Doings Around the Ranch…

Just a little hodgepodge of what’s been going on around here…

First, the garden:

It’s hell on earth gardening in the desert. Inevitably, one of the little spaghetti tubings pops off its little emitter and some plant (or two or three or a whole row) dies. It’s constant vigilance. And the dirt here is decomposed granite–not sand. So, basically, if you apply water to it, it’s as good as concrete. Truly. The stuff should be patented. We hauled in dumptrucks of good dirt, but it’s never enough.

The only thing that can’t be killed by lack of water, 115 degree heat, and beetles, are the weeds. We would own a lovely weed farm if we allowed it to happen. Or went away for a week.

Nonetheless, we are getting zucchini, kale, chard, and turnips right now. The tomatoes are green. It’s too early to tell what the fruit trees are doing, but I am hoping for some serious apple pies this fall, so I am hoping they are hip to the program.

Here is our second attempt at a front yard:

Two winters ago, when we started the adoption actually, we decided that the future girl would need some grass to run around in. So R. went in with the tractor and ripped out scrub and mesquite (nasty stuff) between the house and the gate to create a little playspace. Grass is controversial at best in the desert, but we have an artesian well at the ranch, which means there’s so much poundage of water coming out of the earth (the drill hit water at 9 feet!) that we can’t possibly use it properly. Our pump guy actually told us we should just let water run all the time because we’re hurting our well system by not being able to take advantage of the amount of flow…um, okay. Whatever. Last summer, we planted grass seed and had sprinklers on all the time and had an awesome grassy yard. Then winter came. The thing about the desert–even the high desert–is you can’t let grass go entirely dormant because there’s no winter rain or snow to help keep it alive. We didn’t water it over the winter. It never rained. It snowed once–that would be this paltry show one morning in January:

The grass died. We started again last month, ripping out the old lawn, using a stump digger machine (I made that name up because who the hell knows what the thing is really called), bringing in two dumptrucks of dirt, spreading the dirt with the tractor, and then leveling the dirt with the wide wooden rakes. Next comes the seed. Then the water. Maybe by late fall, we’ll have a lawn again, just in time for it to go brown. Cycles of death, people. That’s what we’ve got here. Death. Cycles.

I AM proud, however, of the fact that I can grow the ONLY poppy in the universe that foils Martha Stewart every time. Heh. She announced at one point in her magazine that she has collected and now grows every single variety of poppy in the entire world–except the kind that grow like weeds in the desert Southwest, which routinely die in her acidic, moist, peat-like conditions of New England. That would be these.

For some perverse reason, I find immense satisfaction in this little factoid and repeat it to every visitor at the ranch. I can’t kill them to save my life. They grow everywhere, and I rather like them, so I let them choose their own places to bloom just to spite Ms. Stewart.

Finally, the lovely and talented walternatives sent an awesome stool for The Bee, all handcrafted and such*:

When The Bee got up this morning, she found it waiting for her in the kitchen…Little Miss Bee thinks her new sitting place is just amazingly cool:

Thank you so very much, Auntie C!

(*and I just have to say, that my bloggy pals are WAY more handicrafty and creative that way than I…I’m just sending clothes and books, FYI. Sewing, woodworking, painting and decoupaging, embroidering and the like? Y’all (and you know who you are) impress me in that nineteenth-century sort of way. You would rock on that Pioneers reality show.)

Now to answer a few questions that people have asked in the comments section:

+ no, The Bee has not gotten a haircut…heavenstoBetsy! NO. I am trying for pigtails by her 2nd birthday in August. A pipe dream, I know, but I’m feeding her lots of Omega 3’s just in case.

+ I have no idea why my new acupuncturist is treating me for non-apparent anger issues…WHY WOULD YOU INSIST ON ASKING ME SUCH A PERSONAL QUESTION???!! DAMMIT. Um, okay. Not that funny. Anyway. My acupuncturists use a form of energy work called NMT to communicate with their patients’ bodies. And this is where I have to say that one must suspend disbelief to gain benefit from such a practice. It isn’t for everybody. But that’s how she diagnoses me…my body “tells” her through reading muscle impulses and the like. As for her comment about my internalizing anger, I don’t know…I don’t consider myself an angry person, although…um…I have opinions. So, who knows. It’s something to think about, in any case.

We are headed off to the palm tree farm, where it will reach literal biblical proportions of heat this week. If you don’t know about the palm tree farm, see this and this for quick background. The Bee will get to swim and meet her Granddad; the dogs will get to run around on grass (ahem!); I will get to eat the avocadoes that grow there.