Monday, August 22, 2016

Family Heirlooms

garlic drying in our garden shed in Louisiana
Years ago when we lived on 23+ acres of land in Georgia, I grew several heirloom tomatoes for the first time--Cherokee purple, green zebra, among others. The tomatoes were very colorful, and I managed to encourage my two kids into eating them as healthy snacks by slicing the tomatoes and arranging them in a colorful pattern on a white platter. I called the dish "tomato snacks," and the kids often asked for this dish as a midday, summer treat--another example of presentation being everything. 

The beautiful diversity of heirloom tomatoes is one reason to grow them, and I have been growing different heirlooms ever since. They are tastier than most hybrid tomatoes, and they are open-pollinated, so that you can save seed to plant the next year and have true-to-the original descendants of the parent plants. 

There are some possible drawbacks: some heirlooms seem to be more susceptible to various fungal or bacterial wilts or root rot. A couple of our plants this year have succumbed to such a disease. But even hybrids bred to be disease-resistant can have problems. The Better Boy tomatoes that we planted in our greenhouse here have tended to have blossom end rot, a dark, leathery spreading "sore" on the bottom of the tomatoes. The soil in the greenhouse includes chicken manure that accumulated in what was once a chicken house. Perhaps we didn't water the plants sufficiently at just the right time, or perhaps there was a calcium deficiency in the soil, or perhaps we planted those tomatoes too early. Not all the tomatoes from the Better Boy plants have developed blossom end rot, and other tomatoes in the greenhouse seem to be doing very well. But we are noting these problems for next year, as we rotate the tomatoes to other areas of the garden to reduce the chances of those diseases spreading further.

Heirloom vegetables are also interesting because the seeds have been passed down for generations and often have interesting origin stories attached to them. For example, the Mortgage Lifter tomato is said to have been bred by a guy who cross-pollinated five tomato varieties and saved the seed. He planted that seed and saved its progeny seed for several years until he had a stable descendant plant with the fruit qualities he desired in a tomato. He then sold the seed and made enough money at the time to pay off the mortage to his house. You can now buy Mortgage Lifter tomato seeds from seed catalogs. As this writer says, "Growing heirlooms is a direct link to our heritage, making a connection to generations of gardeners that came before us and extending the link to our children, grandchildren, and beyond." 
Tom standing among the heirloom tomatoes we grew in 2013, Louisiana
Over the years we have saved seed from season to season as well as planted the descendants of plants that our grandparents grew. I have lost count of such plants that we have left behind in our moves, still flourishing, I hope, in our absence. However, we have managed to bring along with us one vegetable that is the descendant of ones my grandmother Margaret Cole Dugat and her mother before her grew: bunching onions. My dad has grown these onions for years, and we got our onion plants from him. 

Year after year, we grew these onions, eating what we wanted to eat and saving others for planting the following year. If we moved and were unable to salvage onion plants in the move, my dad always had plenty to give us for planting in our new garden. But then my dad and mom moved, and Dad thinks he may have lost his onions to too much rain and then drought in the garden he left behind. Fortunately, we managed to bring some of those family heirloom onions with us to Arizona, where they have flourished in our garden. So, this year, we may be giving back to my dad the heirlooms we first got from him and that he got from his mother and grandmother. 
Cassie watches as Tom transplants onions in our AZ garden, onions that are descendants of ones my dad, my grandmother and her mother planted in their gardens.
Our bunching onions were primed to grow in the winter in the South, and we didn't know how they would do at a much higher elevation and a much cooler climate. We kept some in pots in our sunroom over last winter, and only a few plants survived. However, the ones we planted in the garden last summer, right after we moved into this house, managed to survive winter temperatures in the single digits. Their growing clock reset, and they flourished this summer, as evidenced in the photos above and below, where only two or three bunches, pulled apart and transplanted singly, filled out two full rows.
Tom pulls apart bunching onions to transplant them.
When we pull the tomato plants out of the greenhouse, Tom plans to plant some onions there, as well, so that we can observe which ones do better, the ones exposed to the winter weather or the ones in a more sheltered space. (The greenhouse is not heated.)

