Hello Padre,
Its been sixty one years since my last confession. Just thought i'd throw that in. I feel much better. Thanks. How are you all doing? Of course I don't expect you to actually carry on a hypothetical conversation with me, but around this time of day, you know, the time when you drizzle some scotch over your Kashi to take the edge off before morning prayer meetings with the chickens, it sometimes occurs to me that warm, caring, soothing conversation, albeit imaginary, is better than yelling "die choad die" while watching Glenn Beck soil himself on cable. Not that that doesn't have its merits. I'm fine, thanks. How are the kids doing?

Speaking of which, the hanai son approacheth. Tyler,  love of my life, bane of my existence, radiant soul, turd in a bowl, smart as a whip and hung like Shadowfax, arrives next week for a much needed break. He's been Wwoofing in Costa Rica where he picks peach aphids off sugar apple trees ten hours a day. Then he washes dishes in a sleazy cantina called the Stuffed Donkey until two a.m. at which time he goes back to his tent to sleep on a dirt floor teeming with kookaracha's. In his spare time he keeps the servers up and going at the local web-cam house of porn where fifty or so lovely senorita's stream live flesh. He says it beats college.

We've been hiking the crater pretty much every year since he was ten. Missed one here and there, and he did his first solo hike last year. Well, he's twenty now and I figure that gives it the weight of a tradition in this rag tag family, the only other one being liftime memberships in the "Venerate the Pussy" society. Haven't seen him since we turned the corner on 09'. He said he met a shaman in a remote village that could charm the eggs right out of a chicken. Said it gave the chickens "human skin" just to be in his presence. He's turning into quite the little raconteur. We'll have the cabins for a couple of days and then out the gap. He may make a guest appearance at the Grimelock where he will debut the first chapter of his new cookbook called "The Homeless Persons guide to Roadkill Recipes".

We picked up thirty more Ameraucana chicks. Those are the ones that lay the tinted eggs in the blue to blue green spectrum. They won't be kicking in for awhile but when they do, they'll give us at least a couple per dozen to mix with the white and brown ones if all goes well. Doc Bebockboc took some time out of his busy schedule and torrid affair with nurse Sally (yes, its official) to swing by and take a look at the layers. He was all smiles. Said they looked like rose petals and chocolate pillow mints strewn on your bed at the Four Seasons when you get back to your room after a sumptuous feast and start popping buttons on a buxom blond. He's totally gone over nurse Sally who looks like she lifts weights with her breasts. So firm they are, young skywalker.

We're into a nice planting rotation and starting to fill in as much space as we can with layers of edible goodness. In having developed scalable models of plant guilds that prove to be productive and beneficial to the landscape we stand poised and ready to develop more of the property once we start paying about 23% as much for water as we are now. I'm gonna have to create a new wwoof job description. "Water wwoofer" will be a revolving job, shared amongst the intern population and affording the opportunity to commune with the plant life in a way unparalleled by any other farm task. When you give water to thirsty plants and wash the accumulated dust off their leaves and just stand there in the mist and scent there is a bonding. There is a sense of gratitude. There are bigger freakin' mangoes.

Hard to overestimate the critical importance of water to dry-land farming. Its everything. We will continue to employ conservative methods for our use of water and liberal to gonzo philosophical models for all else. As in, "two rabbi's and a kidney walked into a New Jersey bar". I'm more amused than amazed at the news these days. Not sure that's a good sign cause' there sure is a lot of shit being slung over yonder. We're about seventy percent water. You'd think we'd be all sloshin' around merging with everything and flowing into the most natural position gravity could afford. More like a viral form of robocop with notable exceptions being hippies who overdosed on acid at Winterland, dancers of any stripe, the young and the young at heart, in their minds.

Its dry as the pig femur you find digging a hole in the dry dry dirt that crumbles when you look at it too hard. The chickens kick up a cloud of dust every time they come runnin' to praise the food guy with the magic blue bucket. The cloud drifts through the orchard dusting everything cinnamon. The cow pastures across the road show no sign of green. It is a golden brown embrace. Just add water and get baked.

Lets see, what else? Oh yeah, we're having a contest to find out how many nurdles it takes to constitute an area twice the size of the continental united states that is currently swirling slowly in the pacific gyre (a.k.a. garbage dump) and composed of some hundred million tons of plastic debris oozing just beneath the waters surface and inexorably becoming part of the food chain. Soon we'll be able to hike from Maui to Alaska using my new web foot water shoes (patent pending) which allow for easy maneuvering across the buoyant plastislime.

Random factoid: When Bush took office there were 77 non organic substances that were permitted to be used in u.s.d.a. certified "organic" foods. This number was to be reduced over time to protect the integrity of organic labeling. There are now 245 non organic substances that are allowed into our foods. These foods are still considered certified organic. Codex Alimentarius baby, codex alimentarius.

Soooo, as strategic alliances for resources and markets continues to grind humanity into a high protein food supplement, and political posturing continues to pose as progress, we here at the Rancho are hunkered down with our psyche's tuned to higher frequencies and our expectations at the lowest setting available. That way, when the turds hit the turbine we'll feel like a monster truck hitting a speed bump at sixty with a cd of Jimmy Hendrix playing Red House not missing a beat.

Check the c.s.a. tab on the website for this weeks food selection and give us a shout if we can help you out.

The more you show, the more we'll grow. Peace, jP.