I woke up to this view from my front door. Snow in Tucson!  This is the second time we have had snow this winter! This is the epitome of what Katherine Hayhoe termed "Global Weirding!" Maybe I'm exaggerating a bit. But it is weird. It is rare for it to snow in our desert town.   I like to fancy myself a "citizen scientist" taking pictures to investigate what is happening in our garden and desert food forest. So out I went this morning with my cellphone to take pics of the snow. Here are the lessons I learned.  The snow on the gravel or plain dirt has already melted ..read more

I started with compost, covered it with bermuda grass then planted carrot seeds If you've been following this blog, you may have heard me lament on how it is nearly impossible to be completely Zero Waste in our consumer culture. Our family is Reduced Waste at best. But we do try. We tote reusable grocery bags (including produce and bulk bags) and refillable water bottles.  One area where we've come closer to Zero Waste is in the garden. I don't use any store-bought fertilizer since it is packaged in plastic then shipped from far away and may even be derived from fossil fuels. I a ..read more

Dan and I were on a mission to photograph some examples of rainwater harvesting for the new website soon to be launched: Desert Lifestyle Tucson. Our self-guided tour of Dunbar/Spring captured more than rock-lined catchment basins and cisterns. There were signs of community - a community that Brad Lancaster carefully crafted along with his guerrilla curb cuts... ... including signs displaying before and after photos of the neighborhood project. It's a story I love to share - how this once stark, crime-ridden neighborhood became an example of Green Stormwater Infrastructure and community b ..read more

  Plan Tucson is getting updated!     What do you want for Tucson? Your vision for the future of our community is needed as we update Plan Tucson, the City of Tucson General & Sustainability Plan (2013).      Over the coming years, community members will have the opportunity to develop a 20-year plan for Tucson, reflecting our shared goals and diverse aspirations. The goals and policies spelled out in the new Plan Tucson will be used to guide the City’s investments, programs, policies, and land-use decisions over the next two decades.    D ..read more

It's that time of year again when I try to wrap my head around the meaning of a Christmas without all the commercial trimmings and trappings.  In our quest to have a more sustainable lifestyle, our little family does what we can to cut back on our consumption of single-use plastic. It has become a habit to tote our reusable water bottles on the bus and bring our reusable grocery bags to the store (including canvas bulk bags and produce bags). That gets a little trickier at Christmas time. We no longer buy wrapping paper or gift bags. We started by using what we already had. (There are al ..read more

Someone on Nextdoor asked where to get a bird feeding table. I don't have one. We've designed our yard to be a habitat for birds - even got a sign from the Tucson Audubon Society for it. Birds really like bushes (like bougainvillea and purple sage) where they can hide. I don't put out seeds for the birds. But I have plenty of birds. I do have bird baths. That's hackberry to the left I have native plants that the birds enjoy: hackberry, wolfberry and chiltepin in the front yard. Wolfberry in foreground and hackberry to the right of the mesquite This bunny likes our wolfberry t ..read more

Brr... Holding this ice is cold.... After some winter rain, we had our first frost and then deep freeze in Tucson with the temperature getting as low as 28 degrees at night. Yesterday I woke up to find frost on our purslane mulch and ice in the bird baths.  A few days before, I started preparing for the hard freeze. It was past time to harvest my sunchokes (or as we affectionately call them "fartichokes.") The stalks and leaves were all dried up, and some of the roots were breaking through the ground and turning purple.   So I pulled the stalks up with the roots ..read more

Richard Roati's food forest There's nothing like having a lush canopy of trees to enhance your life in the desert. Those trees won't just cool your house and yard (and cut down on your energy bill), but they will cool off the whole neighborhood. Areas with trees are up to 12 degrees cooler than areas without. And those tree branches hanging over sidewalks make a nice place to walk your dog and socialize with your neighbors.  You've probably seen gravel and cement in too many yards around town. While that may cut back on the water that would otherwise have been used for a lawn, al ..read more

With all this rain, we are getting a lot of so-called "weeds." A weed being any volunteer plants that we don't want in our yard. But before you start pulling out all of  your weeds willy-nilly, I thought I'd do a blog on which are the good weeds and which are the bad weeds (in my opinion.) The good weeds include edible weeds, wild flowers and native grasses. The bad weeds include sticker weeds like goat heads and tumbleweeds. I'll show you how to identify both. If you've read my posts, you're probably aware that I'm an advocate for pulling the weeds where you don't want them and leaving ..read more

The piles of brush and bulky in our neighborhood got me thinking about where all our trash goes after it is picked up. I have never understood why they pick up the tree branches and other organic materials at the same time as other big junk like broken washing machines, flat tires, and furniture. Fortunately, Tank's Green Stuff is currently set up at the landfill to take some of the tree branches and turn them into mulch to be used in our landscaping and gardens. Unfortunately, the rest goes into the landfill.  The Los Reales landfill takes in 2,300 tons of solid waste daily and the ci ..read more