Category Archives: growing corn in Mexico

Yesterday

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We practiced! Yes, we did! For the first time in – no, I can’t say it. Just know that there were many, many reasons that other activities took precedence. It took several hours to locate all the equipment we needed, and to set up. We’re trying out a new spot in the portál. In this photo you can see our Audubon bird clock (very popular with the denizons of the rancho), some framed needlepoint work, our ancient electrical switch box and the place we hook up our musical electrical equipment, and a very old cement tile floor that I have grown to like.

In the afternoon when we took a break, we went to survey the lot behind the house.

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On the other side of the stone fence is our neighbors’ corn field. For the first time in 6 years, the two middle-aged sisters have a respectable crop. Since the parcel slants down, and is dry land, the season was perfect – some rain every night.img_4558They also have some squash plants, tomatillos, and beans. I cooked a big handful of beans with lentils, and I must say that they were excellent. I had small hopes for them because the bean pods were beginning to dry. I shelled the driest ones to find tender, pale beans inside, and as for the greener ones, they soften right up, and the combination of legumes was delicious, cooked with onion, garlic and tomatoes. We had an excellent supper, served with bolillos.

Our friends Michael and Richard headed home to the Los Angeles area today without us being able to spend time with them. Their Mexico vacation didn’t turn out quite as planned.

In the afternoon I found some time to try to make up for lost time knitting. It’s beginning to look like a sweater! That’s the back of a short top-down cardigan knitted with recycled cotton yarn.

img_4543And in the evening, more practicing!

Caldo De Res In The Afternoon

Afternoon clouds behind the house. See that dark spot above the left high window? That's a panál, a bee hive that's getting larger every day.

Afternoon clouds behind the house. See that dark spot above the left high window? That’s a panál, a bee hive that’s getting larger every day.

We both had been thinking about beef soup, Mexican style. It’s something that is cherished and admired by Chon. The corn is ripe, and it’s an important element in caldo de res. I had heard many times about the wonderful soups The Sisters made (and make), and I was a little intimidated and at the same time I was thinking “How hard could it really be?” I mean, really! Water, beef, carrots, celery, potatoes and any vegetable that appeals. So I decided to give it a try.

In our rancho, beef is sold on Sunday mornings. I asked Elena if I could go with her when she bought her meat for the week, and she told me we’d go at 8 a.m. on Sunday. We walked to the corner where the vendors set up, and immediately I could see why the time was important. There were three people waiting in front of us, and the line grew and grew behind us. Elena said to buy about 3/4 of a kilo of ribs, costillas, and (I believe) cross cut hind shank or en español, chamorro. The meat was all beautiful, very clean, and being sold by two young women I had met by purest coincidence only two days before in nearby Jalpa.

I had 20 pesos left from the 100 peso bill I had taken, and I bought 3 tamales from Lola on the way home, leaving me with 5 pesos left over. One hundred pesos these days is about $5.40 USD, in case anyone is wondering. The meat was the only thing I was wondering about. The beef here is not aged, and is therefore tougher. I bravely forged ahead, simply boiling the meat as instructed for over an hour with salt before adding the vegetables. I had some slightly sad carrots, nice celery, and some pre-cooked potatoes, and they all went into the pot. The meat was still tough. I worried a bit. After another hour the meat was less tough, and the flavor was excellent. i stopped worrying, kept the heat low, and kept it cooking.

It was very good! I served it with some lovely slices of avocado, and a toasted roll, bolillo. Chon was happy – caldo de res was probably made on few occasions while he was growing up. He asked for a second serving.

And today we had leftovers for a pleasant afternoon meal. Here you go. As you can see, I’m not in the running for best food photos, but I think the soup tasted even better today, sitting at a table in our patio.img_4456The view from our table:

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Our untidy fall garden that still threatens to overtake the patio.

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Just Another Irrigation Day

Chris suggested I translate some words, so I did. Good suggestion.

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It was one of those awful, good days – a little bit of everything! It was cloudy and warmish when I got up before 6. We got an early start and got to El Joconoistle at 7 a.m.( All the fields around us have old, official names you can read on the deeds, and there are maps of them. I’d love to put a copy of the old, fragile map right here – one day I will.) We own a field in El Joconoistle, named for some cacti that used to grow there. Another field in El Joconoistle is rented from a friend. In La Tabla Grande, the big board, we own two fields that lie next to each other, purchased from two of Chon’s uncles.  El Melonár, named for the melons grown there many years ago and La Tierra Blanca, or white dirt, named for its light-colored earth, are also rented, from Chon’s godfather.

