Our Mexican Organic Vegetable Garden: December Report

We added four organic vegetable beds to our yard this past summer, with brick or block walls and some really good compost that a man in nearby Jocotepec delivered to us. By the time we got the beds created, it was way too late by US standards, but we decided just to see what would thrive.

Here, lettuce on the left and carrots on the right are going strong. You can't see the daikon, cilantro, or kale. That's a little dog statue from Colima at the corner. We had two rare hailstorms one December day, but all the hail did was poke some holes in all the leafy greens.

This is our largest bed. The tall bushy vegetation is a bunch of cherry tomatoes that are not doing much, but then we are having nights in the mid 30s to mid 40s. Next to the tomatoes are snow peas that have about stopped blooming but gave us a prodigious harvest for weeks. In front, we had green beans which are now done but we still have cucumbers, chard, kohlrabi, and a zucchini-like squash called zucchino -- it, like most of our plantings, are heirloom non-hybrid seeds so we can save seeds for next year. There's an adjacent bed with five artichoke plants coming along nicely.

 

This squash is turning out to be something of a wonder. It is producing numerous long, curved zucchinos. You can sort of see three of them toppling over the garden wall here, all the way to the ground... that turned out to be a problem, as worms got in the ones resting on the ground. The statue is something we got locally, representing the rabbit in the moon (that's what they see) with a female figure.

 

 

 

Gardening in a tropical paradise at 5000 feet elevation is not all easy, though. There are a number of bugs to compete with, and we don't always win. Here, you can see what was done to our nasturtiums. All those stems once had leaves on them -- eaten by caterpillars. Kelly has picked hundreds of them off. They also like the arugula (rocket) we have there, but they completely ignore the basil and carrots nearby.

 

 

We are happy with our gardening experiments so far. The zucchino wrapped around my neck measured 46 inches... it was delicious, stir-fried with other veggies.

In case you wonder how we clean our veggies here: if we just pick a handful of something, we usually rinse it in bottled water. But when I process as much as you see in the photo or more, it would use a good bit of bottled water, so I rinse things in our tap water which is not safe to drink. Then I fill an enamel basin I keep just for this task with the tap water and add the requisite number of drops of MicroDyn or Albiosan, both available at grocery stores, usually in the produce section. The produce sits for about 20 minutes in this bath and then I have a dish drainer I use for clean produce. This system seems to work fine.

Spring by Lake Chapala

The climate by Lake Chapala is often called springlike year round, but it's certainly spring now and I haven't had a sweatshirt on in over a month. There are flowers in bloom all the time, but they are really glorious now. I just wandered around our yard for a moment and got these pictures.



This two-tone bougainvillea is a favorite of mine:

Last time we went to the pottery factory which I've blogged about, we got this interesting head with a lizard atop it. We just put it out in the yard but haven't planted it. And yes, that's a spider plant behind it. We have them here and there in the yard.


Here's the view from our front porch, which is essentially our living room. That's a pottery barbeque on the left. Our swimming pool has a cover on it but now that we have solar panels to heat the water, we should be able to take the cover off from now till the rainy season begins, usually in June. This will be hottest time of year coming up. It's already hot some days.

There's something that looks like a volleyball net beyond the pool. That's new, and it's actually a badminton net I came across at the Soriana chain store in Chapala. Kelly and I used to play a little tennis but I'm not sure I had played badminton since I was a teenager. It's perfect for us -- we play a little most evenings. The only rule is no keeping score. And we try to keep the birdie out of the bottlebrush tree where some black birds are nesting.

You can see Lake Chapala in the distance... it has more of a presence to us than you'd guess from the photo. A neighbor took out a tree that blocked part of our view and then Kelly trimmed a row of our junipers to give us more of a view than we've had. We enjoy it a lot.

Ah, Spring!