My mother-in-law, Regina was 23 years old when she moved to the Agua Linda in 1968.  She had recently married my father-in-law, Arthur Loew Jr., almost 20 years her senior.  Arthur had purchased the farm (which we also call “the ranch”) in 1957.  At the time of the purchase, Agua Linda was a 1000-acre property belonging to Tucson’s own Ronstadt family.  Carlos Ronstadt, one of southern Arizona’s most prominent cattlemen and businessmen of the 1930’s and 40’s and uncle to singer, Linda Ronstadt, farmed cotton, alfalfa, corn, barley and beef cows on the ranch.  It was in the 1950’s, however, when the property had its first taste of Hollywood when the opening scene to Oklahoma was filmed in the cornfields of the farm.

Arthur, a movie producer, had spent much of his childhood in Southern Arizona and dreamed of living the simple life of a cowboy.  He attended a one-room schoolhouse in Oracle, and was the only student who had a horse to ride to school everyday.  At recess, he and his friends would take turns riding “Dunny” and the burros belonging to the other kids.  Arthur came from one of the biggest Hollywood dynasties in the movie business.  His maternal grandfather, Adolph Zukor, founded Paramount Pictures. His paternal grandfather, Marcus Loew, founded Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios (MGM) and Loew’s Theaters, and his father, Arthur Loew Sr., was a president of MGM.

It was respiratory problems that had brought Arthur to Arizona as a boy.  He joined the military when he was 17 and was part of the Army Air Corp Motion Picture Division.  After World War II, Arthur was a member of the USO, entertaining the troops in Korea. Eventually, Arthur wrote and produced a few movies including, Penelope, The Rack (the first leading role in Paul Newman’s career) and Arena, which was filmed in Tucson during the Fiesta De Los Vaqueros.  His Hollywood friends, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr. and the rest of the “Rat Pack”, however, perhaps best knew Arthur, for his comedic genius.  Arthur spent as much time as he could at the Agua Linda and moved here permanently with his new wife in 1968. In the years to follow, Arthur entertained many of his Hollywood friends at the ranch.  Today, the long hallway on the southern end of the hacienda is lined with black and white photos of some of these visitors – Natalie Wood, Elizabeth Taylor, Joan Collins, Paul Newman, Robert Wagoner, Gene Kelly, James Dean and John Wayne – to name a few!

When Regina arrived, she brought with her a love of horses, (show jumpers, in particular) and a dislike of cactus.  She was a Boston girl, a Broadway dancer, in fact, and a model and actress.  Eventually she realized that there was only one way to bring the green of New England to Amado, Arizona and she began spreading horse manure, one wheelbarrow at a time around the grounds of the hacienda.

When I met Regina in 1989, she was still at it, working daily in her gardens, planting flowers and tending to the lush landscape she had nurtured to life.  Today, there are roses thriving along adobe walls and the fence surrounding the swimming pool.  Purple iris, originally introduced to the property by the Ronstadt family, have been painstakingly separated every year to multiply and bloom each spring.  Yellow daffodils, a cheerful February flower, grow along pathways and in every corner of the grounds. When fragrant honeysuckle and wisteria perfume the backyard, it is an occasion for a dinner al fresco near the blooms.  Delicate primroses and violets carpet the ground and lanky, old-fashioned hollyhocks have almost taken over the flowerbeds between the hacienda and the view of the Santa Rita Mountains.  In the summer, Regina seeds colorful zinnias in pots around the pool.  Volunteer pomegranate trees have sprouted and grown beneath the protection of giant cottonwoods, and Regina has added a few plum trees, a peach tree and grape vines to the landscape.  Mulberry trees provide a huge canopy of shade, and drop messy berries in the spring, attracting birds, (the scarlet tanager, most notably) to feast on fruit that we were unable to harvest and make into jelly.

The sprawling hacienda itself is like a museum showcasing stories of the past beginning with the very brick and mortar that shape the walls.   The hacienda was designed in the 1940’s by Josias Joesler – indisputably Tucson’s most recognized architect.  His buildings are typified by the use of burnt adobe brick, clay tile roofs, romantic archways, built-in niches and dramatic fireplaces. Though Arthur loved the rustic comfort of his Arizona home, he brought to the Agua Linda luxuries from the former estates of his grandfather’s like the Tiffany windows installed in the dining room and the master bath.  With the help of Regina’s best friend and my mother, both interior designers, Regina has improved the old hacienda, added a pool house and expanded the guesthouse where my family and I live.

