Days of awe and wonder

The two Leucophyllum frutescens (often called Purple Sage orTexas sage though it’s technically not a sage) in the kerb appeal project are, briefly, a dazzle of purple blooms. With a very distinctive funky, musky scent this sudden spectacular flowering draws swarms of fuzzy buzzy pollinators. Carpe diem was never more apt.

With this hum of insect activity ringing in my ears, I inhale deeply of this special scent, feel it enter every cell of my body, on a recent morning, as I prepare garden beds and plant this season’s garlic under cloudless cobalt blue. Turtleback mountain supervises.

This year I have enough homegrown mulch to blanket the garlic. Straw from the cereal rye grown last cool season has been sitting in an untidy heap, escaping its assigned (too small) cardboard box alongside the driveway. Using the straw for mulch is reassuring. I’m not just a hoarder. There’s a purpose to the piles of biomass which periodically form around the garden. This little patch of desert produces so much stuff. Constantly. I wouldn’t have thought it capable of it a few years ago, in late 2018 when first we met.

 It’s taken a few years, but some systems are perhaps settling into place. While I would still love a good load of horse manure if I could find it, I am beginning to use kitchen food scrap compost from the bins outback, instead of purchased soil amendments for the areas which I’m preparing and planting now with cool season crops. Though I’m diligent about directing stuff into compost bins, it seems I’m not so good at anything after that. Maybe it’s the maintaining moisture part. There’s black crumbly stuff (good?), hard knobs of black mass which take some pounding, or soaking to render down and then unapologetically still wholly identifiable avocado pits and skins. It feels like I haven’t yet aced this compost thing. Any suggestions on hastening composting time for those slow to break down things like avocado pits and skins? While I can still afford them, avocados from Mexico are a huge part of my daily diet. It shows when I draw on the compost bins.

Other insects are not so loud as the bees as they go about availing themselves of the resources on offer in this Garden of Earthly Delight and in the process, unlike me, are proving to be excellent and fast recyclers of biomass into soil nutrients. I think this beautiful almost 4 inch long beastie, discovered recently on the Datura wrightii outback, is Manduca sexta the larval form of a Carolina Sphinx Moth/ Tobacco Hawk Moth, though I stand open to correction.

This green garden dragon is impressively efficient. In a day it had rendered the Lizard Lounge Madame Moonflower’s abundant foliage down to a sprinkling of impressively sized black caterpillar poop pellets which I shall sweep up and use to amend the soil alongside. Thank you, Madame Moonflower. Thank you, Green Garden Dragon. Thank you Carolina Sphinx Moth (if that’s who you are). Since I don’t grow or use tobacco, this scourge of tobacco farmers is welcome to join my community.

While my roommates various go about doing helpful stuff, supporting the health and wellbeing of this patch of earth, I begin my autumn pantry harvest. This year it’s mostly cowpeas, but also a few peppers are drying to spice up the cold days ahead.

The less said about the corn harvest, the better. Hopi blue corn was a dismal failure this year, yielding only a few, small, sparsely populated (poor fertilization) sad little cobs. Weather? Climate? Location? Poor nutrition ? I did worry about how stressed the plants looked during the summer weeks of exceedingly hot days and nights especially around flowering and tasseling. I found a number of agricultural research papers which tie poor pollination with very high temperatures.

I will get about half a cup from this year’s no milagro cornfield, which will translate into one pot, so maybe a few posole meals-for-one, if I go that route. Or a couple of batches of corn chapattis/**insert your culture’s name for flatbread. Sure, this is better than nothing, but next year I think I will dedicate the hot season garden real estate to tepary beans, Lima beans and cowpeas. These legumes are more robust in high temperatures and feed me so well. I just need to resolve the issue of who or what makes them disappear them just as they germinate.

Corn crop failure aside, I am eating well, with tasty garden offerings gracing every plate these days. Pomegranates season is here. My favourite salad of the moment is a spicy arugula and Asian mustard green mix with pomegranate and, if I’ve made it, dukkah. Ingredients for a lemon tahini dressing have to be sourced off site, but the bean cakes on this plate above include last season’s cowpeas and sorghum. My summer pickling and fermenting pursuits add delicious, colourful, gut biome supportive elements, to meals. Don’t you wish you were eating at my house today?

