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Letter Re: If Life Gives You Tomatoes, Make Salsa!
Dear James,
Thank you to S.M. for the great article about gardening in the desert southwest (If Life Gives You Tomatoes, Make Salsa!). I’ve spent most of my years in the desert southwest near the metros of Tucson, Las Cruces, and Albuquerque and have grown gardens in these regions for the past decade. In 2010 a similar article was published in SurvivalBlog titled Starting Your Desert Backyard Garden. I was one of several readers that submitted some helpful comments and tips on that article.
This is my fourth season growing in the high desert of Northern New Mexico. I’m at around 5,000 feet elevation and the growing season is rather short, as compared to my experience in the Southern Arizona area. Last frost is usually mid-May and first frost early-October. I now start a number of plants indoors in trays beginning in late February for later transplanting. As S.M. mentioned, I too was growing year-round in the Tucson area, without cold frames or any frost protection even though there are some cold winter nights it’s usually not enough to kill hardy plants like broccoli, cabbage, kale, etc. I never grew indoor starts because it wasn’t necessary.
The growing season of 2013 is a first for me because it’s the first time ever I have attempted row crops rather than raised beds. The results have been disappointing so far. Last fall I relocated to a more agricultural area that is about 1 mile from the Rio Grande River and has historically been farmed for hundreds of years. I live on a property with horses (lots of manure!) and I can hear cows and pheasants not far away. All around me are fields of crops, mostly alfalfa for livestock, but also smaller family farms. Driving or walking by neighboring properties and you will see many have at least a small garden of some kind. This area is very Hispanic, if that has any bearing on anything. My new home has enough yard space that raised beds seemed impractical for our goals and would make watering more difficult, so we prepared the space for row crops and flood irrigation from the river ditch bank.
[JWR Adds: I recommend using cow manure rather than horse manure, for garden fertilizing, eve if that means hauling it. Because cows completely digest grass and hay, any contained seeds are not viable by the time that the Schumer hits the ground. Not so for horses, which have more rudimentary digestion, and that means lots of weeds!]
Over the winter we removed what we could of the weed growth (bindweed), hauled in a bunch of dry manure, and tilled it all in with a tractor plow. Covered some areas with black plastic (this had no effect on the bindweed whatsoever). A few weeks before last frost we mapped out the growing areas and formed rows & furrows by hand. Our main space is about 1,200 sq. ft. and we have some satellite garden beds elsewhere on the property.
Source: http://www.survivalblog.com/2013/08/letter-re-if-life-gives-you-tomatoes-make-salsa.html
