One furniture store delivered our Bedroom set on Monday. Today, the other furniture store delivered our dining set and the great room set. Milestone 4 is now mostly complete with the large item deliveries.
In the composite image you can see (top left) the bed, nightstands and lamps, (top right) the great room set, (bottom left) detail pattern on the love seat and (bottom right) the dining set. Click on the image to enlarge.
This morning, I went in to the little wash in the back yard and broke off a couple of opuntia leaves to add to the cactus and rock garden where we planted come of the imported cacti yesterday. There are several native cacti on the back side of the yard. One cactus was from a spiny green cactus similar to prickly pear, but with longer needles. The other had purple flesh and a couple of flower pods. The latter looked like “Kermit the Frog” when I finally got it into the ground. We transported some boulders and other colorful rocks to give accents to the garden beside the RV drive on the west side of the house. Click on the image to enlarge.
One of the succulents we transported from California is this epiphyllum or “Cactus Orchid.” Today, one of the flower pods opened to reveal this brilliant canary yellow flower. This variety is called Frülingsgold, which translates to “Spring Gold” in English. Click on the image to enlarge.
In addition to about 15 small cacti we brought from the California home, these two fairly large (and heavy) barrel cacti made the trip (almost*) without incident. The one on the left is a Golden Barrel cactus and on the right is a Devil’s Tongue cactus.
Most of the cacti we brought will go into the ground around the outside of the courtyard since we don’t want to have any cacti with needles and sharp spines inside where the dogs will be allowed to be loose. We have chosen no-thorn shrubs and flowering bushes for that area.
* Unloading the Golden Barrel, Bob scratched the sh*t out of his left inside forearm on its sharp needles. There was no real damage though and no spines were embedded beneath his skin, thank goodness – they can be hard to get out and easily become infected.
We will be putting both of these in the ground which is long overdue for them since they are becoming rootbound in their pots. Our cactus and succulent garden is going to be coming along nicely.
When the clouds finally parted after a storm passed through here last night and this morning, there were dozens of poppies in the garden. I took this photo of one that was starting to open. It almost looks like a paper flower. Click on the image to enlarge.
We have a compost bin at the California house and we want to try to compost in Arizona as well. In California, when you set up a compost heap, the worms find it since they’re already in the soil there. Not so much in Arizona, though, so you need to supply the worms to the new bin.
Last week we set up a compost bin that we purchased at Lowe’s. We assembled the bin and put it on the west side of the house next to where we keep our trash bin. On further review, however, putting the bin where it can get direct sunlight is a bad idea since the worms can’t take extreme heat.
Image: 250 worms just after they were introduced to the compost bin (inset). Click to enlarge.
This morning, we moved the bin to the north side of the garage where sunlight is seldom seen. We put three bags of topsoil and added some kitchen scraps in the bin and wet it down. That’s where the worms come in – today we received our shipment of 250 red worms from Uncle Jim’s Worm Farm. I ordered them last week on-line, and today the post office delivered them. Literally, a bag of worms.
The worms were in a cotton bag packed in dry peat which keeps them protected from heat and cold. The instructions said to introduce the worms to the bin as soon as possible and cover with some wet newspaper. They will dig their way into the earth within 24-48 hours and start doing their thing consuming decomposed scraps and such.
By next spring, we will hopefully have a nice compost heap from which we can extract nitrogen rich soil for Damsel’s desert garden.
We drove out to Congress today to have a look at the finished courtyard gate at Mike’s studio. Mike called this morning to advise that he would be finished shortly and to come have a look if we wanted.
When we got there, we were both amazed at how good this was looking. I took photos of the gate on the workbench and Bob put this slideshow together. Mouse over to stop and out to resume.