The Wacky Weed

Val loved this cartoon growing up: Andy Panda brings home a gorgeous flower and plants it, only to be menaced by one wacky weed. The sequence below is often how we feel these days: spring in New Mexico is gorgeous and budding green, but much of it is weeds. We spent the past month uprooting weeds from the flower bed in our courtyard, and they're still popping up. Wacky....

Stills courtesy of Walter Lantz Productions, 1946

Smug Alert!

We attended another Earth Day festival, this time in Albuquerque's charming Nob Hill business district. Since Jon is now working for Edible Santa Fe Magazine, it was a great opportunity to hand out some free issues and talk to vendors at the festival about advertising.

However, once again, we were "smugged"! This time, by a girl working the carbon offset booth. As Val was walking by, the smugger asked if Val would like to donate money to offset her carbon footprint. As Val politely said "not today, thanks!" the smugger proceeded to follow her through the crowd, insisting that just a $1 donation could offset 200 driving miles in a 4-cylinder vehicle. Val retorted that she rarely drives (as we live in the country, work from home, and share a car!), and the smugger continued pursuing her almost angrily, shouting "well, you still release carbon in other ways!"

It reminded us of an episode of South Park we ironically watched the evening before we moved to New Mexico, about a "smug cloud" emanating from San Francisco as the result of a self-righteous George Clooney environmental speech, and which was dangerously heading toward a similar cloud over South Park, Colorado. If the two clouds collided, it would cause a "smug storm" the likes of which we've never seen! The South Park cloud resulted from citizens switching over to hybrid cars and feeling very self-satisfied for doing so, thank you very much. In the episode, Stan makes it his mission to stop the clouds from colliding--or at least to get his friend Kyle out of San Francisco, where his parents moved him so they could inhale their own farts to offset their carbon footprints....

Here's a terrible but quick cut of the episode we found on YouTube:



It's so true. If we're not careful about self-righteousness and badgering others with our ideas of environmental responsibility, there will be a backlash. Why can't we all just be reasonable?!?

Earth Day: Why Bother?

Michael Pollan, author of "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and more recently "In Defense of Food", has written this brilliant article on how in just a couple generations we've managed to forget how to use our minds, bodies, and the resources available to us, and instead we point fingers at government and big business for skyrocketing oil prices, climate change, and other major flaws in our world (have we all forgotten our high school economics classes? A free market is dictated by consumer demand).

But rather than just jammering on about our flaws, Pollan challenges us with some real solutions--some real ways to change the way we think and live every day. Are you up to the challenge?

How'd You Like to Be This Guy?

Stuck in an elevator for 41 hours...

http://www.newyorker.com/online/video/2008/04/21/080421_elevators

A Visit to Denver

Last weekend we drove about 7 hours, 460+ miles, to visit family and friends in Denver. It was a great road trip, full of laughter, adventure and good music (we listened to some of our old CD collection--Radiohead, U2, the soundtrack for 'O Brother Where Art Thou', Django Reinhardt & Stephane Grappelli, among others).

The most bizarre thing about the trip (besides stopping for a beer in Trinidad, Colorado, on the way back--more later...), was that it was April 17th and it SNOWED during half our drive, mostly in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado. It was kind of a treat, but we were counting on nice weather.

We stayed with Val's brother, Jean-Noel, and sister-in-law, Linda, and couldn't have had better accommodations. They run a veritable bed-and-breakfast! We especially dug their coffeemaker and catching up on Bill Maher (courtesty of DVR, we got to see a recap of the Pope fiasco and Maher's...apology).

Over the weekend we visited with friends Mark & Tara and Jeff, Jen and their little girl Madi. Both couples moved to Denver from the Bay Area, ironically. Jeff and Jen hosted us for a BBQ Saturday in their gorgeous home, and we enjoyed a few games on their Wii console. Boxing anyone?

We also met a lot of dogs on this trip. Introducing...Jean & Linda's little angel (with a surprising demonic side), Lilly:

And Jeff & Jen's new dog, Cooper, a French bulldog with lots of class (except for the lewd things he was doing to that rubber chicken in a bikini...):


On our way to Denver, Val had a hankering for a good milkshake, so we stumbled on the historic Conway's Red Top diner in Pueblo, CO, and slurped down old-fashioned shakes in tins. They were deeeee-licious, but our stomachs regretted it for a couple days.

