Harvesting Melons

Okay, gotta brag about the fruit from my tiny garden.

This cantaloupe is the grand daddy of them all. 6.6 pounds. It grew on the vine that clings to the fencing mesh-wire that keeps the little critters out.

The melons get so heavy, I make slings out of mesh bags that Trader Joe's use to pack avocados four at a time.

I have several melon-hammocks tied to the mesh-wire, and another large cantaloupe ripening and soon ready to harvest.

In the other photo you see the cantaloupe and some muskmelons. You get an idea of their size from the Le Souk Ceramique cereal bowl which is almost six inches in diameter.

Cheers,
Shari.

Monsoon Frogs & Turtle

If two incidents can make a pattern, we have one. Two years in a row we have had a Noah's flood monsoon storm pass through the Foothills on the Fourth of July. Do we know how to celebrate the Fourth or what?

It's not just the wind and water. The Wet brings out critters you otherwise never see. Our Fourth of July gathering is blessed with frogs -- one tiger striped little fellow found its way into the kitchen where a guest, familiar with these things, pronounced it an endangered striped Chiricahua frog and gently took it outside.

The down side is the croaking. These frogs make a lot of noise -- all night. They are looking for mates and they don't have a lot of time. The sound is not as pleasant as frogs on Whidbey. It's more like the wailing of something in great pain. Lovesick, I suppose.

So frogs have become a staple for our Fourth of July parties. No, we don't eat them. We just look at them with flashlights. Then the following morning we net them out of the cement pond -- easily a dozen or two.

But the tortoise yesterday was a first. We had a big pour yesterday. Monsoon rain can be very local. A quarter mile can make a huge difference. Lately most of the rain has hit downtown and south. Yesterday it hit the Foothills, up to two or more inches depending on location.

When the rain gets that heavy, I am out in the back sweeping water away from the back doors. As I often complain, people here don't think about rain when they build houses. Without the wood dams that I have caulked down by the thresholds, sheets of water would be oozing into the TV room and kitchen. Not good. The concern is enough that I sweep the water away. It's a fun way to get exercise and really get into the Wet.

So I'm out there sweeping water and there is this tortoise by the side of the house. I have no idea where these guys live 51 weeks out of the year, but it's astonishing what shows up in the Wet. Bugs the size of pigeons. I can hardly wait for the tarantulas.

Hydrocarbon Harvest

Sheets of the precious hydrocarbon harvest.

It's monsoon season, the Sonoran Desert's version of the Wet, and many people do not realize that in addition to all the fauna and flora that actively thrive and bloom this exciting time of year, it can also be time to harvest hydrocarbon from our swimming pools.

Cut and formed, ready for shipment.

The blue blooms burst out, blushing from the sunshine absorbed during the spring and summer weeks. The azure film covers the pool surface, ready to be pulled out, cut to size, processed, and converted into the myriad uses that we have all come to take for granted. But it all begins here.

Close up shows the fine cellular construction of
this versatile native material

Known under the trade name "solar blanket", the hydrocarbon sheets can be used to cover and insulate swimming pools where the sunshine is not as plentiful as blessed Baja Arizona. The versatile harvest can also be used for packaging, whether in sheets or separated into popcorn sized pieces, used in residential insulation applications, serve as pet-bed liners, and even exported to China where they grind up the prized sheets into a fine powder used to color Blue Hawaii mixes.

If left too long in their Sonoran solar habitat, the hydrocarbon sheets become over-ripe, pieces detaching and freely floating through pumps and filters where they gum up the works, so it's good to harvest them when ripe.

The Fifth Season

A headline today reports the hot weather the country has been experiencing.  NOAA is quoted, "Most of the contiguous U.S. was record and near-record warm for the six-month period, except the Pacific Northwest."

Except for the Pacific Northwest?  Sorry about that, Lower Alaska. 

As for Baja Arizona, it's nor-mal. We just call it the summer and monsoon seasons.

See, we have the usual seasons: autumn, winter, spring and summer. But we add a fifth season, monsoon.

Just when I thought the dry heat was getting to much, it turns into the Wet. The change is dramatic. There are clouds in the sky, lightning in the afternoons, and even rain. Evaporative coolers (swamp coolers) have little effect and the A/C keeps the cool. It stays warm at night because the clouds and humidity hold the heat.

The desert smells different. Especially when it rains, the fragrance of the creosote bush is spectacular. New green growth appears on some plants, like the ocotillo which can shed and grow leaves several times a year, and some plants have learned to take advantage of the Wet and flower this time of year.

Bugs, like beetles the size of a small bat, come out that haven't been seen in a year. And worth a separate blog, frogs and toads appear like they have been transported from a different planet.

Most of the world has four seasons, but I wonder if Vivaldi lived in Baja Arizona, would the Four Seasons be the Five Seasons? If Beethoven knew the desert monsoon, would the fourth movements of his Pastorale Symphony have even more thunder and lightning?