Last useful rain: 10/8. Week’s low: 31 degrees F. Week’s high: 75 degrees F in the shade. Winds were up to 30 mph in Santa Fé on Tuesday.
What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid rose, morning glories, red amaranth, Maximilian sunflowers, cushion chrysanthemums, dahlias, zinnias, marigolds, yellow cosmos
What’s blooming beyond the walls and fences: Datura, white pigweed, chamisa, native sunflowers, ánil del muerto, broom senecio, purple aster
What’s blooming in my yard: Miniature and floribunda roses, hollyhocks, large flowered soapwort, pink evening primroses, chocolate flowers, Mexican hats, black-eyed Susans, blanket flowers, plains coreopsis, anthemis
What’s blooming from this year’s seed: Cantaloupe, Sensation cosmos
What’s turning red: Leaves on sand cherries, Virginia creeper, leadplant, timothy
What’s turning orange: Leaves on peaches
What’s turning yellow: Leaves on cottonwoods, catalpa, Siberian peas, grape vines, roses of Sharon, goldenrod
Animal sightings: Rabbit, flocks of birds, gecko, cabbage and sulphur butterflies, bumble bee, drowsy hornets, crickets, few grasshoppers, harvester and sidewalk ants
Tasks: I continue to cut dead wood from shrubs before leaves fall and it’s impossible to tell what is barren. Saturday morning, I burned what had accumulated because the brush pile was getting close to 2' high.
Weekly update: Drought continues to take its toll. In April, when the winds blew Russian thistles into my back yard, I discovered wind and rain had been eroding the dirt away from the posts that supported my south fence.
I had neglected the area the past few years because the mid-summer heat kept me indoors. This past week, I’ve been clearing the area directly in front of the fence so I could see the problem.
When I went out after it rained, I could see marks where water was coming from the other side of the fence and gnawing away at the dirt on my side. You can see the two levels in the photograph above. The top layer of cement around the post at the front left has nothing around it.
The amount of erosion inside the fence depended on what was growing in the area. In the far west, where there’s less seepage from the house, winterfat had grown up to the fence. The black sticks in the photograph are winterfat.
Farther east, where more water crept from my watering shrubs at the back of the house, four-winged saltbushes grew. They didn’t go beyond the moisture and did not reach the fence. In that clearer area, Russian thistles emerged this summer. Many were huge with a fringe of small ones on their perimeter.
As I’ve mentioned before, the winterfat died over the past few years as it got less water, and the saltbushes expanded.
You can see the boundary between the two members of the Chenopodium family in the above photograph. Nothing is growing where the two shrubs have branches, but June grass has sprouted along the border. Those three plants kept the thistles from rising.
As I cleared the area near the fence, and hacked a path so I could get to the fence, I left as much of the dead winterfat as possible. I suppose it could be a fire hazard, but the wooden fence is probably more ignitable.
June grass always rises with the spring or early summer rains, and dies in the summer heat. It has thrived this year, but will disappear next year if the drought returns. Then, its mounds of dead, gray vegetation will join the dead winterfat as tacit protests against erosion.
Nature’s arrangement looks a bit like a Japanese landscape. I imagine that, if one put a photograph in a glossy magazine marketed to the wealthy, people in Santa Fé would pay gardeners to replicate these effects of weather.
Notes on photographs: All taken 14 October 2022.
1. African marigold (Tagetes erecta), Sensation cosmos (Cosmos bipinnatus), and California Giants zinnia (Zinnia elegans) growing in the retaining wall built to keep dirt from drifting down from my upper neighbor’s yard and stopping my gate from opening in winter. All are annuals.
2. Effects of water erosion along south fence.
3. From top to bottom, four-winged saltbushes (Atriplex canescens), winterfat (Eurotia lanata), and June grass (Koeleria cristata) keep the soil from eroding.
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