The weather is finally starting to cool off at night so that we can open the window screens and turn off the AC. With the modest change in the weather, we have noticed some wildlife changes in our area. The migratory bats have mostly moved on. They were dive bombing us at sunset at the community pool.
This week, we made a road trip to Wilcox. Julia and I had been there once before, and I was unimpressed. She heard from friends that the farms and orchards in the area were worth the visit. The apples were past season. There were still a few Granny Smiths, but that was pretty much it. For twenty cents off full retail, you could pick your own vegetables in the fields.
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| Tirrito Farm |
There may have been a milk stout involved in providing an incentive for the trip.
I can say that it was interesting how Wilcox farms can turn irrigated desert into vegetables, nut trees, and fruit trees. There is no free lunch, however. It will be interesting to see how agricultural interests compete with homeowners' desire to drink water and bathe, as ground water levels drop each year with more and more reports of dry wells.
One of the locals was telling me that Arizona farms export a certain variety of pecans to China, while China imports a different variety of pecans back to the United States. I asked what the difference was in the taste, and he said he couldn't tell the difference. We humans do strange things for a buck.
We have seen bobcats in our community before. Julia saw one on the sidewalk in our neighborhood. However, we had a first today when a juvenile bobcat quietly walked through the back patio only a few steps from our sliding glass doors--before squeezing through the back fence to hunt packrats on the other side. Good bobcat!
10 comments:
Water is certainly becoming an issue in La Paz County where the Saudis grow fields of alfalfa to be exported and using massive amounts of unregulated water.
Finding a good milk stout is worth a drive.
It's been at least 30 years since the city councilors launched their campaign to get everyone to convert from lawn to xeroscape. Back then I asked if they were gonna stop folks from putting more pecan orchards; they didn't. What I heard was residential accounts for about 2%. Agriculture and Intel, the chip manufacturer, use the other 98%. We still have all the golf courses.
Amazing you have bobcats all over the place!
How is Allie doing?
That's also what I understand to be the case from what I've read. Groundwater for irrigation is largely unregulated. There have been some attempts by the old guard to limit new entries from using the groundwater, but that seems to me to be more of a turf war than an effort to be ecologically responsible.
The stout at Territo Farms was very good.
The Tucson City Council recently voted to not proceed with an Amazon Data Center due to concerns with massive use of water to cool the equipment. Rather than give up, they are looking to develop in Pima County and use air- cooled equipment. Of course, the power needed to run the data center and for the air conditioning to cool the equipment will require building more power plants operated with fossil fuels. Tucson Electric Power is asking for a 12% increase in rates this year, which they assure is unrelated to the proposed data center.
Allie is coming for a long weekend this week, and she will be bringing along her boyfriend, who I haven't met yet. She also started a new job, which came with a promotion, so things are going pretty well for her.
We humans will do anything for a buck, no matter who it hurts!
We're starting to see more bobcats around here. The rancher ro the south of us was the nicest guy you'd want to meet, but he was old-school and, as a matter of habit, culled many critters, including bobcats, but at 85 he sold his place and moved on and I see that the new guy removed all the traps, at least the ones I could see from the fence-line.
Uh-oh, first time meeting the boyfriend - that's not awkward at all!
One would hope that with as much sunshine as Tucson gets they'd power the cooling with solar....at least during the day, and LPG or mini reactors at night.
One would hope, but Tucson Electric Power (TEP) is owned by Fortis, a Canadian for-profit utility and regulated by the Arizona Corporation Commission (composed entirely of Republicans). The current presidential administration's disdain for solar and love for fossil fuels mostly knocks down that hope.
Most of Allie's boyfriends haven't hung around long enough to bring home for a weekend. This one seems to have more potential than most; he treats her well.
We Humans do indeed indulge in some very strange practices. We have several varieties of Pecans growing in our Mini Farm Community and all of them look different and are good, but I must Confess, I couldn't tell the difference insofar as their actual taste. Bobcats are often seen in Neighborhoods near raw Desert, but not so much in the City, but, Coyotes have Urbanized quite well and come in to Hunt. And the Raptor Birds are everywhere.
I love the wildlife in Arizona. It's so different from Wisconsin
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