It’s time for a short break for me! Company has come to town – seven women I have not seen since high school graduation in 1972! The last thing I want to worry about these next few days while we have an amazing reunion (and recovery days afterward!) is posting to this blog, Twitter and Facebook. I’ll be back next week with a couple guest posts and hopefully some writing of my own.

I have gone back to school to be a Residential Planner. It will expand my real estate business, but it’s very time-consuming. And I miss getting up and writing in the morning! I have a few weeks off from school, so I hope to get caught up with desert verde, too, and bring you some original writing.

Meanwhile, go through the drop-downs in the navigation menu at the top of the page, and read Eco-living Tips, the Solar Building Series, and facts and news about Eco Building. Check out the Nature Quotes and Book selections, and visit the ads on the right side of the page to help keep this blog alive! There is lots to see while I’m gone a few days!

The Carson National Forest just announced in The Taos News that fire danger is high. Temperatures are in the 90s, and humidity is low. Even after all that snow in March and April, there is a high risk of fire. It doesn’t take long for things to dry out in the desert!

Fire season officially starts on May 15. Fires can be started by lightning and fireworks, but, more frequently, humans. People burning trash, out-of-town campers, and people throwing cigarettes out of their car windows are all responsible. Once in a while, it is arson. Please be careful!

Whether you live in the beautiful Pinon and Ponderosa forests in New Mexico, or in the mountains of southern California, you can protect your home with firescaping – landscaping for fire resistance.

Create defensible space.

Defensible space is your home and all outbuildings and 30′ of adjacent yard around each. It should be as clear of flammables as possible. If you are on a slope, your defensible space is 100′.

> Use fire-resistant roofing materials – tile and metal instead of wood shakes and shingles.

> Plants with the highest water needs should be closest to the house – groundcovers, lawn, flowers and other herbaceous plants. Do not plant volatile vegetation, such as evergreens, in this area.

> Plant fire-resistant plants.

> Plant in loose clusters, instead of densely.

> Mulch to retain moisture, but do not use pine bark.

> Keep plantings of shrubs and trees to a minimum. Prune them, and keep them in good health. Dead and dry vegetation is wildfire fuel.

> Trees should be pruned at least 10′ off the ground, and branches should not hang over the house.

> Do not plant vines to climb up trees. Ground fires will quickly climb them to the canopy.

> Lawns should be well-watered and cut low.

> Hardscaping – walkways, patios, stone walls, driveways and parking areas- is an effective firebreak.

> Your driveway should be wide enough for fire equipment to come in and turn around.

> Remove flammable vegetation at least 10′ on either side of the driveway.

> Keep leaves and debris out of your gutters.

> Keep your defensible space free of flammable materials, such as wood piles and scrap lumber.

> Keep hoses and tools handy in the event of a fire.

Consult your local county extension office or US Forest Service for information specific to your area.

Photos courtesy Firewise. Learn about Firewise Communities.

> As I prep my yard for curb appeal for potential buyers, I see I have a lot of work to do! I have two compost piles in my fenced off vegetable garden. They are just large rings of wire I found in the shed that was here when I bought the place over 11 years ago. I have recycled this wire time and time again for compost piles. To me, my fenced-in kitchen scraps, grasses and weeds are beautiful, practical and earthy! Now I have to think objectively like an outsider, though, and they aren’t so pretty. I wish I had a set-up like this!

> I’ve been traveling quite a bit the last couple of years to visit my daughters away at school, and I noticed the potential waste in hotels. I’ve even written about it. Since I don’t frequent hospitals (thank god!), I never considered how they can be more eco-friendly, but being large buildings with large staff and many patients, the potential for waste is also large. Here is one hospital that has embodied not only my green ideas of an energy efficient building, but also of efficiency for staff and patients. People are important, too!

> My 16 year old daughter has to create a PowerPoint on the economy in a green society for her Environmental Science class. She called me yesterday to ask what future technologies she can include. I told her that buildings are the largest consumers of energy, so more efficient building methods need to be employed. I suggested she talk about net-zero energy homes, since they have not caught on in a big way yet, but they need to!

> I am a small-home advocate, and I have been working on a blog post about it for a couple of months. Information and ideas keep coming, so it is never finished! Here is a great story about a musician living in 600 square feet in New York.

DWI – driving while intoxicated. But not with alcohol.

