Category: Uncategorized

this year has been on fast-forward.

autumn is late and warm so far. and very busy. the trees are only just beginning to turn, though we are more than halfway through the month, and we have not had a freeze yet. that in and of itself is not hugely unusual, but it is normally cooler at night by now. i’m worried that we’ll have another warm, dry winter, and the bugs will proliferate instead of dying off, and we won’t get the snowpack in the high country that we need to survive next summer.

but what more can we do about it? we keep on living, day by day.

cornstalks dry in the garden (note the green of the cottonwoods in the background):

echinacea in the garden — this one was a volunteer.

here’s that lovely white flower that fluffs itself up in the back fields each autumn:

and this artichoke, which i grew from seed this year, is about to flower! we’ll let this one flower and go to seed, so that the plant is stronger for next year, and can produce multiple flowers, which we will then harvest to eat. i can’t wait! fresh artichokes!

we’re still harvesting tomatoes, green beans, dry beans, peppers, and chard. we also put in a fall crop of sugar snap peas this year, which are now setting up:

pretty, aren’t they?

a view of my yurt from the bridge toward the back. this is looking toward the front of the property & the road. note that gorgeous woodpile that two visiting wwoofers put up early this month!

the lovely woodpile close up:

they also put in this border on the path into our pasture, which was sort of falling off the edge of the ditch.

early October is Albuquerque’s Balloon Fiesta. it attracts people from all over the world, and hundreds of hot air balloons float over the city for a week or so. even this far down in the Valley, we can see them:

and because i know you all love him as much as I do, here is Tattersall, chillin’ in the pirate fort of an autumn afternoon.

The Harvest Festival this year, our fourth, was also Sunflower River’s fifth anniversary.

Over 100 people came down over the course of the day to see the farm, enjoy the potluck and one another’s company, catch up with friends old and new, and take part in our annual Pie Contest.

Gawain enjoys the apple bobbing:

Sandy evaluates the wide array of excellent and delicious pies entered into in the contest.

Brian, Jim and others from Wildlife Rescue, Inc New Mexico came down this year with raptors to give a presentation on wild birds, and on what WRI does. this was well-received and seeing the birds was highlight of the day for many.

Brian with an owl:

and a hawk:

who was a little restless in the crowd.

the late afternoon included a lovely mellow little musical jam

and some acro-yoga.

the full photo-set for the day is viewable here.

Come one, Come all,
to Sunflower River’s 4th Annual Harvest Festival!

Come celebrate our 5th Anniversary with us!

Monday, September 3rd (labor day)
1pm till sundown

Activities will include:

Potluck — bring a dish to share!

Bobbing for Apples

Horseshoes

Pie Contest — bring a pie! (Clear glass-bottomed pans are preferred for the judging. Prizes!) The more pies, the better!

Open Music Jam — all instruments welcome!

And! We’ll have folks from Wildlife Rescue NM with raptors! They’ll have an info table set up, and will have hawks, owls, and other raptors for folks to learn about, and interact with.

Scott Chazdon from Affordable Solar will be there with the Solar Roller demonstration rig, and will give a presentation on solar energy.

the schedule:
1pm gather & potluck
2pm brief bread-breaking ceremony
3pm pie judging
pie eating after the judging & prizes
raptors & solar power demonstrations to follow
apple bobbing, horseshoes, and eating of potluck foods will be taking place all day
music jam in the late afternoon (or whenever people start to play)

Bring your friends and family — this is an all-ages celebration of the year, the harvest, the cycle of the seasons, of friendship and family and the beauty of the world.

RSVPs are not necessary, but always appreciated. All events and activities will take place outoors, in the green belt beyond the pasture field. It’s a bit of a walk from the street. Please dress appropriately (sensible shoes are a very good idea).

Questions or comments? Want to volunteer to help out? Contact Kat at yarrow@sunflowerriver.org.

and! if you have not “liked” Sunflower River on Facebook yet, you can keep in touch with us here:

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Sunflower-River/485070315506

Hope to see you Monday!

our guinea fowl are finally out of the brooder and free-ranging the property! so far, they prefer the barnyard, but we are encouraging them to prefer the garden as well, for pest-management purposes. we got guineas so that they would eat the grasshoppers and cabbage moths (et cetera!) that eat our crops. they’re a little slow getting the memo so far, but we’re working on it. they’re poultry, after all; intellectual speed is not their strong suit.

they are really fast on the ground, though, and good flyers, and just absolutely adorable. they are gentle with each other, and strongly prefer to travel all in a flock.

here they are:

and in the garden:

and a couple portraits:

and while we’re at it, have some chicken butts.

hey there. whose butt are you pointing that camera at?

barred rocks

and our turkeys.

the farm is finally ready to receive a lot more artwork! towards that end, we are starting up sculpture parties to play with mud on the interior of the wall. here’s the last sculpture party:

work days are fun! seriously, they are.

