The main garden:
This is an experiment of densely planted mixed circles, including greens (chard, kale), cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, and more. So far it’s all doing well.
Cucumbers, shishito peppers, and green beans
Cukes are coming along
Watermelons — lettuce beds are under there somewhere and getting hard to harvest
Cantaloupes
Cover crop bed with pumpkins mixed in
Beautiful sorghum
And the screened secret garden:
I am fascinated by large-scale animal migrations. I’ve seen the wildebeest in east Africa and the the elephant seals on the central coast of California. And now the ladybugs!
I spent the last couple days camping on Mount Graham, the tallest of our corner of Arizona’s sky Islands. (This is about 2 hours from our house, plus another hour or so up the mountain on a very windy road.) I spent most of my time on the bottom half of the mountain, since the top half is gravel roads and I didn’t bring the truck. There was lots of great camping and hiking here, and the temperature was a good 20° cooler than at the bottom.
I extended by trip by a half day to stop at an amazing 100-year-old u-pick fruit orchard that is right in the middle of the forest. I picked a peck of the best peaches I’ve had in a long while. Yum!
Last weekend, we went on a hike in Price Canyon (which is south of Horseshoe and north of Rucker, about 20 minutes from here) and were delighted to find Price spring running. It was beautiful and a hike we’ll do again. It’s amazing that there are such different kinds of ecosystems so close to us.
With good early spring rains, the poppies are blooming here, and we’re looking forward to warmer temperatures. We had enough rain that my garden greens are thriving even though I’ve neglected them. I’m hoping to have more time in the garden soon!
Kind of a lackluster year in books for me, but here it is. The highlight of the year may have been that I finished (and even enjoyed) my first audio book ever.
1. Blue Desert by Charles Bowden
2. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula LeGuin
3. Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
4. Chorus by Rebecca Kauffman
5. The House on Fripp Island by Rebecca Kauffman
6. The Gunners by Rebecca Kauffman
7. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
8. Faces in the Crowd by Valeria Luiselli
9. Headed into the Wind by Jack Loeffler
10. The Crossing by Michael Connelly
11. The Wrong Side of Goodbye by Michael Connelly
12. The Late Show by Michael Connelly
13. Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
14. Grizzly Years by Doug Peacock
15. Two Kinds of Truth by Michael Connelly
16. Unlikely Animals by Annie Hartnett
17. Our Towns by James and Deborah Fallows
18. Dinners with Ruth by Nina Totenberg
19. The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel
20. The Poorhouse Fair by John Updike
21. Man Swarm by Dave Foreman
22. The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese
23. Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
24. A Burning by Megha Majumdar
25. In the Land of Invisible Women by Qanta Ahmed
26. Comfort Me with Apples by Ruth Reichl
27. Theft by Finding by David Sedaris
28. Oh William by Elizabeth Strout
29. Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
30. Solito by Javier Zamora
31. State of Wonder by Ann Patchett
32. Commonwealth by Ann Patchett
33. The Boys from Biloxi by John Grisham
34. The Wind Knows My Name by Isabel Allende
35. The Boy from the Woods by Harlan Coben
36. Stalin’s Ghost by Martin Cruz Smith
37. Dark Sacred Night by Michael Connelly
38. The Night Fire by Michael Connelly
Every once in a while, we’ve had cows get on our property even though it’s fenced. Sometimes a delivery driver leaves the gate open or something else random lets the cows enter.
Last week I looked up from my bed to see a large black momma cow and her baby grazing on our otherwise unmunched grass and felt dread at having to chase them off. (Cows here are very skittish, and chasing them without benefit or horses or dogs is challenging.)
But last year, Brad came up with a new solution to the challenge that works great — a drone!
This solved the problem in minutes, rather than the hours it used to take. Much safer too.
drone’s eye view
We are now finally free of all of our landline phones. When we moved to Arizona, we had three. And for a variety of reasons, both business and personal related, it took a while to get rid of all these, but now it is done.
When I drop email, you’ll know my metamorphosis is complete! :)
After all the stuff that went on in the last year, things has finally freed up for some leisure activities.
After a week long camping trip to Oregon Pipe National Monument in May, this month I also took a 3-week long road trip across the country.
I experienced many insights from this trip, but the overwhelming one is what an amazingly beautiful country we live in. Driving back roads and camping along the way gave me the opportunity to see many places that I hadn’t seen before. So much beauty. This trip also marked my visit to the 49th state in our country. Only Alaska remains.
States I drove through on this trip included: Arizona, New Mexico, Texas (a purposefully small section), Oklahoma, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah. I visited White Sands National Park and Badlands National Park, as well as the Cache La Poudre wilderness in northern Colorado and Bears Ears National Monument and Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park and many great state parks. Some pictures are below.
As I drove across the country, mostly on back roads, I saw many billboards and handmade signs. They said a lot about the mood of our nation. (This struck me as a much more prominent display than I’ve seen in the past. Is this new? Or am I more sensitive to it?) Overall, people seem to be arming themselves, getting high, and praying a lot to hope it all works out in the end. Political signs were everywhere, including strong support for the currently indicted ex-president/presidential candidate and opposition to abortion. I saw these sentiments loudly proclaimed nearly everywhere I went, which was alarming. Next year is going to be a hell of a year.
On a more positive note, development in renewable energy was apparent everywhere. Miles and miles of solar panels and windmill farms. Encouraging.
Another thing I noticed on this trip was that many small to mid-size towns that I’d visited in the past seem to have grown considerably. This included places like Tulsa, Cheyenne, and Grand Junction. Lots of big box stores now, more traffic, miles of sprawl. Not encouraging. I wonder how much of this change is a change in my perception having now lived out of the city for so long versus a change in the actual size and layout of these cities. Probably some of both.
Speaking of which, boy am I glad we didn’t move to Moab as we had considered. I’m all for accessibility of public lands, but the development that’s happened in this area made me sick. Helicopter canyon flyovers, sound and light tours, multi-level condo complexes, ATV culture. (Note that I’ve been reading a lot of counter culture conservation work. Hat tip to Jack Loeffler, Doug Peacock, et al.) It’s reminiscent of seeing beautiful wild animals in a zoo.
As our own Chiricahua National Monument is currently being considered for national park status, I have been thinking a lot about the balance of wilderness with public access. Seeing several large national parks on this trip has made me even more fearful of this for our own area. As far as we are from an airport and any real services, we have not been seriously concerned about this in the past, but now my concern is heightened. Even since COVID, we’ve seen changes. Development like this probably won’t come to our area in my lifetime, but I wonder. I applaud the work of conservation groups on these issues, and I’m stepping up my own commitment to this work.
I fear we are killing our planet, but remember the words of longer term thinkers who say that the planet will go on, it is just life on it that will be extinguished.
Cache La Poudre wilderness
This was a lovely remote area with lots of great camping, rafting, kayaking, hiking, and fishing, and not a lot of people.
Badlands National Park
The most stunning thing about these badlands was the green prairies.
Bears Ears National Monument/Goosenecks State Park
Amazing place to camp and hike and some truly epic storms and the wildest wind I’ve ever camped in.
Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park
Here is my book list for 2022. After three years of pandemic and other personal challenges, I finally managed to turn the year into more reading (albeit with a large dose of Michael Connelly, which I found easy to read amidst other chaos). As usual, my favorites are shown in bold.
Notable for this year….more fiction than usual (though the majority of my favorites seem to have been nonfiction); a good selection of western/environmental reads; and the first time I’ve been able to get into Ursual LeGuin (the Hainish cycle, which I’ll continue in 2023).
