Craftsy

Are you a fan of Craftsy? I’ve spent enough time on there to warrant the full expression: fanatic.

I’m sure I’ve mentioned my lust for learning: the multiple 4-year degrees that I dragged out to 6 or 8 years just for the joy of taking classes, the online writing courses, the annual art retreat… those were the days. Unfortunately, education is exceedingly expensive, and taking classes just for fun has gone beyond the reach of my fixed income.

 

Thankfully I can afford Craftsy. As you can see from my course list, I’ve gone a bit overboard in signups. Mainly because they keep having sales!

 

I've managed a bit of weird, wobbly crochet, thanks to talented instructors Vickie Howell and Linda Permann.  

I know, I said I did not need any new hobbies! I was wrong. Between crochet and quilting, I’ve had a nice break from sewing.

 

Katrina

Lost and Found - Part 7

Here at last is my final found treasure. It’s a small booklet that I found hidden between two books at an antique store. I am amazed that after 88 years, such a small, ephemeral item still survives, and in quite good condition.

 

This is an example of a time-honored tradition, the church cookbook. In 1925, the Phoenix Central Christian Church Women put together this booklet and sold it at 25 cents each for the church.

There are several pages of household hints, many of which were new to me.

 

Imagine using crystallized cyanide for ant control! And putting your ostrich plumes in the oven to get them to curl. (But watch carefully so they don’t burn!)

 

 

The advertisements are short, simple, and appealing.

Check out the gorgeous typeface for JC Penneys. And the illustration for Pilcher Optical could fit right in to Dr. Eckleburg’s billboard in The Great Gatsby.

On another page is a barber shop that offers marcelling for $1 and permanent waves for $15.

 

Finally we come to the recipes, and there are a lot of them. It looks as though the editor wisely decided that every submission should be included, rather than trying to select one or two from each category.

Thus there are five recipes for Gingerbread, eight for Devil’s Food Cake (!), and other similar multiples throughout the book.

It’s interesting that many recipes omit the actual cooking or baking instructions. Also, there are no oven temperatures.  A slow, moderate, or quick oven were the options, if any guidance was provided.

A recipe that no church cookbook should be without is, of course, the Bible Cake.

  

Another special find was inserted between the pages – a map of Phoenix dated April 1924. I find it utterly amazing to see the entire city squeezed into a tiny space that we consider a small part of the downtown area today.

 

The quaint charm of this map will probably be more apparent when you see the difference between Phoenix of the 1920s and Phoenix today:

The tiny black spot on the map on the left corresponds to the 1924 map above.

 

This amazing piece of history is the last of my found treasures, for the time being.

Have you discovered any treasures recently?

 

Katrina

Sometimes Nature Is Too Much Even For Me



I'm embarrassed to admit that I shrieked when this thing jumped on me.

You know, I really do my best to live in harmony with the natural world. Yes, I do have to run the air conditioner several hours a day for seven months, but I balanced that out by converting the front yard from a water-guzzling lawn to a wildlife haven filled with native desert trees and shrubs.

I like to work in the garden all day in the company of birds and bees.

I encourage our spiders, large and small, to do their work of pest control.

Crab spider?



Black Widow Spider - I've seen them kill scorpions many times their size (below)

I really have no sympathy for these - I keep getting stung!

 I rescue poor confused snakes and lizards from the pool all summer. 

I even put up with some of these pests...

But once in a while, something comes along that is too weird!

 

I was just walking around the back yard yesterday, minding my own business, when this thing flew right into my face. It was scary.

WHAT IS IT AND WHY IS IT HERE?

When I recovered my composure - and when the bug removed itself to a tree - I was able to appreciate its beauty. The body is about 1/2 inch long, and then it has those crazy red legs. It really has the most amazing colors. It likes the mesquite tree. The closest I can get to an ID is that it may be related to the Giant Mesquite Bug, Thasus neocalifornicus.

 



I've recovered from the shock, but honestly, I can do without any more surprises hitting me in the face for a while!

 

Katrina

 

Bathing Beauties

  

I bet you weren’t expecting that.

 

 

For years I’ve bathed these two separately. This time I thought I would just try putting them in the tub together. If it worked, I could save time, water, and a lot of back strain.

 

It worked! Neither dog likes being in water, and shampoo is just adding insult to injury. They were so miserable that it didn’t occur to them to cause any mischief. I got them both clean in half the time.

 

I think I have a very limited window of opportunity with this though. Once they figure out that I can only hold on to one of them at a time, it will be every dog for him/herself and my bathroom will end up looking like a tidal wave came through. 

Looks like that moment of discovery is near.

Katrina

A Fine Mess

It was such a simple plan: I’d move some of the stuff off the shelves so I could brush the feather duster over the top layer or two of grime. Then drag the fabric bins out into the hall and run the vacuum around. A good couple of hours and I’d be done, with a nice clean room.

That was Tuesday morning.

This was the situation by Wednesday afternoon:

 

My simple plan did not include allowances for investigating the contents of each and every container, deciding I didn’t want half of it, then deciding whether I wanted to throw it away, give it away, or sell it, and then reorganizing the remaining half.
 

