Potato, potahto

My friend Valery has been taking care of my plants for a few months since I’ve been rambling. Next Friday we are going to participate in a forum together so she is coming in to ABQ and bringing my lovely plant friends and worm bin home to me (I wonder if the worms have survived? I have a new home for them:). I’m most excited because I had a bunch of sprouting potatoes, sweet potatoes and big baking potatoes. Anyway, if you haven’t seen a growing potato, they are gorgeous. Sweet potatoes have sort of lovely purple shoots with flowery things at the tips. The regular potatoes look more like tentacles heheh.

Anyway, there are a couple other plants too, but they are decorative, so the potatoes are my big interest. I am going to try to find a large barrel on Freecycle or at ReStore and fill it with dirt. I will ask Stella to make me something to set it on and put it out front over the Nightshade hiding rocks.

Then I will take the sprouted potatoes, cut them into small pieces and bury them in the barrel. Hopefully there is enough time for them to grow until October or so. I’ll put more in the back where it’s hotter just in case that will help them grow faster.

If you are going to do this you may not want to use potatoes from a chain grocery. They are more likely to have rot or been exposed to pesticides. I got mine from Pro’s Ranch Market (www.prosranch.com) which is a huge Mexican grocery here in ABQ. They have very fresh fruits and veggies. The potatoes that I let sprout were accidentally left in a dark cupboard for a few months and got very wrinkly until the eyes sprouted awesome tentacles.

I’ll let you know how they taste in a month or so.

oops, that WASN’T a tomato… am I gonna die now?

There I was, water on full blast (and yet it was a pathetic little trickle) trying to save my roommates plant beds in the front yard. There are a couple that will probably make it but one of the tomato plants might be beyond the pale. Anyway, I turned around to turn off the water and had to walk through the other side of the yard. This side has a couple of nice shade trees but its full of the same strange weeds as the backyard.

As I’m walking back to the knob I see a couple of random plants along the walk that are being smothered by weeds so I give them all a drink and start looking more carefully. Thats when I saw them. They looked like weird tomato plants, kind of short and squat. The leaves were narrow, about an inch and a half long and a sort of silvery green. There seemed to be two types, one with bigger thorns, yellow fruit the size of cherry tomatoes and scalloped edges to the leaves, the other had fruit that was green. It looked sort of like small watermelons. That plant had strait leaves and smaller thorns. They smelled good.

I got all excited thinking “OMG we have a whole yard full of cute little tomatoes or maybe watermelons!! This is so great.”
I was so excited I texted Stella with the good news. Then I got a fruit of each color and brought it inside. I cut them open to see the inside. The yellow one looked like a typical tomato except with green pulp, the green one had sort of arrow head shaped leaves. I got even more excited thinking of watermelons.

At this point I’m googling tomatoes and watermelon images like crazy but the leaves all look wrong and the leaves are the major identifier. Suddenly my phone rang. It was my friend Valery, artist, foodie and plant lover. (See her website here: http://www.fluxfire.com) So I start describing the plant to her. She’s all “hmm, I dunno, that sounds odd, lemme think” when out of nowhere she gets all excited and starts yelling “DONT EAT THAT” at me “I know what that is” she says “that’s Nightshade and it’s poisonous.”  I was like “holy shit, I licked it, am I gonna die??” And of course started googling the heck out of nightshade but I couldn’t find any pictures that looked like what we have until I landed on an Australian government site. The plant is called the Silverleaf Nightshade. It’s poisonous and possibly deadly to children and animals (particularly livestock, although fortunately less so to dogs cuz Evelyn has been popping the berries like they are candy 0_o), invasive, can live dormant underground for up to 15 years and will grow from any bit of root. Ack. Apparently our evil invasive weeds in the backyard may actually be dormant (non seed producing) off shoots of the Nightshade (I may be wrong here, but it looks alike except for the lack of fruit). The info I read suggests it may take 3 years to remove them if it isn’t completely impossible. Our yards are infested. I went all the way around the perimeter even to the back and they are all around the edges in the shaded areas.

Some of the sites suggest growing a larger plant and hacking down the nightshade until the crop plants are well established but we aren’t going to grow barley in the front yard! I’m also concerned about the neighborhood kids. The fruit looks great and the flowers are gorgeous. What if some little kids get into them? Urg.

The roommates and I have decided to rip all the weeds and Nightshade out on Sunday. Then we are going to cover the area with landscapers cloth and rocks. It should look ok, it’ll save on water and it should keep the Nightshade dormant until the house’s owner decides to do something about it, or the next tenant does.

Anyway, Nightshade is a very odd plant. Here is more info on it if you are interested in learning more or need to remove it from your own yard:

http://www.nwcb.wa.gov/weed_info/Written_findings/Solanum_elaeagnifolium.html

http://www.santafebotanicalgarden.org/subpages/LCWP%20Naughty%20Ladies.html

Dust Storms

My room mate & I have been working on getting supplies to fix up the back yard. Currently it looks like a stereotype of a desert, just with less cactus and more dust. We haven’t drawn out any plans yet but we’ve decided to build a large green house, a storage shed for our various bikes and a firepit. Oh, and a pond, just for fun. And there will be chickens. I tried to get one through Freecycle (www.freecycle.org)but I haven’t gotten a response yet. Stella, my roommate, is designing (she is a welder) a chicken house and run that can be moved from plant bed to plant bed during the winter so the birds can scratch up the earth and fertilize it with droppings. The thing I’m most excited about is our green house. We will make it by buying dozens of old windows from Habitat for Humanities ReStore (near San Mateo & Zuni Walmart: http://www.habitatabq.org/restore). Incidentally I plan to volunteer there. Please support your local ReStore by donating old household items and building supplies so poor people like me can afford to make their home look nice.

