Accidental storm chaser

In monsoon season the sky owns all the drama.

From sultry mornings with deep belly thundery rumbles, which often go nowhere, but occasionally deliver a blessing of a shower, to noontime desert parched vistas where we see the rain falling in the far distant elsewhere or swelling cumulus puffs flaunting promise, monsoon season is all about hope.

The place I currently call home is the Chihauhauan desert, a transnational geographical area spanning the Mexican state of Chihauhau, a swathe of west Texas, and parts of southern New Mexico.

Even for an arid geography by definition, the Chihauhauan desert has been in a serious drought cycle for a while now. Year after year, monsoons have failed, delivering only a few mean and paltry storms. This spring the NASA Observatory observed, (yes that’s technically what they do), that our dust storm season (yes that’s what spring is officially called here) was the worst with the most low visibility blown dust days since the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s. A ninety year record! Hmmm. Their interesting (to me who lives and breathes this earth, this air, this dust, these spores and detritus) report is here. I hope. US official Government websites, perhaps through a ketamine enhanced discovery of their inner faux shaman, shapeshift often in these current days of miracles and wonder, and sadly aren’t as reliable a reference and data resource as they used to be. Sigh.

Recently Janis truck and I left town by another road, not the one that takes us up into the refreshingly cool mountains and the Gila National Forest featured in the previous post. Looking for rocks and other interesting things. Ostensibly. Sometimes it’s just to get a visual reminder of how the county I live in gets to be called Sierra.

Out there in the desert where one can see forever, or at least to distant blue mountain ranges which surround, we briefly became accidental storm chasers, the little white truck and I.

In the middle of this nowhere, this nothingness, this ver verlate vlakte sonder even die kreun van ossewa,** this place of thinly scattered gaunt cattle, cactus and dust, we also found a descanso, a small roadside shrine, for Benji. I think Benji might have been a cat. Curiouser and curiouser since eye could find no habitation. Typically descansos, which occur along the highways with too sad a frequency, are at the site of a death. A cat domestic enough to be called Benji and to have earned a bird patrol badge, died out here?

Sidebar: While not all states allow these very personal shrines alongside roads or in public spaces, descansos are protected under New Mexico state law. In 2007, the state added a new section to its criminal code making it a misdemeanor to “knowingly or willfully deface or destroy, in whole or in part, a descanso, also known as a memorial, placed on a public road right of way to memorialize the death of one or more persons.” Those found guilty of desecration can get jail time and a fine of up to $1,000.

Some descansos can be really elaborate.

Judging by this series of horse crippling burrows, someone else lives out here too, but I don’t know who. In the middle of this very hot day they weren’t showing themselves.

Tearing gaze from the spectacular sky, and realizing that we didn’t have enough petrol in the tank to drive all the way to where it was raining, Janis truck and I found an arroyo with enough spare rocks to make some spirals around Firecracker and Dragon’s Blood, the new sedum roommates in the Garden of Earthly Paradise, which is such a lush and lovely oasis only because I water and make rockery pockets to hold earth until such time as roots take hold and (hopefully) take over the earth holding duties. Rock hunting is a thing Janis truck and I like to do with regularity.

A few (three small ones so far) monsoon storms have helped the current lush greenness of the Garden of Earthly Delights, bringing with them swirling wind to set the mostly gone to seed sunflowers dancing. These storms are beautiful noisy deluges which briefly obscure Turtleback mountain, flash with brilliant lightning, rumble with thunder and pound with rain. Then come the rainbows.

Ten minutes later the sun is out again, and everything steams.

The floral roommates respond in flowers.

In the clear light of afterstorm, everything’s pink and peachy.

I didn’t eat all the hermerocallis (day lily)buds before they opened, though they are a tasty treat when breaded or lightly spiced and oven roasted.

Madhu Ras Rajhastan desert honey melons are currently using all their neighbors to clamber, pull, crawl and climb. Talk about community!

All this is, I think, to get to display their flowers in the most advantageous way to pollinators and ensure the light eating cells in leaves get maximum sunlight exposure.. I hope these vines will produce some fruit and that those will be little honey sweet baby melons, but the results of open pollination, if it happens, are always unknown until revealed and thus known. These plants are grown from seed saved in 2021. As we all know curcumis melo is particularly promiscuous. I don’t know who else the bees visited that year, or what my neighbors were growing.

Here is a blog post I wrote back then in July 2021 about the Madhu Ras melons as they were forming fruit and another in August 2021, at harvest. The latter post receives an inordinate amount of internet traffic. Why? I hate to think about possible intentions for the search terms people are using to stumble on this particular blog post with such regularity. I fervently hope all of them are truly looking for information on harvesting Madhu Ras melons, but I know there’s a dark underbelly exists on the internet and I also know artificial intelligence is very very dumb, very often.

I’m a little more sure of other current plantings from saved seeds. The cowpeas and Christmas Lima beans will probably be true. In fact I’ve read that one can grow different varieties of cowpeas as close as ten foot apart and they won’t cross pollinate.

The kitchen window planting of Vigna unguiculata (cowpeas, Southern peas, black eyed peas), from seeds saved in 2019, recently enjoyed a whirl with a monsoon storm. Sunflowers joined in the fiesta of wind and pelting rain, surviving miraculously unbroken. I watched from the kitchen window with bated breath, a parent watching their offspring doing something dangerous, knowing I can’t intervene.

