I picked the first pound of the sour cherries. The best part of having a rare (for here) tree is inviting friends over to come help themselves, but I’m not seeing much gleaning possibilities this year; the unusual rain in May wiped out a lot of the fruit set. I’m thinking we’ll get about three pies for the entire year.

But the cherries there are are the bigger for it, so, less work to process.

The sweet cherry tree had only just opened its flowers when that storm hit. We got one single cherry from it and it had five peck marks but I finally found one and it was mine and I brought it inside. Just…I tried to get myself to…don’t ask me to eat that–they wouldn’t…

The faster I get the white afghan done the faster I can go play with colorwork again. Twelve rows. Ice packs. The cabled rocks are deliberately random but it works because I said so and I would tell you how many there were but then I’d have to pull it out of the protecting zipped tote where I’ve stashed it for the night.

Besides, then I’d knit some more on it and it’s getting late.

It rained again last night. So odd.

So one 12-row repeat is about three and a half hours plus all the required breaks thereunto.

Meantime, my apricot tree that went into the ground last spring was (finally!) growing visibly this spring, to the point that you could see the difference day to day if you paid attention.

Not so much this past week.

I went out there and took a closer look today.

Instead of new red leaves what I’m seeing instead is brown and in the crotches of the existing branches.

Those take a lot of energy. Those are fruit spurs for next year’s flowers. My seedling is actually getting there.

If I had a bigger yard I might well buy one out of blatant curiosity. But I just don’t.

In the aftermath of one of our major fires, someone discovered a fig tree alive. The fruit was cranberry-like with an intensity of flavor that is, quote, AMAZING. (I talked to Four Winds’ guy briefly since there was a review posted on a date that hadn’t happened yet. He looked and said oh–the site is set up to go day/month/year not month/day/year, hadn’t noticed that, thanks.)

They haven’t actually tasted one themselves yet, but they’re sharing this Cool New Thing whose mother tree is rising from the ashes.

I have questions. I don’t have cranberries nor a bog, of course, but I have sour cherries. I’m trying to grok baking a bright red fig pie.

Found this little seedling growing directly underneath my mango tree and went to pull it out. The stem broke away from the roots.

It was a pretty little thing, actually, and I put it in a small flower vase with some water and thought, y’know, every floral arrangement should have one of these in it. I need to keep an eye out for the next one the squirrels plant, and I’m sure there will be many given the young oak growing next door.

Could you bonsai something meant to be big. Hmm.

Two days later, it’s got the beginnings of new roots and new leaves and I’m having visions of surreptitiously planting it by a roadway where there’s a lot of space. Once it gets enough of a root system. If.

Maybe I’ll dig the next one out rather than yank.

Immediately after getting home from the hospital yesterday I looked at my phone to see if there were any messages.

There was one.

Since the baby was supposed to be delivered today, we had tentatively planned between my friend who wanted an Anya apricot seedling and the local Mormon missionaries who’d offered to help move the thing for them to pick it up Friday–or else next Monday or Tuesday as things worked out and plant it for her. We hadn’t asked; they’d offered, because lifting that heavy pot with a tree on its third year was beyond us and someone else had clued them in.

They are here to serve, they said, so, cool, let’s go!

So here I was looking at my phone at 4:45 and they’d asked if they could be there at 5:00 and I sent a quick message to the friend who thankfully was paying attention to her phone and got immediately back to me and then there they were.

That tree has grown a lot and a lot sideways these past two months. It took careful maneuvering with the dolly to get it through our gate door without damaging anything. They lifted it in and then strapped it down carefully: it was not going to budge an inch in the back of that pickup they’d arranged for.

The friend is ecstatic.

My backyard feels odd with it gone, but a very happy odd because it is where it was meant to be. My old and dear friend gets to see it flourish in its new digs. We get to race to see whose tree fruits first.

It had been growing robustly and then somehow this past week it didn’t seem to be. I took a closer look.

Then I asked a friend at church and the instant seriousness on her face as she named it made it clear you do not mess with this.

But I thought only pears and apples get fireblight?

Peaches can, too.

I looked it up: those heavy winds we’ve been having can cause small points of damage where the bacteria can get in, and the three days of rain to finish the job, yes, my two-month-old Kit Donnell tree had it.

I put on trashable clothes this morning and followed her instructions.

Hair pulled back out of the way. A small jam jar with about a half cup of straight bleach in it. Heavy latex gloves.

I went out there and took pictures to compare against later. I bleached my pruning shears, took a single cut, walked it straight to the trash can around the house, came back, bleached the shears again, cut, walk over there, do not touch any parts of the tree except to take them away.

It surprised me that it took about twenty-five minutes. I’d thought there were two spots affected. I found six that definitely were; some leaves were a little lighter colored but well away from any blackening–I wasn’t sure and put them on a watch-and-see list. I didn’t quite want to know because I really didn’t want to lose a whole major branch or two. I’m hoping I don’t regret that.

I really, really want it to thrive and live.

They really needed another day. But the critters hadn’t gotten to them yet.

And so we sampled our first two strawberries from the plants I put in six weeks ago.

They were not yet the very best strawberries we have ever eaten but they would definitely do.

I found the large utterly dead portion of my coffee berry bush back against the fence and quickly cut it out of there–it appeared to have been chewed.

The definition of a rodent is a mammal whose teeth never stop growing and will grow through the jaw and kill it if it doesn’t gnaw on things to grind them down.

