Mini-biker rally
Sunday September 22nd 2013, 11:00 pm
Filed under: Family,My Garden

The apple.

Juicy. Crisp. Slightly tart, not too sweet. It was as perfect as one could possibly have hoped for after all those years of anticipation.

Meantime, last Saturday when we were there, Parker decided he wanted to ride around the block on his trike and knew the way to talk his avid-cyclist daddy and his Grampa into it was to first go run get his helmet. Then he got his Lego Croc shoes on. Ready!

They ended up going around about five times.

 



Poofball
Saturday September 21st 2013, 10:56 pm
Filed under: Family,My Garden,Wildlife

How to tell when your apples are ripe (Googling).

Can’t tell by color.

The apples farthest out on the tree ripen soonest.

Lift one sideways; if it snaps right off, it’s ripe.

So that’s what I waited all day to try.

We had a major downpour for the last day of summer. I have to show you, just because I’ve never seen one poof out quite so much: this one house finch finally shook herself off and went for a dry perch. The birdseed was all over at the feeder she’d just left, but it was somewhat exposed and enough already with this wind and the randomness of water falling out of the sky–since when does it do that? (I wondered if she’d hatched this spring.)

By evening the storm had blown over and I went outside with scissors and a bowl to hold stuff.

I snipped open the tape on the clamshell that held the biggest two apples and a few leaves and one small one in there too, photo above. I carefully, carefully opened it and found to my surprise that there were actually the two big ones and three, count’em three little ones crammed inside. I did thin those, I’m sure, I think there were four each side originally, but there you go.

I lifted the nearest big one to the left and it came right off in my hand. Into the bowl, done.

I lifted its mate to the right. Nuh uh, nothin’ doin’, ain’t lettin’ go.

Oh okay, so, I put the clamshell back on, grabbed the shipping tape out of the bowl next to the apple and sealed the thing back up again. Sorry raccoons, these are still mine.

And I would tell you how the first ripe critter-free Fuji after 21 years’ anticipation finally tastes, except… I waited for the others so I could share the grand moment with them too.

Michelle got home at about ten o’clock. It’s bag night. (Every third night I can’t eat past dinnertime so that I can change the dressing in the morning. It’s a Crohn’s thing.)

The apple. It awaits.

 

 



In the leafy treetops
Tuesday September 10th 2013, 11:29 pm
Filed under: My Garden

It’s not a fear of heights, I told myself:  it’s an acknowledgment of matter-of-fact limitations. The balance, it is iffy. The ladder ain’t so steady itself. But hey, my nemesis and me, we’re the best of friends, right, Calvin?

And yet this evening as I was looking at that annoying big weed-tree branch that had been leafing out wildly while growing ever longer right over the top of my Fuji apple tree all summer, doing it no good whatsoever, I hauled the big orange plastic ladder thataway, climbed up to the second step in firm determination and, arms outstretched with long-handled shears, whacked away at that thing above me the best I could.

Eventually I simply climbed the third step, pulled the big limb towards me with those loppers, and then broke off one small branch after another with my hands.  Snap. Snap. Snap. Braced myself as the ladder wobbled (quickly moving the tips of those shears away. My husband as a kid fell out of a tree with pruners going into his eye socket–he totally lucked out and needed stitches only).

Sheared that thing.

I let the main snap back in place and suddenly, as I looked up at it, allowed myself at last to realize just how high up it was. How up high I was. And why I hadn’t done this all summer.

Scrambling. Done done done. Not going back up there, not anymore today, maybe not anytime soon, no sir. Done!



Speaking peachably among ourselves
Monday September 02nd 2013, 11:42 pm
Filed under: Friends,My Garden

The annual block party in the early evening: old friends, good neighbors, great times.

I apologized to the neighbor on one side that I hadn’t planted the peach trees where they would grow over her side after all, like she’d fervently hoped I would.  Sun and soil issues. (Although, I could train the one at the end maybe eventually…)

Later I was chatting with the neighbor behind us on the other side. She had bought her house in the early 1950’s. I told her that there are now peach trees for June, July, and August growing on my side of the fence from her, and, (as I watched her face fall) a goodly distance away from it but that I would trim any limbs back should they ever grow too close to it.  (Knowing she doesn’t want anything to damage that fence–10 years old, but from her perspective and to some degree to mine too, brand new.)

There was a distinct lack of enthusiasm in her face. A suddenly-deeply-dour expression of, tell me you didn’t.

I tried again. I promised I would keep the trees trimmed short so I could reach the fruit and that they weren’t supposed to get very big in the first place.

