Things at the Zorora Ranch Homestead have been so busy these last few years. Since my last post I attended a Permaculture Design Certification (PDC) course; the experience was life altering. I took the course in San Diego with the  San Diego Sustainable Living Institute and am grateful every day that I made the decision to invest in myself. Since my PDC we've added beekeeping, a rabbitry , and Hogs to our homestead, as well as increasing our production of fruits and veggies that we grow for ourselves. I joke with people all the time that between working full time, being a mother to two bright and energetic daughters, and running a farm there's no time left for anything else, it would be a funnier joke if it weren't so true. Th funny thing is I'm the happiest I've ever been. There is something to be said for producing something of value, even if it's only for your family, and knowing that when it comes down to it  taking care of our selves and reviving skills that people have used to survive for centuries is worth every minute. That's not to say that it isn't exhausting, it is, and difficult, it is, but the intrinsic value can't be matched by anything else I've found.

Todd has also been attending courses, one at UC Davis for mead making, and most recently a class on harvesting pigs through The Farmstead Meatsmith who have also recently begun a podcast called "A Meatsmith Harvest" I very much recommend this podcast if you're interested at all in raising, harvesting, or even just preserving meat in a sustainable way. In one of the podcasts they compare dry curing meat to writing a Shakespearean sonnet. Now, I know that isn't everyone's cup of tea, but I'll explain why it spoke to me so clearly. in Permaculture there is a saying that the more restrictions a designer has the more elegant the resulting design will be. San Diego's climate is one heck of a restriction for so many things, plants that make it 10 months will wither and die in 2 days of August heat, as will rabbits. We  have no winter so to speak of, which is great for gardens, and terrible for fruit trees which need a certain amount of chill hours to produce fruit. Knowing these things and building a design that accounts for these things is the trick. Similarly with curing meat, temperature, humidity and time are all part of each recipe. The use of the word recipe even is a stretch because for the most part it's apply salt and time to meat and wait, so simple and so complicated, particularly in our fast pace want it now culture. Historically these methods were used because they were absolutely necessary, now they are only used by a few who recognize that the old way, though difficult and time consuming, are better tasting and healthier. Shakespearean Sonnets, like designing a landscape with many restrictions, or curing meat where your temperatures and humidity are beyond your control, requires the writer to fit their message into a very concise, package. So much can be said in those 14 lines of verse, but the trick is the structure. each line must have exactly 10 syllables, they should sound a certain way too, but I find when I bring up iambic pentameter people let their eyes glaze over, so I'll leave it at 10 syllables, and there is a very specific way your rhyming words fit into the poem. To me these three things, landscape design, curing meat, and sonnet writing are all the same, the structure and restrictions challenge you and force you to create something better than you would have without the restrictions.

All this lead up to say I was inspired, while listening to that podcast and tried my hand at a Shakespearean Sonnet, about curing meat. I haven't written poetry in a long time and it felt really good. I'm hoping to start doing it a little more often, maybe I'll put them up on here sometimes. sharing poetry is always a little nerve wracking, but I'm going to do it today. If you're interested it's below. You can also see all of our homesteading stuff on Instagram ZororaRanch or tandmpalmer

Surfeit, in Death’s penchant for rot, mocking

The Meat-Smith’s imperative to harvest.

Lest ruin this succulent flesh, wasting

All that we Artisans needs must divest.

With haste, root out the way to halt Decay.

Betrayed by moisture, you must desiccate;

Withdraw that which robs delight. With salt stay,

Cure waste. Let Time’s artifice permeate.

Matured with time complete, we devour

Fine Charcuterie. Imbued with motive,

Lofty dreams our triumph, we omnivore;

Sustaining abundance our narrative.

Unctuous delight nearly sacrament,

Prosciutto, a work of art, transcendent.

