Weather: My internet was down for ten days after the storm on August 26. During the last week, I was having breathing problems I couldn’t easily manage. I began to wonder if I had developed new allergies.
Then, when I got my DSL back on Tuesday, I discovered we’d been getting smoke from fires on the west coast at the same time an inversion from the heat was trapping moist air coming up from Baja. Once I knew the problem, I started wearing a mask whenever I went outside. And sometimes, I kept it on in the house.
Monday, Labor Day, is traditionally the start of fall, and this week I noticed it was staying darker longer in the mornings. When I walked around the entire yard on Friday, I discovered a number of plants, especially the cultivated ones, had peaked or gone out of bloom entirely.
Since I missed posting last week because the local brand X telephone company is operating with a large backlog of service requests, I’m including changes to bloom data that document the dramatic changes of the past week. It does not include the many spring and early summer plants that have resumed their bloom cycles with a few, widely scatters flowers.
Last useful rain: 9/9. Week’s low: 42 degrees F. Week’s high: 90 degrees F in the shade. No winds over 25 mph in Los Alamos or Santa Fé.
What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid roses, buddleia, upright sedum, trumpet creeper, silver lace vine, morning glories, Russian sage, purple salvia, sweet peas, David and purple phlox, bouncing Bess, roses of Sharon, winecup mallows, red amaranth, farmer’s sunflowers, cushion chrysanthemum, black-eyed Susans, marigolds, zinnias
In bloom last week: red-tipped yuccas, dahlia
What’s blooming beyond the walls and fences: Apache plume, datura, green leaf five eyes, bindweed, Illinois bundle flowers, alfalfa, fern leaf and leather leaf globe mallows, nits-and-lice, stick leaf, toothed spurge peaked, prostrate knotweed peaked, goats’ heads, green amaranth, white pigweed, Russian thistles, lambs’ quarters, snakeweed broom, native sunflowers, ánil del muerto, Hopi tea, tahoka daisies, wild lettuce, horseweed, dandelions; heath, purple, strap leaf, and golden hairy asters; ring muhly, six-week grama, smooth brome, timothy, barnyard, and quack grasses
In bloom last week: Purslane, silver leaf nightshade, ivy leaf morning glory, scarlet creeper, Queen Anne’s lace, alfilerillo, yellow evening primroses, velvetweed, chamisa, goldenrod, ragweed, goats’ beards, native dandelions, Nebraska sedge, black grama grass
What’s blooming in my yard: Miniature and floribunda roses, cliff rose, yellow potentillas, garlic chives peaked, large flowered soapwort, lead plants peaked, lady bells, sidalcea, hollyhocks, golden spur columbines, perennial four o’clocks, blue flax, pink evening primroses, chocolate flowers, Maximilian and cultivated sunflowers, Mexican hats, blanket flowers, lance leaf and plains coreopsis, anthemis
In bloom last week: Desert willow, hostas, tomatillos
What bedding plants are blooming: Snapdragons
What’s blooming from this year’s seed: Cardinal climber, sweet alyssum, cantaloupes, watermelons, bachelor buttons, Sensation cosmos
The melons came up early, and one watermelon even produced a few flowers which the rabbit ate. They went into remission with the heat, and now are blooming like they should have been in June. I’m quite happy to see the flowers, but I’m not sure what good it does for them to be putting out fruit when 90 days do not remain between now and frost.
Tasks: Farmers cut their hay.
Weekly update: The battle against flooding and erosion is never ending. I’ve been spending part of every day, when I’m outside, resetting bricks that terrace my main bed. After twenty-five years, roots have grown into the dirt that washed between the bricks, while some of the bricks themselves have tilted from water moving under them. They had become dangerous to walk on.
After the rain that washed through the retaining wall, I went out with a hoe and enlarged the channel that carries water from the down spout on the front of the house. When it rained a week later, again on a Friday, the water moved away from the house, and rapidly through the channel but did not reach the top.
While I’ve been working slowly, my uphill neighbor stopped tending weeds sometime last summer. This past week she roused herself, and began pulling the pigweeds and Russian thistles that had taken over her border on the other side of our shared drive.
Her preference is to remove plants. I pull them when they’re young, but when they mature I would rather cut them at the base. My experience has been that, if I remove large root balls, I create disturbed soil for seeds to colonize, and the seeds often come from the plants I’m removing.
This Friday I heard a loud noise, and looked through the front window. She or her husband had hired the same backhoe driver who destroyed the gas meter in the yard of my neighbor on the other side. He has never meet a patch of green he didn’t want to vanquish. Brown is his sacred color.
My neighbors may be from urban areas, and not particularly interested in the ways of native vegetation. I know I’m unusual in tracking changes brought on by the drought. I know the explosion of thistles was caused by the April wind that blew them from afar, but they may have concluded they came from their south yard.
Russian thistles usually grow in disturbed ground. The neighbors had many in their north field and around their buildings, both of which had been stripped of native grasses and shrubs. When I looked at the south field two weeks ago I was surprised that, not only had the grasses survived, but they had not died back like those on the prairie.
There were, to be sure, problems. Thistles grew along the high ditch and berm. Pigweed and some thorny shrub was thick along my wooded fence. Saltbushes had colonized their septic field, and then spread. But worse were the piles of debris left when my neighbor’s husban went out with a chain saw to cut down elms or Russian olives, and left the wood were it fell. That was where the rabbits and ground squirrels took refuge.
The problem is that the north field gently slopes toward their house, while the back field slopes more quickly toward mine. No one seemed to understand one cannot strip a hillside bare of its vegetation. The backhoe driver does what he is told, but he doesn’t understand things like contour plowing. Most of the traditional farms here used flood irrigation in fields that had been leveled by water. When they needed to be cleared, it only mattered that the furrows direct the water where needed.
So, he started at the upper corner of their back field and drove downhill along the barbed wire fence to my fence.
If not, I’ll have to see. All I absolutely know is now that the ground has been scrapped, thistles will abound next year, and, sooner or later, the backhoe driver will be back. He’s made two passes, so far this year, in the relatively flat yard across the road.
Notes on photographs: All taken on 11 September 2022.
1. Watermelon flower (Citrullus vulgaris) coming up between morning glories.
2. Melon, which is 2" across and heavy.
3. My neighbor’s bare field sloping toward the south end of my fence; the backhoe driver left the salt bushes (Atriplex canescens).
4. What remains of the berm and ditch shown in the photographs in the last post.
5. South end of fence where the need to turn the backhoe saved the salt bushes and created a small change in direction of the furrows that will bring water downhill.
6. Area of my fence where I was flooded in August. Whatever had been growing on the opposite side has been destroyed. The Maximilian sunflowers (Helianthus maximiliani) on my side, and the ánil del muerto (Verbesina encelioides) on the other side won’t stop anything. The green is white pigweed (Amaranthus albus), which may do some good. However, I’m allergic to its seeds.
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