Weather: Clouds know no boundaries. On Wednesday, the sky turned gray around 9:30 am. I assume smoke from the flare up of the fire in Flagstaff arrived. Friday, the winds were strong all day, but got worse around 1 pm. The sky turned gray as Los Alamos had winds to 48 mph.
By 4 pm visibility was falling. The lights blinked as the utility recovered; winds were up to 53 mph in Santa Fé.
NOAA reported a dust storm around Cochiti at 5:42 pm, with less than a quarter mile visibility. It got to us around 6:40 pm. I couldn’t see the Black Mesa, which is less than two miles away. The white haze was suffused with a rosy glow.
Things began to abate around 7:30 pm. The mesa became a looming dark mass.
The winds stoked the wildfires. We now have them on three sides: one to the northeast near Mora, one to the southeast near Pecos, one to the south near Albuquerque, one to the southwest near Jemez Springs, and, of course, the one near Flagstaff. It won’t be long before Colorado makes its contribution.
My nose has been running constantly since Tuesday, and my eyelids have been itching. The surrounding areas on my face are getting raw.
Last rain: 4/1. Week’s low: 29 degrees F. Week’s high: 83 degrees F in the shade. Winds were up to 61 mph in Santa Fé on Friday.
What’s blooming in the area: Apples, fruiting crab apples, purple leaf sand cherry, and forsythia. The flowering quince has fewer flowers than usual. Tulips only bloom for short periods. I noticed more dead evergreens this week. This time they were 5'-10' long-needle pines.
What’s blooming beyond the walls and fences: Siberian elms, alfilerillo, western stickseed, cheat grass. Many of the dandelions I picked had small insects on them.
What’s coming up beyond the walls and fences: Strap leaf aster
What’s blooming in my yard: Sand cherry, grape hyacinths, lilies of the valley, blue flax, and vinca. The wind takes the petals off the cherries so quickly, I rarely see a flower.
I can see the flowers on the rose-colored crab apple. When the leaves open, they are maroon. In the past, it began blooming before the leaves turned green, and the flowers blended into them. This year, the leaves turned green before the buds opened. As soon as they opened, the flowers attracted bees.
What’s coming up in my yard: Hostas, peonies, David phlox, Rumanian sage; black locust, cultivated tamarix, snowball, and caryopteris are leafing
Animal sightings: Rabbit, quail, geckoes, sulphur butterfly, small bees on flowering crab apple and Siberian peas, sidewalk and harvester ants. The local farm supply store is advertising baby chicks. Two people had goats in their yards on Thursday.
Tasks: Warm temperatures say I should be planting seeds, but the wind forecasts say it would be a waste of time and money. I did feed the potentillas and spirea on Wednesday, after the first “wind event” of the week. I use a dry fertilizer than is heavier than dirt. I immediately ran water to soak some of it in. Theoretically, I should have used the hand rake to dig it in, but that would only have loosened dirt that would blow away. I felt the need to do those shrubs because, once they fully leaf, it’s impossible to get to their roots without crawling. Hopefully, those same arching branches blocked Friday’s wind.
I started cutting dead wood in the winter. I couldn’t burn then because it was too cold, and now can’t until the wind season passes. The worst thing about a pile of brush is that it threatens to escape in the wind. A couple years ago I bought some 3' x 5' wire-mesh fence sections to lay over my seeds to keep the rabbit from eating the succulent sprouts. When some brush blew away, I laid a section on top of the pile and weighted it some spare pavers. It worked well on Friday.
Weekly update: Saturday was clean-up day. I removed more than 200 Russian thistles from my yard. Most blew in from the prairie where people’s ATVs have destroyed the vegetation, and the continuing drought has prevent the grasses from recovering. The soil is so dry, I left inch-deep foot prints in areas that I don’t water when I was picking up the carcasses.
My fence was a more serious problem. A horizontal bar had come loose a year ago, but the man I asked to fix it only put in some short screws. When I woke from my nap on Friday, both ends were out of the braces that held them to the posts, and the section was bouncing off the guy wire for the electric line pole.
I just watched. Nothing would have induced me to go outdoors then.
When I looked again around 8 pm, the fence section had uprighted itself.
Saturday I did go out. It was standing, but at an angle. Since the pine boards have dried over time, it wasn’t heavy. I could lift the one end back to the fence line.
Then I tried to stabilize it with string. That may sound silly, but it had worked the day before elsewhere. Another horizontal was loose, this one notched into a 4x4. I couldn’t get someone to repair it, and I kept knocking it in place. However, the ground in the area is tilting, and gravity pulled it out again.
Finally, I went out on April 11 with a small step ladder and tied it with four different pieces of string. I had learned looping one piece of string multiple times didn’t work, so this was an experiment.
The winds may not have reached that area as strongly Friday as it did the more open area to the south. Anyway, the strings held.
So, on Saturday, I looped string around the top horizontals and lashed them to the metal posts. After I did the first, I discovered I couldn’t do the bottom rail. When I did the other end, I did the bottom first.
Notes on photographs: All taken in my yard yesterday, 23 April 2022.
1. Profusion flowering crab apple; it probably has a heritage so mixed it’s not worth giving the generic name in the rose family.
2. Sweet cherry (Prunus avium), supposedly a self-fertilizing Bing, which seems an oxymoron. I have not seen a complete flower this spring.
3. Broken fence section on Saturday morning.
4. Another fence area repaired with string.
5. Broken fence section repaired with string.
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