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greenstormWe've had the first frost, not last night but the night before. Here are garden notes.
Tomatoes:
Cherries: champagne cherry, green grape, green doctors, rons carbon copy, sungold select (almost a saladette, a bit variable), copper cherry, Hawaiian red currant, sunpeach, coyote, snow white cherry, pink princess get planted again of cherries.
Coyote and kiss the sky and one rozovaya bella were crossed and one of the two crossed kiss the sky plants sported into a saladette (!!!). The crossed coyote had that flavour. Growing these all out except maybe the roz bella.
Mission mountain grex second year the orange fluted gave me four orange fluted plants, nice and productive, and the yellow antho pear gave me variable breadth yellow antho pears.
Mission mountain grex first year I got an antho grape that didn't ripen, a beautiful stripe saladette that ripened decently, and a beautiful antho blush thing that I'm going to try again. Oh, and a micro I'll grow out this winter maybe.
Miracle cheriette project very satisfactory, great flavor, 2 larger and 3 cherries to continue -- one black, one large grape, and another grape with interesting calix shape. Those are the early ripening and prolific.
Otherwise utnyok, cesu agrais, sareaev 0-33, sugary pounder, rozovaya bella, black sea man, katja, jory, maya and sion, jd cooper are the slicers to do again, offhand.
Zesty fir and uluru mikado trial decent, though the uluru mikado weren't well watered and thus got a bit of blossom end rot -- they were in with the brassica greens I let go to seed and then dry down. Zesty fir plants are very well behaved and decently early.
Zesty carbon f1 grew a huge plant with huge tomatoes. Can't wait to see the f2.
I haven't got into the greenhouse yet but I know there are rozovaya bella and I believe JD Coopers ripe in there, as well as less-good-tasting Amy's Apricot and better-tasting snow white cherry. Also a bunch of other things but I'll write that up when I get in there.
Woody perennials: I hit up the garden center several weeks ago, I think on Avallu's ok-to-go-outside check, on their fall sale day. I had been flirting with a discounted quercus macrocarpa all summer and picked it up since the sale + discount made it worthwhile. So now I have two bigger macrocarpas in the front yard, as well as some tiny ones. I've also ordered some acorns, which-- I'm going to need to be doing a lot more from seed now, even big things, for financial reasons.
Also into the front yard were four "mystery" romance cherries (discounted because the tags had fallen off and then again on the sale" on top of the one from way back that already was there, and the three labeled ones (cupid, juliette, and I forget the third but it has a clay label) from this spring.
Then a sumac "Tiger eyes", a quercus gambelii, a lonicera Goldflame, a morden concord and a valiant grape, and there will be a named hazel variety. This is all part of screening the front yard as the aspens are gone, so I can hang out there. My house sits on a curve in the road and on a bit of a rise, so my front yard is a bit of a stage for anyone driving along that long curve. And lately a lot of people have been driving my and slowing down significantly as they go past my house. I used to think it was because of the pigs, but the pigs aren't visible from there anymore, so I think it's just because they can kinda see through the vegetation. I'd like that to stop.
I also have a bunch of black currants I haven't planted yet, and a row I want to plant something tall in to screen the winter garden but not screen it enough to shade the garden, maybe something 8' tall or so.
Oh! This spring I also planted most of a ring of swamp white oaks in the back upper field, the one that is basically a stream during snowmelt and dries up by June-somethingish. These oaks should be ok with that, and give me a nice big ring. I paced out the ring instead of measuring it, and it's on a slope, so it'll be interesting to see how it goes. They got mulched and not watered much, nearly all survived regardless.
Josh and I got a bunch of apple and seabuckthorn seeds on the trip up with Avallu and those will be started for next year. Seabuckthorn seems to do easily from seed.
Perennials: This is the year I started planting perennial flowers that aren't roses. I haunted that sale and got a bunch of $5 and $3 plants, daylilies and salvia and some verbascum and russian sage and ecinacea and whatnot. I have ordered some peonies, some common (inexpensive) cultuvars and a bag of root fragments that are unlabelled, they'll take a long time to bloom but I have more time than money (I hope).
