Brad’s garlic and asparagus are thriving. Good health all around, so far at least.

Lettuce from our garden

Peas in the garden

Eggplant in the foreground and tomatoes behind them

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Tags: Coronado National Forest, fire, garden, greenhouse

Always something new

Tuesday, April 5th, 2011

My baby plants outside to start “hardening”

Current state of the houses

Spring is in full swing here. It has been warm and lovely all week. The wind has finally died down, and the garden is thriving. We ate our first spinach of the year. Brad’s garlic are shooting up in height and doing great (under some cover now being protected from the quails). Peas, lettuce, and arugula are all doing well outside. The tomatoes and eggplants are outgrowing their pots and have started venturing outside in preparation for transplant, which I hope will be within a week or so.

We are moving ahead with building but having a few fairly major reconsiderations. One is that the on-going pursuit of someone to make adobe bricks for us is resulting in no good options. The price to have bricks made on-site here is escalating, in part because it is not a huge order. (We are only doing a few walls in adobe.) We have talked to several folks about making bricks for us elsewhere, but shipping 36,000 pounds of bricks isn’t very feasible. The project seems simultaneously not big enough and too big. So we are considering (and I am taking a deep breath as I write this) making our own bricks. We’ll see. I am still hoping for another solution, but as Brad says, we are always happier with work we can do ourselves.

Along that same line, as we were getting ready to place the final order for the SIPs for the roof, we had a second thought about that. They are quite expensive and the contract from the supplier was onerous. I wondered out loud about other options. Several phone calls and emails later, we are now considering i-joists with the same spray-in insulation we’ll use between the two external walls. The potential advantages are: 1) cost (and no contract risk) and 2) easier to do the work ourselves. If the R-value is comparable (which we are investigating), we may go this route.

Not much else going on here. We have some visitors coming this week and are also planning a very small neighborhood party for late in the month. The birds are singing, and life is good!

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Tags: adobe, garden

Changing seasons?

Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010

It seems time for one of those newsy updates about life here.

We awoke this morning to a cool steady rain. It was the kind that really soaked the ground, much better for the plants than the storms that whip through here, though less entertaining for us. The rain gauge this morning held a little over 1/4″ (three-tenths as they would say here), and there are still low clouds holding rain all around us.

Yesterday, huge thunderclouds loomed all around us, and by sunset, there were huge downpours falling to the north and south of us, but only a few drops here. So it was nice to wake up to the sound of a steady rain.

Other than that, the weather has still been hot during the day (90s), but it has been getting very cool at night (high 50s). Fall seems to be in the air. (At the farm, we are harvesting pumpkins and winter squash, more signs of changing seasons.)

We haven’t quite started the second house yet, but have been working on some changes to the plans. Now that we’ve lived here for a while, we have a better feel for things. In particular, while we’d been warned that we probably designed with too many windows, we are adding even more windows to the second house. The summer heat hasn’t been too bad (especially with the ceiling fan and shades), and we love the views more than we ever thought we would.

We are also getting new quotes on materials. We’ve heard that prices have gone up considerably in the last few months. I can’t imagine why — has there been a resurgence in the building economy that I’ve missed? At any rate, we should start ordering and then building soon. (By the way, what do you all think of “Gila” — pronounced heel-uh — as a name for the second house? I’m not sure it means anything by itself but there are many things named for it, including a river, mountains, a county, a fish, and obviously a monster lizard sometimes seen in these parts.)

In the meantime, we’ve had time to finish up some detail work in Tumbleweed that we hadn’t gotten to previously. Not that there won’t always be more to do, but things are very livable and mostly finished looking now.

Our garden, though late in coming to its prime, is producing a lot now. We’ve had tons of green onions and cucumbers, and yesterday I counted 12 green tomatoes of varying sizes. (We’ve harvested four so far.) We’ve also had a good amount of green beans. I’m currently planting a fall crop of spinach and lettuce, and we are also planting garlic and Egyptian walking onions. I feel like I’ve learned enough this year that we’ll really have a good garden next year.

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Tags: design, garden, greenhouse, planning, weather

KB Ranch

A journal of Karen and Brad's adventure to make a home in a remote corner of desert southwest