I took this photo at high noon a couple of weeks before the winter solstice. Some parts of the lower canyon never get touched by sunshine for a few months in the middle of winter. It’s a totally different environment than just a few hundred feet higher elevation up the hills. And the north and south sides of the hills are also markedly different. When one grows up in such an environment, it all seems natural, and easy to orient yourself. But to someone from outside… the deep dark canyon, the trees overhanging with spanish Moss…. green moss on the trees and rocks, rickety old trucks on the narrow rutted dirt road… for some folks it’s just a bit too much like the film ‘Deliverance’…. we’ve had a couple of people who were visiting us turn back when they became too scared to venture into the hills deeper and deeper… further and further away from society and safety…..
The local deer are forming a temporary family. The male is after the female, but in a bit of an uncommon twist, he is allowing the little fawn to accompany him. These local male deer are usually loners, and I’ve never seen a fawn follow a buck day after day. Someone who didn’t know these deer as much might consider them a family… and yes, I suppose they are.. but the male is usually further up in the hills, further from people, and safer. It’s deer season here, people are roaming these hills looking for him and his ilk. He’s safe here… but there’s a ring of fire around this place…. a little refuge oasis for deer and quail.
Local lore says these guys forecast the first of our autumn/winter rains.
We get no rain to speak of from May to October most years….
Tarantulas have a breeding cycle that co-incides with the coming rains. Maybe they need wet humid conditions for their eggs… maybe the rains stimulate some food source the young will need… I don’t know why, but yearly we can predict the first rains by these guys. When we start to see them, rain is no more than two weeks away.
BTW, it is the males that roam seeking a cute girl spider…. the girls are holed up in their burrows ready to breed with the right fella, and lay their eggs in their deep silk-lined burrow.
We also tell the amount of seasonal rains by the height above the creek-banks the females put their nests…. but those nests are hard to find…. they are camouflaged to reduce predation on the young spider-lings inside. I saw this fellow on the 27th of September…. we got rain on the 29th. that was our first rain since probably April… so he was spot-on. And on 27 Sep we had super-high temps, totally dry weather, no clouds… nothing on the weather about rain.
A tarantula heads through the fence...A tarantula is prediting rainA tarantula walking though the hay
Some of us neighbors get together and exchange veggies. Even though most of us are from inside the canyon, there are many local micro-climates that favor one fruit/vegetable over another and enable that family to grow something that might be difficult for some of the other folks.
Here’s some of the veggies we got last week. All grown by neighbors.
The real find is those Palestine sweet limes…. they are not limey at all.. they have a very delicate flavor….. I want to grow some for myself.
Local produce grown by the neighbors
Clockwise from High noon… avocado, tomatoes, Palestine sweet lime, squash and portobello mushrooms.
Roasting peppers
We roasted some Anaheim peppers for supper…
first you have to remove the skin….
you roast them to boil and blister the skin…..
Scraping roasted peppers
Let them cool enough so you can handle them easily….
and the skin will then peel easily from the fruit with a butter knife.
You then have to split them open, and scrape out the seeds inside…
then chop ‘em up and set them into the bowl to finish cooking…
cactus, mushrooms and peppers in skillet
In the end we fried the peppers, some cactus, onions, and mushrooms all together in olive oil.
Add some spices… and you’ve got a pretty decent meal that’s really nutritious.
Something like this is good over rice…
“My thoughts expand and flourish on this most barren hill…” ~Thoreau
In the summertime we get a regular weather phenomenon known as a ‘marine layer’ that appears in the later afternoon. This brings in a layer of moist wet foggy low-clouds that roll in from the sea. By late afternoon the fog has reached inland enough to blot out the sun. While this might seem a disadvantage… actually, when other places are broiling in the summertime, our coastal areas can have very nice and cool temperatures. And in wintertime, we often have much sunnier weather than we do in the summertime…. go figure!
At any rate…. the spread of this fog layer normally extends only to the first row of hills that are a prominent feature of the landscape along much of the California coast. The relatively flat areas between the hills and the sea are known as a ‘Coastal Plain’. The Coastal Plain is heavily influenced by the moderating of the sea. In the winter time, the relatively warm waters keep the coastal plain a bit warmer than the hill areas and inland deserts. In the summertime, the relatively cool waters will keep the coastal plain area from being too hot.
We live inland beyond the coastal range of hills. So while we have clear skies in general, we can often look at the hills along the coast and see the fog backed up on the coastal side.. trying to reach over the hills. When it does, it slides down the low spots (saddles) and drifts down like a stream… slowly the warmer drier inland environment will break up the mist and vaporize it… you can watch as it slowly dissipates and turns into a vapor and drifts off into the air…. vaporizing and disappearing as it drifts….
They say that each Hydrogen and each Nitrogen, and each Oxygen molecule has been around the world a number of times…. been breathed into and out of the lungs of great numbers of people and animals in the last billion or so years….. each of these molecules is something that is, was, and will be. Eternal as matter can be.
The fog creeps in from the sea, behind the grassy knoll
Big Sky
Fog
Panorama from the Rivenrock Cactus Plantation
Fog creeps over the Coastal Hills in California
The importance of this fog layer cannot be discounted. The fog keeps the local dry environment cool enough so plants transpire less, it reduces soil moisture loss, and as a great bonus, the fog often leaves the plants wet with dew by morning. This dew and fog being caught by the plants and dropping to the ground gives the local environment a bit of moisture in the heart of an otherwise dry summer.
