The Digging Continues

Winter is over! Yes, the temperatures have been in the 80s several times already, but there was a brief (2-day) cool spell last week that I counted as “wintry” weather. That’s all over now, and all the mesquites have sprouted leaves, and that means they think we’re done with cold nights. And none too soon for me!

The old garden bed has sprouted too, with corn and peas and lettuce, and even some carrots I think, leftover seeds that didn’t grow last year. It looks like the spinach & sunflowers didn’t make it — old seeds, I think. I need to get more. The netting is preventing the birds from eating everything as soon as I plant it, so that’s working just right. I didn’t have room for potatoes, since they don’t seem to like growing in the same spot two years in a row, so that’s just more incentive to get this hole dug quicker.

And work is progressing there:

Yes, I still haven’t cut & capped that irrigation pipe. That would require going into town and buying caps, and that hasn’t really risen to the top of my agenda yet. Maybe next weekend.

Meanwhile, the big rock emerging in the north end of the hole has now shown itself to be at least twice as big as it appeared last time:

Shown here again with the sandal for size comparison.

No idea how that dirty foot keeps showing up in the pictures! Anyway, last time, the triangular bit on the front face and the ridge at the top of the rock was all that was showing. It’s definitely a bit of a whale. I still need to uncover more of it before I start planning its removal.

And here’s the growing dirt pile:

It only rained once in February, and once so far this month (that cold spell), so we’re just a bit more than an inch above normal YTD. Rain really is magical for the vegetable plants: they accept the water I give them from the well, but when it rains they really look happy. Maybe an extra inch of rain over a three-month period isn’t such a bad thing.

Hole Update, Plus: Chores!

First, an update on the garden bed progress. The pile of dirt is growing more quickly now, and I need a wider angle to get it all into the picture.

It now reaches halfway across the space I had planned for it. I guess that’s good, since the hole is about half as deep as I want it to be, but I’m seeing the corner of the garden fence getting closer, and I’m starting to think about running out of room.

And the next layer of dirt is out of the hole.

The rocks are getting bigger and more numerous now. In fact, I think I’m starting to see a moby-sized one appearing at the north (upper) end of the hole, just below and to the left of the white rock sticking out of the wall there. Here’s a close-up:

Size 8 sandal shown for comparison. Dirty foot should be ignored.

OK, the real reason I’m showing all these pictures of the garden bed under construction is because (and you are forgiven for not believing this) I’m terrible at taking before-and-after pictures. I’m trying to get better at this, with only moderate success. As seen below.

I remember mowing the grass in Florida. I had (have!) a reel-type mower, and the grass there grows three inches a week in the summer, so most days I’d be out chewing down the grass. It was great exercise, but there were days when I heard about yards in the desert covered with rocks, and I dreamed about how “maintenance-free” such a yard would be. Now I have one of those rock-covered yards, and it isn’t quite as maintenance-free as it seemed, although it isn’t the three-days-a-week ordeal that hand-mowing in Florida summer was. Now it’s more like twice a year weeding and the bi-annual rock grooming.

The “decorative rock” that covers the whole front yard and circles the back yard are just stones that have been hauled in and poured over the dirt. When you order them, you get to pick a color for the rocks; mine are mostly reddish. Anyway, there’s nothing but gravity holding them in place, and sometimes that gravity is not my friend. Wherever the level of the rocks is slightly higher than the surrounding dirt, the rocks have a tendency to run away, and I have to round them up and herd them back where they came from. In other places, where the rocks are slightly below the surrounding dirt, the dirt drifts over them when it rains and then the rocks need to be disinterred. And (did I mention?) it rained a lot last year. But the truth is, decorative rock looks so much more decorative when it’s on top of the dirt.

2015 was the year for rock grooming, but the rock grooming didn’t happen. I blame the extra rains, and the fact that there were more engrossing excavations going on in the yard last year. It’s not that I was ignoring those rocks though. Each day when I went out, I looked at those rocks and thought about their increasingly scruffy appearance, thought “Ugh!”, and passed them right by. This year, I will be paying for my negligence.

If I were good at before-and-after pictures, I would have taken some before I started. But I forgot. So here is one where I had just cleared the crevices between the red slate pavers and barely started the next section:

At the left is a small area I’ve already worked. Almost the entire right side of the picture, where you can see a small number of scattered stones, is the work I have yet to do. And that’s just the little section between the red slate walkway and the recovery tree moat. Another large section on the other side of the walkway and on past the garden is lurking as well.

Most of what looks like dirt there is actually buried decorative rock. The rocks above the French drain (rounded gray rocks) are holding pretty firm, but the outside is looking very ragged. At some point, I’m going to need to dig out the drain as well, since it doesn’t work well when it’s full of dirt. Later, later…

I think I heard somewhere that playing in the dirt is good for you and raises your serotonin levels. So let me grab my handy little claw tool and go herd those rocks!

The Hole is Halfway Done

This little critter was showing off for me this week. It’s a Harris’ antelope squirrel (Ammospermophilus harrisii), standing on the tarp over the dirt pile in the backyard. It stood there for quite a while and let me get several pictures before running off.

