KB Ranch

I love food [foodchoices]

Written by karen on August 23rd, 2010

[This is the first part of a series of posts about food and why our food choices matter. It is related to a bunch of reading I’m doing and a presentation on these topics that I’ll be making next month. Since it has nothing to do with the ranch, I will be tagging the posts as “foodchoices” so you can choose to read or not.]

I love food. And when we moved here, one of the things I worried about was that there wouldn’t be the kind of food choices I was used to living in a big, diverse city.

Over time though, I’ve come to see that we all have many food choices, no matter where we live. And , in fact, Brad and I are eating better now than we ever have…even in LA.

Why is that? In large part, it’s because of thinking more about the food we eat.

In LA, we typically shopped by the meal. Each night on our way home from work, we stopped at a grocery and bought the main ingredients for our dinner. We also ate out a fair amount, usually one or twice a week.

Here, we need to think a little further ahead. With no local grocery here, we must buy ahead and plan. When we first moved here, we went to the grocery every week or two. Now we go once or twice a month on average, and it is almost always when we have to go to town for some other reason. (Restaurants are in limited supply here as well. There is one restaurant that is open evenings about 10 miles away. We have eaten there once in 20 months and that was when we won a free dinner there.)

Shopping for several weeks of meals forces me to think about what we’re going to eat several weeks out (instead on what we’re going to eat in a couple hours which requires very little planning and results in much less interesting menus).

Stay tuned for the next installment…food choices we have.

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Tags: food, foodchoices

The guest house is officially open

Written by karen on August 18th, 2010

Yes, you guessed it — we now have a bathroom door.

More pictures here (I especially love the slide bolt latch from Wild West Hardware.)

The monsoons have been continuing here. This week, we had at least two downpours that lasted several hours. We were in the truck one afternoon when a bolt of lightning struck within 20 yards or so. (I’ve since learned that cars act as Faraday cages and that it is a good idea to wear shoes and not to lie on the floor during a storm if you have concrete floors.)

The rains have brought a plague of giant grasshoppers. The ground is crawling with them, and they are particularly attracted to concrete.

They are the most unbelievably uncoordinated things. If prompted to jump, they land on their heads or backs at least half the time. While I am preparing for the likely eventuality that they may eat my entire garden, I am hoping for something better. In the meantime, we have enjoyed eating beans and one tomato (more on the way) from the garden. The cucumbers are also finally taking off.

We had our first day with Internet down today. (I am actually writing this offline. Of course, as you read this, you will know that it has been restored.) I guess it’s good that it hasn’t happened until now. When we were in the rental house, we seldom had Internet outages, though the power went off nearly every time it rained. Brad takes great delight in the fact that our (solar) power stays on regardless of the weather. I can’t quite get used to it and still cringe when I’m on the computer and a big bolt of lightning strikes.

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Tags: doors, wildlife

Tumbleweed: the movie

Written by karen on August 12th, 2010

Last year, I did a video walkthrough of Tumbleweed to show how the rooms were laying out. I thought it would be fun to do a new updated video now.

[coolplayer autoplay=”0″ loop=”0″ charset=”utf-8″ download=”1″ mediatype=”wmv”]

Tumbleweed walkthrough
[/coolplayer]

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Tags: movie

Green is a lovely color

Written by karen on August 9th, 2010

The monsoons continue here, and things are really greening up. Every day that it rains, we hope it is not the end. It is beautiful and looks so different from how the land looked just a month or so ago.

Back across the septic field...bare dirt just a few months ago!

toward the Peloncillos

Toward our front gate and the Chiricahuas

Other miscellanea for this week…. We have eaten some unusual, truly native food. First, we ate some seeds from acorns. They were really good, something between a pine nut and a pumpkin seed. I’m thinking of making pesto from some of them. (We have far too many to plant them all.) We also harvested some prickly pears and made lemonade and cocktails from them. For those unfamiliar, prickly pears are the dark red fruits that grow atop a certain type of cactus. We have lots here. They are not only exquisitely colored but delicious.

We had a very nice hike down “our” Horseshoe Canyon Friday.

The garden is doing great. The cucumbers finally have fruit. We have one tomato ready to harvest and several more on the way. We’ve been eating beans and green onions, and they are delicious. The eggplants look very healthy, but no blooms yet. I’ve transplanted a few watermelon plants outside. They are very spindly and small, but we’ll see.

(Also for anyone interested, here is a post I did for the farm this week on freezing food that has some good tips in it. This week, I’ve been doing a lot of cooking and freezing for the farm. I am officially sick of zucchini! I know we’ll all enjoy it in the winter though.)

