Solar beans and more

Despite looking like an outer space receiver of some sort, this is how we cook the majority of our food.  This huge solar oven was hand made by a man in northern California who we met at a fair this summer.  It has all the little details of someone who has carefully crafted something after using and observing a how a tool works and how it can be improved.  It swivels in two directions, and has a hole in one of the reflectors that allows the sun to hit a target and help one align it for most heat, and has a large gimbaled shelf inside which fits multiple dishes at one time.  It gets quite hot.  Right now, a big pot of soup is cooking.  There is a cow that is slaughtered once a week in town, late Friday night, and then for sale at the grocery store Saturday.  We've gotten in the habit of buying "chambarette" which are slices of leg bone, with marrow and some meat, for soup, that gets cooked and eaten with all sorts of other ingredients over the course of a few days...

It has also turned out some nice loaves of bread, and kept a pot of chai simmering constantly through frigid January.  

And below is the old version of the solar oven, smaller and portable, but mostly I wanted to post this picture because it shows our first four legged friend, who was grazing on the land when we arrived early in the winter.  Unfortunately, his owner eventually showed up to retrieve him, but not until I'd gotten quite attached.

And it is actually quite sunny here most of the time. All of my pictures show dramatic cloudy skies, but  that is just when I like to take pictures I guess because the clouds are usually wonderful when they do appear.

Revolving Around Water

A few days ago while it rained off and on outside Stevan and I sat inside the tent to talk about farming plans this summer.  Our experiments can be divided into two categories- those happening in larger chunks in the field, and those in the garden.  The garden will be a collection of smaller plots inside the tree grove next to the canal, and larger plot on the west end of the field. Maybe I'm just having trouble transitioning from growing food in a 1/4 acre back yard to a 5 acre field, but I keep finding myself most drawn to growing things in sunny pockets among the mesquite trees next to the canal where things won't be as scorched in the summer heat, and will be fertilized by the mesquite.  I have fully planted out the garden I already started there, and am now eyeing a spot that is covered with a pile of spent agave fiber-- from moonshine making down the road-- to start digging next.

We are going to grow corn and beans and cover crops in the larger field experiments, and it seems there are really two seasons to do that.  The first one starts sometime around now through March or so, and the second one, with the monsoon in August. Traditionally, many crops were grown around here with the monsoons are no other irrigation, and I hope to experiment a good bit with that, using seeds from varieties traditionally grown that way.

Currently the field has lots of patches of bare dirt (eek!), skeletal remains of devils claw bushes and seed pods, and other dry plants I don't recognize.  There are also "vignorama," a type of acacia, sprouting all over the field. I have been resistant to pulling them, as they are nitrogen fixers and seem beneficial, but if we want to plow up the field(which I have mixed feelings about too), we are going to have to move them.  Stevan has been dedicated with the pick maddock and there are sizable piles starting, which today I collected for future garden fencing.

Looking over the brown dead field, east towards town

We are waiting for the "Juez de agua," (water judge) to get back to us.  Stevan was picking me up in Tucson the last time we were scheduled to water, and it only happens about every two and a half weeks right now.  We must open the canal and flood the field before trying to get the neighbors and their team of mules over here.  And we can only plant our first crop of corn, beans and cover crops if we manage to do all this in the near future, while of course, finishing the building.

welcome

I'm taking the time while internet access is easy and plentiful (on a visit back to CA) to get this little blog up and rolling.  I'm starting it to have a place to write regularly about my experience here, other than in my spiral bound notebook.  Which is great, but harder to share with all of you who I want to share with.  Besides, the Mexican mail system isn't what it is in the US, and letters take a long long time...

What is a milpa?  A milpa is what people around here call the smallish plots of land (1-10 acres) outside of town where people farm (a few still using animals for power).  A milpa is where people here grow their corn and beans, and sometimes alfalfa and sometimes a cow or two.  And where the rattlesnakes like to be in the summertime apparently.  Wikipedia goes on at length about milpas, and calls them a sociocultural construct rather than simply a system of agriculture. It involves complex interactions and relationships between farmers, as well as distinct personal relationships with both the crops and land.  And while I won't say I know that to be true or not from my brief experience here, it does seem that there are complex interactions to be had around the farming of milpas here, especially when it comes to figuring out the canal system.  More on that later.