Tiles and Ice

Weather: Rain last Wednesday and Thursday from tropical storm Raymond that developed off the coast of México around 11/12. It traveled west, but apparently kicked up enough moisture for us to get our fall soaking rain.

Last useful rain: 11/21. Week’s low: 18 degrees F. Week’s high: 61 degrees F in the shade.

What’s still green: Leaves on juniper and other evergreens, cliff rose, yuccas, red hot poker, chives, grape hyacinth, bouncing Bess, pink evening primroses, golden spur columbine, snapdragons, alfilerillo, blue flax, hollyhock, vinca, violets, sweet peas, coral bells, Queen Anne’s lace, Shasta daisy, anthemis, white and yellow yarrow, purple aster, cheat grass; bases of needle grass; rose canes.

The alfalfa fields have been cut, so the manmade landscape of fields and yards has been stripped to the base coat. It’s tan, while the fields on Dreamcatcher Hill have more colors and heights. A few dead leaves remain on the cottonwoods, catalpas; and Russian olives.

What’s still gray or gray-green: Leaves on cliff rose, snow-in-summer, catmint

What’s red or purple: Leaves on coral beard tongues

Tasks: Men were cutting down the last of the corn stalks in market garden fields before the weather turned wet. Others have been replacing their farm fences with block walls, horizontal board fences, or coyote poles.

Animal sightings: Small birds

Weekly update: Years ago when I laid Saltillo tile along the west side of the house, I first had to apply three coats of sealer on each side. I ran out of tile before I was done. A few years later, I bought more tile and started the sealing process. I don’t think I ever finished.

A couple years ago I laid gravel between the tiles and bricks edging the western border of blue-flowered plants. That also could go no further than the tiles, but did eliminate most of my problems with standing water that turned to ice in the winter.

This summer, I decided ready or not, I was going to lay the remaining tiles. Before I started though, I had to reset all the existing tiles so they were flush with ones at the north end. On Tuesday, the day before the rains started, I finally got it all down — or all except some tag ends that I can do later.

After I was done, I took the hoe and leveled the dirt in the path. It was so dry, I couldn’t compact the ground enough to put down the rest of the gravel.

Last week’s rains revealed no low places, but I made some when I walked in the path to test the surface. They filled with water.

I didn’t stick my nose outside again until today. The ground was frozen. I’d never thought about it, but it’s obvious: you can’t have frozen ground without water.

The sun reached the area in the afternoon and thawed enough of the ground I could re-level it with a hoe and dump the gravel. I learned I only needed one layer to keep my feet out of the mud, and the stones didn’t need to be dense. There only had to be enough to support my entire foot.

I had a little gravel left, and spread it in tire tracks in my drive that had become bald. A thicker layer is needed there because the weight of the car pushes stones into the ground. Of course, if I could have gotten the man who rebuilt the driveway to hire a roller to compact the ground that wouldn’t have been a problem. But, that wasn’t a concept in New Mexico. He just told me to drive over the gravel a few times.

Anyway, there had been standing water in some of the tire tracks last Thursday. So, I used that most useful of tools — the side of my foot — to move loose gravel that had accumulated a few feet from the tracks into the bald areas.

Nothing is ever complete. The main drive probably will need a new layer of gravel this winter, but nothing will happen until we have rain following a thaw that creates problems. My neighbor only reacts to problems, not symptoms.

The new tiles already are beginning to disintegrate. I always thought that was because the interior tiles shouldn’t be used outside, and the actions of snow and ice eventually destroyed them.

However, last week I noticed something else. Some of the new tiles had splotches of white on them. I realized that some of the water that drains off my roof is sufficiently corrosive (either too alkaline or too acid) to eat through the sealer and the glaze. When that happens, chips loosen, and eventually the tile crumbles.

Like the realization that rain or snow is necessary for frozen ground, it was one of those answers to small puzzles that had never quite form themselves until the solutions appear.

Notes on photographs: All taken 17 November 2019.
1. The tiles and gravel two days before I finished laying the tiles to the stairs.  The hose to the burn pile is at the right.

2. Newly laid tile with white splotch.

3. Newly laid tile with section eaten from the surface.

Fire and Ice

Weather: The difference between morning temperatures below 20 degrees F and afternoons when it’s possible to work outdoors in the sun is the difference between the pessimist and the optimist. The Weather Bureau falls in the second group when it says there was a warming trend this past week.

