My Spider is Bigger Than Your Spider

I've been seeing a news story on Facebook and other places about the terror of a New Hampshire family when they found a black widow spider inside a box of organic grapes. The spider caused a big stir in the local and even the national media.

These photos were taken by the Fremont, NH family and published in various places around the Internet

That got me to thinking about how brave we must be to live in New Mexico, where even the plants can grab you and the spiders are not the only creepy-crawlies we must face on a daily basis.

Even the plants can grab you; this one looks pretty
but it wants to hurt you. Trust me. 

For example, I know a lady who knits. She is mild-mannered and kindly, and you would never suspect her of heart-stopping bravery, yet every night when she gets up to go to the bathroom she carries a black light so that she can avoid stepping on the little nocturnal scorpions that scamper across her tile floors.

When we go for walks in the nearby desert, we carry walking sticks to let the rattlesnakes know we are coming. We like to coexist in safety. 

Nobody panics, everyone gets along

Occasionally, we come across a snake who wants as little to do with us as we want to do with him/her. Now, I am a gentle retired librarian and nobody called the press when I met this fellow. We just both went on our way.

Now that I think of it, we live risky lives of constant danger that would send many Eastern folks scurrying right back to the airport. Lots of black widow spiders live on our front porch and in our garage. Those pesky sticky webs of theirs are everywhere. Fox News doesn't seem to care a bit. We just watch where we stick our hands. 

And those bitty old black widows are nothing, compared to our tarantulas. I helped one safely cross the road in front of our house one day. It didn't even make the evening news. 

This tarantula was interfering with traffic on a road near Tucumcari, NM.
That's my sister's shoe he is patting. He chased me across the highway when I took his picture.

Are You Ready For Some Cactus?

Springtime is just as exciting in the high desert as it is anywhere else. It's just--well, different. 

The pale pastels I was used to in New England--daffodil yellows, crocus pinks, soft lilac lavenders--are replaced by the pastels of the landscape itself. Apparently this new Spring style has been growing on me over the years and I've just realized that I would miss the sun-washed (washed out, truth be told) colors of springtime here--the pale blue shades of the sky; the soft greens of the budding trees in the river valley; and, yes, the pale adobe brown of the little houses and of the wind-driven dust storms. 

Springtime means growth in the garden, of course. Here are some of the stars of our blazing hot southern-facing front yard. The roses that I blithely planted, all nestled up against the adobe walls (knowing that they always appreciated a warm wall in New Hampshire) have long since dried up and given up the ghost; but the cacti are thriving. Lesson learned, Yankee transplant!

So, get ready. The pale colors of Spring in the Mesilla Valley are about to be punctuated by some hot pops of flamboyant cactus flower colors. But first come the leaves or pads or thorns...

The-cholla-we-never-should-have-planted

Lots and lots of new cactus pads coming--those are the rounded things--and lots of flower buds, too (the pointy buds)

This one has some wonderful lavender tones in the pads that you can't really see in the photo
My constant gardening companion, Pete, sends his greetings (upper left)

Detail, new pad coming out.
As much as I love the colors of this cactus, it is the very WORST one
for getting its little almost-invisible needles stuck in you.
Those little things are called glochids and here is an article (for my future reference,
and yours, too) telling how to remove them from your skin.

The center of this plant matured and died away a couple of years ago and now its descendants are coming to life. That's a hollyhock leaf trying to shade the little cactus--more about hollyhocks in a later post. 

Here is the same bud, opened up later the
same day. POP!

Spring in the Desert Garden

When we bought our little vintage adobe house in 2009, the yard was barren. There was a hot strip between the covered porch and the fence, and I was determined to fill it with color. 

It's been a learning experience for a gardener used to the abundant rainfall and loamy, rocky soil of New Hampshire. Here, we have almost no rain at all (maybe 8 inches total in a good year), blazing sun reflected off a south-facing wall, and hard clay soil. Some things work, like these flowering cacti. Some things do NOT work here, like the roses and irises I see blooming luxuriantly in other parts of town. 

Hollyhocks adore our yard and put on an amazing show every year. These older, short ones are just starting to bloom now. Our plants self seed, and I just move the seedlings around a little. My knitting friend, Diane, gave me a little packet of seeds from her plants up on the East Mesa part of town a few years ago, and the rest is history. I have sent my seeds, in turn, to gardening friends in Nevada, Northern California, and Washington state. 

I am hoping for great things from this scrawny-looking tangerine crossvine, just planted a couple of weeks ago. I would love to train it to drape from the porch roof. We'll see.

