Lif Strand

I've been thinking lately about pine needle tea, especially since so many local trees are dying from drought and beetle infestation. I have read contradictory information about already brown needles, so I plan to test fresh vs brown to see what the difference might be, taste-wise.

Pine needle tea is supposed to be rich in Vit C (more than citrus!) and Vit A, as well as other nutrients. Another bonus is that harvesting pine needles doesn't disturb the roots or the flowering/seeding parts. Not only that, but as long as there are pinon pines on/near my property, I'll have an year-round tea source for free.

While I generally am less than thrilled about teas, I do think about the price of coffee and the potential for unavailability the way things are going these days. Seems to me I could learn to drink tea.

Hank Fletcher wrote:
I ride 30 mile roundtrip to go to the grocery store. I have ridden 200 mile one day rides carrying groceries home with the last 30-50 miles, simply because they were on sale and I wanted them. I structured the ride around being able to get one of their nearest stores so I could buy the sale.

It's all about the wanton desire. You can get in shape for doing anything you want to do, you just have to want it bad enough.

I guess I don't have the desire. If I was only going to town for the groceries, that might be one thing, but my every-other-week restocking fills up the back seat of my car or the bed of my pickup depending on what I'm restocking. But even if I could juggle my budget to buy in even bigger loads so I'd only need to drive a vehicle once a month or even less, it would take me a year to become fit enough to ride a bike in that terrain. It's not 30 miles with mild hills, it's 30 miles of multiple steep 1000' climbs between 7000' - 8000'. The people I see biking it are either decked out in special gear and often have support vehicles following them, or they're pushing their bikes up those 'hills'.  You sound like you could do it with a load of groceries, but as a senior citizen who's not even thrown my leg over a bicycle in probably 25 years, and given the weather extremes here in the high country of western NM, it's not particularly enticing an idea for me.

My desire level is more the idea of biking out to the mailboxes and back. Crappy gravel road, but there's only a 300' altitude difference to deal with, and it's only a ten mile round trip. Now all I have to do is get serious enough to find a bike to do it on!

EDITED TO ADD: Note that I used to endurance race horses 50 and 100 mile trails over rough terrain. I'm not a stranger to what it takes to prep for that kind of physical exertation. But that was then and I'm not the person I was anymore. These days I'm happy I can jog 3 miles on my own two feet.

I would love to use a bicycle, but it would be a challenge for me. Aside from the challenge of taking up bicycling at 7000' altitude, I have nowhere reasonably close to go with a bike except to the cluster mailbox, a10 mi round trip over a gravel road. If I wanted to go to a store - any store except for a sometimes-open rock shop near the mailboxes - it would be a 60+ mile round trip with little carrying capacity.

Bicycles are great for cities and for fun, but not as useful for routine transportation in extremely rural areas like where I live. Even so, I would still love to ride a bicycle out to the mailboxes and back. I keep looking at bikes in the local swap groups, just in case one would pop up that didn't have a million gears and fancy suspension and all that. A sturdy three-speed built for gravel roads, with a basket on it for carrying mail ,would be perfect.  Unfortunately I know nothing about bikes (last one I owned and rode - 30 years ago - was a street bike that was terrible on dirt roads.

Many people don't truly see what's around them. They look at the trail immediately in front of them, maybe at a bird in a tree that they hear - but they don't look near + far, in front + to the side + behind.  They don't pay attention to the sky - where the sun is, what the sky looks like above and in the four directions in the distance.  Many people don't pick a point to head for (like a mountain top, or a tall dead tree, something easy to find again if they lose view of it temporarily), and they don't do it every time they are moving in the wilderness. Even when they're on a clear trail. So many people just go any which way, so of course they don't know how to get back to where they came from..

It's stunning to me how many people have no clue where north is. To me I'm always subconsciously aware of compass directions.
It's equally stunning to me how many people don't look to see what the view behind them is. I mean, when you want to go back, it's nice to know what going back will look like.

Too many people in the wilderness think of themselves as the center of the universe where everything revolves around them, when in fact they are motes moving through an infinite universe and it is each person's responsibility to understand where their place is in that universe by paying attention to their surroundings as they go.

Gordon Longfoot wrote:
There were prairie dogs in our front field before we moved to our farm. This was out in Springerville.

Are you still in Springerville? If so, that would explain why your conditions seem so similar to mine, because I live in NM 30 miles east of Springerville! And if you are still there and that's what all your posts are about, your experiences will be super valuable for me and the tough growing conditions of this area!

Jeremy Baker wrote:Our neighbors use trench gardening in the southern AZ. They love it for plants that are not “desert” plants. They dig down about a foot then toss a bunch of weeds, grass, and organic matter in the bottom. Then they replace some of the topsoil and plant herbs, vegetables, or berries.

