Autumn Coatsville Color

Crabapple.

Crabapple skirt touches the ground.

Japanese Flowering Cherry

Service Berry tree at year four in the yard; the boldest color spanning many back yards.

Service Berry

Pampas grasses bound up for winter, so this week’s snow doesn’t lay them flat.

Pond is turned over for winter, with salt water softener added to keep the fish healthy.

Hunga Tonga- Hunga Ha-apai is mounted to the wall between the Bean Whole coffee roasters. Jed is planning on painting the black gas line behind the mask white. At night the backlighting will look great from outside through the front wall of windows.

View from the common area of the Neighborhood Hive in Sugarhouse.

The latest Aeromod to the truck is this “floating” bar of mudflaps running the length of the back of the truck, with a 6 inch gap to the ground (unloaded). The low pressure a truck drags behind it will push all the way to the front, proven in wind tunnel studies. This low line in the back is nearly as effective as a similarly (impossibly) low bumper in the front. The bar is a custom weld job from scrap metal I had around, fitting into the hitch mount (or in tandem with the ball hitch), and has two loose-fit stabilizing pins in the bumper; in this way, additional to the mudflap’s flexibility, some tip and give is allowed when backing up our steep drive. The truck also drops a lot of big ranch mudballs that explode onto the highway, so this keeps other drivers and their windshields safe.

Back to Utah

Lucky in his Coral Bell patch.

The roses have had two seasons here.

The neighbor’s Box Elder shattered by 110mph winds in 2020 is being removed. The shop is safe at last!

6:30am and heavy rain!

Porch coffee and rain!

All day rain. Next morning we leave up the gumbo slick road, and rain at Yellowstone clears the ranch-mud away.

Coatsville Colors

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  Service Berry

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  Wisteria

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  Crabapple

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  Kwanzan Cherry

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  Miss Kim Lilac

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  I turned the sprinklers off two weeks ago with our first hard freeze. It has rained twice since; about an inch each week. About 15% of total annual rainfall.

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  Coral Bells

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  3 new mini-roses from a big-box store fall clearance.

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  Our Daffodils are making questionable decisions. Pasque flowers are blooming around the neighborhood as well. (clues to disaster)

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  Pond water is mid-40’s and switched over to winter system. The fish will go unfed til Spring when the water temps rise back above 50 degrees.

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  A sea of super-tall grasses.

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  The “Yucca” Dasylirion Wheeleri (Desert Spoon) is nearly as tall as the “weather vane” tail. One more year and I’ll have to reconfigure the lower plates.

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  The Service Berry went in two years ago. So far so good.

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  Xander’s winter arborium.

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  The deck’s plants moved back in to the sunroom back before the freeze…

Utah Desert Xeriscape Garden

Water Hyacinths have filled in the upper pond nicely, better than ever- I think it is because of water-blueing. This year I started using a water-bluing agent to cut sunlight penetration, and the water has stayed cooler and the fish are happier, and algae has cleared out.

In past years I have used a pricey UV light in the pond filtration unit, and this year (our hottest / driest year ever) has been fine without it.

The hyacinths are a living whole pond filter; I haven’t had to clear the pump or the filter in weeks!

A spot for morning coffee. From here we watched a male Broadtail hummingbird court a female; lots of ringing and diving as they both flew, then she settled into the big flowering Trumpet Vine and he began a series of side-to-side waggles / perch-breathers / waggles. She was impressed and they flew off together.

Sultry and hot, shaded in the ever-embiggening Purple Sage. She did some math in her head re: Delta transmission at R9, vs the original at R2 (R9-R2)/R2 x %100 = 350) The Delta variant is 350 times more transmissible than the original variant. (now a week later, updated to the same transmission rate as Chickenpox= R12. So 500% more transmissible than the original variant) It also has a replication factor of 1000 over the original, hitting full speed 3 days after infection while still fully asymptomatic (now, showing the same factor whether vaccinated or not). This is the kind of thing she ponders, because she’s aluminum and doesn’t have to worry.

A hummingbird favorite.

Drip irrigation keeps the landscape from powdering out.

The goldfish all rush to make the shot; Influencers, each and every one. Even Koi follow their feed.

WeeOne has left the Ms.Kims unmolested since the fixes, and it looks like they will survive.

I cut all the roses back before our last trip out to MT, and this one has come back nicely.

Out front this summer bloomer fills with bees every day. It dies back to the ground each winter, and this summer has seen its rowdiest growth and blooming. All the plants to the L of it were nuked last summer, even the ground cover reduced to powder this summer.

The little patch of front lawn is heat-stressed and yellowing out- it has been more than a month since it needed mowing and will likely stay dormant till late fall.