Desert Gardening----Trying Again!

We had ferocious heat and a devastating drought this year across most of the country.
The garden I had hoped would feed my family got baked. That's the only way to put it! Blossoms shriveled up and fell off, seedlings I watered and kept watch on withered and died or were so stunted by the heat and sandstorms (a delightful  side benefit of desert living --yeah, sarcasm there) that they never produced.

BUT...now it is time to get my Fall garden in the ground and going!
I WAS going to try using the raised bed boxes I tried growing my Spring/Summer garden in. However, long term weather predictions say that we will have continued severe heat until the end of August and drought until the end of October.
OUCH!
I went to a couple of lectures/talks given by local Master Gardeners and went to check out a local community garden run by Master Gardeners to see how they do it. Their gardens had suffered in the heat, too, but not as badly as mine. They actually had veggies!
The big differences iin what they did as opposed to what I did:
Drip Irrigation and Shade Fabric.

LOTS of shade fabric. One MG I spoke to said he had spent several hundred dollars on shade fabric alone this year to protect his garden! I certainly don't have the money for that! So, I looked through what I DO have. I have tarps. And some camo netting stuff the Darlin' Man brought home that looks like it could approximate shade fabric pretty good.
So, tarps and camo netting (actually, that's a misnomer and it's more of a fine screen that net!) to start with.

Moving on...Drip Irrigation.
Some of the gardens I saw had 10 or more drip irrigation hoses snaking through the rows. The gardeners themselves told me that in order to keep up with evaporation and the heat and the sun, they had to run them at 3 to 5 times the pressure they normally do.
I am HUGE on water conservation AND, here in the desert, we have to be as careful with our water as we can. The water bills can get pretty high, too!
So...my strategies will include the following:
Burying 2 liter bottles in the garden at two foot intervals.The bottles will have holes poked into them so water can trickle out. I figure I can fill them once a day and they will seep water into the ground all day and night.
Using *gray water* as much as possible. I can't exactly route it directly to the garden, but I can, for example, use a bucket to empty the tub instead of letting that precious water go down the drain! I have figured out a way to route my washing machine *gray water* to the garden, so that's a plus.

I had plenty of seeds left over from this spring, so I have already started some seedlings. Butternut squash, cabbage, etc.
Although I still have loads of raised bed boxes, I think I will borrow my neighbors tiller and give a try at putting this garden directly in the ground. Maybe put a few things in the boxes.
Seems a shame not to put them to good use!
Remember all these?

I figure I can use at least one for a small herb garden...
I already turned a few of them into shelving for my food storage and am ripping apart a few more for a chicken house project.

 I have my fingers crossed that my Fall garden will succeed!

Summer Heat

Yes, the heat is on here...ugh! Hot, hot days!

An oven is a dry heat, too...but I am not gonna crawl into one of them!
As I have noted before, I don't do well in heat. I get ill. I have cramps, I throw up, I get severe headaches. Doesn't matter how much I hydrate, I can drink 3 gallons of water a day and still have these maladies.
I have been this way since infancy, more or less. In cold climates, I thrive. In hot climates, I wilt.
The past few years I have had air conditioning. I always keep my AC on the coldest setting.
However, I do not have that option here. We have evaporation coolers (AKA "swamp coolers") and they cool the house down 10 to 20 degrees cooler than the outside. Not a big help with temperatures going over 100!
So, in an effort to avoid the worst heat, I have flipped my schedule.
I am getting up between 2 and 3 am, feeding the goats, having breakfast, then milking the goats. I water my garden beds sometime around 3:30 or so,do my housework (except for vacuuming) and generally catch up on the news online, etc.I get the fella off to work and the kids off to school (they have one more day this week and the Girl starts summer school this coming Monday).
I generally finish up with everything around the house by 11 am and then go to bed. With two fans blowing on me. The kids get me up when they come in around 4:30 pm.
I get up and fix dinner then, the fella gets home and I generally go back to bed around 11pm.
Weird schedule, but it is working for me.

I know some people that are seemingly "allergic to the cold". They can't function at all when the temperature drops below 60 degrees.I, on the other hand, rarely put on a sweater until the temperatures dive below 32 degrees. I have been known to go barefoot in the snow!

I guess some people are *cold* people and some are *heat* people.
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The fella stopped at the store the other day and found some great sales going on in the meat department.
He got a couple of nice lean pot roasts that were in the *must sell today* bin. And they were also marked "Buy one get one free". It was a deal...a good one.
I repackaged them after he got them home...two pot roasts became the basis for 5 meals! Possibly six...

First things first...a sharp knife, my vacuum sealer and cutting board and the bags for the sealer.

The pot roast cut up. I now have two small pot roasts (each enough for one meal, with possible some left for sandwiches left over), stir fry meat, beef stew meat (I cut meat for stir fry smaller), and some nice thick slices I will marinade and braise for a nice meal.

