To the Agricultural Question

[piperdbh]

I need to get an ironwood tree started too.

I thought ironwood needed lots of water. Would it grow in your environs?

[Old Hippie]

in August I will be planting, Big Fields Brown, tepary beans: another desert crop.

Living as we do in the Desert Southwest of Canada we're xeriscaping and exploring dry-land crops as well as our other staples. Problem we have is that while the days in summer can get up to 40+ C, the nights can still get cold enough to frost. We'll be trying tepary beans this summer in the test plot.

Sherlock Holmes ain't got nothin' on Penny. She's been sleuthing out heirloom varieties and traditional plants that do well in this and similar conditions.

I have to re-do the drip irritation system in the orchard because the mice ate the last one. At least the Saskatoon bushes can go all summer without water, nearly. As for the rest, we'll keep trying new things. We're also breaking new ground this year. Finally enough room to grow that we can start fallowing 1/4 of it every year.

I'll be thinking of you, working out in the heat!

:ootd:

[Bugbear]

Oh, sorry, piperdbh. I'm talking about the Ironwood (Olneya tesota) of the Fabaceae family. It's a native of the Sonoran desert out here. It has cat-claw-like thorns, and makes a bean with an edible seed. Very, very dark brown, hard heart wood, and also, because of it's beanness, tends to fix nitrogen in the soil, and makes nice shade and so on and so on.

I don't think it's related to the one that grows back East.

And Old Hippie,

Most people, down here, plant tepary beans at the end of the rainy season, then almost don't irrigate them at all because with too much water they grow like crazy but don't make any beans. They're a bit chewy and tuff no matter how long you cook them, so you might consider milling them. Good luck.

[Bugbear]

Well, it looks like two of the native salt bushes we have out here are hosts to butterflies, other than the Monarch: Quail Bush (Atriplex lentiformis), and Four-Wing Salt bush (Atriplex canescens). I realized I just happen to have seeds for those in a re-vegetation mix. Those seeds happen to be easy to pick out from the rest of the seeds, they come all mixed up in a brown paper bag, so I have picked out and begun planting them. There's milkweed seeds in there too, but I can't tell which ones they are: very small. I might devote a strip of my property to planting the re-vegetation mix; there's grasses and other plants in the mix.

So I think that's the plan. It's a butterfly thing.

[Bugbear]

Ok, here's what I'm working on now. I have three abundances of organic material: spineless cactus pads, citrus peals, and shredded paper. The cactus goo is used, sometimes, as a binder in adobe, the orange peal is used as pectin jell, and shredded paper is sometimes recycled into paper.

So, I am experimenting with putting all three items into a blender with some water, liquefying them, then pouring the goo around my crops as a mulch; I also throw my coffee grounds and that stuff in there too. The goo hardens into a water permeable crust around the plants to keep the weeds out and do all the other stuff mulch does, and it brakes down into humus over time. I have tried all three separately and they did ok, but together, they seem to make a more flexible crust.

I'm thinking about experimenting with a variation of this for making soil blocks to start seedlings. For now, I'm just watching to see how this works out, and I might also try pouring the cactus/peal goo over wet shredded paper after packing it around some plants. I don't have a giant blender, so I am limited in how much goo I can make at a time.

Just thought I would report if anyone is interested.

And to bring this around to a subject that comes up in the accessories forum a lot, I felled one of my mesquite trees back in January. Not exactly the right season, but it will grow back with several new trunks; it had two.

I am thinking one of these may make a good cromach. Meanwhile, I have a good stick from a sour orange tree that I cut last year. It is dried now, no cracking or checking, and I plan to start carving on it at some point this year. There's a substantial fork at one end. Hopefully it will come out well, but I'm still looking it over to decide what to do.

[piperdbh]

You can use several (5-6) thicknesses of newspapers as much, too. Just surround each plant with the paper, lay some rocks or something else on it to hold the paper down, then wet it down to make it heavier. It should reduce your frequency of watering, which I imagine is a big concern in your neck of the woods.

[Bugbear]

You can use several (5-6) thicknesses of newspapers as much, too. Just surround each plant with the paper, lay some rocks or something else on it to hold the paper down, then wet it down to make it heavier. It should reduce your frequency of watering, which I imagine is a big concern in your neck of the woods.

Oh, ya, I doo that with the junk mail. I have had problems with the paper blowing away, no matter how many rocks I use, though.

Shredded paper locks or weaves together a bit better, but also, it's paper that I am supposed to shred, and I end up with a lot of it.

The other thing I do is in my back yard I let certain areas go fallow, as one should; however, I let the weeds that will grow have those sections. I don't irrigate those areas at that time, our hard water can cause hard pan very quickly, so growing a cover crop is not always the best solution. The weeds that will grow without water, usually have very long tap roots. At some point, I mow them down with a string trimmer etc. That leaves the roots in the ground as an organic material, and I leave the chopped up stuff where it falls.