The good news is that as of Friday night I had all of the to-go stuff out of the room, and it’s looking pretty clean, open, and conducive to creativity again.

 

The bad news is that all of the stuff I took out hasn’t really gone anywhere, it’s just sitting in the hall. I guess that’s some sort of progress?

 

Katrina

The Farm at South Mountain

My camera refused to do anything but flash a “memory full” message at me, so I finally uploaded everything. This led to a realization that I’m at least a month behind in posting photos. Also that many things that are so fascinating at the time are just not that interesting when viewed weeks after the event. And that I compensate for poor camera skills by taking dozens of shots of each subject.

pecan tree leafing out

Out of the photographic chaos I was able to extract some decent pictures of a recent trip to The Farm at South Mountain, a former cattle ranch/pecan orchard which is now a combination organic farm, restaurant, and outdoor activity area.

Maya's Farm

Maya’s Farm takes up the center of the property, growing organic vegetables for restaurants and farmers markets. Needless to say, the farm is always my main interest when I visit.

 

rows and rows of beautiful lettuce

 

fluffy, feathery dill

At various times of the year there are gardening classes, plant sales, farmers markets, even wine tastings. There's a small shop with a well-edited selection of cooking and garden items. I love the casual restaurant where you can pick up a sandwich on freshly baked bread, a salad made from farm vegetables, and imaginatively decadent desserts to carry out for a picnic under the century-old pecan trees.

rustic gateway

It was unusually crowded the day we visited (it happened to be Easter Sunday), but it was still like a trip out to the peaceful countryside instead of only a 10-minute drive from the center of downtown Phoenix.

 

a simple and lovely vignette at the shop

As it heats up here and my garden shrivels to nothing by early summer, Maya’s Farm will somehow keep on going. I’ll go there and walk among the rows of tomatoes and peppers and wait for fall.

 

Katrina

The Cobbler’s Children Go Unshod

Doctors make terrible patients and carpenters never fix their own homes. These are ridiculous generalizations that I personally know to be untrue, but I’m bringing them up in the hope of explaining why I, as a CPA with years of experience, postpone the chore of tax preparation until April. When I finally sit down to do what should be a straightforward task, I thrash through it, screaming and crying as though it were a medieval torture.
 

the original Form 1040, from 1913

Anyway, for the past week, I’ve been sitting at my desk, working on taxes.

Ha, ha. Just kidding. For the past week, while I wallowed in self-pity and pretended to do tax stuff, I was actually finishing the jeans I started in February.

 

I also spent hours looking out the window at the spent winter vegetables that need to be composted, poking around on Pinterest, reading (Little Heathens by Mildred Armstrong Kalish), and doing pretty much anything other than taxes.

 

I hope you were all clever enough to get your taxes done early and/or by someone else.

Katrina

The Really Big Bee

Here is the Spruce Goose of the bee world: a Carpenter Bee.

Xylocopa californica arizonensis or Xylocopa veripuncta

I love to watch these beautiful behemoths chug along from flower to flower.

An inch long, and almost as wide, this one had the whole pea patch to herself.

 

Each time she visited a flower, the branch bent under her weight, turning the flower and herself upside down.

 

My Arizona Ecology books state that there are 1300 species of native bees in the state. Many of them are too small and too fast for me to identify, so I enjoy being able to follow the leisurely activities of the Carpenter Bee.

Katrina

A Garden Journal

One of the projects that has been devouring all my time the last few weeks is garden-related.

Recently, someone asked how I was getting such an incredible carrot harvest (20-30 carrots per week), and wanted all the details, from the soil in the raised beds and the sun exposure, to the type of seeds and fertilizer I used.

carrots at Dec. 7, 2012

carrot plants at Dec. 20

carrots at Jan. 7, 2013

I decided this might be a good time to settle down to a task I’ve been putting off for some time: compiling all my planting and harvest notes from the beginning of the vegetable garden.

I thought it had been at least ten years, but it turns out that we built the raised beds in 2006, so we just finished the sixth year. With two seasons each year, that still adds up to twelve possible planting seasons so far.

 

My gardening records are graphic (literally) and very brief. I have a simple map of the garden area, with each raised bed divided into square-f00t sections.

 

When I plant seeds, I just write the seed name in each box or area of my map.

If and when the seedlings grow, I make notes about the plant, the harvest, and any problems. Supposedly, I keep all these sheets together in a binder so I can refer to them later.

Unfortunately, when I went to the binder to compile all the information, I was missing half of the sheets. I know I didn’t plant for a couple of fall/winter seasons, but the other sheets could be anywhere. Maybe I stuffed them into the wrong binder, or they blew away, or maybe they’ve long since been composted.

Blogging helped, as well as the hundreds of photos I have cluttering up my hard drive. Sometimes I found dated photos or a blog post to fill in missing information from a previous year.