Creating Healthy Soil

Yesterday I finally finished "Gaia's Garden", by Toby Hemenway. The book is so full of information and ideas that by the end  the reader feels both energized and overwhelmed. I can see clearly in my mind how my property will look once it has become a mature food forest, full of fruit trees and beautiful native shrubs and berry bushes, but then I look out the window I'm quickly reminded that my future yard couldn't be more dichotomous to what actually exists, a barren slope of hard packed hydrophobic dirt and decomposed granite, a place where only the most stubborn wild mustard plant can survive. Thankfully Hemenway provides, in the last chapter, some advice on where to start, he is sympathetic to those of us just starting the path to a permacultural paradise, as only someone who's been there can be. He confides to the reader that it won't happen overnight, and that there will be failures along the way, and shares that the best way to begin is to look for a place in your yard that is sheltered from nature's extremes, in our yard that would mean the blisteringly hot sun and high winds known as Santa Ana. He also advises to start small, and close to your back door. In the beginning there is a lot of work to put in, and if you have to traipse all the way across your yard then your first project is more likely to fail, start somewhere you're likely to pass most every day.

Now a note about me, I like to try things for myself. If I see a recipe that I think looks good, I make it, a craft that I think would be fun, I do it. I'm not usually satisfied by just knowing about something and assuming that it works the way someone else has said it will. Mostly because I want to prove that I can accomplish the task, and also a bit that I know some things are not quite as advertised. Either way, I set the book down and immediately set out to prove that I could turn a particularly terrible section of my yard into a garden. Behind our barn there is a flat section of hard packed dirt and decomposed granite. As a location it would be perfect for a kitchen garden, as a potential garden site, it literally couldn't be worse; the dirt is so hard that it could be confused for poorly poured concrete. Water pools on the surface of the dirt and rolls away without even thinking for a second of soaking in. It would be foolish for me to think I could take a shovel and dig more than an inch down without throwing down my broken shovel in a litany of curses. But this is where Hemenway suggest I start, in a sheltered area near the home, so I decide to deploy one of the tools he describes in the book, sheet mulching. Now I'll start by saying this, while I want to succeed and also to prove that I can create an oasis out of this horrible section of packed granite, I don't, however, want to go to the store on Sunday morning, so in true stubborn Michele fashion I used only those items I already had on hand. I realize that this means my experiment may not work as well, but I've bolstered myself with a quote directly from Gaia's Garden, "Overall, doing an imperfect something is better than doing a perfect nothing" and with this guiding me I set out with my shovel, gloves and wheelbarrow. As we only just recently moved I have an over abundance of empty cardboard boxes, this is one item that seems to make it's way into most blogs about sheet mulching and so I sat down peeled off the tape and labels and used that as the base of my garden. It was great to have a clear visual marker as to the size and shape that my garden would take,but also the cardboard will hold moisture and as it breaks down will help to add organic material to the dirt below it.

As you can see the area I'm working with is as dry and un-garden-like as possible. This addition of cardboard initially made it look more like an illegal dump site than a garden, but I wasn't deterred. As I've mentioned in a previous post Ramona, Permaulture, and Hugelculture, I have a surplus of horse manure lying around my property, another person would view this as a nuisance, but I see it as a valuable resource, one that I can shuttle from here to there, and one that I can use for free (I know not many people have this and I view my manure ownership as quite fortuitous). 

Two very full wheelbarrow loads of manure later and my little garden plot was well on it's way to looking, at least marginally more like a garden. The manure was about 2 inches deep across the surface of the cardboard, and as it had been lying around collecting weed seeds I decided to ad a layer on top of semi weed seed suppressing material. 

I'm the worst grocery shopper in the world, and I've always hated that stores send me ads in the mail that I don't even look at much less use, what a waste of paper. I hate wasting a resource, so imagine how happy I was to re -purpose those ridiculous store adds, and especially happy that they will forever be sandwiched between a layer of manure and dirt, I mean could there be more fitting an end for them? Now that I had this layer in place, and thoroughly wetted down; it was slightly breezy when I was working on this which was great for me, but horrible when needing to keep sheets of paper flat on my mound of horse poop. The next step was to put a layer of soil on top of this.

