Fall Gardening...

Want ideas on when to do what in your garden, now that it's Fall? The Common Ground community garden website (arid if not as much so as NM but same latitude and still Southwest) provides three different ways of learning, all under "Garden Tips for Los Angeles County":

1.  Monthly discussion – Why each month is the best time to do all the different things that need doing.  Each month's information is separated into Edibles, Ornamentals, and General.   
2. Monthly Checklist – Specific activities and listing of which plants that apply
3. Six-month Overview – Outline by topics such as soil, irrigation, composting; also includes the monthly checklists at the end.

 Manager and Master Gardener Yvonne Savio also writes about and photographs her Pasadena garden for an every-other-Thursday Southern California Coastal and Inland Valleys Regional Report for the National Gardening Association.  You can subscribe by going to the website and clicking on "Free Newsletters" in the upper left corner.

 

Children of the Corn: Tuscarora Indian Reservation

A story about heirloom seeds and heritage agriculture well worth reading....

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"This corn...has been grown by the Tuscarora since they lived in what was not yet the Carolinas, and for who knows how long before that. During the four-year Tuscarora war ~ which killed more than a thousand American Indians and settlers before its end in 1715 ~ the corn traveled with the Tuscarora in their episodic exodus from the South, through Pennsylvania, and into New York, where the tribe was adopted as one of the Six Nations of the Iroquois [the oldest living participatory democracy on earth] in 1722. Tuscarora corn flourished until the boom in highly mechanized industrial agriculture that began in the 1950s and then, like so many breeds and crop varieties across the country, it dwindled until only a few families were still growing it in the traditional way."   Natural selection Strings of Tuscarora corn, 40 and 50 ears to a braid, hung from rafters, "The way to assess Tuscarora corn is not to gauge its difference from the genetically engineered corn being grown in fields a few miles from the Tuscarora Nation. Gauge its difference instead from the species — or species plural — from which maize originated as long ago as the oldest bristlecone pine. It is a long way, geographically and temporally, from the tiny ancestral ears of Mesoamerican corn to Tuscarora corn. Embedded in the ear I was holding was not only the tremendous adaptability of Zea mays but also the will and the needs of a people, expressed family by family." T: STYLE   | September 21, 2011 T Magazine: Children of the Corn By VERLYN KLINKENBORG An Iroquois tribe's heritage seed survives the ages.

Briefly Updated + Edible Education [video]

Meeting changes: 

• Today's Community Garden Workday and Fall Planning session at Mountain Arts on Broadway site has been postponed to October, but Joan E, Kristine and Addie will be at the garden around 10am to do some tidying up and planning extended beds. Volunteers and visitors, as ever, are welcome. Today might be a good day to drop by and ask questions.

• Due to the Shaffer Hotel closing Thursday (no more Packs Family at the helm), the iCreate board will meet at Lenora's.  Since the meeting is not being held in a public location, this one will not, as per usual policy, be open to the public. If you have questions about iCreate or wish to suggest items for the agenda, call Kay Stillion at 847-2301. Agenda items include: music outreach donations and thank you notes, new location for Mountainair classes; grant plans and deadlines, community garden and SEEDS project

Associated Links: I embed links just in case anyone reading is interested in following them. Today's links added to the video notice strike me as being of particular interest. The Edible Schoolyard is a lovely site, definitely worth a visit, and certainly related to SEEDS, the community outreach and sustainability components of the iCreate mission. Joan Embree will certainly be familiar with Chez Panisse and its foundation.

UCBerkeley 

Edible Education: The Politics of Food

Marion Nestle, PhD, MPH, Paulette Goddard Professor in Dept. of Nutrition at NYU 

Sponsored by The EDIBLE SCHOOLYARD PROJECT with support from Stephen Silberstein and the KNIGHT FOUNDATION FOR ENVIRONMENTAL JOURNALISM Live Stream and sponsored by BON APPETIT Management Company Instructors MICHAEL POLLAN and NIKKI HENDERSON (People's Grocery).... More

KGI News: a global community cultivating change

High school teacher Adam Guerrero of Memphis, TN has been cited for his front yard kitchen garden. Please help send a message to local officials there that Adam and his garden are not the problem, but part of the solution.

