When I served up the recently inventedbubbly lemonadeto M’hijito, he observed that it’s a variety of Mexican water; and when I described the version I made with watermelon, he said that’s classic Mexican water.
So…what’s “Mexican water,” besides something you shouldn’t drink or brush your teeth with? It is in fact very similar to my concoction, except that it’s made with flat water instead of seltzer. Here’s a typical recipe for one made with watermelon:
You need:
about 4 cups cut-up watermelon, seeds removed (I used seedless melon)
8 to 12 cups water
a blender
a large pitcher
about 1.5 cups sugar, or to taste
In batches, purée the watermelon in a blender. Add water and then stir in the sugar. Chill well and serve with a slice of lime or a mint garnish.
For the fizzy version I invented, I added no sugar. Instead I used one of those small, round melons, which are wonderfully sweet. This makes about two servings:
a cut-up slice of watermelon, seeds removed (I used seedless melon)
a can of seltzer water, chilled
a blender
a tall glass
ice
Purée melon in the blender. Pour enough into a glassful of ice to fill about 1/3 to 1/2 to the top. Top with cold seltzer or club soda.
M’hijito says you can make these with cantaloupe or strawberries. In that case, he suggests, run the purée through a strainer before adding water. A squeeze of lime is an authentic Mexican touch, too.
Any of these drinks lend themselves to the addition of vodka or rum.
Am I the only so-o-o-cialist in the world who is annoyed at the way my homeowner’s insurance floats ever upward to cover the cost of homes that people deliberately build in harm’s way? Does anyone else wonder why local governments issue building permits in disaster-prone areas and why state and federal governments do nothing to discourage or prevent people from moving into areas where lives and property are put at risk? Is there really any justification for having you and me pay when houses built in the way of floods, tornadoes, and fires are reduced to piles of ash or sodden sludge?
In 2004, disaster-related economic costs in this country exceeded $145 billion, up from the $3.9 billion annual cost in the 1950s. The problem is not so much storms and fires allegedly related to global warming but the fact that too many people are building in risky areas. In Canada, where an expanding population is moving into forest fire-prone areas, citizens saw their homowner’s premiums rise 4.3 percent in 2001 over the previous year, a rise of 9.4 percent from 1997.
New Orleans was known to be at risk of disastrous hurricane damage for years before Katrina struck. Yet people were allowed to continue living and building in districts that scientists and government agencies recognized would flood—and flood catastrophically—when a major hurricane hit the city. Little was done to rebuild the eroded marshes and barrier islands that, before human intervention, protected the site where the city stands. Many parts of the coastal Southeast are prone to powerful storms and major flooding; the Midwest is notorious for its tornadoes, yet people are permitted to live in flimsy mobile homes throughout these regions.
And then we have California: what possesses humanity to build its homes in canyons whose ecology is evolved to thrive in brushfire?
Yes. Chaparral actually needs fire to germinate. Nature has designed plants that grow along the West Coast to function like torches. They’re bombs waiting to explode. This is something that has been widely known for years. But how do we respond? We let people build deep in a fire zone, and then we underwrite their short-sightedness.
When an insurer pays to rebuild a house incinerated in one of these fires, the operative word is we. The insurance company raises everyone’s rates to help cover its losses. This year the losses in California are likely to be huge. Topanga Canyon alone houses over 5,400 people. It is an area of extreme fire hazard and today is among many populated areas in the path of the vast wildfire presently consuming a large swath of Southern California, where more than 12,000 homes are at risk.
Why should firefighters lose their lives and every homeowner in the country see their insurance costs soar because foolish people insist on living in the San Gabriel and Santa Monica mountains, areas where wildfires and mudslides are part of the local environment’s natural cycle? Instead of relying on insurance companies to cover untoward and foolish risk and then screaming when the companies refuse to insure homes in disaster-prone regions—or raise premiums out of sight—we should be passing laws that prohibit people from deliberately building structures whose likely destruction will hit everyone’s pocketbooks.
Now, I yearn to get out of the city’s anthill as much as anyone else, and if I had enough money to build a manse in the Santa Monica hills, I’d be sorely tempted. But maybe if people who crave and can afford a pleasant, quiet environment were forced to stay in the city with the rest of us peons, we’d all have more livable cities! If, instead of running away from poorly planned, blight-ridden urban areas, wealthy homeowners lived in their cities, the money and political influence they would bring to the urb would fuel renovation, improvement, effective crime control, enforcement of noise abatement laws, better schools, walkable shopping districts, decent public transport, and green space.
And the rest of us would have lower homeowner’s insurance premiums.
One homeowner died in this fire; his teenaged son suffered burns, as did four firefighters who attempted to rescue them. Four migrant workers also are thought to have died in the Harris fire. Nine hundred thousand people were evacuated, and a power emergency was declared after several major transmission lines, including the 500,000-volt power line from Arizona to San Diego, were damaged.
Simply Forties, now comfortably ensconced in Virginia, is celebrating her blogiversary with a very nice giveaway prize: EcoSmart’s essential oil-based insect-fighting products that are billed as 100 percent nontoxic to humans. Visit and comment on her site this week, or tweet about it, for a chance to win a package of these intriguing products, just what I need in the current Ant Wars.
While you’re there, be sure to check out the rest of the blog. The latest Make It from Scratch Carnival went up today (more about which later this week), with lovely pictures of the area where she recently moved. And I was especially taken by the story of a cabin a friend built from a Home Depot kit: the result is a hunting or vacation camp with real charm. The frugal empty-nester can see grand possibilities here.
