Hike and Prune

There has been yard work and hiking in the Old Pueblo, as well as cartography.  I recently discovered that one can make their own topographical maps in Google.  Google "Google My maps" and it will take you there.  When creating the map, you can choose the topo style.  My original map of the John Krein trail was created by a blogger who winters in Tucson Estates and via e-mail he was kind enough to tell me how he'd made his maps.  I found this map which shows an alternate route for returning to the Sarasota trail head after doing the John Krein trail.  We decided to walk it backwards  yesterday before crossing the top of the ridge and then having commit to the new route home.  We got a good feel for the distances involved, and I'm not sure this route is much of an improvement over the way we usually go; although it is a much nicer trail.  So, maybe we'll try it.

It's taken me awhile to be able to overlay the above map with this map in my head.  The way they draw the lines  on the maps posted on the trails is counter intuitive to me.  Plus, they keep renaming things.  My map of John Krein refers to it as being across First Ridge.  This map is calling it Bobtail Ridge.  That took awhile to work its way into my consciousness.  Anyway the John Krein trail stretches between the two arrows.

Yesterday's route is a pretty hike, fairly flat with stuff to look at.  Notice the arms the saguaro has put out at his base from what looks like damaged tissue.  We have not seen that before.

It was windy, note the lenticular clouds.

Rocks.

This was our turn around point.  We're at the intersection of Little Cat trail and the David Yetman trail.  Our standing joke is "Yetman, he's everywhere."  He has a lot of trail, and trail off shoots named for him.  That's Bren Peak in the distance.




The Google My maps is cool because now I can get a sense of where all the mountains and ridges are.

We spent two days hacking back the bougainvillea and then we started in on the lemon tree.  The big lemon tree (as opposed to the one we just planted) is a graft.  When one grafts bud stock onto a root stock, one must exercise eternal vigilance to keep the root stock from suckering at the base.  This was not done with our lemon tree.  The one we took out was completely over run by suckering growth.  Apparently the root stock is not chosen for its taste, but rather disease resistance and fast growth.  The big lemon was producing two types of lemons.  One tasted good and the other was just awful.  So, we're removing the suckers, which are the size of saplings.  An interesting article about grafting can be found here.

I took this last November.  The tall growth is the suckering growth, and those lemons are inedible.  They're just terrible.

This is what the tree had become.  The wide part at the bottom is good tree, the tall part is bad tree.

Here is Jim, deploying the pruning saw.  The suckers come up from the base of the tree.

If you ever wanted an impenetrable hedge, lemon trees with spines would be just the ticket.  Some of the spines are two inches long, and they are sharp.  We both were scratched several times (bleeding!) just moving around the branches.  Tucson does not have yard waste pickup, it goes in to the garbage trucks.  If you have dangerous items such as cactus and branches with thorns, they must be boxed.

We spent a lot of time cutting this up into small pieces so it could be boxed.  It's interesting how dense and heavy the wood is.  I would not have predicted that.

 

The hopseed hedge is starting to bloom.  Are they not lovely?  The flowers and leaves are coated with a waxy layer that slows down the amount of water they lose in the summer. 

Cartography and pruning!  That's all I've got!