An Apple In The Hand....

Last week my wife and I stayed with a friend and his wife in their house in a little town in the mountains of southern Utah. We had gone to see a play at an outdoor theater and then had driven up to their house, about 30 minutes away. It was well past dark when we got there. The sky was lit up with the Milky Way and billions of stars that we don't see because of all the light pollution we have here in Las Vegas. (It's Vegas, Baby!)

The next morning we noticed that his two apple trees had put on quite a crop of apples this year and they were all red, ripe and delicious. Don't know what kind they are, but they are sweet with enough tart to keep you eating them. So we all started picking them. My friends are extremely generous and insisted that we take a bunch home with us. We filled every bag we could find a big box and even a huge cooler. We almost had to sit on our overnight bags to make sure there was room in the SUV to fit all the apples. We ended up with at least a bathtub full, if not more. And we didn't get but a little over half of the apples on the two trees.

Here's my wife picking apples.

If you look closely, you can spot the Royal
Bluecrested Apple-picker, a rare bird indeed!

On the way back, we stopped at a kitchen store to get some parts for my wife's bread mixer. (We don't have that kind of a store in Las Vegas, but they do in Utah.) While there, we picked up a water-bath canner and a marvelous food strainer and some other things like this gadget that peels, cores and slices apples as you crank the handle. Managed to squeak out of there for a little over $200.

The kids loved the apple slicer and actually got busy eating apples, as long as they could slice them with the gadget. But even with 15 people living in my house, we were never going to take care of that many apples before they went bad. So Saturday morning, we started canning.

And canning.

We set up a camp stove on the patio and fired up a pot of water to sterilize bottles and another pot to cook the apples a bit to soften them. We also set up a pot to cook apples in the kitchen as well as the water-bath canner. Then we installed the strainer on the island.

First, we washed the apples.

We washed bottles and sterilized them, then we packed them full of yummy applesauce that we had run through the strainer. Once full, we put the lids and rings on and processed them through the canner. And repeated. And repeated. And repeated. For eight hours.

Then we cut them up into halves or quarters depending on
what size they were.

We used a lot of the grandkids, too. They would help to crank the strainer, fetch more apples to wash, cut apples, fill the jars, get the bubbles out and things like that. Tough to keep them from licking their fingers all the time. The stuff was just too yummy! (Yes, I said yummy. Deal with it.)

Then we cooked them in boiling water for a few minutes to
soften them up. Not too much, don't want really runny applesauce.

Next we dumped them into the hopper of the strainer. This machine is a miracle.
Crank the handle and applesauce comes out.

We went through every pint jar we had and I went to a couple of stores for more lids. Then I went back to the stores and got more lids and more jars. We didn't realize how many jars that many apples would produce.

Sometimes you have to help move the apples into the grinder chute.

This is the applesauce as it comes through the strainer screen. The size
of the holes determines the coarseness of the applesauce. You could
just eat it by itself (and we did!!). We did all of these apples
without the addition of sugar or cinnamon. You can always add
those later if you want, but you can't take them out if your recipe doesn't
call for them.

The exit chute of the strainer had the skins, the seeds, the stems all mushed up and ready
to feed chickens or put in the compost pile. The good stuff goes into the other bowl.

The water-bath canner holds 8 pint jars at a time. They took 15 minutes to process once
they water got to boiling at the right temperature.

8 hours later, the house smells wonderful and we have more than 100 pints of
delicious slightly tart applesauce ready for the pantry.

You know, looking at the big pile of jars on the table, you would think that it's a lot of applesauce. Well, for most families it might be. But the very next day, we had our kids over for dinner and went through several jars. With 12 kids, assorted spouses and nearly 20 grandkids, we'll be lucky if there is any left come spring. But that's what it's for.

When we boxed it up and put it on the shelves in the pantry, the shelves just sort of swallowed them up and made it look like that day's work wasn't so much. But we know better.

It's wonderful to have food put aside for later. It's wonderful to have projects in which many members of the family can participate. It's satisfying to look on the shelves and know that there is great-tasting applesauce waiting to be eaten. 

But it's even more wonderful to have friends like Rick and Patty who are so generous and kind that they gave us all those wonderful apples. Makes me want to go back up there and help him prune and trim his trees. A simple "thank you" just doesn't seem sufficient.

Back in the Garden, Again (Still!)

With apologies to Gene Autry for the title, I am announcing that I am back to writing about my stealth farming again. I didn't quit farming for the last bunch of months, I just stopped writing about it.

Have you ever done something that was fun at first but then began to be a chore so you stopped it only to realize that doing it was actually rewarding and now that you stopped it you realized that you missed it? Well, blogging about my farming was becoming that and I realize that I have missed it for several reasons.

I missed it because it pushed me to do something regularly. Routine can be a good thing; it's how habits are formed. If it's a good habit, something that is beneficial, you want it to be regular and almost routine. By forcing myself to write about my gardening, I also forced myself to look at my garden in a different light or from a different perspective every time I worked in it. As I would be weeding (not a big chore, just a regular one) I would view in my mind how I wanted this to look on the blog.

As I would be thinning or harvesting or shaping or pruning or trimming or any of a dozen other farm chores, I would imagine writing about it and think about how I would tell someone about what I was doing.

And I got to take photos of my garden. That's fun because you get to make your garden look like a total success without any failures and without any weeds. Close-ups of bees and other critters are fun, so are flowers. Photos of my garden are fun for me to look at  because I get to remember the good stuff. Looking at a rather empty bed in the winter can be almost depressing. Looking at a photograph of that same bed all green and lush and productive is thrilling and makes me want to plan and do more.

