the cottonwoods in the storm light are majestic.

meanwhile, the garden is coming in. greens of all sorts, turnips, peas. strawberries.

for the first time, fruit is setting up on all of our fruit trees — we have apricots, cherries, peaches, apples, and of course mulberries (we usually have mulberries). the almonds didn’t make it, but those trees are very young.

alan installed an aquaponics system this spring (which he’ll post in detail about when he has time), and which is now producing dill, jerusalem artichokes, and lettuces. there are also a couple of yellow water iris, and something we’re calling a helicopter plant because of its wild spray of stems. and because we don’t know its name.

dill

helicopter plant

water iris

next up, lotuses. i just discovered that they grow here. i am going to get vivid pink ones. and a turtle. and some mosquito fish, to eat the extra mosquitoes the pond is generating.

and a woodhouse’s toad in the little toad bowl, in the herb garden. they love it here. rose petals, pond scum and all.

last saturday’s workparty was very successful. we got more plastering done on the east wall, and tackled the north wall project for the first time this year — which turned out to be locating the job site, under all the leaves and whatnot of winter, and sorting out the scope of the work, and then tearing down most of the old dome (rather than starting a rebuild project at 2pm). we also moved the grown layer birds into the main chicken coop, pulled the meat bird tractor out into the field so they could start browsing on greens, cleaned up the area where the chicken tractors were, and set up the empty one as a brooder again. just in time — that afternoon, the post office called to say our new meat birds had arrived, two days early. perfect timing, really, as we were able to get them all installed and everything that same day. Dusty and i transplanted the majority of the tomatoes that day, too. so corn and tomatoes are in. this weekend, i’ll put in dry beans, green beans, lima beans, (you have to give the corn a head start on the pole beans, or the beans just overwhelm the corn), okra, peppers, and eggplant.

meanwhile, we’ve had major and increasing rat problems all winter. we thought we might reduce them by moving the barnyard compost (prime rat habitat) away from the chicken coop fence and into the field. this might have helped, but it has definitely not gotten them out of the barn. we lost half a bag of game bird feed to the little boogers this month. yesterday and today, Jenny & Caden tackled Jenny’s plan to rat-proof the feed storage area. they enclosed the whole area in 1/4″ hardware cloth (a firm wire mesh), and built sturdy wooden doors with hardware cloth screen for the front, with latches on everything. so the rats simply cannot get in. I came home today to find Caden inside the cage, stapling hardware cloth on and making jokes about storing the wwoofers (interns) in it as a pen, while Jenny finished installing the doors around him. we got a truckload of feed unloaded and installed in the new feed cage, and it looks darn rat-proof. (photos not uploaded yet).

the eclipse this weekend is supposed to be spectacular. Albuquerque’s south valley is also supposed to be among the best possible places to see it. so sunday evening will find me hanging with a couple friends in the pirate fort with a beer and some eclipse glasses and my camera.

so yesterday was celebrating that, and then also irrigating our field. that was exciting! i called the ditch rider (who is the person whose job it is to schedule water) and he said, “sure, i’m sending water down to Isleta Pueblo today and tomorrow, so just go ahead and open the gate.” so we walked down to the west acequia to do that– and found that it has been blocked by a new turn-out kind of thing. interesting. hopefully nothing to do with us, though it felt un-neighborly. as long as it’s there, we can’t get water from that side, unless we dismantle it. so we went the other way, up to the gate at the acequia madre on the east side. this involved crossing the street, jumping down into the ditch, and following the ditch back to the next big ditch. there we found the right gate — and no way to open it. we decided that, since we had to talk to the Hunsikers across the street anyway, to get the keys for Mahazda (Hill House), we’d ask them how to open it.

