Hello from southern Mexico

Hi,
I didn't spot the introductions forum when I joined a few weeks ago. My name is Melissa.

I've known about permies.com and the forum for a long long time, but when they first came onto my radar, sometime around the turn of this century, I was very active in two other old-school (not that they were old school at the time) forums and decided that there wasn't room for another forum in my life. Well, neither of those other two forums have survived the social media shift and after listening to one of Paul's podcasts, I felt the need to comment, so I decided to join up.
I used to be quite the forum junky so this is dangerous, but I've committed to NOT setting up access on my smartphone so that will limit my ability to while away the hours on here.

So, about me, I'm originally from Iowa, in the USA, but I've been living in the state of Oaxaca in Southern Mexico since 1998. I teach English as a Foreign Language at a small engineering college here. My father grew up on an old fashioned farm in northwest Iowa, think little farmer boy type thing where they produced a little bit of a lot of different things, my uncle transformed it into a small dairy operation of about 75 cows, none of his children went into farming and the land that had been homesteaded by our family in 1881 was sold at auction in 1996. My mom grew up in a tiny town where her father was a welder/blacksmith repairing farm machinery. They had a large town lot with fruit trees and a huge kitchen garden. While I grew up in a suburb of Des Moines Iowa, in a very typical suburban lifestyle of the 80s, ruralness and growing food were still very much a part of it. And I was absolutely obsessed with the Little House on the Praire books as a child.
So it wasn't much of a stretch for me to get into permaculture as an adult. When I decided to stay in this semi-arid region of Mexico, I started looking for how I could grow things here. That lead me to Toby Hemenway's classic Gaia's Garden in 2002, then to the work of Art Ludwig and Brad Lancaster. I've never done a PDC, and don't plan to, as I don't feel the need to have a credential, though find the idea of PEP badges attractive and would like to do them together with my son who is about to turn 12.  I've read tons, watched tons of videos, and listen to tons of podcasts about permaculture.
My house is on a tiny "urban" lot in the edge of a town of about 50,000, it's a row house in an estate that the Mexican government makes available through guaranteed mortgages for people with stable jobs.  The lot is only 5 meters by 20 meters but I've managed to grow a fair amount of food on it.
My husband's family comes from a traditional communal agricultural village and has masses of land about 90 minutes drive away. We've built a tiny stone and adobe house there, and have to keep planting the milpa (corn, beans, and squash) if we want to retain the land, otherwise, the village council can take it away and re-assign it to someone else in the village. I know a lot of people won't like the sound of that--but I love it, especially after seeing how sad my Dad was when his older brother sold off our family farm. I would have maybe been interested in taking on part of it, the houses, barns, and a few acres that were meaningful to the family, but because it was private property belonging to my uncle, I would have had to buy it from him, and I did not have the means to do that at 23. I love the fact that my children can not sell off the land on their father's side, and if they don't want to work it, one of their cousins could step just because they were born in the line that has always lived there. (Of course, I know that my family's family farm was originally stolen from the rightful stewards of the land).
Currently, we are in a program to reforest some of the village land which was drastically degraded by the repercussions of the "green revolution" of the mid-1900s, which arrived here in the 60s and 70s.
My interests are in landscape restoration, rainwater harvesting, dryland agriculture. Here are a couple of photos.

My daughters in the milpa at harvest time

Young milpa with our village house in the background

Dragon fruit bloom in my tiny urban lot

Welcome Melissa! I enjoyed reading about your New Year's celebration, it sounds like a great place.
I live a bit south of you (southern Brazil) on a similar-sized plot of urban land (7x26 m in a suburb of a state capital with 4 million people) and it's amazing what we can squeeze out of this little plot of land. I look forward to seeing what you're doing!

Thanks, I think I got the photos fixed.

I've found vertical is the key for growing in small spaces. We have tree that also holds our chayote and dragon fruit vines.

Welcome Melissa!

great photos of the milpa


I can only imagine all of the varieties of corn which are grown in your village. I recently heard about corn which fixes nitrogen.  https://www.amazinglife.bio/post/olot%C3%B3n-the-nitrogen-fixing-corn-from-mexico


Any chance you are growing something similar?

Do you have any photos of your stone adobe house you can share?

Have any corn processing experience to share on here?

I myself grow about 130 dent corn plants and mostly cook it into whole nixtamal.

Our corn is a red and white mix. We don't grow tons of it since we have day jobs, it's a hobby.  About half of what we harvest goes to the village for the tortillas and pozole for the festival, as the tradition is to feed anyone who comes or the celebration (Nov. 24th if you want to plan a trip!) the other half will be made into tortillas for us, but nowhere near enough to cover our tortilla eating or the year.
All processing is done by hand. Again, as its not a huge amount.