Blue grama, blue corn growing at Arboretum Patrick Pynes Master Gardener 11/27/2004
Season's greetings from The Arboretum at Flagstaff. We hope that you had a fine Thanksgiving, with plenty of good things to eat, and plenty to be thankful for in 2004. We hope to see you here at The ARB next Saturday, Dec. 4, for our annual Holiday Sale and Celebration. Admission and refreshments are free. A wide variety of handcrafted gifts, scented geraniums, and seeds will be for sale. With snow piling up on the peaks (many thanks!), and with the winter solstice only a month away, a gardener's thoughts turn to the lessons learned from last year's growing season, and to dreams and plans for 2005. Learning lessons from the land and using this knowledge to plan for next year is vital to being a gardener. Learning by doing keeps us going; in some ways it's the heart of the gardening process. Gardens teach us, thus supplying constant inspiration and refreshment. Sometimes they even give us the food and energy we need. This was certainly how it worked for us at The Arboretum in 2004. We learned a lot by growing many different native plants, especially grasses, and even managed to harvest some good local food, perfect for celebrating Thanksgiving. At The ARB we steward many of the Colorado Plateau's native grasses, wild and domesticated, perennial and annual. When the summer monsoon began this year, we restored four native grass demonstration plots by planting new native grass/wildflower mixes. Two plots were planted with a custom "High Altitude" mix donated to us by High Country Gardens in Santa Fe. This mix includes 25 different grasses and wildflowers of the Intermountain West, including Arizona fescue, Idaho fescue, mountain muhly, prairie junegrass and small-flowered penstemon. Two other beds were planted with custom mixes donated to us by our friends at Flagstaff Native Plant and See "East of the Peaks" bed includes sideoats grama and Indian ricegrass. To reflect local and regional differences, each bed contains a distinct kind of soil. All four beds are growing at least some blue grama, a "keystone" Southwestern grass species. These mixes all germinated strongly and are doing great. We're looking forward to watching and learning as they grow and flower in 2005. Last summer we also planted maize or corn, a domesticated annual grass. Maize belongs to the grass family that includes our native muhlies, fescues, and gramas. Indigenous American horticulturists created corn several thousands of years ago by selectively breeding a wild perennial grass. Like blue grama, corn is also an important native plant of the Colorado Plateau. Hopi gardeners have grown locally adapted maize varieties for thousands of years. From Apache to Zuni, maize is central to the Colorado Plateau's indigenous cultures. Because it enjoys the Plateau's warmer middle elevations, and because I'd had success growing this delicious, drought-tolerant variety during my years of gardening in Albuquerque's South Valley, we decided to try growing Hopi blue corn at Southside Community Garden. Surrounded by concrete and asphalt, Southside is located in an especially warm urban microclimate. Our friend Michael Kotutwa Johnson, a citizen of the Hopi Nation, gave the seeds to us. Hoping to avoid a hard late freeze, we waited patiently and planted three different experimental plots in early June. All three grew well, but the bushiest, healthiest corn plants were located in a raised bed. The other two plots were located in basins. In the Southwest's hottest, driest elevations, indigenous farmers use basins for conserving water and concentrating soil nutrients. Based on our experience at Southside, and other observations, we've come to believe that raised beds are better than basins for growing warm-season plants like corn, at least in the Southwest's higher elevations. Colder air sinks into basins, even small, shallow ones, slowing plant growth. Plants growing in elevated beds or on berms, especially if south-facing, soak up and hold slightly more heat, invigorating growth. We've observed this effect here at The ARB, where warm-season buffalograss grows vigorously only on the top edge of the Turf Demonstration Garden's south-facing berm. (Watch where the snow melts first after a storm; these spots are usually east- or south-facing microclimates.) Unfortunately, we didn't harvest as many ears of Hopi blue corn as we had hoped. A relatively cool summer diminished the urban microclimate effect, slowing the plants' growth, and then a mid-September hard freeze stopped many plants from fertilizing or maturing their ears. During August, we also admired the green lushness of our bushy plants so much that we forgot to thin our plots sufficiently. Along with the relatively cool summer, not thinning more aggressively also slowed the plants' growth. Even so, we are thankful to have harvested several beautiful ears of blue corn, and we are seriously thinking of planting this variety again next growing season, but only in raised beds. We'll try planting our seeds a week or two earlier, in late May, giving the plants more time to produce fertilized ears before the first frost. We'll also force ourselves to do some thinning! Although our urban "milpa" (cornfield) was not superabundant in terms of yield, it was very successful because we learned so much. Patrick Pynes is the Gardens Manager at The Arboretum at Flagstaff, has a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of New Mexico, and has been gardening in the Southwest since 1989. ______________________________________________________ The American Community Gardening Association listserve is only one of ACGA's services to community gardeners. To learn more about the ACGA and to find out how to join, please go to http://www.communitygarden.org To post an e-mail to the list: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe, unsubscribe or change your subscription: https://secure.mallorn.com/mailman/listinfo/community_garden
