The front of our San Simeon house is the pretty much the first domestic place you see driving in. It has a rock slope below the house, an area I call the Cirque. The rock is Catalina granite boulders and rocks — pale somewhat soft, with quartz veins and sparkling mica.
Granite isn't granite without mica and quartz.
I like Catalina rock. It's local. It's where we are situated, and what naturally exists in our washes and Foothills. It's subtle and pretty. At least it was until the pack rat, tiny white mice, and cute, abrubt-speedy chipmunks moved in.First was the pack rat hoarded debris. Swept some up then spooned dry concrete into the cavities. Hosed it down. Looks solid. Mostly islands of Catalina rock poking out from grey cement treacle.
We have had lots of rodent activity this summer. We hired a pest control service ...
but that's another story.
Then I noticed increased chipmunk activity. Fresh green gouges had been chewed out of my prized hanging cactus and torch cactus.
The other clue was big dirt piles on my Catalina rock slope, like ugly mining tailings of which there are already way too many in the Copper State.
The clincher was seeing chipmunks hanging around on that rock slope, then disappearing in small holes above the dirt tailings.
Casus belli. It meant war.
It was war.My weapons were cement blocks, stucco, gravel, 60 lb. bags of pre-mix concrete, chicken coop wire, wheelbarrows full of dirt, and my hard earned experience with the various burrowing reptiles and mammals we have here in the Sonoran Desert.
And stripping the heavy rocks off, then strategically stacking them back up.
The slope is beginning to take the shape of two terraces, which means two solid surfaces on which the traverse the slope and attend to pruning.
I still have a couple of days work left. Hopefully, what I am doing will hold them there varmints.
