A Mulch Mystery

With the digging completed, I planted the Three Sisters triad using seed varieties from Native Seed Search. The Yuman Yellow corn was started indoors three weeks ago, and then transplanted. They seems to be thirstier than I expected, taking time to acclimate. Just over the weekend, I planted O' Odham Vayos common beans. They popped up and put out two pairs of real leaves almost overnight, like Jack's magic beans. If they keep up this scorching pace, they might overtake and overwhelm the corn stalks!  I've started Dark Star zucchini to be the third sister, under the partial shade of my living mulch. 

Over the winter I let my plots go fallow to be overtaken by all the dominant herbal species that I had innocently planted: chocolate mint, "best" mint, catnip, lavender, parsley, and last but not least, a mystery plant, the dominant weed of my back yard. What makes it a dominant weed?  It's just a (native or naturalized) plant growing where it's perfectly suited, but totally unwanted. This one had certainly taken over a part of the back yard, poking up through the crushed rock, proliferating everywhere there's moisture, sipping at the landscaping drip irrigation. There aren't any specimens of this plant outside the boundaries of my backyard wall. Like dandelions, it's got terrific tap roots! The above-ground part of the plant breaks off leaving the buried root to send up more greenery. It's irritating as a weed, but a garden workhorse if the roots are allowed to dig into heavy clay soil, and the foliage is allowed to shade the roots of the wanted plant, acting like a nurserymaid plant. The foliage is lacy and attractive as weeds can be.  They form a continuous fluffy layer of green 10" high. I don't remember ever seeing any blossoms, but there must have been some in order to propagate so broadly, so readily.  

Last year's sunflowers have also been propagating across the yard from their original flowerbed, but haven't made it to the vegetable plots yet. I'm told that sunflowers are sometimes called a Fourth Sister for their help in attracting bees to pollinate the corn. They are welcome, and even deserve being planted directly!  (Note to myself - go plant some sunflowers in the corners of the plots.)  In the meantime, the composite living mulch is shielding new carrots and the golden offspring of last year's marigolds, by keeping soil moisture from evaporating in the 90 deg (nearly 100 deg) Arizona temperature.  Green, yellow and orange bell peppers have been planted in mini-clearings and the yellow and orange tomato varieties will go in as those seedlings develop. Has anyone ever had a pale pink Georgia Peach tomato? Come by my house in a few months and maybe you'll taste it for yourself! 

A Perennial Vegetable Garden

I haven't written anything in a while, Easter being a very busy time of year. But now we're in May and the weather is right for planting.

It's amazing how the clay soil becomes increasingly workable with daily watering.  I am very grateful for no-till gardening which is keeping my top soil from blowing away on these windy days. The recent wind gusts have thrown all sorts of garden debris around, but plentiful soil moisture remains 5 inches below the ground. Soil is the best place to store water where deep healthy roots will be able to access it.  Most days I haven't had to water the older beds, the lush ground cover of parsley, mint, catnip, lavender, as well as "backyard weeds" has kept the soil in the old plots moist and friable.  

Japanese permaculturist Masanobu Fukuoka wrote in his books: "One Straw Revolution" and "Sowing Seeds in the Desert" about his technique of using white clover as a perennial no-till cover crop.  Whenever he needed to plant new crops, he would remove a plug of white clover and insert the new seeds or seedlings, pat it down and repeat.  His hillside plots, unlike mine, have been developed for decades, but I'm sure his techniques as well as those of other permaculturists will benefit my garden, however long mine lasts.

My backyard garden expansion is nearly done.  The area looks so much better now that I've straightened out the old plot boundaries skewed since created a  year ago. A new raised bed has been planted with native sweet corn in a 3x4 pattern. I've started heirloom yellow-orange tomato seeds indoors and the bean plants will be sown around the corn.  The squash will go in last. The soil in all of the beds has been treated with beneficial nematodes which I'm hoping will prevent last year's crop failures from grubs and other garden pests. 

My experimental plants the Moringa oleifera and the Malabar spinach have arrived and the spineless cactus too!  The Malabar spinach does taste like mild spinach, but it needs to grow much more before the leaves can be harvested. The moringa tree is starting its growing season - I think it's grown an inch over the last week and can be expected to grow 3 feet in a single season. The tree grows well in the tropics, is said to be nutritious; the drumstick pods are edible and they are used to purify water.  

The almond tree finally got planted in late March after a lengthy root detangling session (almost more roots than soil)! The next morning it looked so much happier, it seemed to have leafed out overnight with several almond fruits already visible. 

Everywhere new leaves and new life show themselves. A dove has been trying to build a nest in the lamp bowl of the patio fan, so we are keeping the fan blades turning to dissuade our avian visitor.    Wildflowers are showing up in abundance. The apricot mallows hug the walls outside the back yard, they love the reflected sun warmth and the small amount of drip moisture that seeps under the wall. 

Vernal wonder

Over Holy Week, the weather has been mild, about 70-80's, great for gardening. The wildflowers around my home have been increasingly joyful.
 
The creosote has now burst into tiny bright yellow blossoms, and when you take some leaves and crush them between your fingers, you get the scent of fresh desert rain. The wonder of spring bursting out is experienced anew each year. The plants that the winter frost turned into dry sticks put out new verdant growth, as exuberant as if they had waiting and waiting for a start signal. In their own ways the leaves and petals burst out from the buds, and seem to race one another in their eagerness to face the sun and the rowdy breezes.

