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Monday, January 16, 2012 - LoW-HI RV Ranch, Deming NM

Breakfast, Green Chili Buffalo Burger, January 16, 2012
Breakfast, Green Chili Buffalo Burger, January 16, 2012

Tiny Homes by Lloyd Kahn

Lloyd Kahn's new book, Tiny Homes: Simple Shelter, is out. I've been following Lloyd's Blog for a while now and have been looking forward to getting my hands on this book. For anyone interested in living small this is worthy material.

Makes me a bit nostalgic for my cabin in the woods that served me so well in the earlier part of the century and that in some part led to this full timing life I'm enjoying so much.

Here's a link to Tiny Homes: Simple Shelter at Amazon.com

Night camp

Site 8 - LoW-HI RV Ranch, Deming NM

Teosinte and the Improbability of Maize

The ancestors of wheat, rice, millet, and barley look like their domesticated descendants; because they are both edible and highly productive, one can easily imagine how the idea of planting them for food came up. Maize can't reproduce itself, because its kernals are securely wrapped in the husk, so Indians must have developed it from some other species. But there are no wild species that resemble maize. Its closest genetic relative is a mountain grass called teosinte that looks strikingly different - for one thing, it "ears" are smaller than baby corn served in Chinese restaurants. No one eats teosinte, because it produces too little grain to be worth harvesting. In creating modern maize from this unpromising plant, Indians performed a feat so improbable that archaeologists and biologists have argued for decades over how it was achieved. Coupled with squash, beans, and avocados, maize provided Mesoamerica with a balanced diet, one arguably more nutritious than its Middle Eastern or Asian equivalent.

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