Desert Blooms

"The sky darkens with clouds. Thunder rolls, lightning flashes and then the rain pours down. It is the male rain. The female rain, on the other hand, is gentle, with a soothing effect. In Navajo belief, there is a male and female to all things above, below and around us. To Navajos, rain is one of the four main elements of Earth; light, air and pollen are the others. It is said by wise ones that if you have no respect for the rain, and your thoughts and words are bad while it rains, the sacred forces will punish you. The Navajo have a ceremony that restores harmony and balance with nature."

Last night we had female rain.  This afternoon we went for a walk in the open space.

Spring Clean-Up

To save water, the best Albuquerque landscaping does not use grass.  Many of the yards, including ours, are covered in decorative rock mulches, with patterns made of various types, colors, and sizes of rock, sometimes bordered with brick or timbers.  A few small trees, shrubs, cactus, or other ornamental plantings are included.  One of the things that attracted us to our neighborhood, Four Hills, is that because it's an older development, it has mature trees.  That made us feel more at home, but the leaves and pine needles are presenting a bit of a challenge when they drop into the rock mulch!

 As you can see, there are tiny reddish rocks in the foreground, larger ones on the hill, and two different size accent rocks.  There is a brick walkway and some flagstone.  The steps are timbers with brick.  All this makes it very difficult to remove the leaves.  I tried raking, but it messes up the stone too much and ruins the landscaping.  Below, you can see what I'm talking about with the leaves.

When we lived in the apartment, I saw the landscape guys use leaf blowers to get the leaves out of the rocks, then they raked/shoveled/swept them up.  So that's what we thought we'd try.  We decided to borrow a leaf blower and a leaf sucker from someone Stephen works with and see whether these would be useful pieces of equipment to own.  The plan had been to do this last fall, but we dropped the ball.  Now there are more leaves and needles, and they are more embedded.  Ugh.

Stephen used the blower and I used the sucker.  It sucked.  I mean, the job sucked.  It was noisy and took forever and was only somewhat effective.  I raked up the leaves that Stephen blew into the grass and filled three lawn bags.  The leaf sucker mulches, making really tiny pieces that take up much less room, so that was a plus.

We took a break for lunch, then tackled the front.  The sucker wouldn't suck up the pine needles. 

I started to work in front of the house, but the afternoon wind picked up to the point where I couldn't do anything and I couldn't see.  So we quit for today, and there are no after pictures.  It looks better, but it's definitely not a professional looking job.  Perhaps tomorrow we can finish up and be happier with the result.  So far, we do not like this job at all.  But it's possible that if we actually did it twice a year, it wouldn't be such a pain.