Our yard’s first squirrel-free, scrub jay-free peaches in two years. Very juicy.

And, frankly, rather flavorless. Being in a clamshell sped up the ripening process, I guess–they about fell into my hand–but not the sugaring.

But we got them and they were ours and there are more peaches to come that are protected by citrus-branch barbs rather than plastic boxes.

In between the insurance company calling, the adjuster calling, Enterprise calling, Enterprise picking me up, Enterprise filling out the paperwork and sending me on my way in a minivan, and the company the insurance picked to fix the Prius calling about the tow truck they’ll send to get my car…

Ruth and Lise were going to Yamagami’s Nursery. Where one must wait in line in the sun to go in: only so many people are allowed in under continued lockdown procedures at this Essential Business, you must wait till someone comes out, etc etc. Which is why I have not been able to go. After buying a bag of potting soil somewhere else years ago that turned out to be, somehow, plain sand with just the smallest bit of dirt mixed in, I am quite loyal to the place where I know I get the best of everything and it is what it says.

Did I want anything?

I made sure they knew I am by no means on their way. Did they still want to?

Absolutely!

Ohmygoodnessyes! Thank you! I had vegetable plants so root bound they were starting to look sick. I’d ordered fifteen and twenty gallon fabric pots so that I could plant them where they’d have lots of root space without having snails disappear them overnight, all I’d needed all this time was some good soil. For two months. And I wanted to help keep my favorite place in business.

My friends–I met Ruth via knitting at Purlescence years ago–are fruit tree enthusiasts and the reason for my Black Jack fig: they’d told me that in our climate that was the best-tasting of their three.

I showed them around the back yard. They exclaimed in recognition as I named variety after variety, most fondly, the fig. We geeked out together over the thought of picked-first-thing-in-the-morning sweetness.

And I sent them home by way of thanks with one of my two Anya apricot seedlings. They were thrilled at the offer. I was thrilled; it absolutely felt meant to be. I had always known I would give one away and had been trying to figure out who it might best be, when suddenly as we were planning all this there was no doubt.

You cannot, as far as I’ve been able to find, buy that variety tree at retail. You can only plant a kernel and hope it’s true to its parent, and here I’d given them a year’s head start on the process.

They were very very pleased.

And now my own Anya is happily planted in the oversized pot that had been waiting for it. It should last it for several years. I was surprised at how big its root structure already was.

(The watermelon and squash plants were so grown into their clay pots that I finally had to shatter them carefully against the concrete to free their grip.)

I stumbled across an old photo while looking for something else: four years ago with the late, much-missed Coopernicus, the people-semi-friendly Cooper’s hawk.

Several weedy-looking trees were taken out two years before because they were starting to damage the fence, and although they were not the most glorious looking they did offer greenery and it felt bald and bare with them gone. If you click on that link (scroll down, the first picture is from my visit to my sister in Atlanta) that’s where the mango went in a year later.

The hawk’s spot now: for nearly thirty years those coffeeberry bushes had stayed small; I thought it was just the variety they were. But once the sun became unobstructed and they had the root space all to themselves (I got rid of that I think buckthorn upstart in the foreground, too), look at it now.

Two years ago a friend gave me a miniature hydrangea from a florist so I planted it in a spot beyond the coffeeberries, and now they shade it. It has naturalized and blooms freely all summer just the same.

And to their left, the tart cherry, which for three years refused to grow higher than my waist as I fought off Japanese beetles and it fought off old olive roots, has finally come into its own and has in the last month topped the fence. Its flowers fed the white-crowned sparrows, its fruit has been feeding us.

Things are looking up.

What my Anya apricot seedlings get to be when they grow up! When they’re not about three inches tall.

This Blenheim was a housewarming present, before I’d even heard of Anyas, and every year Jennifer sends me a picture to show me how it’s coming along. (Looking at the date on that old post–wow, this is only its third year.)

“So many apricots,” the email said. She asked for ideas on using them all up and I sent her my two favorite fruit cobbler recipes; her kids are going to love all the extra desserts.

She does indeed have sourdough starter and I told her we’d finished off that recipe tonight and were quite sorry to have it all be gone.

Biden broke quarantine to get out and talk to protesters and to advocate for peacemaking–and I imagine to protect them, as well, which was sorely needed today in too many places.

In Wichita, on the other hand, the cops and the protesters held a cookout together and talked.

Me, after feeling overwhelmed at 45’s mendacities today, I think I’m going to go post the plum tree my kids planted for me. And this peach.

When a citrus tree is new and vulnerable it sends out thorns to protect itself; once it’s grown, oranges generally don’t have any.

The rootstock on my Page mandarin started taking over and sending up stabbiness and later than I should have, I cut those branches off to protect the health of my tree.

And let me tell you, they are sharp.

The peaches were getting bigger and beginning to be targets and those thorns suddenly showed me why I’d let them grow.

The third, late-sprouting apricot seedling had a root coming out of the bottom of its paper cup with the pencil hole at the bottom. Neither of the others had had that at that size. I prepared a ten gallon pot and carefully tore away the paper constricting that nice full root structure and eased the damp ball in there–once this one got going it really got going. It had earned its new digs.

