Anita Martin wrote:Regarding good bacteria for cleaning: As I am not sure about the English term I don't know if EMa are also a thing? These are a certain culture of lactobacillus bacteria that are not only used for fermenting bokashi but can also be diluted to wash down surfaces and eliminate odours, as an additive for pet food, as an activator for healthy soil.

Anita, are EMa "effective microorganisms" like this proprietary blend from TeraGanix? Have you used something like this for household surfaces? I've fermented citrus peels and pineapple rinds with some sugar, water, and some brine from previous vegetable ferments as a Lactobacillus inoculant, then diluted the resulting liquid. I spray that on our chest freezer, which doubles as a food prep surface. I have a feeling that, if I sprayed it on our soil, the red ants would go nuts.

Julie Hoolie wrote:Thank you, Beth, for the informative reply!  If I'm going to switch from the bleach-water in the bathroom, would you suggest just straight baking soda for the toilet?  I do have a toddler in the house whose aim is less than perfect so I'm cleaning the floor tile most days as well.  I'll try the peroxide there.

You're welcome, but I'm really not a cleaning expert! (Witness our house. Well, really, please don't.) Raven Ranson has an ebook on good natural cleaners here that I think is great and very useful. In that, if I remember right, she questions the common combination of baking soda and vinegar to de-clog drains. Fair enough. But toilets are a place where I think the two work well together (see this recommendation). Vinegar, in addition to being antiseptic/disinfectant, is especially good at breaking down urine (got a cat that pisses on your bed in revenge? you learn this trick fast), so you could use that first (as the last parenthetical link recommends), and then follow up by scrubbing with baking soda on your toilet brush to remove stains and continue deodorizing, then rinse with water.

Julie Hoolie wrote:Also, which do you recommend for a shower that gets heavy use?

We don't have a shower (I miss showers!), but here are things I've done in the past when I did: Do you keep a squeegee in there for each person to use as soon as they're done in the shower? (Your toddler might even love using it as far up as he can reach!) That should help keep mold and mildew from growing. Then, when it does need cleaning, I've used a spray bottle filled halfway with distilled white vinegar and halfway with water, adding in a few drops to a teaspoon of tea tree oil (like this), to spray on tile and similar surfaces like that, let it sit a while, then wipe off.

What do other folks use for cleaning their bathrooms?

Julie Hoolie wrote:I admit that I've grown to love the smell of bleach and bleach-water has been my go-to cleaner for the bathroom. Why is it frowned upon?

There are lots of reasons for this. As I said, I do still use bleach for some things, although I never use it in an enclosed environment, never mix it with acids (please! don't die!), and never put it down drains that lead to any kind of water environment. Note that I do use it to clean the toilet enclosure (lid, seat, etc.) that our compost bucket goes into, but none of that is hooked up to any plumbing. Here are my reasons:

Human and Animal Health: I've had really bad reactions (skin, respiratory, and head pain) to using even dilute bleach for long periods of time (cleaning large quantities of surfaces for work) even outside in the fresh air, and my mom was once rushed to urgent care with a horrific headache after bleaching out part of a hot tub.

According to Healthline, "Chlorine poisoning can occur when you touch, swallow, or inhale chlorine. Chlorine reacts with water outside of the body and on mucosal surfaces inside your body — including the water in your digestive tract — causing hydrochloric acid and hypochlorous acid to form. Both of these substances can be extremely poisonous to humans.[...] Chlorine poisoning can cause symptoms throughout your body. Respiratory symptoms include coughing, difficulty breathing, and fluid inside the lungs.[...] Chlorine exposure can damage your circulatory system. Symptoms of this problem can include:

"changes in the pH balance of your blood

"low blood pressure

"serious injury to the eyes, including blurry vision, burning, irritation, and in extreme cases vision loss

"skin damage, resulting from tissue injury with burns and irritation"

IMPORTANT: Bleach is especially toxic when mixed with ammonia, vinegar, or any other acid type cleaning material. Inhaling the resulting fumes can be fatal. See Healthline again.

Environmental Health: Bleach is also a water pollutant. This is primarily at larger quantities (say, chlorine bleaching of pulp and paper and other industrial processes) than would normally be used around the house, but it's still a good reason not to pour it down the drain (including into toilets). The damage happens when it combines with other things in the environment to produce toxins (similar concept to combining with ammonia or vinegar). The best-known of these is dioxins, which are persistent (resisting break-down over time). They "can cause cancer, reproductive and developmental problems, damage to the immune system, and can interfere with hormones," according to the EPA. They're of particular concern for bodies of water like the Great Lakes.

Good alternatives include:

rubbing alcohol (for effective sanitizing in the age of COVID)

vinegar (for surfaces, and even to brighten clothes)

baking soda (for toilet and sink cleaning, among many other things)

hydrogen peroxide (many of the same functions as bleach, including killing bacteria, but much safer and just as effective -- but, like rubbing alcohol, please don't swallow it!)

lemon juice (to bleach and disinfect)

Castile soap (this and water work just great to clean hands, produce, etc. of bacteria and even viruses)

diluted tea tree oil (great antifungal and antibacterial, e.g. for shower curtains)

salt (for certain things like we've talked about up-thread)

putting things outside in the sun for a while (use lemon juice first for extra bleaching action)

From this historical sewing site (including, yes, batiste!):

Fabric Suggestions for Undergarments:

Muslin – good starter fabric but be sure to feel the piece before buying. Muslin (known as calico in the UK) is produced rather quickly as a cheap textile. You’ll find the hand (feel) is different on bolts sitting right next to each other in the store. Select the lightest weight you can.

Broadcloth – watch out for poly/cotton blends! They are everywhere and do not deserve to be used for a precious chemise or drawers. One hundred percent cotton broadcloth can be heavy so make sure you can feel the material before purchasing. A wool broadcloth is too heavy – keep that for a petticoat.

Batiste – perfect for undergarments. It can have a slight sheen to it but is thin and opaque – a good choice.

Voile – very sheer cotton that will work well for late Victorian and Edwardian chemise & drawers. Early 19th C. chemises should be made with thicker fabrics. Voile is simply too sheer.

Lawn fabrics are beautiful. Unfortunately for us they are mainly sold as prints today. However, I’ve seen solid colors at a couple online vendors. Lawn is a soft cotton between a voile and batiste that has a stiffer drape like a shirting but sheer. Although mainly used for dresses, the stiff hand shouldn’t be too detrimental to undergarments if you want to use it.

Shirtings – although cotton and can be used for undergarments, shirting fabrics work best for dresses and petticoats. Look for something else if you can.

Kona cottons and other quilting cotton solid basics – although 100% cotton, these textiles are rather heavy and don’t drape well for chemises. But quilting cottons will work for drawers.

Cotton or wool flannel is wonderful for drawers for cold weather if you need something heavy. I wouldn’t recommend flannel for a chemise as it’s just too heavy and with all the other dress layers is not necessary for the chemise. Be cautious though: wool drawers around the legs may be irritating.

Linen – I have fallen in love with my linen undergarments! It’s simply beautiful to wear, breathes well, and is opaque. Stick with a lightweight linen between 3 and 5 ounces.

I had thought that even any passive method of harvesting moisture from the air would be called an atmospheric water generator, even if it was something like a net or air wells, but I may well be wrong. I would agree with you that suspending something like wire mesh or nets between your plants may well yield some condensation or thaw melt and would be worth trying if you already have materials around!

We don't collect dew yet. We live in a high desert, and most years we get around 13 in. (33cm) precipitation, which we do collect for all our uses around our homestead, from drinking to watering plants. We also harvest ground runoff using dams and seguias and plant in sunken beds filled with mulch to capture and hold any precipitation.

This year we essentially didn't get any summer monsoon, where normally we get the majority of our rainfall for the year during that time (normally it would have just ended, but our last rain was in early August, and it was one of only three or four small rain events we got all summer). Also, monsoon is normally our most humid season, when collecting moisture from the air might work best, and it was only very briefly at all humid this year!

