Oh my, oh my!! Yesterday it was 81 degrees here in the afternoon. Right now it is raining like crazy. I could be filling barrels with rain water. Everything looks wet and shiny and green--well green is relative. It's supposed to rain tomorrow, and then we move to partly cloudy and back to sunshine! Hooray for April Showers!

A rose by any other name. . . .

You would think, living in the desert, that cactus have all the advantages. I used to worry about my rose bushes. But roses thrive with all our sunshine. They have a heavy dark leaf and a fairly heavy clustered petal. No. Roses do fine as long as they have water. What I did find is that some types of cactus need protection from direct sunlight at least for part of the day, and so I plant them under the rose bushes where they can get shade. They do well there.
Never fear, not everything prickly is as tough as it appears. A lot of us can put on a good show, all mean and thorny--but what we really want is the shade and moisture under a deep green, fabulous smelling rose.
And a few of us are roses.
Which is what makes life in the garden infinitely interesting!

I love springtime. I love pre-springtime. I love anticipating the garden I am going to grow and starting my little seedlings inside in the kitchen. Every year the same foolish notion. And the seedlings grow up in their tiny boxes in their oh, so protected environment, and then, because I have been waiting so long to see the lush garden begun, I take them outside in the sun, and the wind, and the cold evenings, and I kill them. Patience Karne, patience. That's what makes your garden grow. So, yes once again I have killed my tender little sprouts, and once again I am ready to plant seeds directly into the dirt, where they inevitably grow up and are strong and sturdy living plants. But the first method always seems like a good idea. Next year, no more babying the little guys, I'll just have to outwait myself and do the first real planting outside!

Post it note

Do you think facebook is just too easy?? I can write a sentence or two and that's that. But, fewer people are making fewer posts on their blogs. Where are you? Come back. One of you is me!

Night in Nogales. . . .

Coyotes howl in the dark
A dog barks on the hill
Voices. . .
I wonder
Who wanders in the cold
night rain?

Rain is falling all around, again

Lovely rainy day. Worked in the yard until I got rained in. We drove to Nogales for Taco Bell, came home and watched movies, made a screensaver with our 700 favorite photos, thought about making oatmeal cookies. . . manana.
Got to save some fun for the next day!

Blue Agave

They look so harmless. I felt like I was moving sharks. Sawing wasn't so bad. It was the picking them up to put in a pile that riled them up. I got bit numerous times!

Do these blue agaves seem just a little too BIG for the front of the house?? They get all the rain off the roof and they have prospered!! You can see that I have trimmed then at the bottom. That is just so some poor stranger like the Fed Ex guy can come to the door without being stabbed to DEATH!

I know they are beautiful. But I think they'll have to go.

The ugly little plant in the middle is a different agave which put up a gorgeous stalk this year. The stalk became our Christmas tree, but the plant had put it's whole heart into producing seeds and soon died.

I had to trim the agaves to try to remove the dead neighbor, but I think maybe all three will have to go. We'll see~