Lessons from La Milpa
Madeleine Bavley shares lessons from La Milpa Comunitaria, a young project bringing people together around the garden on Santa Fe’s Southside.
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Tag: gardening
Late Winter 2026: Food Access
This issue of Edible New Mexico is dedicated to food access: not only where food comes from but how food flows and whom it feeds.
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Acequias and the Art of Growing Vegetables without Plastic
Willy Carleton reflects not only on the risks but on the rhythms, the mentorship, the elegance of irrigating with acequias.
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Fall 2024: Acequias
This issue celebrates acequias, the ditches familiar as breath to many who’ve grown up in New Mexico.
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An Inexhaustive Snapshot of Regional Seed Resources
High Desert Seed and Gardens (Montrose, CO) provides a nice selection of open-pollinated...
Read MoreGarden tea
My garden reminds me of a summer ice tea. I sit down and sip the cool and quiet. I feel the sensations travel across my tongue, down my throat and through the inner corridors of my body.
Read MoreI’m too busy to be writing this
That is just what spring is like in our house. Task after task. It is a happy mixture of work, love, talk of moving to a small apartment, a sore back, and pure joy. Little piece of our desert.
Read MoreExcuse me, my dead chicken is in your yard
The soil is sandy and pebbly and virtually devoid of organic matter. Perfect for hardy native plants like wild mustard or wild lettuce- they do just fine in his yard. Yet I can’t help want to amend it with some mulch, orange peels, compost, leaves or a dead chicken– just to satisfy my obsession with soil enrichment.
Read MoreThe road to winter
Ahead stretches the long road through winter- mile after mile of bleak landscape and little change in terrain. It is time for the gardener to take a rest in the passenger seat- feet up on the dashboard and weary back hugging the seat. Her right hand, resting on her belly, is rough. The tiny trenches in her palm are still full of soil from her last stop—pulling down plants, chopping them into pieces, mounding them on the beds, layering leaves and manure. Cementing it with water. Her parting gift was cover crops- winter wheat, hairy vetch, fava beans.
Read MoreMy soil test results are in!
Nitrogen is a large woman in a black dress. She has hairy arm pits, stinky feet and keeps cheese in her fridge until it is covered with mold, which she never bothers to scrap off and eats voraciously.
Read MoreAmpersand Sustainable Learning Center
I recently had the chance to visit with Amanda Bramble of Ampersand Sustainable Learning Center. She and her husband, Andy, have created an amazing living system around their home on 38 acres just north of Madrid, which is completely off the grid – without even a well. They grow vegetables, fruit trees, fruiting shrubs, and other perennials, based entirely on natural precipitation and rainwater catchment. The property is an inspiring demonstration site for hands-on learning about sustainable design and construction.
Read MoreSoil testing and other mysteries
“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.” ― Zora Neale Hurston Tonight I dug up...
Read MoreMy plants will not grow
My garden has a weird growth curve this year. Something like 5th percentile for height and 10th percentile for weight. In all my years gardening I’ve never seen my plants so diminutive
Read MoreThe garden squat and… Hello Kitty?
Lately I’ve been overcome with a deep sense of doom about the evolutionary trajectory of humans. For all but a blink of our 200,000 years we have been a species completely immersed in moving around in the natural world….
Read MoreThe secret to gardening
And so-people ask…why is there not a garden in every front yard, on every street, in every neighborhood?
Read MoreWinter- where the real work is done
As if my neighbors didn’t think I was eccentric enough for ripping up my lawn and putting in a garden, I add to it by standing there all winter in my cumber green $5 ski swap down jacket watering the dirt.
Read MoreIn the belly of a whale
The plants stare up at the arc of grey rib. Taught cloth skin between them and the sky. How to build a whale (hoop house).
Read MoreOn the prow of a ship
My garden is the front yard, hugged by a driveway on each side and the street out front. I often feel I am on a prow of a very green ship- sticking out into a concrete sea.
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