About the Episode:
Enjoy this timely spring episode with Bunny. She shares some great things to do in New Mexico around this time of year, when to start your spring garden, what to plant, and some cherished childhood memories.
Links
Planting dates for spring (ABQ)
New Mexico vegetable gardening
I Love New Mexico blog page
Bunny’s website
I Love New Mexico Instagram
I Love New Mexico Facebook
Original Music by: Kene Terry
Episode Transcript
Bunny : (00:00)
Hi there. I’m Bunny Terry, and you’re listening to the I Love New Mexico podcast. Whether you’re a native new Mexican, who’s lived here for your entire life, or you’re just considering a visit, this episode is for you. Join us as we share a lot of New Mexico stories. Talk about all things New Mexico, and include topics like what’s magical here, where you ought to visit, what’s happening, and the things you absolutely cannot miss in the land of Enchantment. We’re excited that you’re here and we can’t wait to show you what an amazing place New Mexico is, because let’s face it, I love New Mexico.
Bunny : (00:51)
The craziest thing that happened to me today, um, I had a podcast guest scheduled and we got our dates mixed up, and so it gave me an opportunity to think about if I were talking about, um, my New Mexico springtime memories, what stories would I wanna tell? Um, it’s New Mexico is such an interesting place. We, most people who don’t live here think that it’s all desert. Um, people who have never visited here liken us to liken this, the land of enchantment to, um, Arizona, mostly, I would say, um, as, as many of you who grew up in New Mexico or have moved here recently, can attest when you talk about New Mexico to your friends, especially elsewhere, they’ll sometimes mistake it for, um, Mexico instead of New Mexico. Um, I was married many years ago to someone in North Carolina, and, um, his aunt, every time I would see her would say, oh, oh, that New Mexico, we had the best vacation there one time. “The beaches at Cabo San Lucas are so beautiful,” and I would think, well, not quite. We don’t have any beaches in New Mexico, but one of the coolest things about where I live in Santa Fe is that we have four such distinct seasons. And, um, I gotta tell you, spring is absolutely the best time. After we’ve had this long, harsh winter, sometimes it’s harsh. This year it’s been a little harsh. We’ve had a lot of late snow and late cold weather last Tuesday, a week ago today it got down to 17 degrees, although we were already in April. And so when I think about springtime in New Mexico, I think about, um, Easter egg hunts. Sometimes in the snow when I was a child, um, sometimes 80 degrees. The best thing about New Mexico weather is that all you have to do is wait five minutes and it will change.
Bunny : (03:01)
But when I walk around my backyard right now, the sense of renewal is so fresh. The Holly Hawks are already against all odds with no measurable precipitation other than, um, what they got from the snowfall this winter. We haven’t had any water on them. They’re determined to grow. In fact, if you wanna grow Holly Hawks, my best advice is to treat them badly. In the summertime, we see them coming up in the cracks in the sidewalk downtown, and I’m shocked, um, they get no care, and yet they bloom beautifully. Um, the other best thing about New Mexico is that the wildflowers will surprise you when you least expect them. We were walking the dog last night, and we could see these teeny tiny, um, the earliest of the purple wildflowers just starting to peep through. So those of you who live in areas where there is lots of rain and lots of water, you probably don’t get how, um, amazing it is that the desert blooms. But I wanted to give you few, um, quick springtime tips and, and share some memories with you. The first tips I wanna share are, um, hang on, don’t plant your bedding plants yet. Um, check your local last freeze date in Santa Fe. It’s May 15th, and I’m telling you, I’ve been to the nursery to look at, um, plants just to kind of wet my spring appetite, but people are buying bedding plants, and I know they’re gonna be putting them out, and I know that we are going to have yet another freeze almost certainly. Um, if we don’t, it will be an anomaly. So hang on, give it until May 10th, May 12th, but, but optimally May 15th before you set up any garden plants or, um, try to plant your tomatoes or any flowering plants in your beds, any annuals. And my really best, best advice is to buy perennials instead because they’ll do what my perennials are doing, which is they’ll start growing early April. You’ll start seeing green leafs in your beds, and then by the middle of May, they’ll start to be gorgeous. So, um, hang on with the, with the plants, with the garden plants, and consider perennials every time. If you, if you wanna plant something fun under your trees, trica, it always does well. You can plant veka under your trees. Um, they, it absolutely loves shade and it’ll surprise you. It’s such got such abundant greenery and blooms that you’ll think you’re somewhere else besides the high desert. Um, a a few other plants that love, love the New Mexico climate are, um, yaro. You can get it in, um, yellow and purple. But, uh, and yaro, if you know, is the, it’s got sort of dusty green leaves and it puts, um, it has a yellow floral top. And it’s, if you go back and listen to our, our podcast with, um, manana botanicals, it’s also considered, um, somewhat mandi medicinal by corins blue flax, which is a wonderful blue flower.
