Weather: I’ve been learning more about the daily temperature cycle as I try to keep the pansies from dying.
My thermometer says it starts getting hot before noon — I don’t know the actual temperature because the sensor is in the sun in late morning, and not reliable.
Then, one of several things may happen. The heat may cause winds, or I think technically convection. Even when the temperature rises, the moving air tempers its effects by removing heat from the vicinity of plants.
Soon after noon, clouds begin to form. I suppose they are from evaporation or water released into the air by fire fighters, since no moisture has moved into our area from either Colorado or México. Friday, the weather bureau was blaming a high pressure system. I take its word; all I can see on the satellite is moisture that’s moving north from México is being turned east into Texas.
The clouds screen the sun and temperatures begin dropping from 1 pm onward.
It is nearing the solstice, so temperatures generally rise as part of the sun’s annual cycle. Until Friday, the fires were under control, and less water was being used on the one to the southwest of me. Thus, less water was being released into the atmosphere. That, along with the high pressure system, has prevented anything from ameliorating the heat.
Last useful rain: 4/1. Week’s low: 51 degrees F. Week’s high: 100 degrees F in the shade. Winds were up to 46 mph in Santa Fé on Monday. Days in June with winds over 25 mph: 10 of 11; day’s with temperatures in the 90s: 6 of 11.
What’s blooming in the area: Dr. Huey, hybrid and wild pink roses, silver lace vine, Asiatic lilies, daylilies, snow-in-summer, bouncing Bess, sweet peas, coreopsis; catalpa blooming period cut short by heat
What’s blooming beyond the walls and fences: Datura, bindweed, green flower five eyes, silver leaf nightshade, alfalfa, scurf peas, fern leaf globe mallow, velvet weed, Hopi tea, strap leaf aster, goat’s beards, common and native dandelions; three awn, cheat, and brome grasses
What’s coming up beyond the walls and fences: Corn in one shaded yard
What’s blooming in my yard: Betty Prior and miniature roses, yellow potentillas, tamarix cultivar, red hot pokers, Johnson blue geranium, Maltese crosses, white spurge; coral, fox glove, and smooth beard tongues; golden spur columbine, Dutch clover, winecup mallow, blue flax, catmints, Rumanian sage, pink evening primroses, Mexican hats, Ozark coneflower, Shasta daisies, chocolate flowers, blanket flowers, anthemis, white and yellow yarrow; sour cherries ripe
What’s coming up in my yard: Second leaves on some Heavenly Blue morning glory and African marigold seedlings
What bedding plants are blooming: Pansies, snapdragons; someone in the village has petunias
Animal sightings: Rabbits, hummingbird, western chickadees, geckoes; cabbage, swallowtail, and other unidentified butterflies; ladybug, large dragonfly, bumble and small bees, hornets, grasshoppers, sidewalk and harvester ants; hear crickets and noisy insects
The only thing that seems to love running about in the sun and heat are the geckoes: a rabbit comes into the shade of some shrubs in the late afternoon, while I’ve startled chickadees in areas where water was spraying.
Tasks: I began removing sweet peas that were growing over hoses, or had gotten tall enough to block water from getting to its preferred destination.
I also am spending more time watering seeds with a garden hose, rather than a soaker. Last year, I only watered the seeds in the bed outside my gate. Now, I’m watering the pansies in the late mornings, rather than the evening when it is part of my routine. With the dry conditions, I have added all the other seed beds to the late morning regimen. What took 5 minutes has grown into half an hour.
Weekly update: The worst thing about the drought and associated heat and high winds is that it wears me down. Growing a garden anywhere is an act of optimism that somehow survives constant negative feedback. One keeps going, even when it is obvious flowers will continue to be blighted by heat, and drought continues to gnaw away at the very soil that supports it all.
There were high winds between 6 pm and 7 pm on Wednesday. I have no idea how high, because Santa Fé did not report wind speeds for that one time period to the weather bureau. They weren’t as strong as those on April 12, but were much stronger than anything we’ve had since.
It happened to be the time when I run water to plants on the south side of the house, so I was outside several times. Dirt was blowing from everywhere in my neighbor’s yard. I said last week, this had stopped. I don’t know if the winds loosened more dirt, or if they were moving at a lower altitude. The next day, the dog kicked up dust every time it ran along the fence to bark at passers by.
I’m not growing the pansies from some nostalgic desire to recreate Midwestern conditions here in arid New Mexico. One of the problems with construction is that the ground around a house gets disturbed. Some gets destroyed just by the needs to level an area. If nothing is done, plants like Russian thistles colonize the barren ground.
