Fingerling Potatoes

Chitting in the front window

Potatoes should generally go into the ground around May 1st in this region, but I'm still going to plant a late crop of three different types of fingerling potatoes. They should be ready for the farmers' market by mid-August. Harder to find than regular potatoes (still available @ the Holiday Nursery), I ordered 15 lbs. of the Russian Banana, La Ratte, and Rose Finn fingerling potatoes from Peaceful Valley Farm Supply.

First glimpse of light

They cost the steep price of $4.99/lb, but should return quite a bit of that at the market. After receiving a tightly packed box from the growers in Colorado, I began chitting (pre-sprouting) the potatoes by placing them upright in empty planting trays and exposing them to medium light. Normally you would avoid allowing potatoes to green (the color denotes the bitter alkaloids found in the greenery of all members of the nightshade family), but in seed potatoes it helps them get a quicker start once they get in the ground. Something I need, planting at the beginning of June. I'll plant these in a 25x4' row with 3 sandy soil filled trenches in the natural clay soil of the row. Then I'll try not to overwater them, and fend off the grasshoppers with Nolo bait. Fingers crossed.

Radishes, Spinach, and Onions @ the Co-op

Co-op delivery waiting on the front stoop

Today I learned the Gallup Farmers' market opens on July 10th of this year. Quite a bit later than I was expecting. I was planning on it opening in June so now I'll have a fair bit more produce to sell to the La Montanita Co-op during the early season-- the first snow peas are already flowering. Just in time for a 25 degree night!! Ahhh. Blanket brigade tonight.

I'm getting hung up think months ahead. Just this afternoon I harvested 2.5 lbs of large green onions, 2.5 lbs of bright red radishes, a decent basket of long leaf spinach (oh, it's so sweet), and another ubiquitous basket of baby salad greens. It should be on the co-op shelves by today.

More Spring Greenery

Young Scarlet Nantes carrot

Long leaf spinach planted in early April

Shiitake mushroom left to its own devices

Shallots grow with many more leaves than onions or garlic

Radishes growing amongst the lettuce

Food Miles

Sadly I drove this basket to market instead of pedaling

Much of the food selection we have available to us at the supermarket is determined by the practical reality of how and when that food gets to the market. I can now empathize a little more with the growers of those thick-skinned cherry tomatoes and unripe bananas. The problem I'd been struggling with was how to get my lettuce to the Co-op in the freshest condition. Cutting lettuce when it's cold (ie. in the early morning) is much preferable to cutting it during the heat of the day (when I get home from work); it won't wilt as quickly and it's sweeter. I generally leave for work by 7 and the co-op doesn't open until 10. Consequently, I was hesitant to bring more to market.

A serendipitous encounter with the manager of the Co-op at the RMCHS Health Fair (I can't believe one of the main attractions is candy at each booth!?!; Gallup Trails 2010 passed out maps instead!) yesterday solved that. Clearly dedicated to providing Gallup with fresh, healthy, local food, she immediately offered to meet me early in the morning several hours before the store opens when hearing of my concern. And so, there I was a few minutes ago in the crisp morning air cutting the first harvest of my baby red and green lettuce mix-- grown under bed sheets at first, and now under the low tunnel. Cutting a 2'x 2' area of the bed nearly filled half of a bushel basket. I'll also bring down green onions and some radishes later this afternoon.

Not surprisingly, I'm not the only one starting to make a few dollars growing food at home. Check out this LA Times article, Backyard gardens become income generators in lean times.

Container Crops

Containers awaiting soil and seed

So, sometimes I awake at 1 in the morning panicking that I haven't brought in the flats of transplants or handful of containers susceptible to the precipitous nighttime lows of a clear spring night. Most often it's a well placed emotion and i'll don my favorite Patagonia 'dirtbag' jacket and a pair of Crocs and then spend the next 5-15 minutes carrying flats inside or spreading bed sheets over sprouting rows in the sharply cooling night air.

Container Tomatoes

The most strenuous of these middle of the night tasks is carrying in the 5-gallon containers of cherry tomatoes. While strong fingers and back are a pre-requisite for repeatedly carrying 40 lbs. of damp soil around the house past midnight, I've found the determining factor is mustering the gumption to get out of a warm bed. Sometimes I gamble and stay in bed. I've been lucky this year. And yet despite the up-front costs, the benefits of starting some tomatoes and peppers early in containers will come with time. The key is both are perennials in their natural environment and moving large containers of soil around the yard and house, while cruel to the back, effectively simulates theyear-round growing season. And, oh, their so tasty when the first snow starts to fall in November.