Yellow or white?

One yellow, two white, I answered, not sure what she was hoping for there–but then it was clear that that wasn’t it. The whites, clearly, no. I didn’t protest except in my head that the Babcock and Tropic Snow white ones are supposed to have a more complex and intense flavor than just plain sweetness, that they are nothing like anything from any grocery store, they’re top taste testers, really, she would love them. Honest!

I remembered that not everybody’s childhood memory is of a ripe, sun-warmed, perfect fruit that you yourself climbed into the tree to get, its juices running down your arms and dripping down your front till your t-shirt is soaked in essence of peach perfume.

There’s a reason they don’t sell peaches like that in the grocery stores.

It didn’t occur to me till later that perhaps she’s a diabetic and sweet fruit is nothing but a terrible temptation. Or maybe she sneezes in the spring. I don’t know. But I’m going to go out on a limb here and say I think they need to stay on our side.



The pits
Sunday August 25th 2013, 10:47 pm
Filed under: My Garden,Wildlife

The funky Fuji feat.

I had an avocado pit, a really big one, with the usual toothpicks and in a glass of water and sprouting four roots.  I don’t know why I do this every few years, but there it was. Maybe it was the fact that it was trying so hard to give life that I decided to give it a chance to.

Biologist daughter told me the thing was living off the sugars of the pit only and that to grow well at all it needed soil, to go plant the thing now, not wait for the stem to show.

Oh okay, thinks I, no junk food for baby trees, minerals and future chlorophyll here we come, taking that as my motivation to get going. I got out potting soil and a plastic pot, nice and light and easier to transplant out of later, rather wishing I’d done this with the one that sprouted twin stems a few years ago. That one was cool!

I plant the pit. I water. I put it out by the containered blueberries where it will get lots of fresh sunshine and be faithfully watered every day. I wait.

You know what’s coming, right? You know it took only one night. Ooh, who brought the big nut?! Opened, even!

Seeds are the most concentrated form of nutrients in nature, yonder biologist reminded me just now, and while I might think of an avocado pit as having all the charm of a rock, there was utterly no sign of the thing this morning. None. We had an impressive display of free-range, unconstrained dirt.

I might start another one out of sheer cussedness just so I can sprout it inside. Maybe I’ll even get twins again.



Shape up
Saturday August 24th 2013, 9:21 pm
Filed under: Family,My Garden,Wildlife

Hey, don’t steal from my Gramma’s fruit trees!

The raccoons climbed into the Fuji some time in the night and worked a little more of the shipping tape loose on several of the boxes, but at least one length held on each one and they just couldn’t quite manage to get their little paws in there this time. But they got real close.

I retaped the clamshells. (Again.)

A few weeks ago, one managed to pry open a box just wide enough to swipe a clawmark out of one of those apples–and in the process broke the stem, and the still-mostly-sealed clamshell tumbled to the ground.

The two half-squared apples that had been growing inside were still there in the morning, the one nailed, the other untouched: the tape had held just enough.

Square apples. Seriously odd-looking. I’m rubik-cubing the little critters a puzzle. You know, I could maybe grow some really funky shapes next year–I wonder if a raspberry double-pint flat would hold up against the growing apple inside long enough to… We could have an apple that looked like it swallowed an apple!

Okay, I have about eight months to think up ways to make them grow into funky shapes while keeping them safe from the critters. Any ideas?

Meantime, ripeness is scheduled for the end of September. I am so going to win this year.



You need updates on your box-inations
Friday July 05th 2013, 10:17 pm
Filed under: Friends,Knit,My Garden,Wildlife

The doorbell rang. Cliff! And Don, sitting over in the car pulled in front of the house. Hi!

Cliff handed me a bag full of clamshells they’d been carefully saving for me, for which I am very grateful. It was so good to see them.

The raccoons, meantime, had been clambering for more last night, partying and carrying on.

Occu-pie! In spite of their best efforts as they wall streaked, we made light of their raids on the sus-pension system and held a clambake in the sun all day to celebrate; Apple’s shares tanked on the news, being all caught up in white tape, while Fuji’s stalkholders held out hopes of  a crisp increase in dividends.

Apple felt boxed in by the French regulators on their case, protesting proudly, Mais je m’apple…

Fuji raked in the green, adding last week’s fallout to this in hopes of their own sweet success.

I think I’ll clam up now.



Coon found it all
Thursday July 04th 2013, 9:45 pm
Filed under: Lupus,My Garden,Wildlife

Happy Fourth!

