by 
We were at the Azure drop one day this week and just about finished picking up our loot when we chanced to glance off to the north and spy a dust storm coming our way. It had been blowing out of the north all day without there being much dust so maybe it came all they way from Kansas. It took 10 or 15 minutes to finally reach us and rolled in like a mist, one a couple hundred feet high. As I said, it had been blowing all day and the wind didn’t really increase. It was just laden with someone’s topsoil. Visibility was about a quarter to half a mile. It left a coating of on dust on things — cars, porches, grass, people — as fine as face powder, so fine in fact it was hard to sweep up. A nice half-inch shower would be nice to wash it off. Anything less would probably just turn it to mud.
Dust was pretty much the theme this week. I took advantage of a couple of calmer days after the blow to clean up piles of leaves that had accumulated around the place since fall. I carted my shredder around in the trailer with my tractor, going from pile to pile and reducing the leaves to crumbs which I spread in situ. Being much reduced in size, the crumbs don’t blow like the leaves do and they will decompose quickly enough , especially if it rains someday. Too bad there wasn’t enough to put a layer all the way around the lane. That would have cut down on wind erosion, but, then It would have been a lot more work to shred it and it was plenty of work as it was. And nasty work at that, what with all the dust on the leaves which got down my collar, in my eyes and up my nose in the process. My loogies looked like I’d been chewing tobacco.
The Hunts looked in on us on their way back to the promised land after a ski outing. Joyce and I were at our gardening class when they arrived so it was getting late before we had a chance to say hello. Speaking of the gardening class, the presenter for this week’s class on xeriscaping was a fellow that has a nursery called the Canyon’s Edge specializing in drought tolerant plants, many of them native to Texas if not the high plains. He is a bit of a character with an understated sense of humor and we enjoyed his presentation. If nothing else, this blasted drought has taught us to plant close to a source of water and use drought tolerant plants. At least it would if we had any sense.
We are gearing up to plant the garden. Joyce, Chris and I met Saturday to try to come up with a better way to water the garden. Chris has been helping with the garden’s irrigation system all along and, bless his heart, he’s put a lot of work and money in coming up with something that beats watering by hand. Last year he installed a sprinkler system to replace the inadequate-in-drought-conditions drip system we had been relying on and we’re trying to improve on that. We wound up watering mostly by hand in spite of his efforts because he had too many sprinkler heads for our water pressure. The last couple of heads on the line more or less just leaked. We think we’ve come up with a way to make it work but only time will tell. Sorry for being redundant, but a little rain along would help.