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 Fo...

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” comp...

Some of this spring's harvest Being a lifelong gardener in the Midwest and Pacific Northwest, and having had great success in my first 4 years of winter and spring vegetable gardening here in Arivaca, I really thought I could get the hang of growing a bounty of summer crops pretty quick.        However, the oh-so-humbling truth is that I have experienced an almost complete failure in my summer veggie garden!   The meager harvest from all my spring planting was as follows: 4 medium-size servings of green beans, 2 small squash, and 1 large tomato.   My only success has been a clump of chives and a clump of French Sorrel that I got from local veggie-growing experts Les and Jay, which have both continued to thrive, though neither has grown enough to harvest from.  Recently my friend Ralphie gave me a Chiltepin plant that was already bearing peppers, which I have managed to keep alive... so does that count too? Sigh.  The valiant Collards ...

There’s an old saying, “plain as the nose on your face”, that always reminds me how easy it is to be so busy looking ahead that I lose sight of what’s right in front of me. These days when so much about the weeks and months ahead is out of my control, focusing up close on what is right around me has brought me a lot of peace, and makes the rest of life look different too!       On August 23rd, I arrived in Arivaca after 2 months in the Pacific Northwest, and when I woke up the next morning, I decided to re-experience my garden by taking a sensory walk.     I knew the best time for doing this would be very early, before I started bustling around unpacking and doing chores, so I could experience it with all my senses before my mind woke up too much.   It was extra quiet at 5:30am when I walked slowly into my garden, trying to imagine that I was experiencing it for the very first time, or the way a wild creature would.     I began by focusi...

A small creek in the midwest When I was 7 years old, my family moved from a brick bungalow on the south side of Chicago to a ranch-style house in a suburban cul de sac in Ft. Wayne, Indiana.  Everything about our new neighborhood was very different than our old one (which I missed so much), except for one very special thing: our small Chicago house on a small urban lot was across the street from a giant easement of open meadow, wetland, and trees, with freight rail tracks running down the middle of it. All us kids called it "the prairie", and it was filled with the magical sights and sounds of dragonflies, songbirds, lightning bugs, and frogs.  How I longed to venture out there, but because it was also a place where teens and young adults met to hang out, build fires, and fight, it was off limits to me (but not to my big brothers).  However, the backyard of our new house had a "prairie" right behind it too, with hundreds of acres of farm fields and a tree-li...

Investigating egg-laying locations Soon after the ladybugs-and-aphids experience I wrote about last month, I was able to witness the entire life cycle of another interesting insect:   Gulf Fritillary butterflies!   Ever since moving to Arivaca, I’ve seen the adults of this species fluttering through my garden and feeding on many of the flowers there.   But because Uno and I have left Arivaca in May during previous years, I'd never gotten to see any of their eggs, caterpillars, or cocoons (aka chrysalis).   I had learned that these beautiful orange butterflies prefer to lay all their eggs on a Passion Vine so that their caterpillars can feed on its leaves, and in previous springs I had been happy to see Passion Vine starts popping up all around my studio porch… so after we decided to extend our stay in Arivaca this year into the summer months, I became excited about getting to see the result.   Sure enough, as soon as the Passion Vines got tall enough ...