Author Archives: collaborators

Mike Halverson

Posted on by

PERSON OF PLACE

My interest in growing plants started when I was five. My mother set up a little garden plot for me in the backyard where I grew Pansies and Snapdragons.  Both sets of grandparents were role models as well, one side growing vegetables and the others growing flowers. A childhood neighbor would bring back exotic seeds from trips and I would attempt to grow them, and sometimes I would have success. Then an interest in landscaping arose when I played with my Hot Wheels in the yard and noticed I needed plants to make it feel more realistic. As I got older, on some of my hikes I noticed how resilient local plants were and became fascinated by the characteristics of plant trunks like the alligator juniper and four-wing salt bush. My interest in plants and landscaping just grew from there.

I’ve been manager of the Santa Ana Native Plants nursery since 2011. The tribe started the nursery around 1991 to raise vegetables starts for the people of the Pueblo. Now we propagate 75% of our plants from seed here, of which 35-40% of those are shrubs. A good amount of the seed we collect ourselves. Our nursery is at the Pueblo and our retail store is in Bernalillo on Hwy 550 near the casino.

We also do a lot of educational activities: after school garden clubs, classes with Santa Fe Indian School and the Institute of American Indian Arts, and work with Master Gardeners from Bernalillo, Sandoval, Valencia, and Santa Fe counties. I really like the education part of our work! It is important to educate the next generation about native plants and their uses, whether traditional or environmental.

Some of the important things we are doing at the nursery are helping with reclamation grow outs after fires or floods. We work with both the National Park Service and the Forest Service as well as other reclamation companies. For example, we just worked with the Little Bear Fire site near Ruidoso on a trial site to see how well certain plants would repopulate a small area. When working in the reclamation field, you want to make sure you are using the right indigenous plants to the area. There we supplied many trees and shrubs, such as Box Elder and New Mexico Olive and Three Leaf Sumac, and grasses including Indian Rice Grass, Side Oats Gramma, and Little Blue Stem just to name a few.

There are advantages to starting so many plants from seed. We go out and hike as part of our work to collect seeds. One of the seeds we collect is alligator juniper. We go to areas where there might be a lot of bear scat, collect it, clean it, and get the seeds from what the bear has been eating. Because of natural acid scarification in the bear’s stomach, these seeds generally sprout well. It is important to remember when seed collecting not to collect more than 1/3 of those on the plants so they will be able to continue propagating themselves. When collecting, you need to dry the seeds before storing them, preferably in a paper bag. A fun exception is acorns. You may put them in a plastic zip bag and, with their own moisture, they should sprout in about week.

Blessing

Posted on by

Hold on to what is good even if it is a handful of earth.

Hold on to what you believe even if it is a tree which stands by itself.

Hold on to what you must do even if it is a long way from here.

Hold on to life even when it is easier letting go.

Hold on to my hand even when I have gone away from you.

Monsoons

Posted on by

Monsoons are a weather phenomenon caused by unequal heating of the earth’s surface. The land heats up to a higher degree than the surrounding ocean, causing heat to rise and creating an area of low pressure. The pressure difference then causes a wind shift with the winds blowing towards land and picking up water from the ocean as it moves. In some parts of the world, this process picks up an incredible amount of water and dumps it on the land, but not where we live in the American southwest. We are far inland from the ocean with mountain ranges in between. Our monsoons deliver rain in the form of thunderstorms in the late afternoon.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged

Rachel’s Warning

Posted on by

While not living in the mid Rio Grande watershed, Rachel Carson left us this wisdom sixty years ago:

“We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost’s familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth super-highway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road—the one ‘less traveled by’—offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth. The choice is ours.”

Humanure

Posted on by

Poop is one of the most taboo subjects in human parlance. The prevailing wisdom is that it is dirty and needs to leave your life as soon as possible before it makes you sick and endangers everything around you.

I beg to differ: I see poop as a resource. Yes, it needs some careful management, but can save water and other key while resources providing nourishment for our surrounding environments. 

