The ever prolific green.

It's been a while since we've written but a lot has happened since we last posted.

The heat has been increasingly drying. We deep water nearly every day now. A boisterous rainstorm the other day flooded the yard with much needed moisture but smaller seedlings have dried up in just a few days absence of our watering routine. Only the thick-rooted, absorbent plants survive here.

Weeding is more work than usual; they seem to be sprouting constantly. It keeps us busy maintaining the yard but we don't hesitate to visit the garden.

Our first salad harvest! Greens like mad, green onion and oregano.

The greens are quite prolific, despite the 3 hours or so of direct sunlight they receive.

Our productive cucumber plants.

Cucumber flowers.

Salvia gregii, French dwarf marigolds, and possibly tomatillos.

Our cat prowling the roadrunner.

S/He knows.

Our flower garden sunflowers.

We can't quite tell what these are but they're the first flowers to have opened this season.

Jordan slowly soaking our squash and watermelon rows.

Lazarus, the grape cutting we thought had died.

Another soon-to-bloom sunflower.

The nightshades bed panorama.

Cider Update.

The first batch went smoothly, as hoped! It was drier than most bar ciders, cloudier, and had notes of light caramel before it went down, quite satisfyingly we might add! We shared a liter bottle of it with our friends over a game of the Settlers of Catan and decided we'd be making more.

The Sandia foothills via Copper Road.

After a quick hike out here with a meetup group, we swung over to Costco to pick up some kitchen staples. Costco has a not-from-concentrate, preservative-free apple juice for half the cost of the gallon from Sunflower though it comes in thin plastic, which I find unsuitable for pressurized brewing. With about a fifth of the cider left, we poured in most of the gallon of the Costco stuff. It's filtered and not Organic but the flavor is great and the cost is half so we're willing to experiment. Some of the first batch is sitting in the fridge, waiting to be enjoyed at a later month as we also see if aging is truly worth the time.

Batch number two.

Have any of you started brewing since our last post? What are your results like?