Gardening Rough

Now for something completely different: the fun and games of mini-farming in a small town in rural Arizona.  Doubtless most of you have heard about my little house on a large lot in Buckeye, AZ, and my efforts to grow a small (less than 20 trees) orchard.  So far I have eight pomegranate trees of different breeds, colors, and flavors, plus one surviving grapevine, one pecan tree, two (one may not survive) apricot trees, one stunted tangerine tree, one struggling almond tree, and a sour orange tree that started out to be a Bearss lime tree (long story).  That's not counting my breed of super-smart cats.  I put together a legal club -- the Ralston-Fish Land Club -- just to have a legal entity (I can't afford to create a legal "trust") that I can will the land to, that will continue to keep the trees and the cats alive if I should knock off suddenly.  I've got a Go Fund Me project to support the club which I don't report to nearly often enough.

Anyway, the main problem with doing any kind of farming or gardening in Arizona is water.  The heat is secondary, and after that there's the salt in the soil (which is why I can't grow avocados here), and after that the #%!&*@ gophers.

Starting from the top, this year started out wonderfully cool and rainy, perfect for farmers, but almost exactly on May Day everything changed.  The temperature rocketed to over 110 F and stayed there.  The summer Monsoon became a Non-soon -- all of two small rainstorms and then nothing.  I've had to go out and water the trees by hand every other day.  This has not made my water-bill easy to pay, and the trees took heat damage anyway.  The pomegranates fruited all right, but the fruits are small and hard.  I'll go out this week and gather all the ones that are ripe (and when they're this hard it's difficult to tell just which ones are ripe) and run them through the juicer.  I'll be lucky to get a single gallon of juice from the lot of them. 'Twas even worse for the grapevine;  the only grapes that grew were snatched up by the local birds.  And I lost the little American Chestnut tree, and won't be able to replace it until December, damn.  I may have lost one of the apricots, but the other's surviving.  The pecan tree was sunburned and stunted, though it's surviving too.  I'll need to get another pecan, of a different breed, to cross-pollinate with it in order to get nuts off either of them.  Oh, headache!

Nothing can be done about the salt in the soil;  most of Arizona is old sea-bed silt.  The best I can do is keep adding fiber and compost.  Given all the vegetable-trash that the local grasses and weeds produce -- not to mention the available stable-sweepings from my neighbors who keep horses -- that wouldn't be a problem except for the effects of the @#$%&! gophers.

The local critters are a breed called "pocket gophers" -- which means they're small enough for a cat to catch when they poke their noses above ground, if the cat happens to be crouching in ambush at the right place, at the right time.  Alas, that's not enough kills to cut down on the gopher population.  Getting at the damn diggers when they're in their network of tunnels as another story.  I haven't been able to find any source of gopher-snakes anywhere in the state, and hiring an exterminator costs a good chunk of change.

Even so, that wouldn't have been much of a problem (gophers don't like the taste of pomegranate roots, or pecan or citrus roots) if it hadn't been for the tenant's dogs.  We  had a couple of tenants living in the trailer outside who had dogs, and both dogs enthusiastically declared war on the gophers.  They'd chase the gophers into their holes and then try to dig them out.  The result is potholes all over the yard, some of them nearly a yard deep, not to mention the equally-large mounds of dug-up dirt.  The yard would look like a fairy-sized barttlefield, except that -- as in the famous World War One poem -- the grass, and the native weeds, did their work.  All that loosened soil made fine bedding for every kind of seed in the territory, and my necessary tree-watering benefited the damned weeds as well.  The result is that my orchard is more like a miniature jungle.

The cats love it.  They can hunt through the tall weeds or stay cool under the leaves during the heat of the day, or they can stroll back into their roofed kennel, or hop through the pet-door into the back room of the house, as they please.  It's not so much fun for me, since I have to drag the watering-hoses up and down the yard full of thick weeds and disguised pot-holes that could easily catch and twist my rather-fragile ankles.

So I've got to go out and mow that sizable yard, then rake up all the vegetable-trash and run it through a wood-shredder, dump it in a compost-pit, and then flatten out the ground.  This kind of mowing can't be done with a lawnmower;  it'll take a weed-whacker, a machete, a hoe, a pick-axe, a tiller a wood-shredder and maybe an axe.  Yes, the weeds grow tough in Arizona!  Aside from the wood-shredder, I've managed to collect the tools -- including a new weed-whacker which I've named Goses, because I want him to Mow Down the land -- but the problem is the time and labor that all this is going to take.  Between me and Rasty and Jerry Marin, our current guest, we don't have a single body athletic enough to do all this in a single day -- or weekend, or week.  Neither can we assemble enough $$$ between us to hire professional landscapers to come do the job for us.  Damn.  We've got to do it ourselves, and it'll take a month at least.

So this is another reason (besides finances) why I didn't show up at CokoCon this weekend, and don't foresee going to any other local cons soon.  No, I haven't given up on fandom, really.  If anyone asks what Leslie's doing this season, tell them she's hacking her way through the fairies' jungle, trying to reclaim the land for her orchard.

Now you know.

--Leslie <;)))><  )O(