Not an Infestation After All

I spent much of December house-bound and abed, due to a respiratory infection. I’m one of those awful people who rarely gets sick, and then when I do, I don’t mention it because — well, don’t you just hate people who talk incessantly about their health? I do, and I don’t want to be one of those people.

I only mention it because I spent a lot of time last month looking longingly out the window at my yard at the rescue tree and the new garden bed under construction, and you might wonder why I was just sitting around staring out the window instead of going out and playing in the dirt. But I was trapped in the house, and I was also a little bit brain-addled from lack of oxygen and the amount of concentration it took to get a bowl of chicken soup down my throat. Or hot tea. Anyway, my eye tended to rest on this image:

See it? Right there in the middle: isn’t that Donald Trump hiding behind that prickly pear? This bothered me for weeks, until I could get real proof that it wasn’t.

2015 Year-End Hole Pictures

Big sigh here. WordPress isn’t taking my photos lately, so I had to arrange for an alternate storage location. Much of the problem is probably due to poor rural Internet service, although WP is trying to make me buy a new computer too, so there’s that…

Anyway, here are the big year-end pictures of my lovely second garden bed! So yay.

Slow Progress on the Hole

I detect a fairly large schedule slippage.

The gnats have had a wonderful (and prolific!) year here. They live only such a short time, but every time they started to settle out, it would rain again and a whole new batch would emerge. If it weren’t so hot in summer, (and if I didn’t live in such a red state) I’d seriously consider a burqa, just to keep the gnats off. I don’t mind them much on my arms and legs, but I hate having them crawling around inside my ears. And honestly, they should have the decency to just die as soon as they’re inhaled. Instead, they just wiggle around in my sinuses and trachea, which makes for misery digging.

This is the hole with the fourth layer dirt removed.

Quick Update on Hole #2

Now that the summer monsoon is “over”, the level of precipitation has dropped back to merely 50% above normal. It kept raining through September, and by my gauge, we ended the month at 4.6″ which doesn’t sound like much to my Florida friends, but is actually 3.2″ above normal for the month. During the rest of the month, there wasn’t a day when the hole was dried out enough to work on, so I spent that time pruning the bushes & trees around the house. There always seems to be pruning to be done, so that was a good use of that time.

Once the hole finally dried out, I had to work fast to get the third layer of dirt out of the hole before more soakings.

And It’s Still Raining

When I was very small and had not learned to count that far (not to mention being entirely clueless about the weather), it seemed possible that having rain for forty days and forty nights might actually cause a world-wide flood. That turns out not to be possible after all, especially not with the kind of slow drizzle that counts for rain in most places in the world. And besides, forty days and forty nights is a bit less than a month and a half, so also not all that long. I read recently that to move enough water in only a month and a half to actually flood the world would require something like the capacity of firehoses packed together from horizon to horizon in all directions. Yes, here I am, actually spreading the urban legend of alien space firehoses; Pass it on! These things have to start somewhere, and my version is every bit as believable as that other one. Or rather, those other ones, plural.

Hole #2: And Then It Rained

I might have mentioned the rain we’ve been having this year (heh). Since January, it had been raining ‘a bit’ every few days. I say ‘a bit’ because I don’t know exactly how much — just enough to wet down the dirt piles from the tree moat. According to the NOAA data (best guess), by the end of June, we were 1⅓” above normal.

I finally bought my own rain gauge so I could see what is happening in my yard, but really. Through July, monsoon season was looking just like spring: my new rain gauge got between an eighth and three-quarters inch of water every 4 days. HAH! It wasn’t my imagination, and now I had proof!

Hole #2: Breaking Ground

I do learn, slowly. Here’s the first lesson I learned when digging the first garden bed: water is my friend. Well, sort of. While digging the first bed, I noticed how much easier it was to chip out the dirt after it had rained. So I began watering the hole at the end of a day of digging, hoping to soften it up for the next day. Unfortunately, by the time I figured that out, some parts of the hole were much deeper than other parts, so the water would all run into those spots, and I ended up with deep soft spots alternating with hard mounds where the water just ran off.

And I really don’t know why it took me so long to buy a caliche bar either. “Caliche bar” is the local, modern name for a tool that is only a tool in the most basic sense of that word. An alternate name for this tool is “digging stick”, and I’m pretty sure the design of the tool hasn’t changed much in about twelve thousand years. The modern digging stick is a 6′ iron pole that has a square blade on one end for chipping and a sort of flattened knob on the other end for tamping. It weighs somewhere between 10 and 800 pounds. (It becomes heavier as you use it: ✨Magic!✨) The idea is that you pick it up vertically, then let it fall, blade end down (and hopefully with some directional control), and it embeds itself a tiny way into the dirt. You then repeat that several thousand times, or until your arms fall off. Next: go inside and have a nice cold drink. Or three. Take a shower. Read a book. Or three. Have dinner. Watch several hours of TV. Go to bed.

I’m kidding: I don’t have TV.