We interrupt this travelogue to bring you a special announcement:

The giant fig. Our very first Black Jack fig. (Tadaah!) Maybe the biggest fig I have ever seen–it was huge.

When I planted the tree last year I had no real idea what I would get, just that Ruth via Purlescence grew three kinds and that that was her favorite. How big they would get, how they would taste, how much the strawberry color would fill up the inside vs the probably-blah plain interior edges (or if it would even be strawberry colored) I had no idea.

Widely strawberried it was, and I’d show it to you but that after the thing was split top to bottom and shared it didn’t last long enough for that.

Black Jacks set two crops, the main, and the breba figs that set at the end of the season and ripen in spring. Brebas are supposed to have less flavor, not having gone through the full heat of the summer. And we’ve had a fairly cool year so far.

This was our only breba that made it through the winter and past the squirrel gnawing of spring. I guarded the last of the ten jealously with a plastic clamshell and tape and cinnamon on top and nylon mesh fabric around the trunk that the raccoons didn’t like stepping on and this was the long-awaited payoff.

Now THAT’S a fig! Are the main ones really supposed to be better than that? Wow. Just, wow. Thank you, Ruth!

I am finally motivated to set up the tall heavy (I can’t even move its box by myself) crop cage over that dwarf tree. Definitely. There are a whole lot of small green summer figs growing fast and just since last night the birds started taking small peck marks out of a few of them.

Probably because they couldn’t get to that one.

Every single one of those figs is worth whatever hassle it takes to protect them. I didn’t really know that before.

Grabbing a quick moment on the run to say thank you everybody and the head is reasonably okay, all things considered. I was afraid of it being dangerous and it’s not. I do actually have a padded leather helmet these days, I just wasn’t wearing it at the right moment.

Meantime. One person here on dietary restrictions can eat raspberries as a particular treat and the raspberries got eaten.

Oh.

My youngest walked in the door from the grocery store not too many moments after with 24 oz of fresh raspberries: it had been anticipated. There’s plenty out there, no problem.

Looking out for each other. It’s what the day is for.

The tomatoes. I browsed, ordered, planted seeds in March and transplanted them when the weather warmed up and did all the things you do when you’re pretending to be a gardener. I know you’re not supposed to plant them in the same spot from year to year; I didn’t have a lot of new places to choose from but thought here and here might be okay.

Turns out those were not the best spots for morning sun when the UV is highest; I was looking at them from my height and not seedling level. Direct sun doesn’t hit them till nearly noon. Ouch. Once the June sky gets going, though, I think they’ll grow tall enough to do okay. I just don’t want it to be ironic that this is the year I finally sprang for the heavy-duty Burpee cages.

Monday I think it was I stumbled across three tomato plants the squirrels had planted together by a tree trunk. I had promised myself I wasn’t going to waste water on any junk tomatoes again but look, that’s a cherry tomato on that one! Hopefully that could only be a Sungold offspring. Hopefully.

Except that it was starting to wither for lack of water because, I mean, who knew it was behind there? These had to have spent most of their lives in the shade. Clearly there’s hope for my own.

The next day I found a fourth plant in front of the shed. This one was smaller–the gas cylinder for the grill blocked its light. I moved the thing out of its way.

The one with all its leaves curled and withered is still standing and its tiny tomato is a bit bigger every day. How I don’t know. The other two in that trio bloomed today when they didn’t even have any sign of buds when I first found them. Water is a wondrous thing. I guess I’ll know soon enough if and which plant is worth keeping.

It turns out the way to get tomatoes to grow well is to plant them last year.

So there were these two Boy Scout leaders striking up a conversation recently and getting to know each other at some Scout thing or other. One was Muslim and one was our Mormon bishop. Together they hatched an idea.

And that is why today we bought half a dozen Costco packs of toothbrushes and happened to walk in the door at our church at the same time as a Muslim man was walking in with a stack of toothpaste boxes.

A lot had been donated. People were really throwing their hearts into this.

Long rows of tables were set up with shampoo, deodorant, dental stuff, soap, kleenex, crayons, coloring books, etc: grab a bag, walk the lines and fill’er up. Boxes of diapers over here.

I would have brought finger puppets (some pictures here) had I thought of it and had I had enough.

Housing costs are so breathtakingly high here that we don’t have refugees resettling in the area so we were doing this for a homeless shelter. The big room was full of people, all of us wanting to come together to help our fellow man and to share the experience with others of faith that we’d like to get to know better. A side row of tables was full of snacks and cheerful people making sure there were more.

