Photos in other places

I haven't posted here for quite a while, but do have quite a few pictures with captions in my Picassa Album. It's much easier to upload there than to try and lay out these blog posts. So if you want to know what we're up to in New Mexico, check out:
https://picasaweb.google.com/homerhorns

(Try clicking on the slide show option at the upper right in each album.)

Santa Fe Trip

Annie had an appointment with a Dr. of Chinese Medicine in Santa Fe on Friday, so we packed up the tent and headed north Thursday. Spent the night just outside of Santa Fe in the Hyde Memorial State Park (didn't see Franklin or Eleanor). The acupucture treatment seemed to do Annie some good, as she's been walking around a lot more while we've been out in the willy-wags for the past four days.
It was great to leave the heat of Truth or Consequences behind and get up into the mountains around Santa Fe. The campground was at around 8,000 ft elevation and it got quite cool at night.

Santa Fe is very beautiful, but a little too quaint for my taste. They control the architecture and colors to make sure everything looks like a post card. The classic southwestern look was developed to attract tourists and although the individual buildings are gorgeous, the enforced similarity makes it less a city than a theme park. We did see the Georgia O'Keafe museum, which was a treat, and walked around the square in the center of town. We also stopped to see the St. Francis Basilica. St. Francis is the patron saint of Santa Fe. The Franciscans originally showed up with Coronado and Juan Onate when the Spanish came north from Mexico. Annie posted some pictures at https://picasaweb.google.com/homerhorns/StFrancisBasilica?authkey=Gv1sRgCPbCqojxheqE6gE#slideshow/5617816201622807410

Upon leaving Santa Fe Saturday morning, we drove south along the western edge of the Cibola National Forest. The only campground we saw was closed, due to the fire danger. It's been very dry and windy and we have been inundated with smoke from the 700 square mile Wallow fire in eastern Arizona for over a week. We ended up driving all the way home, spending Saturday night in our own bed, and then driving down to the Gila National Forest Sunday morning. We spend the night at a beautiful deserted campground on Gallinas (chicken) Creek. We drove about a mile off the road along a dry creek bed in an amazing canyon with rock spires towering overhead.

With no threat of rain, we left the rain fly off the tent so we could look up and watch the moon through the trees. A very loud Whip Poor Will seranaded is all night.

I hiked down the canyon and found this at the base of a cliff just above a section of creek bed that had retained some water and was tracked up by cattle coming to drink.
Note the Jack Daniels bottle nestled in the rocks. This was RIP Justin!

As June Approaches

We've been in our new house for just about 6 months now, and the yard is looking up. Not a drop of rain since last October, but somehow the trees find moisture and leaf out. We have an old Spanish Olive that bloomed and had the sweetest smelling flowers. I've cut back the dead branches in hopes it will last a few more years. Annie wove a trellis (at right) out of cane stalks that will eventually have climbing plants to hide the garden tools, extra plant pots and buckets. The trash can catches water from the swamp cooler on the roof. If the water isn't changed every now and then, the minerals get so concentrated the cooling pads and pump get encrusted with calcium.

The flower boxes in front of the porch have been planted for quite a while now. One lone sunflower has blossomed and a few other flowers are starting to blossom as well. I finally finished painting the floor of the porch yesterday. I also put a ceiling fan up, which makes it quite a pleasant place to sit. The temperatures have been quite moderate, only in the low 90's in the afternoon. We still generally have a breeze in the pm as well, so as long as you're out of the sun, it's quite tolerable outside. We don't spend a lot of time indoors this time of year, unless there's a Red Sox game on.

Annie ordered a bunch of bare root fruit trees a month ago.

The one on the right is an apple tree. It has several kinds of apples grafted onto one trunk. In the middle is a fig that we bought 3 or 4 months ago. We thought it had died so cut it right back to the ground. Voila! It's coming up from the root. On the left is a fruit cocktail tree. Like the apple, it is several varieties on one trunk. I think it's peach, nectarine and apricot. You can see several different kinds of leave.

Here's the front entry. The street we live on is very quiet, making this a very peacefull place to sit.