So there I was on Sunday morning. My roommate had planned to help but she conked out around 5 am doing school work and I decided not to wake her. I decided to start by weeding the backyard. There’s a strange sort of weed that looks kind of like a pepper plant, but with no peppers. It’s got dark green, narrow, long leaves and a sort of fuzzy thing sticking out on top (a pistle? pestle?), where I assume its flowers were. Can you tell I don’t know much about plants?

Anyway, there I was weeding the yard. I managed 2 hours and only finished 1/4 of the yard! I dont know what kind of weeds these are but they have deeeeep roots that are thick, they remind me of small trees. The dog even tried to help by biting and pulling on weeds in between crawling up my back and trying to play with my elbow. I was a bit depressed at how long it took to do so little since I thought I’d be done with the whole yard in that time, then Stella could rake the weeds and all the doggy poo into the compost bin. After seeing how tenacious the weeds were though I started piling them in a bin to trash. I dont want to risk spreading seeds all over the yard. On another note, its just as well I didn’t pull up all the weeds yet. The fall dust storms have started and since the weeds are the only thing holding our yard together every room with an open window facing south is currently filled with gritty dust.

I’m really worried we wont be able to rehabilitate the soil. We may have to just pour strait manure/fertilizer all over and cover it with soil but that might be expensive. We’re thinking about making raised bed and laying paving stones or gravel in paths around them. Oh and I discovered we cant dig very deep into the soil. There is a layer of Caliche (mineral) only 6inches down. Hopefully getting some plants growing will let the roots break it up. Here’s the Wiki for Caliche if you want to know more about it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caliche_(mineral)

Fruits and veggies n om nom nom

On Monday I got the project itchies and decided to go on an adventure. After rampaging about on my bike for a few hours, hitting the library and borrowing 10 DVDs and a similar number of books and stopping at Talin, a local “world food” market for coconut water, I somehow ended up at Walmart (oh no I just looked up and there’s a giant spider crawling up my wall 0_o it has a yellow stripe down it’s back). Now I knooooow that Walmart is a bastion of unethical corporate behavior but….. they do have cheap products…. So I wandered in through the gardening section.

Basically I went nuts. I only had about $30 left on me but I left with 54 cents. I ended up getting some potting soil and a bunch of plants. Two decorative water lily type things (not sure what they are called), basil, an orange bell pepper plant, some kind of hybrid yellow cherry tomato plant and a strawberry plant. Also a bunch of red lettuce sprouts. I bought larger plants to make up for starting so late in the season. Luckily this is New Mexico so it should be reasonably warm until November.

So… there I was trundling out with my purchases. I rolled the cart up to my ride…. passerby pointed and laughed (not cool) while I carefully loaded the plants into the super adorable white detachable basket (convenient!) hanging from the front of my bike. I managed to get all the plants in front without squishing any leaves. The sack of soil I squashed up as small (ooh alliteration win) as possible and bungy corded to this thing on the back (not sure what it’s called) that I think is intended for baskets. So at this point I was finally able to free my bike and care straddle it by climbing over the soil using a bolder. And I rode home wobbling from the awesome weight of all I had managed to attach to myself. The basil smelled amazing fyi.

I managed to get all the way home without mishap and lean my bike against the wall. After extricating myself
from my backpack I tried to shove it into the house while avoiding being gnawed on in welcome by a certain overly excitable puppy who goes by the name of Evelyn. About this moment is when my bike randomly decides to take a flying leap off of the porch. BANG. Basil leaves everywhere. Also 2 caterpillars and a bunch of aphids (I guess the fall was a good thing then). So as I rushed around trying to save poor plants and repot them I suddenly realized… I FORGOT THE POTS. dang. and then I remembered those awful expensive hanging tomato baskets at Walgreens.

I raided my room mates recyclable materials bag. She has one full of glass bottles and another filled with plastic. I snitched two 2 lt soda bottle and two milk gallon jugs. Then I cut the bottoms off of them all and punch two holes on either side through which I strung some old shoe laces. Then came the hard part: getting my rescued plant babies  into their new homes… They were too big and fluffy, too many sprouts and leafy bits. They just wouldn’t fit. Sooooo I wrapped the leaves up as tightly as I could without crunching them, then slowly and carefully  pulled firmly through the holes in the bottles. It was especially hard on basil and she came out much worse for the wear. (Before this I had already removed each plant from it’s pot and loosened up the roots. I think if the roots are smaller you could put the plant in roots first or even start it growing in the pot and cut off the bottom when it’s big enough to hang.) Afterwards I filled my makeshift pots with dirt and hung them outside.

Currently my plants have healed from their jarring experiences and after only 5 days they are already growing upwards towards the sun
shine that hits them from the west. I water them until they seep out the root hole every evening to prevent them drying out.

Unfortunately I couldn’t do this with the lettuce and I haven’t yet found a solution. A gardening article I read suggested making a hydroponic  planter for lettuce out of PVC tubing so I will tell you about that later.

Sustainable living, recycling and the green revolution…

“Sustainability” “urban farming” and “green living” are quickly becoming meaningless buzzwords. I set out on a mission to discover for myself what it means for me to live “green.” I may have cheated slightly by beginning this project well before I started this blog but I will try to keep my related experiences as factual as possible.

Many people have gone out of their way to tell me how silly I am for wasting time on this subject and learning about things like composting toilets and container housing but I am firmly of the opinion that every aspect of living is related and effects other aspects of your life. The food you eat effects your energy and health which effects the type and quality of work you can do which effects the amount of money you make which effects where you can live and on and on. In a way I could say that this is my mission statement, to discover whether I can maintain and improve my lifestyle by living “green.” For now I will give myself one year to chronicle my experience.

Thanks for dropping by!