Growing things in New Mexico is sometimes a challenge. With the intense burning sun (the thin atmosphere does not filter out any burning rays) and the record drought and the nearly hurricane force daily winds in the spring, the plants are easily parched and stressed.
Even though the back yard is fenced, there comes in the dead of night or early morning, the critters - squirrels, rabbits, pack rats, and then come the insects, the birds - all looking for juicy morsels, eating leaves, pecking at fruits, etc. not to mention an occasional hail storm.
After using humane traps to relocate 6 squirrels and concentrated fox urine to discourage other wild life (it didn't work) I have put cages around the most vulnerable plants and when that did not seem to be sufficient I finally erected a cage of bird netting enclosing the entire main vegetable garden, sides and top, which is approximately 12'x14'.
Talk about keeping busy. (Mitchell, you wonder why I envy your being by the ocean. I could lay on a beach 8 hours a day and be content and shop for fresh produce at the market.)
We have begun our "monsoon" season here in New Mexico and have had a few rainy days. The garden has responded. Natural rain does wonders - that water from a hose or spigot or irrigation system doesn't do.
So here is a tour of my gardens.
Four O'Clocks
Grown from seeds brought from Connecticut 6 years ago
Four O'Clocks have multi-colored flowers on the same plant
Bougainvillea I purchased a few years ago from Lowe's "Almost Dead Plant Rack" Otherwise known as "Frank's Bargain Gardening Rack"
Geraniums and Succulents (The ceramic guitar was from an "antique" shoppe.)
Petunias and other assorted plants (for some reason I have a lot of purple flowers)
The Palm from the "Almost Dead Plant Rack" a four or five years ago, surrounded by a forest of Basil (which almost died from one day without water and the scorching sun and relentless wind back in May)
Some Geraniums, Coleus, Petunias The two-tone Geraniums are "Martha Washingtons"
Mom's Virgin Mary looking over the front gardens (OK, the people down the street are "christian" MAGAs, had a T___p Flag that some folks gave them grief about...and have in their front yard, a large cross made of logs with a crown of thorns and a bible verse about sin. They have mentioned on Nextdoor social media that they "disagree" with other peoples' flags (we have a rainbow flag all year long). So I am certain that Mary in our yard has got to be heresy to these Fundies. They just don't get the Blessed Virgin at all. As I said to someone, we Catholics don't talk directly to Jesus, we go to Mary, then she talks to her son. That just makes so much more sense. (Well as much sense as anything in religion, I guess)
So ever since Leon relayed a news item to a couple of lesbian neighbors about a shortage of gnomes in England, they have been decorating our front yard with all kinds of things, this gnome being the first one. Virgin Mary probably doesn't approve.
And then a pinwheel
And a rubber snake
And toy dinosaurs
More Dinosaurs and a Plastic Plant When will this madness end?
The Giant Yucca
Russian Sage in bloom and the bees love it.
This Fig Tree arrived mail-order in April as if it had come off the "Almost Dead Plant Rack" It is surviving with some loving care. Notice the chicken wire cage.
I have resorted to putting cages around many of my veggies because of critters - squirrels, pack rats, rabbits? They raid at night and eat the tender plants. This is an artichoke, grown from seed. I will be surprised if it produces anything this season
The peaches are getting big...may be ripe by the end of July!?
Ordinary Kale, Lacinato Kale, Green Beans The darn critters ate the green bean sprouts and I had to replant. Last year I was picking beans by this time
One of several heirloom tomatoes - San Marzano
This Acorn Squash was a "volunteer" meaning I did not plant it - it grew from the kitchen scrap compost that was dug into the garden soil.
I did plant zucchini. Luckily the squash bugs haven't gotten the word that I have zucchini at this address. Last time I tried growing squash, two or three years ago, the bugs invaded and killed it all. Couldn't even use the dead plants in the compost for fear of the bugs surviving the winter.