Tristan and I made several small images near the mailbox

and a snake and lizard by the main gate, for protection

i’m very pleased with the head:

Ali and Raian working on an Aum and a solar sunflower (which mirrors the beautiful sunflowers Rev is sculpting onto the coyote fence directly across from this.

thus:

and the crowning glory of the day, a praying mantis, by Eso Robinson & Nina Dubois

with a plant i added, for him to eat. i’m going to add more to the plant.

and here’s Gawain showing us the new dance he learned from Donna Pauline:

Next sculpture party, this sunday! Come on down. we’ll be doing some wall-building on the north side, and more of this kind of sculpture on the east side. hope to see you there!

a harvest basket for a friend. parsley, chard, leek, lemon balm, basil, tomatoes, green beans.

one day’s harvest last week, including a few beautiful dragon carrots.

another day’s harvest:

in the orchard:

jonathan apples:

not *quite* too pretty to eat.

peaches!

fruit basket! peaches and apples.

Alan, beautiful with the apple basket:

and the basket itself. this is the first year our trees have given us fruit, and everything is bearing this year! we got a rain of apricots in june, and a few cherries, enough nectarines to each have one, and now enough apples to each have one of each kind (jonathans and galas), and this basket of peaches. with the peaches we made two pies!

in the garden:

zinnia & malabar spinach:

corn! we are once again growing Inca Rainbow corn, a sweet corn that dries well for polenta. it’s setting up to be a really nice harvest.

the light, inside the Alice in Wonderland corner of the garden:

i really like harvest baskets.

corn, beans & sunflowers

technicolor cherry tomatoes. these are Isis Candy Cherries, our favorite variety of heirloom snack tomato. they have re-seeded well for us, and they bear abundantly all season. the flavor is incredible. divine candy, indeed.

watermelon vine among the beans

green beans! these are kentucky wonder pole beans.

the garden is also growing Golden Orb Weavers. these beauties are my favorite spider. gentle, enormous, and highly effective predators, they spread their webs across paths and among tall vegetation.

this lovely mama is deep in the Alice in Wonderland garden tangle:

which looks like this from the outside:

and here’s her daughter:

Signs of autumn: this dead butterfly is being eaten by ants.

and if you plant monkey bars, then you will grow monkeys.

Alan excited about the results of a summer of irrigating our field, in which he is cavorting.

goldfish in the aquaponics system:

which now also has a gate that Rev built:

and is the farm’s favorite hangout spot. here are Alan, Rev, Caden and two interns who have worked with us all summer, Justin & Ryan.

or almost, anyway.

neither are the sunflowers
kat heatherington

under the bluegreen door
a girl is dancing
barefoot on the sidewalk,
her long white legs
in the sunlight,
surefooted,
ignoring the passersby
while her friend
plays accordion.
her brown hair & dress cry out,
“it is autumn,”
and i can’t believe
it’s already autumn
the maximillians
have only begun to bloom but
it’s autumn
even in the green grass
i’m not ready yet
and neither are the sunflowers
or the barefoot girl i wish i could be,
dancing
between the sycamores.

***

that’s from a few years ago, but i seem to feel the same way every year. not yet, not yet! maybe it’s that the academic calendar sends me catapulting into the fall semseter before the weather or my mind are quite ready yet.

but sure enough, the maximillian daisies are starting to bloom, and there’s a chill late in the evening that hasn’t been there before.

turns out i ahven’t uploaded my photos here in about a month, either, so i’ll get on that tomorrow. all sorts of new things coming along. the pond, our darling new guinea hens (i actually have yet to adequately capture their cuteness on camera, but that’s on my agenda for saturday), *fabulous* new wall sculptures on the interior east wall. and as always, the garden. peaches and peach pie.

i do hope you all are following us on facebook. we’re here:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Sunflower-River/485070315506

(as soon as i figure out how to add the FB widget on the sidebar, i’ll do that, too.)
we update that page with photographs every few days, so it’s a great way to keep in touch with us. :)

more here soon.

apparently, i let the entire month of June get away without a blog update (or writing any poems, for that matter).  whoosh.  summer on the farm is always busy, and it doesn’t feel any busier than usual this year, but my attention’s been on other things.

so, the garden!

the corn is coming in nice and tall, as usual. it’s hot out, and the corn mostly does very well with that, though it and we would all appreciate more rain. we put in Inca Rainbow corn again this year; we’ve had the most success with this variety (which is a modern hybrid, but not GMO) for both fresh eating, and drying for polenta.

my wild patch between the apricots and the corn this year is already working its way into an enchanted wonderland.

i also put in a row of ornamental sunflowers this year, for pretties.

and our usual giant sunflowers, the original seeds for which came from our friends Andrew & Katie during our first garden season. i have no idea what variety they are; we call them Andrew’s Sunflowers. they’re delicious.

the bees think so, too.

this is totally overexposed, but i kind of love it, so i’m sharing here anyway. it captures more how the day feels, in the glorious expanse of sun and garden.

another sunflower

beans are not coming as strong this year as usual, but we do have some beauties.

