yellow month came late this year
eons ago i wrote about our version of hanami, what i called desert hanami, where i would go out and look at the palo verde blossoms in the spring. much like sakura hanami, the blossoms of the palo verde come on quickly and are fleeting as the increasing summer heat ramps up in May.
only recently i learned about Yellow Month, a designation on the Tohono O'odham calendar (see below, highlighted yellow), and so i've slowly come around to calling this time yellow month (because the desert's favorite bloom color is yellow) as opposed to desert hanami.
because of the atmospheric rivers, our yellow month started quite late - late April (as opposed to late March). but the trees are in full bloom now, which is great news.
palo verde trees are incredibly important for desert survival. you can eat the buds of the flowers. you can eat the flowers (and some ppl brew them as tea). and most importantly, you can eat the beans. Tohono O'odham used to ferment the beans into a drink, keeping the beans in large ponds of water, drinking from it as they aged/fermented. the most common usage of these beans today is to grind them up and bake with them.
but more importantly, they're vital for animals. we used to have a bunch of large pipes out here, and when you'd tip them up in the middle of summer, you'd have tons of beans slides out, packed away by rats and squirrels to make it through the hot dead summer. we don't typically harvest our beans because we'd rather leave them for local animals to use.
these trees are a staple for our local ecology, and they are at risk due to climate change (x). compared to mesquites and ironwood trees, palo verde is less tolerant to the heat, and succumbs to disease more readily when its hot and dry. almost every single palo verde on my property has some amount of disease, and there is very little to be done about it.
i personally love how you can spot every palo verde on the mountain side because they're so bright and yellow compared to the surrounding area. unfortunately, a lot of ppl who live here find them annoying as their petals litter the ground, but to me, its like desert's form of sakura. something to be enjoyed for the brief moment they're here each spring.
