Letter From Northern New Mexico

Hello, Friends,

Summer is almost gone: Nights are cooler, leaves are turning, and a successful monsoon season is drawing to a close. That said, it's time for a big old catch-up session because I haven't been writing and there's much to see here in Northern New Mexico.

We've been here for 8 years now and even though there were a few bets that we wouldn't last, here we are.

So let's get to it.

We still have cattle, but it's a rotating cast of characters. These guys were Regis and Phil(bin). Tom named them; not I. 

Regis and Phil(bin) are gone now to the great pasture in the sky and we are grateful to them.

Our new pup, Liza Jane, has been a handful. We went from exceedingly polite Ms. Pearl to a bossy tornado. This is a rare puppy pic of her lying still.

Summer gardening was successful. I think having a canine tornado keeps the bunnies from eating too much.

 This was early in the season. We had asparagus, green beans, kale, carrots, strawberries, sugar snap peas, and there's some broccoli I'm hoping will weather the upcoming cooler weather. The kale was especially pretty. I even froze some and I will tell you how another time. I used this kale for Zuppa Toscana. I found a copycat recipe for this Olive Garden favorite and it was yum!

Inside the Growing Dome we had a good season, too. Up here at 7200 feet it can be iffy for tomatoes and indoor gardening solves this problem. This year I grew five plants: Golden Jubilee, Black Cherry, Chocolate Sprinkles, good old Early Girl and Brad's Atomic Grape. All did well and I froze some, made a tomato and gruyere galette, and sometimes leaned  over the sink, salt shaker in hand, and ate them like apples, juice everywhere.

Tomato Plants Growing Like Crazy

Straight Eight Cucumber Plants and Burgundy Green Beans

A Few Tomatoes

Tom has been cutting up a cottonwood tree that split in two.

We really don't need firewood because last winter was so mild, we didn't even touch the artistic wood piles I made.

And he chopped thousands of thistles, which are noxious, invasive weeds. I don't have any photos of that.

I set up a sewing area on the porch.

Here was my view:

There was a field trip to Santa Fe's Botanical Gardens.

And to the Santa Fe Opera, twice! It was my first time experiencing opera and I loved it. People have tailgate dinners here, so we did the same. The big difference was our tailgate had road dust inside and out, and just as I was taking the photo, there was a wine mishap, but you get the idea.

I think I'm growing up. Opera? Wow.

It's always nice to come back home, though, to our little bubble.

See you next time!

Sugar Sprint Peas

During the winter months I grow Sugar Snap peas in the growing dome because they like cool weather and unless it gets below freezing inside, they do well in there. Around May, though, it begins to get too hot inside and I must pull out the vines.

This year I decided to take my chances growing Sugar Snaps outdoors. I figured the moderate temps would be kind to them, so why the heck not. Because our weather is so "iffy," with snow, hail or rain likely any month of the year, I tried a variety called Sugar Sprint. The peas can be harvested at around 58 days, which is a plus in this high altitude growing region.

On May 9 I planted the seeds and placed a few tomato cages in the 4 by 4 bed, even though the envelope said 2 feet tall. I didn't want them drooping over the edges, tempting any passing critters into a snack. They might like that plant too much and that would be all she wrote. Then it rained and rained and I didn't even have to water.

I did a little weeding in that bed, but pretty much forgot those peas until July 4th, when I realized there were a zillion mature pods busting out on there! Talk about a forgetful gardener!

I've picked peas three times so far and each time I get about a pound of peas, enough to fill this strawberry clamshell.

My friends from around here get excited this time of year when roadside venders sell bags of traditional peas that you take out of the pod, but I am too lazy to shell them and just like eating the whole thing. It's the only way I can get Tom to eat peas.

Here are some links for snap pea recipes that I really like.

This is a copycat recipe for PF Chang's Garlic Snap Peas. The secret is to add the garlic at the end and very quickly get everything out of the pan and onto a plate. Otherwise you burn the garlic and it gets bitter when it's burned. Experience.

