Environment

This Evening’s Desert Sunset

As viewed from the courtyard in front of our beautiful little desert house. The weather was mostly cloudy today, but the clouds were clearing when I snapped this photo. We’re expecting sunny skies tomorrow. Click on the image to enlarge.

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Rejuvenating the Compost Heap

compost.jpgCompost red wiggler worms slow down their consumption of organic scraps in the wintertime, but we humans keep producing the scraps. So, to reinforce the worm workload, we ordered a thousand more red wigglers from Uncle Jim’s Worm Farm.

Image – the compost bin after introducing the new worms. Click on the image to enlarge.

The worms arrived in the mail today, so to get things started, I gave them a “drink.” The worms are packed in dry peat and come in a bag (see insert in photo). The next step was to dig down below the organic scraps in the compost bin to the layer of worm castings below. I added some moist garden soil and put the ball of worms on top of the soil. The instructions that come with the worms say to cover them with a wet newspaper. The worms will absorb the moisture and begin to crawl into the soil and thence start consuming scraps within 48 hours.

Desert Delight

desert-delight.jpgThe Wickenberg Sportsmen’s Club, where we went to practice shooting today, is less than a fifteen minute commute from our little house. It’s a short distance but the route takes us out to the east side of town where there are wide-open desert spaces.

This scene is the view across Constellation Road just outside of the entrance to the club’s shooting facilities. Note the very happy saguaro cactus on the right and the hills and mountains in the desert beyond. It’s just beautiful!

Click on the image to enlarge.

Gorgeous Autumn Days

We had some rainfall over the weekend (and some hail too). After the weather passed, we have been having beautiful weather. The temperatures during the daytime have been around the low to mid 50’s and the night temperatures are just a hair below freezing.

I took this photo from the ridge just about a quarter mile north of our house. The Bradshaw mountains are in the background with the northeast part of our little town visible below the rim of mountains. We think that there may be a little snow on the north side of the mountains after the weekend precipitation. One of these days, we will take a drive up that way after the next snowfall for some photo ops. Click on the image to enlarge.

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