And my apologies for forgetting to say that in last night’s post. Yesterday shouted reminders that I do, in fact, have lupus, brainstem no less, and it was a distraction.

Today was better.

Learned something new today. To quote Wikipedia (slightly shortened):

“The most important sense for the raccoon is its sense of touch.[52]  Almost two-thirds of the area responsible for sensory perception in the raccoon’s cerebral cortex is specialized for the interpretation of tactile impulses, more than in any other studied animal.[56] They are able to identify objects before touching them with vibrissae located above their sharp, nonretractable claws.[57] The raccoon’s paws lack an opposable thumb and thus it does not have the agility of the hands of primates.”

Whiskers on their paws? Curious. And they show a picture of one up in an apple tree. Bingo.

The paws on ours seem pretty agile to me; the little Tarzan both charmed and aggravated by figuring out how to pull the clamshells apart at the center to raid the apples. There were two clamshells that were still on the tree, still closed shut–empty. And bent open at the middle just enough for me to picture the thing going Yow! as it snapped to on its paws–but it did it again.

The others were left alone so far.

And so last night I experimented: I taped the clamshells shut at the center with clear shipping tape.

So far so good.

After checking on them tonight, I ate my very first homegrown blueberry ever, and although it was supposed to be a small wild blueberry and I expected tart, it was sweet and it was good; our heat wave probably added to the sugar content.

The critters haven’t discovered those yet.

(Edited to show off and add a link to my nephew, one of my sister Anne’s boys, playing a composition of his.)

 



Going out on a limb
Saturday June 29th 2013, 10:29 pm
Filed under: My Garden,Wildlife

Skunks don’t climb, I’ve been told (true or not I don’t know). Raccoons certainly do and possums too, I’ve seen them.

If only I’d had a motion-activated camera. I would have loved to have seen the expression on the face of whatever it was as it joyrode the limb down to the ground with a snapping sound behind it.

And still it was thwarted: the clamshells stayed shut. I opened one of the little boxes, the ripe fruit having been knocked off its stem, and we had homegrown plum/Comice pear/peach crisp tonight, very pretty–and oh, after all these years of the critters claiming it all, the sweet taste of success.

One more tree to go, with months to ripeness. A Fuji clamshell got knocked to the ground last night–but it too refused to reward such behavior.

Maybe I should hide them under paper bags over the clamshells. How do you like them apples.

 

 



Yellow Transparent
Wednesday June 26th 2013, 11:03 pm
Filed under: Family,My Garden

A few Parker pictures from our trip–he let go of the ground and took his daddy and Grampa by surprise and had fun with it, if only for a little while; they wanted to be careful with little boy shoulders. There is nothing like the exuberance of a happy two-year-old! (Don’t miss the captions.)

Meantime, Marian and Sherry were clearly right, with every picture and description I could find being dead-on, and so now I finally know the name of my tree. Yellow Transparent. Thank you!

Sherry told me go pick them, pick them all right now.  Turns out they’re supposed to be ripe the first of July and they store better if you pick in the middle of June. I had no idea. And so at dusk I went out there and opened those clamshells; the biggest apple came right off the tree at the slightest touch and the others came inside  as well, along with a bunch of plums.

So. I have two apple trees that bloom together but ripen far apart. That’s actually pretty useful. And I imagine if I want pectin in my plum jam I can just chop a Yellow Transparent into the batch, as natural and homegrown as you could ask for. Cool!

 



It struck a core
Tuesday June 25th 2013, 10:51 pm
Filed under: My Garden,Wildlife

Two clamshells on the ground, the one under the plum tree popped open probably at impact, empty, but the one under the mystery-variety apple tree intact.

But on opening the little box and looking a little closer, I saw the damage. Oh. And thought, it’s a toss-up whether that was the mockingbird that found one of the airholes in the plastic and went at it or a jay. The hole in the fruit isn’t too deep, but that beak had to get past the airspace between the tops of the apple and of the shell.

A crow couldn’t have fit in there. A mockingbird’s beak is too short. Scrub jay it is, then.  Busted.

I cut up an unpecked apple and tried it with a sense of reverence that at long last, our first apple. Twenty-six years in this house and we finally get to find out what the rootstock-gr0wn-back one was all about. Drum roll!

And the verdict was: yeah, yeah, I know it’s underripe but that’s a really mealy lousy apple for eating. Isn’t the mealyness supposed to happen when they’re overripe?

But I put it in the microwave with a bit of water, zapped it about 75 seconds (it wasn’t very big), scraped the flesh out of the peel–and had me some really fine applesauce. Seriously good applesauce, given the nothingness I was expecting. A bit of zing to it, good texture, just right.

