What's Cool in Tucson When it's Hot ?

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What's a Swamp Box?

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One thing you notice as soon as you start driving around Tucson is the many  beige-colored metal boxes  you see sitting on the roofs of houses all over town.   Some look pretty neglected and rusted out.   At first glance, you might mistake them for air conditioning units, and they are, sort of.   They are often referred to as “Swamp Boxes” by the locals.   A Swamp Box is what the heating and cooling industry calls an Evaporative Cooler.   It works much like a home humidifier.   The cooler contains a basin of water and a rotating drum with a foam pad.   Air is blown over the wet pad and into the house to produce cool moist air.   With an A/C unit, humidity is sucked out of the interior air in the cooling process, whereas with a swamp cooler humidity is blown into the interior air.   Since Tucson is a desert climate with very little humidity, for most of the warm season, an A/C unit is of little use.   The locals who have lived with their quirky swamp coolers since the 1960’s, like to
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Desert Fruit

What distinguishes our Tucson home from all the rest in our post-WWII tract-home development are the two stately olive trees that grace our front yard. Our property is the only one in the neighborhood that retains its original curbside olive trees. When our development, and others just like it all over Tucson, were first built, its streets were lined with olive trees.  Over time, the trees died or were chopped down my homeowners who found the trees to be more of a nuisance than a distinctive shade tree.  The city of Tucson has since band the planting of fruit-bearing olive trees anywhere in the city.  Olive trees have a nasty habit of producing tremendous amounts of pollen and dropping huge numbers of olives all over sidewalks and streets. Believe me when I tell you that fallen olives will turn a sidewalk into a slippery purple-black mess. They are so bitter that the birds won't even eat them. People who come to the desert to get relief from their pollen allergies, have little appr
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Figaro - Growing Figs in Tucson

Not long after settling into our new place in Tucson, I discovered a garden center just down the street that specialized in native plants.  Great!  I could now start learning how to identify and name all the local desert flora.  As I browsed the aisles and started noting names on the tags of the most interesting plants, I found my way over to the fruit tree section.  Just beyond the lemons, oranges, and grapefruit trees, I spotted an aisle of trees that looked surprisingly familiar. Could they be? Was it possible?  Was I really seeing rows of fig trees? Yes! They were truly fig trees. I had never expected to find fig trees growing in Tucson.  It was early September, and the figs were just beginning to ripen. Unfortunately, some trees were infested with fig beetles.  Fig beetles are gigantic iridescent purplish black things the size of a cockroach.  When they begin to feast on a fig, they swarm on that one precious fig until they are hanging from it like a bunch of deep purple grapes. 
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