Tuzigoot National Monument

Desert grassland surrounding the Tuzigoot ruins.  National Parks website photo.

When it comes to living off the land as the ancient Sinagua Native Americans did, Tuzigoot National Monument near Cottonwood, Arizona has it all.  Landscape diversity is essential when it comes to finding the products essential for life and Tuzigoot is especially rich when it comes to the landscape.  Think about it.  If you were to live off the land and not be required to wonder around searching for things constantly you would need a variety of different types of habitats that support a variety of different types of plants and materials necessary for life.  You would need food, building products for shelter, material for clothing, and water at least.  At Tuzigoot, all of these things are highly concentrated in a relatively small area. 

If you visit Tuzigoot National Monument you can see four major habitats that would have provided nearly everything the ancient Sinagua's would have needed within about 50 acres, which is about the size of a very small farm.  Tuzigoot is located in the desert grasslands of the Upper Sonoran Desert.  The desert grasslands surrounding these ruins would have provided yucca plants which provided some fiber and some food for the Native Americans.  Food would have been in the form of plants such as cacti fruits that could have been gathered or animals for hunting.  The desert grasslands are the least productive habitats though of this area.  Even more productive would have been the mesquite and acacia bosque downslope and closer to the river and wetland.  This thick brushy habitat grows where soil moisture is higher than in the grasslands and where the river has deposited deep soils.  The mesquite trees provide huge amounts of food in the form of mesquite beans every summer.  These bean pods were ground-up and made into cakes.  Mesquite wood also provided materials for building and tools.  The deep soils of the mesquite bosque are also likely where farming took place.  Of course, farming in these areas provided food mostly in the form of corn, beans and squash, but it also provided cotton to make clothing.  The mesquite bosque was also a great place for animals to hide and was therefore very good for hunting. 

Tavasci Marsh. Photo from National Parks website.

Slightly down slope from the bosque two extremely important habitats can be found.  The first is the large marsh.  The marsh is today known as the Tavasci Marsh and is dense with grassy wetland plants.  The marsh would have provided essential habitat for all kinds of animals that came to it for both water and food, both of which were scarce in the surrounding desert grasslands.  The Native Americans would have used the marsh as a hunting area as well as an area to gather food from plants.  For example, the cattails in the marsh provide huge amounts of potato-like food in their root systems.  Lastly, the perennial flowing Verde River would have provided trees for building materials, water to drink and for watering plants, and wildlife for eating.  Across all of these habitats there of course can be found an abundance of rocks that the Sinagua used for building. 

Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument

View from the visitors center trail at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument.  In this photo jumping cholla, saguaro, and organ pipe cacti can all be seen with the Ajo mountains in the background.

Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument is located right on the boarder of Mexico as far south as you can go in Arizona. The monument is quite a ways off the beaten path and probably the most dangerous monument in the national park system. There are multiple boarder patrol checkpoints that are actually in or near the park and boarder patrols can be found all over the park. Tragically, a few years back a park ranger was killed in a boarder incident and things were quite dangerous within the park. Today however, a barrier fence has been put into place along the monuments boarder and dangerous sections of the park have been closed to visitors. The park is significantly safer today than it was several years ago. Unfortunately, Senita Basin, the only population of the columnar senita cactus is currently closed due to these issues. Fortunately, other sections of the park such as the Ajo Mountain Drive are open and offer spectacular views of the Sonoran Desert. For a desert, the monument is quite green and hope to a decent amount of vegetation. This unusually green desert is a result of this particular desert being one of the wettest deserts in the world. Organ Pipe receives about 10 inches of rain annually with significantly more falling at higher elevations. Both winter and summer rainfall seasons also contribute to the amount and diversity of vegetation here.

View along the Ajo drive in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument

A total of 28 species of cacti can be found within the park. Several of these are at their northern most limits, and are prevented from migrating further north due increased number of days with freezing temperatures to the north. Organ pipe cacti are one of these species and can be found in abundance within the park. The amazing diversity of cacti can be found on the Ajo Mountain Drive, and it is spectacular for organ pipe viewing. Most commonly, the organ pipe is found on upper slopes facing south. The sun warms southern slopes just enough to prevent colder freezing temperatures that prevents the cacti from growing on colder northern slopes. Upper slopes also are slightly warmer due to warm air rising up these slopes. If the growing tissue of an organ pipe freezes for too long of a period of time or too many times in the winter it will kill the plant. So these slightly warmer areas give the cacti an added edge so they can become established. I also have a strong suspicion that organ pipes prefer soil types typically found on upper bajada slopes. Even with this added warmth however, conditions are not absolutely perfect. The organ pipe sill needs some help from what is called a nurse plant. Small shrubs, mesquites, ironwoods, and palo verdes all help protect young organ pipes from the intense summer heat and sun. The cooler temperatures and shady conditions also help hold the water in the soil for longer. On occasion, large rocks can even provide these added benefits of shadier, cooler, and slightly wetter conditions. Nurse plant associations can be found for several different species. The saguaro cactus has very similar nurse plant requirements. A different type of nurse plant association that can be found within the park is that of the jumping cholla and pincushion cactus. The jumping cholla is a rather large shrubby-tree like cactus that looses an abundance of spine dense joints. These joints naturally fall from the cholla and often will form a mat around the mother plant. Nothing really wants to go close to these piles of spiny cactus joints making it a perfect place for the small pincushion cactus to live.

Organ pipe cactus

Tassel Ear Corn

Tassel-ear that another garden produced.

Back in July we planted several blocks of corn in our college garden.  July is the normal time to plant corn in the Arizona Sonoran Desert.  The corn we planted was a normal desert adapted variety that was supposed to mature in about 70 days and grow to about five feet.  This would mean we would harvest our corn about the first of October.  Some of the corn grew exactly as we expected.  Most of it however just kept growing and growing and growing until December (150 days) and never reached maturity.  The corn grew to over 10 feet tall and produced weird tassel-ears at about five feet.  Oddly, this extremely tall tassel-ear corn was the exact same variety as the corn that grew to only five feet and reached maturity in 70 days. 

Why the extreme difference?  We wondered if we had messed-up by planting some other seeds instead.  But we could find no evidence of that.  We also wondered if we had some mutant corn.  Again, no evidence.  We also wondered if we had planted to late in the season.  Probably not since the varieties of corn we planted normally are planted that time of year.  So what was mutating this corn into a gigantic tassel-ear plant?

With a little more investigation we found that the soil where our gigantic mutant corn grew had extremely high clay content and was very commonly saturated with water.  Water was often found pooling in this area.  Areas where the corn grew as would normally be expected also had slightly lower clay content but were not saturated with water and did not have pooling issues.  But we had no good explanation for why poorly aerated, high clay content, water saturated soils would produce gigantic mutant tassel-ear corn.  So we took to the internet, where answers to all good gardening questions are found of course...

What we found was the condition of tassel-ear corn.  This is where corn cobs also form tassels, just as our corn did.  Our corn appears to be an extreme example of this condition though with the corn cob actually becoming very elongated and forming mostly tassel.  Apparently this condition is common where corn plants are growing under poor soil conditions, just like ours.  No one knows what triggers tassel-ears but from what I read, all corn cobs start off as both male and female, or both tassel and corn cob.  Hormonal changes in the cob during development normally cause the cob to become fully female and produce seed and not a tassel.  For some reason, tassel-ear corn does not have a hormonal change and the result is a corn cob that is both male and female.  This condition does not however explain why our corn grew twice as tall and for twice as long as it should have.  I could find no explanation for these weird problems though.  For now, I'm simply blaming poor soil conditions on everything.