The mystery tree stays.

 



What is it about them…?
Monday May 27th 2013, 11:00 pm
Filed under: My Garden,Wildlife

Pictures, and of Hudson, too, but still working on getting my WordPress update to show them.

Saturday evening there was one.

Sunday evening there were five.

Tonight I found eleven on the ground, chewed in a top-off-then-hollowed-out pattern so as to get the most of the innards with the least of the skin, the biggest one maybe an inch and a half across and not due to be ripe till September and October. This is May! Just the apples, and only the Fuji variety and not the due-in-June plums–and the dirt under the Fuji tree now looked like a chinese checkerboard with a preemie apple for a marble inserted into one of the new holes.

Game on!

I need me more clamshells, fast.



Cherry, cherry baby
Thursday May 16th 2013, 9:54 pm
Filed under: Family,My Garden,Wildlife

(Sorry for the earworm.)

Out of milk and orange juice, and there was something else we wanted to look for.

Which they didn’t have. But Richard humored me while I went to go see if the latest batch of ooh look, they’re all ultra-dwarf this time! trees at Costco included, by wild chance, a Stella cherry again.

Found one. Didn’t look great. And then two more that did. I actually got a choice.

I doublechecked with my sweetie….

I asked one of the employees for help getting it into the cart past all the lilies on the forward part of the pallet. He moved those out of the way, made sure which tree I was pointing to, I read the tag again just to be certain that this trunk and that tag went together, and then as he brought it over and set it down he started peppering me with questions, very interested: how much were those? $18.99? When do they produce?

I checked the tag: mid-June here, and I told him they grow to only six to eight feet tall and produce about nine pounds of cherries a year. (Found out after I got home that we should get our first ones next year; it doesn’t take them long.)

You should have seen his eyes! “My mother could grow one of those!” Something that small, that productive but not overwhelmingly so, that enticing–what a cool idea!

And so my delayed Mother’s Day present sounds like it means someone else’s mom may very well get one too. Or maybe the Kieffer pear or one of the peaches or apples or that nectarine over there. But the fact that Costco was out when Richard went to get me mine earlier meant that this conversation happened and now there’s all this other good that can come from that. Picturing that fine young man planting a fruit tree for his mother just totally makes my day.

They take so little effort. They last so long. They flower, they fruit, they give so much.

p.s. Michelle saw what she was very sure was a golden eagle as she was coming out of work yesterday, and today, not far from her office, a local golden eagle intruded on Clara-the-peregrine’s territory near her fledglings and Clara firmly escorted the much-larger bird out of there–one of the very few that can prey on peregrines, but not this time. Eric’s pictures of the encounter, here.



Save some for me
Saturday May 11th 2013, 11:25 pm
Filed under: Family,Friends,My Garden,Wildlife

Happy Mother’s Day!

This morning Richard and I came home from an errand and there was a Cooper’s hawk at the top of the tree behind our front gate, duly noting our arrival. My territory, your territory, no-wings; welcome!

Didn’t quite catch the best moment, but, an Oregon dark-eyed junco male (the one with the black head) feeding his mate. He takes good care of her and it charms me to no end.

And below, the black squirrel that had a bad case of mange two years ago and went bald in patches and her fur grew back in white, making it look like she’s wearing a tank top and head band. She’s easy to spot. She does look like a very agile small skunk from a distance.

Don and Cliff saved six plastic produce clamshells for me, to my great delight, and now I have that many more plums and apples protected from those little thieves that in the past have stripped my Fuji apples clean in a day, two months pre-ripe. The little stinkers.

I know you’re supposed to thin the fruit out to one per branch but there aren’t a whole lot this year to begin with. I left the first cluster I found at two–safe now–and then went eh and snapped a clamshell around the whole threesome I found next.That tomato package was big so I was going to make the most of the space.

They may come out big they may come out small but we will at long last have our first homegrown apples (and plums!) Twenty-one years after I planted that Fuji. Thank you Don and Cliff!



One month already!
Wednesday May 08th 2013, 9:44 pm
Filed under: Family,My Garden

Happy first-month celebrations to Hudson!

Costco had Stella ultra-dwarf cherry trees today.  Grow it in a big pot, never have to prune, go ahead and make use of that one little sunny spot outside the laundry room that’s too close to the house for free-range roots.

About ninety cherries a year forever after for about the price of a skein of yarn. (Oh wait. Pot and potting soil. Three.) I am seriously tempted.