Winter Watering

We've had bright, still, dry days recently. The Santa Fe sun, always intense even in mid winter, has been out, the skies have been blue, and the air has been calm, with just enough crisp breeze to occasionally temper a hot sit in the sun on the patio. 

My drink gets too warm unless I put it in the shade.

Shade is a little hard to come by. Everything is still dormant and leafless. When it's overcast and colder this landscape can really be grim. The high desert is brown, the stucco homes are taupe, and all the gravel looks depressingly blah under gray skies. 

But when the sun is out and the air is warmer, the brown earth tones turn soft, the gravel becomes a lovely neutral foil to brilliant sun and saturated blue, and our homes all look soothing in the landscape, quiet refuges from sun and sky.

These beautiful days in the 50s are as much a part of winter here as the grim cold days and the snow. We get snow here, quite a bit, and the ski area outside of town is thriving this season.

But the snow we got down here below the mountains in January didn't soak into the soil much, so I was out watering a lot of my garden this weekend. The plants are all dormant, but water once a month or so when it's well above freezing is called for. See Winter watering.

My hoses are stored away for our freezing nights, so it was a lot of toting a watering can back and forth from faucet to garden. But how lovely it is to be outside doing stuff even though mostly it was sitting in the sun between watering chores.

That's where I'll be all next week -- sitting in the winter sun as I recover from some minor eye surgery. 

🕶

I'll be offline for a while. Back soon.