Growing Native with Petey Mesquitey

Caryophyllaceae is the pink family or carnation family and as I write this I'm wondering why isn't it the campion family, but oh well...

I like the way the family name of Polemoniaceae just rolls off the tongue. What a delicious word to say.

The scientific name for jaguar is Panthera onca and these large wild felines range from Sonora, Mexico down to portions of central and South America.

Epazote (Chenopodium ambrosiodes), the plant jabbered about in this show, is originally from tropical America, but is naturalized in North America, not to mention Europe and Asia.

Snake Cotton (Froelichia arizonica) is nothing to write home about I guess. I mean you’re not going to find it a nursery and why would you look, right? But there is something nice about learning all the plants and critters we encounter out in the wild. It’s fun to be a nature geek don’t you think? Yeah it is.

Cliffrose is the star of this show. It also goes by the common name of quinine bush or its scientific name is Purshia mexicana.

There are five species of lubber grasshoppers found in the United States and two of those species of lubbers found here in the borderlands; the horse lubber and the plains lubber.

There are eleven species of goldenrod found in Arizona and those species range in elevation from 2,000’ to 9,500’ around the state.

At our place we don’t remember this many fruit flies from years past, so I guess in a way this has been a good year, at least for the fruit flies.

I hope I’m around so I can say, “You should have been here 2017. Now that was a flood!”