Plum Conundrum and Pear Perplexity

In recent days, as I took Haku outside in the evenings to run around in the orchard,  I've noticed that a couple of trees in the orchard are so heavily laden with fruit that the branches are actually sitting on the ground.  Specifically, the Italian plum and one of the pear trees - the Comice - were so bowed down that I made a mental note to get out and pick some fruit as soon as possible.

Then a couple of days went by. This morning Homero told me that the plum tree had broken nearly in half.

I said "No, the big branch is just sitting on the ground, that's all."

He said "Go take a look."

The biggest branch was indeed broken. It must have happened just that day, because the leaves were still bright green and crisp. I ran for a bucket and with Homero's help, stripped off five gallons of plums from just that one broken branch in five minutes flat. We didn't even get all the plums from that branch - many of them fell on the ground and we didn't even bother to pick them up.

The plums are not quite ripe, but it doesn't matter, because I looked it up and plums ripen beautifully off the tree. In two or three days I will have a bushel (more or less) of ripe plums, not even counting those still on the tree. The still-on-the-tree plums account for at least four fifths of the total. I tried to think of something to do with five gallons of plums. Drying comes to mind, of course, but really - who likes prunes that much? And I am not much of a jam-master. If I'm going to attempt to make jam I will make blackberry jam, which we all like, rather than risking going to all the work of canning jam only to find out that nobody enjoys the end product.

That left wine.

I don't have much experience with making alcohol. Sure; a side effect of fresh cider is tepache (naturally fermented fresh juice) - and I have occasionally expanded upon wild fermentation and ventured into the alchemy of hard cider - with mixed results. But I have never set out deliberately to create "wine" which seems for some reason very serious and highbrow, even when made from an accidental glut of plums instead of fancy pedigreed grapes.

Today I went to our local home-brew store and told them what I was up to and ended up spending something over $50 in tubing, plastic airlocks, yeast, and specialized equipment. Chances are better than even that I will not produce anything drinkable by any but a late-stage alcoholic, but I'm going to try.

The pears are a whole 'nother story.

For one thing, they mostly will not ripen on the tree and demand careful and specific post-harvest handling in order to reach peak perfection. For another thing, the time period between "peak perfection" and "post-perfection" is about fifteen minutes.

Also - The pears arrive in tsunami-sized waves. So when I try to think of something to do with the pears, I am thinking about seventy-five or eighty pears at a time, not six or eight, which would be the perfect number to make into a pie.

With that in mind, I went and bought a dozen wide-mouth quart sized canning jars. I figure I can make a few gallons of pear-sauce; hopefully mixed with blackberry if I can coerce my children into picking a few pints.

I may also try Car-dehydrating. The weather has been unrelentingly hot. It's supposed to hit 90 degrees tomorrow and stay there through the weekend. I have read that in this kind of heat, you can lay our thin slices of fruit on foil-covered trays and put them in your car. The temperature inside will reach 150-175 quite quickly. Basically, if it would kill your dog, it will dehydrate your pears.

But by far the best option is to trade some of my fruit for something else that I want more. I put out the word today over social media and within minutes had received offers to trade plums for locally caught trout; for freshly harvested green beans;  and for assorted canning jars. That's neighborliness at its best.

Homecoming Harvest

We had a bit of difficulty getting home

from Oaxaca. Without going into details, we got home 48 hours later than we thought we would; paid more than a thousand dollars more than we thought we would have to; and had to take a seven hour bus ride to Mexico City instead of flying from Oaxaca, as we had planned. 

None of that matters, in the grand scheme of things. We are home - whole, hale, and hearty. We had a wonderful trip (recap to follow, with pictures). The farm, under Rowan's care, has flourished in our absence. 

I was sorry to have missed so much of harvest season. All the berries were early this year and the strawberries and raspberries came and went while we were gone. I got anxious as I saw my friends' Facebook posts of blueberries and even blackberries while I was still

thousands of miles away. 

Today I found out that there is plenty of harvest season left. As you can see above, the blackberries are in full swing but there are plenty of green ones left and there will be blackberries for weeks yet. 

The blueberry harvest is not over yet, either. My favorite local no-spray blueberry farm had many plants loaded with berries still, although some had begun to dry on the bush. It only took me twenty minutes to pick about 4 pounds. Sometime this weekend I'll be bringing the kids out to pick more.

Walking the orchard brought some delightful surprises. Some trees that had never yet borne fruit are bearing. Chiefly - the hazelnut. I don't know if this is due to the two new tiny hazels I planted this spring for improved fertilization or if the bush simply needed more time. In years past, it flowered but never developed nuts. This year there are hundreds of nuts all of a sudden. I need to read up on when to harvest them and how to cure them. 

