Beside the Stream

Lamb’s Ears

Published on July 2, 2009 in gardening. 0 Comments

This photo is from mid-March, when lamb’s ears look very tender.

Lamb’s ear is drought tolerant and deer resistant, but I never thought twice about where it came from until I checked the spelling and found out that, aside from it’s Latin name Stachys (from the Greek word stachys, or spike-like), this plant is called woolly betony, woolly woundwort, lamb’s ears and lamb’s ear (and it’s either woolly or wooly, depending on your mood) .

Lamb’s ear has long been used as a medicinal herb. It’s called woundwort because when you bandage a wound with bruised lamb’s ear leaves, it heals quickly (and the juice of the leaves soothes bee stings as well).

Here’s the odd part: Stachys Byzantina–our garden variety lamb’s ear–originated in the Mesopotamia. Like barley and roses, the lamb’s ear has been cultivated from the dawn of agriculture. Households in many cultures used lamb’s ear dressing for wounds, and perhaps that’s why it spread so far.

I think it’s safe to say that if there was a Garden of Eden, it would have had lamb’s ear in it. Millenia later we’re still growing the same plant, but have collectively forgotten why. Lamb’s ear is just a fuzzy old favorite now, but it wasn’t so long ago that each household had its own Band-Aid plant!

Bee is for Beauty

Published on July 1, 2009 in insects. 0 Comments

A group of small bees were working over a big stand of Stachys, or Lamb’s Ear.

It looks like the bee is nuzzling its face into the flower

in a sort of bee-flower communion,

but instead each bee has its proboscis deep down that flower’s throat.

They rub their legs over their body, perhaps to pack pollen grains into the pollen baskets on their hind legs

which this bee is helpfully stretching out.

Here’s a bee kicking up his heels,

and here’s a bee showing off its pollen basket (Thanks for posing).

The three sisters

Published on June 30, 2009 in gardening. 6 Comments

Corn, beans and squash were called the Three Sisters by the Indians, who planted them together on hills with the beans growing up the corn (no need for poles), and the squash growing between the hills as mulch.

Last year we grew rows of corn interspersed with beans, with pumpkins planted around the perimeter. It was a mess. We realized that the three sisters concept doesn’t work with rows: you have to use Indian-style mounds instead.

This 1918 photo of Indian fields shows the mounds of corn and beans, but I’m not impressed with their squash.

I think we got it right this time. Bob put the corn in first, and after it sprouted he planted the beans (that way, when the beans are old enough to stretch out, the corn will be tall enough for them to climb). The pumpkins around the mound were greenhouse starts.

Here are six mounds, and it looks like the area between them will be filled in another month. The three sisters–corn, beans and squash–don’t grow together successfully when you use rows. But when you put them in hills with the vines between, they rule.

Inside an earthship

Published on June 29, 2009 in travel. 1 Comment

Since the earthships are dug into the ground, they are very low profile. Most of them look like they’re no more than eight or ten feet above ground level.

Earthships have angled walls of glass, and the house is a passive solar structure where the sun heats a large mass during the day that gives off heat during the night. This is good for heating during the winter,

but in the summer you want to screen the sun out, and it’s hard to make good curtains for slanted windows. I saw a lot of very badly dressed windows in this subdivision.

I like that there weren’t any electrical poles and wires along the roads,

and that’s because everyone has their own solar panels.

Bob’s guess is that in spite of the recycled materials and humble design, you couldn’t build this earthship for less than $100 a square foot. The electrical system is more expensive than a conventional house, because you have the solar panels and it’s harder to wire these thick concrete walls. The water and wastewater system is also expensive.

This is the back of the earthship (windows on the front) and you can see the big cistern on the right. Some of the earthships were collecting water from the roofs, but I think this cistern may be filled with hauled water. This might be a 3,000 gallon cistern. Inside, this water is used for drinking, cooking, washing and bathing, and is plumbed to flow into

this greenhouse arrangement, where the gravel-filled trough will be fully planted. The plants use the impurities in the water as fertilizer, so as the plants grow, they clean the water. This purified grey water is used for the toilet, and the water you flush is used (after treatment) for exterior vegetation.

I believe that my tenth grade english teacher would call those bottle mosaics ’stylistic indelicacies’, but they’re starting to grow on me.

Visiting the Taos earthships

Published on June 28, 2009 in travel. 5 Comments

In the sagebrush plains about fifteen miles from the Sangre de Christo mountains and Taos, there’s an Earthship subdivision. It’s a very unusual subdivision.

The Earthships are self-sufficient, so the subdivision has no electrical wires above ground, and no underground water pipes delivering water or septic systems for wastewater.

