Harassing Gophers

Weather: A typical storm cycle this week. On Sunday, the weather bureau said there was a 60% chance of rain or snow in Los Alamo, continuing Tuesday, with remnants through Thursday. The satellite showed moisture moving across the entire length of the Baja peninsula.

Monday, the chance of rain or snow that night was 100%. The Baja moisture was coming up from the south, but only a little was getting this far north. By the afternoon, the forecast had changed: the storm would end on Tuesday, while the satellite showed most of the moisture then was going into Texas.

Tuesday, about 4" of snow accumulated outside the house. It stopped soon after 9 am. The satellite showed the moisture stream had split, with most going to Texas, and a little coming to the Española valley. By mid afternoon, the snow had melted or condensed down to an inch or so on the ground.

Nothing on Wednesday or Thursday except soft ground in places.

Last snow: 2/11. Week’s low: 18 degrees F. Week’s high: 58 degrees F in the shade.

What’s green: The junipers, yuccas, and other evergreens, grape hyacinths, vinca, coral bell, blue flax and Mexican hat leaves

What’s turned red or purple: Sandbar willow and some rose branches; alfilerillo and coral beards tongue leaves

What’ turned brown or yellow: Weeping willow, arborvitae and some other evergreen leaves

Tasks: This afternoon I dumped more stones onto bald spots in the drive. There were places outside the drive path where stones either had been pushed by tires, or were dumped by the man working on my drive several years ago. I used my foot to slide the top stones along the surface until they covered the bare areas. Then, I used my foot to relevel the cannibalized areas. The side of my foot actually works better than a hoe because it stays on the surface. The iron blade tends to dig down a bit.

Animal sightings: I started to reroute a block path after I finished kicking around the gravel. When I first laid it, it was forced to created a bypass around a winterfat stump. A rose mistook the blocks as a personal gift of mulch. I was moving the blocks to the other side of the stump. When I picked up one block, I discovered an active colony of shiny black ants.

Weekly update: The first year I tried tulip bulbs, I planted them along my retaining wall. None came up, and I blamed that generic villain—the gopher.

Before I planted bulbs again I bought some shakers of cheap black pepper and sprinkled the cracked seeds in the holes with the bulbs. At the time, I knew that peppercorns lost their potency when they were ground, but hoped they would still act as a deterrent.

I later heard chili peppers were more lethal. I sprinkled some around what I thought was a snake hole last summer. I hoped that even if the ground spice no longer was any good for cooking, the granules might have retained enough of their chemicals so they would become activated when they got wet—either by contact with the skin or by being licked out of fur.

I had no intention of killing the animal, whatever it was, that made the hole. I hoped to drive it away by harassing it.

Scott Long said one method tried against pocket gophers was pouring "pepper oil extract (capsicum) into the soil." He added: "this irritant is effective in making gophers avoid that area." [1]

Last week I was reading a collection of African-American folklore. Around 1917, a seventy-year old man living on the North Carolina Piedmont said witches stepped out of their skins when they left their homes by the chimneys. One time when they were gone, someone "get two pods of red pepper." When they returned, they couldn’t get back into their skins because "it was hot." They hid in the sheets, but died when daylight hit their denuded bodies. [2]

Elsie Clews Parsons indicated the belief about the skin was found in the Bahamas, the Leeward Islands, and in Guiana. [3] Newell Niles Puckett noted the belief had been reported from Georgia, Missouri, Virginia, Louisiana, North Carolina, the Sea Islands, and West Africa. [4]

The primary difference was the kind of pepper. He said Vais of West Africa sprinkled salt and pepper in the room to "prevent her from getting back into her hide." Parsons said salt and pepper were used on Andros Islands in the Bahamas.

Chili peppers are a New World plant, and anyone who’s gotten near them knows about their affects on the skin. It took no imagination to substitute them into the traditional tales and practices.

I talked to a woman a couple years ago who remembered when she was a child, her mother warned her to wear gloves when she was picking the pods. Being young and invincible, she ignored the advice.

She was a cashier in a local market. When she said she used lotion and cold water to treat her hands, the man bagging the groceries suggested vinegar would help. She agreed, and said "these are the tricks you learn as you grow."