But the second one, which had come up a month earlier: the little one that had sent up a few sets of leaves and then stopped, that had made me wonder if I had a natural dwarf on my hands and how good a small-yard tree that would be if it succeeded. Cool, right?

But you still have to grow at least some. And it wasn’t doing that anymore.

It couldn’t handle the 90-95F heat we’ve had this past week and day by day despite anything I could do it gradually crisped and died.

Curious, I gently pulled it out of its pot to have a look tonight.

Wait, where was the kernel?

Somewhere along the way it had gotten jostled or something but broken off from the nourishment that’s supposed to send the shoot up and the roots down; with that support missing, it had still sent up leaves, it had still harnessed the immense power of the sun to add its tiny bit of oxygen to the earth, and it even had the tiniest nubs of roots trying to make it.

A little further down, there was the kernel, plumped and good and ready to help but unable to save it.

They both did the best they could for longer than I would have thought possible.

But I still have that plant’s two healthy tree-sisters, and they will show how apricoting from a perfect fruit is done.

I found the perfect shade of bright royal blue in my stash, exactly what I’d been looking for, and oh good it was labeled worsted weight superwash. Neighborhood Fiber Co. Nice stuff from nice people. My grandson Mathias has a baby blanket made out of that.

But I just could not make myself start that next fish with it. It was both thicker and more densely spun than what I was working with and the difference was just too much.

But the color!

I spent the day again wishing for it to be back to when you could simply drive to the yarn store to ogle the options in person.

But I did not want to waste a pandemic day, because this is what those are good for, how I make myself feel good about the isolation: getting that project finished after its two year wait.

And yet I didn’t have what I didn’t have.

Finally, it became, oh forget it, just go with the Malabrigo that isn’t the best possible dreamed-of color but it is what there is and I knew how it would perform with its peers in the wash and that counted for a lot, too.

Kalida’s Washington Square wool will get its turn in its own project–speaking of which, two circular needles arrived from her today for Venn-diagram-knitting the next hats at a denser gauge. Needles, meet yarn. From Ball’more, Maryland.

And then, at long last, I just did it. I grabbed a Rios color that would be just fine after all and simply started that silly fish. As soon as I did I loved it, with a strong sense of relief at the perfectionist logjam having finally burst. Who knew. It was right there all along.

Meantime, the English Morello tart cherries are starting to grow hints of red here and there, and I will definitely wait for that color.

A few photos.

If you want to take pictures of squash blossoms, you have to do it in the morning: they shout Huzzah! to the new day and then step back to let the leaves do their big sugar-making job with the sun. This evening there was a second tiny zucchini growing, and I haven’t even gotten the plant in the ground yet. (I’m dithering: I’m liking having it on top of the old barbecue grill where the critters can’t get at it. Hopefully. But then it’s not a winding vine yet, either.)

Two picotee amaryllises opened up on Mother’s Day.

Fig, iris, apple in the back.

And best of all this last one.

A few hot days, and quite to my surprise we had a third apricot seedling yesterday. I thought that thing was surely long dead in there, I’d been watering it since February and the other two had come up about a month ago a week apart but somehow I kept going. How cool is that! A new baby tree! I was not expecting that at all and it just worked out anyway.

Someday I’m going to be that neighbor who’s bugging everybody, trying to find kittens a good home, only they’ll be apricot trees. Really good ones.

It seems to be a vigorous grower like seedling #1; #2 is much slower, which I’m hoping means it will be naturally dwarfing, but I guess I’ll find out. If they need pollenizers (most don’t) then having visible differences early on is probably a good sign–given that they have one parent in common if not two. I may end up learning to graft so I can combine them on one.

So I was feeling pretty good about that tiny bit of green joy and I walked outside to get the mail and as I came around the corner of the sidewalk, standing in the front yard next door was a woman with an older woman just beyond her, daughter and mother, I assumed. Turns out they’d been looking at the house. Turns out our assumption that our neighbor’s buyer was simply in it to flip it was correct, and it was put on the MLS for the first time today after three weeks’ intense work that the place had badly needed.

Friday is the day realtors look over the new listings. There were two Tesla X SUVs between our houses.

I imagine they have to disclose that the place was originally red-tagged for mold and plumbing issues, because for all the markup it’s still below market. It needs serious and expensive tree work that can’t happen till after nesting season is over, but still. The place is gorgeous now.  It’ll sell fast.

So we chatted a little while and enjoyed each other’s company and now she knows that if she buys the place she’s got a friendly face next door. Looks like we’d have three generations there and young children to play with the ones across the street, and that would be so cool for everybody.

Never did see the guy on the roof again. Clearly, they were done.

They are ubiquitous where I grew up, but here, you have to be willing to buy new bulbs every fall or dig the old ones up and store them in your fridge all winter and not mistakenly use them for dinner. They’re poisonous, so you really don’t want to make that mistake.

But not to the local squirrels, who go straight for them as soon as they’re in the ground. I tried to plant some years ago and found it a lost cause.

But today brought a surprise.

