I untangled the two old dead strands of lights off the mango tree yesterday before running out of sunlight. It was a job. I got a single new string on today, wondering whether I should just think, hey, heat rises, or whether I should add a second. I didn’t want future me to have to go through that much trying to separate leaves and branches and lines again.

But the point is to take care of my tree so I’m probably not done yet.

For the record, blue lights are the least intrusive for nighttime. The only ambient glow I can find is through the camera lens.

I stockpiled when incandescent bulb sales were banned. All I want is the heat. There’s a whole market waiting in this climate for someone to come up with a safe non-light warming system for tender trees: old-style Christmas lights have been the standard off-label use for decades.  There are a lot of citrus trees around here. C’mon, Silicon Valley, you can figure out a way.

(Nighttime photo.)

It amused me no end and I went to take its picture. Where did I put my phone… And then I got distracted to something else.

There had been a pair of pomegranates hanging onto the tree that I could have picked weeks ago but I’d never gotten them past the critters long enough to see how long they should/would stay there if I let them. I had a small pop-up style birdnetting tent–not over them, trying to balance it in those branches was too fiddly, but sideways with the fruit sort of just inside the bottom of it and the top of the tent facing the fence: En garde! (Autocorrect added an n. I am much amused.) I knew they were accessible but the critters who could reach it didn’t have to know that from their favorite runway and I knew they did not want to be in a cage.

It worked!

Michelle’s a fan of pomegranate juice and on her last night here I squeezed the ones that had been kept in the fridge, and that was as much of that work as I wanted to do at the time.

I checked. The two on the tree were still there.

This morning she was back in Boston and some sheer curiosity got me to go outside to check those fruits again.

Picture a little kid on Christmas morning tearing open a present: the strip of wrapping paper still attached to the tape in their hand while the box falls away. That’s essentially what was left: two stems, each with a thin strip of the bright red outer rind.

While all of the rest was utterly gone.

I laughed. The timing! As if they’d only been holding on for her! How did something get to both of them among those thorns, how did it eat that much? I wanted to get a photo. Didn’t I put it–where was it? Huh. Whatever.

We were just sitting down to dinner when something just really nagged at me and I apologized and said, I have to know if I left that phone in the car, I haven’t been able to find it anywhere. He said Go ahead, and meant it, so I got right back up from the chair I’d just sat down in.

It wasn’t in the car.

It was on the ground in front of the passenger door for all to see where it had fallen out of my purse when I got out this morning.

Had I waited ten more minutes there wouldn’t have been enough light left to see it there and I might well have stepped on it going to the car door to look. I’m just glad it was still there.

Thank you pomegranate silliness…

(Embiggen to really see. The picture was taken this morning.)

While so many trees are dropping their leaves and skinny-dipping their way towards winter, the California Coffeeberries are dressing themselves in sweet-smelling blooms, ready to provide: the bees and hummingbirds, for now, the berries to come, everything else. The density of the branches in the spring provides perfect cover for many a bird and nest. This, not the bird-poisoning-berry non-native Nandina, is what everyone should plant here. (It can survive down to -20F.)

I wrote that. Stopped a moment. Considered the thing. I put down the computer and slipped on the gardening shoes and walked outside where it was cold and dark and a bit wet from a storm and leaned into a flower cluster, and oh my word, took a deep breath.

I had been admiring it all day. But I had somehow forgotten to go and take in the whole of it.

The leaves, crinkled and brown, have all given way to the season on my zucchini plant.

So it was a surprise to look out the window this morning and see brilliant upturned yellow on it. I went outside to check: it had! It had bloomed! How?

But once I got close enough to really see it I saw the rest of the story. Something out there in the night had likewise been delighted to find a flower and nearly all of the lower side of it had been eaten clean off, leaving just the top and the inner edges of the sides to go Ta Dahhh!

I chuckled, glad that my plant was still providing sustenance to the world out there. It didn’t have to be for me.

We were waiting at a red light and I was admiring the flowers in the strip in front of the gas station. They cut back somewhat during the drought several years ago, but there is always something in bloom there. Always. Someone clearly puts heart and soul into it, and occasionally I’ve even see the guy at it.

Their immediate neighbor is a garden center.

And it hit me: if you’re sitting there manning that booth all day bored and watching people fill their cars–but also watching people just a few feet further away filling their cars, too, only with flowers and plants and colors and hopes and trees of blooms to come–

–yeah, that’s a temptation I would happily succumb to, too. And it definitely makes their spot much more inviting than the other gas station across the street that sees no reason to spend time nor money on things that don’t bring in money.

Oh, but (looking at where the cars line up vs where they only do when this side of the street is too busy) they do. Even though those flowers are their own reward, they do.

I got to meet Bethany and Nick!

My big sister said her friend was moving to the area and we both told the friend that I’d love to meet her.

Today was the day.

I had no idea what to expect but still, I was kind of picturing someone about Marian’s age.

They looked younger than our kids, and came here for the same reason we did years ago: the tech jobs. They arrived with a gift of ripe lemons from the tree next to their ADU.

The four of us swapped stories for a bit, older Silicon Valley meeting new.

Looking out our window, Bethany was exclaiming over the trees and I offered a tour.

Yes please!

Blueberries, mandarin, pomegranate, sour cherry, apricot, orange, mango, sweet cherry, peach peach peach later-ripening lemon peach peach plum apple apple fig and tucked way over in the far corner over there, a pear.

Did you plant all these? they asked,

All but the lemon and that apple that died and the rootstock is starting to come back up. (For the second time. The Yellow Transparent is my zombie that refuses to stay dead.)

We had completely lucked out in getting a big (.2 acre) yard with a southwestern exposure for all this; it was a for sale by owner, a bit of a fixer-upper and well under market. If only I could replicate that affordability-plus-yard for them!

There was clearly some serious desire to dig in the dirt, and they offered to come help in the garden any time.

I’m looking at my sweet cherry and thinking, biennial crop because I didn’t thin two years ago? