- Welcome back to
Southwest Yard and Garden. We're still in the Gallup
garden of Sid Gilson. And this is a very interesting
garden in a challenging area. So this is beautiful. You've had to really work
to create this garden. - Thank you, Curtis. We have. We've put a lot of
work into the soil and building the soil up to have
bountiful harvest in plants. - You've got no grass, but
a lot of different plants. I know it's
sunflowers right here. - Yes, we like the sunflower. They come up by themselves
and we thin them out. The grasses takes a lot of
water, and it's hard for me to grow grass in Gallup. - Mmm hmm So you just dispense
with the difficult one and go with what actually
produces something for you. - That's right. - And so you've got
these here for the birds. - Yes, we have-- we let the seed
pods stay on and the birds come and enjoy them. They really like to get
out here in the morning and the late evening, the
finches, and eat this. And it's delightful. The butterflies and the
hummingbirds with the bee plant that we have, they
really enjoy it. - So you do have a
lot of diversity here. Over on this side of the garden,
you've got the bee plant. Bees and hummingbirds love that. - Right. - And you know, bees make honey. So you don't grow
honey here yourself, but somebody's making honey. - And they, they do pollinate
all our squashes and things like that. - OK, then you've got
corn and squash, tomatoes, amaranth, dill, asparagus. You've got a lot
of things in here. - We've got some broccoli. We've grown just about every
vegetable there is here, and we've brought
it down to what we enjoy eating and freezing. - Which, you've had
to work to do it, and you've had to
build this [INAUDIBLE].. I'd like to go see
what you've done here. - Very good. - So let's take a look at that. - OK, fine. - Sid, I see some interesting
things here in your garden. I see newspaper with straw
on top of it, and then pieces of tires on top of that. How does this all work together? - We strive to keep
our soil moist. So we take this tire rim and
hold it down over the straw. And underneath the straw,
we have a paper mulch that we put down
as wet newspaper. As you can see, this paper mulch
keeps the soil nice and moist. You see there is an
angleworm right there, a little red worm coming out. They love to stay under
this soft, soft paper mulch. And you can see what
it does to our soil. There's some more worms. As you can see, the
red worms, they just love to stay under that soil. - Ready to go fishing. - And they work, and they
keep that soil nice and moist. - Oh look at it. - And that's Gallup soil
after it's had the treatment. - And what's the treatment? How do you modify the soil
so it really looks like that? - We have to use a lot
of organic material. I've used over the
years some horse manure. Not too light, because
that breaks up real well. And the secret is keeping this
mulch on and keeping the soil moist so we don't get the
evaporation and the salt buildup. - And then in the fall when
you're through with the garden, you just rototill all this in? - In the fall? No, what we do is we lay cattle
panels down, cut our corn stalks, cut our plants, and
then I put the paper back over, and I put the
cattle panels on it to keep the wind from
blowing it and let that sit there with a little
more straw on it all winter. And it keeps the soil,
again, from getting too dry. - OK. - And it soaks up the nice snow. - Interesting technique for
this part of New Mexico. And how do you
irrigate your garden? - Well, we irrigate, as
you can see, underground. This is the end plug of our
underground water system. We have a plug here,
and I take the plug out for the air bubbles to come out. I've got holes in this pipe. - And that's buried
under the soil. - It's buried under the soil. This is our little flag. So when the water
comes, I know just how to plug it back in
to put the water in. And that's how I irrigate
underground right alongside the plants. - So how much water
comes through this when you're running it? - The secret is not
to put too much water. Usually, you don't
want the water to come out any more than
a couple inches, and then a couple inches this way
in terms of pressure. The danger is getting
it come out too fast. It's better to have it
come out nice and slow. - Can you show us
how you do that? - Yes, we can do that. As you can see, the
water is coming out here, and it's about that far. That's all the water
pressure we need. Not very much. Then we take our plug, plug
that up nice and tight, and we've got it nice and tight. And then the water starts
coming up underneath. - So Sid, you've plugged it now. Now the water has to come
out the holes that you've got in this buried pipe. - Yes, we have 1/16 inch
holes every six inches along this pipe underground,
about four to five inches underground. And then we have every two feet,
we have a hose, another hose and we can do four
lines with one outlet. So this is the way we
water, right underground. - And that's good. That keeps the
water underground. It's not on the
surface so that you don't have evaporative loss. And considering the water
quality you've got here, you don't add surplus
salt to the soil. So that's good for the soil. - That's right. And as you can see then
with our paper mulch, we also keep it nice and moist
as the water distributes out from the hose. - Can you water
your corn that way? Your squash that way? The carrots, the
tomatoes, everything in the garden's
watered that way. - Everything is
watered that way. And the tomatoes, what we do
with the tomatoes is we just put the holes, cut the holes in
the pipe underneath the tomato plants before we
have planted tomatoes so that we know the
water is coming right where the tomato plants are. - Well, Sid, thank
you very much. This is information that'd
be useful to gardeners all over New Mexico, not
even northern New Mexico, but the whole state can use
some of this information to conserve water and to
have a very lush garden. - You're welcome. [MUSIC PLAYING]