Wild plums are blooming along irrigation ditches lining the back roads of Taos’ agricultural land. They intoxicate me almost to the point of distraction. Like a dog, I stick my head out the window and lift my nose to the air to take in the rich, sweet, luscious scent. This is a fine end to winter.

Just as delicious, the lilacs will bloom as soon as the plum flowers go by. These scents send me to a place that seems to be out of my body, out of this world.

With a mature lilac out by my clothesline, I enjoy hanging laundry in May. To put my nose in on of its red-violet flower clusters is… mmmmm… one more sniff… mmmmm… heaven? How does one describe the effect on humans of the fragrance of a lilac? It is sweet, romantic, uplifting, fresh… and unfortunately, temporary!

Most lilacs are native to Asia, but because French growers hybridized them, they are often called ‘French lilacs.’ They do well in an alkaline soil with a pH of 6 to 7 and need cold winters to flower well. Those are two reasons they grow well here. Another is that once a lilac is established, it requires minimal water. They gracefully fare well in drought years in the high desert. (photo: flikr Mrs. Gemstone)

Lightly prune your lilacs immediately after flowering. Cut off the spent flower stalks, and remove older branches and new suckers. Lilacs need minimal care, so be careful not to over-prune. They will grow for centuries – literally! According to the Arnold Arboretum, ‘The oldest living lilacs in North America may be those at the Governor Wentworth estate in Portsmouth, N.H., believed to have been planted around 1750.’

Be sure you plant lilacs by a window or door you can leave open so the scent fills your house. You may not need that afternoon cocktail!

I went for coffee with a friend the other morning. Like reading a box of cereal while eating it, we had to read the outside of our paper cups while drinking from them. A graphic of the globe circled most of the cup, white on a soft green, and the text on the remainder said:

It Makes a World of Difference

In one year, Eco Products customers make a difference by saving:

742,414 gallons of gasoline – enough to drive around the earth 673 times

13,478,914 pounds of greenhouse gases

8,629,476 kW hours of energy – enough to power the average American household for 810 years

ingeo™

Plastic Lining Made From Plants Not Oil

Off to the side of that, it said:

Compostable

…and…

Eco Products, Boulder, Colorado

Impressed and intrigued, I came home and googled Eco Products. I was interested in this plant-derived lining, and I wanted to compost my cup.

What is PLA?

PLA stands for polylactic acid, or Polylactide, a versatile polymer produced by NatureWorks LLC. PLA is made from lactic acid. Lactic acid is made from dextrose by fermentation. Dextrose is made from starch and starch is made from carbon dioxide and water. Ingeo™ biopolymer is the world’s first and only performance plastic made from 100% annually renewable resources. It offers the cost and performance necessary to compete with traditional petroleum-based materials in the packaging and serviceware markets. Clear and strong like petroleum-based plastic, but with the crucial benefit of being commercially compostable.

That’s the lining of the cup. The exterior is 24% post-consumer recycled paper. Not a really high number, but better than 0%!

I saved my cup to write this blog post. Now I am going to toss it on the compost pile and watch it contribute to rich dark soil for the garden. I will keep you posted on this new experiment!

Aside from bringing my own reusable stainless steel coffee cup, this is the most eco-friendly cuppa I’ve seen. I cringe when I order coffee and get handed a styrofoam cup! Look for Eco Products cups in coffee houses you frequent. If they don’t carry them, ask them to. Eco Products carries a full line of plates, bowls and cutlery, as well as biodegradable trash bags, so ask your favorite take-out places to use them as well.

Everything we can compost, reuse or recycle reduces new manufacturing and emissions. I can’t emphasize enough the need to cut back on new plastic and paper products and buy recycled. The lining of this Eco Products cup and the plant-derived materials in all their products are a huge step in the right direction. I hope they get noticed and set a precedent for all food serviceware. Please support them. Read about The Million Gallon Challenge.

In 1997, I lived in Ojo Caliente, New Mexico, near the Rio Ojo on the way to the mineral springs. The soil was very sandy, a stark change from the adobe clay I was used to in Taos, and water ran right through it.

There was a small flower bed under a cottonwood tree off to the side of the house. When I see a flower bed, I have an impulsive need to fill it up. I planted it with the leftover flowers and shrubs from the foundation plantings. When I went to water it, though, I realized that my longest hose only reached just inside the edge. I watered the plants in by hand until they seemed established, then I let nature take its course.