My neighbor’s answer is to hire someone to scrape away the vegetation several times in the summer. This has the added benefit of eliminating fire hazards near his residence. Fires probably aren’t new to this area; they may not have been like the ones this summer, but when wood was the only fuel, fire must have been a constant danger. Eliminating dry matter is inherited wisdom.
I’ve tried another tactic, keeping the native vegetation in place. While it may be a fire hazard, having a vertical board fence is worse. I would have preferred a stone wall, but every time I mentioned it, people said it was too expensive and refused to consider doing the work.
The problem is around the house, where I placed foot-square, Saltillo tiles around the foundation to keep away both weeds and vermin. The one problem area is the few feet on the downhill side of the southwest corner of the back porch. It’s in the drip line for the roof, so all the soil improvements have washed away.
Since it’s behind some lilacs, I’ve tried any number of shade tolerant plants: first native grasses, then various bedding plants. The clover seed I planted this year came up everywhere but in that one small section.
Most recently, I’ve been planting different hostas in hopes that if they got started they would protect the ground from erosion, and allow some grass to grow. I’ve put some in each of the last three years. They survive, but so far I haven’t found a variety that will thrive. The pansies simply are interspersed to keep the ground covered.
Anyway, it was while I was checking their condition Friday evening that I saw the smoke column beyond the northern end of the Jémez. The temperature was 95 degrees F, but the air was calm. It was then the angst of “Not Again” settled on me.
Walls of silence have been erected by bureaucrats everywhere who are trying to protect themselves in the face of declining budgets. Every institution, not just the government but the media and corporations, are trying to maintain some level of services with less money. Inevitably, that means less populated areas like Rio Arriba county get left behind.
The county has no weather station, and so I have to make deductions based on reports from Los Alamos and Santa Fé. Having no report of wind speeds when it was most needed is typical of what happens: someone may have made an error or equipment may have failed. Either way, something that should have been known has been lost.
When I got in the house Friday, I checked the weather bureau site and noticed an Air Quality alert that mentioned the Midnight Fire near El Rito. The office in Albuquerque was passing on a message from some state office that said the fire was in Colfax County, and listed the areas that would be effected. It included places like Ojo Caliente, Taos, Los Alamos, and Santa Fé. It did not mention the Española valley. Someone in the state should have had a better grasp of local geography than that. Colfax County is up by Raton; El Rito is in Rio Arriba county.
Garbled as it was, I had a name and found some information from various media sites that said it was discovered on Thursday, and was 60 acres. That was the early report. Another said it had grown to 500 acres. [1]
It took the New Mexico Fires website until noon on Saturday to issue a report. Overnight, the conflagration had spread to 3,500 acres. There are only so many trained men and women in the country, let alone in New Mexico. Individuals and resources are being diverted from the fires north of Mora. [2] They must have long since passed the point of “Not Again,” and are blindly continuing to do what they can in the face of overwhelming adversity.
When the temperature in the shade of my house reached 100 degrees F on Saturday, I went out to cool down the pansies. They still were wet from being watered around 11 am, but nothing in their short lives could prepare them for that temperature.
As I was coming back into the house, the phone was ringing. It was an automated call giving me some kind of information about evacuations in the El Rito area. Since it’s hard to isolate locations by telephone number, it probably was calling every number that might be in the area.
Or, just as important, it may have aimed to contact local relatives of people living in that area who don’t have phones. People in the valley may know people who live on the other side of the Sangre de Cristo, but many have land in the northern part of the county. El Rito is getting close to home.
This is the first time I’ve gotten such a call. This doesn’t mean Midnight is more dangerous than the Cerro Gordo fire when embers were falling near the river in town. It’s simply an example of the upgrade to emergency systems that has occurred since then.
When an emergency is local, local sources of information are best. Our television stations are in Albuquerque, as is one of the daily newspapers. The ones in Santa Fé and Los Alamos are more provincial in their coverage, and the local paper is a weekly.
The first reports on Friday night were all depending on a press release made by the El Rito Ranger District, and the most detailed information was on the website of the Rio Grande Sun. [3]
Notes on photographs: All taken around 6:40 pm on 10 June 2022.
1. Pansies (Viola wittrockiana) and several varieties of hostas; the white is a piece of bark from the beauty bush (Kolkwitzia amabilis).
2. Midnight Fire as seen from my back porch; the smoke is blending into the afternoon clouds.
3. Midnight Fire as captured by the zoom function on my camera.
End notes:
1. William Coburn. “Wildfire Breaks out Near El Rito.” Rio Grande Sun website, 10 June 2022.
2. Carson Nation Forest Public Information Office. “Midnight Fire Saturday morning update.” New Mexico Fires website, 11 June 2022.
3. Coburn.
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