It seems we will have room for yet more fruit trees, with a call in to Chris at Shady Tree for a bid on two more weed ones that are shading the solar panels (and my mandarin and mango. Richard stood by the Page with a UV meter and it read zero at 2 pm, thus the yellowing leaves and my willingness to let a little more bird habitat disappear for a few years till the new catches up.) Montmorency? Lorings at last? Let the plotting commence.

And then.

We were at Costco, looking at a monster package of cherries. Rainiers–I’d like to try them, but that was a month’s supply. Now it might have been different had they looked like they hadn’t just traveled a long way over a long time and then been left out unrefrigerated, but as he wondered how we could eat them all it yanked my thoughts to our Stella cherry, to all our fruit trees as they grow up. That box (which we did not buy) potentially represented only a few branches’ worth.

For a brief instant the sheer volume to come overwhelmed. Countered instantly by, but see the difference is that we’ll be eating and freezing however much we want and then giving just-picked totally ripe homegrown to all comers, and surely there will be no shortage of those. A sun-warmed, dripping-ripe full-flavor peach is hardly the proverbial and much-maligned foundling zucchinis abandoned on doorsteps in the dead of the night. ( A side note: make zucchini bread, using butter, brown sugar, baking powder not soda, and, the most important part, substituting ground pecans for a quarter to a third of the flour. That will justify any zucchini planting you might ever do.)

And the picking of that fruit means this necessarily sun-deprived lupus patient will have reason to be outside at dusk for many a day, getting some badly-coveted fresh air and the satisfaction of doing good in the process. It’s like you cast on and then the trees do all the knitting for you.

Cherry on, then.