It was a very dry summer, so I turned the hose on that bed a few times to get as much of it wet as I could. The sandy soil was not helpful in keeping things damp! By fall, the pansies and other annuals were crispy, but the hardy native plants had survived. I was moving back to Taos, so I dug those up and took them with me. If anything could have withstood that watering torture (or non-watering torture!), it got a gold star and deserved to come along.

Can you already see why it’s important to plant native species? Only the plants that were used to very little water survived. They did not need more than natural rainfall to get through.

Adaptable species are hardy, too. They may not be native to an area, but they grow and thrive in similar conditions. The sandy soil and climate in Ojo are similar to parts of France and Greece, I was told. Herbs do well in those countries, and mine flourished with very little care in Ojo! I had the most beautiful lavender I’d ever grown! And with little maintenance!

Other reasons for planting native and adaptable species:

> They do not need fertilizer. Native plants are used to growing in the local soil, and that is why they are established there. They get exactly what they need from the environment. You don’t have to add anything.

> They are less prone to disease and pests. Plants that are stressed from too little water are susceptible to attack. An extreme case in point is the bark beetle damage to the pine forests of the Rocky Mountains. After years of drought, the trees were so stressed, bark beetles were able to move in and kill thousands of acres of trees. Like I say, that’s an extreme example of susceptibility. As a homeowner, when you grow drought tolerant species, a drought will not interfere, but you an also choose to water in dry times.

> They offer food and shelter for wildlife. You can attract local birds all year with nectar in summer and berries and seeds in winter. If you planted a yard full of exotic plants, the native animals would not be able to feed, nest or have shelter.

> You will have more time to enjoy your native/adaptable landscape by eliminating water, fertilizer, pesticides and the maintenance that goes along with them.

Do not move to a different part of the country and expect to grow the same plants you grew at home! You can move across town and experience the same thing. Soils, light, humidity and rainfall all affect not just plants, but all wildlife.

Live within your ecosystem to be a conscious gardener. To learn more, get involved in your local or regional Native Plant Society, and check out these books:

For the southwest, I highly recommend Judith Phillips’ books, especially Natural by Design: Beauty and Balance in Southwest Gardens and its companion, Plants for Natural Gardens: Southwestern Native & Adaptive Trees, Shrubs, Wildflowers & Grasses.

Here are books for other parts of the country.

4.12.10 – The first hummingbird was at the feeder this morning! He is early! I expect them around April 15 (easy to remember, since it’s tax day….), and they generally come in later than that. (photo: flickr s p e x)

Yesterday, I washed the feeder and filled it half-way with food to attract them. This morning, I was sitting near it on the back porch, and the hummer dive-bombed the feeder. He scared me – loud, fast and too close! But I was glad to see him and more glad that I put the feeder up yesterday.

There are not many plants in flower this time of year for hummers, so a feeder is the only way to get them used to coming to your garden. Hummers don’t sense food by smell, but by color. They drink nectar from red tubular flowers, and feeders are made to resemble them. The food in the feeder does not need to be red, but if you buy a commercial preparation, it will look like Kool-Aid (not the political kind). I make my own mix – 1 part white sugar, 3 parts water. The sugar has to be dissolved completely, so I use warm water and stir vigorously. Extra can go in the fridge, but be sure to label it.

Keep your feeder out of the sun, because the food can get moldy. Bugs also climb in there and die. Wash it out with soapy hot water and rinse well each time you change the food.

Hummingbirds come back to the same feeding spots every year, so once you start feeding them, you will always have them. One year, my cat killed about ten. I didn’t think there would be any the following year, but I had plenty!

They check in at my house in April for a few weeks, then they leave. They return when the hollyhocks start blooming in late May. This is their natural food, but by putting up a feeder in the spring, I have shown them this is a yummy place to eat. They leave around the middle of September for Mexico. Not a bad idea, huh?

For hummingbirds all summer, plant a garden that includes these shrubs and perennials to attract them:

> Penstemon (Penstemon spp)
> Columbine (Aquilegia spp)
> Bee Balm (Mondara spp)
> Hollyhock (Alcea rosea
> Autumn Sage (Savlia gregii
> Desert Willow (Chiloppsis linearis)
> Coral Honeysuckle (Lonicera sempervirens)
> Trumpet Creeper (Campsis radicans)
> Agastache ‘Firebird’ (Agastache sp.)

And always grow organically. Please!

During March, I get the outdoor planting beds ready. We had so much snow last month, raking, pruning and weeding were erratic. I was out of town for a week, but got down to serious clean-up when I got back.

