Gather ye rosebuds

A pungency of garlic, the stinking rose, has been gathered in now. After curing a week or two, this year’s harvest was cleaned outback in Cafe Paradiso in the cool of a recent dawn. The stalks and root trimmings are laid aside for mulch for next year’s planting.

The 12-15 lbs of garlic which now sit in baskets bringing their distinctive odor to the gathering room isn’t my best ever harvest, nothing like the first year grown outback in areas amended with beautiful horse manure, but, none the less, it’s satisfying to have gathered this season’s main market crop in.

A selection of midsized bulbs are being offered each week now on my farmers market table. I’ve reserved several pounds of the biggest bulbs for replanting or selling as seed garlic in October and November. Apparently I am the first market vendor to harvest and bring garlic to the market this year, but, as far as I know, no one else is growing this Inchelium Red soft neck artichoke variety on the scale which I do even though I’ve given away, for free, a lot of bulbs for planting in this community over the past few years. I’m coming to realize that, in the USA, if no dead presidents (money) are exchanged, most people do not attach much value to an item, do not recognize the gift of potential for nurturing one’s own future nourishment, whether it be in the form of garlic bulbs or actual seeds.

I guess what I’m fumbling to say is that it seems to me that the vast majority of people in this country, even if they call themselves “nature lovers” or farmers or gardeners, have lost real, authentic contact with the earth and how to sustain a worthy life in a non capitalist paradigm.

While the garlic should be available now throughout the rest of the summer, unless I make Korean pickled garlic with too much of it, the ever popular herbal teas will not feature for much longer. I can feel the more tender plants hunkering down, preparing for a few months of heat induced dormancy. Already calendula, possibly my most popular herbal tea pack, are looking decidedly skuzzy, done for the season after recent days, stretching now into weeks of of 100 degrees plus (40 C and higher) temperatures.

With the heat, potatoes have all been dug. I didn’t plant a lot so this entire around 5 lb harvest of Adirondack Blues is all for me. I am enjoying these lovely purple earth apples just simply sliced and steamed, or grated to become potato pancakes. This cultivar, though probably better suited to cooler climates, doesn’t lose colour in cooking, and thus makes a very imperial purple anthocyanin rich contribution to the rainbow on my plate.

Having done some research into when cereal rye is ready to harvest, I decided to call time on this beautiful golden swathe of wind dancers just outside my bedroom window. Those stems do mostly look yellow, don’t they? One resource said one could tell by colour of stalks. I want the space for sowing Christmas Lima beans anyway.

While I work out how best to get the little rye grains from their very pretty, feathery packaging, the gathering room has bunches of rye drying in a multiplicity of containers populating every surface. Along with herbal teas and other seeds, mostly coriander, laid out variously for drying, its getting busy in there.

Most online resources I have found seem to address harvesting of cereal rye on a scale much bigger than my little cottage (shala) garden enterprise. They talk of using harvesting machinery. I’m kinda still pre-industrial revolution in my gardening methodology.

Chile harvest is just beginning. The first yellow Sante Fe Grande guero peppes, a cultivar with almost no heat, were added fresh to a Haitian pikliz inspired dish. I purchased two plants by accident thinking they were someone else, because they were sitting behind a label for a hotter cultivar. I only realized when I came to plant them out that they had been misplaced. That’s what you get from shopping in the garden section of an indifferent big box store, but it’s the best I have available in this town. Maybe it’s a sign that I need to get acquainted with some other members of the vast pepper family instead of just growing what I know year after year.

In Cafe Paradiso, the first fruit on a poblano (ancho) pepper plant is ripening alongside a proliferation of swelling Rutgers tomatoes.

Last year the Rutgers tomato plant was the only one to survive my mid summer abdication of watering duties, due to roadtripping and visiting friends on the west coast. I can’t believe it’s almost a year since that lovely adventure.

And here we are, Cafe Paradiso a veritable jungle of fruiting and flowering.