We are running low on water and looking into other ways to get it. We have a lot of sun, so I'm thinking something like solar hydropanels might make the most sense, but we can't afford to buy anything like that either. I'm wondering if we could build something like the air wells out of local clay and mud and organic matter; or if our cisterns perhaps already create condensate on their outer surfaces that we could collect (I haven't observed this; it may just be too dry here right now). We don't seem to get much dew. We do sometimes get a bit of frost.

Hi, Lukas!

I feel like this keeps coming up in conversation lately, but I'm having trouble remembering all the different projects we've talked about. I'll try! To aid you in searching, I believe anything used to harvest condensation would be called an "atmospheric water generator."

Here's a potentially very cool passive means of harvesting water from air using solar hydropanels.

Here's a paper on dew harvesting in the West Bank.

Here's an article on using a net to harvest fog in the Atacama desert, here's the Wikipedia article on fog collection in general, and here is a good article on using mesh as well as "fog harps" and more.

This is very interesting on using air wells to harvest and collect condensate, with a number of historical examples.

I swore I remembered the intricate and wonderful water collection and storage systems of the Nabateans incorporating an element of condensate collection, but I can't seem to find anything about it now. Can anyone else recall anything like this?

The other thing that's tickling my memory is a mimetic technology that I think I read about in Stefano Mancuso's The Revolutionary Genius of Plants, that I thought was copying an ability of an unusual desert plant from South Africa that only has two long leaves and uses them somehow to harvest moisture from the air. But again, I can't seem to find this again (I don't own the book -- I had borrowed it from the library). Does this tickle anyone else's memory?

I've been somewhat obsessed with terraces of different types and have posted about them here (building them with rock retaining walls), here (might be especially helpful because it's another discussion of what earthworks might be most appropriate for steeper hills), and here (starting them by planting trees and then weaving brush amongst them -- and letting sediment accumulate against them with floods -- so that your stakes are live rather than dead, but otherwise similar to Tyler's suggestion), if you're curious. Also, check out some of this discussion of techniques like checkdams for slopes.

Some back-of-the-napkin thoughts (so, if I'm getting things wrong or forgetting things, please correct and/or add in, folks!):

In my experience and from what I've read, if you're not in a desert situation, techniques like hugelkultur that are raised rather than sunken may work better for you, because you're likely to see a lot more precipitation in a year than the 13 inches that we see here in southeast Arizona, for example. How many inches of annual precipitation do you get there, and how are they distributed through time?

For us, dams and seguias (channels to direct water) from Middle Eastern foggara systems (more great traditional techniques from the Sahel!) combine well with sunken beds full of organic matter -- like modifications of Zuni waffle beds as well as smaller indentations like zai, in different applications -- because we rarely get rain. In certain seasons, though, we get daily rain and some torrential rain, which we need to be able to control and then hold against the long dry times.

For you, you may well need more and better drainage lest you end up with things too soggy. That's where raised beds, especially when full of organic matter, come in.

In various parts of Africa (even some arid parts, if I understand right), this is accomplished by mounding with a hoe in combination with adding organic matter, then planting into the mounds. This may be simpler and more easily accomplished for you than building hugelkultur beds, for example.

From the Penniman book I cited before, there's a good section on "bed forming" that describes a process of smothering existing vegetation (like with tarps temporarily applied, or cardboard or other biodegradable material you intend to remain there and break down over time) and then moving soil from your pathways to your beds. If the ground is currently thick with vegetation like sod, cutting and flipping it, then seeding a cover crop, then coming back and turning all that organic matter into your new raised beds could accomplish much of the addition of organic matter (pp. 130-131). The Ovambo of Northern Namibia add "manure, ashes, termite earth, cattle urine, muck from wetlands, and other organic matter to increase the fertility of their mounds" (Penniman, pp. 74-75).

Your pathways should also help drain and move away floodwater when necessary, functioning like the systems of dikes and canals built to move water away from waterlogged soils e.g. by farmers in the Rio Nunez region of Guinea (p. 141). You could mulch them or plant a cover crop like clover there.

One shared thing here is adding organic matter. The more organic matter you can add to help retain moisture, the less you should have to pump and add groundwater to the system in between rains.

Keeping the ground covered with plants and/or mulch is also important in both situations, to prevent topsoil loss and excessive evaporation as well as to help any floodwater sink in rather than rushing across the land, carrying everything away with it.

Also, what kind of slope are you on? That will help to determine what solutions will work best for you as well.

Sorry for the current obsession with Penniman's book, but it is just so good and inspiring. Highly recommended.

You might be thinking of zaï or tassa, an agricultral system of pits from the western Sahel in Africa. This thread discusses a very similar strategy and this one goes into zai pits a bit. There are other strings around Permies that mention it here and there if you do a search.

I think the original idea is to put compost and other organic matter (manure, whatever you have) in the pits, and you can plant trees in them if you want, or let nature do that for you. The book Farming While Black, by Leah Penniman, has a break-out column on zai that is very interesting. It tells the story of Yacouba Sawadogo of Burkina Faso (in the Sahel, where zai or tassa is traditional), who in the 1980's facing severe drought and deforestation filled zai pits with manure and compost "to attract termites, whose tunnels further decompose the organic matter." The pits helped his millet and sorghum grow, and native trees started to grow out of the zai, "anchor[ing] the soil, buffer[ing] the wind, [...] help[ing to] retain soil moisture[..., and] provid[ing] mulch for the crops and fodder for the livestock. As others adopted Sawadogo's technique, water tables across the Sahel began to rise for the first time in decades" (pp. 80-81 in the Kindle version, which I got through the public library).

I hope that's helpful! What more can you tell us about your project, where you are, and what kind of desert you're working with?

Kim Goodwin wrote:

Lemongrass - These are in our wicking bed, as I read they need constant moisture to grow well.  I started these from some bought at an Asian market.  I can't believe how well they are doing - WAY better than the lemongrass I grew in Oregon.  Apparently, lemongrass likes a lot more sun than it got in my Oregon yard.  When I move them next, I'll put them in more sun.  I don't think they needed the passionvine over the top for shade, though the galangal behind them might still.  The location in the picture is on a north and east wall, and I'm going to attempt to overwinter some in that wicking bed.  Another discovery, fresh lemongrass straight from your garden is so tender!  The main stem is tender and totally edible, unlike the stuff I would buy in stores.  The leaves are prolific and make awesome tea.  I'm also saving leaves for trying some basketry later this year.  Eight plants turns out to be way more than we can eat, but we're enjoying the tea and the other potential uses.

Kim, have you tried freezing your lemongrass? I used to buy big bunches of it fresh from farms in Wisconsin when I lived there, cut it up (with scissors was easiest) into pieces about an inch and a half long, and freeze it in quart-size ziplocs. Then I could take out however many pieces I needed for use later; MUCH higher quality than dried lemongrass, which seems to lose its scent and flavor fast. I regularly added lemongrass, fresh ginger, reishi, and chaga, to my sweet black tea when making kombucha, and this was how I always had the lemongrass on hand. I found it stayed good that way for multiple years. So before your first frost, cut back what you're not moving inside and freeze it! I love lemongrass.

I've wondered why sewing machine sales and repair shops also tend to be vacuum cleaner sales and repair shops, because that is true here in the U.S., too. I just talked to my partner about it, and he suggests that it's because they are household appliances of a similar scale that both have electric motors and may be belt-driven or have some other similar transmission components. But why wouldn't they also sell and repair electric stand mixers (like KitchenAid makes), for example?

Hi, James! I have not tried this -- hopefully others who have will chime in -- but I did find this page on growing blue elderberries, which says, "Propagation: Usually by cuttings, also seed," and "Planting: Place rooted cuttings and seedlings, that are at least one year old, in full sun in well draining soil." It seems to me that it's worth a try, especially if you have a good rooting hormone like willow water to help out, following something like these guidelines. Please let us know how it goes!