Bunny : (06:45)
And I gotta tell you, there aren’t many blue flowers in the, um, flower world if you’re planting in your yard. But blue flax blooms every morning, it’s very hardy. It’s, um, stick it in the ground, water it a little bit, um, feed it on occasion, but don’t pay much attention to it, and you’ll be, you’ll, it’ll greet you very happily every morning. Um, any kind of sage, as I said before, purple sage. But Mojave sage is also a great choice, and you’re not gonna believe it. But, um, in Santa Fe and in the rest of New Mexico, um, columbines, especially the Golden Spur Columbines, the yellow ones grow very happily. And, um, and they like sun or shade. I grow some of mine in the shade. I grow some in the sun. Um, Mexican primroses or Pink Evening Primroses is a great choice. I’m gonna put a few links with this, um, podcast so that you can get online and look at your plants. But consider putting out, um, some perennials this year instead of a lot of of, uh, annual plants. Pensman, Rocky Mountain Pensman especially is, um, and yellow. We’ve got, and we’ve got firecracker, hummingbirds. Love the firecracker piman. And I may be saying that incorrectly, but um, I’m just reading from my notes. So consider putting out perennials instead of annuals this year and next year. You won’t even have to think about the freeze date because your plants will decide that for you. Thinking about springtime makes me think about my mom in the garden. I am an avid, not particularly successful some years, but a really avid vegetable gardener. And I know that that comes from the years. When I would wake up in the morning at, when we lived on the farm, I would wake up on a Saturday morning and my dad and the boys would be in the field, and my sister would’ve gone to town. She worked as a waitress at the Yucca Cafe in Logan. And I would wake up early in the morning and no one would be in the house, and I would go through the living room. We lived in a tiny, tiny, little, probably thousand square foot house, the six of us, my three siblings and I, and my mom and dad on a farm eight miles north of Logan. And I would wake up and the house would be empty, and my mom would’ve opened the windows to air out the house, and I would find her out in the garden planting radishes this time of year radishes and onions and beets. And I would go out there and find her with her hands in the dirt. And I would think, well, of course I should be able to help. And she would let me plant my own row, and I would plant everything far too closely, and I’d only get eight or 10 radishes out of the bunch. But now when I go into my own garden and I begin to plant, that’s what I think of. I think of my mom with her son hat on and her gardening gloves bent over, and, and, and she didn’t, I don’t know if she gardened for the pleasure of it or because of the necessity of it. You know, my mom made all of our clothes. I thought she did it because, um, she loved making clothes. And now I understand she did it because there wasn’t much money in our household. Um, she made all of our clothes. She canned, she pickled, she, um, put away lots of food so that, um, come wintertime, we’d have fresh vegetables to eat. So when I would find her in the garden, I would think it was because she liked being outside per, perhaps that wasn’t the deal. But, um, that’s why I do it now.
Bunny : (10:42)
I like being outside. I like feeling a kinship with all of those uncles. And my granny Terry, who used to plant her seeds in the backyard of her tuum carry house, she lived in little little house on Adam Street across from the, what is now the Toum Care Historical Museum. And she would save coffee cans, all winter vulger coffee cans, and then she would put her tiny little, um, tomato seedlings that she had nursed for the last two months in her dining room, under the dining room window. And she would take them out and put them in the ground and then put those folders, coffee cans around them, both for protection from the wind and to keep them warm. And anytime it looked like it might freeze, she would go out and put a blanket over the top of them. I remember lots of times going to her house early in the morning, um, when we would go, go to Tu Andary to do errands, and there would be a blanket over the coffee cans. And I always thought, what in the world is that about? And she would say, I had to keep my babies warm. So those are the things I think about when I’m out in the garden. I think about my Uncle Hermann heirs who grew the best garden in Quay County. It was across the road from his house that I last remember, and it was rose and rose of green beans and cucumbers and tomatoes and okra, which by the way, I’m sorry to tell you, doesn’t grow very well in Santa Fe. Our growing season is too short, so if you’re moving here from Dallas, don’t plan to plant okra. But there would be so much in my Uncle Hermann’s garden that we would go once a week and gather our own aprons full and baskets full of cucumbers and green beans and okra and peas, blackeyed peas. Wow. Do, do you have memories of sitting on the porch with your grandma snapping blackeyed peas? Because I do. And I hope that other people are doing that with their kids now, because wow, it’s a lost art. If you don’t know how to snap black eyed peas, um, check in with somebody who’s older than than you and find out how to do it.
