New Life

Despite cloudy skies and rain, it is anything but gloomy outside. New life is bursting forth wherever one looks, and I didn't have to go outside the fence to find a lot of it.

The combination of a steep hill and "soil" that 50% rock and 50% clay riddled with tunnels, has reduced us to some pretty hardscrabble planting methods. As I was pulling out the dead ice plant, which was so spectacular just a year ago (see my post from March 9, 2013) a very tiny rodent-like creature no more than two inches long leaped out of an agave and scurried off. Could this possibly be what is girdling every single unprotected plant with tunnels? It hardly seems possible that even an army of these tiny things could wreak so much havoc. OilMan has waged a battle worthy of Caddyshack against the unseen enemy but was our first sighting of any possible culprit.

I love rocks both large and small and we are blessed, or cursed, depending on your point of view, with lots of beautiful ones. Dana has been building beautiful little walls around many of the new plants to try to keep the soil from washing away from their roots. As if our own plot didn't cough up lots of them whenever a hole is dug in the ground, we collect them on our morning walks through the fields, now running with creeks. Dana put a huge orange one which she dug out of the field behind us, on the slope outside our living room window. If you can't beat "em, join "em.

There are red mushrooms springing up under the oak trees and the large shrub outside our back door is blooming spectacularly. I liked the contrast of the new blooms with the lichen covered branches, behind them, and if you look closely at them, you can see the clusters of leaf buds at the ends.