Oh, Inge, I love your Koh-i-noor tin of steel pins! That's one of the things I love most about the supplies I inherited from my gramma and grand-nannah. The containers themselves are works of art. I think part of it is just the colors!

Oh, man. But do you suppose it's like this shop I love in Madison, Wisconsin -- the Community Pharmacy cooperative -- where you can call them up (or send them an email) and give them the list of stuff you want (like bulk herbs, safety razor blades, beeswax, I mean they've got everything), and they'll go get it and put it in a box and mail it to you for a reasonable fee??

r ranson wrote:I got some fabric this week.  The shop suggested this was the right kind of fabric for this pattern (she has made four so far).  But.. I don't know.  I'm going to have to trust.  

But at the price they sell wool, I can take the risk.  It's cheaper than most cotton.  I suspect that 50+ years ago, they must have bought out the remnants of an old woollen mill or something.

Wow, where'd you find that good deal on wool fabric?? I have some beautiful, soft and sleek light wool suiting (in pinstripe, woot!!) that I bought at a chic little vintage shop in Brooklyn many years ago, and I love it so much -- plus it was somewhat expensive -- that I've never been able to bring myself to cut it up and try to making anything from it! One of these days I'll make myself a really lovely skirt, so say I. Hopefully there's enough of it for all that!

I'm jealous of your wool skirt project, even though it was such a disappointment getting started with it last year. I'm glad you're keeping us posted!

Thanks for all your wonderfully helpful recommendations, Kate! I do a lot of mending and some other hand sewing, mostly of small things like bags or gifts like girls' dresses or the fabric linings for knitted bags, and some simple embroidery like sashiko. I have a machine but I never use it. I've pieced my first full-size quilt and have yet to quilt it, so I also have curved safety pins on my list for that. (Right?) I'm no expert at any of this, except possibly some forms of mending, just because I've been doing that regularly all my life. Basically I need some high-quality multi-use pins.

Your suggestions are great. I'd forgotten that I had a set of the Clover fine quilting pins on my wish list already, actually!

I saw your recommendation of Mulqueen before but didn't see that they're located in Arizona. That's great. I'll be placing an order with them. I just have to decide how much of my now-loaded shopping cart I actually need... ;) In case anyone else is looking for it like I was, the discount code for notions is "Sewing".

Do you or others know if other brands of glass-head pins that they carry, like Bohin, are any good? (I have to admit, I'm asking because they sell rainbow color sets of Bohin quilting pins, so I could satisfy my neurosis.)

Do folks here have a favorite type of pins and an online source for them that is not Amazon? I'd prefer glass-head pins (assuming these are really glass? are they?) or something like that in different colors without plastic if possible. I've never had really high-quality pins and I'm getting really sick of the crappy ones, but I'm also indescribably OCD about odd things like placing pins in rainbow color order... What can I say? Anyway, I could of course try to wean myself from this odd habit if some kind of non-colored pins are the best, highest quality option. Thanks in advance!

I dug out some of my fabric and sample stash while looking for materials (mostly yarn) to start planning Christmas gifts and remembered some other sources:

Hemp Traders for a really nice selection of hemp fabric, twine, rope, and many other things hemp, including seeds (for eating and planting!) and raw fiber. A full set of 6"x6" (much larger than usual, in my experience) fabric samples/swatches is $25, and I've patched many things with these over the last few years.

Kasper Organics has a variable selection, and I've mostly bought clothing and towels and things from her (Aleta), but sometimes she has fabric and notions -- e.g. right now she has latex-free elastic -- and she's always been wonderful.

Burnley & Trowbridge is the company many recommend for linen and silk thread.

I often use sashiko thread, needles, and thimbles for hand sewing. In the past I've gotten these through Amazon, but I'm definitely boycotting them now, so A Threaded Needle in British Columbia is a good source.

I'm also pretty sure I've confirmed that Organic Cotton Plus (which I mentioned in my previous post) used to be called Cotton Plus, so I've been buying from them for longer than I initially thought. They've been good.

Sorry to be an absent OP for a few days!

Caroline Metzler wrote:Here in southwestern New Mexico I'm growing the following drought-tolerant plants with success: Giant Sacaton (grass, edible seeds), Tepary Beans, Metcalfe perennial beans, Agave, spineless Nopales, and Golden Currant. These are recent experimental plantings, but I'm encouraged with their growth and productivity. The nopales and agaves are super easy. And the Tepary beans are showing a lot of promise — very productive and heat tolerant. Another plant that's doing great, albeit with water, is Styrian Pumpkin. That's the variety that is grown for the seeds, as they're "naked". Another new plant for me, but one that's showing good promise is millet. It's a fast grower and producer, and doesn't need much water. I hope this post adds value for others growing under our harsh desert conditions.

That's a great list. I'd never heard of either Giant Sacaton (grass?) or Metcalfe perennial beans. What part of the former is edible, the seeds? And have you had a chance to eat either of those yet? How are they? I wonder if some of the wild beans we see while hiking in the Chiricahuas are Metcalfe. They certainly seem to come back in the same place year after year. We also see wild tepary beans up there, but those have much smaller leaves than the ones I'm thinking of that always grow on one particular slope.

We've seeded Styrian Pumpkin in with our winter squash landrace last year and this year, but either none of them grew or none of the "naked" genetics won out, I guess. I would love to have some squash/pumpkin seeds that are easier to process into pepitas, but around here everything has to go through the gauntlets of climate, little or no added irrigation, being grown "haphazardly" i.e. without separation distances between types (with the stated goal of developing landraces, although it also just fits our circumstances better), and producing copious large edible whatever such that it really helps fill out our diets. So if the Styrian pumpkins keep getting lost in the mix, that's probably it for them in our system, sadly.

We've thought about growing millet, too. Let us know how the harvest and processing goes!

We've been trying to figure out a good staple grain. We've grown corn, but never successfully in large enough quantities to keep up with our use of masa harina for bread, etc. We keep trying. We've collected and processed seed from the wild Palmer's amaranth, but that's both a bit hit-or-miss and very difficult to thresh, since the seeds seem to blow away as easily as the chaff or more so. We've collected seeds from the sotol (Dasylirion wheeleri) stalks, roasted and ground them. They taste like peanut butter if you don't over-roast them like we did (then they taste like burnt peanut butter, surprise surprise). We've just about worked out a good system of hulling them, then grinding them into flour using the same vintage manual grain mill at two different settings. We hope to collect more seed later this year. I should have included sotol and agave on my original list (thanks for the reminder about agave, Caroline!), since they're perennial, although we haven't gotten any to grow at our main place yet (we forage for this and other slightly higher altitude things at our "mountain place," some land we own a little ways away).

How do you collect and prepare the agave, Caroline? We've struggled with it. For one thing, we go out week after week looking for flowering stalks at just the right point of development, and it seems like it goes "nothing-nothing-nothing-nothing-oops, they're all too far along now." When we do manage to get a young stalk, we roast it in a pit, but with everything all buried in there, it seems really easy to over-roast. A couple years ago it turned completely to ash by the time we pulled it out. (Do you sense a theme here? Yes, we've been known to over-roast multiple things.) Then, if we venture to dig out a "heart," it's a huge undertaking, avoiding the acids, then getting the heart to wherever it will be roasted, etc. And the whole thing kills the whole plant, of course, so given our track record, we've grown increasingly hesitant to try harvesting.

We've started to focus more on sotol because apparently harvesting the flowering stalks doesn't kill the plant like it does agave (although if we were to cut out the heart, that would kill the plant, of course), and the seeds are edible as I mentioned. Has anyone else tried this? The only thing is that it seems even more difficult to pinpoint the exact right time to harvest the tender young sotol stalks than it is for agave stalks, so we haven't tried one yet. We'll probably focus primarily on the seeds as we continue looking for a staple grain.

