Imbolc                                                                      Settling Moon II

Realized yesterday that a missing part of January was seed catalogs. They all got turned back at the post office. Not forwardable. After about a half an hour on the web I’ve ordered at least 10 catalogs, focusing on ones that have high altitude, arid climate gardening in mind. Not all of them do, of course, but there are a few right here in Colorado.

Putting those together with the Eliot Coleman work on plastic hoop enclosed cold greenhouses should give us a reasonable shot at growing some of our own vegetables in a less than favorable environment.

Becoming native to a place involves far more than getting your material possessions placed in a convenient and useful manner. And, oddly, it involves other humans much less than it does plants, animals, geology, meteorology and geography.

The snow fall here, for example, comes in bursts, sometimes intensive. Today we got 7inches or so overnight. Predicted 3. Over the next few days the temperatures will climb to 55. The snow will melt away. This snow, melt cycle is new to me, a decided difference from Minnesota.

The gardening zone and the frost dates, for Conifer, are similar to Andover. Other places we looked were more severe. Even with this similarity though there are two major differences. We are much closer to the sun and the sun shines through thinner air so plant burn is a problem. We are no longer in the humid east, but the arid west. Picking plants that are drought tolerant and how to water them becomes more critical here.

Then there is this. A truism here: where you have deer, you have mountain lions. Mountain lions will kill and eat dogs. There’s a dialectic between our pets and the predators on whose land we live.

And much more. Altitude acclimatization. Mountain driving. A new ecosystem. Mining culture. Cowboy culture. Ranchers versus farmers.