Reflections on Earth Day

This year I jiggered together a sort of semi greenhouse out of Wal-Mart shelving, animal fencing and a heavy plastic drop cloth. I set out trays of Cherokee Purple tomato seeds saved from last year's crop (lost one tray because it got too hot one day, and they cooked!), long pepper seeds -- we could pretend they're Hatch chiles, but they're not, they're seeds from garden variety Anaheim chiles grown in Texas,-- a tray of wildflower seeds, and pots of Indian corn and bolita beans, cantaloupe, acorn and butternut squash, catnip, lavender, and other flower varieties. Most of the seeds have germinated, and the tomatoes and peppers are almost ready to transplant to larger peat pots. I think I'll have plenty to give away this year just as was the case last year. Some of the people who took the plants last year said they had the Devil's own time trying to get any fruit off the vine, but tomatoes are touchy. It's simply a fact that it's very dry in New Mexico, and tomatoes like lots of water. I know one year I grew tomatoes here and for a while, the plants seemed to flourish and then they declined, never had more than one or two tomatoes from each plant, and then they seemed to shrivel and die. I'd grown them in large pots with good potting mix, and so their decline seemed strange -- until I pulled out the plants and discovered that only the top couple of inches of the soil had any water. Most of the soil in the pot was bone dry; I hadn't watered them nearly enough, though to my eye, and to my California conditioned watering hand, they'd had more than enough water. Lesson -- sort of -- learned.

This season, we had the driest winter in many years, and it has affected everything. I've started watering the trees and lilacs and other long term residents of our property here, but some,  I think, aren't going to make it. They've had many years  of drought stress before this only occasionally relieved with "good years" of reasonably abundant rain and snow. And a "good year" is dry by any common measurement.

The Indians abandoned this area in the 1670s during a severe drought and famine exacerbated by Spanish colonial Franciscan padres who simply saw the suffering of the Indians as God's wrath for  idolatry and whatnot. By the time the nearby pueblos were vacated, there were only a few hundred Indians left. They mostly joined pueblos on the west side of the mountains along the Rio Grande -- which apparently still had some water in it. This area was left more or less uninhabited for many years. The raiding tribes would set up temporary camps amid the ruins, and from time to time Spanish settlers would run their cattle and sheep over the range. But otherwise, it wasn't until the early/mid-1800s that small settlements were set up on the lower slopes of the mountains, and re-settlement of the plains (without the Indians) only got going in the early 1900s.

It's not easy land to farm, and drought is a persistent risk. I'm sure the early dry-land bean farmers were shocked the first year the rains didn't come. And the next and the next and the next. Eventually, they realized they couldn't rely on summer rainfall and winter snow to grow their crops, and somebody decided to drill down into the aquifer that underlies the whole basin. Sure enough they hit water, and ever since, such crops as are grown here have been under irrigation. But it's an uneasy balance.

There are a few farms still operating, but mostly such agriculture as there is around here is cattle raising, and when things get too dry -- as they seem to be right now -- the cattle... disappear. Where they go is one of those.... mysteries. Most I imagine go to slaughter right away. A few go to feed lots or greener pastures in Texas and Colorado.

The farms grow beans and corn and alfalfa and a few other crops for the animals, not so much for people. I'm one of several trying to get some varied vegetables to grow here. It's possible with enough water, soil amendments and care, but it's not easy.

For one thing, the soil lacks nutrients. It's mostly heavy clay with some sand, and it's highly alkaline. Organic matter is nearly completely absent, and all our attempts to establish a compost pile have failed. There are no earthworms, and practically no soil bacteria. Compost doesn't form because the material you're trying to compost doesn't decompose. It petrifies.

They say there's a way to make compost in buckets if you're patient and you keep it wet and introduce bacteria and earthworms, but I haven't figured it out yet. The two open piles we started are kind of hilarious what with their petrified garden debris and food scraps. One has grown quite large, but nothing has happened. Everything is as it was deposited, just dessicated.

In pots -- and bags and other containers -- things can grow very well. The only things we've been able to grow in the soil have been tulip and daffodil bulbs, but even they are stressed by the super-dry winter, and this year they are pretty peaked and wan.

