Market Gardens

Weather: Another week when promised rains failed to appear. It’s true some fell during the night last Sunday after dark, but that was supposed to be a prelude to days with 60 to 70% chances of heavy rain. Instead, we got strong winds for several hours on Friday and Saturday, with humidity and nothing precipitating.

This has been happening for at least a year. One can see the moisture blanketing the area on satellite images, so one knows the weather bureau isn’t daydreaming. But something is happening that’s preventing it from falling. Something more than the highs and lows, or ridges and troughs, it talks about.

I suspect that something isn’t just missing from the written forecasts. It could be missing from the forecast models themselves. I’ve long since learned to discount predictions to "maybe" when it says 50% because the models don’t include the contours of the land. But, more than that is going on.

Last useful rain: 7/8. Week’s low: 56 degrees F. Week’s high: 93 degrees F in the shade.

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid roses, yellow potentilla, desert willow, trumpet creeper, bird of paradise, fern bush, silver lace vine, red-tipped yuccas, Spanish broom, Russian sage, bouncing Bess, hollyhocks, datura, sweet pea, hollyhocks, annual four o’clocks, cultivated sunflowers, coreopsis, black-eyed Susan

What’s blooming in my yard: Rugosa and miniature roses, buddleia, hybrid daylilies, golden spur columbine, coral beards tongue, large-flowered soapwort, Johnson Blue geranium, catmints, lady bells, sidalcea, winecup mallow, blue flax, tomatillo, pink evening primroses, white-flowered spurge, sea lavender, perennial four o’clock, white and Coronation Gold yarrow, chocolate flowers, blanket flower, Mönch aster

What’s blooming outside the walls and fences: Tamarix, purple mat flower, stick leaf, white tufted evening primroses, velvetweed, bindweed, silver leaf nightshade, greenleaf five eyes, leather leaf globemallow, scurf pea, alfalfa, white sweet clover, Queen Anne’s lace, Hopi tea, fleabane, horseweed, wild lettuce, common and native dandelions, goat’s beard, plain’s paper flower, golden hairy asters, Tahoka daisy

Bedding plants: Pansies, violas; local petunias

Tasks: White sweet clover was the enemy of the week. It gets to be six feet tall and is covered with tiny flowers that turn to tiny, hard seeds. The legume took over the rugosa roses last summer. I spent one morning out with loppers cutting quarter-inch diameter stems, but only made a dent in half an hour. Then my thumb hurt too much to go back the next day.

Instead, I returned to clearing the main bed where some clover plants were blocking the path of the hose spray. One plant had been there for years, and, even with a spade, I was only able to remove some of the root. The area around it was filled with new plants about a foot high. If the ground is wet, one can remove them by pulling gently. The roots on young plants are narrow and vertical.

Once the visible plants were gone, I found seedlings which resembled those of the neighboring golden spur columbine. Since there are so many of the yellow flowers, and I suspect a plentiful seed bank, I felt no compunction about removing all the three-leaved seedlings with the chisel. It did act like a hoe and eliminated the need for my right thumb to prick them out individually.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, hummingbirds, other small brown birds, geckos, sidewalk ants, bumble and small bees, hornets, other small flying insects, grasshoppers; heard crickets

Weekly update: When I first moved to Española, several produce stands were active on Saturdays on the main road from Santa Fé to Taos. Arlo Martinez died in 2009, and his stand finally was razed last year. Another painted red, white, and blue hasn’t been used for several years. It remains abandoned like some older ones on the roads north of town.

The farmers’ markets, especially in Santa Fé, have created a new outlet for market gardeners. Many of the ones I saw in the local market a few years ago weren’t strictly local; they came from places like Velarde, but to kin in the valley that’s local.

I’m not sure any landowners in my immediate area are market gardeners. Instead, I believe men rent land that has access to water from the ditch for a season. This has the advantage that, if they practiced crop rotation, they could simply rent different fields each year and leave the owners with the fallow ones. A few subsequently tried to plant alfalfa in the improved land, but it failed to take hold.

Usually I see two or three men working together, but one year it was a couple and their young children. The farmers usually planted corn or peppers.

A few years ago I saw a commercialization of this rental system, when larger operators rented fields and hired crews to do the work. I believe this was the consequence of the expansion of the big boxes north of town onto land once owned by the Merhege family [1] and others. The land became to valuable to farm, although it was an ideal site for a u-pick-it. For sale signs sprouted instead of crops.

One field I’m sure was rented each year by people who had land near what was once San Juan pueblo, and is now Okay Owingeh. They often planted peas. This year they put in onions.

A third group may have entered the area this year. The drought and lowered levels in the Río Grande and its tributaries were creating problems for farmers in Dixon and Alcalde this spring. According to Andy Stiny, some simply weren’t planting, or had switched to drought tolerant crops. [2]

I suspect some others started looked at unused land along the ditches fed by the Santa Cruz dam and lake. In the spring, it had water. And so, some new areas were brought under cultivation. But because the tillers were absentee, they did less cultivating, and their furrows were taken over by weeds. One was plowed under around the Fourth of July.

This wasn’t just about inattention. When the heat of June hit with the low humidity, things stopped growing. Watering the roots wasn’t enough. The usual crops, the corn and peppers, simply stopped growing. Less indigenous plants suffered more.