This brutal-looking plant is the kind of thing that really thrives here. It started from one cactus pad in 2010 and will soon be immense. I just hope we can control it, because you can't go near it to prune without heavy gloves and long-handled tools, and even then it will find a way to get you with its thorns (painful) and tiny glochids (stiff hairs, way more painful and very difficult to get out once they are embedded in your skin). Why do we put up with it? Well, it's here now, and is very beautiful in its way. It has many shades of purple and aqua in those pads, and it will be flowering soon, too. 

I should have taken these photos earlier in the morning. It would have been easier to see what I was doing and the photos might be in focus! The desert bird of paradise (known to us as The Bertie Memorial Tree) on the right and the Texas lilac out of sight just beyond it both provide some much-needed shade just three years after being planted. 

This was such a rookie gardener mistake--I thought that cacti would be slow-growing and planted these too close together. I like the sharp colors, though. 

These hollyhocks around the corner from the other, smaller ones may not look like much right now, but stand back! I'm expecting a wonderful show soon. The plants are at least 6 feet high and still growing taller ever day. They colonized themselves in a partly shady east-facing bed where nothing had grown before. There are some larkspurs down under there somewhere, which will add some more color to all the hollyhock pinks. 

There you have it, my April report for the garden. What's growing (or about to grow) in your garden? 

In the Garden This Morning

Just a couple of weeks ago, this was the garden scene from the front porch: I was happy for the flowers, but things were pretty sparse and the trees were still bare. 

With the arrival of Spring, our annual jungle-look flower garden starts taking shape out front. I wish you could have heard the morning birdsong as I took these photos. 

I love the early morning light. Even the spent pansy blossoms are glorious.

We are just at the end of pansy season; I planted these last November
and they have lasted all winter. The heat of April is getting to them now.

It's hard to get a shot of these brilliant cactus blooms: They are so much better in real life!

First blossoms on the Bertie Memorial Tree; a gift from Helen, this desert
bird of paradise was planted as a memorial to our dear Bertie Pierre

We are at the very beginning of hollyhock season; hundreds of buds
are waiting to open 

Snack

Who snacked on this piece of unfriendly cactus?

While Beez and I were out riding our bikes across the big Las Cruces flood control dam, I noticed this prickly pear (Opuntia) with a great big bite taken out of it. Now, if you've ever dealt with this plant, as I have in my garden, you will know that it is full of tiny, threadlike prickly awful things right where those cute little polka dots are on the pads.

I'm not talking about the big obvious thorns, but the all-but invisible "hair-like prickles called glochids," that get stuck in your fingers and other places. I know this all too well from carrying a heavy pot with a prickly pear planted in it. The pot shifted unexpectedly and I lived with glochids stuck in my mid-section for a while until I figured out how to remove them.

Knowing these things about prickly pears, I was surprised to find that someone out there in the wild used them to snack on. However, I just googled around for a bit and found that livestock, javelinas, and coyotes will take a bite of the juicy pads. As a matter of fact, the young pads (nopales) can be peeled and eaten by people, and the fruits (tunas) can be used to make jelly. A friend of mine just made a batch of cactus fruit jelly and I admire her for it.

As for me, I have a glochid stuck in my thumb again. A year ago I wouldn't have even known its name.

*****

For more information:

Prickly Pear Cactus, DesertUSA

Opuntia; article from Wikipedia: Includes information about prickly pears as food, medication, and as a source of cochineal for dye (made from a scale insect that makes the plant its home).

I Had No Idea

Cactus variation Too Mean to Die (what it's called at our house, since we all bear scars from it)

Last year was my first experience with planting cacti. I bought my plants from a local nursery and assumed that they could survive any weather in our high desert climate--the cold winters, the baking summers, and the temperature extremes ranging from 10 to 100+ degrees F.

This past winter was a difficult one with a prolonged spell of 9 degrees F. In a "normal" winter (do we have these anymore?) we might occasionally get down that low in the night, but the temps usually rise well above freezing during the day. Not this winter! 

Everything suffered, plumbing was a mess, and a good many plants were killed off. My barrel cacti were victims--you can see them here, back when they were thriving. However, all three of the prickly pear cacti survived and are making huge strides this Spring.