Our farmer friend down the road supplements his soil with fish emulsion and manure. It gives him good crops, mostly beans and corn, but he's had only middling luck with vegetables. They will grow, but it's like they don't want to. He's preparing to grow some vegetables in greenhouses, but his first attempt failed when some kind of disease in the greenhouse killed off most of his plants. I don't think he's going to try again this year, but his kids have set up two vegetable plots outdoors. They set out lots of plants one weekend. Couple of days later, there was a hard freeze overnight. They'll have to replant when the weather warms up enough.

My beans and corn germinated in the greenhouse a week ago, and that same hard freeze killed most of the beans. Even though the greenhouse has heat (a number of 25w pads) I forgot to turn them on that night, and by the time I remembered, it was too late. The corn is struggling, but looks to be surviving. I'll plant more shortly.

So far, the squash and melons have not germinated though they were planted weeks ago. I'll give them another few days, then try again. Oddly, some hollyhock seeds that are at least five years old are starting to germinate. We'll see. They can be really tough to grow. You never know.

Though there have been some failures and disappointments so far this year, all in all I'm pretty pleased with the way my modest attempts at growing things are going. Freezing overnights have not quite ended, though, so I might have some more losses. It's not all that cold right now (early morning -- about 5am, about 37°) but the prediction is for it to freeze again by 6am. I've got the heat on in the greenhouse just in case.

I've just got to keep learning and trying.

Meanwhile, we don't do nearly enough R, R, & R, though I think we do much more than most others. Our garbage can, for example, is hardly ever full, unlike that of our neighbors -- some of whom have two cans overflowing, week after week. We recycle, reuse, and repurpose as much as we can, and so we send much less to the landfill than we might.

We learned about "living lightly on the Earth" many years ago and those lessons have stayed with us.

Even our house is a recycled pioneer adobe. From time to time, I think about doing another renovation/remodeling, but since we're getting up there in years, I'm not so sure it's going to happen before we shuffle off this mortal coil. We'll have to make do in the meantime..

Reflections on Earth Day? Over the decades, the lessons are largely ingrained and unconscious now. Sometimes the advocates get too enthusiastic and expect too much from individuals and not enough, it seems to me, from civic bodies and institutions. There's a constant tendency to approach the issues of Earth Day from a position of superiority over those who haven't got the message yet. Demanding, directing, disapproving, hectoring, yadda, yadda. It seems to me, too, that the whole thing is so very, very... white. Ain't much of a Rainbow Coalition. Those who have adopted some of the principles, however, or who have always lived by them, aren't nearly so white or so judgmental at all. We just do our thing!

Keep on keeping on...

Simple Things: "The Garden"

Over the years, we've tried growing things here with middling success. It's a challenge. This is the high plains/high desert after all. Drought. Altitude. Highly alkaline soil and water. Limited growing season. All this and more interfere with growing things.

Yet just down the road from our place is a very successful 160 acre farm known far and wide for its excellent sweet corn and pinto and bolita beans. Corn, supposedly, can't grow at this altitude, but somehow they manage to do it. Their beans are widely recognized as "the best." They also grow squash, pumpkins, melons, onions, potatoes, berries, beets, and other vegetables, some more successfully than others. Though their corn and beans are spectacular, their other offerings vary in quality. Despite the success of their farm, they face many of the same challenges backyard gardeners do in this area.

This year I set out a lot of tomato plants and some wild flowers, all of them in containers. Though there were losses, all in all, it's been a pretty successful season. We've had tomatoes every day; the flowers are not as abundant as I hoped, but they are doing OK. It's been very dry this season with too little rain. Overall, for the year, rain totals are pretty good, but the monsoon season was less than ideal.

Consequently, the plants had to be watered every day, even on days it rained. That's fine if you can do it and you have the water, but many people can't and don't.

Our tomato losses had to do with several problems one ordinarily has with tomatoes:

• 1) blossom end rot, which some say is due to inadequate water. Others suggest it's due to overwatering. Who knows? As a rule, only a few tomatoes were affected -- if any were -- on any given plant, and even those that had blossom end rot were edible after the rot was cut away. (Ew! But actually it works fine.)