This past week I read an article that suggested these men may face another problem in August. The USDA cancelled the contract of the company that supplied the farmer’s markets with the ability to take food stamps, and the company with the new contract wasn’t functional yet. [3] I don’t know how much that affects the ones who sell in Santa Fé, but I did see people using food stamps in the local market in 2015.

Notes on photographs:
1. White sweet clover (Melilotus alba), 9 July 2015.

2. Market garden with peppers and corn, 9 July 2018. This one is often cultivated by a couple men.

3. Market garden with corn and something with visible white flowers, 9 July 2018. This field was planted this year for the first time. The edges were left to nature. Russian thistles are growing at the left.

4. Plowed under market garden field, 9 July 2018. This field was planted for the first time this year. Notice that while the field is broad, long log agriculture was practiced.

End notes:
1. Joseph Merhege died in 2013; he operate the best known of the market gardens north of town.

2. Andy Stiny. "Drought Challenges Northern New Mexico Farmers." Santa Fe New Mexican. 26 May 2018.

3. Michael Hobbes. "Hundreds of Farmers Markets May Stop Accepting Food Stamps." Huffington Post. 13 July 2018.

Sweet White Clover

What’s blooming: Except for sweet alyssum in a pot and two purple asters near a wall, the flowers are gone, and along with them, the insects and other animals that fed on them. The active animals have turned to seeds, roots, winter annuals, and evergreens.

What’s green in the area: Alfilerillo; grasses, including needle grass and June grass; yucca, yew, juniper, piñon, and other pines. Arborvitae is skimmed in yellow.

What’s green in my yard: Coral beardtongue, snapdragons, columbine, roses, bouncing Bess, large flowered soapwort, sweet peas, sweet white clover, baptista, salvia, Romanian sage, thrift, rockrose, winecup, hollyhock, red and blue flax, pink and yellow evening primrose, hartwegia, iris, red hot poker, catmint, California poppy, vinca, tansy, Frikarti and golden hairy asters, tahokia daisy, Mexican hat, coreopsis, black-eyed Susan, chocolate flower, perky Sue, wild lettuce, mums, yarrow.

What’s grey: Snow-in-summer, pinks, buddleia, yarrow, four-winged salt bush.

What’s red: Barberry, coral bells, pinks, small flowered soapwort, white and blue beardtongues, cholla.

Animal sightings: A few surviving grasshoppers; birds around fence and trees; gopher dug more dirt near the sour cherry; something knocked bricks from the lining walls along the garden.

Weather: Clear days, bright stars, no moisture since 15 October.

Weekly update: Saturday was burn day in the valley. I saw five plumes of smoke along the main road in the morning, and noticed two others collecting dead weeds for pyres.

The man behind me at the post office said he was ready to burn his fields, which he likes to do every two years to eliminate mats. The grass comes back and the alfalfa’s not harmed.

I’m much more conservative about burning, probably because I come from Michigan where we were trained to build rock circles around cook fires. At one summer camp, the leader made us line the bottom as well, lest we ignite the peat. That seemed extreme to this teenager, but I’ve been told a peat fire has been smoldering northeast of town for several years.

On a still, cloudy day this July I found a place in my drive that was wet and laid down a long cardboard box that had held a sapling. I piled old financial papers in the box, turned on the hose and lit a match.

While the papers were burning, I cut down 5' high white sweet clover plants from last summer and fed them to the flames. Then I added other dead plants from the drive and rosewood cuttings I hadn’t taken out yet for the trashmen.

As the fire burned, plants in the area would catch. I protected the asters and grasses, but let the rest go, the yellowbrush, winterfat and clover that had invaded the gravel. I rather hoped the heat would kill them.

I’m quite willing to let white sweet clover grow in the yard, but its branches scratch the fence when they dry in winter. Unfortunately, Melilotus Alba needs water and chooses my garden. Yellow sweet clover, Melilotus Officinalis, is the one that grows along the shoulders until it’s mown down in late summer before it reaches its full height.

When I got home yesterday I saw the clover still growing amid the charred remains in my drive. The European native thrives on fire, and only starts to die out when prairie fires stop and other plants take its resources. With no water, it can die out in three years.

I was fooled by the grasshoppers that chomped last year’s biennial seedlings. It was easy to cut any stalks before the spikes of tiny white flowers appeared. But, as soon as it rained in July, old seeds sprouted.

Rain is protective as well as nutritive. The taproots are long; I’ve pulled some that were close to 3' long. They can only be removed when the ground is wet, which is often when it has already produced its tiny seeds. The trefoil seedlings are tedious to pull and impossible to poison in the rain.

White sweet clover was officially introduced into this country by Henry Tutwiler who imported seed from Chile to grow at Green Springs Academy in Alabama in 1856. The legume’s roots add nitrogen and humus to the soil. Animals graze the plants in early spring and eat hay that has been cured enough to dissipate the bitter coumarin.

I assume the rancher prefers alfalfa for his horses. He complained someone from Colorado was peddling hay that horses wouldn’t eat and contained tumbleweed seeds. When I suggested it might work as straw, he said no, not with those seeds. Had to be burned.

Notes: United States Department of Agriculture, Forrest Service, Range Plant Handbook, 1937, republished by Dover Publications, 1988.