Back to annuals again for a moment, we've considered trying hemp for seeds to eat as well as fiber. Has anyone else in a similar climate tried that?

Kim Goodwin wrote:I learned from a local that the prickly pear plants here are suffering from a fungus that is wiping out many mature plants.  So it seems like a great time to spread the seeds around and get our own food forest started.

That's interesting. With a year like this, even? Just as a heads up, in the past when we've looked at suffering prickly pear cacti and thought for sure they were dying of a fungus, it turned out it was most likely sunburn. Now we try to mark the orientation of the plants we take pads from and transplant the pads at the same orientation and in similar conditions, and so far that seems to be helping. Also, the variety that we like best for fresh fruit really likes steep south-facing slopes and grows in deep sand, gravel, and rock. When we weren't as careful to imitate those conditions (and their orientation), our pad cuttings did really poorly and looked pale and ughy like mold or something. One even seemed to "melt away" over the course of a single day after it had been growing fine for months. We've also learned that, if they droop to the ground but don't otherwise look too poorly, they might be fine, since it seems like they propagate that way, almost like Egyptian Walking Onions.

Kim Goodwin wrote:To my surprise, I have had so much trouble with growing beans in the desert.  I'm in SW New Mexico, too. Every bean of every type I've put in (except two plants this year) were eaten by something early on, I think a rodent.   They would be gone in the morning.  I tried using little cages, but nothing worked well.  Packrat? Kangaroo rat? Mice? Does anyone else have these problems?

Hmm. If they're getting them when they're really small seedlings, it may well be birds, like Caroline said. We've had birds run off with all kinds of seedlings, even young houseplants that were temporarily outside. If the bean plants are larger when it's happening, it could be cotton rats. We just started getting those, especially in our cowpeas, last year (and our gardens are surrounded by chickenwire, and we place traps regularly -- we just can't keep out or reduce the population 100%, seemingly). They're diurnal, unlike the other rats, and you can hear and see them rustling through the bean foliage during the day. It gives us the creeps because of course we immediately assume a rattlesnake is coming at us through the bean patch (one occasionally gets through the chickenwire). But anyway, they seem to like the beans when they're green as well as the foliage, so if we start to have trouble with them again this year, we're going to pick and eat the cowpeas green in order to keep more for ourselves.

Caroline Metzler wrote:One (new to me) use for the pads of prickly pear/nopal cactus is to place a few pads in the bottom of a planting hole (for a shrub or tree) . Apparently the gel in the cactus holds water for the plant (like a kind of hugelkulture!).

That's such a great idea! We hadn't thought of it and will try it next year -- thanks!

Hi! I've never posted in this part of Permies before, so please forgive and correct me if I'm doing this wrong.

It looks like most books posted about here are instructional. Heaven and Earth isn't, per se: it's literary fiction. But in addition to being a very engrossing and entertaining book, one that really pulled me into the lives lived, it also takes place mostly on an old farm in Puglia that a group of young people transform into a food forest and homestead. Most of the trees -- olive, fig, mulberry, a holly oak, etc. -- are already there when they begin, which is handy. ETA: They're obsessed with One Straw Revolution!

The young people are quite radical and participate in "actions" to do things like free horses about to be slaughtered, try to keep trees from being cut down, etc. I don't want to give away too much, because I want you all to read it! It does deal with some difficult and/or controversial subjects, everything from sex with multiple partners to difficulty conceiving, having family members in prison or on the run, trying to find refuge in the Anthropocene, etc., but I think it does so in a very sensitive and authentic way.

I think some of you might really like it. I certainly did.

Here are the details:

English translation by Anne Milano Appel
Published July 21st 2020 by Pamela Dorman Books (first published May 4th 2018)
Original Title: Divorare il cielo
ISBN: 1984877313 (ISBN13: 9781984877314)

I read the hardcover edition, which has 404 pages.

We don't have a fabric or craft store nearby, so I used to get most things (fabric, zippers, elastic, yarn, floss, books, tools, etc.) at a good thrift store an hour away, before it changed management and then the pandemic arrived.

I've bought fabric from Spoonflower, mostly to support my sister who has designs posted there, but also when I wanted fabric custom-printed with one of my dad's photos for a gift for him. They have organic cotton and such. It's expensive and takes a while to custom-print, so I reserve it for special occasions. I've bought organic cotton and hemp fabrics from places like Organic Cotton Plus, and they sell hemp thread that's on my wish list as well: https://organiccottonplus.com/products/hemp-thread-4. I bought some things from Aurora Silk years ago: https://aurorasilk.com/wp/. I think the other places I've occasionally shopped from are mostly out of business now.

But as Skandi pointed out, ebay can be a really good resource, too. I've bought yarn as well as tools like darners that way. I've done plenty of window shopping on Etsy, but sadly I don't think I've ever actually pressed "buy" on any sewing supplies that way. My sister did get me a really cool leather wrist ruler like this one for a birthday. I almost bought a wooden manual iron/presser on Etsy before my partner made me one instead.

May Lotito wrote:I'd like to share this:
https://dieworkwear.com/2019/01/19/how-we-lost-our-ability-to-mend/

Oh, that's like a love letter to mending, especially with all the great pictures! It's fantastic.

Mending -- especially visible mending -- has gotten very popular on social media the last few years, and now there are a few good books out on it.

One favorite, very basic/beginner in its techniques and explanations but just lovely, is Nina and Sonya Montenegro's Mending Life: A Handbook for Repairing Clothes and Hearts.



A great small-and-concentrated book that focuses on sashiko-style is Jessica Marquez's Make + Mend: sashiko-inspired embroidery projects to customize and repair textiles and decorate your home.



A beautiful, inspiring one with lots of boro style is Katrina Rodabaugh's Mending Matters: Stitch, Patch, and Repair Your Favorite Denim and More.



And a jaw-droppingly gorgeous book of mending as fine art is Claire Wellesley-Smith's Slow Stitch: Mindful and Contemplative Textile Art.



I highly recommend all of these, especially Mending Matters, and all the work that all these women do. (So please follow the links I attached to each of their names if you're interested!)

Dandelions are a dynamic accumulator, right? So they especially would be concentrating the minerals, other constituents, and thereby flavors and aromas of the various layers of your soil, I'd think.

I feel like I've had vegetables that were relatively tasteless/watery when they grew in soil that probably had been over-fertilized, i.e. too much nitrogen, and maybe over-watered as well. It produced lots of growth, but not much flavor. Whereas a good, healthy balanced soil will produce healthy, vigorous plants with more taste, right?

Here's something else to think about: Herbalists, in my experience, say that medicinal herbs grown wild in the desert are very potent, and often smell and taste very strongly (think creosote, for example) because they've had to struggle; sort of like connoisseurs say the best wines are made from grapes from vines that have had to struggle, grow deep roots, etc. But although desert soils tend to be alkaline and very much lacking in moisture, most people say they're actually good soils, right? (I mean, I'm sure that varies a lot from place to place just like any soils, but I've heard that generally.) So hardy desert plants that grow good deep roots and are able to access all that the soil has to offer can accumulate a lot of interesting constituents and have very noticeable tastes, I'd bet.

I would think that the microbes play a large role in the scent and flavor, too; as well as the fungi and mycelia, as someone else noted.

I've been reading James Hamblin's recent book Clean: The New Science of Skin, and he talks a lot about all the things going on in the "volatolome" (the "sort of chemical fingerprint" unique to a living being, specifically each human in the context of the book) that human noses either aren't good enough to pick up on, have forgotten/gotten trained out of how to pick up on, or (he doesn't say this, but this is my theory) do in fact pick up on, informing things like what we call our instinct and intuition but tending not be processed consciously.

