Love Is Building a House Together: A Tribute to My Parents, Part IV

Chasing History: Exploring My Ancestral Roots - Blog Post #57

By Tonya Graham McQuade

Caption: Dotty Graham of Antioch picks her ripest vegetables from her backyard in order to begin canning. Photo originally published in Antioch Daily Ledger.

In my last post (Part III), I described the work my parents did to landscape their front and back yard after finishing with building the house on Minta Lane (see Part I and Part II). A big part of that landscaping involved planting trees and a large vegetable garden so they could grow a lot of their own food – but maintaining that yard took a lot of work, as you might imagine. 

Before moving to Minta Lane, my parents had a small garden at our house on Kendree Street. As my mom got more interested in canning, though, we started to go places to pick fruit and nuts. Mostly, we went to Brentwood, back when it used to be primarily farms and orchards, but I also remember going to Sepastopol to pick apples. My mom made a lot of apple sauce since we all liked that. She also canned peaches, pears, and apricots; made various jams and jellies; and made delicious candied walnuts, which we all loved.

My mom’s “food preservation” efforts only increased after our move to Minta Lane – at least once my parents had the front and back yard planted. At one point, according to my dad, they had eighteen fruit and nut trees. These included different varieties of Lemon, Apple, Orange, Walnut, Almond, Grapefruit, Nectarine, Kumquat, Cherry, Apricot, Peach, Plum, Tangerine, Pear, Fig, and Persimmon - and if you know anything about how many of these crops come in, you know you have to be ready for them.

My parents also had a large vegetable garden that produced tomatoes, string beans, fava beans, snow peas, squash, pumpkins, zucchini, beets, turnips, garlic, onions, peppers, lettuce, kale, Swiss chard, cucumbers, carrots, broccoli, and corn – and that’s just what I remember. Of course, what they grew varied somewhat from year-to-year. Sometimes, those vegetables came out in interesting shapes, as you can see in the photos below.

My mom holds up an especially large carrot.

My dad shows off a very unusually-shaped carrot.

Andy holds up a piece of Swiss chard large enough to make a salad!

The trees and garden required constant attention, more so at certain times of the year, which sometimes made it difficult to get away for long periods of time. I remember one particular time that the burden of caring for the garden fell on me. The summer after my sophomore year of high school, 1982, my parents and brothers went on a trip to Mexico for three weeks. Though it’s hard today to believe, I (only 15 at the time) stayed home alone since I had a summer job. That’s right – my parents were more than 1,500 miles away, in their car, during a time without cell phones, and I stayed home alone. I’m thinking that’s quite the opposite of “helicopter parenting.” 

Since I would be staying home, I was put in charge of the garden – which mostly meant watering and picking vegetables. Friends and neighbors checked in on me, and I gave them lots of tomatoes and zucchini, as I recall. At least once someone drove me to a grocery store since this was before I could drive, but I mostly just rode my bike everywhere. I survived. The rest of the family had a fun time in Mexico. I sometimes regretted missing out, but I also enjoyed that brief period of early independence.

In our family now, my husband Mike is the gardener. Our garden is not nearly as extensive as my parents’ was, but we have grown zucchini, snow peas, tomatoes, butternut squash, pumpkins, peppers, cantaloupes, kale, garlic, rosemary, basil, and mint over the years. Some of those have been more successful than others. Mike tried growing watermelon, and twice we planted avocado trees, but those never worked out. Our two orange trees in the back yard, though, give us LOTS of oranges. We mostly juice them, then freeze the juice into cubes to use in smoothies. Neither of us have ever tried canning.

For my mom, though, “canning, freezing, and drying the food picked from her plants” became a favorite hobby, as this news article from the Antioch Daily Ledger points out. “Canning … [was] her way of relaxing and a nice contrast to her job,” which by then was serving as a teacher at Live Oak Continuation School in Antioch. The article, written by family friend and Daily Ledger staff writer Pat Kratina, also points out that my parents’ garden was “totally organic” and produced “an abundance of fruits, vegetables, and nuts.”

This article by Pat Kratina originally appeared in the Antioch Daily Ledger.

