Dragoon Mountain Ranch
Growing Guides

Tomatoes (deep coverage, soil + hydro), eggplant, cucumbers, summer squash, melons, beans (including teparies), sweet corn, sweet potatoes — the rest of the warm-season garden.

Brassicas, alliums, cool-season greens, and root crops — the Dragoon winter window from August garlic planting through April spinach.

Annual herbs (basil, cilantro, dill, parsley) plus Mediterranean perennials that thrive here (rosemary, thyme, sage, oregano, mint). Soil and hydroponic.

Cochise County viticulture — variety selection, pre-plant soil prep, VSP trellis, irrigation by stage, annual nutrition, pruning, harvest-to-handoff.

Figs, pomegranates, jujubes, peaches, apricots, plums, almonds, apples, pears — the tree fruits that work in Cochise County. Site selection, chill hours, frost protection, irrigation, calendar.

Full Dutch-bucket build manual — equipment, bench, plumbing, solar pump, and the canonical 5-step Cochise water-treatment protocol.

The two prerequisites the rest of the library assumes: soil-building for the alkaline Dragoons baseline, composting in dry climate, and seed-starting + propagation (slips, cuttings, divisions).

Canonical home for the 5-step Cochise bicarbonate water-treatment protocol. Well-water profiles by aquifer, rainwater harvesting, RO units, greywater, solar pumping, and conservation strategies.

Cold frames, low tunnels, hoop houses, high tunnels — with labeled cross-section & plan diagrams for each. Three concrete build projects ($90, $200, $800). NRCS cost-share, ventilation, thermal mass, and the summer shade-house inverse problem.

The indigenous food complex of the Dragoons and the wider sky-island region — tepary & Anasazi beans, Hopi Blue & O’odham corn, the wild Chiltepin, native squash & gourds, devil’s claw, mesquite, agave, prickly pear, amaranth, yucca. Native Seeds/SEARCH & TOCA as canonical sources. Equal-weight treatment, light cultural framing, monsoon-keyed throughout.

The design layer for the library — not a crop guide but a how-the-crops-fit-together guide. Five biological mechanisms (repellence, attraction, allelopathy, nitrogen exchange, structural). A master matrix covering every cultivated crop × plant-with / plant-near / never-near. Cover crops for the Dragoons. Nine worked guild designs with sketch diagrams — three sisters in the Cochise context, pepper-basil-marigold, brassica-allium harlequin defense, stone-fruit orchard guild, fig + Mediterranean herbs, mesquite-anchored native guild, vineyard cover-crop interrow, continuous-bloom insectary strip, and a monsoon-fed three-bean polyculture.

The kitchen guide. What to cook with what came out of the garden this morning. Sixteen by-crop chapters — peppers, tomatoes, cucurbits, beans, corn, sweet potatoes, brassicas, alliums, greens, roots, grapes, herbs, orchard fruits, native crops — plus a "menus through the seasons" chapter with ten worked seasonal meals (January cold-frame greens, July monsoon tomato, September peak-harvest feast, Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, New Year's). Around 80 recipes total. Cross-references *Guide 12* for any preserve-bound preparation; this guide is the fresh-eating daily-cooking counterpart.

One reference for everything chemistry: Masterblend, locally-sourced DIY (oak ash, bat guano, caliche), pH Up & Down recipes, plus LED & automation.

IPM and wildlife pressure in one reference. Harlequin bug, cucumber beetle, peach leaf curl, powdery mildew. Javelina, packrat, gopher, deer. Fencing, beneficials, and the spray decision tree.

Closes the growing-to-eating loop. Canning at 4,700 ft (adjusted times & pressures), lacto-fermentation, drying (Dragoon humidity is the gold standard), freezing, cellaring, curing, ristra-making.