Sadly though it’s also fire season. Recent mornings have been hazy with that fire-season filtered sunlight and pungent, choking smoke from wildfires currently burning in the Gila National Forest just to the west of me. Several places I like to play in areas around Mimbres, Lake Roberts and including sections of the Continental Divide through hiking trail have been evacuated or access roads closed. The extreme heat (10 degrees above average for this time of year), very dry conditions and wind are combining to make for very hazardous fire season conditions. Again.

The outback is lush and green, though. Thanks to regular watering, the grapevine didn’t get the drought memo

I stand under the fig, eating these incredibly sweet treats straight from the tree, greedily, hastily, daring the birds to get there before me.

On the west side, one Santa Rosa plum tree set no fruit and the other has five plums.

After a character in a murder mystery novel I read recently (Lisa See: Flower Net. 1997) kept offering pickled sour plums, I researched recipes for Chinese pickled plums then harvested my slightly bird pecked five plums one morning. As the somewhat famous professor of literature whom I once upon a fairytale time, had the good fortune to study under, liked to say: “Literature leads one into life”.

This Weeping Santa Rosa plum tree, besides providing plums and a pleasant view from the kitchen window, is meant to be providing screening from the street. Obviously the young sapling is at this stage no match for the behemoth of a house on wheels aka Recreational Vehicle, which has taken up residency in the street this summer.

Talking of taking up occupancy, the barn swallow roommates seem to be exhibiting sitting on eggs behaviours. I’m no orthinological expert, but there could be baby birds some time in the next few weeks. Fingers crossed. I continue to avoid using the front porch too much, to give them as much peace as possible given the ever present, prowling neighborhood cats and all.

Japanese eggplant fruit are swelling. It will be a few weeks yet, I am thinking.

Pomegranates are a few months away, (if they don’t succumb to a virus like last year) but are showing promise. I love everything about these quirky desert denizens.

Just in time to greet last week’s full moon, Madame Moonflower (Datura wrightii) unfurled her cigars into magnificent bloom.

How can one not be enchanted when living alongside this magical, mysterious, oh so gracious floral being.

Recommended Reading:

American Oasis, Finding The Future In The Cities Of The Southwest by Kyle Paoletta. 2025 “An expansive and revelatory historical exploration of the multicultural, water-seeking, land-destroying settlement of the most arid corner of North America, arguing that in order to know where the United States is going in the era of mass migration and climate crisis we must understand where the Southwest has already been” (from the author’s website)

I am currently absolutely besotted with this book, lying under the ticking ceiling fan on these hot hot afternoons, reading and rereading sections, going back and forth, reluctant to close it and move on.

I suspect, even if you don’t live smack dab in the middle of his subject map, this New Mexican author has something to say in this book.

My only gripe is that the person who performs the audiobook does not have an authentic New Mexican accent when reading the Spanish language bits. New Mexican Spanish and Spanglish is very distinctive and it’s everywhere in this enchanted land. The performer’s rendering of the language offends my ear at time. Ah! the intolerance of the local.

Local. There. I used the “l” word. I realized recently that, since moving into this shala in 2019, this is the longest time I have lived in one place, in the same house that is, for over fifty years, since leaving my childhood home for university at 16 years of age.

My biography is characterized by a restlessness, a perpetual uprooting, which habits I still find hard to break. Though I love the needy and ramshackle old shala, and this little piece of enchanted land which I have been given to tend, and have a million lifetimes still of projects, some in progress, some still only in concept stage, there’s always part of me wondering about wandering, imagining being somewhere else.

Can the mutable, inscrutable Tao of sacred datura unfurling alongside me, be all I need?

Sometimes. Maybe.

Powered by moonflower.

Gather ye Rose-buds while ye may,

Old Time is still a-flying:

And this same flower that smiles to day,

To morrow will be dying.

Robert Herrick. 1648.