As the article states: “Graham … spent many hours pouring through books learning how to can. She also had some assistance from her previous neighbor, Sara Sheetz, who introduced her to buying fruit in the Brentwood area to can before Graham had a garden. Her current neighbor, Badia Chapman, often advises her on canning and taught her how to can olives….

“In her pantry, the shelves are lined with canned pickles, peaches, applesauce, apple pie filling, plums, and pickled beets. Very little food is wasted for Graham who also dries nectarines, apricots, and figs and makes fruit leather. Besides drying fruit, she freezes the vegetables from her garden…. This year she froze 234 ears of corn and some green beans.”

My mom picks fruit from the tree.

On the far right you can see the fruit drier my dad built.

My dad picks a beet from the garden.

Mike and the kids and I were often the beneficiaries of my mom's efforts, especially when it came to fresh fruit pies and jars of plum jam and pomegranate jelly. Of course, we also frequently brought home fruits and vegetables from their garden – especially onions, kale, grapefruits, lemons, apricots, persimmons, and pomegranates. 

My parents’ pomegranate tree eventually produced a LOT of pomegranates, as you can see in the photo below. If you know anything about pomegranates, you know they’re not the easiest fruit to eat. It took a lot of work for my parents to seed all the pomegranates so my mom could make them into pies and jelly. My son Aaron, who liked the pomegranate seeds a lot, was frequently given the job of seeding the pomegranates at our house, and he would often become rather sticky in the process. This became an outside chore - lol. 

My dad needed lots of containers for all the pomegranates!

Aaron and Anna also benefited from the pumpkins my parents grew, and they used to enjoy each year getting to pick one out for Halloween. Of course, Grandma and Poppy's “pumpkin patch” also made for some cute photos over the years. Here’s one of Aaron when he was about 16 months old, sitting on an especially bright orange pumpkin. It also looks like he’s got a small squash in his hand.

Aaron, 16 months, sits on a pumpkin in my parents’ backyard.

Both kids enjoyed traipsing through my parents’ back yard as there was always something interesting to discover. During one especially memorable Easter egg hunt, Anna lifted the cover on the compost pile to look for an egg and instead found a mouse. Eek! When Aaron and Anna were the only grandkids, my parents would draw them maps to find their eggs, but once there were more grandkids, the egg hunt (for which we used plastic eggs) became more of a free-for-all. 

Of course, there were plenty of hiding places in the yard – and sometimes, my parents would find missed eggs long after the holiday. The hunt was made more enticing as the kids got older by the increasing amounts of money my parents hid in the eggs. Whoever found the Gold and Silver eggs were the big winners. They always had to watch out, though, for the eggs my dad filled, for they might include sawdust, screws, nails, bugs, or other “icky” stuff.

Aaron and Anna in 2003 search for Easter eggs in my parents’ backyard.

In this photo, you can also see my mom’s bird feeder, which she kept well-stocked with bird seed.

Pat Kratina's article also points out that my parents, soon after finishing the house, started grinding their own flour and raising chickens. These were two additional aspects to their health conscious, self-sufficient lifestyle. As my mom said, “We have the convenience of living in the heart of the city…. We can walk to the store and schools and yet we are still farm-like. We try to combine both.”

My parents’ longest-surviving chicken, Henrietta

Last year, I wrote a blog post about Publishing My Mom's Children's Story, Henrietta and Weber Find a Friend, which I discovered in a folder when I was helping to clean out my mom’s sewing room. My son Aaron drew the pictures for the book, and we surprised her with the book for her birthday. If you missed reading that post, I hope you’ll check it out. Henrietta was my parents’ longest surviving chicken, and Weber was another of their chickens. The “friend” they find in the story is a kitten my mom adopted named Scruffy. The family dog, Tippy, also makes an appearance, though he is dubbed “the furry creature” by the chickens. 

The post also includes an excerpt from an essay my mom wrote back in the 1990s about raising chickens. I included the entire essay at the end of the book. If you’re looking for a cute story to read to kids or grandkids – or just want to hear more about my parents’ experience raising chickens – you can find the book at this Amazon.com link. It would make a great Christmas gift for someone!