So Jenny and I walked over there. George was extremely friendly. We talked over the fence for a while. He gave us the keys, and said several times how happy he is that we have bought that house. He was a good friend of the late Mr Hill. He talked about how he knows we are hard workers (“I see you out here, and I get tired just watching you work! Truth be told, you remind me of myself when I was young.”) and that we will treat that old house right. “It’s a bit run down,” he says, expressing the understatement of the century, “but it’s a good, well-built house.” Then we asked about the irrigation. It took a few tries to make it clear where my problem was, but once we were communicating, he said “oh–you don’t have a wheel. well. will you wait here while i go put my shoes on?” and we did, and he came back with an irrigation wheel, a giant heavy cast-iron thing that fits over the bolt on top of the gate, and lets you screw the gate open or closed. awesome. so we headed back there right that very minute and opened the gate higher than the water line.

two hours later, the water made it all the way to our field. molasses.

here comes the water!

Alan, myself, Jenny and our intern Caden went outside with drinks (hey, we just bought a house! might as well celebrate!) to watch it reach the field. when it made it from the dirt ditch to the concreted ditch, it immediately doubled its speed. no more soaking in! of course, that soaking-in recharges the river, so there are pros and cons on both sides, there. but it sure got faster. then it reached the field.

is that water? i think it’s water!

(or: what to do in Abq on a Monday Night.)

we got all excited. it took it another 20 minutes to fully reach the end of the divot. Jenny said, “it’s like we’re watching paint dry.” we rescued a beetle from the water, and got another round of drinks.

there were bullfrogs (or possibly B-movie monsters) creaking off in the distance, so we made an expedition down the ditch to find them. that worked; Jenny got a photo. they were, in fact, bullfrogs. we came back. water had reached the field. we got very silly.

maybe if i get really close to the water, it’ll look bigger.

we probably hung out there another hour, watching the water seep slowly into the field, appreciating the cool night air, the incredibly fertile scent of the freshly-watered earth. by the time we went to bed, it was clear that the water would still be slowly seeping when everybody got up the next morning.

when Alan checked on it at 4:30 this morning, it was still chugging slowly along. Tristan checked on it a couple hours later; same story. He went back out a half hour after that, and suddenly, water *everywhere.* The ditch rider had released more water upstream, and the main ditch was suddenly a third again as high as it had been. in that half hour, our field went from modestly complete (with several dry spots), to completely flooding the small ritual ground, breaking through the north and west berms, and *completely* filling the root cellar hole. This was at about 6:30 a.m.

all the water!

Tristan and Jenny got the gates closed, on our property and at the main gate, and grabbed shovels and filled the breach on the west towards the root cellar. that allowed the water in the field to level out a bit and begin to really soak in. the “road” (it’s a proto-road) is flooded, and we got all the trees along the main ritual ground, as well as the dye beds (and half the ritual ground itself, oops). exciting morning!

ritual ground:

west berm:

that’s the root cellar. oops.

starting to come down:

newly-repaired berm near the root cellar, where the water broke through.

east side, starting to dry out:

small ritual ground:

we’re going to have an elm or two in here.

We were trying to flood the field, the fruit trees, flowerbeds & grapes around the main ritual ground, and the whole of the small ritual ground, while NOT flooding the main ritual ground itself, the fire circle, or the road. Or the root cellar, for that matter, though i don’t think it was on anybody’s radar specifically, because we had awesome berms on that side. uh huh. we did flood everything we wanted to. and then some!

grapes & a peach tree:

flowerbeds:

the high water line in the ritual ground.

cherry tree

drying out a bit, 8 a.m.

it’s a good thing that “root cellar” presently consists only of a hole in the ground. it’s going to take days (at least) to subside. the road is a muddy wash; we’ll be mincing carefully along the north fenceline, or walking along the south berm path, to get to the back for a week or so.

now we get to watch the grasses & weeds come up in the field, build up the sides of our cut-out from the ditch, fix the berms that broke loose and reinforce areas that look like they might go next, remove the drip system from the trees & dye beds, weed the dye beds (guarantee this brought in a thousand million weed seeds) — and schedule our next irrigation day!

also, when i went out this morning, there were ducks in the field. we have wanted to irrigate to make pasture, to water our trees & grapes & flowerbeds better, to change the ecology of the field, and also to create more wildlife habitat. and now, instant ducks! so that was really awesome, too.

so we are careful to take good care of them. this year, we had a friend who is an arborist come down to prune deadwood out, and remove some branches that were dangerously overhanging the house & power lines. the resulting canopy is light, airy, and feels far healthier. freed from dead weight, the live branches lift up higher and reach for the wind and sun.

here’s the tree over Kat’s yurt:

my favorite view, straight up from the yurt’s front step:

the furthest tree, here, the one past the wall, was a mess of deadwood that was near the power lines. now it is free and clear, and oh, how lovely.

if the rest of the patio is a mess of sticks and construction projects, well, that’s nothing new. we’ll deal with it in good time.

