Sunday, February 23, 2014

Hole in the Wall


Weather: Air is still warm and dry; last snow, 2/04/2014. The relative humidity levels in Los Alamos have fallen below 10% in the past two weeks. Here, the grasses are fading as the air sucks out the remaining moisture that has kept dried chlorophyll in suspension.

What’s still green: Juniper and other evergreens, prickly pear; leaves on German iris, yuccas, garlic, hollyhocks, winecup mallow, Saint John’s wort, vinca, coral bells, cheat grass; some rose stems green. Tansy mustard and alfilerillo have been germinating.

What’s red: Cholla, coral beardtongue leaves, some rose stems.

What’s grey or blue: Four-winged saltbush, snow-in-summer, pinks, golden hairy aster leaves.

What’s yellow or brown: Arborvitae.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geraniums, aptenia.

Animal sightings: Rabbit was out this week. House fly has hatched.


Weekly update: Work continues on the block wall in the village. This past week, the men finished the wall on the south side and added the columns. They also raised the height at the entrance where the drive goes down toward the flat lands by the river. On each side, they are installing wooden grills.

There are many reasons to pierce a wall. In the past, when walls served military purposes, holes with iron bars were made so sentries could check visitors before they opened the gates.

More recently, people have had to include holes for utilities especially gas meters.


Openings are not as challenging as arches, but they share their structural requirements with windows and doors. Something has to support stones or blocks over the opening.


The men building the local wall left a gap in the blocks, then placed wooden posts. The upright posts themselves will support the blocks when the next course of block is laid.

One local variation has been using wagon wheels. They’re stronger and more durable than wood.


Some, no doubt, use them because they evoke associations with the west of Hollywood.


However, one of the oldest walls in the village has an embedded wheel.


Some, including the people who built one of the arches shown in the next to the last photograph in the posting for February 2, place wagon wheels in high openings on each side of an arch.

These echo the window openings popularized by Andrea Palladio in rural villas outside Venice in the middle 1500's. That was the period when Spain dominated Europe with the wealth coming from the Americas.

His openings included a large central window with a half circle above, and flanked by two narrower lites. The proportions may have been derived from three-part Medieval altar screens. Palladio’s greatest contribution was giving a sense of "rightness" to a form that still is being used.

In another wall down the road, the wooden grill shown in the second picture is next to the half arch of the central Palladian opening.


This wall required greater skill that the block wall in the village. The rocks are closely fitted, with little obvious mortar, and no vertical supports for the stones above the opening.


This was built ten or fifteen years ago, and, as I remember, took as much time to create as the one that’s been rising for the past two months.

Photographs: Most photographs taken in the past few years in the immediate area. One is from Chamita, and the one below on the road to Ojo Caliente.

Sunday, February 16, 2014

Plant Records


Weather: Much too warm with dry air leaching away any remains of the last snow, 2/04/2014. Men have been burning their hay fields. Last year’s weather was dry the smooth brome grass never really grew well and weeds took advantage. The men are still working on the block wall.

What’s still green: Juniper and other evergreens, prickly pear; leaves on German iris, yuccas, garlic, hollyhocks, winecup mallow, Saint John’s wort, vinca, coral bells, cheat grass; some rose stems green.

What’s red: Cholla, coral beardtongue leaves, some rose stems.

What’s grey or blue: Four-winged saltbush, snow-in-summer, pinks, golden hairy aster leaves.

What’s yellow or brown: Arborvitae.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geraniums, aptenia.

Animal sightings: Small birds.


Weekly update: One of my New Year’s rituals is creating a new plant records data base. This involves reviewing the previous year and making summary notes like "bad seed, never buy again" or "got a lot of fruit this year." These were the important milestones that got lost in the daily minutia of battling weeds and drought.

Then I would copy the records of plants that survived, change to record year, and reload them to start a new year.

It may not sound exciting to a non-computer person, but I was always surprised at how cathartic it was. Looking at the year’s history renewed my faith in nature. As soon as I was done, I went through the catalogs that had accumulated and ordered seed for the new year. The past wasn’t exactly forgotten, but it was filed away.


Two year’s ago things changed. I had to replace my computer and upgrade the software. Microsoft’s constant quest to make things easier collided with my desire to use a laptop that doesn’t require it’s own bit of furniture.

The display forms no longer fit on a single screen. I could see my history or I could make notes, but I no longer could do both in the same form. The pleasure was gone. I managed to get the 2012 information updated, and postponed creating new records for 2013.

Well, it’s now 2014. Procrastination always sets a date.

I’ve spent the past few days setting up a new data base. I’m now salvaging the old records. As I clean up fields like price and unit cost, I see again how much changes in corporate society have impacted my private pleasures in the past fifteen years.


There are the obvious changes. Small pots that used to cost $2.20 were up to $2.50 by 1999 and rose to something like $3.00. Then, before that particularly greenhouse went out of business, they stopped offering small plants. Only, when you brought the larger pots home, you discovered they hadn’t grown larger plants. They simply had taken the small plants, repotted them at the last moment and charged something like $6.00. The effective price tripled, but not the quality.

