My family spent much of Easter evening tearing out our front lawn. Since Matt works nights (as a critical care RN) and sleeps days, he continued late into the night tearing-up roots and digging-out rocks—hopefully without frightening our neighbors! In our usual overly-ambitious style (which, in the past has included getting an Airdale puppy just before a new baby, and frogs for a 1-year-old) we’ve decided to plant a high-altitude, low-water, clay under the grass, short season, we-don’t-even-know-how-to-start-a-seed garden! My eyes are sore from post-baby-bedtime hours of laptop reading about high-altitude gardening, and scanning all the images of incredible gardens-of-Eden, meticulously cultivated at 6,7, or, in our case, almost 8000 feet above sea level. All I can say is: We may have to subsist on the Jerusalem artichoke.

I’m from western Washington State, a climate where if you leave your shoes out overnight they’ll compost. Out on the Olympic peninsula, any idiot like myself can throw a start in the ground and it’ll be shoulder high by mid-summer. The Native American tribes of the Pacific Northwest were the only first peoples in the Americas who were hunter-gatherers (not agriculturalists) and were still sedentary. Think about that: these folks could just hang out by the edge of a river, build longhouses, and the food (salmon, deer, berries, edible plants) were abundant enough year-round that there was no need to pack up and leave seasonally. They even had enough left over for their big potlatches! Sounds like utopia…if you don’t mind the rain.

Educated women like myself (meaning those who possesses very little commonsense and a lifetime of student loan debt) know that one can learn almost anything from a book. So, I went and got the wonderful bible of local gardening: Growing Food in the Southwest Mountains: A Permaculture Approach to Home Gardening Above 6,500 Feet in Arizona, New Mexico, Southern Colorado and Southern Utah, by Lisa Rayner. I have now posted little charts around my kitchen with growth cycles, planting dates, seed starting information, best veggies for high-altitude gardening, soil-treatment information, and other stuff I will no doubt become confused about. Hopefully our neighbors won’t hate us when we end-up with a dirt yard all summer. At least it’ll have a nice rock border…and hopefully we’ll even learn something!