My parents called this row of buildings along the side fence “shanty row.”

In the above photo,  you can see what my parents called “shanty row” along their side fence. It included various forts, sheds, a woodpile, and a chicken coop where the chickens could hang out. It was there, most often, we would find their eggs – although the eggs could actually be almost anywhere in the back yard. The chickens typically wandered around the backyard during the day and went back to their coop – the second building from the end – at night.

I want to say a bit more about my mom’s flour grinding. My parents started buying whole grain wheat soon after we moved into the new house, and all of us at times took turns helping with the grinding, which involved a very loud electric flour mill. My mom also bought a Bosch mixer, which she used for her bread making. Of course, she first had to convince us kids to give up white bread.

My mom’s favorite cookbook; it now sits on my shelf – I need to get baking!

In the same folder where I discovered my mom’s children’s story and her essay about the chickens, I found this “article” she wrote about her favorite food: Homemade Whole Wheat Bread. In it, she wrote about how she got us kids to eat whole wheat bread: 

Nothing smells quite as wonderful as homemade bread, right out of the oven. I have always enjoyed baking bread, but about nine years ago, I started experimenting with whole wheat. I had taken cooking classes that emphasized the use of whole grains. Since my husband and I were readers of "Mother Earth News," we had become more food conscious and got very involved with an organic garden. 

Whole grains seemed to fall right into place for us, but not with our three children. I had to sell them on the idea. There I was grinding my own flour and merrily concocting all kinds of bread recipes. Somehow their peanut butter and jelly sandwiches weren't quite the same on whole wheat bread. They liked to squish up the bread into a ball, and whole wheat wouldn't do it.

 

I set out on a campaign to show the reasons why it was better for them to eat whole grains. I asked them just to try it for one week and see the results. They all got involved in the baking process, grinding, kneading, etc. When we started adding butter, cinnamon, nuts, and raisins, things started happening.

It didn't take long to wean them from the white, fluffy stuff. None of them even chooses white bread now. Even cookies taste better with whole wheat flour. Try it - you'll like it!

I also discovered a little spiral notebook, which she called “Dotty’s Doodles,” that contained many of her poems and drawings. Fortunately, I was able to rescue it from a box of books my dad had put in his truck to donate somewhere. In the notebook I found this drawing and poem about her garden:

My mom’s drawing: Minta Lane Garden, September 2001

My mom’s poem about their Minta Lane Garden

My mom certainly also fit into that “great gardener” category, and she also put in a lot of work keeping up with all her flowers, plants, and bulbs. They often required thinning, pruning, deadheading, replanting, and replacing to keep them looking in tip-top shape.

My mom works on deadheading her flowers.

My parents also hosted tours of their home. My dad brought his students there on several occasions when he was teaching architectural drawing, and their home was also part of the “Annual Christmas House Tour” sponsored by the Antioch Women’s Club, as the articles below relate. The first article mentions that they are “emphasizing a natural theme in their home this holiday season,” with an emphasis on “do-it-yourself.” It highlights the fact that they built the house and furniture, and that the holiday decor includes homemade ornaments and a dried herb wreath. In another previous post, I wrote how my mother taught me to love the holidays with all of her baking and homemade crafts - you can find that blog post at THIS LINK if you want to check it out.

Articles announce that my parents’ house will be part of the Antioch home tour.

My mom's handcrafted decorations greet visitors at Christmas.

As the years went on, my parents' garden began to shrink, primarily to make it more manageable. My dad took out many of their trees either because they stopped producing, because the amount of fruit got to be too much for them, or because he wanted the space for something else - such as the "sanctuary" he created at the back of the yard, under a tree he trained into an umbrella shape. His book group would meet under its canopy. It was a sad day when that tree split in a storm, destroying his little sanctuary. In many ways, it was the beginning of the end.

It was concern for my dad's health that drove him to take out one tree: the very prolific grapefruit tree. My dad was eating so many grapefruit that he ended up in the hospital. The acidity, it turned out, was inflaming his esophagus. It was primarily my mother's health issues, though, that drove the decision to sell the house.

