High Desert Living

At this time of year I’m not doing much in the garden so it’s a good time to shop for seeds and plants. The following are the catalogs or retail outlets I personally use – this is not an official endorsement from Master Gardeners.

Browsing the Catalogs

When you live on the edge of open space it’s impossible not to share your landscape with rabbits, deer, prairie dogs, pocket gophers, rock squirrels, skunks, mice, and nuisance birds. In most cases, the wildlife was here before we were and we encroached on their space.

Controlling Unwanted Critters

This is the first in a series of articles written for High Desert homeowners about gardening in what for many is a “foreign” environment. If you’ve gardened elsewhere, the four primary differences here are soil, water, wind, and sun.

High Desert Gardening

The idea for this article came from the recent concern about weed spraying in my neighborhood. To understand the level of danger you need to be able to read and interpret the label on the product. Note, however, that in most situations most of the risk is to the person doing the application – in a residential situation that may be you.

How Safe are Herbicides & Pesticides?

You are heading out the door to buy plants because:

  1. You just received a design for your new landscape, or

  2. You had some plants in your landscape that died, or

  3. You want a different look for your landscape.

How to Select Plants

Last issue I talked about “Selecting the Right Plant for Your High Desert Landscape”. This issue is the next step or Part II of the process – how do you plant the plant? Most people feel that planting is pretty simple – dig a hole, put the plant into it, fill the hole with dirt, then water it. And all of that is true, but you may still kill your plant because planting’s not really so simple.

Planting ~ Pretty Basic?

According to a recent Albuquerque Journal article we are in our sixth year of drought. Although many plants are suffering, in Albuquerque we’re losing trees the fastest. This is surprising to me because many of the trees are in residential areas and are being watered regularly.

Saving Our Trees

At our home we have three small beds for mostly daylilies and some vegetables. The vegetables in the middle bed look stunted and diseased, an embarrassment for someone who’s supposed to be a good gardener.

Soil Gone Bad

Why Grow Your Own

There are several reasons why you might want to grow your own vegetables. These are my reasons. Freshness – you can pick your vegetables the same day you eat them

Starting a Vegetable Garden

This question came up recently and I thought it was a good one. Our soil is very low in organic matter so to grow healthier looking plants do we need to add soil amendments/organic matter? And if we do, what’s the best amendment to use?

To Amend or Not to Amend?

With a friend of mine I’ve taken over management of the Garden Shop at the Albuquerque Garden Center. This has given me a chance to think of the products and books I think are worth buying and at the same time it has given me a topic to cover in this article.

Tools for the Gardener

Whenever you purchase a plant it should come with a plastic tag inserted into the pot. When a plant doesn’t come with one, I’ve been known to “borrow” one from another pot. The tag contains lots of usefull information and I always keep mine.

Understanding Plant Tags

There are lots of reasons why you should grow your own vegetables, but the best reasons are that they taste better, are fresher, and you know how organically they’ve been grown. With the possible exception of corn, vegetables aren’t native plants and so they are not adapted to the native soil.

Vegetable Gardening

Because of the lovely wet fall and winter we will see lots of weed seeds germinating. Expect a bumper crop of weeds this spring. Weed seeds like moist soil, light, and bare ground or newly disturbed soil.

Weeds of High Desert

When is a landscape wild looking, and when does wild become weedy? In many cases it's a personal decision, so I'll give you my definition.

Wild or Weedy?

I admit I am constantly annoyed by newspaper articles on gardening that are pulled from the wire services. I’ve read several articles that were written in San Diego or Chicago and what they recommended just won’t work here.

Why Gardening is Local