Life is the best art: uneaten thai peppers

I've grown cherry tomatoes and thai hot peppers in containers for the past two years (they also grow better in the ground), and brought the fruiting fall plants inside to my classroom. The harvest continued well through October, but I only let the students sample one of the two fruits. The latter being hotter than fire, and so damn pretty I couldn't bear to uproot the plant or harvest the pods (I also had a ton of outdoor grown thai red peppers already preserved). Numerous varieties of peppers and tomatoes have been selected to excel in the confined root space of a large container and offer a great low-cost season extender for anyone with large south-facing window and some commitment. I've read numerous accounts of digging up and transplanting different pepper varieties at the end of the summer to keep through the winter and then transplant again as well developed plant. I've yet to try it. Maybe this year. Another weird container planting concept is the upside-down hanging containers for tomatoes and other indeterminate vining perennials. Check out this recent NY Times article, Growing Vegetable Upside Down. The technique seems to have some salient attributes in certain circumstances like gardens with limited space and problems with soil-borne pests.

Hanging Hops

The tallest vine is 23"

The historically famous hop growing regions of the world are found around latitude 48, where long summer day-length allows vines to quickly grow upwards of 20' tall. By contrast, Gallup lies around latitude 35, with considerably shorter summer days. Despite this hops can still be grown here. To compensate for the shorter days I've placed my hops in a full sun location and found they grow well even in the summer heat as long as they get tons of water. Second only to very rich and wet soil, I've found the key to having healthy vines is limiting wind damage to the vines and leaves. While frost tolerant, very cold temperatures below 27 degrees, can also hurt early growth.

Rigging up the trellis

After selecting the most vigorous vines to grow to maturity (the others are trimmed and this year I'm experimenting with transplanting the clippings- so far they seem to be taking), they need to be trained around a sturdy, tall, and taught trellis. Professional hop growers use 18' coconut coir twine, known for its strength and rough texture, for the trellis. I just use cotton twine tied to a 13' ponderosa pole. This year I was a week or two late rigging up the trellis, and a strong wind storm seemed to damage most of the leaves on the vines that had already grown to 2' in length. They seem to be recovering well and I hope to have a decent hop harvest in September.

Low Tunnel Season Extenders

The low tunnel with sides vented open

I'm so excited about my new low tunnels, a small inexpensive version of a green house or hoop house. They'll serve dual purposes: warming the beds on cool nights and either warming or cooling during the day, depending on which crops they cover. The greens and peas will be kept cooler by opening up the side of the tunnels to vent out the heat and shaded by the 85% light transmission of the fabric. Tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers will be kept warm day and night by venting the sides less.

The baby lettuce and spinach crop should be ready for the 1st farmers' market of the season

The key ingredient was purchasing a 250' roll of 83" wide (almost 7') row cover fabric called Agribon 19. The extremely light synthetic fabric lets light, water, and air through to the plants but does retain enough heat to provide 4 degrees of frost protection on cold nights. To build a 25' low tunnel I used 3/4" plastic PVC pipes spaced at 30" (10 pipes covers 25' and costs around $18. The pipes are bent and fastened to wooden poles (with electrical conduit straps)that run the length of the bed. Once my pipes retain some of their bent shape with time, I may try the more traditional method of inserting the ends of the PVC into pre-drilled holes in the soil. The fabric is then spread over the frame and the two ends are pulled tight and fastened with rope to a deeply driven stake. At this point the fabric will hold it's place (vented open or closed) in up to moderate wind. But we don't get just moderate wind around here so I'm going to run a piece of string or cord over each hoop, trapping the fabric between the string and the pipe. Sandbags will also be used to weight the fabric down when needed. On days when extreme wind is forecast, I'll just slide the fabric completely to one side of the hoops, and bunch it up against the ground with a heavy weight on the top; why fight the wind with nearly transparent fabric. The final cost for each tunnel breaks down this way: fabric $6; pipes $18; pipe fasteners $3; string and screws $3.

Spring Starts Indoors

If all of life were this simple: soil+seed+water= life

Do we really learn from lessons of the past? In terms of gardening in the high desert, it seems the 'lessons' to be learned are endless, and each situation is just different enough from those of the past to leave me guessing anew each time. The catalyst for this line of thought runs deeper than these little pots, but it does intersect with these huge squash seeds-- after starting 9 flats of various squash, I reconsidered and wished I had waited and started them straight in the soil. Hindsight is 20/20, huh?

