Sunflower River

pre-caffinating, to get through the day. i don’t normally do coffee, but there’s nothing like a holiday to bring out the bad habits.

Tattersall surveys the patio and suggests we clean it up.

Masala surveys Tattersall.

an hour later, the tidy patio and its tidiers, interns Matt & Gina, with Alan.

Gawain is not too sure about all this fuss and botherment.

Kat working on the pie:

pie is better with honey whisky.

Mom and Erin on the porch

John and Tristan with Gawain, on the porch

we jettisoned the sofa to the porch so we’d have more room for tables. this was universally declared a success.

instead of one long table this year, we had four separate tables of 6 people each. this worked better, and it was more possible to get across the room.

dressed up for dinner: a good shot of my favorite hairfalls. and actual hair, for that matter.

Jenny finishes up the cooking

Rev and I on the patio

the room full of people:

Jean made actual whipped cream for the pie. Erin approves.

pie is popular.

late night cleaning, after the feast

Around the land.

Ozymandias surveys his domain, the mulch pile known as Bugtown.

bird nest in the grandmother cottonwood tree

sunset on the sandias. “sandia” means “watermelon” in Spanish, and this is why the mountains are named that. they do this most nights, even without the snow, but snow brings it out.

snow! on the woodpile

rosemary

snow on the garden (and yes, this passes for a major snowfall down on the farm, i am sorry to say. we are snow-deprived.)

vines in the apricot tree:

chickens do not approve of snow. not even that much.

scratchgrass with snow

Tattersall approves of this bed.

That amazing autumn light, for which New Mexico is justifiably famous:

tending towards autumn

turkeys

loose in the field

handsome fellas, showing off

the next door house that we still hope to buy (seen from the west, looking at the back of the house from its attached field, which adjoins our barnyard)

what are you looking at?

soon to become a delicious plate of coq a vin, and cease perpetrating barnyard violence:

truculent rooster

loose in the garden

summer, setting.

autumn sunlight

and winter arriving. Sandhill Cranes arriving here in the south, where they overwinter.

inky cap mushrooms popped up all over the garden this year, in the herb bed and the dye beds (appropriately enough)

last echinacea flower of the year

and the first frost rimes a globe mallow.

and some bindweed

and a frosted feather, autumn harvest in more than one sense.

my annual leaf photo (i LOVE our cottonwoods!)

kitty in the leaves

the Witches’ Ball and sundry Samhain activities finally being over, we returned to farmwork this weekend, and wow did that feel good. we opened up a cured compost bin, so as to close the summer bin. that one will rot for a full year now with no new materials added. the cured bin had sat for a year, and became deep dark rich dirt, good stuff. it has now top-dressed every orchard tree and berry on the property, with some left over for the main garden.

sunday we had a wonderful work party, canning all the fruit we had cooked and frozen in late summer. we put up pear sauce, apple sauce, canned apples and strawberry jam. we had to get it all out of the freezer, ’cause we’re processing turkeys this weekend and there has to be room!

since the sun sets absurdly early now that we’re back on standard time, we worked into the deep darkness. i think it was around 8:30pm when we pulled the last batch out of the canner.

this shot doesn’t show the last two batches (another 14 jars). we put up a total of 61 jars of food yesterday!

AND, while all that was going on, Jenny finished building and installing the pump house shelves!

these shelves were destined to hold all the canned goods, and have immediately begun to fulfill their destiny.

at the end of the night:

and from the other angle

isn’t that pretty?

and one last shot of those wonderful sandhill cranes, whose call falls like water across the land all winter.

The House Next Door

Short form: the deal fell through, and it is not ours.

Long form: the seller is convinced that the place is worth $75,000. we believe this conviction is partly the result of bad information from her retired friend-of-the-family realtor, who we recently learned was witholding documents & information from her, as well as telling her that anybody would pay that much for a place in that bad a condition in this (largely rather poor) neighborhood. he also told her that the place was worth more because it’s right on Isleta Blvd (a noisy rural highway with a ton of traffic–i believe this to be the opposite of true), that it was zoned commercial (Bernalillo County says it’s zoned Agricultural), and that the land value itself was 75k, even without the house.

alas, these things are untrue. comparable properties (1500 square foot houses on .3-.5 acres — note the same acreage) in the area are selling for an average of 70k if they are 100% move-in ready, and about 42k if they are fixer-uppers — and this place is a VERY serious fixer-upper. empty land sells for 80k per acre down here — this is 1/3 acre, so purely as a field, no money-sink house involved, it’s worth about 30k. the house does add something, as long as it doesn’t have to be knocked down and rebuilt (a possibility). this is just data off MLS; we didn’t make it up. we just looked. which apparently Jerry never did. so we offered less than she wants. though we’re willing to be somewhat flexible on that, tens of thousands of dollars exceeds our tolerance for dropping our hard-earned money into a hole in the ground.

properties sell VERY VERY slowly down here. she wouldn’t believe any of that from us, but we just cannot let ourselves be taken to the cleaners in the price of this place when it is going to take on the order of $40k to fix it into habitable condition. and we are watching how houses down here just don’t sell. they sit and sit and sit and sit. same signs, same places, for years. even places with more land, nicer houses.

