The desert during record monsoons! Those who are glass-mostly-full people are raving about the butterflies. The rest of us are calling upon heaven to release us from the plague of mosquitos such as we have never seen in our many decades on this earth.
The mosquito swarms are downright terrifying. First of all, I’ve never even seen mosquitos in the desert at all. That’s the entire point of living in the desert, right? No mosquitos. Gnats sometimes, but not mosquitos.
Not only are there suddenly mosquitos in the desert, but I’ve rarely seen so many mosquitos anywhere in my life. I’ve certainly never seen this many in my own yard. This is worse than when the last of the snow patches have melted in the mountains. This is far worse than anything I’ve encountered in all my decades in the Pacific Northwest. Not impressed yet? This is the Florida Everglades!
You think I’m exaggerating? Apparently Tucson is #10 in the country for mosquitos. Tucson! We’re suppose to be a desert!
Yep, we’re right up there with Birmingham, Alabama or Houston, Texas, except in our case, the city isn’t spraying for mosquitos. Pima County and Tucson City mosquito abatement programs are nearly non-existent because, well, it’s like when Houston didn’t have any snow plows when they needed them last winter. You don’t want to have to pay for government programs that aren’t typically needed, right?
It’s probably just as well, because some of those sprays kill bees, which we have to stop doing. I’m looking forward to planting bee-habitat plants in my yard, hopefully soon.
The Tucson mosquitos are actually small little guys, but if anything, that makes them worse. You can’t hear them unless they’re right in your ears. And they zip in and out so fast you can hardly see them. Millions of stealth mosquitos!
If, at any time in my past, you had asked me, “Would you rather an infestation of small mosquitos or big mosquitos?”, I would have looked at you funny and said, “Small?”. Well, no longer! Give me a big sucker any time. At least you have a sporting chance of hearing or seeing them!
My whole point of moving to Tucson was to live outside. I wanted to be comfortable outside most of the day, every day. That had been mostly working, until now. Now we just cower indoors, watching the nearly-invisible mosquitos bash their faces against the window glass.
Except I had to weed the yard. My rock garden, generously dotted with cactus and palm trees, had become a green carpet of weeds.
I didn’t think to take a photo of my yard before I weeded, so to give you an idea, here’s my neighbor’s yard.
I’m not making fun of them! Because here’s my other neighbor’s yard.
This is pretty much everyone’s yard. A crazy green carpet of weeds. No, it’s not always like that! I’ve never seen it like that. It’s usually dirt and gravel.
Well, darn it, as briefly nice as it looks (from a distance), I didn’t want my rock garden overtaken by various kinds of burr producing opportunists. I wanted to pull the weeds, and Labor Day Weekend was the weekend to do it.
On Day 1, I pulled weeds and John took the weed eater to the amazing, suddenly appearing, never knew we had it, brilliantly green lawn.
We also picked up our two trees that I ordered as part of Tucson Electric Power’s “Trees for You” program. Customers can get up to 3 trees per year for only $5 each, for a 5-gallon tree! I choose these two, a pomegranate and a chitalpa!
We have a chitalpa in Albuquerque and it’s doing well. It has large leaves and looks more like a wet climate tree than a desert tree, but it is actually a type of desert willow. We first bought one in 2019 and it is thriving in Albuquerque. So hopefully this one will do well in Tucson too.
In addition to being hardy in the desert and growing quickly, chitalpa also have nice blooms. (Picture from the internet)
The next day John decided to help me weed. Big mistake! I should have told him not to, because he has better things to do. He has a long list of fix-it things that I’m totally incapable of doing. Not only that – it turns out John is terrible at weeding! He left little weed stalks and bits of shredded leaves everywhere. Imagine if a 3-year-old cut all the hair off the family’s golden retriever with the kitchen scissors. No, it was worse than that. It was so sad and sorry looking!
I had to pry all those stumps of weed stalks out of the hard-packed dirt and gravel without the full weed to hold onto. What a disaster. John was so fired, lol. And no, he didn’t mess up on purpose just to get out of the task. He was genuinely trying to be helpful. He’s just spent too many years in the desert and doesn’t know how to weed properly.
I, on the other hand, still retain skills developed during the first half of my life in the Pacific Northwest. I am a lean, mean, weeding machine. I take the weed in my gloved left hand, and spear the ground at the base of the roots with a purpose-specific weeding tool with my right hand, and get it out roots and all. One, two, bam, done, onto the next. Over and over.
No, I am not going to come weed your yard for you! I did enough weeding for this year. Enough for several years. But our yard looks great!
These yellow flowers are probably weeds but I liked them, so I decided to leave them to see what happens.
A month or two ago I had mentioned having a gardener, but our gardener is awol. We don’t know where he is. He isn’t answering text messages. We hope he’s ok. We’re hoping he just said to himself, “Fuck this rain, fuck these mosquitos, I’m going back to Mexico until it’s nicer in Tucson. This is ridiculous.”
Because the weather has been ridiculous! And I wouldn’t blame him. But I’m also worried about him. It seems like he could at least let us know he’s ok and happily sipping a beer in Sonora somewhere. I just hope he doesn’t have covid.
Anyway, we’re doing our own gardening now. We actually enjoy it, it’s just hard to find time with being gone so often.
In addition to weeding and planting, John is experimenting with brining olives. Turns out olives aren’t edible straight from the tree. They need brined or fermented. This year we didn’t get very many olives. Last year our two trees made thousands of olives, but we were just moving in and didn’t have time to deal with them so they rotted on the ground. I’m sure we’ll have another prolific year soon. Maybe next year.
At the end of the weekend we finally had time to jump into the pool. Or wait, is that thunder? Darn. We didn’t quite make it. Almost. Instead, we pulled our lounge chairs under the porch roof and sat in our swimsuits and watched it rain. At least the rain kept the mosquitoes down for a few minutes.
Is my honeymoon with Tucson over? I’m definitely less thrilled with the weather lately. I know a lot of people leave in the summer. I thought that was because of the heat, and I was fine during the searing heat of June. Before the rain and mosquitos. Ironically, it’s not the heat of Tucson that bugs me, it’s the rain!
Originally I had thought that if the heat of the late summer was too much for us, we could spend some time with the kids at the end of each summer. Late summer has generally been a good to be in Boise and the California Bay Area – warm and dry. But the wildfire smoke in California was so bad in August and September of last year, we decided to visit the kids a bit earlier in the season this year.
By going in July, we avoided the worst of the smoke, although smoke still impacted the trip. And now I am bummed out about missing fig season! Laura is inundated with figs this year.
Her tree is always prolific, although some years it’s prolific to the extreme. Figs, figs and more figs. There’s even plenty extra for the occasional bright green fig-eating beetle. Rather pretty, isn’t it? It’s much more photogenic than a mosquito!
If we have another wringing wet monsoon season in Tucson next year, I’ll visit the kids in late August or early September – smoke or no smoke! Because these mosquitos aren’t my thing! I’ll take smoke and figs over mosquitos any day.
Oh and for those of you who have plans to visit me this winter – the locals say the mosquitos will be gone by the end of October.
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