I did run into a slight snag at this point. In our back yard there are 2 raised bed planters. They are full of dirt but no plants. I figured that I would steal the dirt from one of these beds in order to compete my garden experiment. Unfortunately this "dirt" was less soil and more like an old wood ash pile. Half way though my first wheelbarrow full of the stuff and it turned powdery and white with little bits of charcoal. Not that it was entirely ash, there was a bit of dirt mixed in with it, but this dirt was also powdery and clearly unable to hold moisture. At this point I considered going to the store and bringing home some nice new garden mix, but then I reminded myself that imperfect is ok, and that I had this resource on my property all it needed was for me to make it into something useful. I added 2 full wheelbarrow loads of this onto the top of my mound and smoothed it out. No matter what the materials, it was definitely looking more like a garden than it did when I started, all that was left now was to plant it. Now this garden bed isn't ready to produce great fruits and vegetables, and that wasn't the purpose of this experiment, if you remember my goal is to turn this patch of hard unusable dirt into a gloriously loamy patch of garden soil. My final step was to sow seed onto the bed. I carefully chose what seed to add, and I decided to go with Sunn Hemp, a legume that adds nitrogen to the soil, has a root system that will tolerate dry conditions and also creates a bulk of green stalks - perfect for adding organic material to a garden bed in the making. 

Due to the horrible nature of the soil I was working with I did decide to use half a bag of organic garden compost purchased from the store, but only because I was concerned nothing would germinate in the ashes that I had used (and the bag was sitting right there). I mixed in a few handfulls of seed directly into the compost mix in my wheelbarrow, this way there was a good chance the seed would be evenly distributed and I spread it out across the top of my lovely sheet mulched square. 

Obviously I won't know if my morning's work was successful for a week or two, but I will say that the pile I created holds water much better that the surrounding area and that I'm very hopeful that when it's time to plant next year's tomatoes they will have a nice , healthy plot of soil that I can sink them into. If not, well, we'll just have to do a second round of sheet mulching, maybe with an addition of some red wigglers; only time will tell. 

Ramona, Permaulture, and the Hugelculture

It's been a bit since my last post, so let me catch you up. In 2009 when Todd left the Air Force and we decided to move home to San Diego we were starting from scratch. We rented a few different places, and once both of us had stable jobs we decided to buy a home. We bought what we considered a starter home, it was small had lots of work to be done and was definitely not in the best neighborhood, or  school district (mind you it could have been much worse), but it wasn't a place we wanted to stay forever. Fast forward 4 years and about a ton of elbow grease later, Todd and I decided that it was time to move, our house's value had risen enough that we would be able to get something nicer, but not too much, meaning it still looked like a great deal. So now we are caught up to present. We've bought a home on the outskirts of San Diego, in Ramona. Ramona is a beautiful city, not quite rural but definitely not like it is in the city. The air is fresh, the views are stunning, and the properties are big. Our place is about an acre and a half, which is a lot, and as you can imagine I'm itching to make it my own. We're lucky in that it is a blank slate, with no real water hungry landscaping, but unlucky in that there are no mature fruit trees (just dozens of eucalyptus). After moving up here my brother in law lent me his copy of "Gaia's Garden-A Guide to Home Scale Permacultre" by Toby Hemenway. I must say that this book has changed my view of gardening and has really inspired me, which wouldn't matter except I've got that big piece of land staring at me daring me to go on and do something (much to Todd's dismay). Which brings me to today, Todd is away in Portland. I'm sure he's having a grand ol' time as he's with my soon to be brother in law for his bachelor party, but it also leaves me here, at home, with no one telling me not to start a new project. I've been telling him for a few weeks now that I want to build a Hugelculture, which is just a strange Germanic word for raised bed garden that is filled with logs and sticks. Todd's been going crazy with me talking about it non-stop, so today, with him away, I pulled out my tools and decided to go ahead and make one. The supposed benefit of using a Hugelculture has to do with the ability of dead wood to absorb water, a well watered hugel retains moisture and so doesn't need to be watered as often, not to mention that the organic matter inside the hugel breaks down over years and feeds the plants planted in it and also replenishes the dirt around it. Another great feature is that on our gently sloped yard it creates a swale, which when, or if, it rains it will create a barrier slowing runoff and increasing the ability of the rain water to be absorbed into the ground. It is obvious that our yard allows water to drain a bit too freely during a rain storm, something I intend to remedy.

So the first step was finding a good location for my hugel, it needed to be on a slope, within reach of a hose, and also not too centrally located (as this was a semi covert operation and I don't need to cause unnecessary trouble with the hubby). I settled on a spot next to the driveway with a good amount of slope where lots of runoff can be collected, and where a hose will reach until California sees some rain.

