Weather: Unlike most places that have four seasons, we have fire season inserted between spring and summer. Winds this year have seemed more constant, though so far no serious fires have been reported in our area. Perhaps that’s because the fronts that have come through had no water with its attendant lightening. So instead of fire and rain, we got more drying that will feed a fire when it occurs.
Saturday was too warm to be out by 10:30 in the morning. Even it gets cold next week, days like it signal the end of spring to cold-loving plants. Lilacs everywhere seem to have given up opening their buds.
Last rain: 4/8. Week’s low: 33 degrees F. Week’s high: 83 degrees F.
What’s blooming in the area: Apples, spirea, redbud, few lilacs, Dutch iris, tansy mustard, purple mat flower, bindweed, dandelions
What’s blooming in my yard: Fruiting crab apples, sour cherry, sand cherries, weeping cherry, choke cherries, Siberian peas, tulips, lilies of the valley, alfilerillo, vinca, blue flax, oxalis, white tufted evening primroses, western stickseed, cheat and June grasses
What’s reviving: Grapes, tamarix, lilies, scarlet loco, Saint John’s wort, lead plant, Rumanian sage, Maximilian sunflowers, wild lettuce, heath asters
Tasks: Two local market-garden fields have been planted. People continued to clean debris and silt from their ditches with shovels.
Last Sunday I used a herbicide on some purple asters that had come up in the car’s path in the gravel driveway. Unlike alfilerillo which stays low, aster stems get tall enough to brush my car’s bottom. In late summer, they turn woody. I also sprayed some alfalfa that had come up in my walkway. The label said I should see results within 24 hours. Instead, I didn’t see any wilting for 48 hours, and yesterday, seven days later, the aster tops were still just bent over. The alfalfa finally was losing color. There’s obviously something I don’t know.
I did continue cleaning the alfalfa I had planted around the crab apples. Of course, it didn’t stay put, but went to seed next to the block path. Then those plants put out stems over the blocks that trapped blowing dirt. New seeds landed into the bed it had made for them. I hacked away two-inch blocks of dirt with a small hoe to reopen the path.
Animal sightings: Hummingbird, chickadees and another small brown birds, small bees around choke cherries, ladybugs which means aphids somewhere, hummingbird moth on a sterile vinca flower, sidewalk ants, hornets
The rabbit has been sitting on the bricks that line the bed around the drive, and filled the narrow area under a peach tree with its droppings.
Weekly update: I thought about long lots this spring when the apricots, cherries, and apples had distinctly separate blooming seasons. Once that land usage pattern was set, it perpetuated itself. Alvar Carlson said when land was divided among heirs, it always was done longitudinally. [1]
The tradition only was modified in the later part of the twentieth century, when people had city water or artesian wells and weren’t as dependent on their ditches. Then, road frontage became more valuable. Landowners created small, shallow lots along the main arteries and kept the long lots in back for themselves.
Old houses were isolated from their acreage, and new houses were built between them. Some apple orchards were cut down, since the fruit market was nationalized, then internationalized. The Acequia manager, Ken Salazar, said he still had productive trees and was able to sell 400 bushels last year in Abiquiú and Colorado. [2]
What weren’t felled were the non-commercial fruit trees. The old long-lot boundaries can be deduced from those trees. You often see a fruit tree in a fallow field near the fence separating it from its mate in the yard of an old house. Less commonly, you see the estranged pair in the yards of an older and newer house.
In the picture below, you can see the man who owned the long lot kept as much as possible that was valuable when he turned the old house into a separate property. That’s a apple tree near the fence, and just behind it is a cement-lined ditch that carried water from the lateral feeder back. The house boundary was the other side of the ditch. I’m not sure which plot got the pollinating apple tree that’s behind the house.
Notes on photographs:
1. Blue flax (Linum perenne) in my garden, 25 April 2018.
2. Tufted white evening primrose (Oenothera caespitosa) in my driveway, 25 April 2018.
3. Local field and hose, 19 January 2012.
End notes:
1. Alvar W. Carlson. The Spanish-American Homeland. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. 31.
2. Amanda Martinez. "Acequia Water Released Early." Rio Grande Sun. 29 March 2018. A3.
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