What’s with the radio silence here at SRB? Stuff. Big stuff, my lovelies. The sort of stuff you don’t really want to talk about until it’s good as done. And now that this double stuffed Oreo is nigh on being a chewed and digested cookie, I’ll share it with the world. (Yes. You and the 12 other people reading this consist of the world.)
The Ortiz Mountains
First let’s back up. Why is this big thing happening? Start at the beginning.
First there was darkness. Then there was light. Then some other stuff happened. Dinosaurs, for one. The Industrial Revolution, for another. Crystal Pepsi. The first episode of Top Gear. And so on. Then at some point Brandon and Amy dug and built a garden in the Ortiz Mountains of New Mexico.
One of the July harvests.
Yesterday we pulled about four pounds of cucumbers, one melon, a few carrots and a butt-ton of Shishito peppers out of that humble hole in the ground. Curtly top victims aside, this garden is a downright success, yo.
Pickle Batch #1 gurgles away in the kitchen as I type.
But it’s not an easy success. The bone shaking wind forces you to cover up the garden with row cover frames, so most of the time all you see of the garden is white sheets.
The terrible caliche/boulder mix that passes for soil round here means before you plant anything you have to dig a big hole and fill it with a mix of dirts slightly more suitable than the native concrete.
And the water. Oh, the water. Sometimes it falls from the sky (sometimes a LOT) and that week God does the watering. Thank you God. But sometimes it doesn’t fall from the sky and on those days you get to carry 65 gallons of water by hand from rain barrels to the garden. It takes roughly two hours to do this. Every Tuesday. Until your arms fall off or winter comes.
Here’s how you keep track of how many watering cans you’ve poured into the garden. You need to do it 32 times.
So how does one reconcile a need to farm with the understanding that growing things on the top of a mesa in a particularly dry part of a particularly dry state is more than a little difficult?
One doesn’t. One takes a good, long look at all of the beauty and wonder and hard-scrabble wilderness that is this piece of desert paradise and with heavy heart and shaking hands, one decides to say goodbye.
Looking off to the north. Our view for three years. Still not used to all the amazingness.
For three years (to the day as of August 11th, 2014) we have improved and loved and lived in and learned about and drank beers upon this painfully beautiful part of Northern New Mexico. And in a few weeks, we’ll be moving on up.
The view from the front drive of the new place.
A more northern part of Northern New Mexico awaits us. It’s one fifth of the acreage. It’s twice the price. But, you ardent pickle fans, it’s got agua. Lots of it. Two wells and an acequia with irrigation rights.
One of the forty-five fruit trees planted on the land.
The awesome family that lived there for a decade planted 45 heirloom fruit trees and raspberry patches, built a chicken coop, dug a frog pond and ran irrigation lines hither and yon. They are sad to see it go and I understand exactly how they feel. We only hope that we do the land and their love of it justice.
My favorite part of this whole shift in locations is, of course, the water. But a close second is what the land doesn’t have that makes it perfect for us.
What’s that on the roof of that shed? Ah. I’ve seen those things before…
No power lines. No sewage lines. No gas lines. Yes. We are still off-grid. Still using power from solar. Still welcoming rain water. And still using those buckets. Which is good because I didn’t want to have to change the name of this blog.
So here’s to new things and new places and growing things with the help of irrigation. Here’s to a new piece of the pie.
Cheers, Madrid. You will be missed.
