Orchard Before Harvest

As I'm kicking through the falling leaves

Loving the clear blue skies over this pecan orchard

And watching little dog Petey run ten miles for every mile I walk

Booming machinery works the next orchard over

 Autumn skies there patched by clouds of dust

My heart lifts a bit at this morning scene

And I feel hope, hope, hope

The frost has come

The trees stand ready

The nuts may not know what's coming

*****

P.S. I hope you used your secret decoder rings!

The Quiet Water Arrives

In the night, the dogs wake us. Just outside our bedroom window there are men in the pecan orchard with flashlights. The quietly flowing irrigation water is here; water moving silently without the noisy groundwater well pumps we have gotten used to in these drought years.

This year's irrigation allocation started its journey a week and a half ago when released from the Elephant Butte Dam upstream. It has made its way down the state through the dry bed of the Rio Grande, branching off into canals and ditches to the gates that let it into fields and orchards.

The water comes to the farmers when the Elephant Butte Irrigation District (known around here as EBID--the initials; or spoken as a word--Ebid) schedules it, thus the voices at three in the morning. They are checking to see that the water has gotten to the farthest reaches of this orchard before moving to the next.

The soft Spanish voices call out to each other that the orchard is full. They carefully step across the slick flooded clay and drive off quietly in their pickup truck to close one orchard's gate and open another.

 The thirsty spadefoot toads begin their joyous songs.

 

At dawn, the toads are quiet; if you turn up your volume you can mostly hear doves and roosters waking with the day.

Reflections on a Reflection, for Skywatch

I love when the farmer floods the pecan orchards surrounding our house. They look like this. 

Or, they can be rotated to look like this. You can hardly tell that this is upside-down, or can you?

Using the same upside-down view and some of the special effects at Picnik, they can also look like this...

HSL (hue, saturation, and lightness) variations

Another HSL

And another

 ... or this...

Heat Map

 ... or even this...

HDR-ish (HDR stands for high dynamic range imaging)

For skies of all hues and degrees of saturation, be sure to visit Skywatch Friday.

The Scariest I Ever Saw, for Skywatch

The pecan harvest is over now, as we complete our first year living here in our adobe house in the middle of the pecan orchard. We have pounds and pounds of pecans in the freezer, just from the nuts that fell into our yard when the trees were shaken. 

Last year, I missed this part of the post-harvest pruning. When everything else is finished, a huge machine with eight really big saws mounted on it comes through and trims the top branches of all the trees. It's a very scary and very loud machine, indeed. It moves down the rows between the trees fairly quickly, and in no time at all the tree branches have all been trimmed. 

However, now I understand how all the tops of the trees are so even and pyramid-shaped.

For photos looking up at various things and into the sky, be sure to visit Skywatch Friday.

What I See in the Morning*

Fragrant odor of the dawn,

Sweet incense to waking souls

While the fresh dew spreads the lawn

And your spirit day controls

Let me, underneath this tree

Standing, be possessed of thee.

~James Herbert Morse

This is what I see each day when I let the dogs and cats out for their morning constitutional. It is so beautiful and cool at this early hour.

I'm really posting this for those of you who picture the desert as a sandy, empty, and desolate place. Who knew that a place called the Chihuahuan Desert could look like this?

I feel so lucky to live here.

*Maybe I should have called this post What I See in the Morning Before I Put on My Glasses. Looks a little blurry, doesn't it?