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Quick garden update

Progress continues!

30 new apple trees (mostly cider a few mixed use eating/cooking/cider in there) on the nearest field ditch bank. The upper orchard also got a decent expansion...

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I didn't get a good picture prior to clearing but it looked a lot like this next one down... But with the added joy of an ancient page and barb wire fence trapped in the middle of it all.

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This is actually a shot from the other side and the bottom end from spring last year on the left of this picture although it really doesn't do it justice of what an impenetrable mess it was.

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Plus a dozen and change new currant bushes up near the house.
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I've also been pulling some of the less useful/dead/dying/sad firs from the edge of the fields. They're not real happy where it's to wet, they get root rot and die out eventually.
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Plus of course more mushroom logs (which have yet ti yield meaningful amounts of anything.. although one did put on some last fall we missed the flush and they were soggy by the time we found them

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Occasional wolf/wolf hybrid skull courtesy of the previous owners

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@Ryan Mooney - So jealous. I have had gardens before. In the ground, in containers, hanging upside down from the patio. Where we live now is mostly horses, donkeys, goats, and dogs :D . We love it and plan to leave horizontally but the land is mostly decomposed granite and clay layers like you get in a desert basin. I have reformed such soils in previous areas to make gardening possible. Peppers and squash family items do well. Here we are older and tend toward potted plants although I hold out hope for at least some container gardening in the future. Your posts are inspiring and I appreciate them.
 
glenn bradley said:
We love it and plan to leave horizontally but the land is mostly decomposed granite and clay layers like you get in a desert basin. I have reformed such soils in previous areas to make gardening possible.
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We have found that there are very definite tradeoffs around such things hah. Our last two garden places were a lot drier (the one a LOT drier).. Hotter and drier worked a lot better for peppers and tomatoes, here we pretty much have to have the big hoop house to get them to ripen well. OTOH we can grow various greens here just vastly better.

The big difference though is in weed load. Holy guacamole, it's a whole different ball game here. The grass and various weeds grow exponentially faster here. In the dry country we could somewhat manage them by just.. not watering those areas. at least past the spring flush, targeted water via drip pretty much kept the aisles clean and clear. Here there's actual water that falls from the sky.. unbelievable.. and the weeds take right off.

That also leads to, I won't say worse, but certainly different pest pressure. At our last garden we had The Plague Of Grey Digger Squirrels to deal with. Here it's more that you have to fence out the deer (and attempt.. to fence out the elk which are just bigger deer with who are also bigger jerks) for the large scale predation.. The small scale is the explosion of slug population with a side of earwigs.

We're also doing some smaller container stuff for various reasons. I hauled a pallet full of herb pots over from the Potting Up Area in front of the one shop over to the house the other day so we can have them right outside the kitchen. The mint is also kept semi-contained in pots for reasons of containment... We have maybe 6 or 7 varieties of that with 2-3 pots per it mostly lives down by the creek to keep it cool & damp... I also have a bunch of various trees and shrubs we're starting from seed (hickory, hazel, chestnut, yes more apples, sichuan pepper, several kinds of stone pines, various elderberry, a couple citrus, avocado <- although I lost the two big ones last winter, etc..) that are potted for the first bit until they're big enough to go out (and no not all of those breed true, but that's ok.. we can cull or graft on the ones that we don't like).
 
The elk come through mid Jan through Feb but they’re only really around my place for maybe 3-4 days tops as the herd seems really mobile (there’s a field a bit further south they hang at for a few weeks after that it seems). I can get land owner preference tags but they managed to make the process incredibly opaque so I haven’t actually done it.
 
Ryan Mooney said:
The elk come through mid Jan through Feb but they’re only really around my place for maybe 3-4 days tops as the herd seems really mobile (there’s a field a bit further south they hang at for a few weeks after that it seems). I can get land owner preference tags but they managed to make the process incredibly opaque so I haven’t actually done it.
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Yup. From what I can tell, it's a whole different world from my last elk hunt in Montana...buy a hunting license, shoot elk, deer, antelope, prairie chickens, ducks, geese, and prettty much anything else. Mid sixties.
 
It's actually interesting (to me anyway hah) to note that while we have lot more deer here the actual pressure from them isn't nearly as bad as it was further east. There's so much more browse and natural food available here that I can get by with what would have been wildly inadequate fences back there.