Here in Albuquerque, I have several options for purchasing poop for home yard fertilization. In the city, we flush our poop to the Wastewater Treatment Facility on 2nd Street SW for multistage cleansing before it’s released back into the Rio Grande. The extracted biosolids are added to other organic waste, composted, and then sold by the city. I can also buy steer manure, such as Earthgro products that come from Pennsylvania. Or I can take a borrowed pickup to a local horse stable to scoop up some free nitrogen. I consider these options a step better than buying chemical fertilizers. I’m wary of what antibiotics those steers have been fed, and I’d rather not risk adding de-wormer and herbicides to my garden. I’d like to do bette

What if I could “close the loop” and recycle my own drug-free poop onsite? I could donate my excrement to the compost bin, where beneficial microbes could feast on it for a couple years and leave behind gorgeous, sweet-smelling food for trees and shrubs. In fact I’ve been doing this for the past ten years with the help of Joseph Jenkins’ Humanure Handbook.

This is actually not a new idea. It’s been practiced in traditional Japanese farming (see Masanobu Fukuoka’s The One-Straw Revolution) and promoted by nonprofits who build latrines for communities that are short on water and wastewater infrastructure. You can buy thousand-dollar “composting toilets” for installation in your house, but my research indicates that they simply dry the material that then needs to be composted for use.

So here’s a simple DIY solution: a five-gallon bucket topped with a toilet seat, coupled with a side bucket of toilet paper and sawdust to sprinkle on the deposits. I keep the setup in a little enclosure outside my house where I can see the moon phases, constellations, and rising dawn. And really, it has little odor. When full, the bucket dumps into the compost bin to digest and transform. (I have a separate bin for plant matter that will end up on annual food crops!)

Ok, so this isn’t for everyone. But if you’d like to experiment, feel free to delve into the Handbook. This is a spiritual exercise in integrating your shadow side that prefers to remain hidden and unconscious.

Acknowledgment of Land

Posted on by

“Every community owes its existence and vitality to generations from around the world who contributed their hopes, dreams, and energy to making the history that led to this moment. Some were brought here against their will, some were drawn to leave their distant homes in hope of a better life, and some have lived on this land for more generations than can be counted. Truth and acknowledgment are critical to building mutual respect and connection across all barriers of heritage and difference. We begin this effort to acknowledge what has been buried by honoring the truth. We are on the ancestral lands of the Isleta, Sandia, and Laguna Pueblo. We pay respect to their elders past and present.”

Written with guidance by the Native Governance Center

If you want to sincerely acknowledge the land, go to it. Put your hands into it. Put your feet in it. The soil is alive. The microscopic communities in it remember everyone who lived here; they shaped one another. Go to the forest, or to a prairie or a creek. We’re lucky to have little green places and public spaces. This is where you acknowledge the land— away from walls and doors and lawns. by Summer Wilkie

Mid Rio Grande Conservancy District

Posted on by
Cochiti Dam. Photo: US Army Corp of Engineers

The Mid Rio Grande Conservancy District, created in l923, manages the amount and timing of water flow in the mid Rio Grande for both irrigation and flood control. In 1935 it built the El Vado Dam and reservoir to store water and also has four smaller diversion dams which it maintains. The district is in parts of Sandoval, Bernalillo, Valencia, and Socorro Counties. The MRGCD works with the New Mexico Office of the State Engineer, and federally with the Bureau of Reclamation, as these three agencies have responsibility for the amount and uses but not the quality of our water.

District boundaries are different than county boundaries and in general consist of properties close to the river. They are mapped and appraised separately, and only people living in the district pay taxes to MRGCD. These are collected by the county clerks. These taxpayers are also the electors of the MRGCD Board of Directors, voting in elections held separately from the general elections.

MRGCD uses its tax money to maintain the various dams, levees, and channels in the district. Some of the money goes toward recreation. In the Albuquerque area alone, there are more than 300 miles of paths along irrigation channels for hiking and biking. MRGCD also helped establish the Nature Center State Park, Tingley Beach Park, and the Rio Grande Valley State Park by providing land.

Recently, MRGCD has had to delay startup of irrigation to April as the district is in debt to Texas for 100,000 acre feet of water to Elephant Butte where, by legal compact, Texas water begins. El Vado dam is the main storage place for MRGCD water. The dam needs repairs to get it back to full capacity and these began this year. MRGCD also delivers the agreed upon amounts of water from the “Prior and Paramount” 1928 Congressional Act, to the six pueblos in the district.