The
Impact
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Climate Change
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Ariel Castillo speaks with Lorenzo Luevano, he is the agriculture manager of San Elizario, a small border town in the Chihuahuan Desert. Luevano runs a community garden and teaches this low-income community how to be self-sustaining by growing low-water crops. But with high temperatures and low rainfall, household gardening is changing. In the face of climate change, Luevano is learning how to adapt by using new techniques and methods that he can then share with his community.
San Eli man experiments with growing food in the desert amid climate change
San Elizario gardener talks about growing food in the desert
Click here for audio transcript
Lorenzo Luevano:
Ever since I was little, I remember my grandma; she had a ton of, like, rose bushes, fruit trees, plants, rosemary.
She was like my mentor. Every time I would visit her, she would go, oh can you help me cut the flowers? Can you help me cut the weeds and grab me some rosemary?
So, I think that she helped me plant that seed in my mind about growing fruit, vegetables, flowers.
My name is Lorenzo Luevano. I’m the agriculture manager for the city San Elizario, Texas. And I’m basically teaching people how to grow their own food, their own fruits and vegetables in an environment like the desert.
I want to say I’m an experimental farmer. Each year I try to grow something new to see if that plant, that seed, grows. If it does, I take notes.
That way, next season I can plant those seeds again and find another plant or seed that I can grow here in San Eli.
So right now, because gardening and farming is trial and error, we do fail a lot of times.
Like, for instance, this season I planted verdolagas, which is also purslane, in May, but the nights were too cold for the plants to grow, and the days were too hot.
So, we did have a lot of issues with the variation of temperature, either too hot or too cold, which didn’t allow for the verdolagas to grow.
So at the beginning, since I’m the one growing, I did feel a little bit disappointed. But in our team that’s our motto, especially in gardening; in agriculture, a lot of things are going to fail.
So yeah, the verdolagas didn’t grow this year, but the outcome was, what did we learn that we can improve next year?
So in reality, yeah at the beginning, I felt disappointed, but I use that disappointment to turn into a positive to see what I can improve for next year.
Of course, I’ve been practicing, even before I got my job here in San Eli, the city, I have been practicing rain harvesting.
I know on my house which section of the roof the water tends to collect. I have like, six rain barrels of sixty gallons.
So, whenever it rains, I know where to put the rain barrels, so I know how much water I can collect, and I use the water especially during the dry period.
So, the community garden, it sits at the historic district in downtown San Eli. So, it’s right across from where the art gallery is, the museum; in front of the elementary school.
And also, we chose that location because it sits along the main road, so that’s where most people drive in and out of San Eli.
(Sound from the San Elizario community garden)
So right now, we have six raised beds, each raised bed is meant for production
Our department, we want to learn and make some errors that way when people do plant some seeds and the plants fail, we can tell them why they fail, what can they do next time?
We just want to have that knowledge so that the community can feel a little bit better.
Because I know a lot of people here in San Eli, they want to grow something, but they don’t know the technique. They don’t know how to start or what to start.
That’s where we also want to encourage people not to give up, just keep learning and keep planting seeds even if they don’t grow.
Next year, we take the knowledge we learned this year and apply it that way, next year we have a bigger chance of having a harvest with the changes in climate.
A chapel dedicated to San Elizario has stood on this spot since the late 1700s, when Spanish conquistadores established settlements from what is now Texas up to Santa Fe, N.M. on the old imperial Spanish mission trail along the Rio Grande. The current church was built in 1877.
PHOTO COURTESY OF BORDERZINE.COM
San Elizario, Texas, is a small border city in the Chihuahuan Desert known for farming high water usage crops, like cotton and pecans, but the high heat and lack of rain from climate change is changing the traditional techniques of home gardeners.
Lorenzo Luevano poses next to a rain harvesting barrel in San Elizario, Texas, Sept. 1, 2022. Rain harvesting is one of Luevano’s main focuses, as it is a technique he uses to water his crops during the dry season.