Another Zucchini
I bought grass seed two years ago. One does not plant grass in New Mexico unless you want to water it almost daily and "mow" it eventually. However I decided to plant a patch because Benni, the dog loves to roll in the grass at the town green. He presumptively has Degenerative Myelopathy and so I wanted to provide a nice grassy area in the yard for him. Maybe I'll rent/borrow a goat when it needs mowing.
Golden Raspberries - last season, after bearing some nice fruit, they seemed to develop a disease of some sort - the tips of the stems where the flowers would be and where fruit would develop were withering. So I cut them all down to the ground (they are ever-bearing so usually bear fruit on one-year-old stems. Hopefully we will get some fruit this season on the new stems.
Egyptian onions. I have no idea/memory where these particular ones came from. I remember my grandma used to have them and we had them at my childhood home. They reproduce and re-seed. I use them in cooking very infrequently.
Another "volunteer" - it is a squash or melon of some type. No fruit yet.
So I had emailed the plant retailer when the fig tree arrived almost dead. They sent me another one weeks later but whoever packaged the replacement fig put it up-side down in the packing box(purposely? no, I'm not that cynical) which clearly was marked "This End Up" It arrived rather crushed from having been scrunched by the pot/soil it was planted in. I planted it next to the one that was "half-dead" and now I have two very small fig trees that are alive and thriving. (Did I mention how it took me several days with a sledge hammer and rebar and shovel to dig a hole through the New Mexico caliche for these fig trees?)
Rosemary "Rosmarino"
Another heirloom tomato "German Queen" I have about 6 varieties of tomato, several of peppers and eggplants
A third planting of green beans in a cage. I will tell you that the effort and frustration I've expended/experienced this year in trying to grow veggies has been more than the satisfaction. But if I give up gardening, what would I do for exercise? To keep busy? Also, as Leon says, I pray a lot, though the folks down the street would probably call it taking the lord's name in vain, a definite sin.
Oregano - the critters don't touch it.
Parsley, basil, fennel - thankfully, also not appetizing to the critters
More purple petunias
Another rubber snake courtesy of the neighbors
Montauk Daisies - a perennial from a store in Connecticut. These are common on Cape Cod and New England and are doing well here. Blossoms in late summer - autumn.
Drought tolerant Lavender
Black-eyed Susans just beginning to bloom
Red Yarrow, also drought tolerant
I already harvested the garlic. It is drying/curing on a rack in the garage. Garlic is a staple in our kitchen. We also ate all the lettuce and arugula as they are early veggies.
And that is my garden tour for July 1, 2021. I will be sure to post an update or two or three as things progress.
There seems to be a number of articles on the web about the general theme of "The Spirit of Pride Days Past" so here is my post of some photos of Past Pride Days.
I guess nostalgia comes with getting older. What with the pandemic and the political climate, things just ain't what they used to be. I sense that we will see the slow demise of traditional pride.
I never took many pictures of Pride parades, so this is pretty short on pics, but it's this year's post of my annual tribute to Pride.
I don't know if it's just that I'm getting OLD, but it seems to me that PRIDE has gone the way of so many other good things in our lives...it has gotten so contorted by the whims and perceptions of so many subgroups that it is almost unrecognizable.
From the controversy over allowing the Gay Officers Action League (NY) to march in the New York Pride parade (because some individuals "feel unsafe" having police at the Pride event), to the revision of the "Pride Flag" - things have, in my opinion, gotten somewhat out of hand.
An article in LGBTQ Nation begins, "While people complain that the list of letters and numbers to describe
LGBTQ people keeps growing, making an “alphabet soup” of the community,
the iconic Pride flag hasn’t escaped revision either."
Apparently the Pride Flag has been "revised" several times now so as to be more inclusive. Inclusive to more subgroups of sexual minorities, some of whom the average gay or lesbian may not have even heard of. The article states:
"Most subsets of the LGBTQ community have their own flags now, from the
transgender flag designed by Monica Helms decades ago to the “Labrys
Lesbian Pride Flag.” There are genderqueer and genderfluid flags, and
bisexual, pansexual, and polysexual flags despite some folks’ inability to tell the difference between the words, let alone the flags. There’s even a flag for straight allies."