Chon is irrigating a section of a parcela we farm so as not to pay a peón to work. (Parcela is the word used here for a parcel of land.) Irrigating is the most highly paid job here, because the irrigator is supposed to be there 24 hours for each turn. The section we were watering had flooded a little bit in the night, and we went there (in the night) forgetting to take a shovel, but Chon had closed the boquilla with his hands and mud, and it was OK in the morning. (A boquilla is a sort of notch in the side of a ditch where the water is managed. To open it and let the water into the field, you shovel away the wet dirt. To stop the water, you just build it back up again. Or use a costál, a large , woven plastic bag that can hold about 100 pounds of fertilizer, or sand, or dirt.)

Boquilla - little mouth. And a costál.

Boquilla – little mouth. And a costál.

Then we went to La Tierra Blanca to make sure that one of our father/son teams were taking care of the water there. The night before we listened to extremely upsetting stories of how the water was taken from us by a well-known peón of the most well-known farmeraround, who removed the boards we had put in the compuerta to divert the water to our ditch. We heard more details of that story.

This is a compuerta with a valve wheel in the main ditch. No boquillas here!

This is a compuerta with a valve wheel in the main ditch. No boquillas here!

The sky got darker and darker, and then it began to sprinkle, and by 8 a.m. to was raining. The sound of rain on tall corn plants is something to remember. And this time it was particularly wonderful, as the plants really really needed water. By 8:30 it was still raining. The ground there gets gummy right away, and I managed to get the pickup stuck. Both front tires were over the edge of the ditch.

One of our workers drove his decrepit red pickup over and after jockeying it around, and nearly getting it stuck, all the peónes together, and the red pickup pulled us backwards out of danger. By this time Chon was chilled to the bone, and his shirt was dripping water from the hem. I gave him my merely-damp flannel shirt to wear, and a bandana, because I nearly always wear a t-shirt underneath flannel in the mornings, and I wasn’t cold. And by that time the sun was out!

This is a small compuerta with a valve, where we divert water into one of our fields.

This is a small compuerta with a valve, where we divert water into La Tabla Grande

We went then to open the water in La Tabla Grande, and were there an hour or so, and then traveled back to El Joco. While we were there, a bump in the road that had been becoming more and more of a driving problem had turned out to be (I knew it! I knew it!) a broken pipe that crosses under the road, and Porfirio and his son started digging, and they uncovered most of the smashed part, and the water began to flow out of it, and then it inexplicably got stopped up, and Chon pulled one, two, three costales out of it. They had been used on the other side of the road at the compuerta to divert the water from the canal into our irrigation ditch. In the US they most likely would have been filled with sand, but these had been filled with mud, maybe a year or two ago. The mud had partly oozed out through the mesh fabric, and the no-longer-full costales had made their way into the 10-inch pipe. Chon also pulled a dinky little mud turtle out of the pipe, and we all laughed at that, and I took it back to the canal.

The pipe just kept getting plugged up over and over, and we finally drove to the house to get a very, very long piece of rebar (12 meters long!) which eventually was used to clean out the long piece of pipe after Chon had a brilliant idea to open one of the boquillas into the field to get the water moving better.

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We didn’t get back from the fields until after four p.m., and it was nearly all work and/or frustration!

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Just Another Day – Rancho Life

Just as we finished the afternoon fertilizer work it started to rain, which couldn’t have been better timing to dissolve the fertilizer granules so the plants can use it.

This is the sort of thing that makes people say jokingly, with a little bit of caution in their eyes, that we have a pact with the devil. How else could we have started off so well 5 seasons ago, and continue to do well when we’re only musicians?

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Manotas, Beto’s male dog, seems to think he belongs here. He’s out sitting next to our pickup (which we left in the street because I don’t want to get wet in the rain moving it) and Chon says “We have to give him something. He’s cold”.

And I say “Do you want a dog or something?”

“No.”

“He’s just fine. If he really gets cold he’ll go to his real home.”

I’m trying not to love the two black and white litter mates.