ARIEL CASTILLO / NEXTGENRADIO
Lorenzo Luevano was born and raised in San Elizario, which locals call San Eli, and got his first taste of agriculture at a young age when his grandma introduced him to gardening. Now in his late twenties, Luevano serves as the city’s agriculture manager, teaching residents in this low-income community how to grow their own fruits and vegetables in desert conditions. This includes one surprising plant with a lot of potential — if Luevano can make it work.
When driving through San Eli, it’s easy to mistake a highly nutritious plant for a weed growing on the side of the road. Luevano refers to these plants by the Spanish word, verdolagas, but its scientific name is portulaca, commonly known as purslane. Purslane is a type of succulent that can be used in several ways. Lorenzo uses them as a substitute for spinach.
“I use the verdolagas in butter and adding bacon, frijoles, beans, and a little bit of jalapeno,” Lorenzo said.
They grow wild in San Eli and are tied closely to the history and culture of the city. For years, Luevano has been growing purslane, along with other edible plants like cilantro, but in his most recent trial, the growth was disappointing.
“We usually get an average of eight to 10 inches of rain, so we want to use that water and store it, that way people, during drought time, they can use that water to grow their own fruits and vegetables.”
Lorenzo Luevano harvests verdolagas in San Elizario, Texas, Sept. 1, 2022. These plants are common throughout the Chihuahuan Desert and can be used as a substitute for spinach.
ARIEL CASTILLO / NEXTGENRADIO
The days were too hot and the nights were too cold. In addition, Luevano says purslane is a tricky plant to maintain. If not cared for properly—like adding too much water—the plant will then flower, causing the leaves to become bitter. This doesn’t make for a very tasty treat. And, in fact, the plant becomes inedible.
In his own garden at home, Luevano planted heat resistant watermelons, “desert watermelons,” which are typically grown in warmer climates because of their ability to withstand heat. But, just like the purslane, there was no growth because of the extreme heat temperatures. For this desert watermelon, it was just way too hot.
Understanding how to adapt will be the key to maintaining crops as temperatures rise in the region, said Kevin Floyd, the botanical curator at the Chihuahuan Desert Garden at the University of Texas at El Paso.
“So the big impacts of climate change in our region are expected to be increased temperature to some degree, but most of the plants can handle increased temperature up to some point,” Floyd said. “They’ve evolved in hot conditions. And so I think unless we get particularly hot, like if we start getting over 110 maybe, I think the heat won’t be a problem. The rainfall is the other big piece, and it seems like it’s hard to say with rainfall.”
Although sometimes frustrating, Luevano uses the failed plants as a way to learn new techniques and methods for the next season, which he can then share with his community in hopes to teach them how to have a successful harvest.
“It’s just a matter of finding different techniques and different solutions to help the plants grow,” Luevano said.
One of these new methods Luevano is currently focused on is rain harvesting—the process of collecting rainwater to help irrigate the plants. He has built what he calls rain roofs, which are designed to capture the water. He also designed and built barrels that sit out during a rainstorm and collect rain water. He hopes to get them installed at the community garden so he can teach others how to use them.
After poking through the leaves of a verdolaga succulent, Lorenzo Luevano holds the seeds of the plant in the palm of his hand in San Elizario, Texas, Sept. 1, 2022.
ARIEL CASTILLO / NEXTGENRADIO
“We usually get an average of eight to 10 inches of rain, so we want to use that water and store it,” Luevano said. “That way people, during drought time, they can use that water to grow their own fruits and vegetables.”
Gardening is a process of trial and error, especially when temperatures aren’t consistent, but Luevano is persistent. He says climate change is here to stay, so all he can do is adapt and share what he has learned with his community, so they, too, can have the chance to be self-sustaining by growing their own food.
“You see on the news that a lot of cities—a lot of states—are running out of water,” Luevano said. “Down the line, five to 10 years, how is that problem going to be bigger? And if there’s a solution, what solution is there on the table for us to help that situation?”
San Elizario, Texas’ community garden sits next to the city’s only main road Sept. 1, 2022. The verdolagas are planted on wooden beds where people from the community can see them as they pass by.
ARIEL CASTILLO / NEXTGENRADIO
A bilingual sign is positioned at the San Elizario community garden, explaining cover crops Sept. 1, 2022.
ARIEL CASTILLO / NEXTGENRADIO