When I reuse that area, I put down a layer of card board and build a raised bed garden, or, if the soil is doing all right, I poke a small "X" in the cardboard and plant through that. It is very effective, and very ugly, and that is why it is in my back yard. I have had to move my gardening to a side of my house, at least most of the gardening, so I now have to be a bit more careful with the "ugly" gardening. (I lost a winter garden bed because there isn't enough light there after last year... I've planted several deciduous fig trees in that patch as a temporary solution.) Setting up that milkweed buffer zone, which is about a quarter of my property, should help a little bit.


Hopefully, with the coffee grounds in it, this goo mulch looks a bit like dirt and it won't blow away.

[Bugbear]

Today, I harvested the first ear of blue maize, "Mt. Pima Maiz Azul," a flour corn, in my horticultural maze project that I brought up earlier in the thread. It's a very dark blue/black or darker than navy blue, I am told, and has a white kernel here and there, with a little green and purple on a few kernels. Yay! Maize has been being grown here in the Southwest for thousands of years, and part of the tradition is of selecting the best seeds (kernels) of the plants that have desirable characteristics, to then replant. Somehow this is innate in human behavior or culture, because it is a world-wide and ancient practice resulting in agricultural grains and domesticated animals, though it may also be that the gene pools of these crops are symbiotically domesticating us right back, going by the concept of the extended phenotype (Richard Dawkins).*

To top it off, I also planted beans and squash, sometimes called "the three sisters" in American garden lore, which are also traditional crops of North America, grown with maize. This was the earliest and best ear, and thankfully fully pollinated. My soil is horrible; I had to abandon my good growing beds, and the garden has to compete with mulberry tree roots for nutrients and water; the selection begins.

I plan to work with this variety and a few others, which I ordered from a native seed conservatory, for as long as I live out here or am able to keep the line going, and I won't be splicing in any spider genes either.

I have consulted a huge number of books, people, and information for the project, however, this is one of the neatest sources:

Gilbert L. Wilson, Buffalo Bird Woman's Garden: Agriculture of the Hidatsa Indians, new introduction by Jeffery R. Hanson (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, Reprn. 1987).
It is a Reprint of a University of Minnesota, 1917 publication, Agriculture of the Hidatsa Indians: An Indian Interpretation; now in the public domain and on line At Internet Archive, for example.
The seed conservatory I use is, native seeds search, in Tucson, Arizona

* Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene (New York: Oxford University Press, Revised ed., 1999).

[Pleater]

I caught a few minutes of TV yesterday and there was a program about growing potatoes in a desert using a non renewable reserve of prehistoric water.

There was not a plant for miles.

Beneath a sprinkler system which rotated once every 18 hours there was row after row of potatoes growing in the sand. The water was mixed with fertiliser and sprayed constantly.

The potatoes were beautiful - grown from imported Scottish seed, gathered up by hand and packed in peat brought from Ireland there are no pests, no diseases, so they are all organic.

It might make sense economically, but ecologically - crazy.

Anne the Pleater :ootd:

[Bugbear]

I caught a few minutes of TV yesterday and there was a program about growing potatoes in a desert using a non renewable reserve of prehistoric water.

There was not a plant for miles.

Beneath a sprinkler system which rotated once every 18 hours there was row after row of potatoes growing in the sand. The water was mixed with fertiliser and sprayed constantly.

The potatoes were beautiful - grown from imported Scottish seed, gathered up by hand and packed in peat brought from Ireland there are no pests, no diseases, so they are all organic.

It might make sense economically, but ecologically - crazy.

Anne the Pleater :ootd:

Pleater , that sounds a bit like the situation with the Ogallala Aquifer, kind of an enormous under ground water table, in the center of the U.S., that is being slowly used up.

It's been a long time since I grew potatoes. We do that in the Fall through Winter and early Spring out here.

I've been switching over to native and naturalized crops and plants over the last five or six years. For me, the maize selective breeding is easier to work with, hand-eye coordination wise. Plus, out here, I can grow a Spring, then Fall crop, rather than one a year, and speed up everything related to selection.

*** It's been a long time since I posted in this thread, and there is a little more to add. I am editing it in to this last post.

It's October 12, and I have a second crop of the blue maize that I planted back around the first of July. I had to plant these in a large container. One of the ears is approaching the stage where I could pick it, but I will leave them on the stalks on into the fall; the kernels need to dry down.

they responded very well to growing in compost and sharp sand, and I will be switching over to raised beds and containers with that mix for future plantings. The plants are shorter than the typical corn, about six feet, rather than ten feet tall. I have an abundance of seed to plant now, along with detailed records for each plant and ear to use in future plantings. And so the process begins. :d