It's been such an active season, which feels really wonderful.
We've finished cleaning up the West side of the house, allocating last year's compost. We also built framing for, sewed, and hung custom shade sails that make the house cooler -- summer is officially here in the high desert -- as well as which make that previously underutilized space another communal/hosting/patio type area just by virtue of being there and creating spacial separation.
My gardens are doing okay, something keeps eating my potato plants' leaves. I thought the birds that nest in the honey mesquite tree at first, but it keeps happening despite the chicken wire I've hung over the infiltration basin. My hunch is some insect, though I've yet to see the culprit in action. My white, black, and violet sages I replanted into the infiltration basin are doing great, though, as are the green onions and garlic I planted. Our nopales are slowly coming back, also, now that we've dug them infiltration basins and moved them to the shade of one of our mesquite trees.
We now have a water storage tank, a critical step in enabling us to get bigger livestock. It creates water resilience if the power goes down and our well pump doesn't work, and enables us to take some pressure off of our aquifers for minor irrigation projects.
A straw bale and adobe bunk house for guests and guest bathrooms are in the works, which will add to our capacity for hosting. A good thing, since we're grateful to be booked with visitors and loved ones from now until January.
We're planting five new trees to attract pollinators, some of our date palms are fruiting (despite being too immature to eat this year), and the infiltration basins on the North side of the property that were on hold are in progress again.
Our broody hen got confused when I moved her to her own coop the first time and abandoned her first clutch (that was my fault) but has successfully been sitting in the broody coop on a fresh clutch for a week now, so we're expecting teeny cluckers soon!
There are other projects that are set to begin soon, as well, but I'll have to update on those later on!
A reminder that if you ever want to support what we're doing here at the ranch, my Kofi directly funds projects like these and contains some sustainable goodies and unique art in return 🤍
Some things just don't biodegrade well here, and part of it is that we're still perfecting our composting workflow and making sure our heaps don't overdry and die in our arid environment. We're getting better all the time, and it's a learning process. But in the meantime, I've been doing a lot of research on biochar. Most of the USDA fact sheets only talk about using biochar from wood or agricultural "wastes" like cornstalks, straw, etc. However, I know for a fact that in much of South America it's common to burn animal bones, manure, and more.
So, talk to me about biochar! Do you use it? What do you burn? What have your results been? Do you combine it with other soil remediation tactics (compost, compost teas, etc.)?
We've just returned from a wonderful trip to see friends in Southeastern Arizona. The trip was full of tours of various local microclimates and properties, the local co-op they're helping to facilitate the growth of in the midst of a severe food desert, and meeting community members engaged in regenerative living to varying degrees.
There are many lessons, musings, and things I've learned that I may share in a more cohesive way soon, after I catch up on things back at the ranch.
New #ClimateChange study shows increasing risk for compound climate disasters - namely heatwaves deplete soil moisture making soils hydrophobic followed by extreme rainfall which runs off causing flooding, landslides, and debris flows.
"the risk of compound climate extremes is projected to increase 2–3 times over most global land masses in future Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5 forcing compared with historical forcing" https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2022EF003466
How Neoclassical Economic Theory Fails to Explain the Modern Industrial Food System
"Neoclassical economics, and economics education cannot explain the modern industrial food system from their current perspective. Only through an honest, wholesale evaluation can we fully understand it, and only through a comprehensive understanding of this system can we begin to change it and make amends for the issues which it has created. "
I've been quiet here, but I can explain...
Last year we were lucky to buy a piece of land and old manor house near our farm. The place you see in my pictures is not our land, we have a lease.
So we were planning to expand to the second location, which is about 20 minutes away, while retaining the original place. Over the past few years we invested a lot of of time and money there, but in the end things worked out differently.
One of the partners in the farm, whose land we were on, wanted to focus on other things so we decided it would be best to move the whole farm to the new location. On the one hand that means rebuilding all the basic infrastructure and a new market garden from scratch which means a lot of work and investment.
But on the other hand it'll be on our land and we can integrate all the lessons learned over the past 4 years, so that's exciting!
Overall I'm very excited but also tired as you might imagine. Moving a farm is a lot of work... And we're not even halfway done. Luckily we have the lease on the original location for at least another year so we can maintain production while resetting.
I'll try and document as much of the process here!