Tales from the Garden

This fall, the garden has been giving many gifts that add meaning to my daily routine and to my overall well-being. The fall migration brought surprise sightings of new “friends” stopping by during their fly-through: A pair of Gilded Flickers spent a week visiting, and seemed particularly fond of sips & dips in the clay saucer birdbath under the Ash Tree, and several Blue Grosbeaks spent a few days enjoying the seed mix we’ve started spreading each morning on the stone metates that are scattered through the garden.      A covey of 10 Gambel’s Quail have also been enjoying the new “snack walk” as they go from one metate to another to scoop up breakfast, then stay around the garden to scratch though the wood chip mulch for ants.   I love their distinctive call and the whirring sound of their wing-beats as they take off into the wash below the garden. They’re the only birds I’ve seen so far who can boss around the Eurasian Collared Doves too!   Daily magic For the past few weeks, a

Kwan Yuen surrounded by native honeysuckles and agaves My recent garden visit from Les and Jay was an eye-opener from the start, because the conversation began with talking about one of my favorite topics: soil.    My childhood and teen years of gardening in the heavy clay of the Midwest, then spending 40 adult years gardening in the saturated sands, glacial till, and clay mixes in the Northwest, taught me a lot about the importance of creating and maintaining healthy soil.   However, neither of those experiences prepared me for gardening in hot desert soils, especially in the blazing months of summer!          Food-digester compost being harvested   When we first began gardening here in Arivaca in the fall of 2016, we bought two barrels of aged alpaca manure to add to our concrete block raised bed veggie garden, along with some store-bought compost.   Every fall since then, I have added the contents of our 3 small “food-digester” composting bins to it before planting.  (Food-digeste