Patty, it feels good to be ready for the season, doesn't it? That was the case here with this year's garden. Your tarantulas will keep a lot of pesky insects away from the house if you leave them be. And while it would seem like goathead comes from a grass (the burr grass here is really sharp) it looks like your nuisance painfully sharp object is Tribulus terrestris and comes from the Zygophyllaceae or Caltrop family. Relative of the lovely smelling and benign creosote plant. (Naturalist Gary Paul Nabhan wrote the book The Desert Smells Like Rain and most people who live out there know that moisture makes the creosote smell wonderful.)

Yesterday I picked up a couple of the bulk ingredients that go into my homemade granola, and I'll make a small batch, minus the powdered milk, for a friend who is interested in the gut-health effect that this recipe has for me. I'll enter the ingredients in My Fitness Pal so if they like it her son (who is a chef) can reproduce it in different amounts. She'll also know how much fiber and such it has.

I also picked up some dry garden organic fertilizer to sprinkle today then I'll water it in tonight. Three more cucumbers this morning, retrieved from the maze of vines that overlap and spread in a tangle next to the side door. The bees are working it heavily, and I have a photo of a baby lizard with its face shoved deep into a yellow cucumber flower.