August 2, 2008
Brenda Barnes, President, Home Grown Food Network, Inc.
At least one of us had to stay here at all times this summer at the Home Grown Food Network demonstration house near Palm Springs, in a mobilehome park in Desert Hot Springs, California.
I’ve written before about how since we started the lawsuit for damages against the park owners in June 2006 for interfering with how we are remodeling our house, and for retaliating against us for going to the government about that interference, every time both of us leave something awful happens to the house. As much as we’ve worked on it now, and as much as we both love it, we couldn’t bear that again, so we’ve agreed one of us will always be here to take pictures and record what happens on an audio recorder and if possible video, too. I’ve had to work on a real estate project in Arizona, so mostly left on guard duty has been my husband and vice-president of Home Grown Food Network, Peter. It’s amazing how much work he has gotten done both on remodeling the house and grounds and on improving the gardens. I think coming back on weekends and knowing I have only a few days makes me more efficient too, so we have really changed things this summer. Also, we are in the process of being evicted if we cannot show we are not violating any reasonable park rules by anything we are doing, and when things are in the middle it is difficult to show that, so we have been trying to finish many projects, and we have succeeded.
Peter has the wall marking the east edge of the front-yard courtyard, which is eventually going to be eight feet high and over 14 feet long, up to almost the top of our heads, on the first 10′ section. He’s using reusable forms and a 5% Portland cement and soil mixture, to see if that is enough. We learned that from the late great architect Nader Khalili at CalEarth in Hesperia, who showed how it works for dome houses made from mostly earth stuffed in continuous plastic tubes he calls SuperAdobe bags. So far it seems great even though we used no bags. Each layer, less than a foot in depth, dries rock-hard in about two or three days, hard enough to put the next layer on above it.
This brought us to think about a moment of truth about our landlords. They actually called our $500 cement mixer (left over from our consumption-driven limousine liberal days) “clutter” in one of their notices to us. That “clutter” has been the real time-saver on that project. Khalili says a family can mix up the mostly soil mixture with just coffee cans, and that works. I’ve seen it done several times, in 29 Palms and in Hesperia. However, a little help from good tools saves so much time. In doing most of these projects, there is always a choice between investing time and labor and investing money. We feel like serfs sometimes, since now we don’t have any money because we’ve lost $150,000 in income fighting our landlords. So to see a project move quickly because we happened to have the right expensive tool invigorated both of us.
The greenhouse in the gazebo frame on the East side of the house is coming along, too. Peter decided to dig soil for the courtyard wall from the middle of that space because it was slowing him down so much to bring soil from the desert, so I decided to wait to put in growing tables and to start them at the lower level of grade where that interior will be when he finishes. Actually, that will give us another foot or so of height to grow in. I decided to shade the greenhouse with vines the way we have the back yard, rather than the greenhouse-grade plastic and shade cloth to put over the frame I was going to use. This week we bought two $19 passion fruit vines at Home Depot, and a soaker hose to water them. We planted them in the moonlight before I went back to Arizona Sunday night, and they seem to have settled in perfectly. This weekend I will have time to put in string for them to grow up and a welded fence panel on the roof for them to grow onto.
The planting directions had all kinds of stuff about non-organic brand-name fertilizers, which of course we ignored, but they did say put a 2” layer of mulch on the plant after it is planted, and we did that, since we mulch everything. That reminded me of another moment of truth about our landlords. They actually sent me a letter once about a year ago saying we had a fire hazard here from all the mulch. That time they focused on three limbs one or more of them saw by bending down and peeking through our west garden trellis at three feet from the ground and lower, or maybe leaning over the four-feet high 10′ long strip of low fence at the west very back boundary. (Maybe we will get that up to 6′ this weekend, or almost certainly next weekend, and Peter put up art against the trellis this week to stop their bending peering.) I had pruned the limbs from a jacaranda and stacked them on the ground to shred later in our electric shredder. Amazingly, the landlords pay for the water we use, so it is incredible they would object to mulching, one of the three main purposes of which is to save water. But there you have it, the kind of thing that causes people to attack others, most often based on ignorance combined with unlimited arrogance that keeps them from educating themselves out of that ignorance. I answered that letter. They never objected to mulch again.
About a month ago, I bought the misting system I planned to use in the gazebo greenhouse to keep it cool for our working and spending time in, and a faucet divider to send water to the mister from the east side faucet, but this morning I decided not to put that in. I’ve been getting a set of newsletters in my e-mail from Mike McGroarty for years, and I decided to use his intermittent misting system to help seeds germinate and cuttings root instead. Once I saw how high the passion fruit vines were growing in a week straight from the store, and I realized how much coolness will be in that greenhouse from their going all over the roof within a year, I realized we won’t need a mister to cool it. In fact, this morning I took some pictures in the back yard where Peter has perfected a method of keeping the sweet potato vines over the area from breaking the arbor. It was so dark the camera flash went off, while there was full sun of the desert five feet away, and it was so cool it approached needing a sweater, when it was over 100 degrees outside. So I’ll use misting only as it is needed for plants, not people, after all.
I also took pictures of new tomato flowers and a small green tomato that grew this week while I was gone—how amazing in a 115-degree afternoon sun area; a new pineapple plant that has started from a top I planted when we ate the fruit; two doves I decided are the same ones I saw on the fence a few weeks ago, this time on the back of the patio loveseat next to the bicycle behind the storage building, and they didn’t fly away when I was less than two feet from them; and the sweet potato vines growing at the edge of the back yard arbor almost back to the ground, so thick you can hardly see the car in the parking space beyond.
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Peter is extending the arbor so it will shade the window in our back door. That is not an easy project to work out since supports have to be out of the way of both the back door and the gate to the back yard opening, all of which we put in and adapted for various purposes as we went along, so haven’t planned really well. What a difference the sweet potato vine arbor has made in how comfortable the house is, but getting that window shaded will be a major plus.
What a great life! Semi-tropical and Mediterranean in the desert. I’ll write more soon. Keep cool.
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E mail Brenda:brenda@home-grown.org
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Filed under: Growing tomatoes in the desert, Partnering with Nature, Renewal, Ultra low cost housing, superadobe