I’m not about to poison them nor hire someone who would, I told a friend of mine.

Get a Havahart trap, was her answer; We did.

You can’t legally release it except right where you caught it.

Right. She said something to the effect that her husband had given theirs swimming lessons.

I looked up Havaharts in the correct size and came away thinking, I’m supposed to lift that big thing with a scared animal with teeth and claws in it and me with no sense of balance? What could be more fun?

So I took the problem to Richard.

He didn’t like the idea of giving them swimming lessons any more than I did. But he had worked up in the hills where ground squirrels are profusely abundant, which attracts rattlesnakes. His building had hired someone–who didn’t trap them, didn’t poison them, they put out contraceptives for them to reduce the population.

Would that affect the hawks? I wanted to know.

Not if there aren’t young being produced and the adults aren’t being sick or dying, right? He didn’t think so.

So I found this research and learned way more on the subject than I had intended. It’s not The Pill, it’s triggering an autoimmune reaction to their favorite parts in the spring. Huh. The gist of it as I read it is that they learned it takes six months to take full effect so they saw better results the second year than the first, where they’d given it too close to breeding time.

They noted that catching and inoculating hundreds of them took a lot of time.

I just want not to have hundreds. But yeah, the ground squirrel was back today (did I see two? Not sure) and that bush next to my apricot tree was showing me what a single one of them, much less a colony, could do.

There are four yards across the fence from ours that all have dogs and we do not. And we have by far the most fruit trees. Where would you hang out if you liked to pop out of your hole in the ground?

Open to all suggestions and stories.

Eighteen days.

I’ve gone from looking down at it to starting to look up. I go outside every day to see the new difference. The one branch that grew at the end of last summer towered over the rest in the first picture (embiggen for details) and now some of the others are taller than it.

This was a plant in a pot. Now it gets to really be the tree it was meant to be and I am looking forward to apricots next year.

One of many such clusters with promises of cherries to come. I love this time of year.

(A brief cloudburst today, so I’m glad we weren’t quite to peak bloom yet.)

A ground squirrel tunnel popped up right under the edge of my sour cherry tree. And another one at the base of my columnar apple.

One is cute. Two is a thousand, fast.

“Did you know it smells like cinnamon out there?”

Uh, that would be a yes. I poured it down the edges of those two holes to make the place inhospitable (and then did a better job of covering the cherry’s roots with an old oven rack, since cherry roots and young trunks are supposed to be a particular favorite.) Pepper and mint they can get used to; cinnamon is both sharp tasting and it gets on their paws and their fur and their noses and they’ll keep avoiding it.

Or at least in my experience so far.

So we’ll see.

I wonder how many neighbors were thinking cinnamon roll thoughts today.

Last year my fig tree barely grew with the leaves small and the crop sparse and the least sweet it had ever been. It had been fine before but it was not happy. The only problem I could figure was the overgrown pepper tree.

And of course that’s gone now.

Early last week there were those glorious new sparks of green amongst the gray.

Today–I’ve never seen it grow so much so fast. And for the first time ever there are, so far, two actual spring breba fruits growing on it, about an inch tall, already big enough to get the critters’ potential attention; they certainly got mine. None of this tiny speck that immediately falls off business, those are figs! (Even if they didn’t get into the photo.) So Black Jack *does* produce brebas. I’ve read yes and I’ve read no and for ten years my tree had shrugged a no.

All it had needed was a chance to dance in morningtime sunlight.

My Frost peach decided to be a good sport about spring, and one can only wonder how different the two resulting peaches would be. (Usually, though, you thin one out when they’re that close together.)

While I was outside, an Oregon Junco flew to the low power line that connects to the house and turned and stared me down. I laughed. It chirped. I walked a little closer (I wanted to get that Frost’s photo.) It let me know I was under orders to get out of its way, stat.

Just then a female junco flew to the tree nearest its intended mate.

She chirped.

He puffed out his chest to make himself look huge and gave her his voice’s best. I wish I could have heard it but I saw, from really quite close.

I was dismissed. More laughing didn’t faze them, nor my going where I wanted to go (gently, slowly.) This was all about each other by now.

So many birds around. What a difference nine days makes. So grateful to the tree crew that took nesting season as seriously as I did and got that rotting Chinese pepper out the very next morning after I’d asked them so that the scrub jays, the only ones that seemed to like that particular tree, could have time to plan.

That’s not a new seedling, it’s actual new growth sprouting from a node on last year’s cherry tomato that I’d thought long dead.

So.

I was out checking the tiny bits of green appearing on tree after tree yesterday when movement caught my eye and I looked up.

And there, just flapping down onto the power line, was a Cooper’s hawk in the late sun. I’m a little out of practice so I couldn’t tell you by the size whether it was a male or a female, but it was content to let me stand there thrilled at its presence. So I’m guessing male, since back when we had a pair nesting above the house it was always the male that was curious about those funny humans inside that big windowed box and occasionally outside of it. I would bird watch; it would people watch.

Its mate was far warier.

I wondered how many generations removed this one might be from our inquisitive Coopernicus. The fledgling that hopped through my amaryllis pots some years ago with a parent guarding nearby would be getting old now.

It was just so good to see a hawk in my yard again.

(Racks for discouraging small footsteps and gnaw marks.)

You know, I told him, planting that tree–we were just following the Biblical admonition.

He looked at me, wondering where this was taking him…

You know: Blessed are the peachmakers!