March 25 – Broccoli, kale and lettuces have sprouted! It took four days. I love those APS starters – they are so reliable! (photo to left)

March 31 – I had tomato sprouts when I returned home!

April 8 – The weather’s been sunny, dry and windy, which means the soil is drying out. I got in the garden and turned over the soil in a new bed, added a bag of compost and turned it over again. It’s ready for planting cool weather crops, like peas, beets, radishes, carrots, greens and broccoli.

When I lived in New Hampshire, it was a contest to see who got their peas in the ground on April 1. It was never me, and was always a farmer I remember as Tut. I think his last name was Tuttle. That was too long ago and is a foggy memory! But even though it seems cold out, there are many plants that will withstand the last cold spell.

April 9 – I transplanted some lettuce seedlings into three 1-gallon pots. I’ll either keep these in the greenhouse or put them outside where they will get morning sun. Plants in containers do not need full sun, like plants in the ground! They don’t have access to the water or nutrients of in-ground plantings, so must be tended to tenderly and manually. I love container planting, because:

> You can grace entryways and walkways with beautiful containers of exotic plants. I love to mix flowers, herbs, succulents and grasses in containers for interest.

> You can shuffle them around, making your garden look different when you need a change.

> You can grow things that your soil will not support. Remember, our soil in New Mexico makes bricks for homes, so it does not grow vegetables without a lot of improvement. Containers let me bypass the soil amending and grow what would need a lot of work in the ground.

> You can grow plants inside until it is warm enough to bring them out, then you can bring them inside at the first sign of frost, prolonging the growing season.

April 10 – The greenhouse was 53 degrees this morning. That is wonderful! Warm weather seedlings, like tomatoes (right), do not like temps below 50, so they are happy. The cool weather plants like greens and broccoli don’t mind. They are actually the plants that grow all winter long – slowly, due to short days and the cold, but they grow. You need to plan ahead for winter harvest, more plants to get enough food, since they produce so slowly.

The beet greens (left) took off with a bit of organic nitrogen fertilizer a while back, so I chopped them down for breakfast this morning. Always harvest in the morning when the plants are fresh. During the day, they are working hard sucking up water and putting out new growth. They can be wilted to save water. They are tired by the end of the day, just like you, so plan for morning harvest and storage.

I am headed out to the garden soon to do that cool weather planting I mentioned above.

I am going to try and keep you up on my garden this year. I’ve been gardening for 35 years, and each year, I keep a journal. As the gardens got bigger (bordering on farm size!), the journals got more involved with diagrams, varieties and results. I have downsized, but even those little beds get extended every couple of years.

My garden journals were simply spiral notebooks, and they were piling up. A long time ago, I discovered the 10 Year Garden Journal, and it served its purpose for that long with the farm-size garden. With downsizing, I’ve simplified and now use a calendar – the free kind you get from any business at the end of the year. It has to have big enough boxes to write in each day.

On Sunday March 21, I started:

tomatoes
broccoli
Jalapeno peppers
green peppers
lettuce – 2 kinds
kale

I use the germinating mix and APS seed starters from Gardener’s Supply. In all my years of gardening and horticulture school, I’ve found this to be the most reliable system. The soil-less germinating mix is the lightest and best I’ve ever used. The APS starters, with a water well and wicking fabric, keep the seeds moist until they germinate. No matter how hard you try and keep your seeds moist, they almost always dry out and never sprout. In the 15 years since I’ve discovered APS, I have had 100% success starting seeds.

I put germinating mix in a tofu box (recycle!) for a couple of tomato seeds and covered it with plastic. I’ll let you know how that goes. These should all sprout over the weekend!

Over the winter, my friend, Esmaa Self, sent me some chard seed, along with other goodies I will seed right in the garden next month. I started the chard, though, right in a few pots of soil. The top inch was the Gardener’s Supply germinating mix, and those seeds sprouted quickly. Chard is a wonderful greenhouse plant, and I love having greens close to the kitchen!

I had a few pots of beet greens started over winter, too, but the greenhouse was too cold for them to do much. Now that the nights are a bit warmer, and the plants are big enough for organic nitrogen fertilizer, they are looking good!

There are two 4″ pots of sorrel that I over-wintered. I love to cut this up into a salad, since it is full of vitamin C. It’s also a sweet surprise! If you have lived in the woods in New England, you have probably eaten sorrel. The first time I tasted it out of my Taos greenhouse, I was transported back to the woods of Connecticut when I was a kid. Someone told me it was edible, and I ate it. It was good then, and it’s good now.