Waiting to be tucked in

A few years ago I started tomatoes, peppers, and various herbs inside in mid-February. 6 flats stayed warm, and then illuminated by 3, 4' fluorescent shop lights. All but the peppers grew into respectable starts. However, keeping starts alive in your kitchen for 4 months before they can be planted in early June is far from ideal. Each day I would shuffle the flats around the house seeking the best natural light, and daily misting from above and weekly soakings from below kept the roots healthy. Did I mention this continued for 4 long, long months! In the end they all transplanted well and I had no problems with the starts being root-bound. So this year I'm applying the lessons learned from that year, and I waited until the first week of May to start my seeds; it seems a little late.

A new era?: plastic protects the floor. Ha.

This year I'll have to buy my tomato and pepper starts. The former taking too long to start now, and the latter never grew beyond the second set of leaves in my cold house and inadequate lighting. To start the thyme, basil, cucumbers, and squash I used the seed starting mix recommended by the nursery, Fertilome's Ultimate Potting Mix. It's an extremely fine mix of peat and compost with no wood products in it (great for dealing with very small fragile seed starts), and it completely lived up to its strong recommendation.

immature 'food' on the kitchen table

In the past I've also struggled with how dense the planting media should be when starting seeds. Too dense and the roots seem to start slowly and prone to damping off or rotting. Too loose and the roots get damaged when transplanting as the soil falls apart as you pull the plant from the plastic 6-pack. My technique this year was loosely fill each 6-pack to the brim with soil. Then I carefully banged each 6 pack on the floor which uniformly packed the soil in each cell, leaving an inch of free space at the top. I then pressed each seed onto the top of soil. Depending on seed type (bigger seeds are buried deeper), I filled the remaining space in each cell back up with more uncompacted, fluffy potting mix. Unlike, many cheaper brands of soil that are very dry coming out of the bag, the Fertilome mix was already moist when I bought it, but it still needed to be wetted after planting the seeds. Rather than watering from above which compacts all of the fluffy mix around the seeds, I placed each flat in my utility sink filled with warm water for 20-30 seconds. The potting mix wicked up water from below, wetting the soil and seeds perfectly, but not collapsing the delicate soil structure. Finally I covered each flat with plastic wrap and placed them in the warmest part of my cold dusty cottage. After 4 days the emergence began with the warmest cucumber flats and has continued steadily over the past 2 weeks as each seed variety comes up for light.

'Wild' Mint

Mint, meet Sandstone

I like to think of any plant that reproduces in the garden without my help as 'wild.' Onions are the ubiquitous 'wild' plant as there are always a number of bulbs that break-off in the hard ground during the previous harvest and then re-sprout the following spring. This year's wild produce includes: lettuce growing in most of the side-walk cracks by my front door (bolting lettuce spread it's seed last year); cilantro amongst the carrots and shallots; corn sprouts in between rows in the back; the 3rd year of parsley hunkered next to thermal mass of the water tank; and several types of mint that re-seeded itself in the waffle garden. I find it interesting to note when these species emerge from soil each year, and contrast that with my usual planting dates and expectations--the 'wild' plants usually emerge weeks before I would have expected them to. Right now, it's the latter on this list that I'm most excited about. The 'chocolate' mint variety came up very early in the spring and was only damaged slightly by the recent frigid night that dropped to 20 degrees for most of the early morning. The only shoots that were adversely affected were those in the middle of the planting square (a waffle garden is partitioned by low rock walls that retain heat), furthest away from the warming rocks. The mint makes an amazing tea steeped with honey, or mixed with loose leaf green tea for a caffeinated version. The connivence of scampering out the back door half-clothed and half-awake each morning to gather mint has inspired me to add more tea producing perennials to my garden.

Death on the Farm

A peaceful silver wyandotte

I returned home from a field trip to Santa Fe on Friday to find one of the silver wyandotte hen's dead on the floor of the coop. There were no signs of trauma or any obvious reason for it's death. It lay, unmolested by the other hens, on the ground below it's favorite roost and I can only hope it passed away peacefully during the night. Over the course of the next 2 days I would loose 3 more chickens. This time it was the young pullets, and it certainly wasn't peaceful. I had just moved their cardboard rearing coop to the outside run area of the main coop. The old hens were sequestered in the inside area of the coop as their natural T-Rex-like inclination is to kill any smaller or weaker chickens. During their first night in the outdoor run, a fox or dog dug underneath the utility wire fence buried 3" into the hard clay and killed 3 of the 6 pullets. That was the first time anything had tried to breach the fence in a year and a half and it succeeded. I'll have to trench the bottom of the fence in concrete soon.

