Seeds

Photo: what the greenhouse usually looks like in April. Or so.

It's seed catalog time on the farm! Every year I promise I won't spend quite so much on new seeds, and each year I end up ordering more. I once told a friend I wasn't addicted to anything other than food and sleep, but thenI realized that what I'm addicted to is seeds. And how can one not be, when these technicolor pictures of plants you've never grown before show up in the mail? All my seed catalogs (and there are many) are dog-eared by now so that I can easily pick out the packets for plants that caught my eye (the new beet, the brilliant pink gazanias, the white corn with the purple cob, and on and on) on the first perusing of each one. After that first look I let them sit and ferment for a couple of weeks, and by the time I'm filling out an order I have a better idea of what I (really) need and what I can do without. I still end up with too many. But, hey, it's a farm! It's a business expense!

Mostly I try to order seeds for open-pollinated and heirloom plants. Why? Because those are older, time-tested varieties, and more to the point, I can save the seeds from them. This doesn't keep me from trying some new hybrids, but I try. Some of my favorites come from the Seed Savers Exchange, and they are really old. Maybe the oldest is the Dewing's Early Blood Turnip, which comes from the early 1800's, when beets were actually referred to as blood turnips. Some of my irises (grown from rhizomes, not seed, except for my own hybridizing) go back to the 1600's and are undoubtedly older than that. And I have other vegetables and flowers which came to this country with immigrants from all over the world in the past couple of centuries. These seeds are history you can hold in your hand.

I'm not sure why we don't consider seeds sacred, because I believe they are. Sure, as a botanist I understand the mechanisms of seed formation (which are pretty amazing in their own right), but it's more than that. Each tiny seed, a dusty brown bit, contains a future plant--a stately blue delphinium, a broccoli, an oak tree. All it needs is to fall on the earth in the right place, or be planted at the right time. Each one is a minor glimpse into the future, weeks from now when the onion hairpins slide into the light, or months from now as the corn tassles. What a blessing in a tiny package!

I'm off to mail some orders for more tiny blessings--may everyone have a lovely day!

How Did We Get Into this Farm Thing, Anyway?

Maybe it's my fault. I was always jealous of kids who got to go visit their grandparents on the farm. Not that I actually knew any friends who had farm-owning grandparents, but Dick and Jane did, and so did all those other children on TV and the other children's books. Clearly, grandparents were meant to live bucolic lives with tractors, baby chicks, and apple pies. The fact that all of my grandparents were city people who had reached these shores from Europe as youngsters didn't impress me. And growing up in Los Alamos, a weird but beloved little mountain town with no farmland within fifty miles, lent the idea of farms a touch of the exotic, too, even though trips to the valley tended to show farmers as relatively poor people with weathered faces. The closest thing to a food garden was the little corn plot tended by a neighbor lady down the street, an oddity in a community of lawns and mixed borders. At least it was the first inkling that food wasn't just something that magically showed up at the grocery stores.

Mom had a nice garden (tulips, forsythia, columbines, sweet peas, delphiniums, and the like), but we kids never really took to it, and we were encouraged to go into professions that were'nt involved with the land. So I spent a decade or so in California being a Medical Technologist, something worthwhile one could do with a Bachelor's in Biology, and Wendy, also from Los Alamos, ended up as a statistical analyst. But that's where I discovered Horticulture, taking courses at the community college in Monterey. And more courses. I was a course or two shy of a degree in horticulture when we decided we'd had enough of California and wanted to come home to New Mexico, trading the ocean and fog for mountains and snow and summer thunderstorms. And I discovered I had to relearn everything I thought I knew about growing things--this is dry hardscrabble land which has to be irrigated, and if the frosts don't get you, the grasshoppers will. But you learn, and you can still grow things. I kept working in various medical labs for another decade and a half, but the more automated Med Techery became, the more high-pressure and the more boring it became. So when it dawned on me that I was avoiding continuing education in the lab field but was still taking every horticulture course coming down the pike (and look at my library--two books on laboratory technology, and four shelves on gardening, composting, plant propagation, and landscape design), I finally decided it was time for a major life change.

Wendy, meanwhile, had been teaching statistics and other math and science courses at two of the colleges in Santa Fe, so it didn't seem that dangerous from a financial point of view when I tried making a living as a gardener. But I have to say that the profession of gardening is for young men, or at least somebody with a large crew of young men, and that wasn't me. So when Wendy decided that her jobs were driving her crazy and suggested we buy a farm and try that, I was game.

Of course the land around Santa Fe, expensive as it is, isn't really suitable for farming, and the best farms were already taken anyway. We kept looking farther and farther from Santa Fe in hopes of finding some land that was in our budget (i.e., cheap). It wasn't until we looked at the prairie around Stanley that we found it--25 acres of grassland which had once upon a time been part of a homestead and still had use of a nearby well. I wasn't keen on it at first. Too open, too flat, too windy. Too many cows. Too windy. Too cold, too hot, too windy. But we could afford it, and we took a deep breath and put down all our money. And had a farm. There we were, two single middle-aged ladies on the verge of being dirt-poor and just beginning to learn what farming is all about. But still, it's our farm!