Growing these heirloom onions that my grandmother grew connects me to a history of family gardening, not just vegetable gardening but flower gardening, as well. For years, I also grew purple globe amaranth flowers because they were among my grandmother's favorites. I always got seed from her...until her plants finally died out as she got too fragile to care for them, I moved once too often, and those seeds were lost forever. Now I have to order seeds from gardening catalogs, and they are not always easy to find.

Just like any family heirloom, heirloom vegetables connect us to the past and enrich the present.

Sunday, August 21, 2016

Re-purposing What's Been Left Behind

"Upcycling" is a trendy word and a trendy activity these days. Wikipedia defines the term as: "the process of transforming by-products, waste materials, useless and/or unwanted products into new materials or products of better quality or for better environmental value." Many websites and magazines are devoted to upcycling: turn mason jars into candle holders or drinking glasses (my least favorite--I hate mason-jar drinking glasses); turn pallets into sofas or side tables, wine bottles into lamps, a decorative wall, or a chandelier. Recycling is a great idea, but I prefer the term "repurposing" to "upcycling." Upcycling is a bit of a snob; repurposing is practical and down-to-earth.

The previous owners of our house left behind a lot of stuff that we either had to discard or find a way to use or repurpose: cans of paint in the attic, old bicycle parts in an enclosed side yard that now serves as our wood lot, some plastic planter pots, a rabbit cage (and underneath it, buried in rabbit crap, a rug), various other animal cages, a 10X10X6-foot dog pen, a cross fence in the backyard meant to contain dogs when not in the pen.

The cross fence was one of the first things to go; I dismantled it, kept the wooden fence posts and the gate, and rolled up the 2X4 fence wire for future use.
cross fence in our back yard that I took down
Tom replaced the rickety garden gate with this gate from the cross fence I removed. I guess you would call this re-using rather than repurposing.
When I cleaned up the garden area next, I had to decide what to do with the animal cages that had been abandoned there: I turned them into compost bins.
animal cages turned into compost bins
We don't have dogs, so we thought we would sell the dog pen. First, we moved it out of the back yard into a side yard where it could be easily loaded onto a trailer. 
dog pen
Then I had second thoughts. What if I turned it into an outdoor room, instead, and let grape vines cover it? So when my friend Chris was visiting in February, we had her help us move the dog pen again and lower it over a small peach tree near the greenhouse that Tom had just built. The tree serves as shade inside what I now call my "Secret Garden" room, after Frances Hodgson Burnett's book The Secret Garden, which I read as a kid. I painted a 6X8-foot section of cedar fencing to serve as a floor, re-painted a second-hand garden bench and side table for a seating area, and attached reed fencing to one-and-a half sides of the dog pen for a privacy screen. With metal ties, I also attached the limbs of a large grape vine to the back side of the Secret Garden room, and Tom transplanted a smaller grape vine into a flower bed I dug along another side of the room.
"Secret Garden" room, late May
Then I began decorating the room and planting flowers in pots and along the inside of one wall. Tom took the bike rims off of two broken bicycles the previous owners had left behind, and I spray-painted them and attached them to one wall of my outdoor room. I crocheted a hemp rug for the floor and created some decorative hangings.
"Secret Garden" room, early June
crocheted hemp hanging with cut-outs from Peace Tea tins and beer bottle caps
Peace sign at the door, crocheted hemp rug inside
By mid-July, the seasonal "monsoon" rains were coming every day, and I had to remove the hemp rug from the Secret Garden because it stayed wet. By late August, the Secret Garden room was covered in greenery that the monsoon season provides for a short period of time in this dry land.
"Secret Garden" room with greenhouse beyond
"Secret Garden" room with apple tree and greenhouse
"Secret Garden" room--borage, poppies, and daisy fleabane blooming outside

Storm clouds above the "Secret Garden" room
The Secret Garden room is the biggest "repurposing" project we've done here, so far. But I'm always looking for creative ways to reuse or repurpose materials that might otherwise be discarded in a landfill. --Just not mason jars as drinking glasses--Adult "sippy cups"? ugh!

