Raise the Baja Arizona Tricolor (Garden Shade - Three)

What a way to celebrate Bastille Day! Hoisting the Baja Arizona tricolor (sand-brown, sand-brown & sand-brown)!

Shari is our Betsy Ross. She finished a day's worth of sewing in the morning. By afternoon, the second and third stripes were mounted and all three colors are now billowing in the wind.

Now all we need is to sing the Baja Arizona anthem each morning at sunrise. Is it "La Cucaracha"?

The flag I refer to, of course, is a very large one that flies flatly, tethered at both ends, as shade over the three garden beds.

The shade is spectacular — even in the cloudy, overcast days of the monsoon season. There is a feeling of relief underneath, yet no shortage of wonderfully diffused sunlight.

The flag is tethered with scores of
"S"-shaped curtain pins holding
grommets to eye-hooks.

We're hopeful the lush green plants will appreciate our modifications to the Sonoran Desert environment.

Now our attention turns towards a patio seating area within the east side of the garden. It's a place to sit under the shade of a palo verde tree
and contemplate the environment.

Shari wants to plant grapes and have the vines trained on an overhead trellis. Whoa boy!  More post-hole digging!

Garden Shade

Shari puts the final touches on the first, middle sheet of
shade cloth. There will be two more sheets.

Morning gardening

It seems to me that pretty much everything in the desert appreciates a little shade, so an integral part of any vegetable garden is shade.

Shade fabric is a popular item here in Tucson. Trouble is, so are wind gusts.

The first of three sheets is up. Shari folded and sewed each six-foot wide end, reinforcing it with cotton twill, then hammered in ten rivet-like grommets on each end. Meanwhile, your author strung seven lines of rope east-west across the length and the fabric is tucked north-south over and under the ropes.

Hog wire serves as a sturdy and movable frame for the
scarlet runner beans.

We had a nice windy rain storm last night. Four of us sat in front of our house, under the eves, watching the spectacle, feeling the heavy raindrops on our legs, smelling the humid air, and watching sheets and bolts of lightning over town. It was a feast for all of the senses; way better than anything TV can offer.

We watched the single length of shade fabric billowing in the wind, barely held by the rope matrix. The fabric and its grommets held.

Today, Shari is working on the next two sheets. They will be tucked over-and-under in an opposite pattern to the middle sheet, which hopefully will make the rope matrix more secure.

In the meantime, Shari is turning the desert green. Shari has a touch for growing basil. Basil loves heat and sun. How she got it to grow on overcast, chilly Whidbey Island is beyond me. She has three kinds flourishing here. Their flavor is very pungent.

They say that about food grown in the desert. It has
intense flavor. You get less product because of the intense climate, but it's way more concentrated.

The scarlet runner beans are beginning to run. Shari started the seedings in pots in the backyard where there's shade. Transplanted into the garden, they struggled from shock and sun. Now they are reaching and climbing up the hog wire frame.

Melons and cucumbers are also thriving. We've been eating and giving away cherry tomatoes. The little peach and loquat trees are hanging in there as we set up trellises to train their branches to create an espalier.

I wonder if they have slugs in the Sonoran Desert. They were our nemesis on Whidbey. Here it may be grasshoppers.

FOOTNOTE:  Shari's 4,000+ sq.ft. garden on Whidbey Island:

Three varieties of apple on an espalier

Four levels of terraces.

Looking up towards the house

Grape vines grown from sticks; cuttings from
autumn pruning at the local vineyard near Langley.

Monsoon Rain - New Growth

We've had something like one to two inches of rain over this last week. Down the hill a rain gauge reports an inch; up the hill another rain gauge reports two and a third inches.

Rain is like that here. Go a few blocks and it can be very different. Check out the Arizona rainlog website.

One can tell the plants are happy. And there are surprises and miracles.

So I'm pulling the recently emptied recycling container back from the street and notice a pin cushion cactus by the side of the driveway. It's in full bloom. It all happened overnight. Pin cushions are tiny cacti, as you can see from the ruler posing next to it.

I had to take a photo and share the beauty of these tiny little plants that like to hide in the shade of sagebrush.

Other vegetative responses are more common, but no less miraculous. There are palo verde seedlings everywhere. What is amazing about the sprouts is how they move the dirt around them. I would need time-lapse photography to capture the movement, but each seedling has pushed dirt and small pebbles aside to create a little depression around itself.

How do they do that? Plants aren't supposed to move like that, are they?

The Desert Smells Like Rain

 Rain.

The shock of humid air and the smell of the first wet after weeks of summer heat are among the most exhilarating and dramatic sensations in the Sonoran Desert.