Masala, our wild little jungle kitty, also enjoys the treetops.

and a close up:

this is the first year i’ve allowed myself the indulgence of a flowerbed, just for flowers, just for beauty — not food, not medicinal herbs. enough of those things are established now that i felt good about devoting the time and space for a patch of early spring bulbs. we got them into the ground in October, and here they are, first blush of springtime:

hyacinths!

my forsythia bloomed this year, as well, though a little bit late (i think because it didn’t get much water this winter).

cherry blossoms (in March, i might note):

which are certainly gorgeous, even if they are nearly two months early.

especially in front of that plowed field.

lots going on this spring. Jeremy came down to trim the trees:

doing a superb job, as always. the cottonwood canopy is lighter, healthier and more brilliant (and less dangerous to the house) than ever.

we planted a new globe willow tree by the chicken coop, for barnyard shade:

Alan has been installing an aquaponics system between the patio and the garden, with Rev’s help:

and the most important part: gratuitous kitty pic.

at long last, after a very great many planning conversations, some experiments with flooding it the way it was (too high for the water to get all the way across), we tackled the project this weekend. our friends Don & Leiah at Johnny’s Garden brought their tractor down, and plowed, disked and then levelled the field.

here’s the field before we started:

we began the day by moving a giant pile of barnyard compost. in the 4+ years we’ve been here, the barnyard compost “system” had gotten completely out of hand, and become a giant sprawling pile of straw and manure, too close to the chicken pens for comfort — providing a prime habitat for rats. so we started by moving it, and spreading it all out in the field prior to tilling.

Leiah & Alan loosening the packed compost:

Don pulling it out of the pile with the tractor’s box:

our sense of accomplishment at the end of THAT project is nearly boundless!

the whole pile gone:

just a little cleanup left to do. which is now something that can be easily managed with shovels and wheelbarrows.

then Don hitched the plow to the tractor, and began to till the field.

he and Leiah traded off driving the tractor over the course of the day.

Alan removed some scrubby little elm trees once the tractor had ripped through their roots.

the field turned out to be very good soil, overall.

downright beautiful.

once the whole field was plowed, Don began the process of disking it. this breaks up the large clumps of soil into soft, crumbly soil.

that was enough for one day. this morning’s work started here:

and included tilling the edges, disking the whole thing, and then using the box to begin to level the field.

the west side of the field is now wholly levelled.

the extra dirt, pulled up along the north edge there, will become the first layer of what will be the road running along the north side of the property. we’re essentially extending the driveway so that we have access to the back.

the east side is not quite done. Don will be back later in the week to finish this up. the dirt along the south and east will become berms, to hold the water in when we irrigate.

meanwhile, all this removed our old walking path through the field. Alan and I made a new path, lining the edges with sticks to keep people on the path (rather than compacting soil everywhere with our feet).

all in all, a fantastic weekend’s work! i’m very excited to finish this job and flood the field. by the end of next month, we’ll have a green pasture out there!

Tonight my walk started with a little tending of this garden.

I love Madder: the roots produce a red dye, but I haven’t had the heart to dig up enough of it to experiment with. It’s come up 3 years now, not terribly interested in staying with the confines of the garden bed.

I’ve been trying to get Prairie Flax established here. Last year, after two years of trying, my first Prairie Flax finally settled in. This year 3 are up! This plant only flowers in the morning. It’s a treat for anyone willing to be up early and working!

Yarrow is my lovesake. Here it is to thrive another year.

The Spice flows again this year. This system does not have to threaten the Rio Grande Cottonwood.

But it does.

Yet a cultivated field doesn’t have to threaten the ecosystem around it.

A muskrat swims in the acequia madre. These ditches are wild spaces. We can’t control that, but we can pick sides.