I also found a lead on inexpensive daffodil bulbs and am putting a bunch of them in, underplanting with a bunch of smaller bulbs as you might expect. Basically any new bed that goes in will have bulbs in it if I can do anything about it (which means fall planted, mostly, since I am unlikely to go back and put bulbs into existing beds).
Weeds: the aspen suckers are nuts this year, which is unsurprising. They take about two years to get 8-10' tall or so and over an inch thick, so there are a couple clumps I missed last year that feel like real trees now and need different equipment to cut down. If I cut them twice a year I can use the really robust hedge shears. It's all really hard on the hands, like I lose the ability to hold cups after for awhile. I've been trying to track down proper ratcheting pruners but it seems like they're out of fashion.
The invasive thistle is everywhere. If I deep mulch yearly it's easy to pull out once a year, also hard on my hands but keeps it from going to seed. Thing is, I need to cut the aspens before I deep mulch, so there's this whole particular sequence that needs to happen and it kind of needs to happen everywhere at once? normally I do cardboard then compost then mulch, but when mom was here last spring she took out most of the gardboard and I've been using the rest to build beds, so grass has cme up to complicate the aspen/thistle removal. I'm definitely getting into a sense for what yearly maintenance will look like. The south slope bed is my oldest one, and honestly I haven't had many longlasting beds I got to handle in a non-professional capacity, so it's interesting to play around with it. The soil is improving steadily, which is good and also maybe why the weeds are so intense. If I can get 6-8" of mulch on everything and the aspen suckers cut down by mid-april I'll e in good shape.
The scentless chamomile which took over the untilled spots in the winter garden dyes fabric well and lastingly, which is nice. I'd still rather have edible chamomile, but this stuff pulls out easily in spring. I'm ok with it. Clover seems to outcompete it too.
My feral gai lan did some good seeding this year, I'm collecting a lot of the seeds and going to move them up from the winter field to the apple field. The back field is lots of clover and grass where the oaks didn't go in. The clover is self-seeding now, which is excellent, but the grass is a bit of a challenge.
I'm losing typing coordination so I'll set this asde for now. But. Good gardening year, looking forward to nxt.
Oh, two kinds of sunflowers did super well. And I need to write about herbs.
Tomatoes:
Cherries: champagne cherry, green grape, green doctors, rons carbon copy, sungold select (almost a saladette, a bit variable), copper cherry, Hawaiian red currant, sunpeach, coyote, snow white cherry, pink princess get planted again of cherries.
Coyote and kiss the sky and one rozovaya bella were crossed and one of the two crossed kiss the sky plants sported into a saladette (!!!). The crossed coyote had that flavour. Growing these all out except maybe the roz bella.
Mission mountain grex second year the orange fluted gave me four orange fluted plants, nice and productive, and the yellow antho pear gave me variable breadth yellow antho pears.
Mission mountain grex first year I got an antho grape that didn't ripen, a beautiful stripe saladette that ripened decently, and a beautiful antho blush thing that I'm going to try again. Oh, and a micro I'll grow out this winter maybe.
Miracle cheriette project very satisfactory, great flavor, 2 larger and 3 cherries to continue -- one black, one large grape, and another grape with interesting calix shape. Those are the early ripening and prolific.
Otherwise utnyok, cesu agrais, sareaev 0-33, sugary pounder, rozovaya bella, black sea man, katja, jory, maya and sion, jd cooper are the slicers to do again, offhand.
Zesty fir and uluru mikado trial decent, though the uluru mikado weren't well watered and thus got a bit of blossom end rot -- they were in with the brassica greens I let go to seed and then dry down. Zesty fir plants are very well behaved and decently early.
Zesty carbon f1 grew a huge plant with huge tomatoes. Can't wait to see the f2.
I haven't got into the greenhouse yet but I know there are rozovaya bella and I believe JD Coopers ripe in there, as well as less-good-tasting Amy's Apricot and better-tasting snow white cherry. Also a bunch of other things but I'll write that up when I get in there.
Woody perennials: I hit up the garden center several weeks ago, I think on Avallu's ok-to-go-outside check, on their fall sale day. I had been flirting with a discounted quercus macrocarpa all summer and picked it up since the sale + discount made it worthwhile. So now I have two bigger macrocarpas in the front yard, as well as some tiny ones. I've also ordered some acorns, which-- I'm going to need to be doing a lot more from seed now, even big things, for financial reasons.
