On Being Authentic Desert Gardeners

Brenda Barnes, President
Home Grown Food Network, Inc.
July 25, 2010

Peter and I are in Santa Monica. He came for a few days a week ago last Thursday and got sick here, with an illness he’s had for the past four or five months that comes and goes, so he is staying until he gets well enough to go back to Joshua Tree.

I just now opened my home page on the computer which is the HGFN home page (www.home-grown.org), and it has a function on it that tells the temperature live, in any place you want. It is almost 1 p.m., and it was 107 degrees in North Palm Springs, the charity’s home, the default setting. I put in Joshua Tree, and it was 104. Then I put in Santa Monica, and it was 68. I couldn’t do that two-place with a zero and carrying subtraction in my head, had to write down the numbers to figure out what the difference was—36 degrees between Joshua Tree and here! That started me wondering if I am an authentic desert gardener, as I always thought I was. How can I be, if I had to escape the heat to a place that is 36 degrees cooler than where I supposedly am gardening?

Before I confronted this, I got off onto how many years I have put up with the heat all summer. It’s been 12 before this one, but the first one I was still driving back and forth working in LA, so I didn’t get the effects. Every summer after the next one, though, when I really stayed in the desert all summer, I told everyone, mainly myself, that I couldn’t take another summer like that, I was going to travel this year. And every summer–except the one when we went for two weeks to the National AAU Under 11 Play-Offs outside New Orleans, because my granddaughter Autumn’s team made the finals, and we stayed in a wonderful timeshare my son traded one of his for, in the Garden District—I’ve been in the desert all summer.

This year I had 10 projects to complete this summer, and four of them were in Santa Monica, so I forgave myself for coming here, and I really did pack up and come, instead of just saying I would. However, for the past 12 years while I’ve been gone I have paid a third of the rent on the space for the mobile home I bought here in 1986, sharing the rent with my son and his father, while I’ve hardly used it, and this year his father died in March, so there wasn’t any reason I could not use the house. Three straight months here would make up for a lot of those 12 years, I told myself. I am going into how I thought to get you to see how hard this is for me. Having started HGFN about desert living over 10 years ago now, I felt obligated to really live in the desert in order to be authentic in demonstrating how it is.

However, Peter is really sick, and I had bad knees I thought I was going to have to have replaced, but they have gotten so much better since I’ve been gardening here, that I think now that maybe I just needed a break from the heat, just as I thought every summer. So now I’m beginning to think this pushing myself to be real was a made-up silly handicap I put on myself, and instead, what I should be real about is how hard it is to live where all summer long it is 104-7 in the shade at 1 p.m. Maybe Peter got as sick as he is, with this recurring intestinal illness that makes him throw up everything he eats, from staying too long and continuing to work in that heat. It’s been that way since mid-May this year, so that’s already over two months, and when you are in the desert, you dread August. Sometimes September is even bad, so at this point of the summer, there seems to be no end in sight. One summer it didn’t get hot until the middle of June, and then cooled off the very day after Labor Day. We all felt so refreshed, the whole year seemed easy.

In the Park where the mobile home is in Santa Monica, there are at least 163 mature trees on 3.3 acres a little over two miles from the beach. Peter and I counted them one day as part of one of the projects I was here to do. We counted until our eyes crossed. There are so many you get confused about which one you already counted. Sitting out in the beautiful back yard we’ve made “sittable” this summer since I’ve been here and Peter has come to help me, I’ve noticed the only birds in the trees are starlings and crows. All the beautiful birds that are here in the winter have gone north or south, east or west, for the summer. Why do I expect myself, a human animal, to be any different? We should go where we thrive, and that is not, for me and Peter at least, where it is 104 in the shade at 1 p.m.

Then there are the plants. To grow mature trees that have fruits like the ones here do, in Joshua Tree, we are going to need to coddle them through four or five summers each. We can do that. Cover them with shade cloth and put them on a timed watering system. Protect them from the indigenous wildlife that doesn’t leave—desert rats and chipmunks, mainly—that would eat them down to nothing in a summer. Those plants would not grow over the summer. They would just be kept alive to flourish and mature over several winters.

So I think I’ll let the birds and plants show me what is authentic about growing in the desert. You do what you can do, and don’t fret about having to go somewhere else for awhile when you can’t keep growing in the desert.

And look forward to when you can be grateful on a December cold rainy day in Santa Monica, that you can see the blue skies and feel the mild desert breezes in Joshua Tree or North Palm Springs. And thrive, along with the beautiful birds and fruitful plants.