The main garden:
This is an experiment of densely planted mixed circles, including greens (chard, kale), cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, and more. So far it’s all doing well.
Cucumbers, shishito peppers, and green beans
Cukes are coming along
Watermelons — lettuce beds are under there somewhere and getting hard to harvest
Cantaloupes
Cover crop bed with pumpkins mixed in
Beautiful sorghum
And the screened secret garden:
** 10/16/22 update – The rain has continued, and we got about .25 ” this weekend. (Other areas nearby had more, some over 2″.) This is by far the longest the monsoons have gone on in or time here. Recording this for future reference.
10/24/22 update – first freeze this week
Well, it’s been an odd year here for a variety of reasons. As I’m looking at the blog, I realize that several interesting things have happened that haven’t been written about so I’m doing a catch up post with some highlights.
This year we are thinking more than usual about how much we value the life we have built here. It is a beautiful life in an amazing place.
There are many wonders to living close to the land (and far from other people) as we do. Among them our connections to the seasonality, awareness of the night time sky, and of course, sightings of wildlife.
For the 13 years that we have lived here, we have seen signs of what I was sure was a badger. Very sharp and long scratch marks in the dirt, occasionally clawing at a wooden door. But we never saw a badger.
Finally this morning, laying in bed, I heard something that sounded strange. I got out of bed, and right in front of the house, I saw it — the elusive badger. It was beautiful. Not too large and with a bold stripe running down its back all the way to the tip of its nose. It moved slowly and seemed uninterested in me as it looked right into the glass doors in our bedroom and then slunk over toward the other house and eventually out into the bush. Pretty great way to start the day.
Here’s a quick update on other things here: it is very hot and dry and windy as it often is in the spring. They are talking about a bigger than usual monsoon, which is rumored to start in mid June. We’ll see.
Being unsure what the future holds, we have cut back on the garden. Instead of our normal 10 or so beds, we are focusing on one bed and trying the intensive gardening idea that I have read much about. The idea is to plant a whole bunch of different things all densely in one bed. Since we usually have so many beds going, this hasn’t really made sense in the past, but this year I thought it might be a fun experiment. We’ll see how things go.
It’s so hot and dry, that the birds, especially the quail, are scratching up everything that’s watered. I know it doesn’t make much sense to plant things before monsoons, but it amuses me and keeps me busy so I do it anyway.
In the meantime, garlic is ready to harvest.
It got into the 30s here last night, but apparently not quite cold enough to freeze the garden. We still have tomatoes and melons on the vines and are hoping for a couple more weeks before the first frost.
Fortunately, it’s still in the 70s during the days. It’s pleasant enough to have the windows open during the day, which is quite nice. (In the summer, we close them to keep the hot air out.)
With all the garden bounty, we have been eating well and also canning, freezing, and otherwise preserving all we can. It will be nice to have all this food throughout the winter.
And we have about 400 heads of garlic and lots of greens in the ground for winter.
It is September, and the monsoons are still going. This is the longest they’ve lasted while we’ve been here. Portal just broke a record for rain set in 1967. The mountains are green, and the grass is getting waist high. There are tadpoles in the puddles, frogs jumping around, and turtles all over. It is truly marvelous.
The garden is doing well. We have had the best tomato harvest in years, and I am canning and freezing sauce and salsa for the rest of the year, as well as enjoying fresh tomatoes with every meal.
The weeds are phenomenal as well. I’ve spent many hours this weekend trying to clear out beds to start on fall planting. And this is the year of the caterpillars. (Each year, there is something that seems to thrive to an unbelievable degree. This year it is caterpillars of every color and stripe, including hornworms.)
There has been another fire in Horseshoe Canyon this month (the Warren fire), which has brought lots of firefighters and jets doing retardant drops. While it’s been windy, there have been enough breaks for the planes to get in, which has helped a lot. At this point, the fire is about 50% contained, and they are starting to reallocate resources.
Other than that, it’s been a pleasant spring here, cooler than usual. We’ve had lots of beautiful birds and have seen three gila monsters, including a mating pair.
The garden is doing well. I’ve been focusing on our soil and have begun doing some in-bed composting in the beds I am resting. It seems to be working well.
We are also beginning a project I have wanted to do for some time — rain water harvesting. I have talked to people who harvest rain water for all their water needs (washing, drinking, garden, etc.) even with rainfall as low as ours. (We get about 15-20 inches a year, though that varies considerably.) The trick is to have a very big tank. There are calculators for the tank size you need based on average rainfall, peak rainfall in volume per unit of time, and collection area.
To date, we’ve just done very small collection with buckets under the roofline. We’re going to expand this gradually, starting with new gutters and a small-ish thousand or so gallon used tank that we were given. Then after we get this installed and working, we can add things like a larger tank and possibly plumbing and a pump out to the garden.
The last year and a half has made me reflect more on our impact on the environment. I like this approach to projects, starting small with recycled materials and then scaling up as appropriate.
As I’m seeing pictures of the first snow in many parts of the country, here I staked tomatoes today.
We had an unusually hot couple weeks (even for here) this summer that prevented my tomatoes from fruiting. Then a couple weeks ago, we had a dramatic drop in temperatures. Since then, it’s been a pleasant 80-90 during the day and into the low 50s at night. Perfect weather. And my tomatoes have done well since then.
Next week it’s forecast to go into the low 40s, so a freeze could happen anytime. Until then though, we’re enjoying it.
In other news, we’ve been working on refinishing the outside wood doors before winter comes. The sun and wind here is very hard on exterior surfaces so there is always work to do. One new twist on this is our recently adopted cat. I didn’t designed the house with a cat in mind and having no interior doors makes it difficult to contain her. She is the best thing that’s happened to us this year though, and we aren’t complaining!
For those interested, I’m also working on a project now to encourage people here to eat local. We’re on the web, FB, and Instagram if you want to follow along. In the spring, we’ll be doing a couple “big reads” with virtual events and online discussions that anyone is welcome to join.
It hasn’t been a great year for the garden. I suspect our soil is getting “tired,” and we also had a stretch of very hot weather with little rain that challenged everyone’s growing.
Despite that, September tends to be our peak harvest for many things. Our biggest success this year has been eggplants. These Rosa Biancas are beautiful.
We also have watermelons, cantaloupes, and tomatoes coming along. And as usual, our greens have been solid all year. We’re expecting to get an unusual cool spell next week, so we’ll be planting more then for the fall and winter.
And in other news, we’ve seen another gila monster — this time right outside our house. This was a big one that appeared to be at its peak age.
As you may have heard, it’s unusually hot here this week, as it is in many places. It was over 110 both days this weekend and didn’t cool off as much as usual at night.
The heat leads the birds and other animals to be especially desperate for water and has led the jackrabbits here to find a way into the garden. You may recall that we fenced the garden a couple years ago with heavy cattle panels and hardware cloth on the bottom foot or so. As the heat has risen, the jackrabbits apparently found a way to get over this and squeeze through. We caught one in the garden twice in the last day.
So today we added another row of tighter fencing higher up. We didn’t have enough hardware cloth so we used what we had. Fencing is hot work even at 6 in the morning.
In other news, a swarm of bees left our front tree a couple weeks ago. This has happened before, but in the past, it always seemed to be just a portion of the hive. (We assumed it had gotten too crowded.) This time though, the bee hive in the tree seems empty, temporarily at least. This is a welcome change.