My dogs woke me up around midnight to go out and howl at the moon with them.
It was superlovely.
This morning, I planted 15 roses, watered everything and washed my car. That will guarantee we get rain.

I watered this morning too including one border just to soften the ground enough to weed it. I didn't wash my truck; I think the dirt is what is holding it together. However it looks as if the rain coming from the west went north of us as is now pretty much expected.

nothing yet must have by past us but there calling for rain most of the week ;0) wish I could send you all some !!!!

Thanks, but we're ok...if I had rain like I wanted, then I'd be on here complaining about blackspot or something else.
Last year I discovered iris and roses do just fine in high temps and drought.
One year not too long ago, we had 40 days straight of rain. I'll never wish for that much rain again. We had so many weeds, and we couldn't mow, so I had to borrow a baling machine, no kidding.
We had mosquitoes which we never get here, and snakes omg the snakes!
The humidity was the killer. ugh. And everything smelled bad.
oh no. Give me dry dusty over too much rain any day.
well as long as the well doesn't go dry, anyway...

I can relate to all of that Cindi we get lots of rain in the spring !!! Up side its easyer to pull the weeds in the rain then when it hot and dry

I think it was in '07 when we got rain rain rain rain rain. I loved it. I didn't have roses at that time (hadn't been bite by the rose-bug yet), and I'm naturally a skeeter magnet, but to have that much rain was a blessing out here. I miss rain so much.. when I lived in NY it rained all the time & I love the water. The smell of it, the feel of it in my hair, how it naturally makes everything sooooooooo much greener... not like this dusty desert here. Humidity is rarely a problem here due to the altitude. There's a Winter Weather Advisory in the mountains right now.. above 7000ft (I don't qualify... I sit at about 6000ft) are supposed to see between 2-5" of new snow. Hey, any moisture is GOOD moisture!

I think how one feels about rain has a lot to do with how much rain one is used to getting. When I lived in the NE I would sometimes wish for rain for the garden, but I rarely enjoyed it. A place that got 40 inches of rain per year, simply made rain feel too common.

Here we average 20 inches of precipitation per year. My guess is that 1/3 of that falls during two or three snowstorms per year. The snow sticks to the ponderosa pines and everything is beautiful. The rest falls in brief rain showers scattered throughout the year. It is usually true that when it rains we have had long stretches of sunny weather and the ground is dry. Rain is almost always welcome here.

I wasn't living here for very long when I went into a restaurant and the waitress asked how I was doing. "Good." I said. "But I wish it weren't raining."
"I like rainy days," she replied sweetly.
Suddenly I realized I wasn't living in NJ anymore. Firstly, there nobody does anything sweetly. Secondly, service people may be surly, but they tend not to contradict you without reason. But most importantly, I realized that here rain was really precious. And it does have a peculiar beauty of its own here.

Last year DW and I went out of town for two weeks. We had someone water the garden daily. He was very careful, and judging from our water bill he used about twice as much water as I usually did. I would have been able to tell anyways because it was filled with the lushest stand of weeds I've seen here.

That may have done the garden more good than I credited it at the time. I lost very few roses over winter this year. I think dry spells that last two or three months in summer can really set back roses that are not well established, which means they are not in a good place when frost strikes in fall. I think that may be one contributing factor to my difficulty with roses here. Probably in NJ, too, where roses got the double whammy of dry soil and humid air in July. Also, I keep being surprised with how much more workable the soil around weeds is than the soil where they aren't growing. Not sure which is cause and which effect.

My weed book says dandelions improve the soil because their roots open it up. Sometimes when I get behind on weeding, and I go in and hoe the weeds, I turn them over and hope I'm adding compost. That works if I don't let the weeds get to the seeding stage.
We get an average of 30 inches of rain a year, and May and June are the rainiest months. The problem is, our rain falls fast and hard. A 3" rain that falls in 1 hour isn't much good to the plants. We're now in a weather pattern of rain falling at night, which brings on blackspot in the roses.
Last summer, we were remodeling the house and I had a drywall guy here who was somewhat dyslexic. He used my outdoor spigot to wash his tools, and carefully reconnected my soaker hose with the "y" connector. Two days later, I noticed water on our gravel driveway. I found the drip lines that run through a normally xeric shrub bed had been on for 2 days. All the shrubs, trees and perennials in that bed were looking pretty happy! That was in the middle of our heat wave of 108 temps. that particular mistake saved those trees, i'm sure. I lost most of the arborvitae (green giants) in other areas of the yard, but everything in that 250' border survived. The really good news is that the well didn't go dry. When I first found out, I was pretty upset with the worker because I didn't know if extended use like that could damage the pump. This year, I will not be afraid to water when the plant need it. Once I get ahead on finances, i'm going to set up a well just for irrigation, so I don't have to worry about losing the household water (and geothermal air conditioning water source) if I need to keep plants alive.

