the dirt

September is a tricky month weather wise in Baja, it’s the peak of hurricane season and some say the hottest, buggiest and most humid month of the year. Last year, it was lovely fall weather with a few intermittent showers, this year has been downright, H.O.T. and I’ve been checking the radar reports daily. Luckily the big storms have been staying out to sea and we have only received water, not wind and the desert is loving it. Between our property and town is the Grande Arroyo, normally a broad, dry river wash, but it ran with water from the mountains all the way to the ocean for the first time in two years, it’s amazing to see. We have a much smaller arroyo on our property that is part of the sculpture trail, it’s a small enough tributary that it hardly ever runs, but it’s big enough that we had to build a bridge with tubes in it for the times when the water does come. And it ran too for the first time in years, luckily we had moved all of the art of of the arroyo beforehand.

With all this rain, comes the greening of the desert which is so vibrant right now, the property is almost unrecognizable. The flowers are all in bloom, mushrooms are sprouting and dying all in the course of a day and the bugs and birds are aplenty. When the temperature cools off enough to do some yard work, we will have our hands full this fall. I’m pretty sure that you can sit and watch the vines grow throughout the day, the grasses are popping up on all our trails and the labyrinth is getting taken over by weeds that have just been waiting for this deluge.

We’ve also learned that we’ve got some leaks in the studio that will need some attention and we’ll need to do some drainage work to redirect the water on a better path when we get mini-flash floods on the property. The leaks are frustrating, the amount of bugs flying up my nose and in my eyes are maddening, but seeing the desert come back to life after years of dormancy, is pretty spectacular.

If you’ve visited the studio over the past two years, our desert was mostly a field of browns and grays since we hadn’t had a significant amount of water in two years. But the flora of the desert are patient creatures, lying in dormancy until their time comes to go green. Luckily we have had a few storms roll through, with possibly more to come and the desert has gone from brown to green seemingly overnight. Check out these before and after photos of the property, what a difference a little rain makes!

The sculpture trail now has grasses and vines popping up in the middle of trail, everything is flowering and the bugs and the birds are thriving too. In an abundance of caution, we have pulled all of the sculptures out of the arroyo for the summer storm season, but the pieces that are still here in the higher sections of our property have a completely new environment to shine in. We are hoping to have enough water in the next few weeks, that our desert stays vibrant through the winter.

Thank you for being patient while we took some time away from writing blog posts this summer, but now, we’re back! Here’s a few things you may have missed out on…

And lastly, if you missed them, here are links to our JULY MONTHLY EMAIL and our AUGUST MONTHLY EMAIL