With scent being such an important part of flavor, I bet that a lot of components of the flavor of foods from our soils are giving us all sorts of information about the world in our immediate vicinity that we're not consciously aware of. But, with greater awareness and attention, I bet we could learn to read these messages!

We just had a conversation here (offline) about whether we can discern a common flavor to all our food, since almost all we eat comes from our land. We're going to try to pay more attention, but so far we think there's an "earthy bitterness" (less bitterness in some things, like our tepary beans; a little more in some things like our winter squash; more in things like mustard and other greens), in the plants as well as any game (which, yes, also tastes "gamey" -- especially any javelina -- although we only hang as long as it takes to butcher). It's pretty rare for the soil (which does occasionally get directly in our mouths -- there's a lot of wind out here sometimes, and also we tend to pick leaves and eat them while we garden, without running off to rinse them first) to taste mushroomy here, although we have started to observe mycelia in our heavily mulched garden beds, yay!

Kim Goodwin wrote:Beth, I'm constantly blown away at what you manage with just rainwater collection (am I remembering this right?).  It's so impressive either way, because you clearly are working with the land in a very sustainable manner.

Thanks for your kind words! We do have a little bit of greywater from our tub and sink, and we pour our occasional bucket of laundry water into that system, too. But the origin of all water we use is rain, and so because we haven't had nearly enough this year, we are rationing. We bathe frequently in order to water the garden (our "patriotic duty"), but there just isn't enough water for us to do much laundry here, so the system never really "fills up" so that the lines run all the way down to the end. The greywater system feeds most of one garden area, but we have an entire larger garden area that is solely rain- and floodwater-fed. I have some tree seedlings and other pots on the nursery table, and when I hand-water those from the cistern I also top off the olla in the herb bed (technically in the greywater garden but too far from the driplines) and give some water directly to anything in that area that's looking especially parched. Any used water we end up having around, like from boiling pasta or when we clean out the dogs' water bowl, gets fed to trees and things like that. I hope this is alright. No ill effects so far that we can tell.

Kim Goodwin wrote:My husband and I have irrigation from both our laundry greywater and a well. Plus roof and driveway runoff to our garden.  For some reason, this monsoon season has been decent here in our section of the SE Arizona high desert.  Last year was a "non-soon" which was pretty miserable, but this year there was enough rainfall for the toads to spawn and multiply.

That's so strange. You're on the east side of the Chiricahuas? Family and friends I've talked to in Tucson, Camp Verde area, Flagstaff, and the Four Corners have told me they're having no monsoon to speak of there, like here. But we often see clouds above and on the east side of the Chiricahuas; they just never seem to come down to us in the foothills here.

Kim Goodwin wrote:Our desert gardening conditions - our garden is on the east side of the house.  My husband made us a bunch of sunken beds and he lined the paths with rocks.  We've found rocks to be really useful in gardening, as they trap water underneath.  The sunken beds seemed to do double duty - besides trapping water, in the early spring they trapped heat like a little nest on the ground.  This allowed a bunch of frost-sensitive plants to survive late freezes.  I was very surprised by this, as my guess would have been that the sunken beds could make frost pockets.  They did the opposite, as proven by the butternut squashes that came up extremely early from compost buried in the beds.  The squash plants that were about 3-4 inches tall, but were totally below the level of the ground around them survived late freezes.  The ones that poked up above the main ground level got frozen!  This was an awesome accidental experiment.

That's great! I had the opposite happen to me a few years ago. I was growing in Paulden near Prescott. I dug a waffle bed and was growing the three sisters in there. We had a late June surprise deep freeze, and it killed all my little baby bean plants down in their waffles. The pattern of where the frost had settled was quite clear: down in the waffles froze, up above them didn't. But I was in a brand new place and didn't have any compost to spread in the new bed. I bet that compost made a huge difference in your beds!

Kim Goodwin wrote:

Sunroot/Sunchoke - Also seconding Beth's mention of this plant.  (I also count this as a perennial vegetable since it's really hard to get rid of once you plant it. That meets the definition for my purposes.)  Ours is going gangbusters.  It does really really like the deep soaks from that greywater, though.  It just started blooming.  It's about 7 feet tall and 5 feet wide, and that row was created by 5 "crowns" we bought from Azurestandard.com's grocery section, so I don't know the variety.  The jackrabbits trimmed the bottom branches in the early summer, but it didn't slow the plant down.  Instead I noticed it made it easier to see if a rattlesnake is hanging out underneath, so that was nice.  Obviously we haven't harvested it yet, but I've dug at the base a little to see what was going on, and the plants are sending tubers out much further than I thought they would.  There will likely be some under the pathways, I think. Also, this plant attracted a ton of beneficial insects early in the spring - lacewings and all sorts of wasps combed it's leaves.  Very interesting to watch, as there were very few pests on it.  Just one wooly aphid-type insect.

Your sunchokes completely put ours to shame, Kim! They're as tall as your house! I also got mine from Azure Standard, but fall-planted them last year. They were doing really well from when they came up in late winter until late June or so, and almost all that new growth died back, and now they're just the few little scraggly things in the very back of the bed in the first attached picture.

Kim Goodwin wrote:

Shallots - not a perennial, but self-propagating so I'll include it for honorary mention.  Shallots did very well for us this year, while our garlic and leeks bolted and died.  Interestingly, jackrabbits ate the top half of the leaves.  Shallots provided our first green onions of this year, before our standard green onion patch went full tilt.  I like shallot greens a bit better than green onions, as they are sweeter.  I was very impressed with how heat tolerant these were.

I forgot about these! We have some I'itoi's Onions, which are actually shallots. Rodents kept eating back the greens in the spring, and then they went dormant, and I wasn't sure whether or not they'd come back. When we got two good rains in late July, they and the Egyptian Walking Onions threw a party, I mean, threw up a lot of new shoots. But now the I'itoi's are either stalled out or disappearing again without more rain! Still, if we don't lose them altogether this year, I'll be happy.

Kim Goodwin wrote:

Chufa/Tigernut/Earth Almond/Yellow Nutsedge/Nutgrass -

This is my first time growing these in a desert location, but since they are grown commercially in Spain it seemed worth a try.  I have them where they get flooded by the laundry greywater, like the sunroots. I put them in raised rows like I read about in this guide to growing chufa: Detailed guide on how to grow Chufa (Cyperus Esculentus)

This is very exciting; now I have to try this, too! Thanks, Kim!

Kim Goodwin wrote:

Prickly Pear - Just adding another supporting vote for that one!  The fruit is divine.  The variety that grows wild near us tastes just like loganberries.  There are tons of varieties in cultivation and the fruit tastes wildly different.  Some have almost no acidity, whereas others are quite tart.  Some like this wild variety on the east side of the Chiricahuas tastes like raspberries mixed with blackberries, mixed with a little banana, whereas others have a totally different flavor.

We've found lots of difference in taste, too. One that grows just on the south-facing slopes of what we call the tobacco hills that extend out to the southwest of the Chiricahuas (sorry, I can never remember their real name, I think it's something-back) has the most incredible fruits that taste just like a cross between strawberries and cherries. But we discovered this year that they're only good fresh! The jelly is almost tasteless. The fermented juice has a strange savory quality to it that isn't pleasant, and it stays too viscous (other varieties' fermented juice is delicious, and the viscosity usually dissipates during fermentation). The really deeply colored, juice-dripping ones seem to taste much less intense fresh but make much better cooked and fermented products. Experimentation seems to be the name of the game!