Friday, August 19, 2016

Morning after A Rain

Side yard with Secret Garden room--so green after the rain
According to the U.S. climate data website, the area where we live now gets an annual average of 11.82 inches of precipitation, with the highest monthly averages in July (2.44 inches) and August (3.03 inches), the "monsoon" months. What a difference between here and where we were two years ago, where the annual average of precipitation is 63.58 inches, with the highest monthly averages in January (5.75 inches) and July (6.65 inches). This past week, Louisiana received much more rain at once than usual: thirteen rivers broke flood records and thousands of homes were flooded in areas that had never flooded in human memory. One town received at least 31 inches of rain in 48 hours. That amount of precipitation here would probably cause mudslides on mountains.

Here in northern Arizona yesterday, rain began falling before noon and fell off and on most of the afternoon. I had just enough time to mow the side yard (leaving patches of wildflowers) and then to gather corn between rain showers. Then I spent a couple of hours shucking corn, cutting corn off the cob, and cooking the corn for dinner. 
Cutting corn off the cob--Tom planted an heirloom corn, Golden Bantam. I think we'll try a different one next year.
fresh corn cooking on the stove--I added milk, butter, a couple of serrano peppers from the garden, salt and pepper
Every morning the cats, especially Cassie, pester me to go outside, and this morning after the rain was no exception. The grass was still wet when we ventured out, and everything was clean and bright.
Side yard, with apple trees, Secret Garden room, greenhouse, and patches of wildflowers
apple ripening
morning glories and scarlet runner beans along the garden fence
cowpen daisies along the fence that separates our garden from our neighbors' garden
Peace
In her book, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (which I read 20 years ago), Kathleen Norris quotes a saying of desert monks: "If a man settles in a certain place and does not bring forth the fruit of that place, the place itself casts him out."

I don't know what would be the "fruit" of the volcanic fields at the foot of the White Mountains on the Colorado Plateau, but in cultivating wild flowers and providing space for local pollinators, I guess I'm bringing forth the fruit of this place. And I'm adding fruit of my own in the gardens we grow--with what little rain a valley in a rain shadow can provide.

Lagniappe:
tomatoes fresh from our garden--more canning this weekend
Persey walks in the bright, wet grass
I took this photo of Cassie two days ago. The cats and I prowl our yard together.

Tuesday, August 16, 2016

Tom in the Kitchen

When I met Tom, we were fifteen years old. I had grown up in the country eating garden-fresh vegetables in-season and meat from grass-fed cattle that my father raised. Tom had most recently lived in Houston, and he had grown up eating tinned meat and store-canned vegetables. But he took to country cooking, and after we married, I quickly ceded to him a great deal of that cooking, cooking which has become more and more health-conscious as we've aged. Lately I've been having some fun cooking meals with fresh vegetables from our Arizona garden, my first tomato pie, a Mexican Pepper casserole with bell peppers from our garden, a squash casserole with squash and peppers from the garden. However, Tom does most of the canning, something he really enjoys. It's really ironic that I'm the one who grew up watching my mother and grandmothers can and freeze vegetables, yet Tom, whose mother never canned anything that I know of, is the one who does the canning now. 

Here's Tom in the kitchen, canning tomatoes that we're growing in our garden. Tomatoes don't ripen here as quickly as they do in the sunny South, so he tends to can only 4-5 pints at a time as we gather enough tomatoes to do so.
Tom even canned a pint of sungold tomatoes!
fresh tomatoes cooking on the stove
The results of Tom's latest canning
We live now at 7200 ft. above sea level, and Tom had to consult the Presto Cooker Canner booklet to get instructions on canning at a higher elevation. He became frustrated with the newest booklet which came with the pressure cooker we bought to replace our old one. The booklet was printed in China, and we're sure the pressure cooker was manufactured there, too, even though National Presto Industries, Inc., still has an Eau Claire, Wisconsin address. The instructions were a little confusing. Fortunately, we had kept the old Presto Cooker-Canner booklet, printed in the 1970s in Wisconsin. The instructions in that booklet on canning at high altitudes were very clear. Here is a sample below, with the most recent publication first.
Instructions for canning at elevation, most recent booklet
Presto Cooker instructions, printed in the 1970s
Add this experience to others we've had with crappy manufacturing from overseas. Hand saws Tom bought years ago are now made in China, and they're flimsy and unusable. Compare a hoe head bought 50 years ago to ones hanging on hooks in a Home Depot or Lowes today--a laughable comparison. Fortunately, Tom is a handy man to have around. Not only did he can tomatoes last weekend; he also replaced a hoe handle I had broken. Good man.