Sometimes Stewart and I and Regina work so hard that we look past the beauty and only see more work that needs to be done.  Then someone visits and marvels with envy at the property and it’s surroundings and we look again with fresh eyes at what is, actually, our own piece of paradise.

Learn more about the farm at www.AguaLindaFarm.net

Winter is also the best time to knock out some maintenance and clean-up projects around the farm.  Keeping things neat and tidy is not one of our strong suits and Stewart and I are both guilty of procrastination when it comes to clean-up.  It just always seems like there is something more important to do!  Having 63 acres allows for messes to sprawl and projects to be put off – sometimes for years – as there is always space to store things somewhere else or a different corral (without a broken fence) to put the sheep in.

Projects do eventually get done, though.  Last spring I single-handedly re-organized all seven of the old horse stalls at the barn, now used for storage and a machinery shop.  I worked for days and days sorting though oily tools that I could not identify as well as plumbing supplies, paint, rolls of soaker hoses, mountains of transplanting trays, shade cloth and various garden implements.  After emptying the stalls and making an even bigger mess outside of the structure, I swept up piles of bat guano and rats nests and put everything back, re-storing everything in a neat and orderly fashion, then faced the worst mess of all.  One of the stalls had not yet been cleaned after its former residents – a few pigs – had moved out.  The boorish tenants had long since been sold to someone better prepared for the frustrations of the pork business.  It had been months since the space had been occupied.  With a bandanna over my mouth and nose, I had to literally chisel away at the floor to remove the four -inch layer of manure and bedding that had adhered like concrete to the floor.  As thick dusk coated my hair and clothes and permeated the bandana, I tried to tell myself that I was working with fertilizer, not pig poop, but it took days for the pungent odor, not unlike a stinky armpit, to leave my nose.  I completed the grueling barn clean-up before the hot summer days set in and proudly walked away.  I think it took about a week for my dogs – hot on the trail of a squirrel – to destroy my work.  It must have been a frenzied scene as Rocco and Patches tore down shelves of paint, stacks wooden transplanting trays, and unravel yards of coiled drip tape and shade cloth in search of their victim.  Old tack boxes were opened and horse blankets and leg wraps were strewn all over the barnyard.  Bright colored paint oozed out of cans and dried in plastic-like puddles on the barn floor.  Heavy shelves laden with nails, bold and screws – all neatly sorted of course – were toppled onto the floor.  I cried when I saw the mess, but the barn is far enough away from the house and days were getting hot…

The upside to having so much space is that we rarely have to throw things away.  Old barn wood, tattered shade cloth and junk metal will eventually be reused for something.  When we do finally haul something off to the dump it is just like when you finally decide to get rid of that sweater in your closet – as soon as you donate it to Good-Will, it will be back in style and you will want it back.  So, as long as we have the space, we hoard all kinds of materials.

Last summer, Stewart and I had attempted to shade tomato plants “using materials we had on hand” to make a trellis with shade on top.  We started by pounding old fencing T-posts along the tomato row at ten foot intervals.  Then we strung hay-bailing twine between the posts six feet above the ground.  For the shade, we implemented rolls of reemay – a gauzy white fabric intended for insulating crops in the winter, and with clothes pins, draped the fabric over the twine.  It took a few days to set up and when we were finished we were very proud of ourselves.  We stood back, hands on our hips, nodding and smiling as the harsh mid-day sun failed to reach the plants.  We generously praised our own ingenuity and bragged to each other how the job got done with no dollars spent and even declared ourselves responsible stewards of the planet since we had “re-used” materials – one of the most important of the “three R’s” of the green living mantra: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.  We even brought friends out to the garden that afternoon to see the neat, white fabric gently swaying in the breeze and continued to pat ourselves on the back.

The following day was the windiest day I can ever recall.  More likely, I was just more aware of the unforgiving gusts as I watched the gauzy reemay billow and strain and whip and tear and envisioned pieces of the white fabric spreading across the valley getting tangled in trees – littering someone else’s property.  So much for green living!  After the windiest day in Arizona history, we patched up our disaster and made the most of it. By October, the tomato patch looked appropriately haunted as ghostly wisps of white fabric danced in the breeze over tall tomato plants.  The reemay has long been cleaned up, but on the winter to-do list is removing the fence posts, clothespins and bailing twine.  We will reuse the fence posts again, but maybe the twine can be thrown away.  Maybe not.