Kim Goodwin wrote:Here are two more possibilities for the desert, but they can't tolerate freeze and thus would need to be brought in for the winter and they would likely need greywater or supplemental water to thrive:

[list]Lemongrass - These are in our wicking bed, as I read they need constant moisture to grow well.  I started these from some bought at an Asian market.  I can't believe how well they are doing - WAY better than the lemongrass I grew in Oregon.  Apparently, lemongrass likes a lot more sun than it got in my Oregon yard.  When I move them next, I'll put them in more sun.  I don't think they needed the passionvine over the top for shade, though the galangal behind them might still.  The location in the picture is on a north and east wall, and I'm going to attempt to overwinter some in that wicking bed.  Another discovery, fresh lemongrass straight from your garden is so tender!  The main stem is tender and totally edible, unlike the stuff I would buy in stores.  The leaves are prolific and make awesome tea.  I'm also saving leaves for trying some basketry later this year.  Eight plants turns out to be way more than we can eat, but we're enjoying the tea and the other potential uses.

Ha! I'm trying this for the first time this year, too! I planted some in the ground outside and am keeping some in a pot inside, just to see. None of it is really taking off -- clearly far too dry for it -- but I'm impressed it's not dead. The second picture shows it in the herb bed. I do love that scent and flavor.

Kim Goodwin wrote:

Galangal root - This is a big experiment.  It's in the shade, hidden behind the lemongrass in the wicking bed.  The house is cement block, and so the temperatures are very stable in that little corner.  There is also ginger in there, but the galangal root is doing better.  I believe this is lesser galangal. I bought it off Etsy from a person in Florida.  It had a slow start and hated the direct sun and wind of the late spring when the lemongrass was still small.  The leaves burned in the sun and wind.  But when the lemongrass took off, so did the galangal.  I'm not sure everyone would consider this a "vegetable", since it's very strong flavored and it more of a spice, but it's wonderful thing to have on hand if you like Thai food.  These plants will likely have to come indoors for the winter.  I'm not sure I want to risk any of them outside in our zone 8a..but I might experiment with one.  The growing season for ginger and galangal root is VERY long, and I probably won't have a harvest until next summer, if what I read is correct.  9-12 months growing in the ground...  Makes you appreciate buying it, right?  It's the sort of thing that's worth it if you love Thai food and want it organic.  And if you are in the low desert that rarely freezes, I imagine you wouldn't have to bring them in if you had them in a nice microclimate.

I'd love to try this, too. I have a bit of ginger inside in a pot, and I did have a little baby turmeric plant, but it died... So sad. I love all these flavors, and the plants are so striking too.

Rojer Wisner wrote:To remove the needles, spikes, painful parts from my prickly pears I just boil them for a few minutes and the needs "melt" away.
I would image similar results for these too.

Thanks for that suggestion, Rojer! We've found that does help, and saves a lot of time and energy, as long as we're going to strain the resultant boiled material through a fine cloth afterwards, e.g. boiling fruits to make juice. But unfortunately we have not found this to be foolproof or advisable for cholla flower buds that we'll eat whole. We've gotten glochids in our tongues and tonsils from eating stew with rehydrated and simmered buds before, and I really don't recommend it.

Here is what we do:

We pick the cholla buds into a 5-gallon bucket with tongs. Then we spread them out on a large piece of expanded metal (a former truck bed tool and lumber rack) and sweep them back and forth with a homemade yucca leaf-and-stalk broom (we've found this works much better than a store-bought broom because the yucca leaves are stiffer, but also because this process will wear a store-bought broom down to a nub fast, so using one we can easily replace with materials from our homestead saves the store-bought brooms for sweeping the floor inside). We do this until there are a lot less spines and glochids. It doesn't get rid of all of them, though, as it seems inevitable that some will get knocked off and then get stuck right back into the buds point-first in the process.

At this point, we could pick those stubborn re-offenders out of each bud with pliers, tweezers, and/or fingers, and we do this for any we're going to cook fresh. But for the many gallons of buds we dry for later use, we just put them on the drying rack at this point. When we pull dried buds out of their buckets to rehydrate and cook with later, though, we go through each batch first in strong sunlight and use a knife to pull and flick any remaining spines or glochids out of the dried buds. The dried buds seem to let go of those last tricksy ones more easily, as the buds themselves shrink down to an amazing degree as they dry, leaving the spines more loosely attached.

John Valdes wrote:Cholla?  I had no idea it was useful other than drawing blood.  Great to know part of it can be food!

It's true! We learned this from the Tohono O'odham, who call the buds ciolim (usually pronounced "Chee'-or-lim") and have eaten them for "hundreds if not thousands of years" (they and their ancestors), according to this fascinating write-up by either LocalHarvest or Slow Food (it's unclear).

Are you ready for a long post on the amazing, miraculous cholla?! Here's more from the same source linked above:

Fresh-cooked cholla buds taste like asparagus tips with a zing in the center. After drying and reconstituting they keep their rich vegetable flavors somewhat like artichoke hearts, and some of the tang remains too. Their texture firm on the outer side and soft in the center, with the precious, tasty surprise of the unopened petals and stamens inside. They have a mild vegetable flavor, not very pronounced, with a lemony tang that varies from plant to plant.

Cholla buds are high in calcium (two tablespoons of dried cholla buds contain as much calcium as one glass of milk), and therefore they were traditionally consumed by elders and nursing mothers.  The buds are also rich in the types of soluble fiber, pectins, complex polysaccharides, and carbohydrates thought to help balance blood sugar levels while providing sustained energy. This blood sugar balancing effect may even play a role in the diet of individuals prone to diabetes, particularly the Native population of southern Arizona.

Tohono O'odham Elders report there are several cholla cactus species that can be harvested. Preferences differ between communities.

Buckhorn cholla and staghorn cholla, the most frequently harvested varieties, are rather difficult to differentiate where they occur together. Both have many thin branches arising from the ground or a short trunk. Both species have variable flower colors, ranging from red, yellow, orange, pink, purple, and greenish or brownish, often all in the same local population.

Buckhorn cholla is widespread in the northern Sonoran and Mohave deserts (California, Arizona in the USA) to about 4000 feet (1220 m). Staghorn cholla is restricted to Pinal, Santa Cruz, and eastern Pima counties in Arizona and northern Sonora, Mexico, at 2000 to 3000 feet (600-900 m) elevation. The season for picking ciolim is before the buds have turned to flowers-- mid-April to end of May. (For more information see the book [/i]I'toi's Garden: Tohono O'odham Food Traditions[/i]).

This year we collected the buds from May 12th through May 22nd, according to my notes, although it sure seemed longer than that.

We have more than one variety of cholla here. We believe the one we harvest buds from is buckhorn (Cylindropuntia acanthocarpa), and ours flower fuchsia-to-purple and produce bright lemon-yellow fruits.





The fruits are also edible, but even more mucilaginous than prickly pear fruit can be. They're very cooling and blood sugar stabilizing (in my case this sometimes reads as "lowering excessively," for both raw prickly pear and raw cholla fruit) and shouldn't be eaten in excess, and their glochids are particularly hard to remove because they emerge from indentations in the fruit.

We prefer the fruit of the pencil cholla (we have a disagreement about which variety this is -- I think it's actually the one commonly called Christmas cholla, Cylindropuntia leptocaulis), which I would describe as deep pink-apricot rather than red. They're much smaller, but the glochids are easier to remove.



Both fruits taste a lot like citrus. The Christmas cholla fruit make delicious jelly and jam, although it does take quite a bit of work to get to that point.

Charles Kane says in Sonoran Desert Food Plants that "immature and non-woody joints can also be de-thorned/roasted and eaten" (p. 17), but I have a hard time imagining how you'd remove all the very many spines that the joints have, and we haven't tried this. He notes that "the pulp material" -- and by this I think he means of any above-ground portion of the plant, much like prickly pear -- "has blood sugar stabilizing and cholesterol lowering effects."

All above-ground parts of both Opuntia and Cylindropuntia species are "tart-slime," as Kane describes it. I believe this demulcent quality is the cause of their health effects. Anyway, if that's not your thing, cooking them reduces (but, in our experience, does not totally eliminate) this aspect.