Monday, August 15, 2016

Death in the Garden

When I headed out this morning at 7 AM to dig up 2 1/2 rows of red potatoes, I expected an uneventful gardening experience. Tom had canned tomatoes on Saturday, and my contribution to our gardening enterprise was to do some of the manual labor, which I actually prefer, anyway, to canning. The cats accompanied me outside, Persey sleeping most of the morning in the Secret Garden room that I created out of a 10'X10' dog pen, and Cassie wandering around the yard and garden on the lookout for mischief.
The garden this morning, after I had dug up a few potato plants
After turning over half of a row of potatoes, I looked back at the work I had done so far and saw something small wriggling on the upturned soil. I bent for a closer look. With my spade, I had dug up a nest of what I first took to be mice but that later I suspected were moles. The creatures were very tiny, without hair, and obviously in distress. What to do? We live far from any conservation group that might want to take in tiny moles still nursing, and since I had violently--though unintentionally--disturbed the nest, the little things wouldn't live.
What I inadvertently dug up when I was spading up potatoes
So I put the creatures back in the soil where they had been, knowing that they would die there. Of course, Cassie, who had been incommunicado when I had called for her a few minutes earlier, showed up, and, when my back was turned, dug up one of the tiny critters.
Cassie with her tiny catch
I took the little mammal baby from her, knowing that Mama Mole would reject these little creatures because they had been handled and disturbed. I returned it to the garden, and closed the garden gate so that Cassie could not return. However, later that morning she snuck up onto the greenhouse roof and down into the garden, making off with another mole--which I "rescued," after a manner of speaking because nothing was going to save these creatures from death.
Cassie makes off with a baby mole a second time
Later I did look up on the Internet how to take care of baby moles, but, really, it was way too late. These little guys didn't even have their fur yet. And I'm not the nurturing type. I have a rather jaundiced view of nature red in tooth and claw--even though there is much in nature that is lovely and mysterious. And as I type this I am reminded of something that the Polish poet and writer Czeslaw Milosz observed about nature in his published journal A Year of the Hunter. I took the book down from the shelf behind my desk and flipped through it, for I knew that I had underlined several passages.

I opened the book immediately to this: "I am not a passionate admirer of Nature," Milosz admits on March 30, 1988, "because Nature is a pain, but I still feel the presence--inborn, inherent--of a tree, an animal, a flower...." And in an earlier entry in September 1987, he describes nature programs on PBS as "obscene" because the scientific approach to these programs includes humans as part of the cycle of nature as any other creature and, because of that, people "must accept the world as it is," without moral force. He is "horrified by the images of mutual indifferent devouring" and wonders how the message of that indifference translates into human society (and how children, for whom these programs are created, interpret that message). He asks: "Is hunting and devouring each other the very essence of Nature?" And answers: "It is, and that is why I dislike Nature."

I don't dislike Nature, but I recognize its indifference. A parent of these little creatures made a nest in garden soil in an Arizona garden. Today, I dug potatoes in that garden and destroyed the nest. I guess I'm a force of Nature, just like my cat Cassie,  though not totally indifferent to the suffering.

I continued with my work.
At the end of the row where the tiny creatures met their fate.
The completed work, stones marking near the center of the photo the dirt tomb of the moles.
The potatoes I dug, drying and curing in the pantry
I suspect that one reason Czeslaw Milosz hated Nature is that it reminded him of the fragility of his own body, that he also, despite his intellect, morality, and fine-tuned emotions, was subject to that same indifferent force, for he also muses in an earlier entry: "The dividing line between life and death is so fine. The unbelievable fragility of our organism, which suggests a vision: a fog of sorts condenses into human form, lasts for a moment, and is instantly dispelled." 

So, here....a poppy memorial for the fragile lives that I destroyed today.
Note: The other lives I destroyed today were the potato plants--"devouring," the "very essence of Nature."