So, for those reasons and for others, I'm back to writing about it.

There will be a few changes, though. I'm going to include more entries about home production and storage, not just the gardening. I'm going to have some commentary on why I do this and why I think others should (or should not) do it. I'm going to put more effort into the concept of the Stealth Farming to explain that more as I think it's not only a good idea, it's a very fun concept, too. And I'm going to discuss some other aspects of this concept like solar cooking and finding space to grow and wise water use and mulching.

I have been talking with folks who keep bees in my area. Now, in my area, bees are illegal in you backyard. (I wonder how they enforce that law to all the wild bees in the area?) We've decided that we want to push that issue to amend the code so that beekeeping is more acceptable and accessible to us. And, we're going to push the issue on backyard chickens, too. My particular neighborhood is an island of chickenlessness in a sea of availability. That's going to be a challenge, I'm sure. (My son lives a mile away and he is in an area that can have chickens. So he has one. The eggs are great.)

So I'll keep you posted on all of these developments as they work out. And I'll share more about growing food in the desert. Since I can grow all year long without a break, I don't think I'll run out of things to write about.

Living in a Desert Island

I live in Las Vegas, Nevada. Yes, that Las Vegas. No, I don't visit the casinos or the hotels or travel down the "Strip" or even cross it any more than I have to. It's not that I have anything against it, it's just that I live in the "other" part of Las Vegas, the real Las Vegas. It's the one that you see as you fly into town to visit those casinos or that you pass as you drive in on the Interstate and wonder, "Who would actually choose to live in the desert?"

In some ways, most of us who live here actually like the idea that the 34 million people who visit our city each year for vacations, fun weekends, conventions, weddings (yep, that's a big deal here, too), or just coming to take part in some world-class rock climbing, do so in a relatively small area of town. Very few of our visitors actually take the time to venture out into the suburbs, which start about a block off of the strip in any direction. That makes for a relatively quiet city.

One thing that you'll notice if you do fly into town is that we don't have any agricultural areas surrounding the urban area. You won't fly over big, green fields of grain or alfalfa or farms of vegetables or ranches or even those big wheel irrigation fields that dominate the western farming landscape.

This is a great view of Las Vegas with Mt. Charleston in the background (Elevation nealy 12,000 feet) and Lake Mead with Hoover Dam in the foreground. The dam is at the bottom. All brown, tan, empty desert as far as the eye can see.

No, you'll see only tan and brown desert interspersed with the occasional beige-to-white dry lake bed and broken up by north-south mountain ranges. That's it. And it's those colors because we don't grow anything in the area. It's a desert which, by definition, means we have a dearth of fresh water available. The whole state gets only an average of about 7 inches of rain a year. Doing a flyover will show some disks of green near some of the underground aquifers and some green in the bottom lands near those same water sources, but by and large, it is not a garden state by any means.

This is Red Rock, just west of town. Still brown.

We have about 2.75 million folks in the state, with about 1.9 million in Clark County, where I live. That makes for a very sparsely populated state.

But since we don't produce food here, how do we feed the 36 million mouths that annually come to my town?

It's easy, we bring it in on trucks. Everything comes in on trucks.

There is one road coming into Las Vegas from the north or south. That's Interstate-15. We're 4 hours from Los Angeles which means we have close access to everything that California produces. It just has to get put on a truck and it's coming up the road. We're 6 hours from Salt Lake City, which means that anything produced in the intermountain region is coming down the same road. US 95 joins us with Phoenix, also about 6 hours away, but less comes in from that direction than from California and Utah.

A precarious position to be sure.

This past several weeks have been interesting. We had about a 2-hour rain storm hit just north of town and it took out I-15. Literally washed it away. No traffic was moving. It took several days to get that road open again for car traffic and a couple more for the trucks to be allowed on it. In the meantime, trucks had to take a detour that cost a lot in time, fuel and drivers. They had to detour around the mountains and up some older roads to get around the disaster area.

That nice new river bed in the center of the picture used to be a divided, 4-lane highway. Now it's just sand and chunks of asphalt.

Normally, the route from Las Vegas to Cedar City, Utah is 177 miles along a fast-moving interstate. That would normally have taken about 2 and a half hours. The route they had to take was up US 93 and then across the US 56 to Cedar. That was more than 4, closer to 5 hours or double the time for just that short distance. Many trucks were cancelled until the road opened again.

This is looking north about 45 minutes north of Las Vegas. Nobody was getting through at that time.

Now, we don't get nearly as much food into this valley from the north as we do from the south. California is a much larger trading partner, if you will, than is Utah. So what would happen if the same thing were to occur in the other direction?

Well, depending on where the break happened, it could completely shut down vehicle traffic as I-15 is the ONLY road in some places between here and there. That would mean that traffic would need to detour as much as 300 miles to make the trip, over much slower roads. If that corridor were to be shut down for a week, there wouldn't be much on the shelves of the grocery stores.

I've mentioned before in this blog about a truckers' strike that happened more than 30 years ago and really crippled this town. The supermarkets were empty in 3 days. Not even bug spray was left on the shelves. It was all gone. No food, no paper goods, no cleaning supplies, no toilet paper. Nothing. It was scary.

Now, once the strike was settled, which happened in a week or two, it took another two or three weeks to stock everything back up again. People still bought everything in sight. Fear is a powerful thing. It was a couple of months before people stopped panic buying.

Now, this year's floods didn't have that kind of impact; the damage was in the wrong area. But it could have very easily. Good thing home production and storage is a good concept to live by.

I'm glad we live that way.

This last weekend, it rained again. Took out I-15 just north of town. Again.

Who knew it could happen twice in one month?