Also into the front yard were four "mystery" romance cherries (discounted because the tags had fallen off and then again on the sale" on top of the one from way back that already was there, and the three labeled ones (cupid, juliette, and I forget the third but it has a clay label) from this spring.
Then a sumac "Tiger eyes", a quercus gambelii, a lonicera Goldflame, a morden concord and a valiant grape, and there will be a named hazel variety. This is all part of screening the front yard as the aspens are gone, so I can hang out there. My house sits on a curve in the road and on a bit of a rise, so my front yard is a bit of a stage for anyone driving along that long curve. And lately a lot of people have been driving my and slowing down significantly as they go past my house. I used to think it was because of the pigs, but the pigs aren't visible from there anymore, so I think it's just because they can kinda see through the vegetation. I'd like that to stop.
I also have a bunch of black currants I haven't planted yet, and a row I want to plant something tall in to screen the winter garden but not screen it enough to shade the garden, maybe something 8' tall or so.
Oh! This spring I also planted most of a ring of swamp white oaks in the back upper field, the one that is basically a stream during snowmelt and dries up by June-somethingish. These oaks should be ok with that, and give me a nice big ring. I paced out the ring instead of measuring it, and it's on a slope, so it'll be interesting to see how it goes. They got mulched and not watered much, nearly all survived regardless.
Josh and I got a bunch of apple and seabuckthorn seeds on the trip up with Avallu and those will be started for next year. Seabuckthorn seems to do easily from seed.
Perennials: This is the year I started planting perennial flowers that aren't roses. I haunted that sale and got a bunch of $5 and $3 plants, daylilies and salvia and some verbascum and russian sage and ecinacea and whatnot. I have ordered some peonies, some common (inexpensive) cultuvars and a bag of root fragments that are unlabelled, they'll take a long time to bloom but I have more time than money (I hope).
I also found a lead on inexpensive daffodil bulbs and am putting a bunch of them in, underplanting with a bunch of smaller bulbs as you might expect. Basically any new bed that goes in will have bulbs in it if I can do anything about it (which means fall planted, mostly, since I am unlikely to go back and put bulbs into existing beds).
Weeds: the aspen suckers are nuts this year, which is unsurprising. They take about two years to get 8-10' tall or so and over an inch thick, so there are a couple clumps I missed last year that feel like real trees now and need different equipment to cut down. If I cut them twice a year I can use the really robust hedge shears. It's all really hard on the hands, like I lose the ability to hold cups after for awhile. I've been trying to track down proper ratcheting pruners but it seems like they're out of fashion.
The invasive thistle is everywhere. If I deep mulch yearly it's easy to pull out once a year, also hard on my hands but keeps it from going to seed. Thing is, I need to cut the aspens before I deep mulch, so there's this whole particular sequence that needs to happen and it kind of needs to happen everywhere at once? normally I do cardboard then compost then mulch, but when mom was here last spring she took out most of the gardboard and I've been using the rest to build beds, so grass has cme up to complicate the aspen/thistle removal. I'm definitely getting into a sense for what yearly maintenance will look like. The south slope bed is my oldest one, and honestly I haven't had many longlasting beds I got to handle in a non-professional capacity, so it's interesting to play around with it. The soil is improving steadily, which is good and also maybe why the weeds are so intense. If I can get 6-8" of mulch on everything and the aspen suckers cut down by mid-april I'll e in good shape.
The scentless chamomile which took over the untilled spots in the winter garden dyes fabric well and lastingly, which is nice. I'd still rather have edible chamomile, but this stuff pulls out easily in spring. I'm ok with it. Clover seems to outcompete it too.
My feral gai lan did some good seeding this year, I'm collecting a lot of the seeds and going to move them up from the winter field to the apple field. The back field is lots of clover and grass where the oaks didn't go in. The clover is self-seeding now, which is excellent, but the grass is a bit of a challenge.
I'm losing typing coordination so I'll set this asde for now. But. Good gardening year, looking forward to nxt.