At least I was able to get enough information on the carrots to provide a pretty complete story to my fellow gardener.

carrots at Jan. 31

Here’s an example of my multi-year garden notes for carrots:

Cosmic Purple	Seed	Fall	2012	Excellent companion for Scarlet Nantes, same size and shape, harvest time. More of a dark wine-red than purple skin, orange inside.
Scarlet Nantes	Seed	Fall	2006	sprouted > 2 mos after planting. Dozens of carrots only 1 1/2" long and 1/8" wide
Scarlet Nantes	Seed	Fall	2010	100+ days to harvest, delicious 4"-6" carrots. Hundreds!
Scarlet Nantes	Seed	Fall	2011	120 - 140 days to harvest - big sweet carrots
Scarlet Nantes	Seed	Fall	2012	Perfect carrot - high germination rate, good shape, excellent flavor. Takes 4 mos to get to full size of 4 - 5".
Tonda di Parigi	Seed	Fall	2006	no germination
Tonda di Parigi	Seed	Fall	2010	120+ days to harvest, cute round carrots

 

And with all of the other information I gleaned from my records, I decided that it might be useful to others, if there are any people out there who are new to the desert and wondering if anything will grow here. So I’ve added a new page to the blog – Grown – where I will post this information. It’s not really a How-To guide, it’s just what worked for me.

I’d recommend that every gardener keep some sort of journal, even if it is like mine, with just the names and a few quick notes. It is invaluable when you see that you've had almost 100% success with one seed company and less than 10% with another. Or that you’ve tried twelve different varieties of tomato plant from the nursery over six years and only had success with one of them.

Valentine carrots, Feb. 14

Do you keep a garden journal?
 

Katrina

The Carnivore’s Conscience

Warning: today’s post may be disturbing to vegetarians or animal lovers.

Warning #2: today’s post may be very long.

As of Saturday, we have approximately 150 pounds of beef in our freezer. While this may seem excessive to you, imagine how shocking it is to me, a former vegetarian.

Alton Brown's beef map, source

How did we find ourselves in such strange circumstances? It was a long road. In the past few years, the Piemaker has gone from the all-American, 3-squares-a-day, meat-based type of diet to a single meal each day consisting of a huge salad. He usually eats a meat dish once a week at the most.

I’ve gone in the other direction. I have come a long way from my Diet for a Small Planet days, circa 1975, when I gave up meat forever (forever turned out to be 3 years) for political and humanitarian reasons.

Today I eat meat regularly, but I do still believe that the mass production of animals for food is one of the most cruel and unhealthy activities that humanity engages in, and that the resulting meat reflects the terrible conditions that the animals endure. I also still believe that the growing population of the world cannot be fed adequately by animal protein and that at some point, if we are to survive, humans will have subsist on plant or manufactured proteins.

That said, if one shifts from a global view to a local view, there is still the possibility for communities in some areas of the world to provide a healthy, varied diet to their populations, if they follow socially responsible food production and consumption principles. Sharing is the most obvious one of these, and is the reason for the success of community gardens throughout the ages. My best example is a simple one: here in the low desert we can grow huge amounts of citrus and some herbs in the winter, while our friends in Northern Arizona have no citrus at all, but they are overrun with tomatoes every summer. Sharing the wealth with each other and many other friends and neighbors creates ripples of benefits through a large community. Soon everyone is exchanging bundles of fruits and vegetables (and once in a while, a plate of cookies!) over fences.

Double Check Ranch steer having a snack, source

Yes, I am going to get back to the beef eventually.












When I read The Omnivore’s Dilemma a few years ago, it just reinforced many aspects of a philosophy that had been slowly forming in the murky recesses of my mind.

My philosophy basically condenses down to one central concept: I want to know what is in my food and where it came from before I eat it.

As you may know, taking a personal interest in in your own health or that of food animals can make it difficult to eat! We all went through the days when organic vegetables were nearly impossible to find and exorbitantly expensive if available. Now it is the animal products. Cage-free eggs are getting easier to find, but they are three times the cost of regular. Grass-fed beef is available at some grocery stores, but it’s twice the price of the alternative. I think you can only get the pork equivalent direct from the rancher, unless you find a seller at a farmers market.

When I learned that our incredibly talented farming friends were raising steers, I knew it was the best way to for us to go. I visited the animals and saw them running around in the meadow, enjoying their varied grassland. I knew that they were never exposed to illness or cruelty.  The small local processor was able to kill the animals humanely (although this always sounds like an oxymoron). And, because of friends and friends-of-friends, we could all share the cost and get a large amount of food for significantly less than we would pay at the grocery store.

And so, the neatly-wrapped packages stacked in the freezer represent one quarter of a healthy animal that ate good food, got lots of exercise, and had a pleasant, if short, life. Have I made peace with eating him? I am working on it!


What experiences have you had in this brave new world of food sourcing, food scares, and so much food information?

Katrina

An afterthought: I probably should have put this above, but I didn't want to goof up the fomatting.

Here is link to a website which lists grass-fed ranches and similar operations in the US and Canada. It's exciting to see that the number of listings has almost tripled in the last couple of years.

Eat Wild - Find Your State

 

[I don't know anything about these ranches, I just loved the pictures]

Lawton Family Sugar House grass-fed cattle in Massachusetts, source



Fruitland America grass-fed cattle in Missouri, source