Years ago, someone gave me a simple way to figure out how I was effected by inflation. Remember the price for something. His example was a large candy bar which cost ten cents when we were children in the 1950's.

Compare how much it has increased since. Last week the same candy was .79 at one place and .89 somewhere else. Then make the comparison with your income between the two points in times. Did my income increase seven times between the time I worked for a dollar an hour in the local drugstore in 1962, or effectively $2,080 a year. Yes it did. I was ahead of inflation on candy bars.

Did my income triple between 1995 and 2000? No. Gardening got more expensive.


There were the changed caused by increasing costs of doing business, when the market was shrinking. That is, when the big boxes arrived - Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Lowe’s - they undersold local nurseries. They attracted the buyers who only cared about price. The local places, like the one that played games with its plants, were trying to keep their best customers who had established gardens and didn’t buy as much a year.

There were costs increased by corporate mergers, especially in seeds. I have old seed packets marked .29 from the 1970s and .69 from the late 1980s. Last year they were more like $1.29.

As with many things, the real price increase was hidden. What once might have had 350 mg was reduced to 200 mg while the face price increased a bit.

Now there’s only one company whose seeds are easily available, Lake Valley. For anything else, I have to pay shipping. That used to be just a bit above the state’s gross receipts tax. Now, it’s a good deal more. Every person who touches a product inflates the price to support their top managers. The value added tax has arrived in a stealth form.


Some costs have been kept artificially low by off shoring production. I’m up to 1999 in the data review. That was the first year a seed company noted their country of origin was Zimbabwe. Soon after, companies changed the definition of origin to mean where they bought the seed they repackaged. That often was Holland or Germany or France. No one knew where it was grown.

I remember when the company that bought Burpee bragged it was the only remaining American seed company. They were the ones who pioneered production in México and Central America. To them, American just mean the location of corporate headquarters.

There are still small companies in this country who grow their own seed. I happily pay their "shipping and handling" because their basic pricing is honest and quality depends on the vagaries of nature.


Last year I put in some new trees to edge the rebuilt driveway. Went I bought my last trees in the late 1990's the local, cheap hardware was selling them for about $17.00. Last year I paid more like $27.00. Neither were great quality. Often the ones sold here were quality rejects with poor grafts.

However, I had learned with trees and roses price wasn’t all that mattered. Droughts and winds were no respecters of quality. They killed everything. Because so few survived, and I had to buy so many to get some strong enough to survive I bought what was cheap and hoped I could manage the consequences of more grafts.

I had a dwarf cherry cut down last year that had reverted to root stock that was threatening the house. That’s one cost I didn’t factor in to my calculations.


Price isn’t the only thing I’m noticing. Looking through my notes on what killed plants may tell me when I finally conquered the grasshoppers and inhibited the rabbit. Both still exist, but aren’t as destructive.

I’ll also recover which were the wet winters and dry summers, the years of fire and winds. One’s swears one will never forget, but all I remember are they occurred. I no longer remember when. I care much more about those patterns of nature than I did when I started keeping records in 1995.

Photographs: Men in the area experiment with building fences from unusual materials. Most look good for a few years, then the weather and vehicles damage them. I love them, even when the are decrepit, as records of man’s imagination in the face of overwhelming challenges in the dry southwest.

1. Made from tires.

2-3. Stuccoed bales of straw and bamboo curtain.

4-5. Wood work

6. Glass bricks.

7. Retaining wall from rail timbers.

8. Fence made with the same techniques as #7.

9. The frame originally held a holy picture, the Madonna or our Lady of Guadalupe. There were three spaced along the side of the fence. They were paper encased in plastic.

Sunday, February 09, 2014

Masons


Weather: Less than an inch of snow Tuesday morning, gone Friday; last snow 2/04/2014.

What’s still green: Juniper and other evergreens, prickly pear; leaves on German iris, yuccas, garlic, hollyhocks, winecup mallow, Saint John’s wort, vinca, coral bells, cheat grass; some rose stems green.

What’s red: Cholla, coral beardtongue leaves, some rose stems.

What’s grey or blue: Four-winged saltbush, snow-in-summer, pinks, golden hairy aster leaves.

What’s yellow or brown: Arborvitae.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geraniums, aptenia.

Animal sightings: Small birds.


Weekly update: The most important element in modern lave stone walls is masonry skill. It is much more difficult to fit rocks together with minimal mortar than to float them in cement.


I assume the masons have moved here from somewhere in México, perhaps as part of the general demand for skilled services in Santa Fé that lasted until the housing bust.

When I was working in Santa Fé for a small building subcontractor, I was told the biggest challenge for builders who worked for the high-end market was getting enough work to keep their skilled crews together. Once there was no work, men returned to México. The loss of skill was more serious than the loss of financing.