We've had three-digit highs and clear skies for weeks. Wednesday night it rained enough that everything smelled heavily moist on Thursday morning. More clouds gathered in the afternoon and the desert got a decent drenching.

It's like a blessing. It's like an incredible act of kindness.

I've been on a weekly schedule of watering plants and trees. I feel responsible for anything I've planted or transplanted, and it's taken some time for me to realize that the bigger agaves, palo verdes, acacias, and even eucalyptus need occasional water to thrive. "There's not a plant in the desert that doesn't like water once a week," said the nurseryman down the street who has a gardening talk show on the radio.

It's one thing to try to flood the roots of a plant with a garden hose. It's another when Nature floods the landscape.

It's an amazing display of generosity. Rain falling everywhere — on ornamentals and weeds alike; petunias, sage, creosote, and saguaro.

The Great Fence of San Simeon

On Saturday, May 31, 2014, the Great Fence of San Simeon was completed.

As the last gate was being covered with hardware cloth to complete the compound enclosure, sure enough, a large lizard had wandered inside and was unable to tunnel or climb out -- a good indication of the value of the fence.

We have nothing against lizards. They eat bugs. I teased and chased it out with a piece of PVC pipe and the garden hose.

Which reminds me of the great walls that we humans erect to keep our kind in and the other kind out. Like the Great Wall of China, the Berlin Wall, the Israeli West Bank Wall, and the other great fence in Arizona that we justify in the name of Homeland Security.

Then we have the walls we build in our minds, like Fox Noise and MSNBC. But enough of comparing people with varmints.

We hope to invite many people into our new garden. And they will also be free to leave.

Our great fence isn't a wall to divide people against each other. It's a fence to keep out rabbits, rats, chipmunks, squirrels, and javelinas.

Odds are, the smaller mammals can climb the fence, and we'll need bird netting for when anything gets close to being ripe, but the fence does give a sense of insular protection.

Perhaps it's a false sense, like the great rabbit-proof fence of Western Australia.

Still, it's an aesthetic of what can be done with an long and heavy iron pike, lots of skin-piercing aviary wire, nasty treated wood (warped as they are), ready-made (thank God) metal gate frames, a rake, concrete and plastic ties.

My work is largely done, although paths to two of the gates need improving. Now it's Shari's turn. She gets to turn the desert into a vegetable paradise. So far, she loves the morning watering of her little green babies.

Gates with Thresholds to Nowhere

The newest curb cut makes the garden entrance more inviting.

It was a delightful long weekend spent working on the new garden. The three gates to nowhere got concrete brick thresholds so they shut and seal along the bottoms, the last two post holes were dug and the posts embedded in concrete.

My favorite work was Saturday. Three concrete blocks were chiseled out of the driveway curb, and irrigation water lines and landscape electricity lines re-routed to make way. Digging two trenches resulted in relocated sprinklers for the oleander and a new, strategically located garden faucet -- my seventh.


Then two blocks were set facing inwards, paving bricks laid, a step to nowhere created, stucco repaired and painted, and some decorative Mexican tiles glued. I'm beginning to like Liquid Nails a lot.


The gates still go nowhere because we have to finish stringing the aviary wire. Although the gate frames seal well, there's nothing to keep javelins and varmints from feasting on the salad buffet.

Soon enough, the wire will be stretched, stapled and nailed, another two-foot wire stretched along the ground as an apron, then covered with dirt, and the gates will be finished.

Meanwhile, one Texas purple sage bush went bonkers from watering. It's amazing how much desert plants thrive on weekly watering. Plastic PVC pipes trenched and buried all over the place give me seven garden faucets from which yours truly enjoys hand watering each weekend. I need one more, down in Coat Hanger Valley.

The New Garden: Gates to Nowhere

This past weekend, we set up three gates to nowhere around the new garden and embedded enough posts in one-foot concrete-filled holes to create the perimeter.

The gate on the left is on the northeast. There's one on the southeast and a third on the northwest. It makes a little more sense when you walk the property, which is easy to do now because aside from the three gates, there is no barrier.

Two yards of dirt were delivered on Tuesday. All three raised beds are loaded up and ends closed. Shari has tomatoes, scarlet runner beans, and Thai basil planted in one bed.

We have enough dirt and space left over for two more smaller beds -- but that's in the improbable future. Still, it's nice to have space to expand.

Soon, probably this coming weekend, we will stretch and staple the aviary wire and the ongoing struggle to exclude javelinas, rabbits and any other varmint we possibly can will open its first chapter.