4015 words about spring

The transition from plant to food

More mesclun

Welcome to the flock

Thinning the radishes

Early Spring Plantings

Snow peas before installing the trellis of branches

It's no surprise to long-time Gallupians, but snowstorms in May are to be expected. The moisture they provide is a nice respite from the seemingly constant drying winds of April and May, but the cold night-time temperatures that follow these storms are an early spring gardeners nemesis. That phrase, 'early spring gardener,' is almost surely an oxymoron in Gallup. And yet, I've been steadily planting cold season crops since mid-march with pretty encouraging results- fingers are crossed considering there's still more than a month before the average last date for frost in early June. I posted about the snow peas and onions when I planted them and both are doing great. With a light layer of straw mulch over the soil the snow peas are about 6" high and just starting to curl their tendrils around the cut tree branches (great use for pruned elms) that form their trellis.

The onions are 9-10" tall and amazingly haven't been crushed by the plodding footsteps of the neighborhood dogs (my dogs have self-trained themselves to avoid the beds of fluffy soil and straw:), though it's required me to be super vigilant at keeping the fence gates closed. Next to these onions I also planted some long-leafed spinach and radishes that have proven to be self-sufficient in the cold and are a week or two away from harvest size.

Late-afternoon light on the shallots and carrots

Carrots and shallots were planted next in late March. I've had good luck with the latter; shallots certainly share the 'anti-freeze' characteristics, common to the other members of the onion family. The carrots were planted too soon. I covered them with only a light layer of straw and kept the bed moist with daily watering (carrot's tiny seeds are barely covered with soil when seeded and prone to drying out during the relatively long germination period, and like most root-crops they don't like to be transplanted). After a month, the first sprouts have begun to appear, but it seems as if only 10-25% of seeds successfully germinated.

Cole crops before mulching with straw

In mid-April I planted my cole crops in a clay bed in the back that had been heavily amended with manure. Green and red cabbage, brocolli, brussel sprouts, and collard greens filled the 25'x4' bed. These were really well watered in and mulched thickly with straw. They're all doing great. Next to the cole crops are the beds containing garlic, corn and pintos, and then more onions.

The back-garden beds- notice the shiny new tiller

Also in mid-April I planted a large bed (15'x4') split between mixed lettuce and Bloomsdale spinach. This bed is under a large elm that provides mid-day shade in the summer and should provide young sweet greens for a while after the lettuce in my cold-frame bolts in the full-day summer sun. This bed is covered with light blankets and sheets on any night below freezing. Even nights down to 19 degrees have failed to harm this young crop that should be ready for steady harvesting at the start of the Farmers' market season. I also companion planted this bed with summer peas, partly as a back-up against the potential loss of the greens to frost, partly to provide shade, and partly for the nitrogen fixing benefits of the legumes. Now that everything looks like it's coming through, I'll cull many of the peas shoots for dinner.

The long-bed of summer lettuce and spinach

The last bed I've prepared was for beets. After planting them in clay soils amended with lots of peat moss and sand, I covered the beds very thickly with sheets of unseparated straw. The seeds germinated faster than expected and I pulled the straw off a day or too late and many of the sprouts had gotten 'leggy,' reaching for the light blocked by the straw. Then it snowed for two days and got really cold. This bed will probably need to be re-seeded.

Native Plant Sale and Gardening Workshop

Are these desert marigolds? Photo from the PSS flyer

Gallup's Plateau Sciences Society (PSS) is holding their annual native and xeric plant sale on Saturday, May 15 at Holiday Nursery, 9-6 p.m. While I like to joke that the only plants I care for are the edible variety, native plants provide many reasons to value and grow them: they're adapted to our climate; take little maintenance once established; consume little water; attract beneficial insects to the garden; best of all, they're absolutely beautiful! Stop by and support this great event.

The PSS is also hosting a workshop by master gardener, Sid Gillson, called The Garden of Eating in Gallup on Friday, May 14. It will be held 1-6 p.m. at the PSS's usual meeting place at the Red Mesa Center, 105 w. Hill.