Act Now  Follow On Twitter Join Us On Facebook

Earthworms, bees, eggplants, oh my! If it seems like just last month that a kitchen gardener was facing legal woes for planting a subversive plot in a front yard, it wasn't: it was two months ago!  Last time around, it was a mother of four from Michigan who was facing a possible 93 day jail sentence for her tidy raised bed garden. This time it's Adam Guerrero, a high school math teacher from Memphis, Tennessee, who's feeding himself from his front yard, keeping bees and worm composting bins in his back yard and using it all to teach teenagers in his community about healthy eating and living.  Read his story and show your solidarity here»

Agroforestry and fighting poverty with trees - The BusyTrees Campaign | Permaculture Magazine

This article from #Permaculture Magazine caught my eye. iCreate is about both creativity and sustainability. This idea is both. The article is also about desert agriculture and issues the community garden has had to deal with: water and shading young plants from strong sun. We could use a few Faidherbia albida trees too. I wonder how these members of the acacia family handle altitude?

"Jessie Bernard describes how agroforestry can make a big difference, relieving poverty and increasing food security in countries in Africa and other parts of the 'developing' world. By improving nutrition, agroforestry can also save lives..."

Agriculture Changes Deserts From The Ground Up

No doubt New Mexico gardeners will relate better to desert agriculture than to Canadian horticulture (a word that always makes me think of of Dorothy Parker for reasons that have nothing to do with gardening).  Egypt and Hungary may seem too distant to be of interest but the conclusions should not be. For all its challenges, notably water, desert agriculture also presents unique potential for resistant, diverse soil bacteria and carbon capture

Agriculture Changes Deserts From The Ground Up, a Science 2.0  article by Caitlin Knight,  September 9, 2011 (short URL http://tinyurl.com/3ljhvlr)

As human population numbers worldwide continue to increase, we are having to be increasingly clever about finding ways to produce enough food for all consumers. One potential technique is converting deserts into agricultural landscapes. Anyone who knows their history will be aware that this practice is by no means new, but modern technology allows desert farming on much larger scales--not only creating larger agricultural areas, but also producing greater quantities of food.

#CommunityGarden Coffee & Conversation, Thu Sep8

A Mountainainair announcement x-posted to Mountainair Announcements and listed on the Community Calendar. Community Garden Manager Joan Embree writes to invite community gardeners and supporters of the Mountainair Community Garden

Gardeners and friends of the community garden: We will gather Thursday at 10 am at Alpine Alley to talk about this gardening season and next.  Bring ideas.  

 

Country Clip Art graphics

Among the questions we might discuss is whether or not to have a booth at this year's Arts and Crafts Fair in November.  Last year we had LOTS of green tomatoes to deal with.  This year, not.  What could we make and sell while we're talking up the community garden effort?
     

Hope to see you Thursday ~ Joan Embree

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And finally, a few gardening links to tide you over until Thursday's meeting:

• The #gardening Daily Newsletter featuring links to articles on homegrown herbs, broccoli rabe, preserving and canning, composting, beekeeping, soil and water management, post Labor Day home and garden ideas, gardening tips, videos, ideas, news and more. Subscribe by email.
• Kitchen Gardeners International, a global community cultivating change and home of World Kitchen Garden Day: gardening articles, recipes, blogs, seed ordering advice, a YouTube channel and more. Subscribe to email newsletter.
• NMSU Extension "ACES" YouTube Channel featuring how-to videos for NM gardening

Ed. Note: this is all the agenda available for this meeting, Presumably a de facto agenda would also include: garden update; financia report (account balance, disbursements and projected expenses); informal recap of this season's gardening and the experimental "instant garden;" discussion and tentative decision-making about the garden's location and plans for the next growing season; off-season and fall/winter gardening plans