Desert Gardening & Village Life in the Andes

2011-12-13T11:34:00.000-05:00

Free Gardening books,Public Domain pre-1923

I’ve found that much of the “new” gardening information in (expensive) contemporarypublications is más o menos recycled from old texts, those meaty, wonderful, captivatingbooks that are in the public domain.

Some are available as PDFs, others must be read online or purchased from a bookservice. Many are available as free e-bookdownloads, but OJO! many times theillustrations are lacking and frequently the text is garbled by the limitations of the OCR (OpticalCharacter Recognition) involved in thedigitizing.

Best to look around online, check www.archive.orgor http://www.gutenberg.org/, with luckthe PDFs of the original transcripts are available, with non-garbled text andfull illustrations. At least one ofthese pre-1923 volumes is available on www.librivox.orgas an audio book: Gardening Without Irrigation: or without much, anyway.

Here are a few that I’ve run across, in PDF, audio,and/or online reads. Anyone who wants toadd to the collection, just send them in. The goal would be to avoid the OCR-translated volumes that frequently are hodgepodgesof strange characters. Of course oncethe PDF is located, it can be easily downloaded to an e-reader.

1) Farm Gardening,quick cash crops and how to grow them. (anonymous)   http://www.archive.org/details/farmgardeningwit00john

2) TheNew Horticulture by H. Stringfellow   http://www.archive.org/details/newhorticultur00stri

3)   DryFarming by J.A Widtsoe   http://www.archive.org/details/dryfarming00widt

4) GardeningIndoors and Under Glass by F.F. Rockwell http://www.archive.org/details/gardeningindoors01rock

5) Gardening Without Irrigation: or without much,anyway bySteve Soloman http://www.archive.org/details/gardeningwithout04512gut
And, as audio book fromLibrivox.org http://librivox.org/gardening-without-irrigation-by-steve-solomon/

6) Crops and Methods for Soil Improvement by Alva Agee http://www.archive.org/stream/cropsandmethods00ageegoog#page/n8/mode/2up

7) and my favorite: My Summer in a Garden by Charles Dudley Warner. Excerpt: “The lettuce is to me a most interesting study. Lettuce is likeconversation: it must be fresh and crisp, so sparkling that you scarcely noticethe bitter in it. Lettuce, like most talkers, is, however, apt to run rapidlyto seed. Blessed is that sort which comes to a head, and so remains, like a fewpeople I know; growing more solid and satisfactory and tender at the same time,and whiter at the center, and crisp in their maturity. Lettuce, likeconversation, requires a good deal of oil to avoid friction, and keep thecompany smooth; a pinch of attic salt; a dash of pepper; a quantity of mustardand vinegar, by all means, but so mixed that you will notice no sharpcontrasts; and a trifle of sugar. You can put anything, and the more things thebetter, into salad, as into a conversation; but everything depends upon theskill of mixing. I feel that I am in the best society when I am with lettuce.It is in the select circle of vegetables.”

Making Adobe Bricks in Putre

2011-11-18T11:46:00.001-05:00

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After the bricks are dry enough to move, about a day, they are first turned over to dry more evenly, then put on edge to keep drying and to free up space in the yard for the new bricks. Then after about a week or 10 days they can be stacked on top of each other, or used for construction. They are very heavy.

But first, get a big pile of good dirt together, wet it down. In the background, a good example of the walls or murallas made here, ie with a rock base with adobe on top.

Then, clay must be added to the dirt, and mixed well.

Next step: add straw to the mud/clay mix, stomp on it and shovel to mix it all up. The straw helps hold the adobe together, provides stability when dry.

Shovel the wet adobe into the form, the consistency is such that immediately the form can be taken off. Note that 2 bricks are made at a time.

Cast: Mauricio (Mauri), Avelino (Ave), Sergio the Boliviano, Pelusa (Vontuti), and little Ratty the cocker.

Aymara folk art & legends

2011-11-18T08:38:00.001-05:00

Aymara folk tale: The Fox and the Goose. Eight of these legends are depicted on buildings in Putre.