Bonnie and Clyde were the only two hatchlings this year. Usually there are eight to ten. Perhaps because of their slim numbers, the pair has imprinted on people – me especially. At about five weeks, they had reached the “cat proof” size and we started letting them out of their pen. The pair stayed close while we work in the garden. They seem to think that when I am busy weeding, that we are actually eating together and they rush over and eat whatever I pull out of the ground. Fortunately, they have no taste for the crops growing in the rows and only munch on grass. I wonder if they think I am their mother, feeding them or if, perhaps, they think I know where all the “good” food is and they are afraid that I will eat it all, since I am a very big goose. They peep and mumble to me as I talk to them and when we rest, they find a spot in the shade of my form, often right under my crouching legs and enjoy when I preen their feathers. It is a rather comical scene, I am sure, because not only are Bonnie and Clyde close by as we weed and harvest, but at least one cat, often two or three, and the two dogs are right there, too, loyal companions in the garden.

Bonny and Clyde are a big hit with customers. I put a miniature red bandanna on Bonnie (no farm girl should be without one!), and they mingle around, visiting with our guests. I was afraid that kids would chase them, but I keep a close eye and there is nothing but squeals of delight from children and peeps of pleasure from the young geese, whose voices have not yet changed to the loud “HONK” of their parents though they have grown big and have lost almost all of their baby feathers.

They are probably big enough now to rejoin the adults in the goose pen, but I’m not ready. When I am, I am sure that it would only be a very short time before they would assimilate and I probably wouldn’t even be able to tell them apart from the others. I also would miss their company in the garden which makes the time spent so much more pleasurable. Yet, they are not as safe from coyotes and bobcats in their current dwelling, even though I have moved the enclosure into our courtyard. They also make a big mess everywhere – especially right outside the front door where they wait for us to come back out to visit. I warned Tamara, a volunteer who is staying with us, to watch her step when she went outside. Despite me and Stewart daily hosing off the porch – sometimes twice – I told her, “There is enough goose poop right outside the door to suck your shoe off your foot!”

I have chosen to keep things status quo for now. It will probably be Stewart’s mother, tired of navigating goose poop, that will put her foot down (and struggle to retrieve her shoe) and Bonnie and Clyde will become anonymous geese with the others, but for now, they are my two very special friends and are one of the greatest pleasures of my day.

For more information about the farm, go to www.agualindafarm.net

The first pomegranate I ever ate was here at the Agua Linda Farm. My husband, Stewart relishes gobbling the messy fruit each fall. He sits on the adobe wall outside our house, breaks the fruit open and eats the insides like an apple, slurping the liquid and spitting seeds, the red juice dripping down his chin and arms and staining his t-shirt. There is no way to eat the fruit in this manner without making a mess which has become part of the fun for our kids, too. I loved the taste of the fruit, but usually opted to not bother – they were just too messy!

It was Stewart’s cousin and namesake who romanticized the fruit for me. Big Stewart is a writer and a poet, (among other things, he wrote the screen-play for Rebel Without a Cause). “Ahhh!” he exclaimed on one visit to the farm. He was sitting on the adobe wall with two halves of the fruit cupped in his hands. Before taking the messy plunge, he paused to admire the gleaming ruby-red seeds, “the jewel of the Gods!”, he poetically declared.

The fruit, in fact, has been the “jewel of the Gods” in ancient Greek mythology and some believe it to be the fruit on the tree of life. It has been cultivated in Egypt since before the time of Moses, yet it has not been as popular in the west until recently. Apparently, pomegranates contain more anti-oxidants than any other fruit, elevating them to a higher level of importance in our diets. Most folks looking to enjoy the fruit and it’s health benefits do so in the form of juice or juice mixes purchased in the grocery store and avoid the messy whole fruit in the produce section altogether.

Many of you in Santa Cruz County either have a pomegranate tree in your yard or know someone who does, but a very large percentage of the fruit is consumed by birds – not people. This year I have been doing a little research and have moved beyond sprinkling a few seeds on a salad or in a muffin mix and I encourage you to do the same. I have learned a couple of tricks to help make the using pomegranates easier.

The first trick to avoiding mess happens when extracting the seeds. Use a sharp knife to cut the fruit in half. Fill a bowl with water deep enough to submerge the halves and holding the flat side down under the water, use your fingers to gently rub away the seeds. The seeds (which you want) will sink in the water, the hard shell and brown membranes (which you don’t want) will float to the top. Continue with as many pomegranates as you like, then skim the surface of the water with a slotted spoon and drain the water with a strainer. Now you have the little “jewels” ready for whatever you want – add to a cake batter, toss with salads, sprinkle on ice-cream or pancakes – YUM! They can be refrigerated and used over the next week or so.