Anything I plant in the ground has to have the hole lined with metal screen for critter protection (gophers, moles, even prairie dogs). Everything is so hungry around here because of the drought that even the rusty water troughs I used to plant in won't work - the critters somehow get through the rust places. This year I'm going to try planting in straw bales that are on top of metal roofing panels PLUS will have metal screen on the sides. I can't even get angry about the loss of my garden knowing that starvation desperation is driving them.

Climate change changes everything.

Gordon Longfoot wrote:Petty much everywhere you look there's dead bushes or a mix of red dirt and sand.

Looks like you're over 5000' altitude, more like where I live in NM - 7000' and near the NM/AZ border. I recognize that red sandy soil!  

I've had so much gardening failure over the years that if I was way more rational than I am, I'd have given up years ago. One frustration is that the gardening solutions for even low desert don't apply here. The altitude changes so much, meaning that it's not just wind to deal with, but also extreme temperature fluctuations on a daily basis, poor soil, severe water shortages, and a short growing season.

There are some amazing solutions, though, and for that I look at high desert solutions elsewhere in the world, and also historical gardening solutions that are specific to these very specific conditions. The greatest success seems to come from creating microclimate zones and historically this has included terracing (which,  when there weren't any slopes to terrace, were created by digging deep pits and terracing the sides); irrigation systems, crops that were adapted to high altitude extremes, and intense soil management.  

Check out trench gardens, African Zai pit gardening, sunken beds, and traditional  Zuni waffle gardening. Ancient Incan pit gardens were hundreds of feet deep for community gardening, but 1-2 foot deep pits will work just fine for individual farms, too.  

Also, check out rock gardening - where rocks are thermal balancers and mulch all at once!

Finally, check out high prairie gardening as well if your area isn't as extreme as mine, e.g. https://www.theprairiehomestead.com/2015/05/desert-gardening.html

Jay Angler wrote: I didn't have to meet the cops, but I sometimes carry collapsible chopsticks with me.  

Oooh, I had to look online for collapsible chopsticks - do you have metal or wooden? I see some that are bamboo on the food end, stainless steel on the hand end. I never knew there were so many choices!

I remember my first flights across the country on a commercial plane, coast-to-coast nonstop. I loved flying then. Unfortunately that love turned sour and now it's been 20 years or more since I've flown anywhere.

The airlines changed my mind about the flying experience with increased "hub-and-spoke" stops, and with smaller seats. I've never liked being in crowds and the whole rush in airports and then being trapped in seats between people was torture for me.  I still flew, though - going to warm places when it was brutally cold at home, and being with family or friends, too, was a treat I'd suffer flying for.

But then came 9/11 and TSA. The addition of security and its absurdity and indignities, plus the need to show up at airports hours before a flight was just too much. I already live 3 hours from the closest major airport and because my flights were so artificially long (more and more layovers added), I'd be putting in 12 hours or more of travel before I even landed at my destination.  After that I figured I'd rather drive in my own car with all the stuff I'd like to have with me no matter how long it took, rather than spend a whole day traveling and a second day cranky as I recovered from traveling.

Driving did rule out flying to tropical islands in the winter, though.

Even before there were strict carry-on limits, I started shipping my clothes via USPS or UPS depending on where I was going. Shipping meant I didn't have to fight the people who carry on all their huge suitcases and claim all the space the overhead storage, and I didn't  have to deal with hunting for my own suitcases after landing, when inevitably it was the middle of the night and I was exhausted.  My carry on bag was small, only as much as would fit under a seat - easy access to it plus no worries about no overhead space. To me not having to deal with luggage was worth the extra cost, plus I liked having my stuff waiting for me at my destination because  I shipped far enough in advance to already know it was there.

Note that my current feelings are because my flying experience started in a time when I could buy a ticket right at the airport in Boston or NY at the last minute, hop on a plane, stretch out with elbow room, get a nice meal, and end up in CA with enough time to go out to dinner and party after with friends. I didn't have to buy a first class ticket for that, either! Paying more for being treated like cattle on the way to the slaughterhouse does not appeal to me these days.

There were some really wet winters in the central California coastal areas in the 1980s. We lived in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains east of Freedom CA, which were covered with Monterey pines and eucalyptus trees all 75 ft. and more tall.

The pines have really shallow roots, and during one particular storm we could see the ground moving as the trunks of the huge trees swayed in the wind. Our horses were freaked out. I went out to calm down one of our Arabian stallions, and was standing next to him in his pen when suddenly a two-foot diameter tree trunk was laying on top of the metal fence panel inches from my shoulder. The tree had fallen so silently that we had no warning. The stallion and I simply stood there, trying to comprehend what had just happened. To this day I have no memory of any sound but the wind, though the top rail of the fence panel was deeply bent!

That was a near miss, for sure, but we put off taking down the pines that were too close to structures until one fell down on a single-wide mobile home during another storm. Luckily no one was hurt in that incident either. Lesson learned: clear the land of trees near structures, no matter how much you think you need shade on your roof.

(Kudos to Powder River for their equine fence panels that we hauled all the way to New Mexico when we moved, because they were too good to leave behind).