Digging a forest garden

In between the Palm Sunday activities, the weather is wonderful and my springtime gardening plans crystalize. I will plant heirloom (non-red) tomatoes, so my homemade pasta sauce will be bright and tasty! My Bell and New Mexican peppers grew well last year, and my experimental tepary bean crop was fantastically good. My hope is to extend organic annuals such as these to include perennial food crops in an edible forest ecology.  
The concept that I am aiming for is that of edible forest gardens, with overstories, understories, shrubs, herbs, groundcovers, all mutually supporting. A familiar example on a small scale are the Native American "Three Sisters" - corn to provide scaffolding, beans to enrich the soil, and squash to shade the roots and crowd out weeds.  A fourth sister Cleome serrulata  "Rocky Mountain bee-plant" attracts bees to pollenate all the blossoms and itself provide edible leaves, flowers, seeds, and roots.

Besides these traditional crops, I will try native Opuntia ellisiana "spineless prickly pear", 
Cnidoscolus chayamansa "tree spinach" or "chaya",  and Moringa oleifera "moringa" or "drumstick tree".  
I plan to expand the raised bed area with minimal disturbance to the existing plantings and the soil.  Extending two adjacent square plots along their common sides and excavating the space between them would create  a  4' x 12' raised bed with an existing Nandina ("Heavenly Bamboo") in the middle sharing space with the catnip, mints and other herbs.  Further excavating a second row would create a  4' x 8' raised bed with a 2' wide path between the two rows for access. 
A stronger digging shovel, a pinch point bar, soil tester and a wheelbarrow and we have begun!  

Sowing wildflowers

Happy Spring Equinox! A week ago, spring definitely came bursting in as the frosts vanished as abruptly as they had come. Yellow flowers suddenly appeared on a shrub against a east-facing wall, while its fellow on a south-facing wall was still only dried twigs. Lantana along a west-facing wall was re-sprouting, while the standalone ones were frost-damaged twigs. The microclimates at my place were becoming quite evident! A new carpet of mysterious sprouts had appeared in the parsley-scallion patch - what could they be? Tombstone roses were sending out new shoots while the Trees for Tucson trees were clearly alive but had neither leaf buds nor leaves.

Today, the Desert Willows from Trees from Tucson are sprouting green at their base.  I aerated their soil and put wire fencing around the trunks to guard against nibbling rabbits. The carpet of mysterious sprouts are identifying themselves as the children of the Vanilla Ice sunflowers planted last fall and permitted to self-seed. They are truly everywhere, poking out from the veggies plot, between the landscaping pebbles and somehow even transported over the gate into the front yard (by wind or shoes, I imagine).  Perhaps they can be transplanted to yet other nooks. 

As Angelina and I hiked along the wash this afternoon, I looked at all the native plants with new eyes.  What grows is adapted to its location; what doesn't should be planted elsewhere.  If not in full sun, then partial sun or shade.  Later, following the advice of my gardening books, I excavated berms and water channels on the southwest side of the house and broadcast wildflower seeds over the area.  Like the farmer who sowed his seed, I'll watch to see what comes up from this. I am struck by the parallels between the parable of the farmer and the sustainable gardening books I've been reading over the last year or two: "Sowing Seeds in the Desert", "Gaia's Garden", "Desert or Paradise". There's the same awareness of earth, sun and water in Biblical times as now, everywhere over the globe. 

Gardening Practice

Jim and I had moved to Arizona from Santa Barbara, a place where outdoor ficus could grow three stories tall, cutting off the light to the upstairs bedrooms, and front yard poinsettias grew ten feet tall, blooming their heads off in season or out.  Coming from this experience, we planted trumpet vines, landinas,  citrus trees, and various ground covers to round out the prickly pear, agaves, mesquite, palo verde and saguaro on our property. They initially did well, although in no way shooting up as explosively as in Central Coast California. We thought we would learn from our gardening mistakes exactly which plants worked best and where.
That first summer, I planted tomatoes and vincas in a patch of yard that I commandeered. The vincas sprouted bright light blossoms in profusion.  The tomatoes grew well, flowered, fruited.  Surprisingly, no worms found the tomato plants, but every other garden pest did. I built wire cages with progressively smaller mesh fencing, until I could no longer reach in to harvest my tomatoes; but alas, the snakes had no problem at all.  The second summer, I planted in earthen pots, and raised thusly above the ground, the tomatoes did fine. The third summer, I was pre-occupied with the community garden for our church pantry, and experiments with local seeds in my garden pots. Did you know that carrots when transplanted put their energy into developing incredible Rip-van-Winkle-class beards! But broccoli plants gone to seed make a beautiful arrangement.

The winter of 2012-2013, has been experiencing some abnormally cold nights with hard freezes. The first spell lasting three or four nights in succession took me by surprise. I did not realize that the late fruiting tomatoes would be transformed into ice cubes even when the plants themselves were covered up. The citruses were next. They had never recovered from the first frost three winters ago, the new foliage that came each spring and summer couldn't make up the losses from the freeze. This despite placing yard lights under the frost covers and large rocks to radiate heat captured during the day. The lemon tree fared a bit better, so perhaps it was its location in the windiest part of the backyard that doomed the orange tree.  Between wintertime frosts and summertime grasshoppers and orange dog caterpillars, what's a citrus to do?  In the meantime the almond is flowering and demanding to be put into the ground. Its fragrance is heady and we will plant it once spring is officially here.