Last useful snow: 10/27. Week’s low: 14 degrees F. Week’s high: 62 degrees F in the shade.

What’s still green: Cholla cactus; leaves on privet, juniper and other evergreens, Japanese honeysuckle, yuccas, red hot poker, chives, grape hyacinth, bouncing Bess, pinks, pink evening primroses, golden spur columbine, snapdragons, blue flax, green leaf five eyes, hollyhock, winecup mallow, Queen Anne’s lace, anthemis, yarrow, purple aster, dandelions, June, needle, and cheat grass

What’s still gray or gray-green: Leaves on Apache plume, cliff rose, fernbush, winterfat, snow-in-summer, catmint

Tasks: I continued cleaning debris from around some rose bushes. The limiting condition wasn’t the weather, but my socks. I wanted to wear wool ones, but they collect bits of weeds and grass. It can take 15 minutes to clean them when I come in.

I found some rubber boots that came over the ankle. However, they only kept out the seeds when I made sure my sweatpants’ bottoms stayed outside the boots. When the elastic slipped inside, the cotton acted as a conduit directing the organic bits onto my socks.

I was cautious when I ordered them. Years ago I used rubber galoshes for yard work. They were a bit too low cut, but the ground was rarely dry. Water from earlier rains, the dew, or my watering always created wet spots.

The last time I ordered a pair, I discovered they had been gentrified. Instead of plain rubber, the manufacturer had put in a fabric insole that not only collected seeds but stood them erect. I couldn’t remove the seeds and I couldn’t remove the insole. I could put the rubbers in the trash.

I wondered why the maker thought everything had to fit the needs of the Martha Stewarts of the world who are always immaculately groomed in the yard and stress how one needn’t be discomforted by work. The boot maker had not so such illusions about its market.

Animal sightings: Small birds

Weekly update: This week I finally got rid of the last bag of peaches. It took two months to get the harvest hauled away.

Meanwhile, I couldn’t burn anything because I had put the bags near the burn pile. It was the only gravel place that was out of the way.

That didn’t mean the burn pile remained static. I spent the fall cutting dead wood from trees and shrubs, and adding it to the heap.

Now I could burn. There were only two prerequisites: a still day and running water. The still time was a challenge in the summer. Gentle breezes always came up in late morning as soon as the air warmed. It didn’t have to be a wind to make a fire dangerous. I always burned very early in the day.

Running water wasn’t a problem. I turned the garden hose on low and held it in one hand as I watched the fire. Only rarely have I needed to turn water on a stray ember that landed in the grass.

This past week, every day was still, but the mornings were all below freezing.

I decided it would be safer if I used a hose connected to the house, rather than to the frost-free hydrant. The hose I usually used was threaded through grasses in the shadow of the garage.

At about 10 am yesterday, I turned on the hose that was connected to the house. At first nothing happened, then shards of ice came out in 3" to 4" sections. That hose was laying on tiles on the east side of the house.

Next I connected the hose that was laying on the back porch. Little water came through because of kinks. Since it was cold, I feared, if I tried to unkink it, the hose would crack. Only slowly was I able to flatten the narrowest section.

Finally, I connected the hose that reached the burn pile. It had been coiled on gravel near the globe willow. When I turned it on, more ice came out. The pieces were about 3/8" in diameter, much thinner than the supposed 5/8" diameter of the hose. This was water that didn’t drain, but stayed on the bottom. However, the ice pieces were round like the hose, not flat.

Once I had a reliable source of running water, I stuck a small piece of paper in the pile on the east side and lit it with a match. The flames worked out from the ignition point, usually advancing under the flames so the smoke pointed east. There was little smoke. What there was didn’t bother me.

The air was cold, which may have limited the temperature of the fire. It certainly was too hot to approach. The twigs turned white, but kept their shape. I suppose if I had let them smolder they would eventually have turned to ashes. They look like so many snakes in a ghostly pyre. Their diameter wasn’t that different from the ice.

When the flames had died from the last leaves and twigs, I turned the hose on softly. In some places, the remains hissed when the water hit them, and it others they did not—they had already cooled. The white remains turned black.

Smoke rose, or rather smoke and steam, and it pointed west. It wasn’t long before my stomach began to complain about the fumes.

The peach branch that came down in late May from the weight of the fruit still hadn’t disappeared. It’s been fired six times now. However, it has gotten much smaller.