I’ve given these Vigna unguilata (above on right side of image) some repurposed tomato cages in case they want to climb. Since I wasn’t even living in the shala at the time, was spread rather thin, working an unsustainable 150 miles round trip away to pay for the reroofing, replumbing, rewiring work which had to be done before I could move in, and didn’t keep very good records, I have lost track of what exact variety of Vigna unguiculata these are. They are a beautiful sumptuous red brown pea with a darker speckle patterning to them.

My original seed was from Native Seed Search, a Tucson, Arizona based non profit with a seed bank and seed saving mission with a special focus on dry land adapted traditional and/or indigenous desert southwest peoples’ crops. They don’t always offer the same varieties for sale to the public each year. Fingers crossed I get a harvest enough of what I shall call Sumptuous Red Speckled cowpeas, to save seed and eat some bowls of good luck in the coming year. Some varieties of Vigna unguiculata, I have discovered, are sensitive to daylight/ nighttime length of light/dark and time their flowering accordingly. The complexity of plant intelligence never ceases to delight and amaze me. The more I learn the more awed I am.

I am trying another experiment outback with Ocimum basilicum (sweet basil) and different variety of Vigna unguiculata by growing them as an understory beneath very tall sunflowers.

I am removing lower sunflower leaves as they grow in size, for better air circulation and to allow for more light. My hope is that the sunflower stems will provide support should the Vigna unguiculata want to climb. It might be that this purple hulled pink eye variety planted here, doesn’t vine, and doesn’t get enough sun, but I hear a lot of local (amateur) chatter on the streets or rather at farmers market which constitutes my plaza, my town square, about gardening through the hottest months here only being possible with shade cloth. Why can’t sunflowers do what shade cloth does? Of course shade cloth doesn’t have the bossy domineering root systems which sunflowers might have. On the other hand they might just all get along.

Bottom line and truth: when the potatoes were done and it was time to prepare the bed to sow cowpea seeds, I couldn’t bring myself to pull out the magnificent, budding oh so tall volunteer sunflowers which had colonized the space at the back door. So we wait and watch.

I did try growing cowpeas interplanted with the fine showing of Hopi Blue corn which has taken over in the west front now that the garlic has all been harvested. Somebody, as yet unidentified, made all those cowpeas, a whole brand new, packed for 2025 season, $3.50 packet, disappear the minute they germinated. Humpfh.

Birds, do your duty and eat whoever is eating my germinating seeds. Please. Curve Bill Thrashers I’m looking especially at you and the Robins as representatives of the insectivores among the avian roommates. Just leave the earthworms alone. Thankyou.

I don’t think this is a Curve Bill Thrasher. Artificial Intelligence, from my iPhone photo app and 2 different bird identification apps tell me it’s an American Robin. Really? Maybe. Baby?

That said, thanks to regular watering but more especially a couple of gentle monsoon storms the Hopi Blue cornfield is easily achieving that “knee high by Fourth of July” gardener’s guide (in this county).

If you can’t make it out, my 25 cent thrift store wooden advertising ruler is 15 inches (38 cm) and my knees are about 20 inches (50 cm) from the ground. A very long time ago, an art professor, (the late great Robert Brooks) told me I had perfect Grecian proportions which made me a superb anatomy model, so my knee height should be golden mean, no?

I planted the Hopi Blue zea mays seeds late because, as regular readers might remember, I dithered with the garlic harvest, not sure whether it was ready or not. Cooler than normal spring etc. Then a hotter than average June and some lovely, energizing, ionizing rain has lit a rocket (of the best kind) behind the maize growth.

Such is gardening: a constant intricate weaving dance of different elements.

The quirky native wildflower Ratibida columnifera in bloom. Aka Mexican Hat or Prairie Coneflower.

I am once more covered in itchy bug bites from the blood lust of critters who come with the season of heat and storms. Small price to pay for the deliciousness of moisture.

Today’s essential tasks: treat all the overflowing (doesn’t take much - they are small) rainwater catchment barrels and birdbaths with mosquito dunks, and clean the gutters of debris which makes puddles. Before it gets too hot.

Also on the list is preparing areas for sowing some monsoon season seeds and continuing to work on paving a couple of dusty walkway areas which become lethally slippery mud puddles after rain.

After a few too many slips (thankyou yoga for giving me balance and fall prevention recovery moves) and almost falls in recent weeks, I’ve noted the warning and begun to pave parts of paradise. Not putting up a parking lot, though.

Like my ragbag aprons, paving materials for this walking not parking project are mostly from what I have lying around, hoarded from discarded, broken or no longer wanted piles I have found in various places. Having a little truck makes it all possible sometimes when “friends” (until you stop being useful, then they become strangers) are clearing their yards of “junk”. Being friendly with the yard manager of a hardware store after inventory has been taken and refund for breakage claimed, is also a useful resource. The way this country works, around this time of year, there is often a pile of broken pavers to be tossed in a dumpster. Some yard managers (not all - I’ve heard no as often as yes) don’t mind diverting those dumpster destined damaged pavers onto the loadbed of Janis truck. Saving cement from landfills. Is that even a thing?

** for those not familiar with Afrikaans or without a digital translator, these words translate as “far desolate plains without even the groan of ox wagons” and are a play on lines from Die Stem, the South African National anthem from 1957-1994, and are used today to invoke the loneliness, emphasize the Karoo-like emptiness of the desert area Janis truck and I explored on this day.

For the record or the curious, since 1997 the post apartheid South African National anthem is a hybrid of the 19th century Xhosa hymn Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika and Die Stem. The reality is that South Africa today attempts to embrace and represent ALL its multiplicity of cultures and heritages, challenging though that might be given its apartheid history, and contrary to false pronouncements by certain mean spirited and ignorant white supremacist tools.