There is an old Mormon how-many-to-change-a-lightbulb joke. Three: one to change it and two to serve refreshments. I noted with a laugh that all the refreshments looked pretty healthy, lots of fresh fruit there. Actually, though, we do like our baked goods and desserts as much as anyone, just don’t tell.

One man had emigrated here as a child and had grown up in upstate New York and was thrilled when I told him I’d hiked Watkins Glen as a kid and loved the waterfalls. He said his kids didn’t understand this weird concept of shoveling snow and what it was like. At. All.

Yeah, ours neither, we laughed.

It was a chance to ask religious questions of each other, too, in a safe and welcoming place.

Our New Yorker friend wished they had a building such as ours to meet in and several people asked for a tour. Then several more, so Richard took a second group around to see, about the time the first circled back to the main room.

I can’t wait to do something like this again. And Jasmin, the New Yorker guy lived for a few years in your neck of the woods and thought he remembered, almost remembered, almost could place your family’s names. Abrara says hi.

Walking the grandkids to their car yesterday, I pointed out the stick-with-flowers tree and said, “That’s an apple.”

Parker, suddenly thrilled, did a little dance: “I LOVE apples!!!” (I like to think this helped start it all…)

Hugs all around, carseats were buckled, our son started to drive away….

“STOP!”

Daddy stopped.

Parker had almost forgotten! He’d been saving something for us, Grampa, come here!

My husband, knowing they were in a hurry to get to their Great Grandma M’s big dinner, dashed up to see what was going on.

He needed to share: “These are for you and Gramma!”

The knitting. Hmm. No, if I say a single word it’ll give it away–so yeah. Later.

Meantime, the first Indian Free flower opened Feb. 23; at March 20 and after all those rains that tree is still blooming, although these last blossoms have no counterparts left on the other peaches for pollination. Such a pretty tree. So very glad I planted it. (Lemons and clamshell-protected peaches in the background.)

And the tart cherry–I counted in the neighborhood of a hundred buds today on that tiny tree.

The Cooper’s hawk swooped overhead while I was outside taking these pictures but I didn’t quite get him in any of them.

Rain rain rain rain rain, much of it in fierce sideways gusts, 1.3″ of it today, wonderful wonderful (cold dark go get a warmer sweater) rain.

My English Morello tart cherry early this morning, responding to all the lovely water and with no sign of Japanese beetle damage whatsoever. We are winning that battle (link to how) this year. And that was the last time I dared take an exposed iPhone outside.

The dishwasher that was backed up last night that I hoped I’d gotten going didn’t stay going. But the sink is just fine…! Crud.

That thing at the back of the fridge?

See, after twenty-six years of lupus and Crohn’s, when I have a good day after a string of bad, when there’s a task or even a fun thing pulling at me I do it while I can, even when I know I’m overdoing. “Today I can do this” is my stock inner phrase and these had to be done. Go.

I cleaned the fridge. The dishes (well, most of the dishes. I can only stand in place so long but I got two good tries out of it.) The laundry, because they were predicting falling trees and power outages with our wind advisory and flash flood warnings–and sheets and fevers and yeah. Meantime, Richard braved it out there, his oversized umbrella flipping inside out several times in the short steps from car to doors as he hunter-gathered into the wilds.

And I made good headway on my new project. I mean, isn’t it, like, a rule that you have to knit and watch the rain?

Coopernicus showed up on the telephone wires, feathers being blown backwards from time to time, rousing and shaking off the deluge. He people watched back for a bit. I could see his beak open as he commented an aside to the unseen.

We’re good for a few days now. My stars, (glancing up), it’s 11:08. G’night.

Took it easy today. Cold, just a cold, no autoimmune attack, just a plain, ordinary, mild germ like everybody else gets: normal is good. Napped for three hours and came to thinking wow, I guess I really was tired. Made chicken soup. Tried to talk myself into working on my new knitting project. (Stitches yarn!) Tried on the now-dried blocked one and hoped the recipient will love it as much as I do.

And then finally I went to see what 69F had wrought out there.

The Fuji apple had started to wake up, that was new, just the first few leaves here and there. The sour cherry’s buds grew, too, even if not quite ready to open yet; I doused them in ashes from my friend Krys’s barbecue to kill the Japanese beetles I knew would be right on any new growth. I’d been watching to beat them to it. The squirrels have been digging around that tree and I figure they’re going after where those bugs are hiding during the day.

Don’t do the ash thing to the far more tender leaves of a pear, though; I tried it last year and got what looked like fireblight, the disease, but was actually a more literal version. All the leaves that grew after that were perfectly healthy.