Notes on photographs:
1. Clouds on Monday afternoon, around 4:45 pm.
2. Snow near the house on Tuesday morning, just before noon.
3. The same area today.

End notes:
1. Scott Long. "Thomomys talpoides, Northern Pocket Gopher." University of Michigan website. 15 June 2008.

2. Carter Young. "Out of Her Skin." Collected by Elsie Clews Parsons. "Tales from Guilford County, North Carolina." The Journal of American Folklore 30:168–200:1917. 187–188.

3. Parsons. 187.

4. Newbell Niles Puckett. "Driving off and Capturing Witches." Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1926. 154–155.

Miguel de Quintana

Weather: Small amounts of snow fell in the nights of Tuesday and Thursday. On Thursday morning, before the last snow, the temperature on my front porch got down to 9.3, the lowest this season. Afternoons temperatures have been in the mid-30s. The snow on the eastern side of the Jémez is still visible. Stars are visible against a dark gray sky.

What’s still green: Juniper, arborvitae, other evergreens; leaves on yuccas, grape hyacinth, garlic, vinca, hollyhock, winecup mallow, pink evening primrose, snapdragon, coral beardtongue, anthemis, golden hairy asters, most low or buried; rose stems, June, pampas, and cheat grasses.

What’s blue-green or gray: Leaves on Apache plumes, four-winged saltbushes, pinks.

What’s red or purple: Stems on young peaches, sandbar willows.

What’s yellow or brown: Stems of weeping willows.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geraniums.

Animal sightings: Two rabbits.

Weekly update: The cold afternoons came this past week when I was reading about Miguel de Quintana. He was a Santa Cruz poet and dramatist who died in April of 1748 at age 71.

Although the book I was reading didn’t say, I suspect he suffered from rheumatoid arthritis. In 1734, one witness said Quintana "rarely goes to mass, giving as an excuse pain in the spleen."

In 1736, a man who visited Quintana said he found him "near death." He also admitted he, himself, hadn’t been active "because of the heavy snowfalls and harsh cold in this region" in the first weeks of April.

The next January, another man said Quintana was "sick in bed from a pain that has been afflicting him for two months. In April, Quintana wrote "both of my bones are somewhat better." By May, he was able to witness a land transfer.

The prevailing medical theory in Nuevo México at the time recommended one keep the four essential humors or chemicals in the body in balance. If the spleen was poor, its black bile sank into the joints causing arthritis and rheumatism.

The terms arthritis and rheumatism were used then, and are now, to describe any pain in the joints. Rheumatoid arthritis is a specific condition precipitated by failures in the immune system that cause it to attack the synovial fluid that lubricates joints. This leads to a self-perpetuating chain with damage to bone cells followed by chemical overreactions that lead to more injuries.

The pain may come and go, but always returns. Some arthritis and rheumatism sufferers believe it’s worse with wet or cold weather. Scientists have found independent evidence rheumatoid arthritis pain increases with the low atmospheric pressure that accompanies cloudy weather. They hypothesize it’s a function of the relative weight of dense or thin air pressing on joints. The comments on high humidity and low temperature are too common to be dismissed, but no one has found a similar link yet.

Quintana’s winter illnesses may have come from infections that attacked his weakened system. He was living in a simple adobe house. One can assume it had a dirt floor, a single wood fire, and a poorly sealed entry opening. Once the summer heat retained in the walls was drained, keeping warm must have been difficult. I live in a modern house with central heat that’s reasonably sealed, and my furnace has been running almost continuously as I write this.

While I was reading Quintana’s coloquio, which described his anguish when he thought about painful situations like the Sorrowful Mysteries that relate to Christ’s last days, I began wondering how he treated his arthritic pain, if that’s what he had.

The four humors defined the spleen as a cold and dry organ related to the earth. To bring it back into balance, one used heat and moisture, which were related to air. Rather then bleeding, which was associated with a different humor, David Osborn said conditions of the spleen required increasing circulation.

He added the best herbs were pungent or bitter. Many had "a musky or earthy aroma to them, which resonates with the humor's associated Earth element."