we’ve gotten a lot more careful about how much amaranth we let grow, but we’re keeping a few of these hopi red dye amaranth plants from year to year, for seed. amaranth is a useful cereal grain, and grows very very well here, but it’s prickly, and difficult to thresh, which has greatly inhibited our use of it. if anybody comes up with a simple system for getting the seeds out of the prickles, please share!

tomatoes are setting up and starting to ripen now, too. i have three tomato patches this year, and this morning, found the first of the hornworms. we’ll be on daily hornworm patrol for a while now, until we’ve gotten them all. the turkeys love them.

and this year, for the first time ever, we have apricots! in fact, it is raining fruit at Sunflower River right now.

midafternoon is not the best time to take photos; everything looks crunchy from the heat here.

looking a bit sunny out.

in spite of our two trees coming in strong, we also took ourselves up to Johnny’s Garden to help out with their abundant apricot harvest again this year as well.

apricot jam canning will commence soon.

also new on the farm this year: peaches!

and apples!

and the grapes are starting to really get established.

and we’ll even get a few grapes, too.

we had a few cherries this year, too, but we ate them. :)

we’re still on curcurbit hiatus pending better control of the massive squash-bug population (tried so far: neem oil, capsacin/ dr bronner’s spray, hand picking, diatomaceous earth, installation of predator species; result: not planting squash for 3 years because NOTHING works against these brutes). but i have a volunteer melon coming up anyway.

Other projects also proceed apace. Rev added cross-bars at new heights to the monkey bars, completing the set. we’re developing quite the playground out there. i’ve been spending some time most evenings doing yoga and working out on the bars in the sunset, enjoying upside-down views of hummingbirds flitting among the fruit trees that edge the ritual ground.

we’re flood irrigating our pasture field. we haven’t seeded it, prefering to see what would come up of its own accord this first season, and then moderate it from there. mostly, that’s amaranth and bindweed. i pull tumbleweeds when i find them.

the big drama of the season has been losing a number of baby chicks (meat birds) to rat predation. we built an awesome new rodent-proof feed cage in the barn, with the result that the rats had less available food sources, and immediately turned to preying on our chicks. it took us a couple weeks to figure out what we were losing them to, and then another day or two to figure out how to get them out of harm’s way; we are now using the still-rabbitless rabbit hutches as chick brooders, since they were already rabbit-proof and the distance between rabbit-proof and rat-proof is pretty small. we had to order new meat chicks. meanwhile, we also got a handful of guinea hen keets:

the white ones are the guineas. aren’t they darling? they are rumored to be very good on insects, and not to scratch or mess up gardens the way chickens & turkeys do. the plan is to let them live in the barnyard, and run them through the garden once a day or so. yes, we know they’re noisy. we really need better pest-control in the garden, though. and we also hear they’re good eating; if they’re not as good on bugs as we want, or if they do more damage than good, or if they’re so noisy that it actually outweighs other concerns, then we’ll eat them. we’ll let y’all know how the experiement pans out.

we are also taking other non-poison rat-removal measures, including this handsome bull snake. he let himself be handled quite a bit before i released him into the leaves behind the chicken coop, where i know the rats to live. moments later, our intern Justin saw a tumult in the leaves, and two rats ran out, clearly fleeing for their lives. a bull snake can eat a rat or two a week, at which rate it will take him a long time to make a big dent in the population, but the fellow at Clark’s Pet Emporium where i got him says that snakes have a deterrent effect; when enough of them are eaten, the rats will move out. we sure hope so.

and of course we’re still working on the wall. east wall plastering has almost reached the north end. we completed the first section of the north wall rebuild:

this was one of the areas that we built wrong the first time, and had to go back and redo. next weekend, we’ll plaster it, and then move on to rebuilding the next stretch. two more patches of rebuilding to go.

i think that gets most of it. we’re deep into summer now. here’s praying for rain.

Albuquerque was one of the primary viewing places for the eclipse today. so after a long farm work day of diverse projects, we took ourselves, some internet-special eclipse shades, our cameras and a six-pack out to the pirate fort to chill out and watch the Fenris Wolf devour the sun.

Alan, rocking the eclipse shades and the spectacular earrings we got him for his birthday (seriously, check these out):

Alan and Rev viewing the eclipse from the Grandfather Cottonwood tree:

a view which got even cuter on the other side:

Caden taking photographs:

the first bite:

at this point, i figured out the best set of filters and settings to use to capture what i was actually seeing. this proved a great opportunity for figuring out more of my camera’s extensive abilities.

vivid red color filter

nom.

Alan, bathed in the eclipse light (seriously, did you see those awesome earrings?)

the bite gets bigger

it got very suspenseful right about this point:

almost!

almost! with tree branches

and, gone. the moon ate the sun. except for that one bit. i never eat the crust, either.

and out the other side

i think this one is my favorite

eclipse light in the elms

branched

the sun’s return, seen through the trees

Rev on the wall, watching

and Tattersall in the garden, not watching.

an altogether magical evening.

it’s been monsoonish out, though not actually raining much. hot in the early afternoon, then windy, clouding up, sprinkling, then clearing up towards evening. it’s very early in the season for this sort of thing, but not unwelcome.

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.