Beauty in the Desert

    I love the desert life and everyone I know keeps asking me why. It is hard to put into words what can only be described as beautiful scenery, quiet nights, and the feel of tranquility when you look up at a million stars or when you wake up in the clouds.
     I add pictures occassionally in hopes of showing the real beauty there is in living the desert life. Here are a few more that can say what I cannot.

 

 

    

Building a New Environment

     Stephen and I sat down a couple of days ago so we could put both of our ideas down on paper. We created a blueprint of exactly how we want things to look when we are finished. We seem to add new things on a daily basis but when all the details are finalized I will share them.
     Some of the things we are including in our blueprints are.... an outside bar, a bocce ball court, an herb garden, root cellar, my zen garden, a 350 foot stream with a couple of footbridges, and a pond. We are also planting several fruit trees and a bamboo forest. It will be a lot of work but we have already started to dig the stream and hopefully the recent rains will help wash it out even more.
     I am also building a wildlife viewing blind on the back 20 acres so I can capture the beauty of the wildlife that has been moving into the area with the cooler weather. We saw two large mule deer a few days ago. One was a 10 point and the other a 6. Stephen is ready for hunting season to start but I have to take the hunter's safety course first.
    We want our place to be an oasis for wildlife and we know that this means some of the less desirable animals may wander in as well but I feel that the area has always been theirs. We decided that we will only kill the animals if they are a threat. We saw our first badger the other day. Stephen didn't even know that badgers lived in the desert and he wanted to shoot it. It hissed at him a few times but I told him he had to let it go on it's way. It ran and jumped in a hole that my oldest son had made so when Stephen looked in it was not happy. Once we backed away it crawled out and ran off. I wanted to shoot it too... with my camera. It was amazing. I didn't have my camera with me but now I am keeping it by my side at all times.
    The snakes are really starting to move around now. We killed another a couple days ago. It is the third poisonous snake we have killed. We also saw a bull snake which was beautiful and about five feet long. Of course, we let it go about its business. It will help keep down the population of rodents and smaller poisonous snakes. Most of the snakes we have killed have a lot of rattles. The past two have been 9 and 10 years old. I kind of feel bad because this has been their land and now we are moving in and taking it over. If they stay away from the house I don't mind sharing the area. I am grateful that winter is coming so they will climb under some rocks for a while.

 

Not Poisonous and still alive somewhere on El Chupacabra Ranch

 Poisonous and dead... was only 20 feet from our front door!

 

 

 

         

Tiny Horned Toad

     When I was growing up in the hill country I remember seeing horned toads all over the place. I never realized that it had been so long since I had seen one until I moved to west Texas. I now wonder when they began to disappear from the areas I grew up with. I am sure you can find one here and there but they are few and far between. In Bertram I remember seeing them quite a bit but after I moved an hour or so away I never saw any. Now looking back on it I realize that even visits back to that small hill country town did not produce any horned toad viewing.
      Since we have moved here we have seen several horned toads. Stephen came to me with the most adorable thing I had ever seen so I snapped these pictures just to let you know that in west Texas they still thrive.

      

A Long Week

    Stephen's new job allows him to work only a couple of days a week and still make the same amount as before. This has been perfect because the house was not complete when we moved out to the ranch. The chickens needed more space being in smaller pens than they were used to. They had just started to lay again so we needed to get them into a coop as soon as possible. We decided to spend a week getting things in order.
    First on our list was to get the chickens in a new home with more space. We had only kept our best mother hens, one rooster and two pullets (all but two are game chickens). We needed to build a coop that would keep them safe as well as give them warmth for the winter. We took into account the fact that we now live in an area with bob cats, mountain lions, coyotes, and snakes. We used landscaping timbers for the outside border and then dug down around the coop to install tin. The tin would be harder for snakes to climb. It would also make digging into the coop a longer task so we could respond to the chickens if they alerted to danger. We then added a small room with laying boxes that would keep them out of the weather. The chickens were very happy to be in their new home. We still wanted to be sure they were protected so in a final effort to do that we built a dog pen around three sides so that at night the dogs can keep them safe.

    The next job to tackle was one I was desperately waiting for... inside plumbing! Stephen is licensed in water and waste water so this part was the easiest. The hardest part was digging a huge hole for our septic tank. I tried to help but he really did most of the work. This was a huge stepping stone in getting things the way we want them. Once the septic was in it was time to install the toilet. I could not wait for this to be marked off our list but I would have to because it was getting too late and darkness was fast approaching. (Solar power was next on the list!)
    The next day Stephen wanted to start by installing the solar panel. This would be a quick job since we had a completed 1600 watt panel. We had also purchased a smaller panel as well as additional squares to build another large panel later. We wanted to have plenty of power for the house and shop so we also bought two large wind generators. Stephen installed the solar panel and then we got to the toilet.

 

          
        The installation of the toilet took most of the day but we still had a bit of time to install the roof trim. Everything was coming along just as we hoped. We spent the rest of the day relaxing in the cool evening breeze. Out in the desert you can see a million stars when darkness falls. The Milky Way looks like thick cloud cover and shooting stars are common. Some nights it takes forever for the moon to come up and on others, it comes up almost as soon as the sun goes down. I think the evenings are my favorite part of living here.

    
   
 

Better Weather

     After just a week of living at our new property we found that we had moved at the perfect time. It was the start of the rainy season in the Chihuahuan desert! The storms and rain brought cool weather. We are used to triple digit temperatures. Rain in Bastrop has been rare in the past few years. I think I have seen more rainbows, since we moved to the desert, than I have seen in my entire life. We have seen over twenty in the past month. The rain is a welcome site. We put up a rain water collection system and in two days we caught 450 gallons of rain water.

    There are many things that live in the desert that I never would have imagined to find there. Right after a rain the desert comes to life with a million dragon flies, turtles, and turantulas... along with other things.

      Rain is always welcome but on a highway with a speed limit of 80 miles per hour it can be very dangerous. We drove into Van Horn and along the way we saw two cars that had hydro-planed. We also saw an accident involving 18 wheelers. This is a thing that, I have discovered, are seen often. So be careful out there.