One of my kids sent me a picture of two beautiful flowers in loud, random-brushstroke stripes, a petal on each curling and twisting while the others grew straighter, with the question, did I know what these were?

Tulips!

I said that historically, tulipmania in Holland four hundred years ago was set off by the search for specimens like these. They were gorgeous.

I went back to my afghan–I finished a fish, yay! I just need to tighten up the strands running behind so they don’t show–and thought about all the new random variants in a short time that made ordinary flowers into something never seen before, more beautiful, each as individual as the next, costly and highly sought after.

Caused by a virus.

The roasted radishes were definitely the way to go. Sweet, soft, no heat–and pretty.

This peach tree nearly died of leaf curl disease last year, but look at it now.

 They were in this area, but this is not how they were. He must have quietly dug them up and replanted them. I thought he’d just cleared off the dead cover plants.

They were here when we bought the house, and over time they crowded themselves badly and then did a mass die-off in the drought–and have been steadily, slowly working their way back ever since.  They ended up kind of split down the middle into two bunches of randomness.

I thought it was so weird when we moved to California that everybody had a hired gardener. Doesn’t anybody work in their own yard around here?

Then I got lupus with extreme sun sensitivity, my husband threw his back out, and we ended up asking the neighbor’s how much he charged. (Fred’s cardiologist had made him retire.) It’s been good to have the help, and Elio’s a great guy.

I paid him extra last winter for something I didn’t feel was in his usual job description. He disagreed and tried to stop me. Dude: Take. The. Money. You spent the time, you did the work, you earned it.

Which is probably why the purple irises are now arranged in a perfect circle of green leaves and purple blossoms, with enough distancing to be social and healthy for a goodly while to come, placed just so between the apples and the fig tree. They are in their fullest glory and they have never looked better than they do right now.

Elio quietly offered up a gift in the barren winter dirt and waited for the day when I’d get to notice.

The amaryllis bulbs that my dad gave me for his last Christmas have begun to come into bloom again, bringing cheer to our lockdown.

And it is not possible–I thought–but that last apricot seed in that last paper cup, the one that wasn’t doing anything but I couldn’t bear to toss because it hadn’t decayed away like seven of them had those times when watering them had left them exposed enough to see…had a tiny root showing today. After trying for what, two months? I thought I was just putting off the certainty of disappointment by not letting the cup dry out, but there it is. It lives.

I covered its brief uncoveredness quickly with just a bit of chicken-manure-enhanced soil and hoped. It would be so cool.

My dad adored Andy’s apricots.

It was so good. Definitely making that pumpkin cranberry sourdough again.

Also in the future food department: looking at my apricot, tomato, butternut, zucchini and watermelon seedlings, I was trying to figure out how to grow all those where there’s the most sun.

The edge of the concrete patio, for one.

My sister Marian has talked a lot about her gardening in cloth grow bags, which got me to go look. The county just shut down the nurseries and those are sold out on so many sites.

Someone on some review said the Vivosuns were the best they’d found, with a three year warranty to back them up.

Another brand was reported as ripping immediately out from the weight of the dirt coming in. I do not understand manufacturing something to be immediately thrown away in the landfill.

The latest of Vivosuns with the improved (maybe read: their decorative contrast color?) handles were sold out but the older version still beat the competition from everything I could find.

The price, the usefulness, the durability, the washableness, you could chase the sun around the yard (maybe, doubt I will) with those handles making them more portable: I bought the 5-pack of 15 gallon size on the idea that those would be big enough for both my tomato plants and, eventually, those teeny tiny apricot seedlings. Of which I have three and two, respectively.

And now that size is sold out. I just barely made it.

Gardening supplies: they’re the new toilet paper.

A little bigger, a little greener, and then stepping outside, the columnar apple has started putting on a show. Yesterday these blossoms opened up at the bottom branch, tomorrow there will be more at the top. 

And then there was this.

You could see the curve of the haunch up against the trunk, the dark tip of the ear, the angle of the jaw with its head turned a bit towards the neighbors behind.

No way.

I stared and stared and then stepped just inside the door to get Richard’s attention and camera and second set of eyeballs: Was that? No, right? Tell me it’s not? That *is* where it would want to be this time of day, that is the shape it would be, that is how it would want to melt into the branches mostly out of sight. (Where squirrels give new meaning to fast food.)

He came out and looked and saw what I saw and went huh…but maybe not. Nah. Couldn’t be. He went back in, grabbed a monocular (how does he always have just the right equipment for the moment? He said no it wasn’t, it wasn’t binoculars) and gave it a better look and then handed it to me.

Okay, then. Man.

Just half an hour later the shapes were the same but the interplay of light and shadow had melted the ear back into monotone brown, the line curving along the haunch had disappeared, and our mountain lion had melted back into simply being the Chinese elm with the weird angles and turns the tree trimmers had cut it into two summers ago when the insurance company required it not to go over the house anymore.

Plus the way it had grown since then.

You had to step outside at just the right time and maybe just the right time of year for it to briefly come alive as something entirely different. Brigadooning?

As for how it acted the part, though, it gave a pretty wooden performance.