While I was sowing seeds on Sunday, the 8″ of Friday’s snow was furiously melting! It was coming off the roof in a constant stream all day, and the driveway and paths around the house were thick mud. I bet the temperature was in the mid-50s, the sky was perfectly clear, and the plants in the greenhouse were happy.

So was I.

(This is the sixth in a 10-part series. The previous post is here, or you can start at the beginning.)

When I bought my house, it was an upside-down T, with the stem facing southwest. In last week’s post, I talked about installing sunny windows in the southeast and southwest walls for passive solar daytime heating. Now I was trying to decide how to further remodel for more solar gain.

I could have added a greenhouse on the southeast corner adjacent to the kitchen. This was very appealing as far as harvesting food and herbs. I’d also envisioned it as a sitting area, the breakfast nook, I suppose. But I enjoyed the new windows, and one was in my bedroom. I’d have missed that if it went into a greenhouse instead of to the moon, trees and coyotes.

The warmest winter sun hit the southwest corner, so I decided to add something there. I wasn’t sure what, but many pencils and eraser goobers later, I came up with this plan. A contractor friend of mine fleshed out the details for me. The plans are below, the top one as I bought the house, the bottom one with a greenhouse built on the southwest side, and the layout of the main part of the house changed to improve air circulation.

I was content enough with the heat produced through the new windows that I put these drawings away. I was also a working single mom of two young girls, and my time constraints prevented me from doing a lot of research into this project, never mind starting and completing it! I rolled up the drawings and propped them up on my desk.

In 1997, I lived in an old block home on an irrigated acre of land in Ojo Caliente – almost the adobe dream home! I was more interested in the land than the house, and we cultivated half of it with beans, corn, tomatoes, squash, herbs and flowers that we sold to friends and co-workers.

Out near the garden, there was a small frame greenhouse with translucent polycarbonate walls. I checked the overnight temperature in early spring to see if I could start my seeds in it. It was too cold, since it was not heated or insulated. It was essentially a cold frame with an 8-foot ceiling and roof.
I started researching greenhouses and was disappointed to find all standard greenhouses need supplemental heat. This is usually generated with electric heaters for something as small as I was looking at. Aside from growing food to eat healthy, cost needs to be taken into consideration. Heating a non-insulated building of plastic walls with electricity was not cost-effective.

I came across the Growing Dome® Greenhouse in a gardening magazine. It is still available, and I see them popping up across the landscape as food and energy costs rise. This is a passive solar, geodesic design with glazing on the south side and insulated solid walls on the north side. Planting beds and the concrete slab floor are the thermal mass, along with a pond. Do you remember the 55-gallon drums in the solar pods? Poisson knew water is one of the best materials for thermal mass. It must be sized properly so it can radiate heat effectively. The pond can hold fish or water plants, or boards can be placed across it to make more room for container plants.

The combination of masses in this greenhouse meant no supplemental heat. It was an environment that took care of itself – an ecosystem of sorts. I was sold on it immediately!

For a variety of reasons, though, I didn’t purchase one at the time, but this is the only greenhouse I recommend to anyone. It needs no extra heat, and the larger ones double as a small living space as well.

Ten years later, it is spring 2007, and I want to start my vegetables from seed. I am toying with the idea of buying a 12′ diameter dome greenhouse and putting it about 100′ from the house down the hill on my property. This is a sweet, quiet, sunny spot with completely different views and feel than the house. A few cottonwoods along the irrigation ditch give the space a cozy feel and summer shade. A passive solar greenhouse here would be an excellent get-away.

As I walked the land, I began to picture it. I imagined bringing in electricity and water, and building a path of crusher fines between the greenhouse, the house and the garden. I considered views, sun, neighbors and the heat the greenhouse would produce. I wanted to somehow move the extra heat back up to the house in winter. I thought of underground ductwork, insulation, fans….. My little greenhouse project was getting complicated, the kind a contractor would balk at.

In a split second, like the cartoon cliche of a light bulb going off over your head, my face went from bewilderment to wonderment and glee! I decided to build an attached passive solar greenhouse for heat and food. Remember this book?

I dusted off my original vision and the drawings I had worked on a few years before.

Keep reading….

Read about and see the remodel in detail.

(Originally published at www.greenbuyguide.com.)