On Saturday we returned from San Antonio, and it felt not a second too soon. For the five days we were there daily high temperatures hovered around the low 100s and were aggravated by the drought that's engulfed the southwestern U.S. and the northern states of Mexico for months, if not years. I feared we'd …
Continue reading Tentative summer gardening forecast: Tomato downpours with frequent gazpachos
The skies over San Miguel this time of the year are frequently cloudy, but that's only a tease. They promise rain but deliver only a couple of timorous sprinkles of little benefit to the plants and trees, except to rinse the dust off the foliage. Last night we had one of those teasers: It came …
One fond memory of living in the Midwest is the taste of freshly harvested sweet corn, from the field to a pot of boiling water, as the saying goes. I've tried to replicate that here several times, with mediocre to lousy results. One year we got a great harvest of corn smut, which in Mexico …
Continue reading The heartbreak of chewy, tasteless sweet corn
I suffer from a lifelong aversion to vegetables that I blame on my parents. My father was a very picky eater, and my mother couldn't, or wouldn't, cook much beyond black beans and rice, staples of the Cuban diet, to accompany a pork dish of some sort. Ever since setting up shop at this ranch, about …
The rainy summer season is slinking away without the landscape reaching its peak kelly-green hue: We've had only half the amount of rain we normally get. I gauge rainfall by the amount of water collected in our cistern and it's only half-full. No reason to panic though: As I write this, dark clouds hover auspiciously …
Continue reading Constabulary notes from here, there and yon
May is the time of the year when, despite the relentless dry weather, vegetables start erupting from the garden faster than we can figure what to do with them. And we haven't even reached Tomatomania yet, which starts around June.Cornucopias are overrated.It's a problem easily avoidable, except for people like Felix and me: The solution …
Continue reading Study: Too many vegetables will make you nuts
It's with a humble heart—not gloating, mind you—that I report, perhaps a bit prematurely, a looming bumper crop of five or six kinds of heirloom tomatoes plus lettuces, radishes, peas, carrots, beeets, string beans, chard, squash, cucumbers and other greens, here at the ranch.Sadly, this is happening while our friends in the U.S. and Canada …
Continue reading Return of the killer heirloom tomatoes. We hope.
Late last year Stew and Félix checked our beehives and were alarmed. One hive was doing great, a second not so well and the third was totally kaput. A few weeks ago they checked again and found two hives buzzing with bees making honey, but the third was still empty.So last week we took off …
While our compatriots back home suffer through daily charges and countercharges of "fake news," in San Miguel we're in the middle of our fake spring, a teaser season that comes about three months before the rains and the real spring arrives. Fake spring brings warmer temperatures, mid seventies at midday and mid forties at midnight, and …
Growing up, my diet was stunted by two major constraints: My father was a very picky eater—meat, rice and blackbeans, mostly—and my mom was a terrible cook who could turn even excellent ingredients into mush almost as if on purpose. At the foster homes where I stayed when I came from Cuba the fare wasn't …
El Rancho Santa Clara 