Oh, two kinds of sunflowers did super well. And I need to write about herbs.
no subject
Date: 2025-09-25 06:16 pm (UTC)on the "plants are amazing" note, while gambel oak is so abundant that you can't take 20 steps in my local mountains without encountering some, AND it comes back fast after fire and takes over more space than it previously had (a beneficial quality, given how many things don't recover well after these megafires), i have so much trouble visualizing aspens as a weed tree. they are very selective about where & how they will grow down here - i suspect northern NM is the southern extent of their natural range. they are high-altitude-only trees - i watch people plant them in the city only to watch them die over & over because it's just too damn hot & dry. and i've spent the last 20 years watching the native aspens receed out of the Jemez mountains due to warmer winters & significantly reduced snow, from which they may disappear entirely within my lifetime.
no subject
Date: 2025-09-27 02:11 pm (UTC)I see a ton of ads for battery-assist hand loppers these days, it's very strange. Ratcheting is just such a *useful* technology. Weird for it to go out of fashion - maybe because so many folks live in cities where there's less use-case? Has your Amazon set stood up?
no subject
Date: 2025-09-27 03:16 pm (UTC)the shears I have are these: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B07BQ9CCKB?psc=1&ref=ppx_pop_mob_b_asin_title and yes, they have held up well. Jenny got a pair for the farm and we all liked them so much we got another. I ended up leaving them on the farm so i wanted to replace them when we moved here.
New Mexico is greener than Arizona overall. The drought hasn't hit us as badly and we have more and higher mountains, as the Rockies end here. I drive back to Prescott, AZ every year to visit my mom (I grew up there), and I pretty much always take the mountain route, and every year it is drier and browner and there are more burn scars. it's intense. the one exception is the area around Payson which has somehow pulled through with a lush forest of mostly scrub oak, gambel oak, manzanita, and ponderosa. i camped outside of Prescott by Granite Basin Lake again last year, as I have often done this past decade, and the vegetation all around the campground and the lake is dying. it's terrible. the ongoing conifer die-off throughout the mountain west, which is also very much in evidence in New Mexico and Colorado, is far advanced in Arizona. I understand the trees are forced to choose between drinking and breathing. I have been told we'll see the loss of 85% or more of conifers in this region in the next 10 years. watching the Douglas fir tussock moth caterpillars devastate whole hillsides over and over again these past 3 years, I believe it. the ranks of standing dead are legion. fire would honestly help a lot of that recover, become some other kind of forest, but i think any fire that comes into those areas will become a dangerous megafire.
one of the things i think i will get out of moving to the California coast is to step backwards in time a little, with respect to climate change, especially drought. the forests are so much healthier. and maybe my dryland farming experience will be useful as things change there.
lmk if you have trouble sourcing seeds for gambelii! i can collect you some. I'll be in the woods in thy high country tomorrow and then once or twice more before I move. we're aiming to experience the fall color.
no subject
Date: 2025-09-30 02:55 pm (UTC)Through work I'd seen the range charts for a lot of BC trees, though they're available publically online. for now and various climate change scenarios ( https://www.planthardiness.gc.ca/?lang=en&m=5&s=b&val=T ) and the lack of overlap in some areas was something I really had to come to terms with. I don't think a lot of people take that kind of thing seriously. And of course, as you say, lots of dead trees are just fire eventually.
As a forester that idea of "letting a forest become some other kind of forest" is one of the things The Public was dead against generally (except it looks like they might be in favour of a conversion to aspen if we pretend it's not a conversion but was always aspen).
no subject
Date: 2025-10-01 04:27 pm (UTC)it turns out i wasn't in a gambel-oak-rich area on Sunday anyway - I have two more hiking days, one to get back to Santa Fe's Aspen Vista area next week at, hopefully, peak color (all aspens and spruce, few/no oaks), and the other to a little pocket canyon south of here in the Manzano Mountains called 4th of July Canyon because the maple trees down there go off like fireworks in the fall - that's the 14th. that area has a ton of gambel oak (and, not coincidentally, has survived a couple significant fires in the last decade; those oaks are always one of the first taller species to come back or move in).
so i will gather you up a jar of the ripest-looking acorns i can find, and mail them as "craft supplies". because that is the week we move, i will either be able to mail them immediately so as not to have one more thing to track, or not until later in October due to not having enough time. :) but - send me your address? are you on Signal or would a direct message here be better?