• 2) hoppers. This year we had somewhat fewer hoppers than in previous years, but still there were many of them. They hatched in waves. Most of the young-uns died before their first molt, but there were plenty of survivors. At first, they didn't notice the tomatoes. There are "sacrifice" plants in front (I don't know the name of them, but they grow wild and have small orange flowers -- and the hoppers love them). Once they noticed the tomatoes, though, they came over to the plants and nibbled. They were acting very protective of them, at least from my point of view. They would nibble on the leaves and sometimes on the fruit, but mostly they just seemed to stand guard. The damage they caused the tomatoes was, overall, rather slight. So we didn't fret too much over hoppers. I didn't use NoloBait this year, so we may wind up with a lot more hoppers next year. Quite a number of preying mantis came to call and were seen feasting on the hoppers, too. Nature's balance, eh?

• 3) tomato hornworms. They actually did only minor damage this year. I managed to pick them off one by one before they could do too much mischief, and there weren't that many in any case. They don't just eat the foliage, they eat the fruit, too, so we lost some -- maybe half a dozen tomatoes -- to the pesky green caterpillars.

• 4) leaf curl. It can be deadly, but so far it hasn't been. I managed to trim off most of the affected leaves before the condition consumed entire plants.  I'm just now noticing mosaic virus on one plant, and it can turn into a severe problem too.

It's getting late in the season though, so I'm not too worried about the mosaic. The plants can't survive freezing conditions, so when we get the first freeze-- probably in October sometime -- that will be it. We have had an abundant crop, really quite remarkable for us. Most plants have had plenty of fruit, and we've eaten tomatoes every day for over a month. We even had some delicious fried green tomatoes and will probably have more before the season ends. Ms Che even wants to try pickling the unripe tomatoes.

I tried different ways of growing them. They're all in containers, but the containers differ considerably. Some are large. Some are small. Some are deep. Some are shallow. Some have one plant, others have as many as six.

They are all growing in Miracle-Gro potting soil -- which actually might be a bit too rich for them. It took eleven large bags to fill all the containers so we're talking a bit of expense for soil. Once the plants die back, I'll empty the containers and ready them for use with new potting soil next year.

I wish we could successfully compost here, but so far we haven't been able to. No worms for one thing, and it appears there's very little active soil bacteria. We had a compost pile going for a couple of years, but all that really happened was that its contents petrified. Oh, and the seeds that were supposedly being composted germinated and for a time, before the hoppers got them, lush melon plants covered the pile. It was pretty funny. In other words, there was no decomposition at all.

I'm intrigued with  the potential of humanure, using human excrement in the compost. Needless to say... it's challenging just to think about. But those who do it swear by it. The problem may be with the apparent lack of soil bacteria. If there's nothing in the soil to break down the excrement and sawdust -- or whatever other organic material is included in the compost -- one must wonder at the result. If there is one -- other than petrefaction.

The Garden is sort of randomly placed this year. Containers are scattered on the west and north and I can't say that exposure has had much of an effect on the plants. I started growing some things on the south side of the garage, but they didn't last. The hoppers got the shoots and the few pitiful survivors dried out one hot day and never recovered. Some neighbors grow everything under shade, and that may be the way we have to approach gardening on the south side. One neighbor has a wonderful hoop house, but said that the heavy plastic covering wasn't enough to protect the plants from the sun, and they had to cover the top part of the house with green tarp material, and even then, it was too bright for some plants.

I've found  that growing multiple tomatoes in one large container is the best way. They don't have tomato cages, but they have simple frameworks that help support the plants and the plants themselves help support one another. I assume that's how they might grow in the wild.

The plants in tomato cages actually didn't produce very well at all. The plants that bent under the weight of the tomatoes actually produced very well and I found a number of ways to keep the fruit off the ground -- including using the seedling cells as supports as well as bent wire fencing pieces we had lying around the place.  In a couple of cases, the bent branches broke away from the main stalk. As long as there was some connection remaining with the stalk, I supported the branch with a stick or what have you and the tomatoes were fine. One time the entire branch broke from the stalk, so I put it in a gallon jug of water. So far, it with its budding tomatoes is doing fine, but it is the one showing signs of mosaic virus. I keep it well away from the other plants.

I have most of the materials I need for a mini-greenhouse, and I expect to get it done sometime this fall. If I'm able to, I'll try to start seeds again next March and we'll start again.

UPDATE: One day's harvest.