Poor Backyard Beddie's Almanac: pues vamos ya.

it's hard to know where to begin.
it makes a body wonder how so much living gets crammed into a life...

when last i connected with you, o vast interwebs, i'd been in mexico for a moment, but the experience had truly just begun.

& now i'm back stateside, where its easier to get a hold of something called a bacon buffalo ranch chicken McSandwich than it is to get an actual chicken. merr.

i've got to admit i've been a bit spoiled: woken by roosters and the sun, privy to in-season citrus fruits i'd never seen, papaya con limon, walking through a fairyland of wild flowers, made pliant by the dual action of mezcal and manual labor, in the midst of a vibrant food culture, passing time with wonderful humans, graciously fed amazing meals by the wonderful Madame Flowers, cups full of amazing coffee, basking in the glow of a life free from cell phones and superfluous social media.

Mexico is magical. & i hope to get back there to explore more, visit the beautiful souls i was privileged to meet & get closer to, and hopefully improve my fledgeling spanish skills.

among the many lessons learned on this adventure, though, is the fact that i want all my travels to have purpose: to work on a project, to learn, to teach. i don't want to be a tourist, i want to actively contribute to collective endeavors.

And that's exactly what i got to do during my stay in Santa Rosa.

before i get ahead of myself (as i'm prone to do) babbling about the wonders of creation, let me attempt to convey a sense of place.

i spent many days in the city: Guanajuato, Guanajuato (like New York, New York....) and it was cool as far as cities go. it was built during the colonial period and is nestled in a narrow valley, so the architecture is gorgeous and the streets are easier to navigate on foot than in a vehicle, plus when you're ambling about you can stop for a mo' and eat some amazing street food.

but the city ain't really my scene. the hustle and bustle, constant sensory overload, and swarming masses of humanity tend to trigger alternating bouts of anxiety and zombification in my increasingly delicate psyche.

despite or because of growing up in heavier population areas, i guess i'm a country boy at heart. en verdad, i'm in love with el campo.

lucky for my mental health, i spent the majority of my days in Santa Rosa, an 11 peso bus ride up the mountain from the city and a world away.

Nicole lives in what is essentially a compound of concrete casitas, so though she has housemates, each has a tiny house of their own and a separate shared kitchen and bathroom. She, Flor (the illustrious Madame Flowers: an infuser of mezcals and a french-trained cook), and formerly an itinerant chocolate-maker called Ivan (that's ee-Ban, gringos) dwell on the northern slope of a primary ridge that juts from the main ridge of the mountain. The property is rife with apple, pear and tejocote trees, naturalized arugula and fennel, calendula and cinco llagas flowers, and sports a terraced garden the three of them installed last year.

From the patio or the roof, if you're so inclined, you can gaze at a massive mountain in the northwesterly distance or check out the activities of the neighbors across the valley, in their colorful casas, looking like a scene out of a Wes Anderson movie. I did a lot of both, sippin coffee in the sun or being still remembering that i am the mountain.

We worked on a lot of projects down there. Nicole's got lists of lists of the lists of things to do, bless her gringa soul, and it seems these days that my most valuable possessions are time and my hoary hands. A day without using them well is worse than a waste; it's damn close to sacrilege. So our confederation has been mutually beneficial.

COOP BEFORE (i took down the gate before i thought to take a photo)

EL GALLINERO

(OR REMODELING A COOP ON A BROKEN SHOESTRING BUDGET)

i started this blog, as some of y'all might remember, as a way to document my experiments in low-cost suburban micro-farming. homesteading and it's numerous opportunities for creative solution-sharing hold particular appeal for thisguy, and i've been building things on the cheap in true Janky Rustico fashion since before i made up that ridiculous moniker. But in Mexico, my Janky Rustico skills soared to new heights.

the eggs were somewhat difficult to collect from in there

it's somewhat disconcerting to realize how many and which things you take for granted...

like salvaged building materials, gravel quarries, and bags of organic matter that neighbors conveniently leave on the curb for you to steal for your garden.

i've heavily relied on first-world waste to do what i do with what i considered to be an extremely modest income. turns out i'm rich, apparently. who knew?

DEMO DONE, WITH DRAINAGE/FOUNDATION
TRENCH DUG

in Mexico, at least where i was, Janky Rustico is the norm and useful things like wood, metal roofing, buckets, etc. are used and re-used until they virtually disintegrate. if you dumpster dive for building materials down there, you're likely to end up building with styrofoam and doritos bags.

basically the only cheap building material to come by were the huacales, small wooden crate-like boxes for transporting fruits and vegetables that you can buy from the fruterias for 5 pesos a pop. We picked up three of those, a 10 peso bag of small nails and a 30 peso tube of contact cement to build the nesting boxes, equivalent to about $4.25 USD.

huacale nesting box, with salvaged hinges and plywood scraps

a little creative finagling allowed us to rebuild the run with the original materials using about half the chicken wire, which we were then able to reuse to build compost bins for the house in the mountains and the rooftop garden in the city.

i'm always amazed at what can be accomplished when humans put their heads&hearts&hands together. we are truly capable of great things when we're not busy screwing things up for the grandkids.