Horizontal world
Last week brought an important milestone to our little half-acre. 

Immediately after moving in the first of June, we had 30 truckloads of sand delivered to plump our eroded landscape, and we contacted the nice man with the small bulldozer to come and smooth it. Then we waited through four weeks of nine thunderstorms and a tropical storm, then three more weeks of flooded yard and too-wet sand. Finally, the sand roller arrived on the Monday, the 20th. 

We've changed the shape of the planet Earth. 

And now, many waiting projects get their turn.

My theme
But first, this thought on subject matter. You've seen Ray's blog with those before-and-after photos of piles of sand and sweeping landscape shots. So as not to be redundant or competitive, my blog is going to leave most of those big picture panoramas to him and I'll veer into some other more micro level of yet-to-be-determined topics as they occur to me.

Stealth fliers
For starters, meet the black witch moths, erebid moth Ascalapha odorata, who like to hide from the heat in our garage rather frequently. By hide, I mean they evade me and hide behind things when I try to chase them out. Clever, tame, gorgeous.

It's hard to show scale when they're on a big wall with nothing nearby, so you could look them up to see better pix than mine and read how they're the continent's largest moth with a seven-inch wingspan. We've mostly had a male or multiple males, though a female was keeping one company for a couple of nights. I like the way his little eye glows in the dim light.

Toxoid happens
You may have seen me bemoan the disappointment that our imported sand seems to be poisoning the precious plants I've so lovingly grown from seed and kept alive in small pots for an extra year as our house-building was delayed. Over time, I'll share a few good news/bad news shots of supposedly salt-tolerant flora that died immediately after being put into the ground, and the few encouraging comebacks. I have hope for fall, aka the second spring, after the Death Star moves south to incinerate the bottom half of the globe, and our world thinks spring has returned.  

Good:  Born-agains

Asclepias curassavica, aka Tropical Milkweed, aka Butterfly Weed

These guys all have burnt, withered tips, but those that didn't die outright kept most of their leaves and are responding now with new growth at the ground level. And two are blooming. They could make it. 

And yes, I'll clip back at least the flowers shown below in winter so the monarchs don't find them here, and keep going on their journey to Mexico.















Sophora tomentosa var. occidentalis

We have at least a half-dozen volunteer Yellow Sophoras that joined existing potted plants in spring back at the rental house. Evidently, I took seeds back from the island when I took buckets of sand back instead of buying potting soil for cuttings and seeds. They join several cousins growing 5' tall in the neighborhood -- yes, native. 






This one's blooming brach is more horizontal than vertical, but happy to show off a blossom even though it's had a challenging life from there back to the home of its ancestors.

And this is who somewhat-patiently waits for me inside. His outside visits occur mostly during the early morning hours when I work in the cool, pre-dawn hours before work, and he watches from the third-level porch, where he has a safe aerial view of the dangerous world below. Just last night, we went out at bedtime and saw six coyotes casually walking down the street in front of our house.