After posting my last blog, it became clear to me that, of the many problems I have with Daily Kos, the biggest one, ironically, has to do with how many inordinately kind people there are here.
I’m not used to that. I’m used to meanness and petty competition. I’m used to backbiting and vindictiveness.
And, sadly; the hardest thing about all of this is having all this kindness only represented in my life by hen scratches on my monitor.
There aren’t any other Kossacks in Carlsbad. Sometimes I wake up in the night with that phrase running through my head.
I am, as far as I know, a lone outpost here, these last ten years. It’s easy to let that drive one crazy. I have in a lot of ways.
But this diary is about gardening. I like to write about gardening. Maybe I can keep writing about gardening here?
And thank you to everyone who was so kind, during my last fugue. I'd rather be someone else, but I yam what I yam.
I’ve been intrigued by gardening ever since I can remember. My mom was an avid gardener, working up every bit of spare ground into strawberries, chrysanthemums, tomatoes, peppers, and anything else that caught her fancy. My earliest memories are of wandering around our back yard, helping? Listening? I’m not sure what I did, but I surely was watching.
Watching is important, with gardening. You have to be out there, you should be paying a lot of attention. Problems arise quickly at times, of both an insect and vegetative nature. One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever heard about gardening is to make a point of always doing something to your garden every time you walk by it. Don’t tell yourself you’ll do it later; don’t even let your mind get to that point. You see something small that needs to be done – a weed that needs pulling, something that needs moving, or watering – stop right then and do it. The small things so quickly become large things, or become dead things.
Gardens are to a great extent artifices. The laziest gardeners work entirely with plants that have some capacity to naturalize in the area. As I get older, and my back and knees and hips more creaky, I come to respect laziness more and more!
Manipulation of moisture and sunlight is a major part of creating these artifices. I’m a big fan of mulch, and my favorite mulch is large grade bark chips. They hold moisture, they look nice, they’re cheap, they decay gradually into always-needed soil humus, they don’t add seeds, and you can easily remove them at the end of the season and re-use them. The smaller grades, and the shredded bark, are also useful, but if your soil management includes having to add a lot of nitrogen and moisture, you don’t necessarily need a lot of carboniferous matter added to it when plants are growing. This sort of thing is better put in the compost heap until it degrades more.
I live in the desert, and moisture is usually on the short side. When I first moved out here, I had the idea that one should heavily water a lot, in order to leach salts out of the soil. Leaching salts is important, but you can actually overdo it, and leach nutrients (that are at times in salt form) as well. Some desert farmers make a point of only using enough water to cover the roots, and watering more frequently, and leaving it to the seasonal monsoon to leach out salts. This is worth considering in dry hot desert summers – deep watering will encourage plants to root more deeply, but not all plants can send down deep roots. The family that includes squash, pumpkins and cucumbers is shallow-rooted, and they do well in the desert, but deep watering isn’t as useful as frequent watering. A hot day will dry out all the surface moisture in most cases, no matter how much you watered previously. And again, mulch is extremely helpful here.
I learned to garden in the northeast US, where a lot of the agenda was about maximizing sun exposure. In the desert, the sun is your enemy from late spring through early fall. I’ve grown wonderful tomatoes here in full shade, and had corn die in May, in full sun, even though I watered it daily. The rules are so different between desert climates, and rainy cold temperate ones. The cohort of plants that are easy to grow, in each case, don’t have a lot of crossover.
One thing I’ve found I can easily grow here is beets. They are rather tolerant of soil salinity, and do well in my winter garden. Even with temperatures down to 15 or so now and then in the winter here, you can easily grow beets, spinach, carrots, lettuce, and various crucifers, including broccoli, rutabagas, arugula, cabbage, and brussel sprouts. In hard frosts, I’ve seen the leaves of crucifers wilt to the point that I gave up hope – but then miraculously revitalize as the weather warmed up. It’s like they have built-in antifreeze.
Very few people here in SE NM grow winter vegetable gardens, from what I’ve noticed; this possibility is mostly overlooked. It’s easier in a lot of ways than summer gardens, since you don’t have to water so assiduously. In places like South Florida, people are used to thinking of summer as being the dormant season, because of the heat. They don’t get frosts in the winter, so this paradigm is easier to relate to. Here at 3300’ in SE New Mexico, it’s more of a mixed bag, but it’s always a good idea, as a gardener, to question the rules, to wonder, when people say "you can’t do that" or "that won’t work," to wonder if maybe it might work, maybe it might work if you put it in this shady spot in the summer, or that warm sheltered spot in the winter. You never know what might work. The world is full of surprises.