OR – how about some pomegranate jelly? If you have never canned before, refer to Pickyourown.org for safety instructions or pick up a Ball canning guide at Wal-Mart or Ace Hardware, (the recipe I am going to give you will not include to basic rules of canning safety).

Makes 9-10, 1⁄2 pint jars

First, make the pomegranate juice. After extracting the seeds from 10-20 pomegranates (depending on size – you will need about 12 cups of seeds), put into a large pot and gently heat to loosen pulp. I mash the seeds a little with a potato masher.

Scoop the seeds into a potato ricer or tomato seeder and extract juice. This may not be a tool you have on hand – get one – squeezing the seeds through a jelly bag can take hours! Strain once more through a fine strainer, gently pressing through with the back of a spoon. You will need 4 cups of juice, but can add up to 1⁄2 cup of water to get to 4 cups.

4 cups juice
7 1⁄2 cups sugar
2 pouches liquid pectin (extracted from apples to make jelly – found in stores with canning supplies)

Prepare jars as per canning instructions.
Stir sugar into juice in a pot and heat, stirring until at a full, rolling boil.
Stir in 2 pouches of pectin, and when it returns to a boil, stir and boil for one minute then pour into hot jars.
At this point, you could either let the jars cool and refrigerate them for up to 2 weeks, or proceed with canning in a water bath as per canning guide instructions.
At our elevation, I process the cans in boiling water for 10 minutes. If correctly sealed, the jelly will last for years in a cupboard!

Canning is time consuming, but rewarding. The jelly that I have made flies off the shelves in the Farm Store very quickly. It is a deep magenta color and is sweet with a subtle tang, making it great on toast, but also the perfect companion to poultry dishes.

For those of you still not convinced – I would love to take your extra pomegranates before the birds get more than their fair share!

Hope to see you all on the farm to enjoy all the flavors of fall for our 10th Annual Fall Festival, weekends this October. I have posted all the details and a map on our website, www.AguaLindaFarm.net.

My First Arizona Summer, 1978

I was seven years old in 1978 when my mom’s job with United States Customs transferred our family from Maine to the Mexican American border in Arizona. Our first house in Nogales was a tiny adobe rental with two bedrooms. “Be careful when you are playing outside because there are rattle-snakes, black-widows and tarantulas and most of the plants have sharp spines that are very painful if you touch them.” My mom warned. What? How terrifying! Somehow mosquitoes and black flies, so pesky in Maine, didn’t seem so bad. It didn’t really matter, though, I soon realized. It was impossible to play outside! I recall giving myself a pep talk “It can’t be too hot to play outside, Laurel. You are just being a baby. It can’t be too hot… It can’t be too hot!” I vividly remember repeating this out loud to myself as I opened the front door and stepped out into the blazing July afternoon. I gasped at the intense heat that caused swirls of distorted air to blur the view of the road that passed the little house. I kept walking. “It can’t be too hot, it can’t be too hot…” I stopped. The air was burning my skin. I stood for a moment as reality sunk in. “It IS too hot. How could this be? What did other kids who live here do?” A movement in the bushes caught my eye and turning, I saw a giant bumblebee. I had never seen anything like it before. It had to be two inches long! I ran back into the house to my sisters and told them to add “giant bumble bees” to the list of dangers they needed to watch out for.

Then the rains came. The monsoons were like nothing any of us had ever experienced. It became an end of the day ritual that July and August to position our chairs on the little front porch and watch the spectacle unfold. Like clockwork around 4 in the afternoon everyday, the big, clear blue Arizona sky was transformed as great thunderclouds came rolling, dark and menacing across the sky. Distant thunder warned of the drama to come and we would count “One Mississippi, two Mississippi…” to gauge how close the storm was. My Mom’s best friend, who had moved with us from Maine, said that every second between a flash of lightening and its accompanying thunderclap represented one mile.

FLASH!

“One Mis…”

BOOM!

The lightening and thunder would be right on us! The rain came hard and fast and so thick you couldn’t see the road in front of the house. It would become impossible to stay dry as the rain whipped sideways under the little overhang, stinging our skin. “AHHH!” we would all scream and shout, running back into the house, laughing, soaked to the bone. After a hot, uncomfortable day, my skin would be covered in goose bumps and I would wrap myself in a blanket. This was an entirely different experience to the damp rainy days in Maine when the sky would be heavy with a gray blanket of clouds and gentle showers traded places with drizzle throughout the day. Arizona monsoons were a terrifying spectacle. Often the giant drops of these desert storms would turn to hail that would rattle on the roof and bounce like pin-pong balls off the sidewalk. Brilliant lightening streaked through the sky and someone would always shout nervously – “That one was way too close!” Thunder clapped and boomed loud – so loud you could feel it rumble though your body. The electricity would almost always go out and we would sit in the living room close together in the dim light marveling at the power of the storm while the wind whistled eerily through the cracks in the old house. Buckets were left in position to catch the leaks in the ceiling – it was pointless, at least for now, we learned, to put them away after the storm – this happens everyday. The storms never lasted long, though. Usually within a half an hour after the first drops of rain, the sky above would be bright and blue as the great thunderheads moved on. Sometimes they would circle back around for “round II” and always a brilliant rainbow – sometimes a double or triple – would follow.