If you've read this far in my blog series, you know that having a creative, health-conscious, self-sufficient lifestyle was very important to my mom. So, you can imagine how difficult it has been for her to slowly lose her ability to do so many of the things she loved since contracting Rheumatoid Arthritis in her early 50s. For many years she pushed herself and managed to keep up with the the gardening, canning, freezing, painting, sewing, crafting (see this blog post), baking, cooking, cleaning, shopping, laundering, decorating, bird feeding, and party hosting, though at a slower and slower pace – but these past two years, it got to be too much for her. 

Back in April, my mom was forced to move to a rehab facility after falling in the kitchen and breaking several bones. My dad, who had already been working on downsizing for a while, began preparing to sell the Minta Lane house. One day when I was there, he asked me to cancel their internet and telephone service, and I ended up writing this blog post: Goodbye to 754-3093. That was our old phone number, and it felt like a big step to me.

Of course, in that post I was also beginning to say goodbye to the house that our family – mostly my parents – built; this house that meant so much to both of them, as well as to my brothers and me; this house that contained so many of our family memories. Just typing that sentence made me tear up. I guess this blog series is my way of finally saying goodbye to Minta Lane.

During my last visit to the house, I did a final walk through after it had been staged for sale. It still included some of my parents’ furniture and decor, but a lot of things had been changed, and most of their treasured artwork and keepsakes were missing. Still, I needed that - and I made a video of it as well. I’m going to post a link to that video here for anyone else who needs that final “walk through,” that chance to say goodbye, and who maybe didn’t get it because it all happened so fast. My mom didn’t get a final walk through. That makes me sad.

So I offer this tribute to my parents, to the house they built with love on Minta Lane and to the life that they built for us there. What an amazing legacy!

This painting of the Minta Lane house now hangs on my bedroom wall.

Love is Building a House Together: A Tribute to My Parents, Part III

Chasing History: Exploring My Ancestral Roots - Blog Post #56

By Tonya Graham McQuade

Working on the front yard landscaping on Minta Lane

(apparently my dad and I were acting as supervisors)

In my last two posts (Part I and Part II), I have written about my family building our house together from 1979-1981. In March of 1981, we finally demolished the old house that was at the front of the property, which meant there was a lot of landscaping to do both in front and back of the new house. One of the first projects was putting in a new driveway, which you can see in the photo above. 

I remember at one point my dad called the driveway “Myrtle Drive” after his Great Aunt Myrtle because he had received a small inheritance ($1,000) that helped to pay for the driveway. My brothers and I also drew our names and ages into the driveway: Tonya - 14; Cam - 11; and Andy - 7. I thought I had a picture of that, but I cannot find one. The driveway was more narrow at the front, which made it rather difficult to back out of correctly. I know that was definitely true for me when I was learning to drive, which happened soon after we moved in – and I may have run over my mom’s flowers a couple time. Oops!

You can see in the photo above that my parents brought in some large rocks to help set apart areas for plants, trees, and shrubs. They also moved around a lot of dirt in the yard, creating a mound at the front that created a natural barrier between the house and the rather busy street. Minta Lane no longer has nearly as much traffic as it used to back then because the city of Antioch eventually made “G Street” go all the way through (people used to have to cut through on Minta Lane), and the city also removed the G Street exit ramp from Highway 4.

Here is my mom, “playing in the dirt,”

as she works on landscaping the front yard.

My dad drew up plans for the front yard that specified heights for the soil, as well as the various flowers and trees they would plant. In the drawing below, he lists the following trees: “Old” Lemon, Granny Smith Apple, Gravenstein Apple, Eureka Lemon, Kumquat, Dwarf Orange, Washington Navel Orange, Walnut, and Grapefruit. They got a lot of fruit from those trees, but eventually some died, and others they chose to take out.

My parents’ plan for the front yard involved many plants, shrubs, and trees.

The drawing also lists some of the flowers and shrubs they would plant: Raphiolepsis, Ceanothus, Euryops, Manzanita, Creeping Rosemary, Leptospermum, Easter Broom, Dwarf Juniper, and Coyote Brush. My mom would always amaze me with how many types of plants she could name, whereas I am rather helpless with all but the most common names (rose, daisy, geranium, carnation, lily – those I remember!).