Saturday, August 13, 2016

Today's Leftovers: Cats, Flowers, and other Stuff

Cassie on the garden gate one evening earlier this week
Just a few minutes ago, I finished a half glass of wine left over from yesterday--Beringer White Zinfandel. We had carried a chilled bottle of the sweet fruity wine to a local event last night and returned home with about half a bottle, most of which I finished off before bedtime except for this little bit of half a glass. I had poured a second glass--very full--started to drink it, and realized, really, I had had too much wine for the evening. I used a funnel to pour the rest back into the bottle. So this half glass I just finished off was really, really the leftovers of yesterday. Tom and I also finished off the neufchatel cheese mixture I had used to make some appetizers for the same event. I slathered the cheese mixture (neufchatel, chopped fresh dill, heavy cream, horseradish) on some crackers and topped it with chopped-up cucumbers. Tom omitted chopping the cucumbers for his neufchatel-cucumber cracker topping.

That's what today has been for me, a left-over kind of day. I wandered around the yard, pulling and chopping weeds; taking the cats out for their daily backyard exercise and entertainment; washing, drying, and folding some clothes; reading the daily headlines online; putzing around on the Internet. Tom was far more ambitious: he canned tomatoes from our garden. Maybe I should be shamed by his energetic activities, but I'm not. Tom likes to can. Maybe tomorrow I will post left-overs from today, which will include photos of Tom's canning. Right now he's in the garage putting a new hoe handle on a hoe that I broke while hoeing weeds a few days ago. 

So today's post is a post of leftovers, photos of the cats I took yesterday and the day before, of flowers I didn't include in my last post. Just a putzing day.....

First leftovers, photos of the cats doing what cats do....

Cassie in an apple tree in our apple orchard (of three apple trees)
Cassie on the greenhouse door, our garden, and rain clouds in the background
Cassie and Persey--Their step up to the roof of the greenhouse is from the empty rabbit hutch
Persey is 14 years old, but since she's lost weight, she's gotten a lot friskier.
Second leftovers are photos of wildflowers that I took in our yard as I am trying to identify them. The Golden crownbeard below--other common names, cowpen daisy, cow pasture-daisy, girasolillo, butter-daisy, hierba de la bruja--came up in our garden last year, and I liked the flowers so well that I scattered seed along one side of the garden as well as in the backyard. My Arizona plant identification book claims that "Native Americans and early settlers used [the] plant to treat skin diseases and boils" and that "Hopi Indians use water of [the] steeped plant for treating spider bites." I like their blowzy look.

Golden Crownbeard, or cowpen daisy (Verbesina encelioides)
Another wild plant that I have decided to cultivate in our yard is the rayless gumweed. The plant isn't really pretty, and it's flowers aren't showy, but I like the odd look of its gummy flowers. Also, Zoe Merriman Kirkpatrick, author of Wildflowers of the Western Plains: A Guide (1992), writes that she learned that Native American Pueblo women use the plant "as a dye source for the wool in their blankets," achieving "lovely hues of yellow, gold, and olive-green." Plants are coming up voluntarily all over our yard. 
Rayless gumweed (Grindelia aphanactis)
And finally, the remains of a day earlier this week...clouds near sunset...

Friday, August 12, 2016

In Search of a Lovely but Subversive Lawn Aesthetic

At no time do I understand better the phrase "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" than when I contemplate American lawns, with their rigid borders and carpets of lush grass. Even before we moved to the dry West, I was struggling to create lawns that winked and nodded at our national obsession with shortly-cropped grass while incorporating more subversive landscaping--planting or just encouraging native flowers and grasses, with their shaggy beauty; incorporating gardening in border areas of a front yard; leaving dandelions to grow in grassy areas and ignoring those brown spots caused by disease or insects. But I always left enough lush green grass to prevent the neighbors from assuming I was an anarchist --or something. 

The American lawn is an Industrial Lawn:
Plant diversity is minimized; grass predation by insects is controlled by insecticides; weed species are controlled by herbicides; new, genetically-altered grass strains are designed to withstand applications of potent weed killers; fungal attacks on grass are thwarted by fungicides; the addition of fertilizers substitutes for naturally occurring nutrient cycling; droughts are avoided by irrigation; and mechanical soil aeration compensates for the absence of a soil structure that promotes natural aeration. (F. Herbert Borman, Diana Balmori, and Gordon T. Gaballe. Redesigning the American Lawn: A Search for Environmental Harmony. Yale University Press, 2001)
In other words, the American lawn is pretty much an environmental disaster-- all that run-off of pesticides, fungicides, and fertilizers and the demands of irrigation from 20 million acres of residential lawns. 

