Can you see the cottontail rabbit in this picture I took in our front yard? It froze when I appeared, and I was able to take a quick snapshot.

        

I recently realized I haven't seen any barn swallows this year! I know some people consider them nuisances because of their mud nests, but I think they're beautiful. I make Phil wait until the babies are hatched before he knocks down the nests, and of course they lay another batch of eggs before he has a chance. What I especially love about the swallows is how they all fly back to their nests just as the sun goes down. Their timing is amazing.

Anyway, their absence this year makes me a little uneasy. All the other birds (California quail, mourning doves, American robins, finches) seem to be here. Have the climate changes affected the swallows'  migration? Or have they found friendlier places around town to build their nests?

        

Did you know the Great American Backyard Campout is tonight? According to the National Wildlife Federation, the purpose of the campout  is "an opportunity for everyone to relive—or to experience for the first time—how much fun it is to spend a night sleeping under the stars and enjoying the sounds of nature."

I do have fond memories of family camping in Oregon when I was a kid. Although I don't actually remember any sounds of nature, I remember roasting marshmallows and waking up in my sleeping bag on chilly mornings smelling the bacon Mom was frying. I love sleeping with the windows open in the summer. The most common sound of nature we have around here at night is the coyote cacophony, which unfortunately sets off the sounds of suburbia—barking dogs.

I'm afraid I won't be registering as a backyard camper tonight. As appealing as it sounds, I could never get Phil to join me. And now that I'm grown up, I'm way too afraid of wildlife like spiders, garter snakes, and who knows what else.

        

All I know is I have potato plants growing. At this point I don't know if I'll have edible potatoes (big enough and not green) to eat at the end of the season or not. Here's where we are.



The coolers I planted potatoes in are above. The white things are egg shells from the compost; yes, I was too lazy to screen it.

Here's the first thing I'm not sure about. I originally planted a "Chieftain" (red) potato chunk in the center of each cooler. I waited for weeks but nothing grew (even though the potato chunks had sprouts on them when I planted them), so I planted leftover Yukon golds from the raised bed (see below) on each end of the coolers.

I think the leaves in the cooler on the left are not a potato plant at all but a melon from a seed in the compost. The leaves of the potato on the right look like the potatoes in the raised beds (Yukon golds), but I'm not sure. I "hilled" soil around it after I took the photo, but I'm afraid I buried a small, new Chieftain leaf when I did it (Chieftain leaves are rounded).


The photo above is of potatoes growing in cardboard boxes. I originally planted two chunks of Chieftain potatoes in each box. It took forever for them to come up, so I planted more leftover Yukon golds in the centers. Therefore, the plants in the two boxes on the left are Yukon golds and the ones in the two boxes on the right are Chieftains. I'm expecting to have both kinds in at least one box before it's all over.

Finally, here is the raised bed:


These are all Yukon golds. To plant them, I dug trenches almost to the bottom of the bed. I have "hilled" them up twice now. My problem is they look like they need to be "hilled" again and I don't have much soil to keep adding to them; even if I did, it would start spilling over the sides of the bed. As you can see, I've taken most of the soil out of a trench in the middle; I'm a little worried that doing that will expose the potatoes to sunlight and turn them green. I haven't seen any blossoms so far. But surely with all that foliage I'll get something edible out of this bed!

        

Just as Nevada's Basin and Range scenery starts to look good to transplants who stay here long enough, cactus plants are beautiful to some who grow them. In fact, people might assume cacti and our high desert conditions would go together like the Oregon coast and forests. We have to remember that even though it's dry and gets hot here, it also gets pretty cold. We have a few native cactus species around here but not many.

That's not to say we can't grow cacti in our gardens. A Sparks man, Charles Barnum, makes it look easy. He wrote in a letter to the RGJ last week, "I grow over 300 selected Coryphantha, Cylindropuntia, Opuntia, Echinocereus, Escobaria, Grusonia, Gymnocalycium, Mammillaria, Pediocactus and Sclerocactus. A few barrel cactus (Ferocactus) can grow in this area, if kept dry in the winter." He clarifies that "[l]ow temperatures coupled with wet soil kills cactus, not necessarily the cold."

Photos of some of his plants are featured on cactiguide.com. That, by the way, is a pretty interesting site. Its main purpose seems to be listing (and showing) every species of cactus. Believe it or not, the owner became interested in growing cacti as a teenager in Minnesota (and provides pictures to prove it). As you can imagine, he knows quite a bit about growing cacti in cold conditions.

Barnum advises those interested in growing cacti here to avoid Opuntia cacti and gravel. If I understand his letter correctly, he adds potting mix, garden lime, and pebble pumice to clay soil (which most of us have) mixed with sharp contractor's sand to obtain "a perfect soil." I wouldn't argue with him after seeing examples of his work.

        

The mound covered with with fuchsia flowers is an ice plant. If you look closely, you can see that it's a succulent and doesn't have normal stems and leaves. I just planted this one a couple of years ago, and it's a huge success, especially considering It has to survive in poor soil without being watered. Would you believe this plant has grown from one little plant from a six-pack in just a couple of years? The flowers are actually prettier in person; they almost look metallic.

Not all ice plants are winter hardy, but this one has been. It does look pretty bad in winter; in fact, it turns gray.

If you are thinking about trying one in your yard, remember there are lots of different colors. Try to find one in bloom or with a photo on the tag. Try to check the cold hardiness, too, if you want it to keep coming back.