Here you see some of the central elements: raked windows provide solar gain for rooms dug into the earth, solar panels provide electricity, and thick walls regulate the temperature indoors.

The walls are made of tires, cans, glass bottles and concrete. Concrete is expensive, but about 25% to 30% of the space in the wall is filled with recycled materials, reducing costs.

It’s a labor intensive process, since the tires have to be rammed with earth and the cans and concrete are all placed by hand. Typically to make a concrete wall, you’d erect plywood forms, string through the rebar (reinforcement bars), do the concrete pour, take off the forms, and repeat as necessary. This is muy differente.

Here you can see the final concrete-clad wall, the earth-filled tires inside it, and the start of a glass bottle wall that will eventually be a seat. It’s such a freeform set of materials that there’s a tendency to create mosaics with the bottles and cans…hence the polka dot edge detail.

Here’s a partially built wall and cistern (to store runoff… of which there isn’t much).

This mosaic must have seemed like a good idea at the time,

and here is a colorful wall of bottles and cement.

I thought the blue glass might be Phillips Milk of Magnesia, but it’s more likely Noxema instead.

[Cobalt Blue Glass: Phillips Milk of Magnesia, Noxema, Bromo Seltzer, even Alka Seltzer used to come in a tall blue glass tube. Many medicines and even poisons were bottled in cobalt blue glass.

1 In 200 - 300 Sea Glass Pieces Found Will Be Cobalt Blue ]

Visiting Taos 1

Published on June 26, 2009 in travel. 5 Comments

Bob and I went to Taos for a few nights for our 20th anniversary. The Taos Pueblo has been continually occupied for a thousand years; it’s a Unesco World Heritage Site and I thought it’d be a nice place for photos.

I was wrong.

I asked the young man if I could take a photo of the sign that said I couldn’t take photos, and he said sure.

Fair is fair, so I did in fact focus on the sign and him, but in the background you can see a back corner of architectural perfection.

This is George Nyman’s photograph of the Pueblo:

and this is from Britannica .

It’s a building of uncommon beauty, but we thought we’d definitely redo the landscaping.

How beautiful are Peg’s iris?

Published on June 25, 2009 in gardening. 1 Comment

After those scat photos, I thought some flowers would be nice. Peg sells iris rhizomes, so this isn’t a casual collection. My thought was for you to quickly scan down the photos as the visual equivalent of a palate cleanser.

This last is her favorite.

Two bear scat and a bobcat scat

Published on June 24, 2009 in bears and what they eat. 1 Comment

There was a big pile of poop on the driveway, along with some feathers. I put a quarter next to it so you can see: it’s a stupendous evacuation.

From a top view, you can see the cherry pits

(sometimes bear scat is stuffed with fruit pits)

and there’s another big scat and some feathers fifteen feet away. That bear got such a bolus of food that he had to evacuate his bowels.

This is a bobcat scat, a neat little cat pile with hair and seeds in it. The cat left it last night in the area where the hoop house stood. When Murray McMurray advertised these birds as being good with predators, I don’t think he had Hermosa in mind.

The chickens have a new home

Published on June 23, 2009 in birds. 2 Comments

I don’t think the dog has ever smelled a back seat with five boxes of 2 chickens each.

Peg has an old outhouse on the far far right that can be used for their winter quarters. She wants eggs, but of the original 26 chicks we ended up with 3 females and 7 males, so she’ll be horsetrading some of the roosters for layers.

I was worried that the chickens would be cold, or that they wouldn’t have enough toys. (They like things to jump up on, and I’m sure they’ll miss their ramps.) But by the time they all came out of their boxes, scratched in the straw she put out, and made a few tentative crows, it was clear that they were happy enough (and more likely to live another day).

They’ll acclimate, said Peg. I’ll be a good Mom.

And I’m sure she will.

A predator returned

Published on June 21, 2009 in birds and what they eat. 2 Comments

It ripped apart the door frame, tore off the chicken wire, bent the heavy gauge cladding like it was nothing, and took away eight chickens.

I started with 26 chickens, and now there are 10. The chicks cost $75 including shipping, and they’ve eaten 100 lbs of feed for $32. Thanks to the wildlife, my little chickie dickies are now $11 each.

So he won: I gave away the last ten chickens and the hoop house. Last night, I propped together the door pieces and draped it with bird mesh, which is enough to keep the chickens in but won’t remotely keep anything out.

The next day, we moved the whole shebang to Hesperus (I boxed up the chickens and drove them in my car),

and all that’s left is a little clean-up project.

Oh well.