Yesterday, we saw the resident Cooper’s hawk being squawked at, his tail tucked in tight as he dove high into the redwood tree. Four crows tried to harass him there. Two quickly gave that up as a bad idea and flew to the top of the next tall tree over to yell king-of-the-mountain from a much safer distance. (Have you ever noticed how they need to be at the tippy tippy top to declare dominance even when it can’t support their weight and they swing and sway wildly? Trampoline trees.)

Clearly, as soon as I kick this bug I need to go back to Los Gatos Birdwatcher and buy one of those rent-a-cr0ws that they’re hawking. For Coopernicus’s sake.

With thanks to Catherine B for prompting me to finally type this out. My one single written-out copy was getting pretty beat up and was the only place I had this with all its updates and notes. And so:

My personal version to add to all the other ones floating around out there. I promise you it is well worth the effort.

Take a 9″ springform pan and cover the bottom with parchment paper and butter the bottom and sides. Or just the sides, but then you’re going to have to peel it off really, really carefully. You can buy it in 9″ rounds or, I often just put the pan bottom against the paper and cut around it to fit. A little too big is better than a little too small. I do *not* just tuck a length of it between the pan and the sides and snap it in because I don’t want to damage how they fit together–learned that the hard way a goodly while ago.

Set the oven to 325 (my old oven) or 350 (my new oven, which by all evidence as well as expectation is far more accurate.) My pans are a bit on the dark side and are nonstick– a gift from my late friend Don, delivered by him and his son Cliff, and I think of them every time I use them.

Ingredients:

10 oz really good dark chocolate. If you have a Trader Joe’s store handy, that would be 22 squares from one of their Pound Plus (500g) bars. I use their brown-label bittersweet but their red-label extra bittersweet would be really good, too.

6 eggs, separated

1/2 lb hazelnuts and

1/4 lb hazelnuts, roasted and the skins rubbed off as much as possible. Blessings on Trader Joe’s for selling toasted unsalted ones now with most of the skins off.

1 c sugar

1 c powdered sugar

2 tbl (or tsp, I won’t tell) sugar

1/4 good cocoa. I use Bergenfield Colonial Rosewood. Don’t use one that’s dutched. The dutching process generally speaking is a cover-up for inferior beans, according to a lecture my husband attended given by Mr. Scharffenberger of Scharffenberger Chocolate (which more recently has been bought out by Hershey) and it removes the flavinoids that justify the cocoa.

1/2 tsp salt

3/4 c butter or, if you prefer, coconut oil. For good or bad you will taste the coconut if you do, though, just be forewarned.

2 tsp bourbon vanilla, the best variety for using with chocolate.

And now you:

In the Cuisinart: pulse 1/2 lb hazelnuts. Once it’s at the nut meal stage add the 1/4 c cocoa and the 1/2 tsp salt. Whirr till almost nut butter, or less far along if you want a more rustic texture to the finished cake. Scoop this out of the Cuisinart and set aside.

Next in the Cuisinart: make the hazelnut paste. Pulse the other 1/4 lb hazelnuts till quite fine.  Important note: start ONLY with the hazelnuts, because if you try to grind whole hazelnuts with egg yolks you may well destroy your motor. Once the nuts are nearing the nut butter stage it’s not a problem. Okay, so: now add the 6 egg yolks and the 1 c confectioner’s sugar and whirr till it’s pretty smooth.

Melt the chocolate in the microwave in a container not much bigger than it; I do one minute, stir, then ten seconds more, sometimes twenty. Stir a lot to make it smooth. Chocolate burns very easily, better to stir more than heat more.

Meantime, in the KitchenAid or whatever mixer you may have, beat the six egg whites, adding the two tbl sugar gradually after it starts getting frothy. Set aside.

In a separate bowl, beat the 3/4 c butter, 1 c sugar, and the 2 tsp bourbon vanilla till light. In my KitchenAid mixer I now change the beater from the wire whisk-type beater to the heavier white beater (not the bread dough hook). Spatula in the melted chocolate, beat some more. Then the hazelnut/cocoa mixture. Beat. Then the hazelnut paste with the egg yolks.

Then by hand carefully work in those egg whites, starting with a large spoon. If you squish some of the whites into those last stubborn hazelnut globs through your fingers you’ll be in good company. Pour into prepared pan.

Bake 45 minutes, to as much as 50 minutes if you’re baking at the lower temperature.

Cool, unsnap the pan sides and remove, put a flat plate on top of the cake, flip it over, peel the parchment off, put another flat plate there and flip it over again so the top is back at the top and the cake is on a serving plate: tadaah!

Refrigerate, especially if the hazelnut-and-cocoa mixture was whirred only to the gritty stage–it’ll help hold it together as you slice.

