Wandering in my "backyard" wild...

This has always been my favorite time of year, especially since we moved to the city where we currently live. Smack in the desert, we're prone to non-seasons or what I sometimes call the mono-season. Essentially, we get lots of dry heat, sometimes lots of dry wind and a very mild winter, comparitively speaking. This leaves only Fall as an out-of-the-ordinary time of year, at least in my mind. The mild days, cooler nights, absence of wind (that we get in Spring), it all combines to be really fabulous. A day spent in our garden yesterday cinched all of these ideas for me as Grady, Ainslie and I gathered in another couple of bountiful buckets, straight from our veggie plot. I've always had a lawn and flower beds but having the veggie garden this year, along with the chickens and all the other critters we share our land and home with, just gives me that much greater appreciation for Mother Nature, all of her cycles and all of her bounty.

First, having seen that we were finally forecasted to have a freeze last night, the kids and I set out to pick green tomatoes. I'd put heads together with a couple more experienced gardeners/farmers and had some ideas for preserving and allowing those tomatoes to ripen. The kids were blown away that I was actually asking them to pick green fruit (all summer it had been a big no-no). We came away with a small basketful and another larger basketful. Thinking of the endless quantity of tomatoes we'd already received from our 5 plans, I was very proud of the additional quantity we came up, especially being that it's he first week of November.

The kids and I were revelling in the change in the air, the slight bite of the cold, and I really was appreciating the difference in the light. I started looking about the yard, with an eye to photos, thinking what I could capture to contrast with how our garden patch and plants had looked early on this year. My sunflowers drew me, as they always do, despite the fact that they are now dry and rigid, crumbly and partially eaten (enjoyed, I should say, by our bird friends). Earlier in the summer, they had been blazing yellow and red and brown, limber, bending toward their own Sun God and swaying in the air.

I've yet to photograph and blog about it but this summer, I got a tattoo honoring my children. It's three bold, beautiful sunflowers, stems tied in a Celtic knot, and a blazing blue sky behind it. I love that the flowers in my garden remind me of it and confirm everyday that it was the perfect imagine to ink upon my skin.

I turned to another patch of the yard, and my thoughts shifted a bit. I think it was at least a year and a half ago when I was bemoaning my extra-vigorous weeds that my wonderful friend Tawnya told me she doesn't really mind weeds, that she admires their persistence and strength and ability to grow where sown. She pointed out the varying beauties of several, just in my front yard. Now, I have one patch of the front yard (which is pretty traditionally land-scaped with rock and plants, thankfully desert hardy) that is left to the weeds. I call it our wildlife habitat area. It harbored many a frog this summer and fall, plenty of grasshoppers and, I'm sure, myriad other bugs that I didn't even take the time to notice. It's now producing seeds that I notice the little finches clinging to, sideways and upside down, eating. Anyway, I have a similar patch in the backyard that I decided to let "have its way" to see if I could come to find the beauty that Tawnya had opened my eyes to. Sure enough, one plant that Lenny tried so many times to cut down turned out to be a wild Aster and bear beautiful purple flowers. Another has lovely little daisies, even now in November. In my herb studies, I've come to have another appreciation for these "weeds" and the medicine that they potentially can offer me.

Having admired the bright blue sky that is one of our trademarks here, my eye was turned immediately to one of the more vivid color displays in the yard. My pyracanthea, a red-berried form, is burgeoning with berries. Having had the chickens mostly penned for the summer, it's bounced back quite a bit from last winter when they'd foraged steadily from it. Although a younger, and less aware, me chose this plant years ago when we lived at another house (we transplanted it), I still enjoy it so much, now because I see songbirds and small animals feed steadily from it all year. It gives to us, in visual pleasure and to the wild, in food.

At this point, I was having so much fun with my camera (just a point-and-shoot) that I decided to check out the front yard. I'm glad I did because I totally had forgotten to blog about our pumpkins since we'd harvested. Our impromptu, volunteer pumpkin plants, spawned from Halloween pumpkins left to rot last year, bore almost 50 pumpkins of small to medium size. We happily gave every family who visited, from about mid-September through October, pumpkins to bear home, and we still ended up having this left.

Too small to carve and not the type ideal for cooking with, we're going to have these small pumpkins with us for quite awhile. As they get soft, some will become bird food, some chicken feed and, most definitely, we'll be saving seeds for next year. Growing pumpkins is fun!

As I was snapping the pumpkin shot, I noticed the plethora of butterflies on my zinnias. These hardy flowers travelled to my front garden bed from my friend Sandra's house in the early summer. She had too many and encouraged me one day to pull up some and see if they'd make it. Given the heat we experience in summer, I didn't think they would but they proved me wrong. Now a good four feet tall, they are a butterfly's heaven. I counted upwards of 10 butterflies (I think. I mean, they do flutter a lot) as I stood there. I tried to capture their image and had only passing luck. Still, just the color is so pleasing to the eye.

It was a good day. It felt good to be thinkful (I wrote "thinkful" and I'm leaving it because I think it speaks for being mindful about what we should appreciate) for what we are surrounded by, and proud of the work that we've put into helping it thrive...