The America lawn also communicates socioeconomic class, status, maybe even patriotism or political leanings --or even the mental health of the home's inhabitants. Neighbors often make assumptions about homeowners by the state of their lawns. Most of us want our neighbors' goodwill, and so we submit to the the demands of the "Majoritarian Authoritarian" lawn. If social conformity doesn't work, there is often formal law to make us give obeisance to the European aristocratic ideal of a well-kept lawn:
...[I]n a great many jurisdictions of the United States, formal law, otherwise known as local public ordinances and private land use deed restrictions, regulates the length of grass or "weeds" in the front lawn. Chances are if the front lawn measures more than six inches in height, a violation from the public weed inspector or the homeowners association is soon to follow. Oftentimes, these grass or weed height ordinances do not make exceptions for alternative landscapes such as wildflowers. (Asmara M. Tekle, "Law and the Authoritarian Aesthetic of the American Lawn." Art Lies: A Contemporary Art Journal, 2011. Online)
I am all for democratizing my lawn, but I'm not ready to open the borders to all the seeds blown into my property in this very windy country. I'm searching for a lawn aesthetic that does less damage to the environment while still being pleasing to the eye--or at least pleasing to me. Here in an area that receives only 10-12 inches of annual precipitation and that is also experiencing a moderate drought, that means wise irrigation. The person who built our house in the 1980s put in an extensive irrigation system that subsequent owners did not maintain. Pipes swelled and burst, leaking water under black landscape plastic and gravel that a subsequent owner had installed. We have abandoned all of that broken system except the lines to the vegetable garden and a small apple orchard and have placed drip hoses in our garden and in flower beds along the house, where more water-thirsty plants also get additional run-off from the roof. Currently, I'm also catching precipitation run-off in buckets; I want to replace those with rain barrels or maybe even a cistern if we get ambitious.

But what about the lawn? 

We have a small front lawn planted with fescue which we mow occasionally. Tom is thinking of slowly replacing the water-thirsty grass with a native, drought-hardy grass, but that will take time. In the meantime, I'm giving my attention to the back yard and one side yard, leaving the other side yard to fate for the time being: the soil there has been compacted by previously parked automobiles and now serves as our wood lot.

Here is the a look at the backyard, as of yesterday morning:
partial view of our backyard
and turning around to take a photo in the opposite direction
We live in an ancient volcanic field, and the ground is full of rocks, with thin soil above. To put in the foundation of cross ties for the chicken house, Tom had to use a pickax to dig out the rocks. Digging in the backyard recently to plant some purple coneflowers, I hit rock within three or four inches. My plan is to amend the soil enough along the back fence (which our property shares with a pasture) so that I can plant fairly drought-hardy flowers that will need occasional watering with an irrigation hose I will place along the fence. In the meantime, I am trying to identify native flowers and plants that grow with very little water and that have propagated naturally. My standard: if I like the looks of the plant, I'll not pull it up. 
The green plants along the fence are a type of annual (native) sunflower. Neither Tom nor I have been able to identify the white flowers, but they look like a type of brassica. Pollinators love them.
close-up of what we think is a brassica but which we have been unable to identify
I tried planting wildflower seeds I purchased online from a garden supply store in Santa Fe, New Mexico, but the seeds sprouted poorly, probably because they needed a lot more water than I provided. Those I planted in flower beds next to the house which have better soil and receive more water, sprouted and thrived. The thin top soil dries out very quickly here, which is why I'm planning to amend the soil along the fence and let the rest of the back yard fill with native plants that require little or no watering. The landscape naturally remains brown here until the monsoon season starts in July.
A species of low-growing Erigeron (fleabane) grows in the disturbed areas of the front and side yards. I'm encouraging these. The flowers close in the evening and open as the sun warms them up.
I love this species of globe mallow, which I am encouraging in many areas of the yard.
I am less fond of this member of the mallow family (Malvaceae)--Cheeseweed or Little Mallow (Malva parviflora)--lower right-hand corner of photo. It's low-growing and very invasive. The seeds sprout everywhere; the flowers are white.
Cheesemallow (see photo above) was introduced from Europe and, according to A Field Guild to the Plants of Arizona, by Anne Orth Epple, is "a common weed of fields and open lots" and is "boiled and eaten by Native Americans." I would like to have a bit more information than the author provides on that last claim, though.

