Colors of Spring: Return to Winter

Snow! Glorious wet snow! Well, you'd be excited about snow, too, if you lived somewhere in the grip of a deep drought. My brain is delighted, for in March the snow won't stay long, and instead of subliming as it can in January or even in February, it will actually melt and soak in. This really isn't much, but it's four to five inches of moisture-laden snow, already melting as the temps climb up to 40 degrees or so. It will be muddy later, of course.

My heart is conflicted, though. Snow and cold in late March can do really awful things to plants just coming out of dormancy, and in other places than out here in the middle of nowhere some of the trees have begun blooming--the apricots in particular. Here nothing has been blooming yet other than the crocuses, though my lilacs and golden currants have started leafing out. But this kind of thing can damage the fruit crop in the northern part of the state along the river valleys (last year most of the apple farmers were completely wiped out). We'll have to wait and see if it warms up quickly and then doesn't freeze solid again.

Two days ago I had to go into Albuquerque for an Herb Growers Association meeting and was struck by how much more color there was there already than here. It's a short distance by Interstate over the mountain pass, but it may as well be a different world. Trees were blooming all over the place--the pale pink of apricots and the purple plums, and along the Interstate where they've been landscaping lately, there are what I think are crab apples in profusion. They are a particularly bothersome shade of deep mauve pink, guaranteed to clash with the orange barrels. One would think highway landscapers would understand about the persistance of orange barrels, but maybe they're not from around here....

Some of the larger trees are leafing out, too, notably the cottonwoods and Siberian elms. The elms are covered in chartreuse green blobs, rather as if a child stuck handfuls of green on with glue, but it's a cheat--these aren't leaves out, but the billions of developing seeds soon to be released on an unsuspecting world. In a couple of weeks these trees will appear to have succumbed to this March blizzard, but it's just that the mature seeds with their wings will have turned tan, the better to blend in with garden dirt, where they will sprout. After that the leaves will show up and turn the trees deep elm green. And gardeners all over Santa Fe and Albuquerque will begin cursing the elm sprouts.

Okay, this is Spring

It must be Spring, because I'm wearing shorts. My pasty white legs have a slight pink glow, the precursor of that dark tan I'll have by the end of summer (some of that will probably be dirt, though). Yesterday I actually planted some sugar snap peas, along with a "dump planting," in which I clear a small patch of ground, spread some mixed old seeds, and hope that something might come up. Occasionally something does, and I end up with a bed of arugula with sprinkles of beets and green love-lies-bleeding. That's really pretty attractive, and I can always sell the arugula.

Oh, I know we'll undoubtedly have more cold weather before it finally warms up and settles down, some time in May. Or June. Spring in New Mexico is always the proverbial crap shoot. You know there will be some sun, maybe a lot of sun, some hail, lots of wind, a couple of dust storms, and if we're really lucky, a few raindrops. This is a La Nina spring, after all, meaning warmer and dryer than usual for us. It's dry, all right; yesterday the weather guy on the local station said we are "the dryest area in the entire nation." I knew that. Our total moisture so far for the month is six hundredths of an inch. Sometimes we can see rain falling, but it evaporates on the way down, creating gusts of wind and dust. The prairie grasses should be greening up some, but they aren't stupid, so the pastures are brown and yellow, dry, dry, dry. But I'm watering my beds, and the golden currants are leafing out over the crocuses. I thank the homesteaders who tried to make a life here early in the last century and left the well that supplies our water. They are gone, for the most part, but they left their names and stories, and the well. They were brave, and maybe foolish, to try to grow beans without rain here, and maybe we are foolish to try to live here, too. But as long as we can get water from the well, we'll raise our tiny amounts of fancy produce and our heirloom poultry. I do wonder what I will leave here when I'm gone.