I went through the local herbal collections hoping to discover which had been used in this area. Leonora Curtin collected medicinal plant uses in the 1940s. In 1972, José Ortiz y Pino noted which of her cures had been used in the Galisteo area when he was a child, and added some of his own.

They made their notes 200 years after Quintana lived. I eliminated those that used ingredients introduced to the area since 1750. I also discounted those that came from the mountains. The Utes, Apache, and Comanche were making so many raids in those years that people simply didn’t go beyond settled areas. At least some of the plants had to be available in the winter.

Many of the modern cures involved baths. I eliminated those because I found no evidence people had the necessary utensils. Quintana’s daughter died a year after him. She said she owned an old round-bottomed pot, an old saucepan, three dishes, a new gourd dish, and white mesh for a sieve. Juana Roybal was much wealthier when she died in 1770. Still she only declared a copper kettle, a chocolate pot, some Puebla chinaware, two barrels and a jug in her will.

How ever people were keeping themselves and their clothing clean, it wasn’t with the large tubs or pots we see in artists’ reconstructions. They must have been introduced in trade later.

As I read through the remedies I realized the specific herbs were less important than their applications. People crushed leaves or roots over painful areas, thereby releasing essential chemicals. If that didn’t work, they boiled them in small containers, then dipped cloths in the liquids. They often bound the herbs or soaked fabrics around the affected areas. They also drank the same liquids they used in their compresses.

While they boiled the leaves, roots and stems, no one said if they applied the extracts while they were warm, or if they waited until they cooled. Contemporary medicine recommends applying cold to sore joints to decrease inflamation. It suggests using heat to stimulate the flow of blood.

One plant Curtin and Ortiz y Pino mentioned I know was available was chile. Quintana’s daughter left "seven ristras of chile, two in an old bunch" when she dictated her will in May. Curtin was told a pepper was split, then soaked in warm vinegar for a day. Next, "a cloth is steeped in the liquid and applied to the afflicted part." Ortiz y Pino echoed her comment.

Modern scientists have determined chile, in fact, would have been effective. The important ingredient, capsaicin, binds with the neurotransmitter in the skin that sends pain messages to the brain, and thus reduces its power. An Italian team even found capsaicin, when used in large doses, might also affect the chemicals within the synovial tissue. However, they considered their results preliminary.

Some capsaicin tests have yielded contradictory results. I suspect it’s because the experimenters used different pepper species. Anyone here now knows there are great differences even within Capsicum frutescens.

Notes:
Christmas, Henrietta Martínez. "Juana Roybal - Will 1770," posted 1 June 2014 on her 1598 New Mexico website.

Curtin, Leonora Scott Muse. Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande, 1947, republished 1997, with revisions by Michael Moore.

Lomelí, Francisco A. and Clark A. Colahan. Defying the Inquisition in Colonial New Mexico, 2006; contains Spanish and English versions of Miguel Quintana’s writings, along with his daughter Lugarda’s will.

Mason, Lorna, R Andrew Moore, Sheena Derry, Jayne E Edwards, and Henry J McQuay. "Systematic Review of Topical Capsaicin for the Treatment of Chronic Pain," British Medical Journal 328:991:2004.

Matucci-Cerinic, M., S. Marabini, S. Jantsch, M. Cagnoni, and G. Partsch. "Effects of Capsaicin on the Metabolism of Rheumatoid Arthritis Synoviocytes in Vitro," Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases 49:598-602:1990.

Ortiz y Pino III, José. The Herbs of Galisteo and Their Powers, 1971.

Osborn, David K. "Pathologies of Black Bile" and "Adjusting and Regulating Black Bile and the Nervous Humor," Greek Medicine website.

Terao, Chikashi, et alia. "Inverse Association between Air Pressure and Rheumatoid Arthritis Synovitis," Plos One, 15 January 2014.

Photographs: Winter sky yesterday, 2 January 2016, around 3:30 pm. The sun is obscured so the temperatures don’t warm and the snow remains in the Jémez. The camera always exaggerates the darkness in the grays.

