One-thousand-one

I went out again this morning to buy more plants (hehehe) and potting soil and a garden hose. You could tell a storm was coming. I swear people start driving loco when they know it’s coming. I guess they’re all trying to get done and indoors before it blows.

The weather in New Mexico is never boring. Back home in the Pacific NW, we had drizzle, showers, sprinkles, mist, rain and fog; which all basically means about the same thing – water in the air, gently.

Here we have 50 mile per hour winds routinely, the intensity of the sun at 7,000 feet, and when it rains – it either evaporates so fast, because it’s so dry, that it might not even reach the ground (called virga), or we get electric storms with downpours and flash floods.

Last weekend the humidity was at 6%. Not a typo. Six. Six percent! Most Walmart-quality humidity readers (hygrometers) only go down to about 20%. We’re lucky if we get up into the teens on a good day, so they are useless to us. Humidity that low is hard on the eyes and nose and sinuses, and skin in general. Sometimes I can feel the dry air burning a single, desiccated route through my sinuses and occasionally that’s enough to trigger a migraine.

I run humidifiers 24/7 throughout the house, and a vaporizer in the bedroom. I’m generally reluctant to open windows, even when it’s nice and cool outside, because I lose all my hard-earned humidity.

But this morning, when I saw 40% humidity I knew I might not be gardening this afternoon. I’m taking advantage of the moist air, and have both doors wide open, the whole house as open as possible.

Just now we got a flash of lightening and I looked up, but before I could even decide to start counting (you know, to calculate how far away it was) it boomed. Like, I hadn’t even thought “one-thousand-one”. My brain was still at “uh” and it was already going “shshsh-crrr-boom”!!!

Well. Maybe I should shut the doors. And then came hail big enough to dent a car (and mine is not garaged). The dogs are trying to act cool with it, but they were falling over each other to see who could get the choice spot on the couch closest to me.

PS. I found bleeding heart and lupine! Two of my favorite flowers with the worst possible names! Wikipedia has lists and lists of all the different Lupinus plants, but nowhere do they explain – why are they named after a wolf?

Neither the bleeding heart nor the lupine I bought are currently blooming so I’m not going to bother taking a picture of them. But here, I’ll do your google image search for you. Lupine:

And bleeding heart. 

Google image mostly shows the flowers, but actually the leaves are pretty too, fine and lacy. The leaves vary depending on the variety. The one I bought has a reddish tinge to the leaves.

That purple flower in the center of this image search is not a bleeding heart, it’s a fuchsia, which I also love. They are not very winter hardy. I actually had a huge one in my yard in western Washington State, and it does freeze there. But Olympia is zone 8 and Santa Fe is only zone 6.

Some of the plants I bought aren’t going to last the winter. Often I’ll bring my patio plants into the house to winter as houseplants, but that doesn’t work very well because they always get little mites or aphids. I might try putting them into dormancy in the garage this year, and see if I can get them to resurrect in the spring. If not, I’ll just buy them again next spring. I figure plants are cheaper than groceries, and much more enjoyable! I’ll eat beans and tortillas 😉

Here’s fuchsias (which I didn’t find in my shopping adventures).

I could always order a fuchsia, but ordering opens far too wide of a range of choices. I could list 300 plants and trees off the top of my head that I’d want to order and then I‘d need to buy a new house. Ok, ok, I’m just joking!!!

Dear John – while you are away in Africa, I promise I will not:

  • Adopt a puppy
  • Buy a house

I’m buying plants instead, so you should be grateful!