Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch: Catching Up

Hello blog friends! After blogging about the big fire it must seem like I dropped off the face of the earth. I haven't, really. I've just been preoccupied with projects that require completion before the monsoon rains come. So, I've spent most of the last couple of weeks outside, working in the sun...

...and covered in dirt from head to toe, literally. Kris would laugh when she saw my dirty face at the end of the day. I've been too pooped to post.

One of the projects that's not quite done yet is resetting the flagstone next to our driveway. It has settled at least an inch, over the years, to become an area where water and snowmelt accumulate. It doesn't drain well at all, making a trip to the curb with trash and recycle bins bumpy and a hazardous. While taking up the stone, I turned one of them over to find this...

...a heart eroded into the underside of the stone. I know there's a metaphor here, somewhere.

The biggest undertaking this summer, however (and the cause of my absence in blog-world), has been landscaping the front and side yards. Our front yard has a steep east-facing slope, steep enough that, by 9 a.m., the angle of the sun would make it high noon on the slope. Nothing but weeds would grow there, and we had almost given up hope until I had the idea of terracing it. Shortly after the fire, we knuckled down and dug in.

With the terracing finished, we planted a native grass, blue gramma, which will not need to be watered once it's well established - which is a major plus in the high desert. Since the gramma is sensitive to traffic, we made a flagstone walkway, across the front of the house, to the terraced rock garden on the south slope. If we'd had our thinking caps on, we'd have laid a path from the sidewalk to the front door before putting the grass seed in. It will just have to wait...

Then we applied our labors to the south side yard, laying another flagstone path alongside the house, to the back yard gate.

That flower bed up against the house used to contain a mass of sickly iris that never bloomed. Up under the eaves and in the shadow of our ponderosa pine, it doesn't see much of what little rain we do get. I love iris, but they need quite a bit of water, and I since I'm all about native/adapted plants and low maintainence landscaping, I'm replacing them with penstemons, cosmos, spirea, mallows, and yarrow. It's become the temporary home for wayward flowering weeds...

About ten days after the grass seed went in, and about 3 hours a day spent watering (to get the grass up and established before the monsoon rains could wash it all away...), this is how it's all morphed.

I love how it's turning out. Since this is the first successful planting, we're seeing alot of weed seedlings, so I'm out for a couple of hours every morning on weed patrol. Monsoon has begun and twice daily waterings are over; next year we should be able to skip watering altogether. The neighbors are in shock, and wondering what those two crazy girls are going to do next...

Here are some photos of the rest of our gardens. First are the white yarrows. There are also red and pink ones in other parts of the yard:

The first squash...it bloomed this morning.

Skyrockets are in the foreground. A hummingbird came to breakfast among them this morning. Indian paintbrush and desert four o'clocks grace the midground.

The first bell pepper:

I love hollyhocks. My maternal grandmother, an avid gardener like me, had them when I was a child.

This is a fairly new bed, with chives, mallows, cosmos, tarragon, and Apache plume.

The pole beans, I believe, are going to outgrow these tomato cages. Vegetable gardening is done in raised beds, 3' by 6', filled with 12" of carefully composted soil. A must in volcanic cinder land.

This is one of my favorite flowers of the desert southwest. It's called by several names, most commonly indian blanket, or blanket flower. It reminds me of an Arizona sunset.

Art play has been pretty limited, snatched when I've had too much sun, or while waiting for lunch to settle. And it's all been little projects that I could finish quickly. I started playing with the book, "Collage Lab," mentioned in a prior post, and got through the chapter on texture. I'm finding it really nice to go back to basics and be reminded of fun techniques I'd forgotten, and a few new things I never learned. These are a few of the sample exercises and experiments in texture I played with:

They'll probably be bound together in a book as sort of a visual primer on texture.

There's been quite a bit of mail art, too. Some of these are not quite finished yet, needing text of some kind before being sent off.

All this heavy labor in the yard has left me feeling my age, bum knee, back problems, post-dislocated shoulders. My chiropractor shakes her head every week when I tell her what I've been up to. I looked in the mirror a couple of days ago, and received a huge shock. I didn't recognize myself. Who is that old woman? I wondered. What did they do with Sharon, and when will they bring her back? Last time I noticed, I was just a girl, middle aged, maybe forty-two-ish, and on the inside, I'm really just a wise fifteen-year-old. How disorienting to see myself growing...old.

Kris brought me this one day, a cupcake, from the local cupcake lady, "Katy's Cupcakes," who operates out of a lunch truck parked in front of the old Furniture Barn on Milton...