This recipe is easy! Ina Garten's Sauteed Sugar Snap Peas

Honey Glazed Pea Pods and Carrots is also an easy way to cook snap peas. I don't use the cornstarch and they still come out yum.

Last, because it's summer, here is Guy Fieri's Black Bean and Corn Salad recipe. I sub snap peas for the snow peas and it's just fine.

Miss Bonnie says hello to you all and wants you to know that rodent hunting is going well this year. She looks skinny, but eats all she wants. Last time Bonnie visited the vet, she (the vet) called her assistants (we are Bonnie's assistants) to have a good look at a cat at a healthy weight. I guess it's a rare sighting, a non-fat cat.

Bonnie is now 15 years old.

All Hail Summer!

Yesterday was a "weather" day at The Nickel and Dime Ranch, with crazy rain and hail.

While this was happening, I was having lunch with M and M in Santa Fe, on the way home from Albuquerque and the "didn't happen" Friday flight to California for my brother's retirement bash.

I ended up not going because Friday was a "weather day" in Dallas, disrupting flights, resulting in a nine hour wait for an airplane that wasn't going to take me where I wanted to go after all. At 2:30 am, faced with the prospect of waiting another eleven hours at the next stop offered to me by a harried, exhausted Southwest Airlines ticket agent, I gave up.

Sorry I missed your party, bro. All I can say is retirement is awesome and now you can work at whatever you want, whenever you want. Congratulations on surviving 32 years of adolescents.

I'd say, "Come visit," but looking at these photos, you might have second thoughts.

Ms. Pearl certainly had second thoughts, not even wanting to hang out on the covered porch while this was going on. Thunder, lightning and crazy noise on the tin roof were not her thing.

This is why my tomatoes are growing inside a greenhouse.

By the time I was home, all this was gone and today is sunny with nary a cloud in the sky. Still, there's a 50/50 chance for more rain today.

I think I'll go water the tomatoes.

Kitchen Garden Early Summer 2015

Man, do I suck at blogging! It seems like there are so many other things to do..."Look! Squirrel!"

But I haven't forgotten you and hope this has been excellent summer season so far. Our part of Northern New Mexico has been blessed with rain, so much rain that we are out of our drought and the drought map says we are unusually dry, instead.

Tell that to the mosquitoes, who have been enjoying this moist weather just a little too much. Afternoons and shady spots are their favorite time for blood sucking, but if it's breezy they don't hang out too long, so I'm not complaining.

I've been working on are both the Growing Dome and kitchen gardens. The heat loving plants, tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers, thrive in their warm dome house, but that story is for another day.

Anyway, here are some kitchen garden photos. I truly love the raised beds, which allow me to garden without crawling around.

Below are some Northeaster runner beans climbing up their netting. This is the first time I've grown these, but a neighbor had good luck with them and when I tasted their flat-podded wonderfulness, I decided they would be part of this year's garden.

You can see that black patch on the ground, which is weed barrier cloth. I need to spread some more bark to cover it.

The beds beyond the beans have strawberries, which are starting to bear, and asparagus in the background, now gone to seed after a couple weeks of judicious picking. The asparagus is three years old now, so next year I will be able to pick as much as we want. My friends say the rain has extended the wild asparagus crop along the roads and acequias, so they're still picking!

Below is another shot of the garden. On the left are white cauliflower, broccoli and garlic. Those grow bags contain potatoes: Magic Molly, Purple Viking, Sangre Red and Yukon Gold. Someone said the first three potato names sound like weed. I think they're right.

And here's the last shot. That long bed in the back has more cauliflower (green and orange varieties), carrots and corn. The corn is called Spring Treat, but we shall see what happens, since most people say sweet corn grown around here tastes like sawdust.

 

In the far beds, which each measure four by four, I have a rhubarb plant, some Sugar Sprint snap peas, a valerian plant which the bees love, and some more cauliflower. I've decided to roast cauliflower and freeze it if there's too much. We could use a little more outdoor growing space, so next year we hope to build some more raised beds.

Next up, inside The Dome.

Asparagus!