And right now we’re fighting for the weeds.

Ever road wants to be a field.

Every field wants to be a meadow. Every meadow wants to be a forest.

And every forest has a place where only the children go, to play.

But it’s OK to go back and swing. And laugh. And love.

And practice a little attending.

The class will cover how drip systems work, types of drip systems, why one might choose drip irrigation, how to design and install drip irrigation (including a tour of Sunflower’s system, and hands-on practice with the materials), and time to engage in the design process for your own yard.

Class taught by Jenny Rice.

Cost, $40 per person (covers materials). Work-trade scholarships are available!

Questions, directions, or more information? Contact Jenny at jenny@sunflowerriver.org.

Hope to see you there! Feel free to invite friends!

borage, much beloved of honeybees:

dill, with chinese kale in the background, and what i suspect is a rouge amaranth in front:

more dill:

chinese kale, already big enough to eat!

beets! these are golden beets.

onions & leeks:

turnips, chard, rat-tailed radishes:

turnips:

the whole array:

and in the garden — our new bulb bed, near the back door of the house. Crocus are blooming, and daffodils and hyacinth coming up already!

and in the early light, Tattersall peeks out from between the raised beds:

If you have ever had the chance to spend time with us during a bi-weekly project house meeting you know that the four Stewards know how to hit the ground running. It is no different for retreats. Within 30 minutes of our arrival we had already transformed the Evelyn Fite Room into our own meeting space complete with massive sticky notes and blank index cards.

This is our fourth retreat and our process gets refined each year. In fact part of the point of the retreat is to improve any area of how we work together, as well as put that into action over the next year. We draw our meeting process from a combination of basic corporate meeting strategies, formal consensus processes, software development productivity tools, and good old common sense. We start the meeting by reading and reviewing our vision statement

Sunflower River is joyfully creating a sanctuary wherein we embody and promote sustainability, spirituality, adaptability & safety within our selves, community, our land and Gaia.

This vision statement continues to be our focus and relavent to each of us as much as it was when we created it five years ago. It does not always encompass every aspect of where we are right in this moment. What it does do is act as a key to all the various items we are working towards at any one moment. It also focuses us back at what we came together to create. I am personally impressed at how well it still represents us as a whole.

The next segment of our retreat is getting our ground rules and agenda sorted out for the remainder of the weekend. The ground rules help us stay present and let us all remember we are human beings who need to be reminded to play nice from time to time. The agenda has settled into a similar flow from year to year. Starting with us using from level thinking about ourselves in relation to the farm in the past year to where we see ourselves in the future. This serves us in two ways. First it allows us to see where each of us is with relation to the farm and our future self. Second it becomes a spring board into generating the remainder of the topics we will cover for the retreat.

To actually manage all the different types of topics we need to cover during the retreat we use an emergent system to help us create the remainder of our agenda. We spend time simply brainstorming topics that we individually want to cover. Our topics come from a built up list of items left over from house meetings, personal agendas, high level view notes. We also do a process called the land walk. During this process we imagine ourselves walking the land and reviewing what we want to talk about in relation to the land. Another process I would like to use is walking through time over the next five years and seeing the land change. Whatever the process we end up with stacks of topics to cover over the remainder of the retreat.

This year we broke up our topics into four categories: intangibles, events, cycles, and projects. We then handled all the topics in one category at a time. Of course themes emerge and multiple topic cards can be handled in a single conversation. New topics are sometimes generated as we progress but that slows down over time and we eventually catch up with ourselves

This year we began refining the process by which we track and think about projects. Alan and I both come from software development backgrounds and are familiar with project management concept called Agile Software Development. One way of manifesting Agile is the Scrum process. Alan started applying this process to some of the topics at our house meeting over the last year. From that experience, over the weekend we came to a collective idea of how to use the key elements from Scrum. The basics are that we are maintaining a master list of projects we will work on at some point this year (called the project backlog) or next (someday/maybe backlog). We have two weeks between project house meetings which then become our sprint. During a sprint we choose projects we each will be working on from the project backlog and move that project closer to finish in some tangible way. Then at the next project house meeting we review the last sprint and select out projects for the next sprint. Wash-rinse-repeat.