Another tree, which I had pretty much given up on, surprised me: the greengage plum. We have two plum trees - an Italian plum and a greengage plum. The Italian plum has been providing us with a good harvest for several years, but the greengage plum had not set a single fruit, despite growing tall and flowering. For whatever unknown reason, it decided that this was the year it was going to fruit. The plums are just ripe - and delicious. The greengage plum is a heritage fruit that many of us remember, but which you almost never find in the grocery store. I'm so happy ours has decided to bloom.

All the pear trees look pretty loaded (we have four - too many), but one in particular is so weighed down with hundreds of enormous pears that the tips of the branches are actually resting on the ground. I think it is the Comice pear - my favorite. They haven't started to fall yet, so I'll leave them be until they do. 

Our first day back happened to be a Friday, which is farmer's market day in Ferndale. Overly ambitious, perhaps, I bought enough green beans for canning and several pounds of pickling cucumbers and dill to start a crock of lacto-fermented pickles. 

I've already got the pickles going in a big glass container on the kitchen counter but the green beans will have to wait until I buy some new canning jars - tomorrow. I swear. 

Yucatan Roadtrip

One of the main things I wanted to do during our six weeks in Mexico was take a significant roadtrip to see some Mayan ruins. 

Before Homero and I were married, we lived together in Oaxaca waiting for his fiancé visa to come through. My oldest daughter, Rowan, was seven. During that time, the three of us took an epic roadtrip. Among other places, we visited Palenque, one of the largest and best excavated Mayan cities in Mexico. Ever since I have wanted to go back and see more of the ancient Maya world. 

Mexico is bigger than you think. It is WAY bigger than google maps thinks. Google told us, as we were planing our trip, that Chichen Itza is a fifteen hour drive from Oaxaca. 

This is late night on day three of the roadtrip and we are still several hours short of Chichen Itza. Luckily, we landed in Campeche - a world heritage site and a beautiful place to spend a day or two recuperating from three days in a van with no air conditioning in July in the tropics. 

I had never heard of Campeche as a tourist destination, which only goes to show how much there is to see on Mexico. I'm not going to google it right now, but I think I remember reading that Mexico has more world heritage sites than any other single country. 

Campeche is on the south-eastern side

Of the Yucatan peninsula, and has a colorful history full of piracy, conquistadors, and indigenous uprisings. The city was completely walled in the 18th century after being repeatedly sacked and burned by pirates. These walls are largely intact, as are the eight watchtowers that punctuate them. At each watchtower is a small but impressive museum cataloging some aspect of Campeche history. We especially enjoyed the museum of Mayan architecture. 

The main city museum - a block away - is also worth a visit. It has a very modern aesthetic, and rounds out a slightly scant collection of artifacts with top-notch presentation. 

As Hope and I sat in the zocalo this evening - she playing guitar and attracting the attention of young Mexican males; I enjoying a good book and a spectacular sunset - we were startled by the abrupt start of a light-and-sound show projected on the facade of the governmental palace. I guess such things have been standard for a while now in European capitols, but I'd never seen one before. 

I'll try to post a video but internet is a bit spotty here in my otherwise world-class hotel. If you've seen one before, it needs no description, and if you haven't, than no description will suffice. It was a

Magic Lantern show, parading all

The attractions of the region. Jungle scenes - Spanish galleons fighting pirate frigates- aerial views of Mayan pyramids. All accompanied by typically too-loud music. I loved it. 

I can't stress enough how much I love Campeche -even as I recognize it has been cleaned up and sanitized for the high class European tourist crowd. It has just about everything - a beautiful centro historico; nice beaches; world class hotels at bargain prices (we are staying in an eighteenth century palace with high octane air conditioning); excellent seafood; and several large Mayan cities within easy day trip distance. 

The heat though. The fucking heat. There's just no way around that. Be prepared to sweat buckets. Carry - not water - but pedialyte. If you are tender of skin like me, bring not just a wide brimmed hat and the highest test sunscreen available, but also an umbrella for shade. Even so, be prepared. Know the symptoms of heatstroke and don't fuck around with the tropical sun. 

We had no air conditioning in the van, so we bought a five gallon bucket and a few bags of ice at every gas station we passed. In addition to eating it, we dipped our T-shirts in the ice water and put them on. 

Tomorrow we leave Campeche for Chichen Itza, and after that we will head back home by way of Chiapas. It's been a great trip so far. 

Ok in Oaxaca

My fears about finding Oaxaca in a state of anarchy were overblown. Yes, the zocalo is covered in tarps and tents, filled with teachers conducting a prolonged sit-in. 

And there is a whole new layer of protest graffiti covering the 500 year old walls of the downtown core:

And there is certainly a dearth of tourists, but on the whole Oaxaca is recognizable and functioning. 

