Henny Penny Farmette

Thanks to the drought-ending rain and the robust activity of our honeybees, my orchard has produced a phenomenal crop of cherries, apricots, and plums this year.

Apricots are easy to make into jam or to dry for snacking

I picked some wild plums today. They’re unusually sweet so I will make them into jam this week. I think the apricots will be ready next week. Today, I’m getting ready for jam-making by taking down cases of canning jars from the storage shelf over the washer and dryer. I’ll need to get lemons, bags of sugar, pectin, and jar lids.

Wild plums are small like cherries

The vegetable garden is also benefiting from bee activity. The summer Italian striped squash and the crooked neck squash plants are producing squash faster than we can eat them. The tomato vines are loaded, and I expect the corn to be ready soon, too.

Nothing beats fresh summer jams to brighten a dreary winter morning. This summer, I hope to make enough to last through 2017 winter into next spring. This past winter, I ran out of apricot jam because it is the one most of our neighbors, family, and friends prefer. But thanks to the rain and the bee activity, running out of jam won’t be a problem for next year.

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Like my honeybees, I’ve been busy this winter/spring, writing two nonfiction books for readers who embrace the path of yoga, healthy living, meditation, meaningful ritual, and mindfulness. To be released this year: My POCKET MEDITATIONS (July 2017) and MY DAILY RITUALS (Christmas 2017).

Check out MY POCKET MEDITATIONS, the newest forthcoming nonfiction title from Adams Media/Simon & Schuster, at http://tinyurl.com/l6lzorq

COMING SOON: My newest offering in the Henny Penny Farmette mystery series,  A HIVE OF HOMICIDES (Kensington Publishing, Sept. 2017).

This cozy features a mystery to be solved, a hot romance, and delicious recipes

The MURDER OF A QUEEN BEE is the second novel in the Henny Penny Farmette series

I awoke in the pre-dawn hours to the sound of soft pattering of rain beyond my bedroom window. The birds twittered away in the pepper tree . I rolled over to listen and said a prayer of thanks that the “storm door” has finally opened. Three storms are expected to hit our drought-stricken California during this first full week of 2016.

There’s always plenty of action at the feeder when the finches discover it has been filled with Nyjer seed–high in calories and oil content.

After I had swallowed a half cup of morning coffee, I headed out to the feed store to buy chicken crumble, scratch grains, and some seed and suet to hang for the birds.

A male Nuttall’s Woodpecker loves dining on the suet cake; he hangs around all year near our pepper tree.

I won’t continue the pruning of the pomegranates and apricots that I started on Sunday. I’ll wait until we have a dry day for that. But I will continue to apply the plaster to the drywall that we’ve hung in the as-yet-unfinished small bedroom destined to become my office. That will be a perfect rainy day activity. And when I finish, I’ll go back to work on my newest mystery.

For more vignettes of farmette life, check out A Beeline to Murder, the first novel in the Henny Penny Farmette series of cozy mysteries. It’s available online and from brick-and-mortar bookstores everywhere. See, http://tinyurl.com/p8d6owd

California is in a historic drought. It’s our fourth year of below-normal rainfall and scientists, city governments, state lawmakers, and communities worry that this drought could run longer, perhaps even becoming a mega-drought. Wells are going dry, reservoirs in the state are lower than they’ve been in years, and water levels in rivers, lakes, and streams have shrunk.

Farmers have a right to be worried that their acreage may have to lay fallow. And what about the fruit and nut orchards? The Sierra snow pack that supplies much of the water to the Central Valley and Bay Area (where much of California and the nation’s food is grown)  remains a fraction of what it has been in non-drought years. Salmon runs are being impacted. Water is getting more scarce and more expensive. And less food produced means higher food prices.

Recently, Governor Jerry Brown mandated water conservation throughout the state. Communities are implementing drastic measures to force their citizens to cut water use. But that doesn’t necessarily mean lower water bills if our communities have to buy water to make up a shortfall. Each of us must do our part.

Environmentalists value bamboo for its drought tolerance and landscape appeal; stone is an excellent element for zero landscaping and can be used with succulents or cacti

Twenty Tips to Cut Water Use

!. Install low-flow toilets and tub, sink faucets, and shower heads.

2. Use a front-loading washer rather than a top-loading version. The front-loading machines use roughly 20 gallons per load versus the 40 gallons of top-loading machines. We installed our energy-efficient front-loading washer when we moved in.

3. Wash laundry less often and make sure you set the machine for the right size load.

4. Take shorter showers with the drain closed. Capture the gently-used water in pails to recycle.

5. Use your energy-star dishwasher for cleaning dishes, glassware, and pans. You will use less water than by washing dishes by hand. But run the dishwasher only after it is full, not half-empty.

6. If you have a pool or hot tub, use a cover on it to prevent evaporation of water.

7. Wet your toothbrush, but then turn off the water as you brush your teeth.

8. Capture gray water (from the dishwasher, washing machine, shower, and sink). Gray water is gently used household water, not water from the toilet or sewer. Have a plumber install a gray water system to trees and plants on your property.

9. Completely turn off faucets to avoid drips. Also, fix any leaky faucets or water pipes.

10. Collect rainwater in plastic barrels and keep covered to eliminate the potential for mosquitoes breeding in the water.

11. Shower less often. Flush the toilet less often and never to flush away an insect or tissue. Use a lidded-waste can instead.

