Long Lots

Weather: Winds were strong again this past week, though I don’t think they reached the 62 mph registered at the Santa Fé airport on Tuesday. The accumulated affects of age and wind loosened four fence boards that fell to the ground. I noticed two people had complete panels blown down from vertical board fences that had been installed in 8' sections.

The winds created another problem. I had put small plastic protectors around some young roses two years ago to keep the rabbits from eating the new, low growth. Sun aged the plastic, and the wind blew them apart. I spent a few minutes tying them back together with string. The problem with that is string disappears. I’m not sure if its age, the wind, or birds foraging for nesting materials.

While the wind kept me from doing more clean up work, it didn’t stop everyone. On Tuesday, when they were gusting the most, one person was cleaning a ditch and another was riding his lawn mower with a bag attachment.

Surprisingly, I haven’t found Russian thistle carcasses blown into the yard. Perhaps that’s because it was so dry last summer they didn’t developed.

Last rain: 4/8. Week’s low: 29 degrees F. Week’s high: 84 degrees F.

What’s blooming in the area: Apples, fruiting crab apples, sand cherries, weeping cherry, flowering quince, redbud, forsythia, lilac, tulips, grape hyacinth, alfilerillo, vinca, oxalis, tansy mustard, white tufted evening primrose, western stickseed, common and native dandelions, cheat grass

What’s reviving: Russian olive, sandbar willow, hostas, bindweed, snow-in-summer, Mönch asters

Tasks: I finished fixing hoses on Sunday, and on Wednesday my message therapist told me if I was going to do any more of that work, he should see me again in a week rather than wait the usual two to three weeks. He agreed the work used a great many lazy muscles.

I didn’t tell him this is the season when I pick dandelion flowers to keep them from going to seed. They especially like to come up under shrubs. Each picked head requires calf, ham strings, and lower back muscles grown soft from lack of use. The task is made harder because pinching stems is too much for my right thumb, so I’m also teaching my left hand something new.

Animal sightings: Rabbit in the small rose bed, small brown birds, sidewalk ants. No bees; they don’t like the wind.

Weekly update: When my home county in Michigan was opened for settlement in the early 1830s, the first settler "secured a pre-emption of the water-power and adjoining lands." More speculators appeared buying up early claims like his. One located in what would be my hometown where he staked a claim "covering the water power." [1]

No one in 1877 though it strange someone could claim a monopoly on water, but it was unthinkable in Rio Arriba county at the time. Here, land was allocated in strips 420' wide running between highlands and irrigation ditches, so each farmer had access to bottom lands where he could grow chile, beans and corn on the heavier, more fertile soils, upper lands where he could grow fruit trees on the coarser soils, and grazing lands without irrigation. Houses were built between the farm land and the fruit land, and roads were up land on non-productive soil.

The average width was probably less a matter of legal precedent, than the amount of land that could effectively be watered by an irrigation branch. Alvar Carlson said the fields could be any length, depending on topography.

Carlson believed long lots developed from the rigors of farming in an arid environment and that the earlier development of such lots by the French in the 1630s in Quebec was an independent invention.

The early settlers in La Cañada did not have a strong sense of community or common cause, although they did care about some of their kin and their children married neighbors. They probably owed their views of equal access to water to the Moors. However, like the French, they created a settlement where every family had access to water and every type of land needed to grow food.

These long lots survive today everywhere in and around Española where they are bounded by laterals bringing water from the main ditches.

Notes on photographs:
1. Blue Spike grape hyacinth (Muscari armeniacum), 21 April 2014.

2. Simple irrigation system in Cundiyo valley, 23 March 2012; the Río Frijoles is flowing across the photograph (you can just see some water in the center back) and irrigation channels have been dug to both sides (marked by taller vegetation). The land is used for pasturage.

3. Long lot near La Puebla, 23 March 2012. The Santa Cruz river is at the back, before the Tertiary mound, where the cottonwoods are growing. There is probably a ditch to the right, marked by the red branches of sandbar willow.

End notes:

1. History of Calhoun County, Michigan. Philadelphia: L. H. Everts and Company, 1877. 12.

2. Alvar W. Carlson. "Community Land Grants, Long-Lots, and Irrigation." 23-37 in The Spanish-American Homeland. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990.