This afternoon I took the small broom rake and swept up the bits of wood that hadn’t burned and directed them to the peach branch. Then, I added today’s contribution to the next burn pile. The process never ends.

Notes on photographs: Taken 16 November 2019.

Abscission

Weather: Despite the occasional snowfall, the exposed ground in my yard is dry as a beach several inches down. The wet soil under the tiles I’m resetting has not frozen.

The house loses heat its retained gradually, so it’s now colder in the house than it was when temperatures were much lower. This week I made the transition from lambs wool sweaters to those made from Shetland wood. Those sweaters are now collecting hair and lint impelled by static electricity activated by the furnace.

Last useful snow: 10/27. Week’s low: 17 degrees F. Week’s high: 654 degrees F in the shade.

What’s still green: Cholla cactus; leaves on privet, juniper and other evergreens, Japanese honeysuckle, yuccas, red hot poker, chives, grape hyacinth, bouncing Bess, pinks, sweet peas, pink evening primroses, golden spur columbine, snapdragons, blue flax, green leaf five eyes, hollyhock, winecup mallow, Queen Anne’s lace, anthemis, yarrow, purple aster, dandelions, June, needle, and cheat grass

What’s still gray or gray-green: Leaves on Apache plume, cliff rose, fernbush, winterfat, snow-in-summer, catmint, Silver King artemisia

What’s still red: Leaves on Bradford pear, woods and pasture roses

What’s turning orange: Tansy

Tasks: I began cutting dead wood in the back roses, and clearing the weeds from underneath them. There was lots of cheat grass stems that came away easily. The new growth is up, and providing some kind of ground protection for the rose roots.

Some sideoats gramma came up along the new soaker hose. I planted seeds elsewhere in 2005, and a few came up in 2015. Two years ago there were plants to the south of the roses. I don’t know if seed from them or native plants landed along the back porch and was just waiting for the right opportunity to sprout.

Animal sightings: Small birds, ants, worms. Insects are coming into garage; I saw two crickets, a moth, and a dying hornet this week.

Weekly update: As I indicated in the post for 1 September 2019 on Duff, the mere work of clearing dead wood and leaves from trees and shrubs is an education in the ways plants protect themselves. It also is a reminder there are no easy generalizations.

When levels of sun light decrease in the fall and the metabolism of plants slows, hormones begin the process of isolating, then dropping leaves. This year’s onslaught of early cold temperatures preempted the process, leaving dead leaves on trees. What happened next has varied.

The apricots, peaches, and some sweet cherries quickly dropped the dead matter, or let the winds remove it. They either had begun the process of abscission, or were able to complete it in the afternoons when temperatures warmed enough to allow some metabolic functions.

The members of the rose family whose leaves had turned red were arrested. The leaves are dead, but still in place. If I touch the ones on the sandcherries, they fall. The leaves on the Bradford pear, however, do not come down. Whatever the interplay of chemicals that produced their fall colors has been reacting differently than the apricots that didn’t have time to change color.

The trees that always hold their leaves still have them. The leaves are still clinging to the cottonwood, and if they fall do so when the wind can blow them away. These are the ones I suspected created problems for the tree’s ability to drink when they accumulated, as they do, on the side where the fence traps them.

The Russian olive also retains its leaves, and the ground is nearly bare under it.

Notes on photographs: Taken 9 November 2019.
1. Bradford pear (Pyrus calleryana) with full set of dead, red leaves.

2. Apricot (Prunus armeniaca) with a few dead, brown leaves; the rest are on the ground under it.

3. Cottonless cottonwood (Populus deltoides) with dead, faded green leaves on the tree, and a few accumulated near the fence. The rest of the fallen leaves have blown away.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (in Technicolor)

Weather: Mornings have been very cold, and afternoons only get above 50 in the afternoon. Saturday, it was comfortable to walk in sunny areas, but not ones in the shade. My hands began to get cold after about 20 minutes.

Last useful snow: 10/27. Week’s low: 11 degrees F. Week’s high: 65 degrees F in the shade.

What’s still green: Cholla cactus; leaves on privet, juniper and other evergreens, Japanese honeysuckle, yuccas, red hot poker, chives, grape hyacinth, tansy, bouncing Bess, pinks, sweet peas, pink evening primroses, golden spur columbine, snapdragons, blue flax, green leaf five eyes, hollyhock, winecup mallow, Queen Anne’s lace, anthemis, yarrow, purple aster, dandelions, June, needle, and cheat grass

What’s still gray or gray-green: Leaves on Apache plume, cliff rose, fernbush, winterfat, snow-in-summer, catmint, Silver King artemisia

What’s still red: Leaves on woods and pasture roses

Tasks: Before it turned cold, I finished clipping dead wood from the Siberian pea, and moved on to the lilacs. They have been neglected for a number of years, and the dead wood turns too hard to cut easily.