I would like to say that we had a nice organized discussion and came to this process smoothly. The reality is that it took at least four different discussions, some check out time, two bottles of mead, and some trusting in the process to make this go. I don’t want you dear readers to think everything is fine and dandy all the time in Sunflower River land. No we witches have our warts too. In the end though we do have a new process. We will work with this process for a while, see where it takes us. A few years ago we started with our first major process overhaul by saying something like ‘could we put our tasks on the refrigerator door’. That system has turned into a major way we work with ourselves and our interns. It too has had some bumps in the road.

Projects however are not the only thing we do, or the only way to categorize our life. Time has its place as well. So before we leave the retreat we schedule the coming year with those cycles and events that happen on a regular basis, as well as whatever special tasks we can reasonably plan. This leaves most of us with a very full calendar for the year. So if you would like to schedule some time with one of us please do. I seem to have some free time in April.

We had one major change this year to our retreat and that was the addition of Gawain to our meetings. There are good reasons to not bring an six month old child to a planning retreat. We found out most of them at some point. We had added a day to our schedule to accommodate and by and by that helped us get finished on time. But screaming babies, even when they are your own, can be distracting and stressful. Neither Kat nor Alan have had to spend that much time with Gawain so they got all the extra stress. As a process improvement we will likely ask a friend to be a weekend nanny for next years retreat.

All in all it was as productive if more so a retreat than we have had. Maybe that is why we came back exhausted, yet still ready to go. Already emails are flying and small items have been accomplished.

Next year I think our big process improvement will be playing more and relaxing more as we plan to transform our land and our selves yet again.

this is what we started with:

Madeline and I emptied it all out, and I sorted out the functional and non-functional milk jugs for the modular thermal mass system. we dumped all the compost out (much of which had begun life as an amaranth harvest, and then been spoiled by mice when we did not get the dried amaranth out of the greenhouse fast enough), sorted all the drip system parts, frost-cloth and shadecloth into their new permanent homes in the Shed of Holding, sorted out all the pots, dumped a ton of trash, dumped all the over-baked soil (which had sat in there all summer, roasting in the amplified desert heat) into the garden where it can grow new microbes, and then flooded the greenhouse until we had forced all the mice to evict their tunnels. the greenhouse floor is pavers with sand between, so water sinks in rapidly. i truly am a cat; i captured 5 mice (in a cup, on at a time, the way you catch a spider) in that first flooding. the next day, i did it again, and caught the one remaining mouse, the large grandmother mouse. a third day of flooding, and no mice emerged. i think we got them all.

having caught the mice and aired the place out, i found some scrap wood recycled from a friend’s carport (thanks, Dave!) and built some shelves.

the shelves are sized to a one-gallon milk jug, for maximum space efficiency in storing water. the purpose of the water in the greenhouse is thermal mass — it soaks up the sun’s heat during the day, and lets it out again, gradually cooling, through the night. in this way it flattens out the extreme temperature highs and lows into a steadier middle ground, better for growing things. it’s not quite there yet — the south and east shelves are not yet stocked with jugs, and the greenhouse is still experiencing temperature extremes, although not as badly as it was before we did this. still — it’s getting below freezing in there. my goal is to reduce instances of freezing temperatures to an absolute minimum — and to reduce summer greenhouse daytime highs, as well; we really don’t need it to be 130 in there, and it really can do that when it’s 105 outside. more water mass is the solution to both extremes. we discovered a couple years ago that water is 30% more effective than adobe as thermal mass, which is why we have gone this route rather than building an adobe trom wall.

Madeline and I spent a week polyurethaning them, and then we filled up the jugs and installed them on the shelves.

note the seed trays on the left, the northern (and sunny) shelf. my picture-taking hasn’t kept up with the sprouting — here’s a turnip sprout from last week:

and now we have radishes & turnips putting out secondary leaves, while beets, kale, chard, chinese cabbage, lettuces, and several herbs sprout in other trays. they’ll be ready for transplant outside in March, at which time we’ll start our tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, and other warm-season crops in the greenhouse, for outdoor planting in May (after our annual, dependable, severe Beltane freeze).