Lifescapes

Hot stuff, folks

Every November, our friend Dolly, a neighboring rancher, gifts Bill with a hefty helping of habanero peppers--not the hottest peppers in the galaxy, but pretty durn hot (and certainly too hot for me). Bill halves them, dries them, and turns them to powder in his coffee grinder. When I pointed out that all the instructions I've read say to remove the seeds first, he just shook his head. "The seeds are the best part," he said. "They make it hotter." So here you have it, friends. Bill Albert's sure-fire habanero factory. You'll notice that the dryer is sitting on the deck. That's because these habaneros are hot enough to make my eyes tear and my nose run--even without tasting one. He's already planning on a couple of really hot (double the habanero) batches of Ruby Wilcox's Hot Lips Cookie Crisps.

Also hot stuff, weather-wise. After a couple of frosts in October and a freeze two weeks ago, we've been stuck in a warm pattern: in the 80s every day, sultry but no rain. A cold front is due in on Thursday, but there'll be a warming trend after that. And we're expecting a La Nina winter, which means that it will be warmer and drier than normal. Whatever normal is in this period of climate change.

But we're not alone in this trend toward hot, hotter, hottest. NOAA says that January-October here in the U.S. was the warmest such period on record. And so far, 19 countries (making up 20% of the planet's surface) experienced record-setting heat. You can see an interesting graphic here. And when I was a kid and the weather turned cold, we'd say "Cold as Siberia!" But even Siberia's permafrost isn't perma any longer. No doubt about it. Hot and getting hotter.

I wish it were as easy to return the climate to the temperate "norm" we all grew up with as it is to deal with these habaneros.

Update: 11/25/10. Today's record-setting temperature: 87 degrees. I had a dozen cabbage plants wintering-over in the garden. The grasshoppers finished them off. All of them.

Reading note. We have many advantages in the fight against global warming, but time is not one of them. Instead of idly debating the precise extent of global warming, or the precise timeline of global warming, we need to deal with the central facts of rising temperatures, rising waters, and all the endless troubles that global warming will bring. We stand warned by serious and credible scientists across the world that time is short and the dangers are great. The most relevant question now is whether our own government is equal to the challenge.--JOHN MCCAIN, speech, May 12, 2008

 

Back to the Books

I've been enjoying my break (doing some housekeeping, rehabbing my spinning wheel, playing in the fall garden) but it's time to get back to work.

The cover of the next China Bayles mystery (Mourning Gloria, April 2011) has been posted and Peggy and I are working on the book's webpage. The first-pass typeset pages arrived via FedEx on Monday, and I've been reading and doing minor corrections--truly minor, I'm glad to say. In the past, I've sent back as many as 30% of the pages to be corrected. There are likely to be fewer than 10 with this book. That's due to Berkley's new system of electronic copyediting, which I hated (to start with) and now appreciate. I'll fax back the corrected pages tomorrow.

And then I need to start thinking about Cat's Claw, China's 20th book--something of an anniversary, wouldn't you say? The first book, Thyme of Death, was published in October 1992, at the same time as Work of Her Own, my first book-length nonfiction. (That turned out to be a big mistake. It was hard to promote both at the same time. Work of Her Own pretty much disappeared, even though it was a good book, ahead of its time.) This was before the Internet, too, when books lived only in print and on shelves and newspapers published pages of book reviews. The world we live in is very different, with online bookstores, e-readers, and book blogs.

I've been promising a book about Sheila Dawson, and Cat's Claw is it. Several herbs go by that name, but the one I have in mind is Cat's claw acacia (Acacia greggii), which is native to the Southwest. It is also called Devil's claw and Wait-a-minute tree (once you're snagged, it takes you a minute or two to get unsnagged). Native Americans had several medicinal uses for it. Several other herbs go by the name of Cat's claw, and I'm sure that China will include as many of them as she can think of. If you know of one, mention it in a comment and I'll give her your list to work from.

Reading. The  long-awaited Post Carbon Reader arrived on the weekend, and I've been gobbling it. The subtitle, Managing the 21st Century's Sustainability Crises (yes, "crises" is plural) tells you what you need to know about the essays in the book, from some of the most important writers on the key issues that will shape our lives over the next 90 years--food, water, energy, population, and climate. A serious book for readers who are seriously interested in looking ahead and getting ready to meet the challenges.

Gardening (speaking of challenges). I just came in from picking the last of the peas. I know--I keep saying that, and more keep showing up. The rest of the fall garden is finished, but the wintering-over plants are . . . well, waiting for winter. (It'll be 75 today, and a warm, dry winter is predicted.) There's kale, chard, spinach, carrots, and cabbage. Oh, and rhubarb, which we grow as an over-wintered annual here in the Hill Country. I moved the two new fig trees out of their patio containers to a spot near the garden, where I hope the deer will overlook them. Only a few figs this year, but I've told them I'm expecting great things from them next summer. They've told me to be patient.