There is a scarcity of a few things in town because of the blockades, but certainly no lack of basic foodstuffs. For example Homero wasn't able to find the right kind of hardware for a job he wanted to do at the house. He went to three different hardware stores and was told they hadn't had any new shipments in for a week or so because of the blockade on the road from Mexico City. Also, he tried to buy a case of Corona beer for a party and the store was all out - he had to settle for the greatly inferior Indio brand. Our in-laws who shop at Sam's club said there were some bare shelves. 

The mercados, however, still look like this: 

And you can still get a meal like this for a few dollars:

Our only concern is whether it would be wise to take a long roadtrip out of town, because there are still roadblocks in place on major highways and of course having an American in the car makes it all the more likely we would be shaken down. I'm not sure I want to risk not being able to get back into the city once we are outside of it. 

There's plenty to do here in town, though, and we are having a good time.  

Ill-Timed Harvest (Bowls of Cherries)

The cherry trees are loaded. The cherry harvest is nearly over, in fact - the cherries are early this year, as is all the fruit. We have been picking cherries off the low-hanging branches of our three cherry trees for a week or so. Today, though, it suddenly occurred to my husband that if we didn't pick the cherries - NOW! TODAY! - they would fall on the ground and be wasted while we are in Oaxaca. 

Waste is a cardinal sin in his moral universe, so he marshaled the troops and drove the Case loader into the orchard. He lifted the girls in the loader up to the higher branches and told them to get picking. Within an hour, they had brought some twenty pounds of cherries into the house. These are Rainiers, beautiful yellow cherries with a pink blush. Rainier are the most highly prized local cherry, commanding a premium at the grocery store. Myself, I actually prefer the black cherries like Bings. I think they have a deeper, more intense flavor. 

No matter how much we enjoy them, however, it's unlikely we will be able to eat twenty pounds of fresh cherries by tomorrow night. I haven't got the time to try and process them. I don't even know how to process fresh cherries, other than by pitting them and submerging them in a jar of 100 proof vodka. So I think we will simply eat as many as we can and send the rest to the compost pile. 

When we planned this trip, I knew we would be missing strawberry season and raspberry season, but I assumed we would be home before the blueberry harvest and certainly before the would blackberries were ripe. Now I don't know - the blueberry U-pick farms are open already and the blackberries are already in the hard green stage. We may miss berry season entirely. 

All the more reason to gorge ourselves on cherries right now. 

Oaxaca Trip (Bad Timing)

It's been three full years since we returned from our year in Oaxaca (for more about that trip, see my sister blog, www.newtomexicanlife.blogspot.com). Three years is a long time in the girls' lives - they were children of eight and nine when we returned and now they are young ladies of eleven and twelve. Their memories of Oaxaca are hazy - especially Paloma's, who is the youngest - and their fluency in Spanish has taken a few giant leaps backward.

Therefore we were very happy to be able to plan a fairly long trip this summer - six weeks. We are supposed to leave on Friday. Back in February or March, there was a short period of time when airfare was very cheap. It was so cheap that we decided to fly all the way to Oaxaca, instead of flying to Mexico City and going the rest of the way by bus, as we usually do. Mama was ecstatic that we would be bringing her grand babies back to her, and the girls were delighted at the prospect of seeing their cousins. In fact, since they are so grown up now, we thought we would let the girls stay at Tia Temy's house with their cousins, and Homero and I would stay at Mama's house, fifteen minutes away by car. Maybe we'd even be able to get away for a three-or-four day trip, all by ourselves. 

Then this happened:

Fires set by protesters to block the road

And this: 

a truck carrying chickens set ablaze and used to blockade the highway

And this:

civil unrest in Nochixtlan

The perennial dispute between the branch of the teacher's union known as section 22 and the federal government has once again flared into violence, as it has been doing every couple of years since at least 2006. This particular exacerbation is probably the worst since that time. Eight protestors have been killed by police, and there are fires and marches and blockades and rocks being thrown and molotov cocktails being tossed and batons swinging all over town.

Blockades are nothing new, and for the most part have been traditionally seen as nothing more than annoyances - inconvenient, yes, but a legitimate tactic nonetheless, like a strike. In fact I would venture to say that most Oaxacans view blockades and strikes with a kind of grudging admiration: "these people have guts" sort of thing. If it weren't for these people putting themselves on the line we'd all be ground under the heel of the imperialist oppressor. At worst, a blockade is met with a resigned shrug.

That changed, however, at least among the people I knew, a few years ago when the teacher's strike dragged on so long that schoolchildren missed almost a half a year of school. Those who could afford to sent their children to private schools. Those who couldn't do that had to miss work to care for kids or else leave them at home alone. Blockaders were so inflexible that a woman died in an ambulance that was not allowed to cross the blockade to the hospital. Tourism shrank away to nothing and many jobs were lost.