I was told a nucleus of men, perhaps brothers or cousins, would work together. They were the ones who could do the best plastering or other finishing work that characterized the Santa Fé style.

Here it looks like a small group of men, perhaps all from the same town or area, moved north. They all have similar skills, but they do not all build the same walls.


As near as I can tell, there was no masonry tradition earlier. Angelico Chavez only mentions two masons in his Origins of New Mexico Families. Both came from Mexico City with the reconquest.

One, Antonio de Moyo, came in 1693 when he was 20 years old. He was dead by 1715, too soon to have passed all his skills on to his two sons. One died in 1715 in Taos. The other had two sons.


The other mason was José Jarmillo Negrete. He was 38 when he came north from Mexico City in 1693. His oldest son, Roque, was living in Santa Cruz in 1711. His wife bore 14 children. Five sons were still alive in 1767. They proliferated. The daughter of one descendant married Kit Carson in Taos in 1843.

There may have been others. Chavez was interested in establishing the presence of immigrant ancestors. Most of his sources were church or government records. Scribes may have been more interested in establishing the legitimacy of the migrants, than in documenting the skills needed in a community. Or, that may be what was of greatest interest to Chavez.


The only construction work he records is rebuilding the chapel in Santa Fé. He was probably was using payroll ledgers that named a master builder, two master carpenters and two carpenters. He also identifies two laborers, two painters and four others involved in the reconstruction efforts.

Andrés Montoya supplied the vigas and other lumber. Sebastián de Vargas provided the iron spikes and nails. One was probably a merchant. The other may have been a blacksmith. Blacksmiths were far more important that masons, for they maintained the weapons. Chavez mentions nine by name.


The skills needed to build walls may have disappeared in the Española valley, but not the appreciation for good stone work. It may have been passed on or fed by trips to México or by the general pride that leads one to discover the arts of ones ancestors.

Lava stone walls with extruded mortar only seem to be built in the local village and in Santa Cruz. I don’t see them in the larger cities, though I’ll admit I don’t cruise the streets of Santa Fé.

More important than the walls are the arches people commission. These require the greatest masonry skill. They come in all types, indicating whoever is or has been a stone worker here aspires to the greatest levels of achievement.


Photographs: Photographs taken in the area in the past several years.

Sunday, February 02, 2014

Cement Block Walls


Weather: Lots of clouds but no moisture dropping out; last snow more than a month ago, 12/22/2013.

What’s still green: Juniper and other evergreens, prickly pear; leaves on German iris, yuccas, garlic, hollyhocks, winecup mallow, Saint John’s wort, vinca, coral bells, cheat grass; some rose stems green.

What’s red: Cholla, coral beardtongue leaves, some rose stems.

What’s grey or blue: Four-winged saltbush, snow-in-summer, pinks, golden hairy aster leaves.

What’s yellow or brown: Arborvitae.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geraniums, aptenia.

Animal sightings: Small birds.


Weekly update: Cement block construction is probably the biggest contribution Los Alamos made to the area’s construction vocabulary. After the war, when the town site was being built, block duplexes were erected everywhere.

Cement block probably was used because it was available. War-time restrictions probably made wood expensive and scarce. Block exterior walls only needed framing inside.

By coincidence, the blocks were an extension of local building practices with adobe. The major new skill was the use of cement. The mortar for the houses needed to be smoother and more consistent that the rough cement acceptable for walls.

Men took their wages and upgraded their existing adobes with the same steel-framed windows. Some also built new houses of block.


Cement block walls are not as common here as they are in Santa Fé. Some are older, but most more recent.

The one that is being built now began when a back-hoe dug a trench. The block was laid in the ditch, with the straight sections built first. The curved portion where the drive leaves the road has been laid out, and the bocks anchored by mortar above and below. The men will add the vertical mortar later.


Earlier walls were built directly on the ground. Block had one important advantage over adobe. It was easier to build over an existing irrigation ditch without blocking the flow of water.


Later, blocks were used to line the ditches. Here the main ditch along the road has been reinforced and the diverted channel for the yard flows behind and under the outer boundary wall.


Blocks usually are laid so the vertical seams are offset from row to row. In Egypt, men lay them so the seams are lined up because they value the neatness of straight lines. I don’t know which men here would have done if the men overseeing work in Los Alamos hadn’t insisted on the offsets.


The hollow blocks need to be topped off. Solid cap block comes in several thicknesses and styles.


Although some walls are left untouched, most here are painted. Covering them with stucco appears to be a more recent choice, and may be copied from the house walls in Santa Fé.


Block themselves are often used as the decorative devices. One in town used solid square bocks on top.


When fretwork blocks became available, several people near the village used them. One, with the openings pointed downward, is still gray


Another, across the road has the openings pointed up. It has been painted.


Another, used a double course. He built his wall with other decorative cement forms.


While some people accept looking at bare, gray bloc, many like to improve the utilitarian. Whatever a tool becomes available is exploited by the more creative.

Photographs: Photographs taken in the area in the past several years.