0 Blog Stew Stored Underground

• Mysterious Kansas: Who built the stone caves and why? "Parish was wowed by the workmanship and created a panoramic image of it. Then he began to wonder: How many more of these are out there?"

New Mexico rock art panel (Western Digs).

• Datura — still legal in New Mexico (and everywhere else). Maybe there is a connection with ancient rock art: "Hallucinogenic plants were found growing beneath the triangle designs, including a particularly potent species of wild tobacco and the potentially deadly psychedelic known as datura."

• Maybe you have read that forest fires are bigger and hotter than in the past. Not if you take the long view, says a University of Colorado study.  "Wildfires along Colorado's Front Range, long assumed to be intensifying, may not be when understood in historical context before 20th-century firefighting, a new study finds."

Detail: Blog Stew Stored Underground

0 You Can't Burn 'Em, You Can't Plow 'Em: SE Colorado's Tumbleweed Blizzard

Southeast Colorado county officials try to deal with the combination of blustery spring winds and last summer's bumper crop of tumbleweeds (Russian thistle).

Burning kills the seeds, but you cannot burn them when it is windy. And the various mulching solutions just scatter the seeds.

Detail: You Can't Burn 'Em, You Can't Plow 'Em: SE Colorado's Tumbleweed Blizzard

0 The Tumbleweed Menace

Colorado Springs Gazette columnist Bill Radford notices the tumbleweed hordes of 2013. 

Oh yeah. I am not one of those people who goes around mowing everything mowable — that is so Midwestern— but this year I mowed one little meadow that I had not touched in twenty years, because it was sprouting kochia and Russian thistle, the baddies:

In El Paso County, the two chief culprits are Russian thistle and kochia, [rancher Sharon] Pattee says. The Colorado State University Extension labels them both as "troublesome annual weeds of rangeland, pastures, fields, disturbed areas, gardens, roadsides, ditch banks and small acreages."

Both are non-native species. Russian thistle originated in, yep, Russia, and is believed to have come to the United States in the late 1800s through contaminated flax seed. Kochia is from Asia.

Tumbleweed Christmas trees? Been there, done that. One year when I was little, I was sick in bed during Christmas, so my older sisters decorated a big globe tumbleweed with glass ornaments and put it by my bed.

This was when we lived in Rapid City, S.D., where they were easy to come by.  This year in southern Colorado, every barbed wire fence looks like a fuzzy brown wall. Yeech.

Detail: The Tumbleweed Menace

0 How dry has it been? Tumbleweed Dry

I mowed the lawn at the guest cabin today — such is the payoff after having more than four inches of rain this month.

But it has been dry. How dry has it been? It has been so dry that the usual invasive weeds such as bindweed are gone, except around the flower bed where they can steal some water.

Instead, the area where all the grass died (previous owner planted bluegrass, which survived the late 1990s but not the 2000s) has been colonized by kochia and Russian thistle (tumblin' tumbleweed).

I have never seen tumbleweed growing around here before. I mowed every bit of it that I could find, hoping to stop it from flowering — the tumbling spreads its gazillions of seeds.

Detail: How dry has it been? Tumbleweed Dry