They’re b-a-a-a-a-c-k! The little myrmidons who think my yard is their empire are moving in on the house again. I had a little frenzy the time they got into the kitchen, where they evinced great joy at their discovery of the dishwasher, a rich new world heretofore unknown to the Ant Queendom. And then, after an hour of frantic activity, was a bit ashamed of myself for having sprayed them in a panic.
Yuck! How unecological. How self-destructive. How…messy!
After all, I do know better. When I first moved into this house, the backyard was overrun with ants…never saw so many biting ants in my life! About that time I realized I’d purchased the House from Hell, and the previous owner was Satan. The ants, it appeared, had burrowed all the way down to Satan’s throne.
Gila woodpecker
I really dislike bug spray—have had it make me very sick, indeed—and I will not have an exterminator on the property. (Not willingly, anyway.) Ant baits are pretty effective, but at the time I had two big dogs and didn’t relish leaving poison on the ground where they might get at it.
A little research, however, revealed that many birds, even seed-eaters, will eat ants. Matter of fact, a few local characters eat a lot of ants: the flicker, its relative the Gila woodpecker, the curve-billed thrasher, starlings, sparrows, grackles, Abert’s towhees, possibly mockingbirds. So, at that time I called in as many birds as I could by hanging bird feeders from the eaves and from a branch of the neighbor’s tree that overhung my side of the wall. This worked well. Within a couple of months, the ant population was under control.
Understand: I’m not interested in killing off all the ants. They serve many useful purposes, and besides, they’re interesting creatures. I just don’t want them to make themselves at home in the house. Or around the patios where I like to sit.
Abert's towhee
Lately, I’ve noticed it’s been unnaturally quiet in the mornings and evenings. At dawn, normally, the neighborhood is all a-chatter with birdsong. In the desert, a city with its lawns, trees, and shrubbery forms a kind of riparian area, and so we have a lot of birds. This summer’s extreme heat and droughty conditions, though, may have killed them or driven them to shelter. The heat really has been outrageous this year: we’re two days short of September and it’s still 114 degrees. Plus the ash tree in front has finally, once and for all, died. That removed a lot of shaded shelter, so they may have just moved on down the block. Still: weirdly silent. As in “no birds.”
Then a week or so ago, I’m sitting on the deck and yipe!My feet are getting chewed! The place was overrun with ants! Looking for nothing in particular, as far as I could tell: just foraging around. They were coming from a mound next to a lavender plant which, incidentally, they seem to have undermined and killed. I put down some baits, and, to keep the dog out, laid an old wire fan cage over them.
Red-shafted flickers
The dog and I decamped to the back porch for breakfast. I’d carried a dish of dog chews outside, so I could bribe her to leave me in peace to read the paper. Forgot to bring that in. That evening when I went out to retrieve it, lo! A blanket of ants was swarming over the doggy chews and all over the glass-topped table, carrying off the dog treats an ant-bite at a time!
Argh! In that encounter, a few of the little gals made their way into the house. I beat them back with dish detergent, eventually carrying the day.
But, it was clear, only a day.Time to mobilize the troops.
My neighbor next door—she of the overhanging tree limb—dislikes birds. Hates them. That could be another explanation for their absence, come to think of it. She threw a hissy-fit when she discovered Other Daughter, who’s next-door to her on the far side, was feeding the doves and thereby calling in a passel of grackles…which, it must be admitted, are messier than your average airborne elephant. As you can imagine, then, I need to be careful here.
This afternoon I bought some fresh bird feed, the old stuff having run out a couple years ago, and hung up the two feeders. If you enjoy using your patio to eat outside or just to sit and enjoy the fresh air, you don’t want to call birds in too close to the house. They can make quite a mess, not being amenable to toilet-training. So I placed one feeder in an orange tree, out of the neighbor’s line of sight, and one on an eave away from the patio and the deck, the same location where it hung the first time around.
There are other nonchemical, relatively nontoxic ways to engage battle with ants. Boric acid, available at drugstores and sometimes at Target, is more or less benign, unless you’re a cat and given to licking your paws. Sprinkle a line of it around the foundation of your house and across each threshold. It’s like fine cut glass to ants—slices up their exoskeleton, eventually causing them to dehydrate and die. Because it doesn’t kill them quickly, they’ll carry it back to the hive on their bodies, spreading it around among their sisters and, with any luck, getting some of it on the queen. Takes a while, but eventually it will get rid of them.
Some people claim you can “erase” the scent trails they follow (ants lay down pheromones to communicate where the food is) with 409 or similar strong household cleaners. I have never found that to be true.
Some say you can kill a hive by pouring boiling water over it. Ditto: never found it to work. Doesn’t do any plants around the nest much good, though.
Ant traps are almost as effective against the little ladies as roach traps are against roaches, which is to say very effective. You have to be sure they’re out of reach of pets and children though. And they do kill all the ants, which might not be the wisest thing to do.
No. Birds are your friends here. Bring enough of them into your yard and they’ll take care of the ants for you. They’ll make short work of field roaches, crickets, and other annoyances, too. A plastic bird feeder (available cheap at Home Depot; I got one of mine even cheaper at a yard sale) or even a planter dish full of bird seed will do the job. Remember to refill the feeder(s) every day or two, to keep them coming back. If you don’t have room to store birdseed, bread crumbs work just as well: save heels of bread, break them up into coarse crumbs, and scatter them around some distance from porches and patios. Then sit back, enjoy the show, and say good-bye to the bugs.