On one orchard space I have just some old 4' high page wire I stuck a bunch of limbs into to make it 7-8' tall - that stopped the deer just fine, the elk on the other hand went right over and through it (oddly didn't attack any trees but did stomp around a bunch). The yet-another upper orchard I have a 3 strands of hot wire around and I guess the elk recognized that because they didn't bother it at all.

The biggest damage I've actually had was some olives that I hadn't gotten to caging at all that the elk ate all of the leaves off of basically all of them and broke two off. The deer were browsing those but spraying them with half-and-half mixed 50% with water solved that (see https://www.conngardener.com/effective-fat-based-deer-repellents/ for more on that theory). I'm currently in "fingers crossed" mode that those recover.

Most of the "free range" trees I've been putting 4-5' cages around far enough back it seems to be mostly keeping the deer off of them. We salvaged some wire and old T posts from a neighbor that was having her fence rebuilt for that, they're not in perfect shape but certainly good enough to get me maybe 5 years for this project. We also selected medium sides apple rootstock for the more open field trees (G890 & EMLA-111 - which are not FULL sized but larger semi-dwarf), more control over tree size and rootstock hardiness is one big advantage of grafting your own - plus of course wildly reduced cost (the apples we're in a couple bucks per.... total..).

And then last summer the main garden I knew the fence was a bit low for deer but they weren't bothering it at all.. until the first tomato came ripe. I swear that deer can smell ripe tomatoes from a long ways away and they must be like candy to them. I had some hog wire the previous owner had left so we used that to redneck another 2 feet and change on top of the fence and problem solved.
 
Ted Calver said:
Yup. From what I can tell, it's a whole different world from my last elk hunt in Montana...buy a hunting license, shoot elk, deer, antelope, prairie chickens, ducks, geese, and prettty much anything else. Mid sixties.
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Back when I was actively hunting (my mid-teens and younger) a NM deer permit also had turkey and bear tags on it. I don't know if the tags were area-specific back then. For elk, you either had a bull permit or a cow permit. These days, everything is divided into specific hunting units, and there are draws for each species and each unit if you're hunting on public land. Private land is by the landowner's written permission only, but you still need a state-issued license. For 2026, my two great-nephews lucked out and drew cow elk tags, while their fathers didn't. (Both boys took the state's Hunter Safety Course earlier this year, and I think the draw is somewhat weighted to their advantage.) And their grandfather (my BIL) drew a once in a lifetime tag to hunt oryx (African Gemsbok) at White Sands Missile Range. The oryx were introduced in 1969 and have adapted well to the desert climate of Southern NM. The carefully-managed population now ranges between 2,000 and 6,000, with about 1,500 harvested every year.
 
Vaughn McMillan said:
These days, everything is divided into specific hunting units, and there are draws for each species and each unit if you're hunting on public land
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Yeah I’ve figured out what unit I’m in and even figured one maybe two of the several dozen or so hunts in that unit that land owner preference is eligible for (I know there’s more but I can’t find out how to find out). But holy cow it’s complicated. They have a how-to slide deck that’s basically “here’s how to log into into land owner preference site” which ok “thanks that’s useless”. In theory once I get an actual hunting license and the appropriate tags… (which again there’s a dozen options for) I can apply for the lop tag and basically bypass the drawing and nominally am eligible for at least? two deer and an elk..
 
Vaughn McMillan said:
Back when I was actively hunting (my mid-teens and younger) a NM deer permit also had turkey and bear tags on it...
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Washington state was similar back in the late 60s. A license came with one antlered deer tag, and three(!) black bear tags. If you used up all three bear tags you could buy more. In the early 60s there was actually a bounty on bears.
 
All the way to the tree line this year..

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Looking back from the other direction (the lower 3 blocks are only 70'x6' not 160'x6...
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And three more 160'x6' blocks across from the Cider Apple row..

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Stone fruit orchard still in progress... about doubled in size this year. A couple of losses.. One apricot from last year looked great this spring.. then we had a late frost and it looks pretty dead. Also one new kiwi didn't make it. I continue to struggle with grafting stone fruit, MUCH harder than apples or pears... Root stock has survived thus far but only a couple of the top grafts have taken.

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Some of my top grafts on invasive bradford pear have take well though.. I'm continuing to do that basically whereever I find them (which is all to all over).

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House garden is chunking along..

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