Peppers, Part 2

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid tea roses, datura, Sensation cosmos, French marigolds; grape leaves dead and dropping, apricot leaves dropping.

Beyond the walls and fences: Clammy weed, stickleaf, chamisa, broom senecio, golden hairy and purple asters; leaves on Virginia creeper killed by cold temperatures; Russian olive dropping leaves and uncovering clusters of berries; leaves on blue gilia and leatherleaf globemallow turning yellow.

In my yard, looking east: Winecup mallow, large-leaf soapwort, pink evening primrose, Rose Queen salvia, Shirley poppies; snowball leaves turning red; Japanese barberry leaves turning bright orange; sidalcea leaves turning yellow.

Looking south: Floribunda roses; first ripe raspberries of the season; cold temperatures killed the zinnias.

Looking west: Calamintha; leaves on Rumanian sage, Mönch aster, David phlox, Silver king artemisia and chives turning yellow; leaves on caryopteris turning yellow and dropping.

Looking north: Chocolate flower, blanket flower, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum; catalpa leaves turned brown and dropping; Bradford pear leaves turned dark red; cold temperatures killed yellow cosmos.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy, snapdragon, nicotiana, impatiens, moss rose; tomatoes ripening, peppers drying.

Inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern, zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: Harvester and small black ants.

Weather: Rained day and night Wednesday; after days of temperatures falling below freezing, we got our first frost Saturday morning; 10:45 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Red or green turns out to be more than a trick question sprung on visitors. Habits of taste may have been determined by the pepper plant’s growing cycle.

There are some 25 species of peppers, of which most eaten in this part of the world are some variant of Capsicum annuum derived from a selection or hybrid developed by Fabien Garcia at New Mexico State University. His inspiration was the Anaheim, developed for a California cannery around 1900. His first release, New Mexico Number 9 in 1921, was aimed at providing a uniformly sized, predictably mild pepper for commercial canners that would appeal to Anglos and could be grown around Hatch.

Peppers, of course, had been grown in northern New Mexico long before Garcia was born. In the 1830's, Josiah Gregg said red pepper “enters into nearly every dish at every meal” in Santa Fé while chile verde was considered “one of the great luxuries.”

A hundred years later chile had become one of the few cash crops in the Española valley. People would take their ristras into Abiquiú or Española where Bond and Nohl examined them carefully before accepting them for credit. They shipped the chiles north on the Denver and Rio Grande.

People in Chimayó remember that if their crop was rejected by store keepers, their fathers would go to places like Mora or Truches or Peñasco to swap the chiles for beans or potatoes or goat cheese. Some had connections through a relative in Mora. Elsewhere, Tila Vila remembers strangers would open their doors if they realized the pedlars were from “good” Chimayó families.

Despite the Latin name, chiles are perennial plants that can bloom their first season, but need time to do so at temperatures above 60. When the real heat arrives, they tend to bloom less until late summer. The bell-shaped flowers drop when night temperatures are above 75 degrees, and fruit development is delayed if daytime temperatures reach 90. The first peppers tend to be larger than the later ones.

To speed the growing season, Leonora Curtin says people used to plant seeds in April or May in tins or boxes they kept on their window sills until the weather warmed enough to transplant them. The move should have been made by May 3 for them to develop their glossy green skins by the middle of September.

Even then, the growing season for a pepper is so long it may never reach the red stage in the mountains or in a summer like this when drought and heat send plants into periods of quiescence. A typical green chile is ready to harvest 120 days after planting, but the red needs 165. By necessity, dried green may have become the standard.

Now we can buy good sized bedding plants. Each time I went into a garden center this past April, there was some man unhappy that peppers hadn’t appeared yet.

I finally settled on what was available, Sandia, a cross between the original Garcia pepper and an Anaheim which Roy Harper released in 1956 through New Mexico State. It’s primary virtue is that it matures earlier. During the summer heat, it sets fruit lower on the plants which makes it less vulnerable to the high winds that can come with the monsoons.

When I put the seedlings out the middle of May in a relatively protected area, they wilted every afternoon. The members of the nightshade family have shallow roots and need lots of water. They only stabilized after I stopped watering them each evening with a garden hose and gave them their own soaker that ran at least 15 minutes a day.

