• Bye-Bye Bell Peppers. (See Ya next Summer!)

    Made it to the farmers’ market a little later this week. To use last week's 'first-tracks' analogy, the best stuff had been skied off. Fortunately, I did bump into many more people I hadn’t seen in awhile, and there were still PLENTY of booths teeming with fresh and/or naturally-preserved foods. There were even some bell-peppers from the same folks who surprised me with them last week. Although visibly less firm compared to last Saturday’s January-crop, I scooted eagerly over at first glance. Turns out Ross Bird of Estancia Valley Produce had planted them in August but “I got froze out the other night, so I had to pick ‘em,” he said. “It’s tough keeping my 11,000 sq. ft. greenhouse warm at night. Next year I’ll do more cold-tolerant crops like most everybody else. Even though I can charge a little more for peppers this time of year, it just doesn’t work to get froze out.”

    Ross also mentioned that he plans to install a cistern off of his huge greenhouse. An hour southeast of Santa Fe, he’s looking at capturing between 60,000 and 100,000 gallons per year—which implies a very big tank. At only a buck a pepper, I hope he has a friendly, patient banker or a talented grant writer.

1 comments:

  1. They actually still had some peppers THIS week (a week later), too! Get down there within 50 minutes, and you might still be able to snag some. YUM!

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SUSTAINABILITY
The final frontier.


These are the musings of an engaging enterprise.
Its thirty-year mission:


To create a greener planet.


To seek a better life in our lumbering civilization, and


to slowly go where we are all are headed anyway.




GRADUAL
GREENING


Is an unproven system for generating wide-spread sustainability.


it asks for 10 minutes a day for a year. At the end of the year, it asks for 10 more.


So in the second year, you spend just 20 minutes a day, in the third year, 30 minutes.


If you keep up this pattern, 27 years later you spend over 4 hours per day being extremely green.


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Describe your attempts At a sustainable life.