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Gardening and Plants
Gardening is an enjoyable and exciting pastime that can provide you with plenty of vegetables for most of the year, without large spaces or requirements. Most backyard gardens can sustain a small family. We have two types of gardens.
One is a partially inside garden, 30’ x 8’. It shares its east wall with the bathroom and its north wall with the main building, protecting it from the cold, northern winds in winter. The south and west walls consist of rock and adobe up to about 3 feet, and then screen to the roof. The roof is made of sotol sticks, which offer partial shade from the scorching summer sun (we get temperatures up to 120ºF). This garden is watered exclusively by the gray water from the bathroom. We started using it for things like squash, but found that insects didn't get in it enough to pollinate them. Now, we keep it going year round with herbs, greens, onions, garlic – we even have an artichoke, which thinks the whole space belongs to him.
The second, outside garden grows from April to November. It takes up about ¼ acre, with twelve 30’ terraced rows. It gets its water primarily from rain – we have trenches stretching across the property that carry rain away from the buildings and into the rows. The overflow from the inside garden also feeds into it, and we occasionally have to water it from our catchment system. It has an ocotillo, living fence around it to protect against all kinds of hungry critters. This fence consists of 2500 individual ocotillo stalks, paneled and planted, so that the stalks continue to grow, leaf and bloom. This is where we grow tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, beans, squash, melons, eggplants and tomatillos.
The gardens definitely took some work to set up, especially as we had to get the earth from a few miles down the road (we use a red, volcanic, sandy earth, which holds water for a long time and is full of minerals). But once that initial work is done, it’s just a question of tilling the soil, feeding it compost and manure, and planting. There’s some work involved in checking everyone is okay and picking off tomato worms, which chickens love by the way, but picking and eating fresh vegetables is your reward.
You should rotate your crops every year to distribute minerals into the soil and avoid from taking too much out of your soil. Till under your plants at the end of the harvest and add compost in to help enrich the soil. Continue to add nutrients at every chance, and your garden will become lusher year after year.
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