In July the light-green plants finally put out a few white flowers, that produced some rather fat, crooked fruits by mid August. About the time the chile roasters were leaving the end of September, the skins turned darker and glossier. The first of October they were turning red and beginning to dry.

There was a very short period when they were at their prime. People, both local and in Hatch, sweep through their fields several times a season picking the green chiles.

My neighbors across the road have four strings of red peppers hanging from their eaves, two long and two short. The latter look redder and fatter, as if the strings represented different croppings, and they were the most recent.

In the 1980's, Roy Nakayama and Frank Matta, also of NMSU, crossed Sandia with “a Northern New Mexico strain” to produce Española, an even earlier maturing red chile.

The famed Chimayó peppers were smaller than others and may have been some special variety brought north by migrants from Zacatecas that self-selected itself into something special in that high environment. In the 1930's, the area along the Chama river produced more strings of chiles per acre than any other part of the valley, but none were considered as flavorful.

The distinctive flavor may have come from the seed’s genetics, from the altitude or soil or water, or it may have come from timing. The chiles may have reached their most flavorful stage at just the right time to fire up the hornos to dry them.

For the past two weeks morning temperatures have hovered around freezing. Pepper plants can’t handle cold temperatures. Mine are probably still alive because I put them next to a southwest facing wall protected by some shrubs that haven’t lost their leaves yet.

My neighbors have picked their corn and peppers, removed the corn stalks and squash vines, and left the tomato and chile plants with unripe fruit to continue to redden. At some point soon, the remaining chiles will need to be picked and dried, because the weather will change. When we get our first heavy frost, the internal cells will rupture, release sap and incubate internal mold.

Notes:
Bosland, Paul W. and Stephanie Walker. “Growing Chiles in New Mexico,” 2004 revision.

_____, Danise Coon and Eric Votava. “The Chile Cultivars of New Mexico State University,” 2008.

Curtin, Leonora Scott Muse. Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande, 1947, republished 1997, with revisions by Michael Moore.

Epicentre. “Chile Pepper Varieties,” The Epicentre Spices website.

Gregg, Josiah. Commerce of the Prairies: Life on the Great Plains in the 1830's and 1840's, 1844, republished by The Narrative Press, 2001.

US Department of Interior. Tewa Basin Study, volume 2, 1935, reprinted by Marta Weigle as Hispanic Villages of Northern New Mexico, 1975, on 1930's.

Usner, Don J. Sabino’s Map: Life in Chimayó’s Old Plaza, 1995, includes quote from Tila Vila.

Photograph: Sandia chile beginning to dry, 23 October 2011.

Peppers, Part 1

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid tea roses, dahlias, silver lace vine, datura, Sensation cosmos, French marigolds; grape leaves brown or yellow, apple leaves golden orange; woman down the road has been putting nightly covers over the plants that are still blooming in front of her house wall; man down the road planted alfalfa this week.

Beyond the walls and fences: Leatherleaf globemallows, clammy weed, goat’s head, chamisa, native sunflowers, snakeweed, gumweed nearly gone, Hopi tea, áñil del muerto, broom senecio, golden hairy, strap-leaf, purple and heath asters, mushrooms; cottonwood leaves turning yellow, some Apache plume leaves yellow, tamarix and choke cherry leaves turning orange; more Juniper berries a grey blue; gypsum phacelia seedlings grown larger.

In my yard, looking east: Winecup mallow, sidalcea, large-leaf soapwort, pink evening primrose, Rose Queen salvia, Shirley poppies; Autumn Joy sedum leaves have coral tinge, Maximilian sunflower leaves turning yellow and falling.

Looking south: Floribunda roses; zinnias turned brown, rose of Sharon leaves turning yellow, raspberry leaves bronzed.

Looking west: Calamintha, Silver King artemisia; sea lavender leaves mottled, red at the tips, then yellow and green toward the stem; purple coneflower leaves turning yellow or dirty brown.