the home inspection revealed *significant* structural issues. we knew there were some, and the inspection was largely unsurprising, but it was worse than we thought, particularly in that he diagosed the house as having probable foundation problems. we knew the subfloor needed to be replaced, and probabyl some joists, but the foundation is another matter. the inspector suggested that the livingroom might have to be knocked down and rebuilt. eep. but we couldn’t be sure before pulling up the floor and letting a contractor take a look at it. there’s a crack you can see daylight through in that room. all that, and then Linda’s realtor withheld the inspection from her.

and when we talked to her about it–she asked me to call her, so we did–she stuck fast to that 75k. she said, send me the paperwork and submit your new offer. so we did. she rejected it and terminated the sale.

we are collectively dismayed, but feeling like we made the right decision — we can’t allow ourselves to be beggared by someone who thinks she can get more than the market can bear for a place that is going to absorb tens of thousands more dollars from us. goddess knows we WANT the place. we want the land. we want the possiblities, the expansion. but we need it to be good for us. it needs to be fair. and that is not a fair price. i feel sad and defensive about it. and unwilling to be played for a fool.

and — damn it, we’re Witches. if this place is going to come to us, then it is going to come to us. the Universe will find the right way for it to happen. we have been acting as fairly and openly as we know how through this whole process. it seemed to want us to let go, so we are letting go.

my best hope for the property now, is that Linda will get a new realtor (we learned after the termination paperwork came through, who will do an actual market analysis for her (Jerry certainly never did, since the one our realtor-friend Beth did diverged so completely from his back-of-the-envelope, ten-years-ago expectation of housing prices — dude, the market tanked, did you not notice? and this is the Valley, not the Heights, and certainly not Denver [which is what Linda's got in her head, we expect, that being her stomping grounds]. nobody wants to move down here; it’s “far”.) and give her a realistic expectation of what she can ask for. That she will then list the property with that realistic estimate in mind, and we can put in a new offer. Or, that she will simply call us back and say, hey, my new realtor says 50k is about all i can expect for it, given the inspection results. can we put this deal back together? and we buy it. that is what i am hoping for. touch wood.

so keep your fingers crossed, folks. positive energy this way would be very helpful and appreciated.

i certainly hope she reads that inspection. because Jerry was so shady in his dealings around it (he never forwarded it to her, nor did he send her our entire second wave of paperwork, which was his legal obligation as her realtor), we printed out the inspection and left a copy in the kitchen before returning the keys to the across-the-street neighbor, Julie. and of course i got my irrigation supplies out of the garage (and put some more cat food down for Furdre, who is an innocent bystander here — though i am also feeding her in our barn, and continue to hope to lure her into permanent residence in said barn, as she is a mouser of unparalleled excellence).

so there’s all that. i need to upload photographs and update the farm blog, which is like two months behind because the Witches’ Ball ate my head. i hope it tasted good.

if anybody wants to see what autumn is like in the mountain country of Central New Mexico, check out my flickr set here, of Fourth of July Canyon. it’s more exiting than you think. :) downright vivid, in fact.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sunflowerriver/sets/72157627811432408/

autumn is fully underway in the mountains, and winter’s coming on strong in Colorado, but here on the farm, autumn is only just beginning. we’re blessed that although we do have to endure a real winter here, it’s a short one.

Fall down here in the Valley is mostly warm, and mostly yellow & green turning to brown, but there are some notable exceptions. this stunning virgina creeper on the back fence, for instance.

curlycup gumweed in the field:

at summer’s end, we get all these tiny yellow butterflies in all the alfalfa fields around here. this year, we started irrigating our own field, adn it came up all amaranth and bindweed of course — but the butterflies don’t seem to mind. nor the spiders. this Golden OrbWeaver is enjoying a butterfly for lunch.

the neighbor’s beautiful horses:

Thistle, also known as Miss Muddy Paws. she’s sad because irrigation season is over for the year and she can’t get muddy. that is, she was until yesterday’s 1″ rainstorm! she’s all set on mud for the week now.

autumn & harvest season incarnate: a bowl of fresh, crisp organic apples in the kitchen, from a friend’s trees.

fall crops! my two raised beds of fall crops represent our first successful fall food-growing venture. most of the lettuce, all the broccoli & cauliflower, spinach & beets got eaten immediately upon sprouting by ravenous hordes of insects, but the radishes, kale, and carrots are doing great. i will replant the others as soon as i get lids built to turn these raised beds into cold frames for the winter — in the next couple weeks, this will happen.

and the other two raised beds are full of strawberries, which are doing very well indeed!

isis candy cherry tomatoes in the garden. they really are candy.

Masala the wild Farm Cat, amid the corn.

i really love these Golden Orb Weavers; i think they are my favorite garden predator, huge and stunningly marked in vivid colours. I’m glad we have successfully re-created habitat for them — in our first year here, there were dozens of them amid the 8′ kochia plants, but the kochia had to go (smoetimes by way of a machete, it was so huge & tough), and then for a while it seemed the spiders vanished. they sure love an overgrown garden, though!

a Bumble Bee in the maximillian daisies out front:

twice.

we did it. we now have a house among the sunflowers. :-D

more images here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sunflowerriver/

if you’re on flickr, feel free to add us!