Even though the slope was already there, I had to clear it more to create a flat spot to pile up all my logs and branches, I wanted to make the hugel start at the bottom of the slope but be about as tall as the existing hill, needless to say it was a lot of digging in very hard dirt, but hey it doubles as a workout, and I love multitasking.

One small problem was the amount of weed debris I created when clearing the spot, out place had been empty for a good while before we moved in and the amount of uncut brush, and invasive thistle is pretty daunting. I decided to use the little knowledge of composting and the even larger amount of ignorance I have to "hide" all that awful weed seed infested organic matter in my hugel bed, a compost heap can kill the weed seeds due to the heat created by decomposing matter, so I took the easy way out and just filled the bottom of my ditch with the pile of weeds (Yes, this will most likely come back and haunt me, but it can't be worse that it was).

I did however, create a barrier between the weeds themselves and my hugel insides, just to be on the safe side, cardboard is a great tool for smothering unwanted plants, so I used it as the base of my hugel and began piling.

The next step involved scavenging my yard for stumps, logs, and branches that were hiding under bushes and in thecreek bed. It didn't take long, I have enough dead wood lying around for another 3-5 hugels, easy. One problem is making sure that I don't use too much eucalyptus, as a hugel made of all eucalyptus could be bad for the garden, it has allelopathic properties, which just means it's toxic and can stunt other plants from growing around it, did I mention how many eucalyptus trees are on our property? It's obscene, no wonder it's just a wide open dirt patch. Fortunately we have a variety of trees in varying stages of breaking down all over the yard.

Now is where the dirty work begins. Did I mention that there used to be horses on our property? Probably not, it's really neither here nor there, except that we have a surplus of manure all along our fence line, just waiting to be put to better use.

Between all the horse manure, and the mess that our chicken flock creates, I was able to cover the entire hugel in a nitrogen rich layer of, well, dung. This will help keep the mound more balanced and able to support plants more readily, it was however not the most pleasant portion of the entire hugel experience. At least it was all free, I'm sure slopping paid for poop is more upsetting that slopping free poop, but only just.

At this point I got the pile nice and wet to make sure the inside of the hugel wasn't starting out dry, the wetter it is in the beginning the less I'll have to water it over time. I also wanted to make sure that the pile would stay put, even if it got wet, I don't want all my hard work washing away at the first rain. After a good soaking I simply pushed the original dirt back over the hugel. This is where, if Todd were home he'd intervene. Luckily he isn't here so we didn't have to go off to the nursery and buy garden soil. I like to use the free dirt that came with the house (are you starting to see my cheap streak)? Sure garden soil might look better, so dark and loamy, but we're creating healthy soil from the bottom up. If this comes back to haunt me, so be it; at least I didn't waste any money in the mean time.

So what did I get out of this project? I mean so far it looks like all I did was dig a big trench in a hillside, just to put all the dirt back to once again have a hillside, oh yeah did I mention how much poop I had to shovel? Well, for one, I got the satisfaction of knowing that I'm starting the process of making my property more water wise, once we do get rain I'll be storing a little bit of it right there in that mound and the plants I plant there will be lush and green without me having to turn on the hose. I'm also building better soil, which will benefit us for years. But best of all I was able to make my property produce, there is nothing better than sweating over a piece of land and being able to reap, literally a harvest from your hard work.  Very soon my hugel will be providing us with kale, chard, arugula, rosemary, chives, carrots, beets, garlic, green beans, and strawberries (sounds like a lot right, but that mound is huge 4ftx8ft and 3 dimensional).

All this before noon, I think it's time to relax.

