The long field season, part I

I laughed to myself looking at the date and the last sentence of my last post...May 14th, "I'm going to get some more time in the garden between field work stints." Right. Instead it has been trip after trip after trip after trip...there was that month in July where I stayed home, then that head injury in Mexico thing...and then back in the field. Again. Again. Again. Got to see a lot of territory and a lot of beautiful plants and landscapes, some recovering immediately from fire, some dry in a three-year drought, and even some with rain. Here are some of the panoramas I've been working on, I'll work backward from the present so you can see where I've been.

Big Bend National Park, Texas:
I got asked to go with the Chihuhuan Desert Network crew to sample some tinajas (persistent pools of water in stone basins) for eight days in early November. The trip was into an area in the extreme western portion of the park called Mesa de Anguilla. We had a pack train that carried a lot of our gear in, which made for a pretty luxurious backcountry trip, and got to hike about 25-30 miles around this really beautiful place. Here are some highlights:

Morning of our first day in Big Bend, sunrise lighting the Chisos Mountains. Wow.

This is our campsite. We didn't see anyone for six days outside of a group of border patrol agents on the first day right near the trailhead.
This is Joseph and our mules making my back feel so so much better.

This is a view of Bruja Canyon, if you move right to left upcanyon...in the distance the mountains on the right are the Chisos Mountains about fifteen air miles away. We hiked from the middle of the image all the way out to the left.

This is looking down Bruja Canyon, in the photo above, this is the portion of the canyon that is on the right half, this is what it looks like from the rim of the canyon.

This is the way to get from the top photo to the bottom photo in Bruja Canyon. No, there are not really trails, and yes that is my co-worker in the photo...

Hiking in upper Bruja we ran across this full Nautilus fossil, which is about eight inches across and like 120 million years old.

A couple days later we hiked to a place called Tinaja Rana, this is a photo stitch of about seven photos, but it gives you a sense of how shear the limestone cliffs and how sketchy all the climbs down to check out the tinajas actually were...needless to say we didn't get into this one...
The last full day in the backcountry a really rare low front went right over us. Rare because it has not really rained in West Texas in something like three years. We didn't get much beyond slick rock that was treacherous to walk on and a beautiful smell of parched desert rain.
The storm as it rolled in...

Then we woke to the most crystalline blue sky.

Our last evening we came out of the backcountry and went to a campsite that was directly north of the Chisos Mountains where the sun setting was really that red.

Big Bend is way out there. The nearest major city is El Paso, 360+ miles away. It is in a county the size of Maryland (Brewster) and there are about 9,000 people in the entire county. The nearest town of any size is Alpine with like 6,000? You look out into Chihuahua to the south and there is nothing there either. You are way out there. It is like the Grand Canyon in its vistas but it is just so far out there. The last night we were there I could see the Crab Nebula with the naked eye, along with so so many meteors from the Leonids. There were huge ones and even the most delicate wisps of green and red light, so minor you would never see them if you weren't in Big Bend. So dark and so clear. Beautiful. And then there are the plants.

Like Hechtia texensis, in the Pineapple family. There were a few beautiful plants blooming, eight flowers in total over the entire time. It is a little dry out there. But I was reminded of how magnificent the planet is and how remarkable all these evolutionary wonders are and how much I really really like botany.

Ariocarpus fissuratus, known as living rock because it looks like a rock. The plant is three inches across and disappears under the ground when there is a drought. This is the only flower we saw of it, which always blooms in November. The flower is about 1.5 inches across. You usually step on the plant before you see it is there...

More to come...

The Garden a year on.

It is generally curious to me that the seasonality of growing food in the desert is so terribly off from everywhere else I've grown. By that, I mean the ability to more or less continually maintain a garden throughout the year with appropriate crop selection. It makes for a really enjoyable winter season when everything else is dead. It really throws you off, especially when you have essentially three growing seasons a year. You plant in early spring, the monsoons, and late fall. And if you don't have a deep freeze you start harvesting in February from the late fall, late May from the early spring, and then October from the monsoon planting, a rolling bounty. Now that the soil is finally getting repaired and I've had a chance to cover crop and get a lot of organic matter in the soil it is beginning to show signs of life. Growing without any pesticides or herbicides requires patience, it is a really slow process of building up the system's resilience.

But as I discovered this year, the deep freezes happen in La Nina years, and not only do they hit the sensitive annual crops, they hammer the trees too. The toll from this year: both Mexican limes died, the Tangelo is now less than a foot tall and resprouting, the entire eleven foot lemon dropped its leaves and is now struggling at four feet but resprouting throughout and I saw flower buds on it today. The grapefruit/blood orange is also a foot tall, but resprouting. The pomegranate? Totally fine. Going to plant a lot more of those, easy to deal with. Citrus is a weenie tree: at least the lemons and limes are. Even lost a mesquite in the center of the garden. Guess it's time to replace that one too. Here's a simple annual shot comparison to show where the garden has come in a year. Here's the link to the original post of pictures from the beginning to August last year for reference. The first is one of my first panoramas taken on May 7, 2010. The second is taken on May 11, 2011. And so it grows...

May 7, 2010

May 11, 2011

Roster of what's in the ground for this year:
Tomatoes: San Marzano romas, Oaxacan Pink, Thai Pink Egg, Punta Banda
Carrots: Scarlet and Belgian White
Tohono O'odham yellow meated watermelon
Satsuki Midori cucumbers
Tepary beans
Uncle Joe's basil
Mrs. Burns lemon basil
Fordhook zucchini
Hopi Melon
Lacinato kale
Hopi white posole corn
fennel
I'itoi onions
parsley
chiltipines
Yankee Red Bell peppers
Nambe green chile
Texas Hill country red okra
celosia
Mexican saffron: Azufran
Pima brown lentils (admittedly struggling this late)
Pulpa de Milpa tomatillo
potato (single volunteer)
dill
San Juan dipper gourd

So we'll see how this goes...Stay tuned, now that schools out and I'm getting the ability to breathe back after my pneumonia, I'm going to get some more time in the garden between field work stints.