After the storms passed, the usually dry, hot desert air would be thick and damp and even more uncomfortable than before. I learned that the parched sand trail behind the adobe house was actually a river – a river very unlike the ones I knew from Maine. These were washes and when the water came it flowed hard and dangerously fast, the color of chocolate milk. “Don’t play in the wash” was added to the list of Arizona dangers.

As I look to the Eastern skies this summer, I am hoping for the return of the daily pattern of soaking, life giving rains to marvel at with my own kids who have lived in this long drought their whole lives. Despite the risk to crops, I pray for rain.

Agua Linda Farm is open weekends year round. Go to www.agualindafarm.net for more information

Agua Linda Farm Journal – May
This month, thoughts of farming are overshadowed by the death of my grandfather.
My Papa was our first dance partner. Standing on his cowboy boots with bare feet, our hands wrapped around his thumbs, my and I sisters waltzed and two-stepped. We danced to the rhythms of his harmonica and to the um-pa-pa of his accordion and, as he sat, legs crossed, we perched on his boot, bouncing and laughing, pretending we were riding a horse.
On dark, cold, snowy Christmas mornings, Papa made sure we believed in Santa Claus. Jingle bells and pounding on the roof could have only been reindeer and a sleigh! His hands helped to build our first home and he was our hero in his big yellow truck that he used to plow the snow out of our driveway and, once, to rescue our school bus that was stuck in a snow drift. He loved to fish and taught us how to thread wriggly worms onto a hook. As adults, Papa eyed our boyfriends with skepticism. When he met Stewart over 20 years ago, my future husband had long hair, a tie-dyed t-shirt and was driving a pink and purple striped truck. “Why don’t you ride with me? ” Papa said, taking me firmly by the arm. I smiled over my shoulder as I walked away from Stewart, feeling honored to be protected by my Papa, who I knew would sit down with Stewart soon enough and would approve.
When I walk into the garage at my grandparent’s log home on Lake Ida in Alexandria, Minnesota, I pause and inhale deeply. My sisters do the same and we smile at one another. They know. We have spoken of it many times before – how the smells of Mama and Papa’s home never change and the first whiffs upon arrival – always after a grueling, long trip – bring back flashes of memory going back to our earliest years. And, over there, where it always is, waits Papa’s chair and a spare for a visitor or maybe one of us, and a side table with his collection of pipes. Here we would sit and talk endlessly as he puffed. That sweet smell of tobacco, too, was the smell of fond memories. Then the door to the entry is opened. The screen door bangs its familiar greeting as we step into the living room, our luggage in tote. “We’re here, Mama! ” we shout, looking around the living room at the furniture that we have sat in for decades. We briefly marvel, once again, how nothing has changed – the rug where we played with dolls and Lincoln Logs (that are in a box in the loft) is the same and is where, more recently, we watched our own kids – the great grandchildren – play with the same well worn toys. The staircase to the loft is in front of us and I am so happy that I will be sleeping up there instead of in the new bedroom that was put in the basement. I will climb those stairs tonight – stairs that I used to slide down on my bottom – to sleep in the loft where I will be able to hear the comforting tones of conversation continuing in the kitchen below but will not be able to make out words as I drift into sleep. Beside my bed I know I will find a basket of children’s books that will include, along with a few recent additions, worn copies of Ferdinand the Bull and Miss Lucy which I will be sure to read before heading back to Arizona.
Through the picture window in the kitchen, we can see the lake and it is magnificent. The ice, we are told, has just melted, and now the water is choppy and rough. It will be too cold for a swim this trip, but we will dare each other and will walk down the hill to the dock and perhaps stick in a big toe, just to say we did. Squirrels busily hop and scamper precariously from tiny branch to tinier branch on the maples that frame the lake view. The trees are still leafless from winter and I can see more of the lake from the kitchen window than I can on most visits which are in the summer – July or August, when a break from Arizona heat is needed and the lake will be warm enough for swimming.
We sit in the familiar chairs of the kitchen where everyone gathers, even if it gets too crowded and someone has to sit on the floor. Cousins will stop by, aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews and friends – “We could sit in the living room, I suppose, ” Mama will say at some point, but we won’t move. We will visit and talk and laugh while we sip coffee and sample new recipes and stuff ourselves full of my Aunt Sam’s homemade bread – still hot from the oven, or Aunts Doris’ “hot dish” (a Minnesota word for casserole). So much is the same this sweet, wonderful place locked in time and I feel embraced like a child, comfortable and safe within these walls, surrounded by family. A sanctuary preserved to which I have always been able to return, but this time things have changed.
Now, Papa’s chair in the kitchen is empty with his fishing journals in a basket on the floor. His tools in the garage are untouched and his boots are on a shelf in his closet. Papa’s garden is ready for spring planting of potatoes and peas so we help my Aunt Sam who has decided to double the size of the plot this year. We till, pound in fence posts, string chicken wire and stake out rows. Most significantly, we all join forces to remove a giant rock that Papa and Aunt Sam gave up on every spring and cheer as the boulder was finally dislodged.
That night I go to bed listening to soft voices coming from the kitchen as I have done so many times. The log house creaks as it settles and when someone walks through the house it sounds just like the shuffling of Papa’s boots and I drift into slumber.