We don't usually go around digging up cholla -- we do propagate them by stem/joint-cuttings -- but if a storm or animal takes out a section connected to the ground and you catch it pretty quick, you could dig up some of the root, especially if it's chainfruit cholla (Cylindropuntia fulgida). It's referenced in both Kane's Medicinal Plants of the American Southwest (p. 153) and John Slattery's new book Southwest Medicinal Plants (p. 120-122) as a mild diuretic and urinary tract remedy (a tea of the roots).

The latter book also calls the stems a "traditional topical remedy, dried and powdered and placed on sores, wounds, and boils. The Seri of northern Mexico employ the boiled pulp of the stems as a "heart medicine" and use the fruits as a remedy for diarrhea and shortness of breath; I learned firsthand from them how the fruit pulp, eaten fresh, can prevent imminent heatstroke and have employed it several times since" (p. 120).

Slattery also says the "dry flowers are taken as a tea to help repair tissue. They contain an abundance of flavonoids, each species varying somewhat in their content or variety of nutrients (perhaps relative to flower color). The tea is soothing and cooling to irritated and burned skin, and its antioxidant qualities help to heal digestive tract tissue" (p. 122).

Both medicinal books also mention using the black sap or gum that exudes from joints as both food and medicine.

We haven't tried any of the medicinal uses of the plant but have noted the cooling and blood sugar affecting qualities of the fruit especially.

Another perennial vegetable I thought of after my original post is the perennial variety of devil's claw, Proboscidea althaeifolia. Unfortunately we haven't gotten our hands on any seeds or starts of this yet, but we try every year to grow quite a bit of the annual variety, Proboscidea parviflora. We're still figuring out how best to increase their germination rates, so the number of plants we actually end up with in a given year varies quite a bit so far. We pick the fruits when they're immature and tender all the way through, before they start to get woody, and cook and eat them (or pickle them) like okra. The year before last we produced so many that we started drying them by cutting them in half (otherwise they continue to ripen and turn woody) and hanging them in bunches from the rafters, and we're still rehydrating and eating those, mostly in soups and stews. For the fiber artists out there, once they ripen, turn woody, and split open (and then I think they need to be buried temporarily in order to turn black -- otherwise they're kind of tan-grey), then they can be used in basketry as a contrast color to beargrass, yucca, etc.

Dustin Rhodes wrote:I have never heard of eating yucca blossoms - can you describe the flavor and how they're cooked/used in dishes?

Sure! When they're fresh in season and sautéed, they taste primarily floral and a little bitter from the saponins. When they've been dried and reconstituted, those two flavors diminish somewhat, and they taste (to us) almost a little mushroom-y. My goodness, though, when we open up that five gallon bucket of dried yucca blossoms to grab a handful, the floral scent is overwhelming and intoxicating, fruity almost like pineapple. We either sauté them or add them to soups and stews. Once they're sautéed, sometimes we put them on pizzas; otherwise we usually sauté them with other vegetables and maybe season them with a Mexican seasoning blend or something like that. They're definitely a favorite.

Hi, everyone! We've been having the worst monsoon season in living memory here in southeast Arizona, and our greenies have really suffered. BUT we still have a surprising amount of food growing. This year has not only shown us the resilience of some of our systems; it has also shown us how much our efforts to slow down and spread what little water we do get are starting to pay off. The mesquite trees on our land are doing better and produced (pods) much more heavily than anywhere around us.

These conditions also make clear the importance of having a heavy balance of desert-hardy perennials in the rotation, especially the ones with good solid root systems. So I'm starting this thread to discuss which ones have been working best for us so far and in the hope that others will have more ideas for us to try moving forward.

Here are things that have been working really well for us so far:

Cholla flower buds from Cylindropuntia spp. (first pic below)

Yucca blossoms from Yucca elata (second pic below)

Nopales from Opuntia spp. (third pic below)

Perennial arugula (fourth pic below, and background of fifth)

Egyptian walking onions (fifth/attached pic below)

Chiltepines (Capsicum annuum var. glabriusculum; sixth/attached pic below)

Right now we harvest and dry quite a bit of cholla buds and yucca blossoms. This year we ate a lot of nopales fresh in season and dried a bit, and we definitely want to increase this. The perennial arugula was a surprise -- I had seeded sylvetta and had no idea that some varieties are perennial -- and doesn't produce a huge bulk of greens, but it produces for more of the year and is a lovely fresh accent to our food. In the spring it produces enough to make a great spicy pesto along with some other mustard family greens. The EWOs suffer greatly in the dry heat, but they put out a flush of new growth with just two decent monsoon rains and seem to be holding on well now despite very little more rain. The chiltepines are still getting established as we continue to add more, but they're true desert plants with seemingly miraculous regenerative abilities.

Here are some things that seem to be working OK:

Sunchokes (first year, did really well until recently)

Horseradish (this was doing really well, but has disappeared now -- I'm still hoping it comes back from the roots)

Not true perennials, but can be grown like them, and do OK:

Garlic (hopefully this will do a bit better as our soil improves)

Perennial but might not make it through our winters:

Jicama (could potentially still grow as annuals)

Palo verde beans (immature pods like edamame, dry beans like other dry beans)

New Mexico locust blossoms (Robinia neomexicana -- ONLY FLOWERS, other parts are toxic)

Fruits are a different story, and this may not be the best thread for them, but just to have them listed somewhere, here are the best for us so far:

Prickly pear fruits

Wolfberries (Lyceum berlandieri and pallidum)

Hackberries (Celtis spp.)

Mulberries (ours are still getting established, but they do really well around here)

Elderberries (ditto)

Jujubes (ditto)

Arizona/Canyon grapes (grow OK higher up and wetter but I can't eat them -- we planted a hybrid of table grapes and wild grapes last fall that we're trying out and I'll report back, it started to fruit this year but lost all the baby grapes to the drought)

I'm not sure whether or not to consider mesquite a perennial vegetable because we grind most of the pods into sweet flour and use them as a combination of staple crop (to make bread) and sweetener (boiling the pods and then concentrating the liquid down into something like molasses) as well as making a bit of beer, but it's one of our major food crops as well as trees and shrubs in our landscape. Similarly acorns from our local Emory oaks (Quercus emoryi), and Arizona walnuts (Juglans major; I do harvest some in the immature green stage, but to make a liqueur as a flavoring), but both do well around here in smaller numbers in wetter areas.

Growing Food in the Southwest Mountains, by Lisa Rayner, is a really good resource with lists of plants, although at our elevation (~4,340 ft.), lower latitude, and with less rainfall than places like Flagstaff where she is even in a good year, less of her great suggestions apply to us. Does anyone know of any other good resources, especially if they might be more targeted to a climate like ours? Are there any good resources for places like northern Sonora or southern New Mexico or even west Texas, some of which is very similar to us? Some patches of California aren't too dissimilar either.

Hi, Daron! I'm definitely not an expert, but I started winter stratifying seeds outside on a table last fall, with germination results about what you said you'd like. We have an outdoor kitchen of sorts with a large table (actually an old steel door on legs) in it. Its roof is a slatted metal gate to which we've wired the solar panels that power our outdoor cooler. So the table gets dappled shade almost like it's under a tree. We also attached some corrugated roofing metal to the west side of the enclosure to keep the strongest afternoon sun from heating up the cooler, and that protects the plants on the tables as well. Of course that afternoon sun isn't such a big deal in January, but by March or April it can already be a problem here where we are.

I started out with the seedling pots sitting directly on this table, watering them moderately, but eventually -- in the spring when some started to germinate -- rodents figured out how to get on the table, and then birds started to peck off anything from leaves to whole plants. I ended up crafting two hanging shelves wired to the roof of the outdoor kitchen, with low barriers around each of them to keep things from falling off. That kept them out of the rodents' reach, and it also makes things a little harder for the birds because there's not that much vertical space for them to fly in there and do damage. Sometimes we also do things like put old window screens over a tray or set of pots to keep birds off of particularly vulnerable pots, but eventually growing foliage means we have to remove these.