All sealed up and ready for the freezer!
I am always on the lookout for bargain buys and I guess it has rubbed off on the fella!
I buy hamburger in the big bulk packages and separate it into one meal packages as well.
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My garden has suffered from the heat as well...I am having to replant most of it, but we have a very long growing season here, so I guess I will have much bounty come September or so!
The only thing thriving right now are my snowpeas.

They popped up within just a couple of days from when I planted! This was taken when they had been planted less than a week!

Cajeta-Mania!!!

I made cajeta over the weekend.
The buttery, caramal-y, awesome-y decadent goodness of cajeta must be experienced...it just can't be explained!
Wikipedia tries.

Check this out:

Oozy, gooey, yummy deliciousness in a homemade caramel sauce!
Drizzle it on cinnamon buns, over oatmeal or fruit, a little drizzled in yogurt or your morning cup of coffee...over ice cream, over a slice of cake...it is AMAZING!!!

The recipe is simple enough.
1 gallon of goats milk (unpasteurized, please!)
1 vanilla bean (broken and halved lengthwise) or 1 tablespoon real vanilla extract
4 cups white cane sugar OR brown grated sugar (the hard sugar cones you get at Mexican grocers)
1 teaspoon of baking soda (to prevent foaming)
2/3 cup water
Stir that all together and heat until simmering. DO NOT STIR IT AGAIN! (If you do, you *break* the mixture and it will not process properly)
Now walk away. Don't stir it, don't even think about it...for at least 10 hours. That's right, it has to simmer UNDISTURBED for 10 to 12 HOURS.
After around 10 hours, you can look at it. If it has cooked down well, the simmering should still be going on, but the bubbles should be breaking slower...you should see that it has turned to caramel.
My stove is kinda slow, so I simmered mine for 12 hours.
Do a spoon and saucer test.
Dip a spoon into the simmering mixture and watch how it sheets and drips off the spoon. Is it thick and drips slow?
Put a spoonful on a saucer and let it cool for 15 minutes. It should thicken even more when it is cool.
Taste it. Is the texture right? (The flavor will be awesome!)
If everything seems right, pour into canning jars and put on lids and let cool.
If you used actual vanilla bean and not extract, pour through a sieve to catch the bean pieces.

Time consuming, yes. Worth it? OH YES!
My 1 gallon of goats milk made 2 quarts of cajeta.
I gave some to my neighbor (she is Mexican) to get an unbiased opinion. Actually, I figured she would be most critical because her mother used to make cajeta for special holidays, etc.
She LOVED it! Said it was just as good as her mother's!
Now THAT'S a compliment!

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The cactus flowers are still in bloom here...finally getting the hang of the camera...

The whole cactus (and it is a large one) should be an explosion of hot pink flowers by the end of the week or so...will try to get some more pictures when it hits peak bloomage!
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STILL no rain here! (I think it's 115 days now!)
Lost a hell of a lot of my garden due to dust storms, heat and the absolute dryness, even though I am watering them nightly.
A dry warm wind blows even at night here.I am thinking I need to mulch like crazy and maybe water once after dark and then again right before sunrise. (Hey, I am already up then anyway!)

I am going to try to replant some this week...maybe if I continuously plant, some of my plants will make it through!

Holiday Weekend

Memorial Day looms dead ahead and the fella has a five day weekend (WOOO-HOOOO!). I am letting him sleep in (as well as the Girl), BUT there are some major things that need doing that I will require their assistance on.
The Boy is currently away from home, so he isn't included in the festivities.
First things first...
We have a dryer. It was here when I arrived, so I take no blame for it. It doesn't work anyway, so all it is doing is taking up valuable floor space in the laundry room. My plan is to get it moved out of there and into the shed (we have a storage shed), so we can possibly find a good used apartment sized refrigerator to put in that spot. It will prove invaluable for the goat milk, cheese and egg overflow for our regular refrigerator.
Ugh...the storage shed. We sooooo need to clean that out! Might as well put that on the list of "to-do" things as well.
I also plan on us cleaning up the yard today.
The wind blows so much here. Even if I pick up every day all the stuff that blows into the yard, I wake up with more stuff to pick up! I also want to trim some dead branches off the few trees in the yard, just to make them look a bit neater.
Planning on working on my raised bed gardens as well. Going to plant some more seeds and hope for the best. This super dry weather/climate, is wreaking havoc on my seedlings, so I try to keep seeds started to fill in where my seedlings perish. I water, I use manure tea, I try to shelter my poor seedlings with mulch, etc., but I am still having about a 50% die-off. I thought it was just me and my inexperience at desert gardening, but I talked to a few gardening neighbors and they told me 50% was actually pretty good! Most of them confess to a 70% or so die-off, despite their best efforts!

I am struggling with the camera...I got some stupid virus n my computer and had to reboot and reset so many things and use anti-virus measures just to get my system back to some semblance of normality. Then I tried to upload some pictures I took of the gorgeous cactus flowers in my yard...and....nothing. I swear I pushed all the right buttons, but nothing happens! So, I will work on that today, too, and hopefully you'll get to see some pictures of bright pink flowering cactus!