June, 2016

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Heat wave

Sunday, June 19th, 2016

I suppose you’ve heard that there is a heat wave, and if you are in the southwest, you may be experiencing it too.

I just looked at our temperature gauge, and it’s 111 degrees in the shade outside, and 86 degrees inside (with no air conditioning). I guess we built our house ok.

The greenhouse is up to 138 degrees, but things inside are looking good. Edamame, eggplant, radishes, and chiles all seem to like the heat. And of course, I water every day.

I did laundry today, and the clothes on the line were dry faster than they’d be in the dryer I think. Simple solar power.

What is saving us right now is the fact that the nights are still cool. We open the windows as soon as the sun is down, and by morning, the house is quite cool.

We’re supposed to be in the low 100s for the foreseeable future. (We’re glad we’re not in Phoenix where temps are over 120.) Keep cool.

Onions

Sunday, June 12th, 2016

Having eaten all the tomatoes, the voles and rabbits moved on to the onions. Here’s an example of what they did a couple nights ago (I hope whatever ate this got very sick):

DSC_2579

So despite the fact that the onions were not really ready to be harvested, I decided to pull them to save what I could. There were a fair number that did well and will be good eats:

DSC_2583 DSC_2582

There were some others that weren’t really mature enough so I replanted them in other places to see if they might grow further. We will also eat some of the smaller ones as “spring onions.” I will also be making a red wine onion confit this week. Yum!

The variety that did the best by far was the Texas Early White.

On the weather front, we’ve started getting some sporadic storms, which seem to me like early monsoons. (We don’t normally get monsoons until early July.) As the rain picks up, this should help the garden considerably and also the pest problems.

And this week for the first time, I sold everything I took to the farmers market, which included 8 bags of greens.

Farmers market today

Friday, June 3rd, 2016

Well, today we were the farmers market with no other vendors showing up for various reasons. Fortunately, we took our biggest selection of food yet:

market

There were somewhat fewer customers than usual but we still sold a lot. The ebb and flow of customers, as well as the variation of what they buy (sometimes I sell only wheat bread, sometimes only white; sometimes the sweet breakfast breads sell out quickly; other times I take some home), is still a mystery to me. We do have some seasonal residents here who leave for summer, and so it will be interesting to see if the numbers continue to be down. The number of vendors is also a factor.

Highlights for this week are that we took 8 big bags of greens to market this week (and even had a couple bags more to keep for ourselves) and that all the toum sold out. We offered samples of it, which were very popular. I’m thinking of more things like this that might fit into the little 5.5 oz. souffle cup containers we have. So far we’ve done pesto and toum, and pico de gallo is soon to come.

Things about the farmers market that make me happy: increasing access to good, healthy food here; spending a couple hours each week sitting under the shade of a big tree talking with nice people about food; having people ask me “who grew this?” or “who baked this?;” having people tell me their plans for what they’ve bought (a woman today bought some lemon cake and told me she was going to share it this evening with her husband for their anniversary); and giving away and/or taking home and eating whatever we don’t sell.