…but yesterday I got a phone call from Linda, our south neighbor Mr Hill’s sole surviving relative, saying that he had passed away. He went quietly, Friday early afternoon, in good care. He had been having a good day, had even eaten breakfast, and died in his sleep. the service will be on Monday.

So Linda called to ask, are we still interested in the house. She got a resounding YES from us. We are clear on that point. The price is the next step, and that includes finding out how much work the place needs (lots, it appears). She had us come over and tour the as-yet-not-cleaned-out house this morning, to just see the layout and overall condition. We were expecting a jumble of objects, a general lack of air circulation, dust and dirt and disrepair. I mean, a 94-year-old man had been living alone in this house since 1979. We got exactly what we expected in that regard — it’s a mess. It desperately needs a good airing. She’s cleaning today and tomorrow and into next week, finding all his papers to go through and/or shred, setting aside the bits and pieces she wants for memories, sorting things out. Her daughter is down to help her out, and her husband arrives tomorrow, and they are going to make a giant pile and call Goodwill, who will come pick up. They will leave any large furniture that they don’t want, and the appliances (including a serious old classic gas stove that all of us immediately gravitated towards) for us to deal with and/or use.

The plaster is cracked and the place smells mildewy– there is a layer of unappealing, possibly biohazardous, carpet through much of the house (it smells of urine; not overpoweringly, but definitely). That will have to come out, first thing. With any luck, that will be the source and sole location of the mildew and/or mold. I hope it’s not in the walls. We are going to have a home inspection in the next couple weeks to determine all that sort of thing, after the place is cleaned out. The non-carpeted rooms have old-fashioned linoleum flooring, some of which is pretty cool. The subfloor does not seem to be in very good shape, though — buckling, soft spots. I suspect a particle or ply subfloor immediately beneath the carpet/ linoleum, rather than a hardwood floor. So we may be redoing some or much of that, depending on the results of the inspection. The plumbing definitely needs repairs, though how major is hard to determine yet. The kitchen sink is calcified into a barely-moving object (the whole sink needs replaced), and Linda shut the water off in the bathroom because the toilet was leaking. The bathroom is comfortably large, close to twice the size of the one in our cottage. She says that the roof does not leak, which is good news. The exterior stucco is in bad shape and needs to be redone. The interior plaster is actual plaster over either cinderblock or concrete, and much or all of it also needs to be redone; that is going to be a big project. The heater is fairly new (and well-located, in that small central hallway where it can effectively heat everything, hopefully) and she thinks it probably works but she’s not sure. The swamp cooler is not working. The windows are plentiful, but they are all the old-style single pane lattice windows, leaky as a sieve in the wind, and will need replacing. Depending on if they are standard or custom sizes, that could be a real big project, too.

We’re planning to buy the place as-is, and get the repairs done ourselves. We have several ideas for how we want to use the space, but in any case, we would not need to inhabit it immediately, so we have time to futz through a series of major and minor repairs. It’s a three bedroom house, bigger on the inside than on the outside (it totally looks small from the street, but it’s a mary poppins house), with a huge livingroom with an old fireplace we can restore, a really good-size kitchen adjacent to the livingroom (with nice cabinets), two good-size bedrooms that face each other across a small hallway, and a third, smaller, bedroom in back of the north room — probably a good space for a child’s bedroom. The garage opens off that room, and the garage turns out to have an open storage-shed space (jammed full of stuff, like every other room of the house), and then an enclosed concrete-floored back space, usefully. That space has a door to the backyard, which includes a truly magnificent cottonwood tree. (i know you were wondering whether or not we really just wanted even more cottonwood trees). And then the field.

the place is zoned A-1, which is spectacular for our purposes, and the county plat info says it’s a third of an acre, though it feels like more than that. it’ll bring us almost up to 4 acres; our current property is 3.45, and this place is .35. So we’ll have 3.80 acres. We’re planning to take down the front fence between the two properties; Linda even pointed out where a gate used to be in the fence that we could re-open with very little effort.

We are moving forward with purchase agreements and suchlike, including contacting our assorted good-friends-who-are-realtors; she has one and we have one. :)

whooo. just when i could see the end of my insanely high stress level, we buy a house.

when were done backing and forthing, discussing and meeting this morning, i came back into my yurt and did something i’ve been meaning to do all summer: i cleaned the hearth. the hearth is the center of the home — literally, in this circular little space, as well as figuratively. but that figurative meaning is there, too. i have been borrowing bricks from the hearth to use in the wall construction process (they hold barbed wire down while you get the bags filled), so i had a messy stack of bricks, with dirt and dust and cat hair and ash and old nails, going on in the center there. yeah, it’s been like that; untended, messy, aching. so just now i removed all the bricks, vaccuumed them and the space beneath them, got all the everything out, and put them all back very nicely in their pattern.

i’m only missing one brick. that’s my afternoon project today: find and place that one brick. then i’m taking it easy, dang it, for the rest of the day. who would have thought that was possible?

and tomorrow? we’re going hiking.