Wildlife sightings this week include our bobcat (who we haven’t seen for a couple weeks), a horned lizard, a few desert turtles, and lots and lots of bats in the evenings. They must love all the bugs that are around right now.

On the house, I’ve been working on the bathroom door. Brad’s been doing several miscellaneous catch-up projects while we wait for the consultation on framing for the next house so we can begin on that. I am hoping to get the much-requested “walk-through” video of the house done this week.

And my big project for work is done! Yay!

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Tags: food, weather

New kitchen counters

Written by karen on August 5th, 2010

I like the tile part of our interior work. I just do the design, pick the materials, and watch while the work is done. It’ s how I imagine other people “build their own house.” Ha ha.

Seriously, I am in the final stages of a big project for work, and so the timing was good for Brad to tile the kitchen counters.

Here is the work in progress.

Ick!

And the final results.

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Tags: construction, kitchen, tile

KB acornseed

Written by karen on July 31st, 2010

We are lucky to have several large oak trees on our property here. They are native emory oaks. We have tried to care for these oaks, especially a few of the smaller ones.

Despite the fact that we have read that they produce acorns every year, we have been told by locals that the ones here only produce every 4 or 5 years. Folks were hoping this would be the year, and indeed it is.

Last week, we collected a bunch of acorns with the hopes of planting some new trees. We’ve read up on how to do this and are optimistic.

Today we planted some. We planted two areas in a ravine where water collects when it rains and where our other oaks are growing. We’ve marked the planting areas with circles of rocks so we can watch how they go.

We also planted a few in washed out 5-gallon buckets. Once they sprout and are doing well, we’ll transplant.

Most of what I read seems to indicate that red oaks (which is the family the emories belong to) do not germinate until the following spring. Other things I’ve read say that the germination is tied to the rainy season, which we are definitely in. We’ll see.

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Tags: oaks

House #1 is done

Written by karen on July 28th, 2010

Not that there aren’t a thousand things still to do, but with the final stucco on, I’m calling it done.

We finished the final coat on the house today.

We also got the battery house done. Now my beautiful door has a proper backdrop!

While we were working on this, I noticed that some of the varnish on the frame is peeling a bit. Probably a result of being taped several times and the hot sun. (It’s been almost 8 months.) I’ll need to put another coat on.

This was my first real encounter with the dreaded “maintenance” issue of home ownership. I mentioned this to Brad, and he told me that the Golden Gate Bridge is continually being painted. It takes about 2 years to paint it, and by the time they finish, it’s time to start again. Hmmm.

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Tags: construction, doors, stucco

We’re out!

Written by karen on July 26th, 2010

We have apparently beaten the odds and become one of the few in America to actually vacate temporary storage. (The statistics on this are incredible. Once you put stuff in a temporary storage facility, it’s likely to stay there forever. I’m trying to put my hands on the article I read on this but haven’t found it yet.) We’re out of our Willcox storage. Yay!

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Looking like a real house now

Written by karen on July 24th, 2010

So we have two and a half walls done now and one and a half more to go.

The final coat of stucco is going on *much* easier than the first coat. (Good thing too, since it’s hotter than hell right now. We’ve been getting up early to start around 6 and be done for the day by noon to try to beat the heat. I’m sure appreciating our lovely onsite shower this week.)

We’re using an acrylic stucco (El Rey Perma-flex) that is supposed to flex and not crack as much in the extreme heat. It is very smooth to put on and the seems don’t really show at all (unlike the first coat). The only bad part is that the stuff really sticks to everything. Our hands and arms are coated in it, and I have scrubbed my skin with a brush until I feel like I have no skin left.

One thing that is very nice about this product is that it comes premixed. No adding sand; no cement mixer; no shoveling or hauling loads of it. (I especially appreciate this since this was my job on the basecoat.) Our division of labor on this coat is that Brad trowels it on and I do the finish.

Putting the tile on has been interesting. I had this idea to put tile accents on the outside and found some beautiful dark blue Japanese tile to use. I wanted to put some small 1″ tiles inside our arched doorway and a row of larger tiles along the top edge. I thought the arch would be really hard but the top edge would be easy. It was actually the opposite. The problem with the tile at the top is that it is relatively heavy and wants to pull off until it dries a bit. (After it dries, I don’t think it’s ever coming off.) We have had several strips fall off, whereupon they fall 12 feet and break, ruining the tile. We have extra though, and we’re getting better at it.

The results look really great, I think.