May, 2015

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Cloverdale

Monday, May 25th, 2015

This weekend, we took an excursion south of Animas to an old (ghost?) town called Cloverdale. (Spoiler: There isn’t much town left.)

It was a beautiful drive with amazing landscapes. Most of the land down there was bought up some time back by the Diamond A Ranch, which is 321,000 acres and is connected with the Nature Conservancy. Despite that, there were “no trespassing” signs posted everywhere.

On the whole drive, we only saw two other vehicles, one Border Patrol and one rancher, both pretty close to Animas. We did see several pronghorn as well.

In the southern part of this land, we found an old abandoned homestead house. We also had directions to the old Cloverdale cemetery. It turned out that there wasn’t a road to it any more, but we walked a mile or so and found it.

Near there, the ranch is bordered by large amounts of national forest and BLM land which you can access by road. We are definitely going to return and do some camping down there.

Being there felt like being in a place no one else had been in a very long time.

Magic beans

Sunday, May 24th, 2015

A few weeks ago, I went to the International Seed Library Forum. It was a great gathering, and I met some amazing people, including a guy from Silver City.

When we met, he hold me about some multicolored “Legendary Beauty Way Beans”  that he originally got from a friend in Snowflake, AZ, who says they were originally from an archaeological site in the southwest. After the event, he followed up by email and told me he’d send me some.

I got them and was astounded by how beautiful they are.

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I’m planting them this weekend and will post updates on how it goes.

Visitors

Saturday, May 23rd, 2015

This morning, I was brushing my teeth, looking out the window as I often do, and saw something unusual out toward the back. It was a large mammal, dark brown, stout, low to the ground. My still half-asleep mind searched to figure out what this might be. A large dog? A small bear?

Yes, you guessed it, it was the evil javelina. It lumbered off into the brush as I was calling Brad, but fortunately he got there in time to see its partner following behind. They were running off from having a drink at the water hole we put in for the animals. Silly us.

While we’ve seen plenty of damage from javelinas in the last two years, this was the first ones I’ve actually seen on our property. They were surprisingly large. All morning, I shook my head in amazement at having actually seen them.

As you may remember, last year, the unseen javelinas did quite a lot of damage to our garden. They ate tomatoes, watermelon, and sweet potato greens, as well as ripping up a lot of expensive insect netting.

Two weeks or so again, we had another visit; it was too depressing to write about at the time. They ate all my tomato starts. After nursing these along from seed for five months and just getting them outside, it was pretty awful. (The good news is that a few have come back, and I still have some starts in the house as well.)

After that, I did some more serious research on the problem and determined that an electric fence was the best solution. So last week, we put one in. It’s only about 10 inches high, and since we’ve put it in, we haven’t had any problems.

In the course of my research, I also found that javelinas are drawn by food outside (especially dog food or bird seed) and by water. Ok, affirmative on that.

 

Rogue plants

Sunday, May 17th, 2015

This is the third or fourth year we’ve planted in most of our beds. As such, we often have odd rogue plants come up from previous year’s ungerminated seeds. I always hate to pull these up, and so our beds sometimes end up to be an odd mix of things.

Last year, we had several random garlics coming up all over, and so I transplanted them all into one “rogue garlic” bed. We’ve been harvesting our regular garlic this week and so I decided to dig up a few of the rogue ones to see how they were. The greens didn’t look very robust, but the garlics looks great. We will have a bigger store of garlic this year thanks to these.