———–

Allergy notes: powdered sugar almost always comes with a bit of starch to keep it powdery, usually cornstarch but you can get it with tapioca starch instead at Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, and various health food stores if this is to be served to someone with a corn allergy. Coconut oil substitutes straight across very well for butter for the dairy allergic. This recipe is definitely gluten-free to the best of my knowledge, since wheat comes nowhere near it. Freezes beautifully, including in individual slices separated by two layers of wax paper if you so choose. Makes a great breakfast.

Note, 5/31/22: Makes four dozen mini cupcakes. Bake at 350 for 17 minutes.

I gifted a friend with a chocolate hazelnut torte recently on a day when she needed a hug and I needed to be needed and she swooned and said it was even better than my signature plain chocolate one. Where had this been hiding all these years?!

Waiting for me to find the recipe online, which was a mess–some ingredients on the list didn’t appear in the instructions, for one thing–and to hash it out till it came out right. When hazelnuts and chocolate are the main ingredients, though, there’s definitely some incentive there. (Checking around, I see I haven’t posted my version here yet. It’s 10:30 pm. Tomorrow.)

When I gave it to her, we were talking and come to find out to our mutual great surprise her dad is cousin to my late friend Conway–whose granddaughter married my son and is the mother of our three grandchildren. She’s family. Who knew.

Her dad is coming to town this weekend, and could she, dare she ask…

Of course she could!

It is in the oven.

And oh goodness, nothing I could ever bake could ever live up to this: she’s bringing me honey from her hives as a thank you.

One other Stitches story: I looked down at the basket at the front of my scooter Saturday afternoon and was stunned to find a four-inch knitted square in soft purple merino finished with a little crocheted hanging loop. Oh goodness!

I wheeled straight back to Mosaic Moon with the deepest apologies for my inadvertent thievery, saying it had to have either been from them or one other booth. (I hoped?!)

The guy laughed off my worries, affirmed it was theirs, and was just plain glad to see me again because that’s the kind of person he is. I was impressed. And deeply relieved it had found its way home and no harm was done. He definitely deserved a shout-out, and Mosaic Moon’s yarns are gorgeous and soft and I spent a lot of time oohing and aahing in their booth.

Back home, the third and fourth peach trees are almost in sync: the Babcock started blooming last Thursday, while the Indian Free, my only one that needs a pollinator, is almost, almost blooming but just not quite there yet. Tomorrow. My Baby Crawford that I planted last month, once it grows up a little, should cover any time the Babcock’s not doing the necessary overlapping flowering while keeping up the steady sequence of ripening times. We do love a good peach.

Meantime, back when I pruned the vigorous Indian Free, I plunked the largest multi-branch in sugar water and left it in the kitchen a few weeks to see if it would do anything.

It sprouted thread-thin roots and I planted it in a pot as soon as I saw them, wondering if they would take and if so how to make the leaf/root balance play out right.

A few weeks later squirrelocity today could not make it uproot from that pot. Looking good.

And today for the first time it had a spark of green at one node and it made me just about giddy with glee: it lives! It really lives!

We don’t need two identicals. I’ve been thinking once it gets going it just couldn’t be that hard to find someone who wants glorious spring flowers and nice-sized leaves, a tree that is highly resistant to peach leaf curl, and if there’s a pollinator nearby all the better and they’ll have Thomas Jefferson’s favorite peaches but it would be worth having even without that. It’s a pretty tree. Without a grafted root stock I can only guess that it will want to be quite tall: future yarn bombers take note.

Let’s wait till we see a second leaf or three, though, m’kay? But still. Looking at it feels glorious. To life!

Stitches West, day one.

Two vendors when I saw them made a point of saying they’d missed me last year. (I had the flu). Blink. They’d noticed? I did not expect that. At all. They quite made my day.

Susan of Abstract Fibers surprised me with this yarn two years ago and it’s a great favorite of mine, so I had to show her the cowl it had turned into: nice and warm (needed that today) and it’s one of those things that when you put it on, you know that whatever else you might have going on, hair, whatever, it doesn’t matter, you look good today, y’know? It does that.

Someone stopped me and asked where the pattern was and how I’d gotten it to be wider at the bottom and she really liked it. I confessed it was a doodle.

Karida of Neighborhood Fiber Company–love her  and her colors, too. And Lisa Souza and her husband Rod. Across from them, Sheila and Michael Ernst with their glasswork. Kate and her team at Dragonfly Fibers. and the surprise of finding out she’s in my husband’s hometown and we could swap a memory or two on the old Inez’s Needlework shop that used to be there. The late Inez had everything going all the way back to the ’60’s. Plastic canvas needlework could be yours, old cross stitch kits, good yarns, too.