In case you're curious about the other flowers, which also thrive in poor, dry soil, the purple spikes are penstemon and the blue flowers are flax. The spear-shaped leaves are from an iris that finished blooming a few weeks ago.

        

First, the welcome visitor: a tiger swallowtail (Papilio glaucus) that enjoyed the dianthus on the patio yesterday:

Now the intruder

It all started with the Idaho locust tree. I love purple flowers, and when I saw purple robe locusts (Robinia ambigua) around town I had to have one in my yard. (The Idaho locust, which I ended up buying, blooms a couple of weeks later than the purple robe.) It took a long time for it to get established in our salty clay, but this year it's really putting on a show.


One of the things that made me think it would be good for our yard was it was supposed to grow fast and tolerate heat and poor soil. (To give you a clue about our soil, the tree is surrounded by salt grass.)

I should have paid more attention to the rest of the description in the Sunset guide: "Drawbacks: wood is brittle, roots aggressive, plants often spread by suckers."

A few years ago, another locust tree popped up nearby. Cool! I thought. A free tree! It grew amazingly fast, much faster than the original tree, in fact. When it bloomed, it had white flowers.

While I wasn't paying attention, locust suckers started popping up all around it. I didn't realize it at first, but each sucker was coming up from a root. And the suckers were coming up further and further from the tree . . . Here's an example:


I let them get out of control until I had a forest of locust suckers. I'm serious. Last year I cut them all down, and this year Phil cut down the main sucker tree. Since then he's been trying to hack out the roots. Here are just a few to show you how big and long the roots are (these are more than 10 feet long).



Unfortunately these continue under the lawn, but it would destroy the lawn to tear them out. (Well, the moles have nearly destroyed the lawn already, but that's another story.) At this point, we're not sure what it's going to take to completely solve the problem. I'm not ready yet to get rid of the original tree. I know now we need to be ruthless with the suckers.

        

We're 2 weeks away from the longest day of the year, but you'd never know it the past 2 weeks. With all the clouds it's been getting dark hours earlier than normal. I feel robbed because I love long summer (OK, spring) evenings. We got just a little hint of it yesterday evening when I noticed a little bit of sun shining on the crabapple tree and the corner post of the patio screen before the clouds blocked it off for the night.



Then last night I looked up and realized it was almost a full moon—just before the clouds covered it up again.

So all the moisture was nice, and everything in the yard (except the veggies) is lush and green, and the weeds were easy to pull today, but I'm very happy to see sunshine again. I'm looking forward to the rest of this sunny evening, and I'm also looking forward to watching the full moon rise tonight if the last few clouds stay out of the way.

Snake update

For those who haven't read the comments on my snake post from the other day, Jeff commented that there was no way the snake could be alive, and he was right. When we went out and checked, it hadn't moved. I guess "belly up" really does mean dead. We're pretty sure it's the same snake we saw moving across the yard, and it seemed perfectly healthy then. Weird. At least I'm pushing the photo down the page with this post.

        

I want to live and let live when it comes to snakes, but they still scare me to death when I come across them in my yard.

This one appeared today. You can see why I always watch for snakes when I go out to work on my garden beds!



I hope it doesn't creep you out. It's a small garter snake lying on its back with its belly exposed.

I know it's alive, because I'd  actually come across it about a half hour earlier about 10 yards away. I was pulling weeds along the fence and stepped back to move a big rock over to the fence. That's when the snake decided to move. It had been curled (not coiled) up in the shade of the rock the whole time I'd been stepping and leaning over it to pull the weeds. It was definitely a garter snake with a yellow stripe down its back.

I've always heard that snakes are more afraid of us than we are of them, so I've always counted on them to get out of my way when I'm crashing around in the brush in my yard. But this is the second time a garter snake has waited until after I've been next to it for a while before it decides to wiggle.

After I finished screaming and jumping up and down, I watched it until it decided to move. I didn't try to get my camera then because I would sure it would disappear quickly. But it didn't. Instead, it moved across the yard toward the raised beds, stopping along the way to check out the speakers on Phil's boom box (the price I have to pay for getting his help in the yard).

I thought it would find more shade or a hiding place. Phil and I continued moving around nearby working on weeds, and I suddenly noticed it at the foot of the garden bed. When I got the camera and came back, it didn't move when I got close enough to take the picture (I didn't even have to use the zoom lens).

I want to pull that foxtail barley next to it every time I look at the photo, but I'll wait.

This picture also shows one of the problems I'm having with our raised beds. Those yellowish plants are zucchini and pumpkin. The soil is a mixture of compost and purchased mulch (Kellogg's "Garden Soil," which is made with forest products). My best guess is the yellow leaves are the result of a nitrogen deficiency. Quoting the Sunset Western Garden Book:

If you add organic matter to your soil as a conditioner, the matter may be high in carbon compared with nitrogen. Soil organisms working to digest the high-carbon material may then compete with plants for the limited amounts of nitrogen available in the soil. For this reason, high-carbon (high-cellulose) soil conditioners—such as sawdust, wood shavings, ground bark, and straw—require special handling.

My next step is nitrogen fertilizer. Sunset says, "As a nutrition source, organic matter is no more beneficial than an inorganic source." That's obvious now! Interestingly, the potatoes in the bed next to it, prepared exactly the same way, are bright green and thriving.

        

I've just added a new blog to my garden blogroll: The Carson Gardener. I'll be checking it often to compare Jeff Moser's garden to mine and to learn from his experiences. He has plenty of great photos. I can see already that the spinach seeds I planted in April should have been up and growing long before now.