Oh another thing....we got real lucky having the mild winter this year. On a normal winter, I would have lost everything following the extreme heat and drought we had last year.

Does your geothermal water empty into a watering system for the garden?

I don't understand why people keep buying arborvitaes. They're a gorgeous tree, but I have YET to see them thrive anywhere! Most of the time, they just hang on for dear life.. but more often than not they're dead. And I understand being on a well. My parent's house in NM sits on a well that has feeds off of an underground river.. they have over 100' of water constantly flowing under them. Kinda creepy thing is that the house is actually built above a massive cavern (hydrogeologist who did the survey estimated about 250-275ft hollow under a 10' base that the house sits on). One time I was goofing off in the garage (dirt floor) and stomped both feet as hard as I could. I could hear an echo! Scared the snot outta me!

It's still dripping outside right now. We may see 1/2" with as slow/tiny as the drizzle is, but I don't care! it's soaking right in!!

No, it feeds into our pond. My husband won that argument. He wanted a constant source of cool water for the fish. Our neighbors to the norh and south also have the same system, and they dump into the pond also. I really really wanted it to run through drip lines or into a cistern, but the quantity was going to be a problem as I wouldn't want the issue of too much water in the gardens.

If your drought last summer was nearly as bad as ours, I'll bet the fish were grateful for the water!

Toni, arborvitae, or Thuja, are pretty much our only choice of evergreen here. We have western red cedars, but they are rough in appearance and full of insects, where green giants, particularly, have a neater look. Pines are all dying from pine wilt disease, spruce all died off when the temps hit 105, hemlock can't take the soil and dryness, and leland cypress don't hold up to the wind or the cold.
I love the Norway Spruce, but they fell off the recommended list for Kansas when they died in the heat last summer.
I've been experimenting with cryptomeria but it is struggling. Our conditions of alkaline soil, wind, drought, extreme heat and cold, dry winters, makes it tough for any evergreen.

porkpal, we were feeding plenty of herons, that's for sure! Our pond is really a blue line stream, and when we bought this place 6 years ago, we bought a used backhoe and spent several months making the stream much deeper. We had to go through corps of engineers, and several other agencies to do it, lotsa red tape. We put in 2 rock dykes so that baby fish could live in the eddies. Right after we decided we had done enough digging, we got rain and more rain. The pond filled, the dam held, and we stocked with thousands of little fish that the biologists recommended. Last year during the drought, we were one of the very few places that still had water. Our neighbors downstream asked us to dredge their waterfront so that kept us busy this winter. Now the water is back up to level, and we're catching bass and catfish again.
Water from one neighbor goes into our bog before it hits an overflow ditch into the pond, and that bog is full of plants I intend to sell some day. the ducks absolutely love it. The other neighbor's water goes into a stand alone pond with overflow, and i have lotus and waterlilies in it. I'm trying to keep the fish out of that one. All in all, we drain over 600 acres, so we have plenty of wildlife at the pond. If the pond were only from geothermal runoff, we could raise trout! Unfortunately, it's fairly muddy from regular runoff.

Cindi - Get some pinons. They'll survive there easily. They'll tolerate down to like zone 4 and can handle years & years & years of drought. Only problem is that they're VERY slow growing, like getting 15' tall in 30 years. That's the state tree of NM, where the wind blows constantly.

And I'm insanely jealous that you have a "pond" where you can catch fish! OMG!!

