Learn from a failed New Mexican Gardener

I cannot claim to be much of a success as a New Mexico gardener. Intermittently I get the bug, and rarely are my crops bountiful. But it occurred to me that like Edison, I've learned a lot from my failures. Since every gardening instinct you learned on the East Coast is wrong for New Mexico, I thought I would share my lessons.

Don't buy seeds or plants from Walmart, Ace Hardware, or Home Depot

The buyers at national chains are happy to sell you flowers that have no business in New Mexico. That pansy or daisy that was so perky in the store, will give it's last gasp the moment you lay it's cultured roots in New Mexico soil. I recommend you only shop at Plants of the Southwest and High Country Gardens.

Don't read any garden books from Santa Fe or Taos

North, high New Mexico is not the desert. It's not reality. They have cooler weather, get more rain, have more flowing plants. I've never seen a garden in Socorro which looked anything like those Santa Fe books.

You can never go wrong with roses

As difficult as everything else is, roses do really well in New Mexico. Roses are in fact desert plants and do really well here (even roses I've bought at Walmart).

A buried soaker hose is the best possible way to water.

The water stays underground, where the roots are. There's little evaporation. It lacks the satisfaction of splashing around with the hose, but much more water gets to the plants.

Even desert plants need a lot of water to get established

You might think that with the harsh conditions in the desert you can toss the right seeds on the ground and walk away. However, that turned out badly for me. I've done much better when I regularly watered my newly established plants. Books on starting xeric (low-water) gardens warn you that during the first 1-2 years, xeric gardens need just as much water as a lawn and marigolds.

When you are ready to go beyond roses, look for things described as "invasive", "pernicious", "tough", and "grows in cracks in parking lots".

I recommend Hollyhock, Evening Primrose, and Arizona Poppy, and mint.

Invest in an expensive water timer

You have to think watering new plants in New Mexico as bottle feeding an orphan kitten, not putting out scraps for a stray. That plant is completely, 100% dependent on you for moisture. We once were forced to reseed a lawn in May, the worst possible month to plant. The gardener set up the automatic water system to water three times a day for 10 minutes. Wow! You should have seen that grass grow!

Never, never plant trees in the spring or summer

Wait for the first cool weather in the fall, then plant and water like mad. Spring winds are terrible for drying out baby trees, and summer heat is aweful for tiny root systems.

Sow plastic in the ground

I feel bad about this but polymer water crystals (Soil Moist, Watersorb, Watercrystals, Moist Soil) have made a huge difference in my gardening success. Adding these little grains to the dirt (in or out of pots) means that my plants don't suffer nearly as much from dry spells. I worry a bit about whether they break down as enviromentally as they claim, but I swear by them. Skip the expensive dirt+polymer and just get the crystals themselves.

Container garden in a beer cooler

It may seem to you that the best way to oppose the dryness of the desert is to container garden -- plastic holds the moisture in, and you are watering a much smaller volume. However, if you plant one plant in a container and another in the ground, you will find that the one in the ground does much better. In New Mexico, plants in pots get their roots cooked. There's two solutions for this: buy containers that are made of styrofoam -- like a beer cooler. They look like terracotta but are rather light. Or, you can make your own insulated pots by placing a small pot inside a large one, with a layer of soil between the two.

Skip the RoundUp

Beside the issues of adding chemicals to the soil (and whether New Mexico ever gets enough rain to flush them out) they just don't work. If you spray a weed with RoundUp, you get a dead, mummifed, weed. It will stand there for months, until you pull it up, just as you should have done in the first place.