In looking up the names of the plants listed above so I would know what they look like, one description kept popping up: fuss-free. My parents were looking to create a drought-tolerant, long-lasting, fuss-free, yet beautiful front yard. Eventually, they added a lot of bulbs and rhizomes to the mix – daffodils, pink ladies, Dutch irises, purple irises, Easter lilies, and more. Mike and I got bulbs from them on several occasions in an effort to add more color to our own yard in the spring – some grew, but never like they did in my parents’ yard.

Eventually, my parents’ front yard would blaze with color from its many flowers, trees, shrubs, and potted plants, becoming something of a “show stopper” in the spring with its myriad blooms. In the photo below, you can my mom standing in the front yard, with lots of orange California poppies, yellow Calendula, and white Easter lilies blooming around her. You can also see the old lemon tree on the right. Mike and I have enjoyed many lemons from that tree, and it was still producing when my parents sold the house. In more recent years, the front yard has served as a wonderful place for the family to take Easter photos after our egg hunt in the back yard.

My mom stands here in the front yard, which is ablaze with flowers.

In this photo, a “tree stand” holds some of my mom’s potted flowers.

This later view of the front yard features one of my parents’ many pelican statues.

Aaron and Anna stand with my mom under the old lemon tree on Easter (as you can tell by Anna’s bunny ears); this tree produced a lot of lemons, and they were BIG!

The backyard took on many iterations over the years, so it’s hard to describe it accurately in a single description. It was always changing, depending on my parents’ desires and needs. At one point in the early years, it served as a “motocross course” for my brothers with their dirt bikes! They eventually extended their “course” to include the hill behind our house (back when no houses were there), passing through a gate my dad created, until a neighbor complained about the noise.

Andy and Cam on their dirt bikes in the backyard

It also featured swings of varying styles over the years, including ropes, boards, and buckets (my son Aaron especially liked the bucket swing when he was little), as well as a number of forts, both on the ground and in the trees. Its most recent swing was a 3-4 seater, meant more for slow swinging and relaxing, situated in a peaceful section of the yard sheltered by a tree and surrounded by statues of Mary, Buddha, and St. Francis. Of course, this swing was not always used properly, as you can see in the photos of my dad and daughter Anna below.

Andy (age 6 or 7) jumping from a swing in the backyard;

you can see the woodpile in the background

Cam sitting high up in the tree after climbing up a “tree ladder”

Cam sitting in one of his tree forts

My dad and daughter Anna (age 6) hanging from the swing

(“Poppy” always kept the kids entertained!)

Since a primary goal of my parents, though, was to be as self-sufficient as possible, the back yard was primarily used for a garden and lots of fruit and nut trees that could provide food for us to eat. They had an extensive vegetable garden, growing (from what I recall) tomatoes, string beans, fava beans, snow peas, squash, pumpkins, zucchini, beets, turnips, garlic, onions, peppers, lettuce, kale, Swiss chard, cucumbers, carrots, broccoli, corn (my favorite), and ... I'm sure I'm forgetting something. It was a lot to maintain – the garden definitely kept them busy, but I'll be talking more about that in Part IV.

Below, you can see my parents standing in the backyard, next to one of their flower beds and on one of the paths my dad laid out using railroad ties. You can also see the brick patio my parents created outside the sliding glass door, which leads inside to the dining room. In this photo, my dad is holding a pitchfork. He said he was trying to replicate, in his own way, the American Gothic painting below.

Here my parents stand in the backyard, with my dad holding a pitchfork and wearing a shirt with a sun that says, “The safe nuclear reactor.”

“American Gothic,” by Grant Wood, is on display at the Art Institute of Chicago.

As explained on Wikipedia: “American Gothic is a 1930 oil painting on beaverboard by the American Regionalist artist Grant Wood, depicting a Midwestern farmer and his wife or daughter standing in front of their Carpenter Gothic style home. It is one of the most famous American paintings of the 20th century and is frequently referenced in popular culture…. The figures were modeled after Wood's sister Nan Wood Graham and Byron McKeeby, the Wood family's dentist.”