Opuntia basilaris (Beaver Tail Prickly Pear)

I have never watched a cactus grow up close and I thought it might be a very slow process--but look at this little guy! Funny little red buds appeared along the base of the single pad after the top "leaf" fell off in the freeze. Within days, they grew and grew until they started looking like pads themselves. They tell me if the plant gets too big, goes in the wrong direction, or if I want another one somewhere, I only need to break off a pad, let it callus over, then stick it into some sandy soil. You can see that this little single pad will soon turn into a bush

If you want to know more about prickly pears, you should check out this DesertUSA page, which includes all kinds of information, photos, and even a video that shows prickly pear food products (and margaritas!). I also found an article on Wikipedia that explains, among other things, that parts of the plant can be used as a binder in the making of adobe. Obviously, these surviving cacti were the perfect choice for growing along our south-facing adobe wall. 

Cross and Thorns

As I mentioned yesterday in the post titled Fixer, many of the more tender cacti around town have been killed off by our spell of bitter weather this winter. We should have known better, pushing the planting zones as we do with plants that are possibly too delicate for our temperature extremes. Now we are all paying for our hubris with piles of dead and rotting plants around our yards.

However, this particular form of prickly pear has made it through. I found this example in Mesilla, but I have a smaller version in my very own yard. We all bear scars from planting it and I don't think anything will ever hurt it as much as it manages to hurt us.

Too mean to die

Every once in a while, we come across other plants that made it through, perhaps because they were sheltered against a south-facing wall, or maybe because they were watched over by some other form of protection. I love this one by a blue gate in Mesilla.

Cactus Garden Update

When I planted the beginning of the cactus garden back in mid-June, we all marveled that I had to remind myself NOT to do anything to it except for a light watering every three weeks. I cancelled a couple of those waterings because of our summer rains. In spite of what seemed like neglect to me, the little plants have been thriving. 

Here they are in mid-September, after three months in their adobe soil (with half sand mixed in for drainage). I've put in "before" pictures, too. 

Echinocereus triglochidatus (good grief!), "White Sands" before

... and three months after. Although the camera angle was different, you can see that there are maybe twice as many rows of thorns on the sides, indicating lots of growth. I'm glad I have these photos for comparison. Cacti are like kids, they grow, whether you notice it or not, from day to day

Mexican fire barrel cactus, before...

... and after. Not such dramatic growth as the first one. 

Euphorbia? It was really small in June...

You have to look hard to see the original part of the plant. It's grown so much that it might actually needs staking, although  I've never seen that done with a cactus. I like the way it throws its shadow on the adobe wall. 

Farmers Market in August: A Little Cactus Tale

The Las Cruces Farmers Market was as crowded as we've ever seen it this past Saturday. It's a wonderful place to watch people, listen to music, get a massage, buy fresh produce, try out an herbal remedy, get a sack of fresh green chiles roasted, and...

... we always need to STOP to see the nice couple who sell the cacti and other low-water plants, just in case we find something to add to our garden. 

We were just digging around in our pockets for some cash to buy the last beavertail cactus when a little boy--oblivious to us, but focused on the cactus--leaned down in front of us, scooped it up, and said, "I think I've found my cactus! What's it called?" The cactus lady explained that its name was Opuntia basilaris. Handing over his two dollars and fifty cents (what a steal!) he said, 

"I think I'll call it Steve."

Then the budding young gardener ambled off, smiling and hugging his cactus pot to his chest. We were charmed. Next week, we'll try to get there early enough to buy a Steve of our own.

Not Steve

The Beginnings of a Cactus Garden

Golden Barrel Cactus

We live in an adobe house in the Chihuahuan Desert, so of course we should plant a cactus garden! However, this kind of gardening is very new to me and the rules are the opposite of everything I've learned about planting and gardening, which is to dig deep, add humus and other goodies to the soil to help it hold moisture, leave a little well around the plant to help water go right to the roots, then cover the area around the plant with some nice mulch, to slow evaporation and to keep the soil cool and moist.

Mexican Fire Barrel

Not so with a cactus garden. Here, you drill into the rich, but adobe-hard clay soil; add one part sand to one part chopped up soil, even out the soil around the new transplant to discourage too much water getting to the roots; then spread some nice hot-in-the-sun gravel around the new planting.

Of course, I've left out the part where you must persuade the very user-unfriendly spiny plant to leave its container and maneuver it into the hole that you have prepared for it. The man who sold us the cacti was most helpful with this part: He suggested making a kind of collar out of a piece of rolled up newspaper to wrap around the plant while tilting the pot on its side and gently sliding the thorny fellow out and into place. It worked!

Some kind of Euphorbia? Help! I've lost the little label

Now comes the hard part for a former New England gardener who has always equated abundant water with plant love. I will be watering the new cacti so few times until they are established that I have had to schedule the waterings on the computer. It will be weeks between waterings, and this is the right thing to do, as the most common cause of garden cactus failure is overwatering.