New Snow on the Farm

Saturday morning, and I'm missing the farmer's market. Actually, I'm still on vacation and have been since Christmas, but there hasn't been much going on in the greenhouse, and of course everything outside is frozen. But I'm getting anxious to get back, so I'll probably cut tiny amounts of chard, sorrel, and mizuna for next week.

I had wanted to post a couple of photos for the last post, but not only was I unable to find the ones I wanted, I had trouble with uploading them, and I was also not able to edit my draft post. Oh, well. So here are a few I took from the house this morning before the fog rolled in. We had about three inches of surprise snow overnight, and though snow always makes more work for us, it's good to see it. We need whatever moisture comes, however it falls.

South Mountain is our iconic horizon feature in any season. We are about six miles east of it, on the north edge of a large draw. So while a lot of the area is mostly flat, we have the benefit of slopes and gentle hills, and we don't notice too many of our neighbors to the south.

The righthand photo is of the little front garden with its birdbath, with bird pens and barns in the background. The left one is the back yard from my bedroom door; how charming the weeds are with snow on them! Later on when I steel myself to go wondering outside I'll take a picture of the house itself--it's also charming in snow.

Wild Winter Winds

In the plains we can get heavy-duty weather any time of the year, but the winter winds seem the most notable, at least as long as we're in winter (In spring, of course it's the spring winds, in summer, the rampaging gusts that come with thunder storms, and in early fall, it's the little proto-tornados that show up a bit before Baloon Fiesta). Today's winds are no exception. These are jet-stream winds, rattling in from the northwest, and out here there's nothing to stop them. At least we haven't had any new snow in the past week, which is a really good thing! Two years ago when we had a lot of snow between Christmas and Martin Luther King Day, winds like this could spin eight inches of snow into ten-foot drifts. That year the winds tried to fill up the Galisteo Basin with flying snow on an otherwise clear, sunny-but-cold day, and the state troopers had to close the highway from Santa Fe to Moriarty, plus all the little dirt roads off the highway. I live on one of those dirt roads, and it took me two days to get home. Even at that I had to leave our market van stranded a half mile from home. All that was the inspiration for Tales from a Frozen Driveway, which I sent out by email to all my friends and acquaintences, and which lead slowly but surely to this blog.

Well, this year is not like that, for which I am grateful. Still, it's enough. The dead blue grama grass from last season is flattened and flailing like fur on some shivering beast, and stop signs bash themselves about as if they are trying to fling themselves out of the ground. The roads all become byways for herds of hysterical fluttering tumbleweeds, and one can tell who overgrazed their pastures by how many big tumbleweeds are clinging to the fences (the amount of tumbleweed is inversely propotional to how much grass is left); some fences look like long furry hedges. The greenhouse heaves under the wind's onslought, and I'm always afraid to watch it, much less work in it on a day like this; the plastic covering makes groaning, snapping noises, and there's always the chance the wind could find a tiny spot to dig into and the whole thing could come off. That would certainly ruin my afternoon. But we never worry about the house. We had an inkling of what the weather could be like before we built our house (though an inkling and the truth are sometimes miles apart), and we built a house with seventeen sides and a conical roof rated for hurricane-strength winds. That was in 2000, and it's still holding up fine, even though its deck is getting a little ratty. So let the winds blow, and whistle and scream--we're okay here.

Post-Holiday Reflections

Something about the beginning of a new year, especially after such a roller-coaster year as 2008. Oh, I understand about the arbitrary assignment of the January 1 date; I live too close to the land and to the natural rhythms of the year to think that there is anything inherently important about this date. It's not like it was the solstice, or the first intimations of the breaking of winter in February, or Midsummer's Day. But still...

Those days between Christmas and New Year's have colors all their own: golden honey and a sort of sepia. I suppose it's the low light that makes the golden color, and the sepia must come from the weight of memory of all the years since childhood. All my childhood was spent in one house, a house now lost forever except in our memories ("our" being myself and my sisters). I can picture the setting sun in late December filtering through the snowy pines, striking through the dining room window and lighting up the aquarium with its little fishy denizens. I look up from whatever book I've been reading and watch the gold shift to blue as the sun drops below the mountains, cozy and warm with my family as the evening cold settles in.

Much later when I worked at the Genzyme lab in Santa Fe, that same golden light speared down the long hallway in my building at sunset during those same late December days. Not being on idle vacation, I used to make sure I was able to take a break at about 4:15, though I never told my coworkers why. They may have wondered why I took my coffee out in the hall to gaze out the glass doors on a winter evening, but they were generally too busy to ask.

Now, of course, I can watch the sun sail into the end of day all I want, and I still love that low, honeyed glow sliding through the windows all around my round house, gilding the walls and all those dusty knick-knacks. At the solstice the setting sun paused on the tip of one of three low hills to the southwest, and now it has begun its long slow trek up the edge of the western horizon. And now that it is January, the subjective color changes.

The color for New Year's Day is, and always has been for as long as I remember, white. Too bright, too featureless, as we venture into a year we haven't quite invented yet. As always, it's a year of promise, more so this year than most, but also of fear. On this one day, though, we can hope that the promise will outweigh the fear, that we can be happy in whatever situations we find ourselves in, that we can always begin anew again. So although we watch the January colors change to silver-blue and gray, may we keep a little of that golden light that graced the last of the year.