Picture was taken after the initial rush of bartering and early worm buying wherein fresh stuff flew off the table and a bunch of flowers and two of basil secured my Saturday morning feast of chocolate croissant and a cardamom cruffin (for later haha)

Spicy mustard greens have been so abundant, I’ve even been sharing at the farmers market alongside Italian and Thai basil and seed garlic.

I even made a free handout pamphlet on growing garlic in southern New Mexico for people buying seed garlic. Ever the librarian, I leaned heavily on the excellent county agricultural extension office brochures which are readily available in PDF form online, easily found in a search alongside a whole headache inducing amount of misleading clickbait slop which is the toxic mine tailings sludge of today’s garbage internet.

I dispair of the fate of two of my garlic bulbs which went to someone who told me they were going to try to grow them in water, harvest the flowers. Uuum these are soft neck garlic. No scapes with soft neck garlic. That’s why I made a helpful brochure. Generally no flowers with this variety of garlic, sir. Maybe, hopefully, I’m wrong and this person reeking of internet sludge will be successful.

Personally, I’ve never been fond of or drawn to aquaponics, especially not for a crop like garlic which is nurtured below the surface. I am too elementally earth for aquaponics and prefer putting plants into the actual earth, did not grow up calling it dirt which I consider an insulting term. I’m not even good at containers and have yet to master seed starting by methods other than direct sowing.

Not to be left out of the fiesta of colour, indigenous Helianthus maximiliani (Maximillian sunflowers) outback are currently in glorious butter yellow bloom. Given water, they are inclined to get a bit assertive about occupying space and some have completely obliterated the circles of ornamental iliums which I invested in a few years ago, on advice from the Last Emperor. I have told them what happened to the so-called Shasta daisies (plant nurseries in this country will sell you mislabeled plants. Often.) which tried to do the same thing under the apricot tree amongst the Iris germanica. The whole lot of invasive daisies got dug up and given to a neighbor up the road who has the best, most generous heart, magic hands on a machine but not much of a green thumb.

With a contained space such as this Garden of Earthly Delights, plants get harsh eviction notices if they show signs of turning from a single slip into a tightly matted cover in the space of a few years.

It’s not proving as easy to serve an eviction notice on the Felonious Feline who continues to evade capture and relocation efforts so continues to just hang around, inhabiting this space alongside me. I read them the response from consultation with an experienced international problem cat expert, including the inability to provide adequate health care to a wild domestic cat, the threat they pose to a fragile and very vulnerable desert fauna and flora ecosystem, and possible solutions up to professional culling.

FF feigns sleep before I am half way through, as if being a problem cat isn’t their problem.

“They are out of your league” I tell FF as the first huge honking vees of the winter migratory season pass overhead, forming and reforming as they adjust leadership.

“You malign me” says FF.

“Your goose is cooked,” say I.

Speaking of geese being cooked this weeks reading recommendation is a hard experience. Really hard. But essential

Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives. Siddharth Kara. 2023.

An excellent piece of investigative journalism, including history and extensive field research in highly dangerous conditions, this is about mining in the Congo - the source of almost all the world’s cobalt whose main use is for rechargeable lithium batteries. Takeaways: There is no clean cobalt. The device you are reading this on is tainted with unimaginable humanitarian and environmental horrors, no matter what the end manufacturer says in the corporate profile. The apocalypse is now. We are officially ALL party to this particular heart of darkness. Our goose is collectively cooked. Greed and avarice are fueling the conflagration.

After reading this book I’m even less sure that electric vehicles are the solution.

Might as well revisit that other book of unspeakable horror based on another author’s experiences in the same geographical region. As if literature can make a difference.

Heart of Darkness. Joseph Conrad. 1899.

Or if we are going total immersion in the horror (why not, it beats paying attention to certain mundane realities for some of us at this moment in time) rewatch Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 Apocalypse Now.

Me? I’ve got a paddle needs dipping in water. Let it go. Let it flow.