I'd attach pictures, but really none of this is very attractive, as it's all scrounged from our resource pile. But it's worked relatively well for us. I don't know how your rodent and bird pressure is there. Here it can get pretty intense when not much else is growing in the dry, windy heat of the late spring and early summer (as well as now, when our world should be relatively jungle-y, since our monsoon is the worst in anyone's memory). Ideally I'd create a more permanent and stable hanging shelf for our set-up and find some better solutions for non-invasive bird-proof coverings as needed.

Hey, Priscilla, how are you? How is your project going now? So sorry to read of and see the flooding, yikes.

This may not be the right thread for this question, but I've been reading Leah Penniman's Farming While Black and she has a sidebar on the Haitian konbit communal labor practice, in which "typically 3 to 15 individuals [...] take turns hosting work events on their respective farms," with shared meals, and music for more challenging tasks. Is that still a common practice where you are?

I've been thinking about how useful kits/pouches/roll-ups like these are, and how I'd like to make one for things like art tools to take on hikes/walks and one for tools like wrenches and such. The latter would be especially useful if it could either be rolled up to transport or placed over the top of a 5-gallon bucket. Maybe one for gardening tools and another for the wrenches, hammers, screwdrivers, etc. (I already have a pre-made one of these in/on a bucket for gardening tools, but because it's so handy I end up cramming a lot of my wrenches etc. in there too and then it's too heavy to lug around practically, so I'd like to make another).

Ten Thousand Villages sells this beautiful artist tool roll-up pouch from Prokritee in Bangladesh (pic below is theirs). I can't find a pattern exactly like it just yet, but I'd like to imitate it. (I think buying one to support them would also be a very good option if money was currently available.)



This paint brush roll-up organizer seems like it has some, but not all, of the elements I'd want for carrying art tools (pic below is theirs).



I found this tutorial to make a tool roll-up from the leg of an old pair of jeans (pic below is theirs). That seems pretty great, although I might add a couple more bells and whistles like a flap to make it go over a bucket and maybe some shorter pockets with snaps for small collections of screws and such-like.



I have an aversion to video tutorials because our internet connection is so slow and because, even when I can get them to load, it's rare that I can find a quiet, private time (i.e. when there aren't too many other sounds in the house to be able to hear) to watch my backlog of video tutorials. So for me, your basic pictorial tutorial is preferable, especially because I can print the page to PDF and save it offline to reference when our internet inevitably conks out. All this is to say that I tend to automatically screen out videos, but if others find good ones, please share!

I just noticed that the November/Fall 2019 issue of Piecework features a housewife sewing pattern (I found it on RBdigital through my library), and the magazine's parent company also sells a "Col. Fitzwilliam's Huswife Knitting Pattern" for the less sewing-inclined among us.

Great find, Carla! The Fall 2020 issue of Piecework on mending is out now! ETA: If your public library gives you access to RBdigital, see if you can check out the issue that way like I did. It looks like a fun issue! I'm especially excited about the article on kantha. I grew up in Bangladesh, calling it (the art) or them (the quilts) nakshi kantha, and love this method and these textiles. It's not at all dissimilar from sashiko and boro, although the stitches used are less often straight stitches as far as I can tell. Anyway, old saris are layered up and stitched together much like the zokin cleaning cloths in Japan that r mentions in her wonderful cleaning ebook. When I was little, I always escaped from our yard into the neighboring bari, and among the many things I loved watching was groups of women stitching these quilts (I also loved watching them make roti on special pans sort of like Mexican comals on their most-wonderful and obsession-worthy earthen stoves, especially since they always gave me some roti to eat).

Sorry to continue the tangent, but that looks great, Jay! I've found Atsushi Futatsuya's tutorials to be very helpful. Here's one on sashiko stitching using a sashiko thimble below. For mending something thicker like denim or where you've got multiple layers of fabric because you're patching, everything is stiffer and more difficult to wiggle back and forth like he demonstrates, but the use of the thimble -- although he uses a metal thimble, not a leather one -- is about the same:


Can you see the way he pushes the needle with the top of his palm (like, you know, where so many of my garden tool calluses are), where the thimble rests against it at the base of his finger? If you can't see it clearly, try this other video of his.
[Edited to correct the name of which of the family I believe does the sashiko tutorials.]

I didn't make my "hussif," but here's what I use (constantly, everywhere I go, which -- along with the fact that we live in a place of blowing dust -- is why it's all pretty dingy despite my attempts to keep it clean): a Piddleloop large box bag set that I bought about 10 years ago. These days I would probably try to make myself one, but really, the Piddleloop folx make fine bags that last a long time. I took most everything out of it, laid things out on my desk, and put it all back in again so y'all can see what I keep handy in it. (Believe it or not, I did take a small bag's worth of less necessary stuff out of it for this "photoshoot," because for a while I hadn't been able to zip it shut.)

This is the bag I use for hand-sewing, mending, darning, and embroidery (I have another bag for knitting and crochet, and I use others to contain drop spindle spinning projects to keep them clean and less tangled, and those all have their own sets of tools). So there's:

a lot of embroidery thread, darning thread, button thread, sewing thread, etc. in lots of colors;

a pincushion;

fabric scissors, pinking shears, and embroidery scissors (those are hiding in the side pocket);

a protractor, circle stencil, and lots of different marking tools for sashiko marking (there was a compass, but it broke and I haven't yet fixed it);

a darning egg (one of several I have, but this one was my gramma's or grand-nannah's);

a double-ended wooden pressing "iron" and corner-pusher-outer my partner carved for me;

several seam-rippers;

a wax crayon for lubricating zippers;

a zipper;

a few scraps of fabric for patching;

several different kinds of needles, including a bunch of sashiko needles in the corked plastic case;

safety pins;

a needle threader (attached to the zipper of the pouch);

a metal ring thimble and my favorite leather ring thimble;

a wrist ruler (and there are a couple other tape measures in the round leather pouch under the thread); and

a bag of small buttons.

That round leather pouch was made for me by a young friend about 12 years ago -- she was 11 at the time -- and is extremely handy, just a round of deerskin with a rawhide cord threaded all around the outside to draw it shut. She threaded some beads and things on the ends of the knotted cord. It makes a fine sewing kit on its own with less stuff in it so it can be drawn all the way shut. The wooden needle case standing up inside there has lived in it since she gave it to me and I used it as my primary kit (I think I found the case at a vintage odds-n-ends store near there that same summer).

Jay Angler wrote: don't know about "r", but I'd definitely be interested in both (picture and pattern - ideally put a ruler on the pattern so we can scale based on how it prints if I decide to print it). I use a thimble, but found I had to use it on my ring finger because it interfered with other steps if it was on my middle finger, but even that was a compromise, and the same thimble won't fit both fingers! I don't mind machine sewing, but there are always situations where hand-sewing is the better option.
Thanks J.

Sure, hopefully these below are helpful! (This site also describes how to use one, with pictures.)

I don’t know how much you love your horn thimble and that particular (over-the-finger-tip) type of thimble, but if you’re not too attached, consider this: The more time I spend hand-sewing (and I’ve always preferred it to machine sewing), the more enamored I become of the Japanese sashiko-style ring thimble that slides down your middle finger and protects the pad at the base of it so that you can push from there instead of a finger tip. I find it increases my speed and dexterity quite a bit for the running stitch or any straight stitch once I get used to the different method. I prefer the leather type to the metal type. When my first one wore through, we discovered that it could be used as a template to cut a new one from an old boot. They’re tied with a piece of elastic string, so they’re easily adjustable to your finger diameter. I can send a picture and/or a drawing of the shape to cut out later today or tomorrow if you’re interested, r!

That's great! We use old rancid/oxidized vegetable oil as part of the process of burnishing unglazed pottery made from our native clay, and it works well for that, too. The oil burns off in the firing.