High Desert Farmers

Did you know about the organic practices I am using to grow your greenthread? Sure. I have my application in for organic certification of the next crop you all are waiting patiently for. (Planting in June for an August first harvest!)

“But it’s native to to the Plateaus, so who wouldn’t be able to grow it organically?” you may ask. Good question.

It’s true that half the battle in organic growing is choice of crops suited to the ecosystem. However, use of herbicides is the main transgression you will find tempting those who are not certifying their crop organic. It would be for them the easiest way to maintain a weed-free crop from year to year. To do so organically requires some carefully planned processes and tools, careful timing of precision irrigation and cultivation, and more hand weeding.

Another tool I am using is the allelopathic power of sprouting rye. Here are two photos from my field, a patch of pure sprouting rye, and a patch of native grasses. The rye is free of weeds, the grasses are interspersed with sprouting kochia, a common weed originating in Eurasia. Rye as a winter cover crop is not only a strategy for building soil tilth and preventing erosion, but also a strategy for reducing weed seed counts in the soil. Smart stuff, huh? I didn’t come up with it myself. Check out this SARE (Sustainable Ag Research and Education) publication, Managing Cover Crops Profitably (5MB .pdf).

A friend and neighbor, Theo Bremer-Bennett, who’s design firm Glyph Engine is helping me redesign my tea packaging, tells me how much he likes the slogan I’ve been using for years, “harvested with a spirit of gratitude.”

Though I can’t say I make use of one tribe’s or the other’s particular ceremony when picking wthe herb, I appreciate that there is mystery in growing things and and in my best moments I am sincerely grateful for the blessing of the harvest.

The many setbacks in this project, however, have often caused me to reconsider my slogan. You know how it gets when things don’t go as planned. Enough said about that. Today is Easter and spring has just started and I’m reflecting on the seasons with real gratitude again. So if you see the slogan “harvested with a spirit of gratitude” on the new packaging that’s coming this summer, you know I haven’t put it there thoughtlessly.

Special thanks to New Mexico Department of Agriculture for their Specialty Crops funding for redesigning the label and packaging.

The fall-sown winter rye has sprouted this spring and is building biomass at this moment. Good snows on our side of the Great Divide this winter have melted and soaked in deep, where the rye roots will need it. I see this as an important way to build organic matter in the soil without transporting it with fossil fuels. My summer crop of Navajo tea greenthread will thrive on lean soil with improved texture.

Are you thinking about summertime when you will be looking for your own healthy wild plants to harvest? Here is an example of an ideal specimen, found last July on Glorieta Mesa east of Santa Fe. You will find much more of the showier species, T. filifolium, blooming there, but keep your eyes peeled for something like this T. megapotamicum, which is most favored by Navajos and Puebloans for herbal infusions.

This implement shapes the bed for precision cultivation and injects the drip tape just below the surface. This allows minimal water use and is an important aspect of my organic growing plan.

I’m looking pretty serious in this photo. It takes a lot of concentration to reach out and snap a photo of yourself, not to mention the determination needed to persist with this plan despite many obstacles. That John Deere was a loaner when my own tractor was in the shop with a stuck valve.

Seeds are worth their weight in gold. That’s why careful winnowing is an important part of my project. A year ago a failed seed storage system destroyed 5 lbs of clean seed I had gathered by hand. The tragedy set my growing back considerably and with no commercial source for this seed I was forced to start over. Back to the wilds to gather seed by the handful and back the winnowing fan to clean the seed for planting. Below is a close-up of the seed head intact and two seeds.

Just received word from Isa, a contact in Portugal who completed an analysis of some of my greenthread and has this to report informally:

I’ve analysed the Thelesperma, using two different techniques and in both I’ve identified Marein, Luteolin-7-O-Glucoside and Luteolin. . . . Luteolin was present in significantly less quantity than the others. I also concluded that these 3 substances exist mainly in the flowers.

Thanks, Isa for contributing to the growing knowledge about this plant. If you get a chance to comment on this, please provide a link to your insititution for reference.

Many of you are stopping by my site on a search for more info about Thelesperma. Please be aware that there is still a lot of incorrect information about the plant around the web, even on the USDA Plants database, which has pictures of some other little yellow flower in place of T. megapotamicum.

Your journey to learn about this genus, if you choose to continue along unmapped paths, will be all the more interesting, as mine has been and continues to be, in learning about the plant I purvey.

I guess that the photographer, Gene Cooper, who submitted the mislabeled photos to the USDA Plants Profile linked above, mistook the leaf shape as a key characteristic of the plant. Many composites, for example tickseed or coreopsis, have the same stem and leaf structure as Thelesperma. The flower stalks in these photos are much too close together and too near the top of the plant, like a groundsel. All the Thelesperma I know has long, lithe stems, at least half the height of the plant, between the base of the peduncle and the flower cluster. The correctly labeled photo on the USDA page is here, seen from the side at a bit of a distance, submitted by Patrick Alexander.

Maria Langer is a customer, an author and helicopter pilot, who wrote on her blog, an Eclectic Mind, about her first experience with Hopi tea at Hotevilla on the Hopi reservation:

. . . A few years ago, I was back on the Hopi reservation and bought more. But today, waking up with a head cold, I decided to forego my usual morning coffee in favor of the clean flavor of Hopi tea. As I brewed up a cup, I realized two things: (1) the long story of how I’d discovered Hopi tea might be interesting to at least a few blog readers and (2) I was running low again.

I did some research for this blog entry. I discovered that Hopi tea is from a plant commonly known as greenthread and scientifically known as Thelesperma [megapotamicum]. You can see some photos of it as a plant and stick bundles, learn how to brew it, and read about its medicinal values on the New Mexico State University’s Medicinal plant Web site. I learned that it grows in abundance in the Navajo, Hopi, and Zuni reservations of the Four Corners area. I also found an online source for purchasing Hopi tea online, High Desert Farmers. High Desert is a small scale grower which sells Hopi tea as traditional bundles (they call it “bulk”), loose, and as tea bags. Since the bundles weren’t available, I bought bags and loose. It cost me $14.50 (including shipping), but saved me a 200+ mile trip to the Hopi reservation.

If you like plain, soothing hot teas like green tea, you’ll probably like Hopi tea. If you ever see some in your travels, I recommend it. And I hope you story of first acquisition is as memorable to you as mine is to me.

As of this posting I have plenty of bundles, by the way!