But, I ask, why? Why does the flag have to include a specific color or symbolic representation for every racial minority and sexual identity group and variation of sexual or non-sexual expression or genital variation?
The ORIGINAL Pride Flag was just a rainbow, a distillation of the visible light spectrum. A colorful, celebratory representation of the entire community with an implied recognition of diversity and inclusiveness.
It was never as if each of the colors stood for gay, or lesbian, or bisexual, or transsexual, or any other sexual minority or expression of sexuality.It was never as if the colors represented white privilege or any particular racial group or skin color. That was never the intent.
The light spectrum that the flag represented implied diversity but it did so, as the word "implied" signifies, without being explicit. It was by inference all-inclusive. It represented the entire spectrum of the community celebrating the beginning of its liberation.
The original Rainbow Flag was perfect. It was simple. It was elegant. It was joyful, colorful, spontaneous, festive, and not especially political or representative of any political agenda beyond being out and proud.
Back in the 70s and 80s we all marched under the Flag of Pride and it became a symbol of inclusivity, a movement in which all who were out and proud or supportive of those who were out and proud were welcome.
I'm all for being Out and Proud, no matter how you identify or live out your identity. And I think the Rainbow Flag includes us all and always had...until some people began to see it through a, in my opinion, distorted lens of discrimination and exclusivity.
I just don't get it. The more colors and symbols that get incorporated into the Pride Flag the more different sexual and racial sub-groups of the community complain about being excluded.
The more we try to appease the political and special interest groups, the more divisive I think we are becoming because these attempts to be inclusive seem to do just the opposite. If one is not specifically represented, they "feel" excluded. And I put "feel" in quotes because there seems to be an epidemic of hurt feelings; hurt feelings which, in many respects I would suggest, are inauthentic.
(I am not suggesting that people don't have genuine feelings around being discriminated against or devalued, only that some of those feelings are misdirected or that some groups and individuals use their supposed hurt feelings as an excuse to gain attention and to isolate themselves from the community so as to further justify their hurt feelings.)
Maybe diluted is a more apt description of what the Gay Liberation Movement has become since that first Stonewall anniversary. Sadly, it now seems the antithesis of Solidarity.
Maybe it's just me, but I will continue to fly the Rainbow Flag. And celebrate the continued fight for liberation that began well before Stonewall.
Many years ago when I worked for the Connecticut Department of Mental Retardation (I’m sure that is now a term no longer used) one of the clients I worked with brought me some Prickly Pear Cactus which he said was from Martha’s Vineyard (an Island off the coast of Massachusetts) where it grows wild and that I should plant it in my garden and it will survive the winters.
“Sure,” I thought to myself, “What does he know?”
But I did as he said. Sure enough it survived and thrived and when it flowered the next June I was amazed.
The cacti flourished and replicated easily from cuttings and dropped pads. Since that time I have seen Prickly Pear growing along the shoreline in New Jersey and in other places in New England. (https://www.rosekennedygreenway.org/opuntia-the-only-native-new-england-cactus/)
For several years afterwards I would throw a “Cactus Blossom Party” every June (in Connecticut it was usually around Pride Weekend) and it became somewhat of a tradition that friends and family enjoyed. One of our neighbors made a specially decorated cake for the occasion one year.
Well I have in my garden, here at Cochiti Lake, a couple of descendants of those Martha’s Vineyard Prickly Pears which came here via Connecticut and South Carolina.
Similar to the native New Mexico variety, I do think their flowers are a bit more showy and deeper in color. In any case Happy Cactus Blossom Time!
There are also some Claret Cup (I think) in bloom and the roses in the front yard are quite nice. But we are in a major drought and so the desert wildflowers are not very showy this spring. The garden gets water and is doing well.
