Garden prep

We are currently between wind storms so Dan and I decided that, although we would rather be working on the paving for the shop/shed porch, this morning would be a good time to till the garden. I had already added a tractor-bucket of horse manure to each bed a week or so ago, so getting this done would be a snap.


I borrowed the little Mantis tiller from friends and while I loosened the soil with the spading fork, Dan worked the machine. I much prefer brute manual labor to walking behind a noisy machine that stinks to boot.

The beds look good now, and just need to be shaped. Gardening in the desert does require some adjustments. No raised beds here (they dry out too quickly). Here you rake the beds very flat and add a small wall of soil all around so that the water does not run off when you irrigate. I have learned a great deal from George Brookbank, an Englishman now living in Tucson, and his book Desert Gardening. Tuscon, in the Sonoran desert, is lower and warmer than here in the Chihuahuan desert, so planting times differ, but his principles have served me very well. I have had better gardens here than in Oregon.

Our soil is really quite fertile, witness the pepper farms and pecan orchards in the valley. Here on the bajada the soil has a lot of clay, rather than sand, and is a bit rocky here and there, but with the addition of some organic matter (never a lack of that, thanks to Buggsy, Bueno and Cody), all you need to add is water.


All in all I don't really know why I was in such a hurry to get the garden ready for planting. Last night the temperature was 32 degrees. It is probably the tomato plants in the cold frame that are pushing me along: I have had to transplant them into bigger pots already.

I just noticed that the quail approve of the nice, loose soil: great for taking dust baths. I will have to be vigilant to keep them out of the garden once the seedlings emerge.