Weather: The first part of the week was Indian summer, with wintry temperatures in the morning and warm in the afternoon. I suppose it’s politically incorrect to say “Indian summer” though, through usage, it has gathered far different associations than whatever was the original. It’s certainly more precise than late autumn, which can have many faces (like the cold on Friday and Saturday). It certainly is preferable to the unimaginative third trimester of the third quarter of the solar year.
Last useful rain: 10/17. Week’s low: 22 degrees F. Week’s high: 67 degrees F in the shade. Winds were up to 31 mph in Santa Fé on Friday.
What’s still green: Trees and shrubs, especially in the rose family, began to change color. Plants lower to the ground remain green but many are slowing their metabolism and turning chartreuse as less chlorophyll is produced. Most soon will be yellow or brown or gone.
Animal sightings: Grasshoppers, hornets, and sidewalk ants still are alive.
Tasks: I got my first order of supplies for fixing my erosion problems and, fortunately, they are all that I hoped. Because the edging is heavy, I have to order it in small quantities, and Amazon is in one of those periods when it deliberately ships slow if one hasn’t signed onto its premium services. The holidays will make wait times worse. What I wanted to hire done now may have to wait until spring.
Weekly update: I mentioned last week the importance of actually seeing the cause of a problem, rather than applying a template based on best practices. This became even clearer earlier in October when I went out to inspect the erosion along the south fence.
I assumed water was running under the it, but hadn’t seen the telltale marks except at the far west end. So, I went out to look when the rain on 16 October had lessened in the afternoon. I discovered that water was landing on the fence, running down the boards, and dripping off the bottom. The landing impact was what was eroding the earth below.
Retaining walls, as proposed by landscape specialists, would have done no good. All I need to do is raise the ground level to just above the bottom of the fence. Then I need to sprinkle a layer of stones to keep the loose dirt from blowing away. Perhaps, depending on how it looks, I may need to add a layer of sand, because sand is what remains when the wind and rain have removed the lighter parts of the soil. It might help maintain the barrier.
The erosion problem did not occur wherever I had a wooden fence, so it wasn’t the fence design that was the problem. It was the execution.
I remembered a conversation with the fence builder, when he was part way done. He indicated the ground was getting uneven, and wanted to know if I still wanted the fence to follow the terrain, or wanted a smooth top line. I told him to follow the ground. He did the other. The problems start where the fence takes a different tangent. Of course, I didn’t notice at the time, and it has taken more than 15 years for the problem to appear.
His sin was that he applied assumptions based on Santa Fé where people who build fences to establish their property lines and create privacy are more concerned with appearances than function. A fence that’s not a barrier is useless.
To recover, I first installed a row of pavers every so often under the fence to act as ribs to keep the filler in place. The fake bricks laid on their sides at the center of the fence, and on their ends at the west end. I used sixteen.
Since I plan to work ninety minutes each day, I leave the wooden fence and move to an area on the west side of the house where I continue to remove Russian thistles by a wire fence. I use loppers to cut them and toss the carcasses overboard. Then I sit on the ground and use a plastic whisk broom to sweep the seeds and broken pieces into a dust pan.
While I was doing this, I noticed some of the soil had a crust with a whitish cast. I think the man doing the plaster washed his tools in this area, and a thin layer of lime was preventing anything from growing in the area. I lifted this crust with a drywall trowel and dumped it into a plastic dishpan. When I was done, I took it to the south fence and dumped it in the empty space as fill.
Dealing with Russian thistles is tedious, and I can only do it for about thirty minutes. When I get bored, I do something else for the rest of the ninety minutes. Once I realized the plaster dirt could be used as fill, I decided to pick up the bits of concrete scattered here and there and adding them to the fill under the south fence. I hadn’t done this before because concrete is heavy, and I couldn’t overload my plastic trash bin.
The first pieces were large chunks on the surface, that usually were in areas where grass was growing. These had been left by the contractor who installed the concrete-block foundation, and used cement as mortar.
After I picked them up, I started on what I assumed was the sand left by the man doing the stucco. I used the carpenter’s chisel to loosen pieces that I dropped in the dust pan. As I was prying out stones, the chisel started to hit buried pieces of rock. He apparently had dug holes around the back and buried his left overs, then covered them with sand and dirt.
It was obvious this was the reason nothing had grown back in an area that had had good native grasses when I bought the property. I removed the gray dirt, digging down until I reached the reddish brown of the soil below. More fill for the south fence.
Notes on photographs:
1. Daylily (Hemerocallis fulva cultivar) leaves are turning yellow while golden spur columbine (Aquilegia chrysantha) still are green, 5 November 2022.
2. Cholla cactus (Opuntia imbricata) killed by ground squirrel that tunneled under it and left mounds of dirt at its base, 31 October 2022.
3. Pieces of concrete left by the man who built the cinder block foundation, 5 November 2022.
4. Pieces of stucco buried by a skilled tradesman, 5 November 2022.
5. South fence with recovered debris scattered in the eroded area, 5 November 2022.
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