Bunny : (13:02)
I wanna shift gears here for a minute and talk about my spring memories of being in school in Logan, being a New Mexico, um, school kid. Because spring was when you finally could see the end in sight when you thought that maybe, maybe now that you’d survived basketball season, which was a big deal for me because I wasn’t a good basketball player. And, um, and yet I still went out for basketball because, um, they needed enough people to make up a team. And, um, all my friends were doing it. And it seemed as is particularly true in small town American schools that, um, the, the athletes were the cool kids. And so I always went out for sports, but then I was always so thrilled when it was almost over. But the sport that I loved, even though I wasn’t very good at it, was track because, um, going out for track meant getting, um, one of those great red and white track suits and getting to go to track meets. And so many of my spring memories are around going to track meets in New Mexico, and in Melrose, and in Tucumcari, and in Santa Rosa and in Springer and in Clayton. And while I, here’s, here’s the very best thing about track. You get to go to a track meet, and if you’re only in a couple of events, you get to spend the majority of the day on a blanket in the middle of the field with your teammates, and you get to, um, sort of surreptitiously, um, check out the guys from the other team. I remember, um, there was a guy from the Texaco team that I thought was the cutest guy in the world. Um, I remember going to Melrose and thinking that, you know, it seemed, it seemed at the time that all the kids from Melrose were just a little more cool than, um, the kids in my hometown school of Logan. And I used to think, wow, if we could just move to Melrose for a year and I could be in the middle of these cool kids, but we would, it, it was getting up early, early, early, putting on your tracksuit, going down to the school, getting on the activity bus with 40 other junior high and high school kids because all of our track meets in Class A, which is the, were the smallest schools in the state. Um, we ran our track meets with junior high and high school kids. I know you call it middle school now, but for us it was junior high and we would be up early in the morning. Um, our parents would’ve packed some sort of a sandwich for us to take along with us. And then we would drive, you know, in, in New Mexico, in small schools, those kids drive huge distances to go to a track meet. And we would drive a couple of hours, get to the track, meet, spill out onto the field with our, I have a lot of pictures from when I was in high school of all of us huddled in blankets for the first hour or two, and then as the day would warm off, warm up, we would shed our blankets and lay them on the dirt on the grass, not on the dirt. Some, some people on their track had had, um, grass in fields. And we would huddle in piles and talk to each other. And every maybe every couple of hours, the coach would come by and say, Hey Bunny, it’s time to warm up for the four 40. And that’s what we call it then. I know it’s the 400 meter now, but we ran in, um, in feet at the time. So the four 40 was a lap around the track. I wasn’t any good at it. I wasn’t a runner, but it was an excuse to get to go to the event. And it was, um, you know, almost invariably in Eastern New Mexico, the wind would be blowing a little bit. Some would be blowing a lot, but there were these glorious spring Saturdays when there was no wind. And, you know, because of track meet is, um, a little, um, I I would say boring to the spectators unless you were really, really, really into those events. My parents never went to a track meet. So it was this day of Gloria Spring weather and kids in tracksuits and laying around on a field and working for a very, very, very short time. And then when it was over, you were dusty and sunburned and ready to get back on the bus. It was, you know, despite the fact that you did hardly any work, it was sort of exhausting. And you’d get back on the bus and you’d get to, to go home with all of your friends and that, and you’d get off the bus and your parents or your vehicle, if you were old enough to drive, would be waiting and you’d get to go home. It’s one of my favorite spring memories in New Mexico. And then if you could, um, like me, um, if you were, if you were one of the horn girls, Glenda and Carol Horn and Rot Young and, um, some of those kids always, always qualified for state and, and one year I was on a relay team where everybody ran like the wind except me and I ran sort of like a quick breeze, but we did okay. And our relay teams qualified for the state track meet at U N M, which was wholly mackerel the coolest thing because it was a such a large track meet that we would have to go up on Thursday and stay two nights in Albuquerque and spend all day Friday and all day Saturday on the field at the University of New Mexico. So if you have kids, um, suggest they go out for track, not because perhaps because they’re athletic or because they’re fast, but because it will create really wonderful spring memories for them.