Life seems to revolve around preparations for the Motorcycle Cannonball… at least for Jim. It is in his brain constantly. But, I force him into other activities from time to time. So today I want to spend a bit of time talking gardening as I have forced it into his time slots quite a bit lately.
I may have mentioned that 5 days before we leave for the Cannonball, I have a garden tour here at the house. For Master Gardeners (of which I am one) we are touring three gardens, spending about an hour talking about the good, bad and ugly of each, how we conceived, developed and maintain them. As you can imagine, Jim has had to partake of many activities from rebuilding rock walls to digging holes through the granite so plants have tiny chance of survival. I included a picture of the garden a few weeks back so won’t include that here. But… the vegetable garden is finally coming into it’s own. We have begun to harvest yellow squash, a few tomatoes and today beets. Green beans are also ready to go. We just need to pick and eat. So, here is a pic of today’s harvest. The beets are cooking as I write.
Picked from the garden today – beets, along with the yummy beat greens; yellow squash; cherry tomatoes.
In my last post I included the video of Jim’s first ride on the Cannonball bike. He had to take that ride as the next two days Jim and I were in a rainwater harvesting workshop and he would have no opportunity to work on the bike. Then the day after that, we were off for a brief camping trip with my bro and sis and niece (the Chicago doctor) and their partners. This was to mean, no moto work for 3 and a half days! The agony of the situation was killing Jim. But, he was committed. He did very well and managed to enjoy himself!
Back to the workshop. It was another Master Gardener event that I was coordinating and Jim very much wanted to participate as we are hot to install a couple of big tanks to catch our (infrequent) rain for our garden. Our well water is oh so hard and very precious and the plants will love the soft rain water. On Thursday and Friday we had quite a few hours of lectures to fill us in on the details of design, sizing and installation of rainwater catchment systems but also had to install the system. This meant digging a 100 foot trench (thank God for trenchers), moving plants and edging in the garden for the trenching, building a rain garden to catch overflow from the tank, install the piping and other infrastructure to move the water from the roof to the tank and from the tank to the garden, replanting the plants and edging and then installing a drip system. Plus a hundred other small tasks. A huge amount of work, but our team of 10 plus our instructor got it all functional in two days! Oh, I forgot, we also built the pad and set the 3000 gallon tank. Here is a pic of the tank installed and functional. A few activities to finish before we go live, but we have tested it and it works wonderfully. Very cool in that it is all gravity fed. No pumps required. We are already planning phase two; another tank to water the herb garden and a small rain barrel to support a small wildlife watering station.
The 3000 gallon rainwater collection tank to water the xeric garden at the Santa Fe County Fair Grounds. We are only harvesting from 1/3 of the roof at the show barn. A 1 inch rain will fill our tank.
Back to our garden at home for a moment. The tomato worms have arrived. I don’t think we’ve ever had so many. But then again, I don’t think our tomatoes have ever been so big… at least at this house. In any case, we seem to be winning the battle. Our new method for dealing with them? You still have to pick them off the plant. We then place them just outside our garden wall–we are on 10 acres so it is still our land but not irrigated nor terribly lush.
I found this guy on a jalapeno plant. He seemed to prefer it to the tomato plant that was right next to him.
The key is to find a spot that provides a good contrast between the beautiful green of the worm and background. Wait 30 minutes and the worms are gone. Not back to your plants. The birds quickly find them. Such a good method as we hate killing them directly and the birds love the treat.
Ok, I’ll provide a bit of motorcycle activity to keep “those types” happy. One of our neighbors, Joe Day, is a freelance producer and is going to do a short radio story for the local public radio station on our Cannonball adventure. I hope I’ll be able to get a copy to post here. Earlier this week I also did a couple of short interviews with Jim and Jimmy. Nothing like what Joe will do, but I though I’d include them here. These were pre-first ride. Here is an interview with Jimmy Allison on how things are going.
And, what Jim has to say about his progress.