This time looks to be pretty bad. But it's so hard to judge without being there. A friend of mine who lives in the city center says that the blockades are so bad that grocery stores are running out of food. He said all he could buy at the local market was potatoes, yams, and cucumbers. Mama, on the other hand, just returned from a trip to Tuxtepec and said her bus had no trouble with blockades and that the stores in her neighborhood are perfectly well-stocked. She and my siblings-in-law are pooh-poohing the situation and say that we ought to come down as planned. In three days.

Here is a case where differing cultural expectations can be glaring. When I expressed concern to Homero that there might be a blockade on the road leading from the airport to the city, so that we might be stuck at the airport with no way to get to mama's house, he waved off my fears.

"The blockades are only stopping vehicles," he said. "you can walk around. It's only a few miles."

Somehow, the idea of attempting to traverse "a few miles" of terrain like that in these photos - a terrain littered with tire-fires, riot police, dead chickens, and rock-throwing youth does not inspire confidence. Especially when I imagine having to do it in 90 degree heat, with young children in tow,  dragging all our luggage. I know those Oaxaca highways and even at the best of times they are not suited to those little plastic suitcase wheels.

Thus far we have not been able to contact the airline. My brother suggested that given the situation, the airline would probably waive the change-date fees. Maybe - IF we could get ahold of a human. But really, what good would that do? Who knows when the situation will be any better? Homero spent an hour attempting to contact the customer service department of AreoMexico and only succeeded in soliciting the information (from a computerized voice) that the change-date fee is $250/ticket.

I think we will go. Nothing is ever as bad as it looks on the news.

But I'm bringing a carton of Cliff bars in my carryon.

Cows and Compromise

One of Homero's clients just traded him a newborn Jersey heifer for a complete engine rebuild on his truck. She's healthy and adorable, and came to us on the day after she was born, after 24 hours on her mom for the colostrum. The first bottle feeding didn't go very well, but she learned quickly and is now able to suck down her twice-daily two liters in about three minutes flat. We are giving her a mixture of milk-replacer and fresh goat's milk - which is something we have too much of at the moment.

Haku is being gentle with the baby. He is very interested, but not frantically exited, the way he was with the baby goats a few months ago. I don't know if he is calming down in general around the livestock or if baby goats are simply more enticing than baby cows (I certainly think so). 

Homero says she weighs about sixty pounds. 

We set her up in the calf hutch, in the small pasture all by herself where she won't get bullied by the goats or the ponies. Just like any bottle baby, she is extremely friendly and runs up to us for attention whenever we come near. I have to admit she is endearing, even though I am not a fan of cows, in general. 

In fact Homero and I have had a few arguments about cows in the past, and I was not in favor of accepting a cow in trade for work. You can read all about my objection to cows and my (very reasonable and valid) arguments in favor of goats as a superior livestock option here: Imaginary Cows. For those who won't click the link, my argument can be boiled down to "we don't have enough land for a cow." 

However, Rowan and Homero are both over the moon about the baby. Rowan has adopted her as her own special pet and taken responsibility for feedings. Homero is already looking forward to milking her. Who am I to stand in the way of such happiness?

As much as I am loath to admit it, I have been pretty selfish about molding the farm in the image I have nurtured in my own mind and not ceding much, if anything, to the imaginings and dreams of others in the family. Homero and I have wrangled about the size of his shop; the amount of land he wanted to devote to a parking area; and how many non-running automobiles ought to be allowed to accumulate thereon. Rowan and I have wrangled about the garden space and the use of the greenhouse, and the species and placement of trees. 

Truly, I don't think of myself as a control-freak; but then again I am comparing myself in my head to my own mother, who is undeniably a control-freak of epic proportions. I suppose it is possible that others in my family might see me as just a tiny bit.... well, inflexible. 

Over the years, Homero has adopted the very effective tactic of, rather than debating with me beforehand,  simply presenting me with a fait accompli. This new cow is the latest example. She was just there one day when I got home from work. 

In my own defense, I will say that I think I have shown adaptability and if not grace, well, then at least resignation when these things happen. I am resigned to the new cow. Her name is Nettles. 

Shear Siliness

I

We cannot afford to hire a professional shearer to shear our lone sheep, nor would one likely agree to come out to the farm for such a small commission. Shearing a few animals, like haying a few acres, is just not a paying proposition. However, the poor sheep needed to be sheared, just for her own comfort. We are going to be gone all summer, and the poor thing can not be left with ten pound s or more of wool on her back. This is what we were able to do with sewing scissors, in about twenty minutes. Most of the wool is off the sheep: although we won't be able to use it for spinning or felting, it did make a great silly wig.