Animal sightings: Goldfinches on Maximilian sunflowers, chickadees

Weekly update: My sense of normal temperatures in New Mexico is that it gets very cold just before the winter solstice and very warm before the summer one. Very cold means below 20, and temperatures remain cool into January. Summers are always hot, but usually in the 80s.

That pattern changed in the past few years. 2016 was a warm winter. It got down to 18 on November 30 and the coldest morning was 12 on January 7. The next year was dry and cold. It went down to 10 on November 26, and the coldest day was 5 on December 12. Last year was a bit better: temperatures fell to 17 on November 9 an the coldest day was 2 on January 27th.

This year we had a normal spring; it didn’t get really hot until June 25, and then afternoon temperatures were in the 90s through the first week in September. We went from mid summer to early fall, bypassing late summer when the annuls bloom and produce seed.

Then, on October 11 we went from early fall to early winter, with no late fall. Trees did not get the gradual messages to prepare for winter, and slow their metabolisms. Instead, morning temperatures went from the low 20s to 18. They rose into the 20s for days, then hit the occasional 18. This week temperatures dropped to 16 on October 29, 15 on Halloween, 11 on Friday and 18 on All Souls’ Day.

No autumn color. Leaves died and fell in masses. When I walked around yesterday, leaves on some, like the sandcherries that had turned red, fell as soon as they were touched.

This year the anomalies in temperature coincided with problems in areas far removed from this high mountain country. Temperatures had fallen into the 80s in the second week of August, presaging a normal transition into late summer. Then Hurricane Dorian began forming in the Atlantic on August 23, and on the 25th our temperatures returned to the 90s and stayed there until the hurricane finally dissipated on September 7.

Our cold weather was preceded by high winds that accompanied the fronts. In California, the utilities started cutting power in anticipation of Santa Ana winds on October 9. That was more than a week before we got high winds on October 17. Winds there continued. We got four days of high winds starting a week ago Saturday, and then the severely cold mornings.

The year has been one of traveling smoke. In May we started getting smoke from fires in México that lasted until the first hurricanes formed in the Pacific in late June. Then, during the worst of the winds we got smoke from California. Since Thursday it has been going north.

One begins to think about what climate change looks like. Some nursery catalogs advertise one can now grow zone 6 plants like azaleas because the USDA map shows average winter temperatures warming. That may be true on the east coast and at low elevations.

Here, we’ve had two years without many late summer annual flowers. They won’t die out, because, of course, they aren’t natives. The seed is grown in warmer climates and sold here. They will continue to thrive elsewhere.

It won’t be a return to the Carboniferous Age of Ferns either. The plants of early summer like bouncing Bess, pink evening primroses, and golden spur columbine did very well. Then in early fall, they grew everywhere after temperatures cooled.

I think of them as sub-alpine although most really are lower elevation plants. I used the term incorrectly to refer to plants that thrive in cool temperatures.

They’ll keep our corner of the world green when plants that can’t handle the extremes either die or go dormant in the summer. It won’t become a landscape of sere browns, but it also may not be one where corn, melons, and tomatoes do well.

When I looked around at what still was green in my yard yesterday, it was an inventory of those invaders that were shoving everything aside this past September. Many, like golden spur columbine and cliff roses, were native to this area. Others were varieties imported from the north, like Cheyenne privet and Queen Anne’s lace.

Many were bulbs, like the grape hyacinths, or had thick, fleshy, deeply-buried roots like the yuccas and hollyhocks. Many produce seeds, but the perennials can survive for a few years without reproducing. They don’t need to adapt to the atmospheric changes. They did that eons ago.

Notes on photographs: Taken 2 November 2019.
1. Cliff rose (Purshia mexicana).
2. Cheyenne Privet (Ligustrum vulgare).
3. Fernbush (Chamaebatiaria millefolium).

End notes:
Wikipedia. "2019 Atlantic Hurricane Season"

Olga R. Rodriguez and Janie Har. "California Faces Historic Power Outage Due to Fire Danger." Associated Press 8 October 2019. WSB television website, Atlanta.