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!