Another plant introduced by Europeans that I thought I would like because it remains green for so long and is very drought-hardy, is horehound. A great crop of it grew in the backyard until I realized just how invasive it is and how irritating are its clingy, sticky seed pods. I dug a lot of it up, but the seeds sprout by the thousands, and plants still remain in corners of the yard and along the edge of the pasture next door. The herb is "highly unpalatable to livestock" according to Wikipedia.
horehound (Marrubium vulgare)
Common purslane (Portulaca oleracea), another plant introduced by Europeans and now naturalized, grows well here, too. I'm just not sure how much of it I want to grow in the wilder areas of the yard; I've been digging it up in a front yard flower bed. I know that it can be eaten as a salad green, and as a teenager, I tried it once.
Common purslane
One flower that blooms brightly in pastures and along roadsides during the rainy season is what I think I have identified correctly as Paperflower (Psilostrophe tagetina). I've found only one bunch on the edge of our front yard, but I hope to introduce more into the backyard. Anne Orth Epple describes it as being "a many-branched, aromatic, rounded plant" which is also "poisonous to sheep." We don't have any sheep, so no worries there.
Paperflower (Psilostrophe tagetina)
In Georgia, I grew a lovely tall species of native Gaura, and here in Arizona, I have found a couple of species in our yard--Scarlet Gaura and Lizard-Tail Gaura--but I have yet to take an adequate photo of the Lizard-Tail Gaura. The stems and flowers are very dainty and not very conspicuous, but I'm tending a patch in the side yard near the apple orchard, and it's growing naturally with other grasses and native flowers between the chicken yard and pasture fence.
Scarlet Gaura (Gaura coccinea), also, Scarlet beeblossom, plains gaura, butterflyweed
a patch of Scarlet Gaura growing in the side yard near the apple orchard
Anne Orth Epple notes that these flowers are pollinated by moths at night. I'm hoping that these moths aren't the same ones that begin as tomato hornworms, which we have been pulling off our tomatoes and feeding to our chickens--poor hornworms! The Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center describes these as "rather weedy plants," but I like to think of them as "ethereal." That's my aesthetic, anyway.

I have noticed in our yard two of the nineteen species of verbena that can be found in Arizona, but I haven't accurately identified the most prolific one, which reminds me of cultivated verbena. I am encouraging these flowers, as well as what I think is a horse-mint. 
I think this is New Mexico Vervain (Verbena macdougalii), but it might be another variant of vervain. "Picture-booking" plants is neither an easy nor accurate enterprise.
A second purple-flowering Vervain is in the lower right-hand corner of this photo. I am also encouraging the plumed grass, which I have not identified yet.
Horse-mint (Agastache pallidiflora)
The flowers of the horse-mint are inconspicuous, but I have a soft spot for horse-mint as it grows prolifically in areas of my home state of Texas, where I have fond memories of first identifying it.

There are other volunteer plants in my yard that I have yet to identify but which I like for various reasons--the color or shape of their stems, the smell of their leaves when crushed. My plan, at this point, is to identify as many plants as I can, encouraging the growth of those I like, transplanting more to fill in bare areas. In the back yard, I'm arranging a pathway that will meander through plants that will never be mowed, though I will certainly have to tend them by weeding or thinning. In the side yard near the apple orchard, I hope to have a little meadow of wild flowers that I will mow only around the edges, near my cultivated flower beds. That's the plan, anyway.
I love the color and shape of the silvery-stemmed plants in the background (a type of sage?)
Volunteer wildflowers in an untended area at the edge of the front lawn--globe mallow, Lizard-tail Gaura, fleabane (flowers not open yet for the day), pink evening primrose
A quote attributed to May Sarton reflects what I feel about gardening: "Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace."

Gardening and writing have long been for me ways to combat loneliness, a consequence of moving often and of a personal tendency to seek solitude.