Category Archives: Explore

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Dandelion Wine

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Dandelions. Photo: Eric McLean/UnSplash

Back in the 1800s, “proper women” did not drink alcohol. However, for medicinal reasons, they could make and drink dandelion wine. It became popular and also fit in with the values of not wasting anything. Many grandmothers have passed down these recipes. And while this wine is incredibly time consuming to make, it gives us a chance to identify with the tasks of past generations.

Dandelion wine is made from only the fine yellow thread-like petals of the flowers. No green material goes into the wine. To get the necessary 1 quart of dandelion petals, you will need to process thousands of dandelions, but you can collect these over several days, freezing the skinny little yellow petals as you go. Then you are ready to start:

1 quart dandelion petals or more. Wash well.

1 ½ quarts of water. Boil and pour over the petals and soak for a couple days

Add zest from one orange to the soaking flowers and boil. Strain.

Add: 1 orange, interior fleshy part sliced (no white pith)

½ lemon, fleshy part only

1 pound sugar. Bring to boil, strain, and cool.

Put flower mixture into a ceramic or enamel pot (not iron or aluminum) and add:

½ package wine or champagne yeast *                                                                 

½ pound yellow raisins

Cover. Stir with wooden spoon daily for the next 10 to 14 days until it stops bubbling.

Strain. Bottle in sterile bottles and cork loosely in case more gas needs to escape. Then cork firmly and store in a dark, cool place for 6 months. This wine is a beautiful golden color and has an earthy flavor.

*yeast available at your local brewery supply store.

Prickly Pear Jelly

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Prickly pear cactus is native to Mexico and grows well in this desert. Picking the red fruits, called tunas in Spanish, is tricky as they are covered with fine hairs called glochids which are very painful to the touch. Tongs can be used to break off the fruit.

Traditionally, people rolled the pears around in the sand to remove the glochids, but now people are apt to use tongs and hold the tunas over a flame to singe them off. (You can also boil the tunas for 3 minutes which softens the glochids and makes it easier to remove the skins.) The next step is to remove the skin. This is done by cutting off the tuna ends and slicing ¼ inch through the skin in longitudinal cuts. You then can pull off strips of skin and chop up the fruit, seeds and all. Cook with water until it is mushy. Strain. Use the juice in any recipe for making jelly. It comes out a beautiful red and tastes great.

Recipes vary widely. They depend on the amount of jelly you wish to make, but all include lemon juice, sometimes in combination with lemon peels, lots of sugar and pectin. The recipes vary depending on the type of pectin you use. So first buy your pectin and then look up a recipe on the internet to proceed.

Sweet Potato Patch

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I love my sweet potato patch. To get started though, you need to find the fledgling tubers. Locally, Alameda Nursery Greenhouse starts them but if they have sold out, you might have to mail order. Those slips will arrive all brown and limp but soaking overnight revives them so you can plant early the next morning. *

My patch has 18 inches of topsoil so the potatoes can get by with a medium amount of water. When in the ground, the thick maze of vines colonize the sidewalk and try to climb a wall, shutting out late summer competition from purslane and quelites. Since most people don’t recognize the plant, they don’t take the potatoes, so I let them grow in my front yard where there is lots of heat and sun.

I dig them up late October, gently with a fork so I don’t end up slicing any. One six ounce tuber with some slips can yield eight to ten potatoes. To keep them throughout the winter, you have to cure them. Do this by keeping them in a warm and humid place for a couple weeks so the skins will toughen. I put them in a plastic bin and cover with a moist towel.

 I highly recommend this high calorie crop, also rich in Vitamin C, and easy to grow in the mid Rio Grande watershed.

*You can start your own by half-submerging one or more potatoes in water. After a month, there will be fairly well-developed branches. Take these branches off the main tuber and submerge them in water until roots develop; it should take another two weeks.

Blessing

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Hold on to what is good even if it is a handful of earth.

Hold on to what you believe even if it is a tree which stands by itself.

Hold on to what you must do even if it is a long way from here.

Hold on to life even when it is easier letting go.

Hold on to my hand even when I have gone away from you.

Humanure

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Poop is one of the most taboo subjects in human parlance. The prevailing wisdom is that it is dirty and needs to leave your life as soon as possible before it makes you sick and endangers everything around you.

I beg to differ: I see poop as a resource. Yes, it needs some careful management, but can save water and other key while resources providing nourishment for our surrounding environments. 