The fox and the goose

Once upon a time the goose was swimming with her kids, as all the geese livedin the middle of the lake. The foxpassed nearby and was watching them. “Whyare your kids so pretty?”, the fox mom said to the goose mom. “It's easy”, said the goose, “put them in theoven and count 1,2,3, and later take them out, they will stay pretty”. The lady fox went home to her kids, heated up the oven, put her babiesin the hot oven, counted to 3, opened the oven, and saw that her babies wereburned and dead.

The fox was infuriated, and wanted to eat the goose, and went to thelake where the goose lived and said to her “Goose! Why did you lie tome! Come, I want to talk to you!”, butof course the fox wanted to eat the geese.

Meanwhile the goose mom was weaving her fabric and heard the call of thevicuña, the goose mom said “I’m coming, right away!” The fox thought "I am going to drink allthe water from the pond in order to eat the goose mom and her kids, and she beganto drink water from the lake until she was very swelled up and could drink nomore. Meanwhile she was walking the foxmom said “Oh Please don't poke me little cactus, little paja brava!” In a moment of carelessness, as she walkedslowly, the fox poked herself by accident with sharp grass spike, exploded thewater and she died.

The Puma, the Caracara, and the Condor and 3 sisters

The Puma, the Caracara, and the Condor

Once upon a time there were 3 sisters that were going to getmarried. The condor married the middlesister, the caracara married the youngest, and the puma wed the oldest. The condor carried his wife to live in thecliffs, the caracara to the top of the hill, and the lion took his wife to livein his cave, and the husbands all carried food to each of his wives.

One day the puma was bringing a leg of an animal to his wife, when hemet the caracara, and the puma, laying a trap, told the caracara "Takethis leg of meat to my siser in law!". The caracara flew with the leg on his shoulder and the meat flattenedhim on the ground. The puma ate him whenhe fell down. But the caracara was stillalive, and the caracara flew out the puma’s behind and the puma died afterthat.

The condor carried entrails to his wife, but she was getting very boredwith so much tripe. One day the caracaracame close to the cliffs and found the wife of the condor and asked her “Why are you crying?” She said, “I am bored with living in thisplace and eating tripe all the time. Take me down from here, please!!” The caracara told her, but you will give me your chuspita (note: smallcolorful bag in which coca leaves are carried), the condor wife accepted and thecaracara took the woman down from the cliffs.

Later on the Condor arrived at his nest, saw that his wife was not there,and went to look for her. Upon seeing that the caracara had the chuspita, hedecided to chase him and eat him. The caracarahad to flee from the condor, desperately hid himself in one of the nostrils ofa big cow. The condor stuck his headinto the other nostril of the cow so forcefully that when he took his head outhe had no more feathers on his neck, the caracara flew out the other end of thecow with the little coca bag.

From then on, the caracara remained with the colors of the chuspita around his neck, and the condor remained with one part of his neck bare offeathers.

Banana Passion Fruit!

2011-11-16T22:17:00.026-05:00

Passiflora tripartita var mollissima

One plant that grows well here is Banana Passion Fruit, AKA Passiflora tripartita var. mollissima, or locally known as Tumbo. It's grown as a cash crop for sale in Arica, and most families have a few vines in the back yard.
Below right is my neighbor Avelino Flores Huanca, life-long Aymara resident of Putre and nearby Socoroma.
I hung the old CDs to keep the thrushes and sierra finches away from the fruits, and strands of old video tape also work great. We water the plants every 3 days, and fertilize with either sheep or llama guano, a few days ago we spent all day digging up an old corral for 12 large bags of the "treasure". Recently a neighbor told me that the vines won't grow so rangy if the tips are clipped, so next time...

Resources for passion fruit enthusiasts:
Online Passiflora Journal

Everything Passiflora

Passion fruit: make juice, popsicles,
use it in baking or just eat it in the garden

Avelino Flores Huanca, Putre, 2011