Looking north: Nasturtium from seed, Mexican hat, chocolate flower, blanket flower, yellow cosmos from seed, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum; black locust, apricot and sweet cherry leaves turning yellow, Siberian pea dropping its leaves.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy, snapdragon, nicotiana, impatiens; moss rose blooming despite many dead leaves.

Inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern, zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: More birds flitting about the arroyo yesterday late morning; don’t know if it was the time of day or the time of year; harvester and small black ants.

Weather: First morning temperatures below 32; last rain 10/07/11; 11:03 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: As soon as you arrive in New Mexico and need to find a place to eat while you await the moving van, you’re confronted with the great question, red or green.

There’s no right answer. You say green. You like the taste of the peppers or don’t. The next time, you say red. You like, you don’t. You notice how others respond to your choice, and the time after you follow their lead.

Unless you’re from Texas, where they eat jalapeños like the rest of us eat celery sticks, it doesn’t hurt to do what others do in public, and eat what you like when you’re alone.

In theory, the distinction between red and green is simply a preference for a particular food preservation technique. If you pick a chile pepper when it’s green, it has a milder taste because the chemicals that give it the hotter flavor don’t develop until it ripens and the skin turns red.

In Chimayó in the past, people preferred to eat them when they were green, but used the red for medicine. Don Usner was told chile caribe was especially effective against colds and sore throats, while Leonora Curtin was told to use chile colorado for rheumatism.

Unfortunately, unripe Capsicum annuum spoil when they’re picked, while red ones will dry and last a very long time. It’s very difficult to dry the unripe fruits because their skins toughen to prevent premature evaporation in this arid climate. The trapped water supports bacteria, that leads to rot.

People in México, probably those who lived in Teotihuacán northeast of modern Mexico City around the time of Christ, discovered they could preserve unripe peppers in their milder state by smoking them.

When Phillip II sent Francisco Hernández to report on plants from the New World in the 1570's, people on Hispañola, where Christopher Columbus had first eaten chiles 80 years before, were drying and smoking one species so it lasted it a year. Texochilli was a soft pepper, with a light spiciness and was “usually eaten with corn or with tortillas.”

Smoking peppers enough to remove all the water takes time. According to Wikipedia, chipotles are jalapeños that have ripened red and dried on the plant. At the end of the season in Chihuahua, the ones that ripened late are picked for smoking that can take several days. Chuck Evans experimented with smoking peppers over hickory wood with a modern rack smoker and found red pods took three days to dry at 110 degrees.

People realized that, instead of completely drying peppers with heat, they could simply heat chiles long enough to make the skins easier to remove.

In Chimayó, Benigna Chávez remembers they would roast red chile “in the horno, on coals of the wood.” I’ve talked to a young woman in her 30's in Santa Fe who says when she was a child her father would roast green peppers in the stove’s oven in pans. Now every August, a section of the local grocer’s parking lot is fenced off for the propane fueled burners that roast chiles dumped from 50 pound burlap bags into spinning wire cages.

Half cooked peppers still spoil if they’re not eaten within a week. In the past, Chávez said they “peeled it and tied it and hung it outside to dry on the clothesline” before putting the dried chiles “away in a flour sack that was not very thick so it would get air and hang it in the dispensa for the winter.”

When people are given their clear plastic bags of roasted chiles in the parking lot today, they still have to remove the skins and seeds, and cut them. Since electricity was introduced after World War II, many have frozen diced pieces instead of drying slices.

Such progress, of course, changes the taste of and for peppers. It also alters that primal New Mexico question, (almost) fresh or dried?

Notes:
Curtin, Leonora Scott Muse. Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande, 1947, republished 1997, with revisions by Michael Moore.

DeWitt, Dave and Chuck Evans. “Chipotle Flavors: How to Smoke Chiles,” Fiery Foods website.

Hernández, Francisco. The Mexican Treasury,” edited by Simon Varey, 2000.

Usner, Don J. Sabino’s Map: Life in Chimayó’s Old Plaza, 1995, includes quote from Benigna Chávez.

Wikipedia entry on “Chipotle.”

Photograph: Peppers from different generations this summer left to ripen down the road, 20 October 2011.