When I pictured a garden in the Chihuahuan desert, sun ripened, sanyasi saffron orange apricots weighing down the limbs of the tree was a dominant piece (along with pomegranates featured in another recent post).
It has taken three years but on one limb alone there are currently more little golden globes ripening than I’ve harvested in the past two seasons combined.
Birds, winds and other unforeseens willing, it won’t be long now before I’m biting into the oh! so sweet deliciousness that is a sun ripened, desert apricot. These little desert apricots, eaten straight off the tree, are the meaning of manna in my dictionary.
While we are admiring bright golden things, it is also suddenly height of sunflower season at the hacienda.
Towering 7 and 8 foot even maybe 9 foot tall giants dominate the horizons front and back. I do appreciate the privacy of front porch screening they provide, and don’t mind the seasonal peek-a-boo view of Turtleback Mountain
Colours range from butter yellow to orange to brown and everything in between. For scale that’s an 8 ft privacy fence behind these pictured below.
All this season’s sunflowers, like the Hopi Red Dye amaranth, were self/bird sown. I have had to do some ruthless weeding to prevent too much crowding.
The Little Brown Birds and now Little Yellow Birds eat voraciously from the sunflower leaves but there are plenty to go around. It also seems to have distracted them from their fixation on demolishing the yarrow flowers and rainbow chard.
Note: the image above was taken just at sunrise as I was finishing up watering. Sadly the path is not wet from rain but soon: in a month, maybe, we can hope for monsoons.
Until then we hold fast, while the temperatures climb relentlessly. Unusually for us, nights are getting really hot too. The norm is a blessed cooling at night in the desert. Still I will take anything below 80 at night and open up the hacienda for a few hours just pre-dawn for the cool, if still somewhat smokey air. The Black Fire just a few miles west north west of the hacienda is still burning wild, around 25% contained today.
Note: because of geography and prevailing wind direction, the hacienda is in no danger. Smoke, ash and cinders are the only discomfort, unlike all the animal, vegetable and mineral beings in the direct path who have had to flee or, if rooted, stand their ground and be consumed, transformed by flames.