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Water first. Everything else follows.
Most of the high desert is a story about scarcity. This valley is the exception. The LAND sits over its own aquifer, fed by snowmelt from the mountains above, and the water that comes from our taps is spring water, straight from the ground.
National forest wraps the valley on three sides. The hills slope down to Polvadera Creek, and every slope, swale and shadow decides where water goes next. Permaculture begins by watching that.
Then there is the acequia. The Cienegita ditch has carried creek water to these fields since 1807, shared among neighbors and governed the old way, by agreement and by hand. We are mayordomo of it now, which mostly means listening to it.
The orchard drinks from it: some twenty varieties of apples, apricots, peaches, plums, pears and grapes, many older than anyone living here. Guests pick what is ripe. The bears and birds take their share.
“We were encouraged to pick all the fruit we could eat and bake with.”
A full year of watching before building anything: where frost settles, where snow lingers, where water runs after a storm.
Swales, mulch and the acequia's gravity flow decide where things grow. Every drop is used twice before it leaves the land.
Trees, vines and roots that come back every year hold soil, store carbon and feed people without tilling the ground.
The orchard is food, shade, habitat and a place to sit. Nothing on the land does only one job.
The richest life is where creek meets meadow and orchard meets forest. We widen those edges instead of tidying them.
Fruit for guests, seed for neighbors, water down the ditch on schedule. Abundance is meant to move.
Four centuries of shared water, gravity irrigation and the annual spring limpia, when neighbors clean the ditch together.
Farmers who built gravel-mulched fields on these mesas to hold moisture in a dry land, centuries before the word permaculture.
Who named permaculture in 1978 and gave it principles: observe and interact, catch and store energy, produce no waste.
The farmer of The One-Straw Revolution, who taught that the most productive move is often to do less.
Whose rainwater harvesting work in the Sonoran desert showed how to plant the rain before you plant the garden.
Who argue that farming should look like the prairie: perennial, diverse and rooted deep.
Next season we will plant saffron crocus in the same beds as chile. The idea comes from New Mexico State University's research station at Alcalde, about an hour south of us, where researchers have grown saffron alongside chile since 2023 and harvested more than six kilograms per hectare from their best plots.
The two crops keep opposite hours. Chile grows through the heat and is finished by the first frost. Saffron corms rest through summer, then bloom in late October and early November, when the chile beds would otherwise sit empty, and keep their green leaves through winter.
At 7,000 feet we are higher and colder than Alcalde, so this is an honest experiment, not a promise. Saffron already thrives on high ground in Kashmir and Morocco. Whether it thrives in our valley is what we are here to find out.
Northern New Mexico's native chiles are not bred in labs. They were chosen by families, one harvest at a time: Chimayó, Velarde, Alcalde, Jemez and a dozen more, each shaped by its own valley over generations.
The highest of the documented landraces, Velarde, grows at about 6,300 feet. Our valley sits near 7,000. Our long-term hope is to grow the highest chile in the north, and over many seasons let this place select one of its own.
The method is the old one. Start with seed from neighbors and native lines. Save seed only from the healthiest plants whose pods ripen red earliest. Keep them apart from other peppers so they do not cross. Repeat for six to ten years.
What might altitude give a chile? Those are our working hypotheses, and we will report what we learn.
Sources: NMSU Cooperative Extension Circular 679, The Landrace Chiles of Northern New Mexico; NMSU Sustainable Agriculture Science Center at Alcalde saffron research, 2023 to 2025.
On the south-facing side of the bowl we are building a walipini, an earth-sheltered pit greenhouse first developed for the high Andes, where the Aymara name means place of warmth. The growing floor sits several feet below grade, where the soil holds a steady temperature through the coldest nights, and a single glazed roof is pitched to catch the low winter sun.
At our altitude the frost-free season is short and the nights are sharp. The walipini is our attempt to stretch it into a year-round growing season with no fossil heat: greens through January, starts for the orchard and the chile trial in early spring, and a place to test what this valley can carry. We will publish what works, and what does not, as field notes.
Douglas Spurlock leads permaculture at the LAND: the orchard and the acequia rows, the chile and saffron trial, the walipini, and the volunteers and workshops that grow around them. If you join a season or a workshop, he is the person you will be working beside.
Meet Douglas —>Spend a few weeks living and working on the land: pruning in March, the acequia limpia in spring, planting in May, harvest in the fall.
Grafting, seed saving, acequia stewardship, adobe and natural building, saffron harvest. Small groups, taught in the field.
Field notes from the chile and saffron trial, the orchard calendar, and what the beavers did this month. No spam, just the season.
Tell us how you would like to be part of it. Volunteer seasons are small and chosen by hand; workshop dates go to this list first.
