Mutt Lucks

Ever heard of Mutt Lucks?  My dog is very happy with them at certain campgrounds.

He is at Sunset Crater in northern Arizona in the above photo.  The ground is cinders - of varying sizes and are very sharp to the dog's pads.  Within a few hours the dogs are limping around and licking their paws excessively.  Not my dog.  Although he didn't like these at first, he now patiently offers his paws to have them put on.  Heavy duty leather on the bottom and ripstop nylon on top with velcro to go around the ankle.  Need a pair?  Try REI.

Colors of Fall

Here in the low desert we don't get a huge amount of fall color.  Things start to look a little less crispy and begin to green up a little in the cooler temperatures.  It's time to plant petunias, marigolds and other fall flowers.  Yes, I know easterners think petunias are a spring plant - but here we plant them in October.  They don't like the heat very much, though with enough daily water they can survive it.  This year though, I did get a taste of fall color.  I visited my brother and his family in Tennessee just as the colors began changing.  So not the full blast of yellows, reds and oranges... but a taste nonetheless.

One little red tree amongst the green.

Yellow just starting to show around the edges.

Reflections give me a bit more color.

And a last bit of red and orange...

Beautiful, but we have our own color here in the desert...

Reds, greens and blues...

Yellows and more blues...

And golds...

Bane of the Peppers

I've been waging war on these suckers for the past few weeks.  Tomato Hornworms.  Big, squishy, and wiggly when you pry them off the plant.  I have no clue where they hide during the heat of the day, but dawn and dusk they are rapidly consuming my various peppers.  I was squeamish about them at first, but when they stripped a beautiful plant of all its leaves and buds I got mad.  Now I have my worm-stomper flip flops right by the back door. I pry these guys off my peppers throw them to the dirt and stomp.  The one in the photo above was the size of my index finger.  I've pulled them off when they were a half inch long.  They turn into Sphinx Moths.  I felt bad about all the Sphinx Moths being caught by my hunter cat as they never seemed to survive the encounter.  Now I tell Mr. Meeps that he is a great hunter (just leave the lizards and geckos alone please) and that he should target the moths.

Rain - or lack thereof...

It has been a long time since we've seen rain.  It seems like forever.  I took this photo last March as I drove home from Tucson.  Unfortunately, I only got to look at the storm.  Raindrops never came my way.  And now that the temperatures have soared here in the desert I am craving rain.  I can't wait for the first big thunderstorm where I will sit on the back porch and listen to the thunder boom and watch the wind have it's way with the trees.

I now work on the 6th floor of a building that is all windows.  It's very hard to concentrate when the storms begin to blow in. To heck with the programming, let's watch the clouds!  We probably won't get any storms until the end of July.  Hopefully I'll get a little taste of rain when we travel up to the Colorado high country later this month.  Thunder there is phenomenal as it echoes around the mountain sides.

Meanwhile I torture myself with these storm photos, trying to conjure up the smell of rain in the desert (ahhhh, creosote), feel the excitement of the electricity in the air, watching lightning zot down to the earth.  Soon, soon. 

Has it really been that long?

I logged in to update this blog and realized I haven't posted anything in over a month.  That's not good.  It's not that I don't think about blogging...I "write" quite a bit in my mind.  In my mind isn't posted though.  In my mind is just that.  So I need to get off my duff and write.  Helps that I got a beautiful new writing desk from IKEA.  It's purple.  It called me from across the room.  It's small - just big enough for a lamp, a coaster for my ever present beverage (desert living - always have water handy), my laptop or pad of paper, and an extra something...currently my camera.  I caressed it in the store.  Shouldn't spend the money but it's purple and it's perfect.  My daughter (for whom we were really shopping for) just got a little smile on her face.  "Write the number down Mom.  You can think about it as I pick out my dorm sheets".  I thought and thought.  The typical "can't justify the dollars", the "But  it's perfect", the "we're here for Mariah", the "NO! DON'T" and finally, the "It's what I've always wanted - I'll kick myself if I get home without it".  So here I sit at my beautiful purple writing desk... but I digress.

This post is really about flowers, Sunflowers in particular.  I like sunflowers.  They're cheery and very easy to grow, at least they are in my climate.  But I prefer other flowers like petunias.  They come in a billion colors and smell so nice in the evening.  Of course, my favorites are the purple varieties.

I also have a beautiful Monarda species that I'm loving currently.  I bought a plant labeled "Oregano" at Home Depot and yes, there was a dying little sprig of oregano in that pot.  But I wasn't paying attention to it - I saw what I thought were nice lush oregano leaves.  Nope.  That little oregano sprig quickly gave up the ghost and the other plant sort of flourished.  It was a Phoenix summer.  Not the best time for plants in pots to flourish.  So the plant limped along and made it to winter.  It did fine over the winter - morphed from a low soil-hugging plant into several tall spikes.  Then as our weather warmed up (and UP!) it got buds.  This beautiful plant burst (well, 6 spikes did) into bloom exactly on the day that my daughter was having a high school graduation party at our house.  Perfect timing.

Monarda... bee balm.  My mom has a whole patch of this plant up in Colorado.  I tried many times to grow it and it always died as the temperatures hit 100º.  So now I have a mislabeled plant - or a rogue seeding - and it does fine.  Scraggly, but the spikes that grew are healthy.  The flower is about the size of a raquetball.  Bigger than a golf ball, smaller than a tennis ball.

But this was supposed to be about sunflowers.  My daughter planted a variety of sunflowers in the raised garden bed we put together back in February.  First to bloom was the typical "Mammoth" variety that kids love to grow.  These things would grow an inch or so a day!  Very gratifying for elementary kids that can't wait for things to grow.

The above flower isn't the first that opened.  I missed getting a photo of that one.  Or it's on the other SD card that I've misplaced.  This one is pretty small - about 4 inches across.  The first one was yellow like this - but about a foot across.  Gorgeous and very gratifying given the amount of water I've put into that garden.  Next up were the red-brown varieties:

Beautiful flower and the bees love this one.  As you can see.  This variety has about 6 or 7 flowers on each stalk whereas the larger varieties (like flower number one) grow only one large flower.  Finally, the orange ones have opened:

This looks more yellow than it really is due to the backlighting.  But you can see that this is another that has multiple flowers on the stalk.  All of these are standing about 6 feet tall - 7 feet in some cases.  My daughter is ecstatic and is searching for more colors for next spring's garden.  Meanwhile, I'm enjoying my pink, purple and bluish petunias.  Don't get me started on the gardenia that went to town this spring.  Sigh.  What a scent.