Here in Albuquerque, I have several options for purchasing poop for home yard fertilization. In the city, we flush our poop to the Wastewater Treatment Facility on 2nd Street SW for multistage cleansing before it’s released back into the Rio Grande. The extracted biosolids are added to other organic waste, composted, and then sold by the city. I can also buy steer manure, such as Earthgro products that come from Pennsylvania. Or I can take a borrowed pickup to a local horse stable to scoop up some free nitrogen. I consider these options a step better than buying chemical fertilizers. I’m wary of what antibiotics those steers have been fed, and I’d rather not risk adding de-wormer and herbicides to my garden. I’d like to do bette

What if I could “close the loop” and recycle my own drug-free poop onsite? I could donate my excrement to the compost bin, where beneficial microbes could feast on it for a couple years and leave behind gorgeous, sweet-smelling food for trees and shrubs. In fact I’ve been doing this for the past ten years with the help of Joseph Jenkins’ Humanure Handbook.

This is actually not a new idea. It’s been practiced in traditional Japanese farming (see Masanobu Fukuoka’s The One-Straw Revolution) and promoted by nonprofits who build latrines for communities that are short on water and wastewater infrastructure. You can buy thousand-dollar “composting toilets” for installation in your house, but my research indicates that they simply dry the material that then needs to be composted for use.

So here’s a simple DIY solution: a five-gallon bucket topped with a toilet seat, coupled with a side bucket of toilet paper and sawdust to sprinkle on the deposits. I keep the setup in a little enclosure outside my house where I can see the moon phases, constellations, and rising dawn. And really, it has little odor. When full, the bucket dumps into the compost bin to digest and transform. (I have a separate bin for plant matter that will end up on annual food crops!)

Ok, so this isn’t for everyone. But if you’d like to experiment, feel free to delve into the Handbook. This is a spiritual exercise in integrating your shadow side that prefers to remain hidden and unconscious.

Acknowledgment of Land

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“Every community owes its existence and vitality to generations from around the world who contributed their hopes, dreams, and energy to making the history that led to this moment. Some were brought here against their will, some were drawn to leave their distant homes in hope of a better life, and some have lived on this land for more generations than can be counted. Truth and acknowledgment are critical to building mutual respect and connection across all barriers of heritage and difference. We begin this effort to acknowledge what has been buried by honoring the truth. We are on the ancestral lands of the Isleta, Sandia, and Laguna Pueblo. We pay respect to their elders past and present.”

Written with guidance by the Native Governance Center

If you want to sincerely acknowledge the land, go to it. Put your hands into it. Put your feet in it. The soil is alive. The microscopic communities in it remember everyone who lived here; they shaped one another. Go to the forest, or to a prairie or a creek. We’re lucky to have little green places and public spaces. This is where you acknowledge the land— away from walls and doors and lawns. by Summer Wilkie

Mid Rio Grande Conservancy District

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Cochiti Dam. Photo: US Army Corp of Engineers

The Mid Rio Grande Conservancy District, created in l923, manages the amount and timing of water flow in the mid Rio Grande for both irrigation and flood control. In 1935 it built the El Vado Dam and reservoir to store water and also has four smaller diversion dams which it maintains. The district is in parts of Sandoval, Bernalillo, Valencia, and Socorro Counties. The MRGCD works with the New Mexico Office of the State Engineer, and federally with the Bureau of Reclamation, as these three agencies have responsibility for the amount and uses but not the quality of our water.

District boundaries are different than county boundaries and in general consist of properties close to the river. They are mapped and appraised separately, and only people living in the district pay taxes to MRGCD. These are collected by the county clerks. These taxpayers are also the electors of the MRGCD Board of Directors, voting in elections held separately from the general elections.

MRGCD uses its tax money to maintain the various dams, levees, and channels in the district. Some of the money goes toward recreation. In the Albuquerque area alone, there are more than 300 miles of paths along irrigation channels for hiking and biking. MRGCD also helped establish the Nature Center State Park, Tingley Beach Park, and the Rio Grande Valley State Park by providing land.

Recently, MRGCD has had to delay startup of irrigation to April as the district is in debt to Texas for 100,000 acre feet of water to Elephant Butte where, by legal compact, Texas water begins. El Vado dam is the main storage place for MRGCD water. The dam needs repairs to get it back to full capacity and these began this year. MRGCD also delivers the agreed upon amounts of water from the “Prior and Paramount” 1928 Congressional Act, to the six pueblos in the district.