Of course, I could go foraging and find some wild asparagus like Betsy and I did last year, but we wanted something closer to home, so why not use those raised beds?

Here was the garden last year, around September:

Planting weather is just starting, and a couple months ago I ordered some Jersey Knight asparagus roots. I ordered two year old crowns, because asparagii must grow for several years before they are ready to harvest enough to amount to something.  (I have since learned that there is no advantage to ordering two year asparagus crowns, that one year one will do just fine.) Oh, well.

So on an overcast day in the 70's (woo hoo! it was hot out there!), I planted my asparagus crowns.

First I dug a trench and piled the dirt in our rickety wheelbarrow.

The wheelbarrow only tipped over once. 

Here is one of the asparagus crowns. They look very unassuming, don't they?

For each asparagus crown, I made a little mound of compost so it would have a nice spreading out place.

After that, I shoveled the soil back into the garden bed and added a top dressing of more compost. When some shoots appear, I think I will add some old dried cow manure to the bed. We have plenty of that around here.

Now the waiting begins. So I will water and fertilize and someday, in the not so distant future....

In the meantime, here is a link to a recipe for Cherry Tomato and Asparagus Salad which is amazingly good, and just the way to start the summer picnic season. We've had it twice now and even Mr. Picky likes it, minus the avocado.

Marching Into Spring

Geez, that's a corny title, but spring is almost here and I'm itching to plant some stuff outside. Considering June 1 is our last frost date, I have a way to go, but a girl can still dream, can't she?

Inside the Growing Dome, though, we have a flourishing garden of winter veggies.

On the left are Waldmann's Dark Green lettuce and a red lettuce variety. I can't remember its name, but will look it up if you are interested. I use a cut and come again technique. All these lettuces have had haircuts and the leaves just keep growing back. All I do is use some organic fertilizer on them once in a while and we've had lettuce all winter.

That's some rainbow chard to the right of the lettuce. I will give them a trim, too, but their leaves take longer to grow back.

Below, take a look at the kale, romaine and basil.

I tried this dwarf kale for the first time in the dome and it's doing well. I keep cutting its leaves and they grow right back. The same goes for the romaine lettuce, called Little Gem. It's the gift that keeps on coming. These little varieties for the dome are perfect because it's just the two of us eating from this garden and they don't take up too much space.

At Trader Joe's I bought a pot of live basil for $3.99. When I looked more closely, there were five separate plants, so re-potted four of them and stuck the fifth in the dome's planter bed. All are doing well, but if we were to get some sub zero weather, we'd cover them and say a prayer since basil is a definitely a warm weather plant.

Outdoors it's still too cold to plant anything, but here's a look at my bed of garlic, its shoots peeking up from the straw mulch I put on there last fall. Plant garlic by Halloween and it's ready for harvest by the Fourth of July.

I have big plans for these raised beds. We all just have to wait.

Last, a reason why I love living here. Yesterday I stopped off at our local grocery store, a little place that has shown much improvement since we moved here almost four years ago.

I needed eggs, and among the Shur-Fine brand eggs, were these. They are from a local farmer who I know and trust and isn't it just cool that I can say, "Oh, those are Roger's eggs."

And aren't they pretty?

That's all today, peeps. I am close to a quilt finish, so stay tuned.

Fall Already?

The past couple of weeks have reminded me that winter is coming. The yellow-flowered chamisa is the last of the allergens to bloom and I think this blooming schedule has been designed to make all the hay fever sufferers happy to see the first frosts and the last of their runny noses.

"Die, chamisa, die!"

The first frost was about a week and a half ago, killing the summer veggies, so goodbye to you,  tomatoes, peppers and green beans.

Since then we've had a few more nippy nights but the kale, carrots, cabbage and lettuce survive.  I planted too much cabbage and we are not sauerkraut fans, so cabbage soup is in the cards.

Next year the summer stuff will go in earlier since the raised beds are in place and ready to go.

Upcoming jobs: the dead plants are outta here and garlic goes in that empty bed in the foreground.

Plant garlic by Halloween; harvest it on Fourth of July. Sounds okay to me!