Pinyon are on the list for our area, problem is no nurseries carry them since so many died off from bark beetles.
http://uanews.org/node/11668
My van der wolff pines do very well, but I have to keep them close enough to the house to water them. i had forgotten about the chinese junipers. They do well. I have some in the yard that are old and huge. I do have to spray them for bagworms every year.
Our pond is 15-20' feet deep in the middle. It's 50-75' across, and it runs the whole length of the property, which is a square 10 acres, so I'm not sure how many feet long that is without digging out the survey. Another creek runs east and west on the south side of the property, but it's usually a shallow bog. The other two sides are fenced but we don't have gates on the drive on that side. When it's rainy, the driveway on the pond side is impassable. (we have a low water bridge).
Last year I was browsing craigslist and found a guy selling old railroad bridge timbers. We bought them and made a dock reaching out over the water. We still have not put decking on it, but it's a neat place to sit. The timbers were so old they had lost more of their creosote smell. My labrador loves jumping off it to chase bumpers.
Don't be too jealous, the house that came with the cool property is a money pit. the foundation was crumbling, termites had eaten the structure, the plumbing, electrical and HVAC all were useless. We even had to replace the roof, windows, doors, flooring and fixtures. We finally got rid of the snakes, spiders, and rats but we kept the bats, bees and lizards. It's been a challenge. Neighbors even warned us it was haunted. There was a violent crime here and the former owner deserted it.
Not a place most people would take on. I saw it as a wonderful place to plant roses. My husband saw it as a place to fish and hunt right off his porch. He doesn't hunt here, but there's enough room to train retrievers and shoot his bow. That's hard to find near the city.

I know what you mean. We were surprised at how much work our house needed, too. Though built well in just 1993 there were a number of things that had gone without maintenance and it took three years and way too much money to get the flaws knocked out. The second water-proofing project should be just about finished this week, and I think that might be the end of the list until the HVAC compressor dies, probably in the heat of the summer. Still, we got a 2.4 acre lot where we can only just see two neighbors. There's a seasonal creek ... er ... trickle of water across part of the property. And when it snows it feels like you are in a national park. All this with city water, gas, trash service, and sewerage, about a mile of Frys and two miles of the center of town. It was just too good to resist. It's even fun watching all the wildlife, so long as it's not eating the roses.

We have ponderosa pine and alligator juniper growing wild here. I planted two pinyon pine and in two years they have gone from 3" tall to maybe 4" tall. Maybe in three of four years they will reach the growth rate of 6" per year. I planted them in a location where I really don't want them taller than about 6 or 7 feet, anyway. I'll report back on them in fifteen years.

Steve, it sounds like you have just the right amount of land in a great location. Have you landscaped the whole 2.4 acres? That size is more work than 160 acres, because in larger properties you have big equipment and only mow twice a year.
We don't get much snow, but when we do, I'm outside taking lots of pictures because that's when we look like a park.

No. Most of it is giant boulders. Fully half of it is inaccessible except by helicopter. We sent a smart, athletic, 26 year old Kenyan guy out to take pictures of the east half of it and within a minute he gave up and returned without anything. Most of the rest is also boulders, too, but you can scramble over it. There's a flat spot by the seasonal stream that is maybe 120' x 50' which is full of roses, iris, lavender, dianthus, artemisia, nepeta, salvia, daylilies, culinary herbs, currants, pinyon pine, lilies, and so on.

Right now the nepeta is so thick with bees you can hear it from ten or twenty feet away. In three weeks it will be the salvia that does it. It's the dianthus, though, that is drawing me into the garden right now. The whole place smells of clove and vanilla. There are two other areas. One is a little strip of vegetable garden that, so far has borne no vegetables whatsoever. A previous owner had planted raspberries here, but they have never bloomed. And they had planted grapes; but the grapes are programmed by nature to wait for warm soil. They always emerge right when the soil is too dry to support their growth, so they get smaller every year. There is also a thin strip that is actually the creek bottom. It's full of native grasses. That I mow to the ground about every other year.

There's another strip that parallels the driveway that's maybe 20 ft wide and 100 ft long that gets brutalized by the sun. So far I've been able to grow some iris and some daffodils in this area, but pretty much everything else dies instantly here including cold-hardy yuccas and other succulents. There's a native euphorbia that survives. And a lovely native gray-leaved grass. There's also a native grass that grows to six inches tall and sets seed that lives on nothing but sunlight and an inch of spring rain.

Stretches of the soil are loose fill sand and other stretches are some kind of impenetrable clay-like soil. In most areas there is not the tiniest bit of organic matter in the soil. We've moved some boulders into this area and we allow it to look pretty much as nature would otherwise devise. I have - from time to time - removed some broad leafed volunteers from the area so that the beauty of the blue-gray grasses shines through.

So when one approaches the house, there's no hint that anyone is trying to grow roses or any other non-native plant. I have had ambitions from time to time to change this, but frequently I am satisfied with its natural look. It's completely consistent with the way neighbors have treated their properties near the road. And it's consistent with the rugged views we see out our windows.