Of course, when I see the name “Graham,” I think perhaps the model for the woman in the photo was actually some sort of relative to my father! I often have thought he would have made a great pioneer. 

My dad didn’t just pose with that pitchfork, though – he used it, along with lots of shovels, hoes, pickaxes, and rototillers, to prepare the soil for the garden he and my mom would be planting. Part of that involved moving lots of dirt from the front to the backyard, which sloped down toward the hill behind it. He brought in railroad ties to put against the old back fence, then added enough dirt to bring the yard there up about three feet. He also took out some of the trees that were there so he could replace them with fruit trees and, in some cases, sheds and forts. That right side of the yard became something of a "shanty row". Eventually, it also housed a large chicken coop – but more on that later.

Taking out trees to replace them with fruit trees and sheds

"Cam's Place" was one of the structures along the fence.

My dad also brought in lots of gypsum to help the soil, as well as many loads of straw and manure from the local fairgrounds. That unintentionally caused wheat to grow in the yard since seeds were mixed into the straw and manure. He also, instead of wood chips, brought in walnut shells to act as a ground covering. He got these shells for free from the old Slatten Ranch in Antioch (which now is a shopping center). At one point, he recalled, there were about a thousand finches in the yard eating up the bits of walnut that were still in the shells.

Rototilling the soil and bringing in bricks to create a path in the backyard

Unloading manure from the Antioch Fairgrounds

My mom also helped with moving dirt around, but here,

Tippy and Andy took turns hitching rides.

I remember one especially "pungent" time when our yard was filled with newly-unloaded manure, as well as a plethora of flies that had been attracted by the smell. I had been reading Jay Anson's The Amityville Horror, which talked a lot about flies and "the smell of excrement," so the atmosphere was already a bit spooky. Then, one night I woke up at exactly 3:15 a.m. and got more than a bit freaked out.

If you aren't familiar with the story, that was the approximate time of the real-life DeFeo murders, when 23-year-old Ronald DeFeo, Jr. shot and killed six members of his family at their house on Ocean Avenue in Amityville, Long Island. It is also the time that the later resident, George Lutz, claimed he was mysteriously awakened every morning. Lutz and his family fled the house 28 days after moving in, claiming they were being terrorized by paranormal activity. On top of the flies and the smell, that put me over the edge!

Here, my dad is playing with Andy on the swing, surrounded by wheat that grew

after he brought in 20 loads of straw and manure from the Antioch Fairgrounds.

As with the front yard, my parents planted a lot of fruit trees in the backyard to go along with their vegetable garden. The photo below depicts the “tree map” my dad drew up for the backyard. It names the many fruit trees, sometimes in multiple varieties, that they planted: Nectarine, Almond, Cherry, Apricot, Peach, Plum, Tangerine, Pear, Apple, and Fig. They must have added their Persimmon tree later. My favorite was the Apricot. In more recent years, I was always happy if I was able to time a visit to Antioch to coincide with the apricots being ripe for the picking.

The “tree map” my dad drew for the backyard

My parents were also very water conscious, using a drip irrigation system for their sprinkler system to waste less water and planting many native, drought-tolerant plants. They would sometimes use buckets to catch water when it rained, and they encouraged us to take short showers (I didn’t always like that part) and to never leave the water running while washing dishes (which I haven’t always kept up).

They always kept the big California drought of 1976-77 in mind. I still remember two bumper stickers that were popular during that drought: “In this land of drought and sun, we don’t flush for number one,” and, “If it’s yellow, let it mellow; if it’s brown, flush it down.” At the time, as a 10-year-old kid, I remember thinking they were funny. They weren't just silly sayings, though; those guidelines were often followed in our house - lol.

In this drawing, my dad laid out the sprinkler system for the backyard,

organized around various garden and tree beds.

In the above drawing, you can also see both Auto and Wood sheds labeled on the side of the yard. My dad taught Auto Shop for many years, and he enjoyed working on motorcycles, trucks, and VW Bugs (of which he owned several). We also needed a lot of wood because, other than solar, the only “heater” our house had was a wood stove. My parents did a lot of research before choosing the wood stove they ultimately purchased, made by Vermont Castings, and that wood stove was still in good shape when they sold the house.

