April 30-More and More Snow

Just a few pics of what we woke up to and saw this morning. Just what we needed: more snow.

Water is Coming

This may be the worst year ever for flooding in our neck of the woods. There is so much snow pack on Timp (the tallest mountain in the area) which drains right into the two canyons just above us.

I took my daughter Catherine and Nikki, our pooch, up into the hills to have a look at the creek and such. The pictures are: (1. from our house, looking up at Timp; (2. Catherine above the stream; (3. a view down the canyon into the valley; and (4. Nikki getting her chin and ears scratched by her alpha male.

Anyway, we're going to be sandbagging in a couple of weeks, probably while I'm in San Francisco with the ESD Japan Exchange Program. I'm a bit worried. The city is going to put a big pipe down the middle of our street but I don't think it will hold all the water they are projecting will be coming down. So much depends on the weather. I guess we're all in God's hands in that we just have to do the best with the cards we are dealt. I don't think there's a habitable "safe" spot anywhere on the planet. Safety, true safety, has its origins in other spheres. It is reverence and awe of nature's power and fury coupled with a realization that acceptance of its cycles, twists and turns, are just how things are that make me grateful to be a witness and part of it. I will work and prepare to save our house and property, but in the end nature will ultimately have her way with all of man's creations.

Split Hives

I split a couple of hives on Saturday, so I'm up to 7, or back down to 5, depending on how it goes. I hope they all survive. I left them lots of honey.

Square-Foot Gardening SFG

Just had a great presentation on SFG by Alan Silva for our school community garden. It was EXTREMELY interesting and it made a truckload of sense. Check out THIS SITE for more information. I'm still kinda hooked on dirt, rather than "magic mixtures," but it really sounded like something I could use, particularly between the grape rows. It's a fairly portable system and I'm pretty excited to try it out this year.

School and Sustatinable Living

The past five months have been a whirlwind of activity. I've been busy with school and Landmark Forum, church, family as well as the regular chores and duties. I'll include more pictures and information about my own enterprises in the future but what's been happening at school has been transformational, for all of us.

The first 3 pictures are of a service project at a local Hindu Temple where we were helping prepare for the Festival of Colors, or Holi. We were able to begin cleaning up their community garden, clean up after the Llamas and fill bags of dye for the 30,000 expected attendees.






The arena of Sustainable Development has expanded with:
1) my acceptance into a UN-Japan Teacher Exchange that's focus is SDE (Sustainable Development Education;
2) a local Economic Self-Reliance Conference sponsored by Brigham Young University and the Ballard Center where multiple connections and validation for my students' Community Garden project were forged;
3) Common Ground which is the community garden project that my students initiated in conjunction with the AP Geography units on Agriculture and Development and my continuing interest in Sustainable Living.Common Ground is developing into a project in diversity. Almost 2/3 of the participants are Hispanic, which community represents 1/3 of our school population. The students are entirely committed to the project. They even had a write-up in a local newspaper.

CabSav

What a season of brewing this has been. I now have 4 gallons of white grapes, 5 gallons of apple cider and now 6.5 gallons of deep red cabernet savignon going. It's so addictive, the process. It's like magic to have the fruit purify itself and change into wine then vinegar. Dang, I'm hooked.

Apple Cider Vinegar

I tried my hand at apple vinegar but there wasn't enough juice in the apples to even begin. I hustled onto the internet and found some recipes calling for lots of sugar water which really added to both sugar and liquid contents. I let it sit in 3 big buckets for a few days then pressed it off into a single bucket, 6 gallons. You can see the results so now it's bubbling. I'm going to follow the same pattern as I have for grapes so we'll see what comes out. I pressed out all the juice I could then strained it all back through a strainer into a 6 gallon bucket. Then I siphoned off enough to fill a 5 gallon carboy and 4 1-quart bottles. It began bubbling almost immediately. I placed it outside on the table under the grape arbor, as you can see.