Reading note. Our starting point for future planning must be the realization that we are living today at a critical moment in the long arc of human history when numerous crises are not only converging simultaneously, they are interdependent and affect virtually ever living thing on the planet. . . . The success or failure of the human experiment may well be judged by how we manage the next ten to twenty years.--Asher Miller, The Post Carbon Reader

 

 

Just in Case

With long-term climate change on our minds and a La Nina (warm and dry) winter on the immediate horizon, we've invested in a 1550-gallon water tank, which Bill will hook up to the gutters. The standard calculation for rainwater catchment systems (in case you want to consider this for your own home) is .5 gallons per square foot per inch of rain. Which means that once this tank is fully operational, 2.5" of rain will fill it. There'll be enough water to meet our basic daily needs and help to irrigate the garden--a backup system, in case something happens to our well.

Just in time. Like everybody else, we do a lot of things around here "just in time." We buy groceries, fill the Honda's gas tank, meet book deadlines, plant the garden, manage the animals, replace equipment, and learn new stuff. (I don't know about you, but I find it really hard to learn the details of something-or-other that I might never need, or that might change before I need to use it). In fact, over the past decade, the business world has entirely shifted over to just-in-time thinking. Companies don't stock inventory until they need it, they don't buy anything until they've run out of whatever-it-is, and they don't look for equipment replacements until something breaks. Just-in-time management is cheaper and--given the ease with which purchases can be made on the global market--it seems like the right way to go. But is it?

Just in case. The water tank we just bought was the product of some serious just-in-case thinking, brought on by our experience of the serious 24-month drought of 2008-2009 and our concern about the reliability of our aquifer. But there's more. Our stocked pantry, Bill's tools and tool-using skills, our garden and gardening skills, even our library of how-to-do-it books--these are all part of our just-in-case planning. Next on our list of things to think about: solar panels and battery storage, just in case the grid goes down. And in the spring, we're planning to rebuild our chicken coop and acquire another small flock of hens.

Why? Like everybody else, we'd like to think that life will go on today just as it has over our lifetime, peaceably, with more than enough of everything we need or could possibly want. But we know that the climate is changing, that fossil fuels are limited and non-renewable, that the global fossil-fueled economy is fragile, that natural disasters can happen, and that pandemics are possible. We also know that we want to be as self-reliant as we can. (Nobody can be entirely self-reliant: witness our call to the Bertram VFD when we had an accidental grass fire here last weekend, beyond the reach of our hoses.)

So we've begun to think with two minds. We live our ordinary lives with as much just-in-case stuff as we need to meet our requirements, given the current abundant supplies of food, transportation fuel, and household energy. But we're also doing as much just-in-case planning as we can, to meet the needs we might have if something happens to interrupt those supplies. We have more questions than answers, and more concerns about the future than I want to write about here. It's sometimes a challenge to live contentedly in the present. We do that as much as we can, while we know that the world that's ahead of us will be different from the world we grew up in.

Are these issues on your mind, too?

Reading note. The future in the modern imagination has always stretched out like a broad highway drawing us onward with the promise of tomorrow. Now rather suddenly, as it becomes impossible to ignore dramatic physical changes taking place across the Earth, the future looms like an urgent question. Whatever the coming century brings, it will not unfold smoothly as some improved but largely familiar version of life as we know it. This is the only thing that seems certain.--The End of A Long Summer: Why We Must Remake Our Civilization to Survive on a Volatile Earth, by Dianne Dumanoski

 

 

 

 

Beans, oh boy!

We love beans. Green beans, yes. Dry beans, oh boy. This year, about half of my bean crop is dry beans, like the unsorted pile of red beans and pintos on my dining room table--open-pollinated, "heirloom" beans, grown from seed saved from last year. We eat the red beans with rice and sausage (with thyme, garlic, cayenne, and green onions), and the pintos (with garlic and cumin) as refried beans. In next year's garden: more of these, plus tepary beans from Seeds of Change. Teparys thrive in dry weather, which we definitely have plenty of. What's your favorite dry beans? How do you cook them?

Still in the garden, after our second freeze: fall/winter greens, such as chard, kale, spinach, and the coles (cabbage, broccoli), and Irish potatoes. But I'm not done planting. Garlic goes in this week, and onions. And there's still time for carrots and beets.

Book Report. China and I have settled on the title for the 2012 book: Cat's Claw. There are probably a half-dozen herbs locally called cat's claw. Acacia gregii is the one we have in mind, although China will probably want to tell you about all the other cat's claws. You know how she is. This book features Sheila Dawson, though. You'll see why, when you read Mourning Gloria (April, 20100).

Speaking of which, we now have a cover. Our web page is still in the works--coming as soon as I get around to it (after I finish the garlic and onions, probably).

And speaking of web pages, Bill wants me to tell you that he's having a holiday sale on his woodwright's website. If you're looking for a unique gift--a beautiful hand-turned piece made from one of Meadow Knoll's trees--you might find it here.

 

Also this week, I read and reviewed two outstanding books you might like: Carol Deppe's The Resilient Gardener: Food Production and Self-Reliance in Uncertain Times; and Growing Older: A Chronicle of Death, Life, and Vegetables, by Joan Dye Gussow.

Reading note. Louis Armstrong loved red beans and rice so much that he signed all his personal letters with "Red beans and ricely yours..."