10 Tiny Minutes

Today I went to the UCSD Women's conference. I normally don't attend events like this, but have been trying to broaden my own horizons. I didn't know what was on the agenda and so sat down in the main auditorium to catch the tail end of a presentation. The topic was "The Miracle of Tiny Habits", about fostering change in yourself one small doable goal at a time. I was intrigued by the thought that one small change would "organically" grow into something bigger if you fed that change correctly. The main concept was "anchoring" the change to a cue, something that would make you remember to complete the task. An example is putting your walking shoes by the door to your office so that when you leave the office you can simply see the shoes and remember that you were going to add a short walk before leaving to go to your car.  I thought about the change that I'd want to enact in my own life, and it would undoubtedly be to begin writing again, if not something structured, at least SOMETHING! There are so many distractions, and every day is so busy, but would it really be so hard to set aside 10 minutes a day to put words to paper? Nearing the end of the presentation I checked the schedule, and to my dismay there was a presentation called " Writing Practice for Personal Expression and Creative Explorations". I couldn't believe it, I had literally just thought to myself if only I could write, and then it slaps me right in the face.

 Judy Reeves author of "A Writer's Book of Days" was the presenter. Her message was essentially  if you are a writer, then write! Easier said than done, right? But then she went on to simplify it even more. You don't have to write to be published, you don't have to write to be read, if you're a writer you need to write simply to write. That inner expression is what makes a writer happy, and if no one ever reads it, you've satisfied your creative urge just by doing the practice. I've thought this so often; I need to just make myself sit down and write, but the computer is my foe. I'll be distracted by Facebook, or who knows what else. Judy's answer to this,  don't use a computer.  The art of writing is so much more that just selecting the next word, you should "write with your whole body", hand to paper thought flowing and just let it happen. When we first sat down she asked us to write down a concrete fact that we had noticed that morning  something that grabbed our senses. My fact was "The ceanothus outside Peet's was extra indigo this morning." This is something that only I would notice, I'm especially obsessive about these beautiful plants.  After a bit Judy asked us to take the tips that she had given to us and use our sentence as a jumping off point, to put pen to paper and just write, this is what the next 7 minutes became:

The color of San Diego is blue. Blue clean crisp skies; deep blue oceans, rarely marred by a graying day, but more than anything, the blue of a ceanothus. Bright blue against a green sagebrush canvas. Each as individual as a snowflake. Some barely leaving the world of gray-scale. Some, robins egg, touching its closest neighbor a deep cerulean blue. Their honeyed fragrance reaching out to the birds and the bees, it is spring after all, finding its way above the salty sea air, the earthy sage and musky sumac. These are the smells that have transgressed ages, same for those first men and women grinding acorns on granite boulders. But most amazing of  all, the most striking, is that deep indigo cone on the rarest California Lilac. 

That was the end of the 7 minutes, I really wish there had been more time, I was just beginning to get immersed in it when the timer went off. So this is my goal to myself, my new "Tiny Habit", I will find 10 minutes a day to write, just for myself, anything, with no story or framework in mind, just for the satisfaction it gives me. I hope that it will grow into something more, but if it doesn't at least I'll have that 10 minutes each day.

On the Road with Steinbeck

I started a new book today. If I'm being totally honest, I started a new audio book. Todd got me hooked on Amazon's Audible.com, it has effectively tripled my reading time. It's a strange thing, being happy traffic is adding time to my commute; it means I can get in another chapter. Today I began "Travels with Charley" by John Steinbeck. Of all the books I've listened to so far this is the first one I've been a little sad I'm not reading in the old fashioned way. There is something about the way the prose sounds; I know it would make me happy to see the words play together and jump off the page. When I selected this book, I actually was selecting a book Todd had placed on his wish list. I'd read some Steinbeck before, obviously the "Grapes of Wrath" is one of the most necessary books for any American to read. Images from that book still stick with me today, I have a feeling that this book is going to be the same. Since I don't know anything about this book, other that what I've listened to this morning, I'm going to take the plot at face value. I'm going to fight my urge to Google the locations that he's visiting and the name of his truck. Because even if it isn't autobiographical I want to believe it is. He sets out on a cross country journey, just to prove that he isn't stagnant, that he has life in him and he isn't going to just lay down and let himself get comfortable. He talks about wanting to live fiercely rather than gain a little extra yardage (such an adept image the day after the Superbowl). He's writing in a time where America is on the cusp of something. Like I said, I refuse to Google, so I'm going to piece together the bits that I can. America is in the middle of the Cold war, he sees submarines that are carrying "mass death", and Khrushchev is visiting the United Nations. He's mad that America is letting Russia to take the lead. It's an election year and he isn't revealing who's running, just that everyone is very secretive and there isn't much debate, as though there hasn't been enough time to digest the changes the world had seen in the past decade, that man needed to mull it over a bit longer before they could make up their mind. He's contemplative about the effect manufacturing must be having on the Earth, that everything we make comes in boxes and packaging, that the bulk of that is more than everything we use combined. he wonders out loud if we'll reach a point where we can't keep burying ourselves in the trash of it all, polluting our rivers, and burying the radioactive waste we create underground. Steinbeck is ahead of his time, seeing the wastefulness of modern life. He's only been on the road for a couple days. I can't wait to see where Rocinante, his truck, takes him next.