The ad for the Vermont Castings wood stove my parents purchased

As I mentioned in my previous post, my parents were audited twice by PG&E because the company couldn’t believe their bill could be so low. It was. As you might imagine, their unique house attracted other attention as well. In an article that appeared in the Antioch Daily Ledger examining ways families might manage increasing PG&E bills, the authors cited my parents’ house as an example of what could be achieved by looking to solar energy as a primary power source.

This article originally appeared in the Antioch Daily Ledger

The article states: “Doug Graham, 41, his wife, 39, and their three children consume as much power in their new two-story home as most suburbanites, but their PG&E bills averaged $17 per month in 1981. And even after the latest rate hikes, their bills have not been over $36…. The solar heating system for their Minta Lane home is designed to take advantage … of the sun’s warmth for heating air and water…. On a recent overcast date, when it was about 62 degrees outside, the Grahams chatted comfortably in their multi-windowed kitchen – where the temperature was well over 70 degrees.”

Mike's and my house in San Jose is not nearly that warm during the coldest winter months unless we turn up our thermostat above normal, but we did have 14 solar panels put in a few years ago, and that has made a HUGE difference in our PG&E bills. So far this year, we have paid a TOTAL of $338 to PG&E, and that was mostly due to using our gas furnace in the first four months of the year. We have not had a bill since April, and we don't have one this month (November). We probably will have a small one in December since we'll soon have to start using the furnace again, and we have once again turned on our spa (which we had turned off since we were traveling so much). The point is, you don't have to have an entirely passive solar-designed house to benefit from solar energy today!

My dad modeled the Minta Lane house after similar passive solar homes in Davis, CA, and it incorporated no gas features, just electric. As he explains in the article above, “The average home in Davis uses 20 percent less energy than those in Antioch,” largely because “Davis has adopted city ordinances which require better sealing on windows and doors, more insulation – and even special landscaping – for energy efficiency.”

Besides tightly sealing their windows and doors and adding more insulation, my parents kept those landscaping guidelines in mind as they planned their yard. While most of the trees they planted bore fruit that we could eat, one "fruitless" tree they planted was the Fruitless Mulberry in the backyard patio area. It got HUGE and provided a lot of shade to the house in the summer, helping to keep it cool (the house never had air conditioning). It dropped its leaves in the winter, allowing the house to be better warmed by the sun.

Caption: “The row of south-facing windows on the roof of the Minta Lane

house in Antioch allow the sun to warm the air inside the house while solar collectors

rest off to the side, supplying the family with hot water.”

That wasn't the only time that house was described "in print." Back when we were still building the house, my mother wrote the following letter to Popular Mechanics magazine: “My husband and I are avid readers of PM, and we both enjoy the approach to life that your magazine takes. We enjoy knowing that there are other people out there who do care about this world of ours and about our dignity as human beings. We are building a passive solar home, as we feel this will further our independence of the system. At the same time, we know we are doing our part to conserve energy in the best way possible. It is still possible for a man to design and build his own home and have it entirely paid for. This has been a real experience for our family.”

My mom’s letter as it appeared in Popular Mechanics magazine

And, what do you know! On December 5, 1980, the magazine’s editor, John Linkletter, responded! I love that he says my mom’s letter “was copied and passed around [their] office and pasted on the bulletin board,” for it “tells better than any of us can the philosophy of the readers of Popular Mechanics,” and it captures “the great satisfaction you get from being able to do things yourself.” I’m sure that must have made both my parents feel really good about the project they had undertaken.

A letter to my mom from John Linkletter, Editor of Popular Mechanics

Without question, my parents both got a lot of satisfaction from doing things themselves, but this post has gotten quite long enough. In Part IV, I will talk more about what they did with all the food they produced in the yard, as well as how they got started raising chickens. I'll also share a couple other news articles about the house and garden. For now, I’ll end with these two lovely photos taken by my parents’ friend Jerry Britton back in April 2004. They capture, from interesting angles, both the front and back yards my parents eventually created. Thanks, Jerry!

The front of the house, as photographed by Jerry Britton on April 16, 2004,

as well as the backyard down below