Irene Dodd

Abraham Palma wrote:Hello,
my family used to have that method in our farm in Andalousia. It's flooding irrigation. You have to prepare your fields first. Take a small field, like 10x20 metres and surround it with a barrier of raised soil. Then make rows of soil, 30 cm tall, and as long as your field. The field is ideally leveled, but if you have some slope then make the rows at the same elevation, leaving only one extreme open, drawing a snake.
Then, when you have access to water, open a ditch so the water can flood your field, and leave it opened until it seeps no longer. If you still have watering time, repeat for the next field. If the field is leveled, it doesn't matter where the water gets in, but if you have a sloped field, then you have to let water in from the highest place.

The plants are planted on top of the rows, I don't remember if it is done before or after the first irrigation. I think they had to irrigate two or three times before harvest. Also, after the surface dries, it forms a crust that must be broken with a hoe.

Thank you! This is very helpful!

Ted Abbey wrote:
Que bueno.. I love Placitas! How does it feel to live on the same road as the Sandia Man Cave, Ski Area, and.. Tinkertown!! (Please tell me that you know and love Tinkertown) I have so much to say.. but for now, pull every goat head as soon as possible, and collect old “heads” with cheap foam flip flop sandals. Plant Quelites (lambs quarter), amaranth, and purslane. (You MUST have weeds, so they may as well be “good” ones.) They will compete with the goat heads and if you do it right, you might be done with them in.. a decade, or so.. Haha! Also, plant your cottonwoods in dormancy, not in the spring. All you have to do is poke a hole in the ground, stick a cutting in, and 9 times out of 10 it will grow. Same with willows, but cottonwood prefers it a little drier than willow.. so cottonwoods high, willows low. Great to hear about all of your moisture, and with monsoons beginning for real in about two weeks?!? Placitas probably looks like Ireland right now. PLEASE post some pictures, and if you haven’t already.. GO TO TINKERTOWN! You will be inspired..

Tinkertown is great! And the cave and picnic area, but unfortunately, we don't have a truck and that road is the worst road I've ever been on, so we drive all the way out to I40 to get to Tinkertown and Sandia. We actually spend more time in the Jemez mountains and Caldera, because the road is so much better (and interesting ruins, culture, and hot springs).

We have seen wild purslane in the rainy season, so I'll look into expanding it, and adding lambs quarters. There's so much kochia, and we've been letting it grow because at least it's not thorny. We tried some amaranth last year and it sprouted then withered, but should try again since the water is so much better now.

Thanks for the advice on the shade trees -- I'll see if I can get a cottonwood cutting this winter, and hope the water is flowing again. The willow stump is huge, it looks like it might have been a hundred years old, but now the septic field is underneath where its roots were, so we're trying not to have the water flow there anymore.

Ted Abbey wrote:

Irene Dodd wrote:I live on about a half acre exurban lot in central New Mexico. It is part of an old Spanish irrigation network (acequia), and has been flowing constantly these past two months, though at other times it flows an hour or so every other week. Currently we have some fruit trees, clump grass, clover, and a bunch of assorted weeds and wildflowers. I would like to grow maybe squash or something, but am not picky (there's heavy clay soil, and sometimes sand over clay, so not the most welcoming to cultivated plants).  

Does anyone have any experience using this system, or resources about it? My grandmother was on a similar system in Arizona, but mostly just grew Bermuda grass and oleander, which seems common for houses that inherited flood irrigation. How did the Spanish garden with it when they first set it up? It looks like the pueblos still use it for their gardens, but I don't have any contacts there.

Hey Irene.. I used to live in Socorro County, and one farm I lived/worked on was on the Acequia. You need to get to know your Mayordomo, and figure out your schedule/usage. I love flood irrigation, and am setting up a similar system here in Nevada. (In what used to be the north west corner of New Mexico when it was still a territory!) I still grow chilis with seeds that I brought with me from NM.

https://lasacequias.org/2016/02/15/the-role-of-mayordomo-in-preparing-for-spring/

Thanks for the response!

We're in Placitas, so a bit cooler and snowier.