Kris Kunihiro was there with her son Ben. These little bowls were shallower than their rice bowls, and with a lip they were perfect for what I wanted. A little bowl for each person’s sour cream, a little bowl for each person’s brown sugar, a bigger bowl with all the strawberries you might possibly want to dip into the one and then the other. You can never have enough of those.

And tomorrow I get to go all over again and see even more old friends all day long. I might even remember to take an actual photo there this time.

“I don’t have anything to write about.”

He considered that a moment, and then his face quite brightened at the morning’s memory: “You could write about the chocolate!”

Alright, then, and this was his Happy Valentine’s Day from me: Potomac Chocolate of Woodbridge, VA has only gotten better as its owner has gotten more experience–and that’s saying something. He’s added truffles to his cacao-and-sugar-only bars and they are the best I have ever tasted.

The best thing my sweetie got me was that he tested my two-year-old scooter batteries yesterday, found them dead dead dead beyond redemption (I didn’t use them for Stitches last year–I had the flu), made the trek to San Jose with me to the batteries place and got me set up with a new pair. The salesman laughed when I said what I really needed to do was ask the neighborhood kids to joyride the thing once a week or so to keep them rechargeable, since it’s the letting them just sit there that wears them down. But when I really need the scooter I really need the scooter.

Go Speed Racer–Stitches West here we come!

(Edited Monday to add a link to those chocolates. The truffles seem to be sold out–gee, can’t imagine why.)

Two new gopher holes by the Indian Free peach tree, which is along the same fence line but at the far end of it from the first attack. I can’t lose that one, I just can’t. But my Comice pear, whose trunk is now ringed by lots of little cinnamon sticks,  seems to be being left alone now.

So the peach got a bunch, too.

I just ordered two more pounds from nuts.com: the cassia type, cheaper and more pungent and exactly what I want. I imagine I’ll have to re-dose after next week’s rain.

And I finally at long last did something I’d been thinking about trying–seeing if swapping out the white bulbs on the warming Christmas lights on the mango would make the night less bright. The answer is, and how!

I didn’t have enough opaque incandescent blue bulbs in the right C9 size to raid from various old strings so I had to finish off with green ones. But oh does it make a difference.

I heard something out there when I went to snap this picture that puzzled me. It stopped when I approached the tree. It started up again when I was almost inside. Walked back towards the tree, and it stopped, but I don’t think it was even in my yard: a rhythmic sound that I finally figured out would be if a critter was trying to dig under, say, a wood plank that was hitting another wood plank. It seemed to come from the other side of the fence.

Skunks eat mice and rats. So that means they’d eat gophers too, right? I hope?

I left the gate open so it wouldn’t have any trouble getting over there. That done, I’m definitely not going back out there in the dark, not tonight.

It was almost time to go pick up Richard when I felt like walking around the yard while there was still some light out, just to enjoy.

Our lemon tree is having the biggest and juiciest crop it’s had in years (thank you, rain!) and I found myself reaching in past a few thorns for a larger, deeper-colored one. The bit of tangerine in the tree’s parentage deepens the flavor the longer they ripen.

Coming back inside, I meant to put it down in the kitchen but somehow I walked on past and it stayed in my hand.

I was almost to the door. I stopped a moment, looked at the thing, and wondered if today somehow I was supposed to gift someone with, of all things, a lemon. A fresh-picked lemon, but still, it wasn’t much, it certainly wasn’t a hand knit, but hey, they’re fun and they smell wonderful and so out the door we go, sure, I’m curious to see if anything comes of this, but whatever.

I tucked it in a cupholder next to the driver’s side.

Richard didn’t get my text that I’d arrived and so I ended up waiting ten minutes before finally calling and going, yo….

And during that time one of his co-workers on his way to his car walked past where I’d parked and waved hi.

I turned the car back on a moment so I could roll the window down and asked how his day had gone.

Oh! He threw up his hands and laughed with a wince. Busy! SO busy! But he looked like he really didn’t want to be asked any questions about details, so okay, and I found myself reaching for that silly lemon. I described having just picked it and on a whim having brought it with me; would he like it?

That was the–comic relief isn’t the word–the break from it all, something so unexpected, and he said, “Sure!” in delight. He turned it over in his hands a moment, taking it in, and asked, “A Meyer?”

“A Meyer lemon, yes.”

He told me they’d had a tree, but, in embarrassment, “I killed it.” I told him that in that big week-long freeze we had about 15 years ago we thought ours was gone, too, but it had slowly come back and now it’s fine.

I don’t know what he’ll do with just one lemon, but I saw what that one homegrown lemon in that moment could do for him. It was just the thing.