Pictures of the Monsoon Rain in the Sonoran Desert and the Bounty that it Calls Forth

The Monsoon season is in full-swing right now in Catalina, Arizona. We get most of our 12 inches of annual rain in July in torrential downpours!

The whole desert eco-systems goes into overdrive to take advantage of the moisture. My seven-year-old son and I go mountain-biking early in the mornings on the weekend so that we won't get crisped by the mid-morning heat and yesterday we both noticed that the mountain sides seemed to have turned emerald green overnight. There is no time to waste! Green up, flower, seed, get into the ground, get watered, germinate, and gets some roots down before it all dries up again!!!

My favorite species - the Couch's Spadefoot hasn't heard a hard enough rain to wake up, yet. They hyphenate underground until a really hard pounding rain tells them that puddles have formed deep enough for them to breed. When they wake-up, no one sleeps. The first time I heard, the little 3 inch male Couch's Spadefoot frogs calling, they woke me out of a sound sleep at 3 am. It sounded like a pig suffering through a breech birth in the next room! The next morning, every little pool was filled with fertilized Couch's Spadefoot eggs - FIFTEEN HOURS later they were tadpoles. And in a frenzy of growth, trying to outrace their puddle homes shrinking size, the tadpoles become little froglets in NINE DAYS! Watching them develop fills me with awe every time I see it. The next time it happens (it doesn't happen every Monsoon season) I promise to take pictures and post them on my Blog.

I do have some wonderful Monsoon pictures to share, though. Here is my garden gate, after a good soaking:

 and the pomegranates - maybe this year, we will get some - the birds seem to always know about a day before I do when they are ripe enough to eat!

Something, my money is on the Javelina's - a kind of wild pig, got to my peach tree the day before I was going to harvest a few weeks ago. Big snouts pushed away the netting that I had put over the tree to keep the birds away and just took the fruit. To add insult to injury, they broke little twigs off, too.

My vegetable garden is in a hoop house, covered in chicken wire - I got tired of sharing my veggies a few years ago with all the desert critters and built it in a burst of energy one Christmas vacation. Sharing isn't really the word...they got it all! Now we have garden lettuce most of the year - just not in June, July or August. I haven't found any varieties that can stand up to our 116 degree days!

This year I am harvesting some of the "Bean Trees" that are beautifully adapted to these 116 degree days. I guess it is only fair that the desert critters share a little of their Monsoon bounty with me, since I have fed them so well for so many years! There certainly is plenty to go around! The Velvet Mesquite trees are heavy with pods. This picture is of a pod that is just starting to turn brown at the bottom. I like to eat the seeds raw at a stage just before this stage - they are a lot like edamine - with about the same nutritional value!

In another week or so, the whole pod will turn a beautiful speckled purple and tan color and dry to a very hard stage. I am going to harvest them at that point and use them in my Shred! Forage! Play! Parrot Toys. Parrots go nuts for them! And they are super-healthy! In fact, they actually LOWER Blood Sugar even though they are sweet. Native peoples in the Tucson area who are cursed with high rates of diabetes are choosing to go back to their traditional diets with a strong emphasis on mesquite to reverse their diabetic conditions. I'm also going to experiment with some recipes for toasting the pods. If they taste as good as they are supposed to, I am going to market them on eBay, too. I'm even going to try an old-fashioned recipe for Mesquite Syrup for Pancakes. It has no sugar in it, just mesquite pods as a sweetener.

Finally, here is one of my favorite pictures, and another ingredient of my Shred! Forage! Play! Parrot Toys - the pods of the Cat Claw Acacia. As it dries a little bit more, the pod will twist more. It also makes an irresistible rattling sound when shaken. I love to walk by the trees when a breeze comes up and listen to their music.