The majordomo lives a few houses down, and is fairly hands-off. He yelled at us once for asking us how to get the water flowing when it had been blocked up for several years, and told us to figure it out for ourselves. Our other neighbors are pretty decent about communication, and helped us out. We are the last house, so whatever comes, comes, and if it's too much we run it off into the canyon by stacking rocks in it.

Their "normal" schedule, which hasn't happened even once in the past two years, is one hour of water every two weeks, from ditch day in late March, to an unknown time in the fall, depending on how they feel things are going.

Since the last two years have been in drought, this is our first year with a good flow. Last year it was half an hour every three weeks -- fortunately some mature fruit (cherry, apricot, a little stunted apple) trees survived and are producing well this year. The potable and ditch water comes from the same source (ponds), so if the ditches are not flowing, they ask people NOT to water as much as possible, maybe just to keep the trees alive.

Right now, the water has been running non-stop for two months straight, and our yard is very soggy, to the point that I'm worried about root rot and erosion, but I don't really want to re-dig a bunch of stuff for what's likely to be a short period of time. Nobody really knows how long it will continue flowing, it depends on the snowpack on the mountain, and how it goes through the earth t our springs.

I've been wondering why the rest of the neighborhood has cottonwood trees, and our house used to have a willow, and apparently this is why. If I had known, I might have planted a cottonwood in the spring.

Fortunately, the man who originally designed the property mostly knew what he was doing, and the water flows safely around the house, through a grassy field, and toward the canyon, where he built some erosion supports with telephone logs and (unfortunately) filled in an erosion hole with junk to break the fall of the water. He also planted magnificent rosebushes that are 6 ft high with no care, a Spanish broom, an heirloom apricot tree that produced way too many tiny apricots and too few leaves this year from his family in Spain, and two beautiful lush cherry trees.

The biggest challenge, aside from unpredictable water, is there's about 600 sq ft of what used to be a horseshoe area with clay soil, then landscaping cloth, then about 6 inches of sand. The first year, it only grew tumbleweeds and I'm pretty sure there was herbicide applied there and surrounding areas. The second year it grew tumbleweeds, goatheads, and a couple of clumps of grass. This year, we dug a little pond and some canals into it, and it's growing tumbleweeds, goatheads, tiny burrs, some decent grass clumps, and a few bushes. It's getting more interesting, but is slow going. The area around it is mostly ailanthus, and a graveyard of dead fruit trees.

Last year, we tried a tiny three sister garden near where the water entered the property, but it was stunted and didn't produce anything, for a variety of reasons, including being on basically a river mouth that builds up clay silt. I tried planting lavender, but probably put it in a bad spot, and the wind blew away the mulch and exposed the roots, so it died.

Do you know of any good books or other information sources of how to go about designing for this? What do people grow? How do they do it? Things like how to design sub-canals and water gates? What kind of mulch might be cheap, effective, and not blow away in the heavy winds? We applied several bags of wood mulch, but the chickens just scattered it, and I don't know if it's doing any good. The clover is doing really well, up to 6 ft, but I suspect it will just blow away if we cut it down. We have no water gates, and just stack rocks or drive in boards, then remove them, depending on what we want, but this is not terribly effective.

I don't care so much what grows, as long as it contributes some to erosion control and doesn't develop difficult to avoid thorns or burrs, though things that turned into food would be great. I have two young daughters, four chickens, and six guineas, all free range, and am unlikely to be tenderly nursing or protecting baby plants. 

I live on about a half acre exurban lot in central New Mexico. It is part of an old Spanish irrigation network (acequia), and has been flowing constantly these past two months, though at other times it flows an hour or so every other week. Currently we have some fruit trees, clump grass, clover, and a bunch of assorted weeds and wildflowers. I would like to grow maybe squash or something, but am not picky (there's heavy clay soil, and sometimes sand over clay, so not the most welcoming to cultivated plants).  

Does anyone have any experience using this system, or resources about it? My grandmother was on a similar system in Arizona, but mostly just grew Bermuda grass and oleander, which seems common for houses that inherited flood irrigation. How did the Spanish garden with it when they first set it up? It looks like the pueblos still use it for their gardens, but I don't have any contacts there.