Agua Linda Farm520-398-3218Stewart@AguaLindaFarm.netwww.AguaLindaFarm.netP.O. Box 975, Amado, AZ.85645

It was on a casual tour of the original 800 acres one day that Stewart told me that he had always wanted to farm his families’ property. He was showing me the old operation, pointing as he described the scene he recalled from his childhood “…the grain silo was over there… that was the office … these adobe walls were where employees lived…” He showed me old irrigation ditches, remnants of which went right into the Santa Cruz River bed. We bush-wacked through overgrown mesquites to find the foundations of structures long gone. It was fun, like we were archeologists recreating the past. But – a farmer?

Stewart had a hard time convincing me that farming was a good idea (sometimes he still does…). My distant memories of living in a farming community in Maine as a child had somehow engrained in me that farmers struggle. He had an even harder time convincing his parents. I thought the idea was ludicrous but I also believed that Stewart should follow his dream.

I arranged to do my student teaching in Rio Rico instead of Tucson and Stewart and I moved back to the farm. Stewart bought a variety of how-to books and started to pick the brains of the very few farmers left in the area. Unlike most folks who farm, he didn’t have knowledge passed down to him from his father, but his parents reluctantly helped him buy his first tractor and Stewart broke ground!

The first crop was the European lettuce in the raised beds commissioned by Regina. We harvested the greens with ridiculous care; leaf-by-leaf and carefully washed and spun dried the delicate greens. Since then, Stewart and I have grown a variety of vegetables – squash, cucumbers, beets, radishes, corn, watermelon, okra, kohlrabi, onions, garlic and much, much more, but our favorite crop continues to be those leafy greens!

It is this time of year – winter – when lettuce does best here. You can plant a little now, then wait a week or so and plant a little more and continue for the next eight weeks or so, therefore staggering the growth and prolonging the harvest. There are countless varieties that you can grow and it isn’t hard. If you have a pot in your yard or a little space in the ground, you can grow your own lettuce. We like having a nice mix of reds and greens. Arugula grows faster and will out-compete other lettuces, so plant it separately. You don’t need to cover the plants at night, but they will grow faster if you do. A piece of clear plastic tented over the seeds until they germinate, then a cloth white row cover over the plants once they have started is all you need if you choose to cover them. You can sow the seeds by sprinkling them lightly over loose soil, then gently rake the surface – they don’t need to be buried deep. Water frequently. Use a sharp knife to harvest the leaves when they are big enough, about four inches tall. This takes 4-5 weeks, depending on temperatures. Wait to wash lettuce until you are ready to eat it (and harvest it when it is dry) as water breaks down the leaves causing decay (this is why “table ready” lettuce in the grocery store turns slimy so fast). You can get 3-4 harvests out of each plant.