Here's the view of our front yard from the porch. We picked all the lettuce in the greenhouse and it's now coming back from the root. We also have chard, tomatoes and beets in there. We've had extremely violent winds off and on this spring, gusting to 60 mph. I'm amazed the plastic hasn't ripped off the greenhouse. We have potatoes in the plastic pots. The beans, squash (winter and summer) onions, watermelon, cucumbers, tomatoes and cantelope are also doing well.

Here's another shot of the flower beds. The yellow flowers are wild Mexican sunflower, I think.

If you subscribe to the blog, I think you get an email whenever we post something. I'm not sure if that's the case or not, so could someone let me know it that's happening.

Turtleback Hike

This is Turtleback Mountain as seen from our front porch. Yesterday, I went on a hike with a couple of friends around the back side of the mountain.

Lloyd and Mark were my hiking companions. We parked on the east side of the Rio Grande and took a ridge trail up the northern end of the mountain beside some deep canyons filled with amazing jumbles of rock. The Rio Grande is in a rift valley with the native volcanic rock thousands of feet deep. The valley is filled with sediment from millions of years of erosion to the north.

Here's the summit from our takeoff point.

We hiked up a well trodden trail to the Crystal Cave. Not much crystal but some interesting quartz in the ceiling (too dark to photograph.) It was in the 80's and the sun was intense, but there was a nice breeze to keep us from frying.

Here's a shot from the backside of the mountain looking east toward the Jornada del Muerto, (Journey of Death) part of the Camino Real that extended from Santa Fe south to Mexico City. Lloyd remarked on the vast expanse, but I thought it was only half vast. To see vast, we would have had to have reached the summit, something we didn't quite have the legs for yesterday...maybe with an earlier start in the cool of the morning.

Here's Mark on the way back down with the Rio Grande and Truth or Consequences below us.

COMPOST!

Our first batch of compost, now screened and bagged. I got some chicken manure from a neighbor and brought home bags of cow manure from the desert and the piles are producing!







I've got 4 big bags of compost now, ready to be worked into beds and two more bins of compost working.
The wind has been fierce the past few days so I made a small shadecloth fence to protect some tender jasmine and honeysuckle vines we just planted at the corner of the porch.

We had lettuce, pak choy and broccoli rab out of the greenhouse the other day.

Bea & Fox et al come for a visit

Bea and Fox came for a visit in February. (Oh yeah, they brought their parents too) Unfortunately, Annie and I got a bad case of the flu a few days after they arrived and missed great chunks of their visit. The cold weather we had in late January - early February departed, so they had nice weather while here. Bea even tried out the wading pool.

Our yard is full of goatheads, little seed pods with very sharp spikes all over, so Bea had to be very careful around the pool. Fox enjoyed splashing around on the porch ..

We haven't had a frost for about a week now, although it's possible for temps to get down to freezing at night into April. We have stuff greening up, however, and bushes, shrubs and trees are beginning to leaf out. Our newly planted plumb tree has lots of buds, as do several unidentified bushes in the back yard. I finally got a back deck built and put up a pully clothes line by the back door so Annie can finally hang out the wash, something she has missed for the past few months.

Our greenhouse is holding up to the spring winds and we have lettuce, pak choy, beets and chard that are all doing famously. Some we'll leave inside and some we'll transplant outside soon. We bought a fan palm and planted it out front last week. Always wanted a palm tree in my yard, now I've got one. Took a drive into the desert yesterday and got several bags of cow manure. (It's just laying around waiting for someone to pick it up, kind of like the coal on Bishop's Beach) Ive been soaking it to make manure tea for the garden and adding it to our compost. I've got a couple of great compost bins going that are really heating up and we should have finished compost in a month.

Even though we haven't had a drop of rain since last September, there are little shoots of grass coming up in the yard and our neighbor's apricot tree is in bloom. And it's not even St. Paddy's day yet!

More pics of Gray Street

Here is a link to a bunch more photos of our remodeling project.

http://picasaweb.google.com/homerhorns/523GrayStreet#