Debbie Ann: Yeah, they seem hugely invasive. I don't usually poison things, but I'm poisoning this one. That's good to hear that the toxin isn't so bad for growing other things, and you were able to plant over it once it was gone.

Shauna: I can definitely try some grapes -- there are already about 5 rebars driven into the ground in that spot, with pretty good spacing for staking grape vines, as long as their roots can compete with what I'm sure is a great underground mess, with not only the suckers, but also the coyote melon, known to have 100lb tuber roots.

We have probably 20 wild yucca, and they're great -- I want to add a tree yucca too, and more prickly pear. I assume we have yucca months, since there are wild ones growing here. But this particular section is on the inside of the flood irrigation zone (whenever I manage to get that flowing), whereas it seems like it would make more sense for the cacti and yucca to be on the outside.

From what I've seen, mesquite can grow here, but it's a bit of a border area for them, and they don't prefer it. A bit on the cold side, getting down to 0 in the foothills where I am. I'm from Tucson, and miss the mesquites, they're lacier than anything common here, but don't want to have to cover it when it gets especially cold. People seem to mostly plant locusts -- there are a ton of purple robe locusts around town. I think I should try planting some locusts as well, they seem to fill a similar role of nitrogen fixing tree.

J Youngman, good to know, thanks. I didn't realize cold hardy fig trees existed, and would like to try planting one sometime, once I've got my water situation better sorted out.

Thanks for the suggestions Anne! I'll have to pay closer attention to what's growing with the Tree of Heaven around here; it's along a lot of the roads, and especially with a lot of junipers, but other things as well.

Rosemary and lavender do great here, and I definitely want some. At my previous house, there were several of both that had been neglected for at least a year, and were still alive; the ones at the botanical garden are huge.

I think it's too cold here for fig and olive (7a). Hackberry sounds interesting -- I enjoy having things for the migrating birds to eat. Mulberry grows well here and seems really tough, so I could give it a try and see what happens too. I'm thinking about trying some tough trees with big taproots like mesquite or locust, too.

Hello!

I live in the high desert of New Mexico (7a), and am in the process of removing a growth of ailanthus (Tree of Heaven), with suckers extending for probably 1,000 square feet. It doesn't seem to have killed the rose bushes, coyote melon, or a juniper shrub. I wouldn't mind more juniper, but don't want more coyote melon, since it smells terrible. I tried looking up suggestions for other plants that might be able to live in its root zone, but everything that came up was just reports of how invasive it is.

Does anyone have suggestions for low water plants that might do well there, and not be adversely affected by the toxins from this tree?

I recently moved to central New Mexico, with a .75 acre property on the edge of a small canyon, and am finding this information useful.

It's very windy, which makes some strategies rather difficult -- if I try some kind of chop and drop strategy (which I like in theory), I'm pretty sure the organic matter will just blow away. The house provides a windbreak for a couple of feet out, where there are currently large rosebushes. I would like more windbreaks, but am not sure about budget friendly ways to go about this.

Another thing that's a bit mysterious is the acequias ditch irrigation system. As soon as our neighbors do their part, we're supposed to have flood irrigation for about 3 hours every 2-3 weeks April - October. Drought years it's every 3 weeks, other years every 2. I've seen this before, mostly with Bermuda grass and oleander hedges. The water association asks that people use this water for their yards rather than the tap water, but it seems difficult to store. I can't afford to install a tank. I think I could easily grow things like native grasses, wildflowers, sunflowers, and the kinds of bushes that grow along the sides of roads, and have seen quite a few yards like that. Neighbors have successfully grown cottonwood trees on this schedule. I also want things like a three sisters (corn, squash, beans) garden and green chiles, which I'm very sure grow here. But I'm less sure about what watering strategy to use for them. I think I'll need sunken beds to hold the water?

There's a small retaining wall with lots of wild yucca, juniper, and a couple cacti, I think built up to allow a desert garden that would remain un-flooded. I would like to clean this up a bit and introduce larger cacti, agave, and taller yucca at some point.

I just moved to Placitas, and am also interested in others' experience in the area.