On our way home, we pondered what craving we'd satisfy at our halfway point. We agreed that a beer would hit the spot, and thought: what better halfway point between Denver and Albuquerque than Trinidad, CO? I looked up breweries in Trinidad on my Blackberry and found Trinidad Brewing Co. Perfect....

EXCEPT for the greenwashed neophyte hippies that accosted us to pay $10 per person at the door for their Earth Day celebration. Now, we of all people are on the green bandwagon--uprooting from city life to start a self-sustaining organic farm is no small commitment. But we had just about enough of Earth Day elitism in Denver (it's getting just as bad--or worse than--oft-criticized fundamentalist religious zealots!). No one wants someone else's beliefs shoved down their throats. Jon calls these people "greeligious". It's ridiculous--after all, shouldn't everyday be Earth Day?

We slowly worked our way past the greeligious freaks and managed to shimmy our way, cover-free, into the brewery for our long-awaited beer. It was 'aight, but we couldn't drink it fast enough to turn tail and get outta there! And we thought Trinidad was slightly askew for its reputation as the sex change capital of the world....

It was a fantastic trip, one that we continue to savor and that keeps getting better with each memory we rehash like a fine, fine wine. Thanks everyone for your Denver hospitality!
xoxo

New Mexico Wildfire

Contrary to frequent questions and concerns from friends and family, we're out of harm's way from the Manzano mountain wildfire. Thanks for your concern!

Fortunately, there is a mountain range and about 40 miles between us and the fire. Unfortunately, our goat cheese friends live and have their operations in Estancia, just 15 miles from the town of Torreon, where the fire just passed through and no one evacuated! Crazy New Mexicans....

Exercising Our Right to Water

Living in New Mexico poses many differences and challenges to any newcomer, particularly people like us trying to establish a small farm. The key challenge for everyone in rural New Mexico--indeed, anywhere in the world these days--is access to water.


Contrary to popular belief, not all of New Mexico is arid, God-forsaken land. The Rio Grande river is one of the largest rivers in North America, beginning in the Rocky Mountains and running smack down the middle of the state, dividing it East from West, and providing much of the water for the state. Early Spanish settlers that established agricultural practices put in various irrigation systems to tap into the river, some of which still exist today. The irrigation system we have available for our land is a community acequia system; a system of canals, gates, and individual turnouts that's regulated by our local Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District.



The politics--and emotions--behind any community water system like this run deep, and we saw some of these play out when we flooded our property on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon. If you've ever read or seen the charming Milagro Beanfield War, you have a taste for what we experienced. It's as if the moment someone saw us fussing around in the canal, the neighborhood set aflame with word that someone new was flooding!











To keep the flood from seeping into our house, we had to have some kind of trench or moat around the area we wanted to flood. Lacking a tractor and having only two days' notice from the ditch rider that water was to be released that weekend, Jon dug a trench by himself--with a shovel. He dug 7-8 hours a day for two days, and our land isn't a roll of Charmin. Much of it is loamy clay which turns into cement-like hardpan if neglected, and according to our neighbors, no one has tended our land in about 12 years. Ouch.

Capturing the water and routing it to release onto our land was a fascinating process. Because no one had irrigated our land in over a decade, we had no gates or boards to block the canal and build up enough water to fill our turnout, and ultimately flood our field. So Jon had to buy some wood and equipment to craft a stacked gate system that would give him control over the water flow. He drilled a few holes in each of the 2x6 boards that stack up on one another to ease pressure from the accumulating water so the boards wouldn't break. Brilliant. We were like beavers creating our own dam system (come to think of it, we saw a beaver swimming down the canal later that evening).

Watching the water rise on our land was intimidating. We weren't sure if Jon's homemade trench would hold, but thank God it did! The water accumulated about 6 inches over an acre of our property, and with Jon's stacking board system and keeping a careful eye on the flow, we shut off the water just in time. Standing in the middle of the flood was a unique experience--we're sure a whole new ecosystem of organisms is now calling our land home, and it's just what we need to prepare our soil for some good, organic farming.


Best of all, choosing to flood our field allowed us to experience community like we've never experienced before. All manner of neighbors came out to chat and to offer help and advice--some friendly, and some entitled and antagonistic (it takes all kinds...). But most of our neighbors were cordial, advising how to manage the water flow, riding the ditch on their four-wheelers to help us time the waterflow from upstream (a few properties north of us irrigated that day--mostly horse farms and manicured lawns), showing us how to open our turnouts, etc. and just to generally hang out and enjoy a sunny afternoon.








Jon's well-deserved celebratory beer after a weekend of digging trenches and flooding.