One of our favorite dinners is a big salad. By adding the additional ingredients, it can be very filling:

• Mixed European lettuce, about 1⁄4 pound, washed and dried
• 2 Green apples, sliced in bite-sized pieces
• 1 avocado, sliced
• 3 tablespoons or so of feta cheese (or gorgonzola)
• Hand-full of sharp yellow cheese, bite sized chunks
• A sprinkling of nuts (pine nuts, pecans or walnuts)
• 2 boiled, peeled, diced and chilled potatoes
• 3-4 hard boiled eggs, chilled and sliced
• 1-2 cans white tuna or 1 pre-grilled tuna steak, chopped or chicken breast, shredded pre-cooked

Toss all ingredients with a mild vinaigrette dressing. Pair with a crusty baguette.

www.AguaLindaFarm.net

Like so many little girls, I was crazy about horses.  According to my dad, when I was a baby we had a little pony.  I don’t remember Frisky at all, except for her smell.  Ponies smell different than horses.  If I bury my face in the neck of a pony, fur thick with a winter coat, and inhale deeply through my nose, I am transported to my earliest years – not with vivid memories, but subtle warm feelings that pass quickly and cannot be completely grasped, like trying to remember a faded dream or having someone’s name “on the tip of your tongue”.  We have a couple of ponies on the farm.  What were at first companions for our children, are now entertainment for their younger cousins and the hundreds of kids who visit the farm every year.  Bailey, who was born here two months after adopting Dez and Jesse, has been trained to pull a small plow, too and helps Stewart in the garden.  I don’t know that she makes a significant difference in the work, but I know she makes the mundane task more enjoyable because Stewart feels a sense of comradery with her as they work up and down the rows.  From time to time we bring Bailey in from the pasture, brush her down and saddle her up for a pony ride or hitch her to the plow.   At these times, I cannot resist nuzzling into that furry neck, closing my eyes and enjoying the brief flash of time travel, but I don’t overdo it – I believe that the whisper of a memory that her smell triggers is fragile and could change – I don’t want the pony scent to remind me of plowing.

Despite begging and pleading, I didn’t start riding horses until I was ten years old and living in the Bahamas.  My elementary school shared a fence with the pasture of about a dozen horses and at recess, that’s where I headed.  Daily I was reminded of what I had decided was my true calling and I passed this along to my parents who finally gave in.  My sisters and I started riding classes that fall.  My instructor was English and abrupt and impatient, but I was hooked.  For the rest of my pre-teen and teenage years, horses were my world.  When I wasn’t in school or at the stables, I was drawing pictures of horses, reading Walter Farley’s Black Stallion books over and over or studying in reference books to become an “expert” in horse care so that I would be prepared to fulfill my ultimate dream of adopting a wild mustang someday (a dream that came true five years ago).

My husband, Stewart was a horse lover, too.  As a kid he would spend hours trying to catch his old horse, Foggy back when the farm was 800 acres and having a horse “out to pasture,” meant you might not see it for days.  Then, at only nine years old, he would saddle up and ride all over the ranch and beyond by himself, sometimes into Tubac, ten miles away!  His mother, Regina had grown up horse crazy, too and shared her passion with her kids by footing the bill for English riding lessons, trainers and fancy jumping horses during the 1980’s.  When I moved back to Arizona in 1986 and met my future family, Stewart, his brother Morgan and sister Alex were riding daily and trailering their horses to shows as far away as New York!  When Stewart’s siblings went off to college, the old jumpers were retired from the ring and put out to pasture, and the English saddles became covered in dust in the tack room.

With the arrival of Dez and Jesse, (our kids were adopted ten years ago at ages 2 and 4) the saddle soap and currycombs came out.  Saddles were restored, torn leather replaced and the rest oiled to a safe suppleness.  I bought bicycle helmets for the kids and a small pillow for Jesse to make sharing the saddle with me more comfortable and we were off!  We spent hours riding the trails that first year.  I had taken a leave of absence from teaching to dedicate time to my new family and we bonded through horses.  Jesse was barely three years old when he started announcing “Cowboys and Ladies!” every time we were all mounted up and ready to ride.  It was like his own version of “They’re off!”  or “Ready-set-go!” and the phrase has stuck.  He was small and rode in front of me with his stubby legs straddling my hips and his arms around my waist.  This way he was positioned safely between my arms while we navigated hills, washes and thorny mesquites.  He continued to ride in front on his little pillow until one day, when he was about four he looked down at my chest and said, “Hey Mommy!  I can see your boobies down there!”   I halted my horse and Jesse officially graduated to the back of the saddle where the view was better (at least in my opinion).

Dez was an amazing rider from the start on Breeze, the former show pony that had belonged to Stewart’s younger sister.  She guided Breeze in and out of the Santa Cruz River and through cactus with confidence while either sucking her thumb or chattering incessantly.  Dez had a slight drawl in her voice that she has since grown out of and would say with her thumb in her mouth “I’m a real lady now, ain’t I mama?”
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Today’s forecast calls for highs in the mid seventies.  It is winter in Southern Arizona, all is quiet on the farm and it is a perfect day for riding.

