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.