In the Wake of Loss

A few years ago a person very close to my family passed, much too early. I wrote a poem after the service. It was the only way for me to deal with and express the feelings I was having.

On Friday I began to think how that poem, though written for a different person, and completely different situation, expresses again the feelings that I'm struggling with. I'm sure it is because my oldest daughter was born the same year as most of the young children that were slain at Sandy Hook elementary school. All weekend I looked at her and thought of the beautiful person that she is becoming and saw the light in her eyes and couldn't bear to think of the anguish it would cause me. I'm making the best out of this for myself. Each day I will strive to treat her in a way that if it was the last there would be no regrets; I know it should be that way already, but in the face of frustration I'm not always perfect. I've spent too much time already mulling over this weekends discoveries, making it too much a part of my thoughts. I need to try and move past thinking about it, and I'm so thankful that I have that ability, that this isn't going to be something I have to carry with me everyday for the rest of my life. But there are so many families this week without that choice. This poem reflects the pain that we see them carrying, and that as outsiders we can only understand a fraction of that.

The hollow thud; shattering.
Empty, I toss my load aside.
Aching with the finality,
crushed under it.
Unsure; I go.
Alone.
A memory.
That echo

A Thousand Splendid Suns

I wrote this a few years ago when 'A Thousand Splendid Suns' first came out. If you haven't read his second novel yet you MUST.

Khaled Hosseini, author of 'The Kite Runner', has written a second amazing novel. It may seem unimaginable that this book could be as strong as 'The Kite Runner,' but be ready to be surprised; this novel is so beautiful and perfectly told. 'A Thousand Splendid Suns' may even outshine her famous older brother.

'A Thousand Splendid Suns' is set in Afghanistan and tells the country's tale of devastation through war, and the compelling survival of its people through not just one invasion, but three. The story opens with an Afghanistan full of culture and a sense of self a country that appears to have a balance of old and new, culture and religion. This all changes when Russia invades. The people of Afghanistan are forced to relearn their way of life literally overnight. These changes don't all appear negatively; women are encouraged to be equal to their male counterparts and are allowed to go to school, and to hold jobs in all fields. Then the Taliban overthrow their occupiers, it's a story that we all think we know, but can't on an intimate level. All the liberties and freedoms that were known under the Russian occupiers are stripped away, and everyone is fearful for their lives. One misstep, one look astray and you may disappear. None are more affected than the women of Afghanistan who must give up their veils for one ruler, then are forced to cover their entire body by another, un-allowed to leave the house alone, or even receive medical treatment. It is here, with the women of Afghanistan that this story shines.

Two women, born a generation apart, who have known two entirely different Afghanistans, one a girl raised in the rural country-side by her mother during a time of relative peace and freedom. The other, born in Kabul on the night of the Communist invasion, knowing nothing but a life filled with war. These two unlikely companions are brought together by the appalling circumstances of war; they must face the loss of freedom, the trials of war, an arduous husband, and the regulations of the Taliban together.

In a life where one must learn to mould oneself to society's changing standards, and be subservient to the very people who have usurped your life, we learn that in exchange for love, no price is too high. We also find that real family and personal identity can be very fluid ideas. But above all that some things are too precious to lose. This is an astonishing tale of love and the survival of Afghanistan itself, mirrored beautifully and tragically in the lives of its women. Hosseini alone can weave a sympathetic and heroic tale of injustice in such a masterful way. This is a great story, from the storyteller who has opened the hearts of the west to the suffering of Afghanistan.