Wayne has been a loyal employee for a few years now. He does most of the tractor work on the farm, keeps our equipment running and is continually patching and re-patching tires that we should just replace. Every October he willingly transforms to the hayride man and totes endless pumpkin pickers around the fields for hours every day. He recently endured triple by-pass surgery but insisted that he come back to work three weeks later.

I marveled daily this year as to why Ryan and Tamara kept making the drive from Tucson to the farm, week after week to harvest, seed and cultivate. The work is hard and the pay not great, but they always arrived with a smile (and, often a 6-pack for the end of the day). In the spring, due to a miscommunication, Ryan planted about ten times as many radishes as we needed. It is a mistake that we will never let him live down – he became a good-natured target for teasing. I told him that he was responsible for promoting our first ever “Radish Festival” and needed to find a way to get our costumers to buy radishes in bulk. We refer to Ryan now as the Radish Farmer and defer all radish inquiries to him.

The onion and garlic harvest at the beginning of June must have taken its toll on these loyal workers. I know I got tired of the job. Mountains of alliums kept coming in from the fields for us to trim, sort, weigh, bag, pack and braid! Desarae and Jesse were out of school by then and worked along side us. Desarae, being 15 was really a major contributor to the effort this year. I could see that she was aware of the pace that I set and would try to match it. She would watch me out of the corner of her eye as I quickly sewed up burlap sacks of onions or cut three heads of garlic at once and she challenged herself to do the same. Her brother, on the other hand, spent more time telling jokes and playing pranks on Ryan than anything else… Still, with now 7 (or, perhaps, 6 ½) of us at work, the piles of onions and garlic were getting the best of us. We all had blisters on our hands and reeked of garlic!

Thankfully, we were able to recruit a couple of volunteers who seemed to enjoy pitching in. To those of us who had been doing this work day in and day out, the thought of processing onions and garlic for fun seemed ridiculous, but we spent no time trying to convince Diane, her son Jett, Brittany and Nancy that they were crazy. We are so grateful for their help!

This past September I was very nervous about getting the farm ready for the festival. Building the hay-bale maze, setting up lights and the dining tent, repairing fences – the “to-do” list for this month-long event is daunting. To the rescue came our friends and family. “Dinosaur Tom” and his buddy Joey spent two days here shuffling straw bales around to make a maze for kids and a straw-bale pyramid. Tom, an artist who constructs dinosaurs for parks across the country, had strong opinions on the best configurations of the straw bales. Stewart’s brother Morgan brought a crew to help put together the dining tent and place picnic tables around the farm. Scott and Selene Bell, who, along with their kids, have become our October “kitchen crew”, came in September to clean out the packing shed and convert it to the kitchen for the Garden Grill. They emptied out the whole space and scrubbed it from top to bottom to serve up hundreds of farm-raised burgers throughout October.

My sister Kristin gets down right giddy in October – she loves helping out! She moves in on the weekends and keeps track of the financial side of the event as well as anything else we need – and has declared October on the farm her “summer camp”. My mom has the tedious task of rolling out pie dough for pumpkin pies and helps run the store while my stepfather has joined Wayne in the pumpkin patch driving they hay wagon. My Dad gave up his fall break from teaching and flew out to lend a hand. He can do anything from teaching kindergarten kids about farming, to driving a tractor, to repairing a fence. My nieces, ages 11 and 8 ran Snack Shack during the festival!

Aside from the kitchen crew, my sister-in-law, Alex and daughter Desarae have the hardest job on the farm in October. They manage the pony rides. Alex insists that next year we need to harness the energy from the pony turn-style going around and around and run the electricity with it! They estimate that they walk ten miles a day in a twelve-foot circle but they do it with smiles and energy and a love of children and horses!

Thanks to our former high-school teacher, Steve for building the onion boxes, to Jesse for finally coming through and doing a good job at the petting zoo, to Nadine for filling in at the pony rides, to Diane and Jett, for selling pumpkins at the lonely outpost. Thanks to Russ, Rudy, Matt, Torey, Travis, Nan, John, Holden, Sean, Erin, Jen, Luis, Gloria and, of course, to Stewart’s Mom, Regina for maintaining such the beautiful, peaceful farm then allowing us to convert it to a bustling festival every year. Most importantly, thanks to the community for coming out and enjoying a day on the farm! Hope you had as much fun as we did!

We will resume normal Farm Store hours this month – Saturdays 9-3, Sundays 12-3. www.AguaLindaFarm.net