by CKR
I have been remiss in documenting activity in my yard. I apologize. There are many excuses I could give, but I think I’ll just let them go.
It’s not that there haven’t been activity or observations to report. Our winter was extraordinarliy dry (yes, it’s been a long time since I’ve yard blogged); maybe a tenth of an inch of precipitation, mostly toward the end of the winter, February, I think.
That made it a very different spring from last year’s. Not as many spring flowers. But, somewhat unexpectedly, some plants seem to do better after a dry winter. Sweet clover, for example, which I have always hated. It’s a legume, and it has the excessively sweet fragrance of sweet peas, except sweeter. You can buy honey around here that has that fragrance. It’s usually the darker honey, so I avoid dark honey. Ick.
On the other hand, it might just be that I let the sweet clover go last year, so it established its roots and then took off.
I’ve also learned which of my cultivated plants are sensitive to a lack of water over winter. Creeping thyme needs more than it got (although it’s coming back from the roots), and so, surprisingly, does the datura, which almost looked like it wasn’t going to make it. As of now, it’s about the size it was last year. I will water it this winter. Mexican (or New Mexican?) sunflowers also need more water than I expected.
These little things (dwarf sundrops,Calylophus serrulatus, yellow evening primrose?) did remarkably well, though.
Another requirement for staying power in this garden is tasting bad to rock squirrels. Or being a cactus and having prickles to keep them away, which doesn’t always work. I hate to think of never having hens and chicks, but the ones that were making such a nice home between the rocks disappeared in a single day. I poison the rock squirrels, but they manage to do significant damage in the day or so before they find those delicious little biscuits. 
About halfway up the steps to my house is a wooden landing that is a perfect home for rock squirrels. I’ve wondered where they die when they are poisoned, but one died in his bed. The smell began about the middle of last week; it’s already subsiding in our dry atmosphere. The flies find it delightful, and I suspect the corpse is crawling with maggots. It’s far enough back that I can’t see it, which is fine, but that also keeps me from dumping some lime on it.
The good part was that a pair of flycatchers arrived on Sunday at this specialized feeding station. They’re probably Say’s phoebes (Sayornis saya); not much red on the breast, but definitely no yellow. I’ve been hearing phoebes since they arrived in April.
The thunderstorms have begun, too. I’m clearing the cheatgrass corpses from another flowerbed. My strategy on that one was to pull everything I could last fall and leave the roots for when the rains came. It’s working; not much came up over the winter, and the roots are coming out easily with minor trowel digging. Cheatgrass doesn’t do well in a dry winter. Looks like the seeds are mostly skipping this year, alhtough some others (Chinese elms?) are just germinating.
I’ve bought a number of plants I’ve wanted, including a giant four o’clock (Mirabilis multiflora). The current name seems to be desert four o’clock, but giant four o’clock is what I learned. The first time I saw one was on the trail into Alamo Canyon in Bandelier National Monument. I came around a turn in the trail, and there it was: a bush four feet across an three feet high, covered with three-inch purple blooms. The roots are supposed to be enormous. Truly a multiflowered miracle. I’ve been looking around the web for photos, but none convey the unexpected size and beauty of the plant.
I need to clear that flowerbed a bit more before I can plant mine, although I’m contemplating planting it in another area that I don’t usually water. I found several spots this morning as I took photos for this post. If they can do that in Bandelier, imagine what occasional watering can do! It seems happy in the pot, so I’ll take a while to consider the best place for it. Maybe I’ll even buy another.
Lots of lizards this year. They need water, but they don’t like it on them, so they scatter when I spray the hose around, but they come back to sip the water from the soil and the mulch.
The cactuses have been erratic in their bloom. My two walkingstick chollas (Opuntia spinosior?) didn’t even fully turgidify until this week, and today I found a mamillaria that is getting ready to bloom. I will watch it carefully to get some photos. This is very late; my big mammilaria bloomed some time ago; I had expected nothing from it in such a dry year, so I didn’t watch it. So a second chance is delightful.
Update: Some bonus lizard photos. And there's a bunny out there now, youngish, probably the generation after baby bunny.