12. Use the broom to clean the sidewalk and driveway, not the garden hose and water.

13. Stop watering the lawn. Consider removing the lawn in favor of a landscape with drought-tolerant and indigenous plants. Or zeriscape, using bamboo, succulents, cacti, and stone.

14. Buy and use green products with the EPA-partnered WaterSense label.

15. Don’t throw out leftover ice cubes; use them to water a plant.

16. Never use running water to thaw meat or fish. Defrost overnight in the refrigerator.

17. Insulate water pipes to get hot water faster instead of running water through the faucet.

18. Install an instant water heater appliance under the sink to get hot water instantly rather than let the faucet run until the water gets hot.

19. When on vacation away from home, turn off the water softener to conserve water.

20. Recycle kitchen waste instead of putting it down the garbage disposal and running water. That recycled waste can become valuable compost for your garden and keeps it out of the septic system.

Any rainy day is a good day to nap, even if it is Halloween when there might be spooks roaming around

Happy Halloween from the Henny Penny Farmette. It’s raining at last!

The San Francisco Giants, by winning the World Series, must have created Mojo in the Pacific because the storm door has opened. It’s been raining outside my farmette window for a few hours. Could this spell an end to our extreme drought?

It’s been a quiet day for me working on my second book. The two dogs that I’m caring for have shown me the sweetest doggie affection with their wagging tails, smiles (yes, I think they smile), and lots of licks. They’ve won me, the reluctant dog-sitter, over.

We’ll have to say goodbye today though. Their family is enroute from Disneland and will be home in a couple of hours. So while the dogs and I started off on the wrong paw, overall I’d have to say it was a great adventure. I’m gonna miss them.

With water use restricted in many counties because of the terrible drought, my garden is withering. Everyone in the Bay Area has to do their part. My onions look particularly pathetic.

In July, I polished a mystery I had hoped to sell. Mid-month, BEELINE TO MURDER sold to Kensington Publishing in New York as the first in a three-book deal. That meant I had to get cracking on the second book.

I forgot the onions. Poor things. The tops fell over and wilted, the bottoms swelled and stopped. A few succumbed to the soil organisms and bugs.

August rolled around and  I looked over the patch of brown stems and the heads that had gone to seed and vowed to dig everything out. But then . . . I got an offer to write a short nonfiction book that tied into the Law of Attraction, one of my favorite subjects. The onions had to wait for another 20 days until I cranked out that project.

Onion seeds fall out of dried blooms

Yesterday, my husband harvested the onions. Some have to be tossed because of bottom rot. Anything ignored will wither and die–that’s an axiom of gardening I’ve known since forever. So, the onions are gone, but their seeds are plentiful (thousands), so  this fall I will plant a new crop of onions and another in the spring and pray for rain.

My daughter knew my husband Carlos had an opening in his schedule and wanted him to create a carefree stone floor for her backyard. She wasn’t interested in grass or plants, given the California drought, and her husband came up with a design. Easy.

Sand is placed over gravel and raked before the stone is set in place, hammered down, and leveled

But as it turns out, the design was fairly complicated. It consisted of a cross with a circular medallion. The stones were four different sizes and two different colors. Maybe not so easy.

Green string, tightly strung provides a guide for correctly positioning the stones in the circle and in straight lines

Carlos, nevertheless, rose to the occasion and with a buddy got to work. My daughter swore that all the sand and rock Carlos would need were already there from the previous patio, but that turned out not to be the case.

The floor pattern emerges more clearly when you spray it with water

So imagine Carlos’s surprise when he realized he would have to pull out the dirt, level the ground, and do all that prep work before he could start laying stone.

Everyone put their stress aside, ordered sand and gravel, assemble the tools like the rake, mallet, and wheelbarrow, and enlisted one of our neighbors for additional help.

It took more than week. But the work is almost finished. My daughter loves the patio and she’s already planning a late summer party to show it off.

Carlos is thinking maybe we could use a floor like that on our farmette. With all the work we do, it’s nice to have a flat floor with a bench and table to sit a spell and catch your breath.

Transplanted bamboo

New to the neighborhood and homesteading, we were offered a patch of clumping bamboo that was growing on the land behind us when we first moved to the Henny Penny Farmette. We worried as many do about the spreading habit of bamboo. The last thing we wanted were neighbors complaining that it had sprouted onto their property.

Back then rotting fences lined the boundaries of our land. The house, too, was in decrepit condition, but Carlos and I saw the potential of the property. We also liked the idea of natural fences or at least plants to soften the stark look of all those boards. Bamboo, we reasoned, made good sense: it was drought tolerant, easy to care for, and quick growing. It could turn a stark, ugly fence into a lush privacy screen in no time.

The vibrant green color turns to a golden amber in the fall and the plant (related to grass) moves gracefully in the wind. The plants were mainly clumping types of bamboo so they were not as likely to spread like thistle in the wind. When we were at the local DIY store, we checked the price of bamboo in pots and quickly realized that the gift we were to receive was worth several thousand dollars.

With shovels in hand, Carlos and a worker began digging along one long fence line on our property. After the planting holes were prepared, he and the worker used the wheel barrow to transfer the bamboo from the back property to ours. The two men planted and deeply watered the bamboo.

Our bamboo two years after transplanting it

Winter rains in 2011 helped the bamboo take hold. It grew well the first year with a little extra watering over the summer. The next rainy season again fostered new growth. Now we have a verdant green fence line of thriving bamboo.