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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...
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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 the...
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Olive Picking Season is Here!

We have the good fortune to live in a house in Tucson that came with two "legacy" olive trees in the front yard. I refer to them as "legacy" trees because these two are the last remaining curbside olive trees in our community.  When our development was built, olive trees were the builders' tree of choice for curbside, street trees in many neighborhoods.  Over time, however, Tucson and many homeowners learned the error of their ways.  People found that the spring flower bloom of these olive trees brought about pretty severe allergic reactions.  Also, if the trees are not pruned regularly, they become quite wild, with limbs growing into power lines, and dangerous when they begin to obstruct lines of sight on busy streets and at traffic intersections.  They also have a tendency to develop multiple trunks which makes them vulnerable to spliting in heavy wind storms. About 25 years ago, the city of Tucson banned the planting of olive tre...
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