Raised Beds and Growing Dome Update-Late Summer 2013

Back in June, Mike Salman and his crew were building the raised beds which replaced the grass in the side yard. I wanted the veggies growing close and inside the stucco wall to discourage critters and because I am lazy. I like lettuce grown just a few steps from the house.

Even though it was almost a full month late, I decided to plant the stuff I had started in the dome.Why not, I figured. There was no room in the dome, so out they went.

I planted tomatoes, kale, cabbage, peppers, lettuce, carrots and purple green beans. There are also three melon plants with no melons.

Here are the green beans, called Royal Burgundy. When you cook the purple beans, they turn green. I like them because my dad always planted them and they're easy to find when it's time to pick. Today's the first picking of the outside beans! Yay!

I haven't killed the flower garden, yet.

Over in the Growing Dome it's a tomato jungle inside. I planted fewer tomato plants this year since they overwhelmed the other plants.

But they still crowded and covered the basil, cucumbers, peppers and one last crop of indoor green beans.

The other side is crazy, too. Note to self: You may need to revisit how to corral the tomatoes.

And it's the lonely, empty bee yard.  I saw their new mom yesterday, though, and she says the bees have easily adapted to their new terroir, which makes me happy.

Late summer looks pretty good, don't you think?

In Progress-Raised Bed Veggie Garden and Perennial Bed

When we moved from Southern California to our cabin here in Northern New Mexico, it was the first time we had a lawn. The little house where we lived for 30 years had a heavily shaded ivy and dirt yard and not much grew in that deep shade, so no grass and no flowers. On the sunny side of the house we grew a veggie garden, but the only flowers I planted were marigolds to help protect the tomatoes.

The cabin here at the Nickel and Dime is surrounded by lawn. It is beautiful, restful and green, but I realized that my 18 foot Growing Dome can only hold so much and I wanted to be able to grow more stuff. So the south lawn is being converted to raised beds along with a bee and hummingbird friendly perennial garden.

Here's what we have so far:

Above is a long view of three beds already made and three waiting for their lumber. There will be 6-12 by 4 foot beds and 3-4 by 4 foot beds. Wow.

Here's how the beds are prepared: The lawn was dug away and leveled where the bed would stand. Weed barrier cloth and then a staggered double layer of chicken wire are laid in the bottom. We have a gopher problem, thus the chicken wire. I wanted hardware cloth, a heavy duty half inch mesh, but the cost was insane. So the chicken wire is staggered to make the holes smaller and I will hope that is enough discouragement.

Sticking up out of the ground is poly hose with a threaded end. I decided to screw on a soaker hose rather than use emitters because I have more watering choices that way.

The wood is 4 inch by 6 inch by 12 foot treated timbers stacked three high. At that height I can sit on the edge and not have to crawl around on the ground when planting.

The timbers are secured on the inside with corner brackets and straight brackets. The sides are lined with more weed barrier cloth to preserve moisture.

So why do I have raised beds? Well, I am lazy, that's why. Weeds are more easily controlled in raised beds with weed barrier cloth and I can mix the soil by adding bagged planting mix and ranch dirt. There are composted raspberry canes in there, too. If I don't like the soil I can add some bagged mix to the bed. Plus, if I wander around a bit I can start a cow pie collection and have some nice manure, as well.

The bunnies who hang out in the yard don't climb, so my lettuce should be safe. Don't get me started on ground squirrels, though.

When I plant lettuce in this garden, though, I will probably add some PVC hoops and row cover to protect the little seedlings from hungry birds and other marauders.

Here is a shot of the perennial bed running the length of our deck. The plants are still small, but they seem to like it there.

Underneath the gravel are weed barrier cloth and drip emitters to each plant. I was excited to see hummingbirds almost as soon as the plants were in the ground. 

Surrounding the raised veggie and strawberry beds is more weed barrier cloth which will be covered with bark. 

The garden is finally coming together and although it may be too late to plant everything I would like to grow, I will have plenty of time to do more research to see which plants would do best up here in the mountains at 7400 feet.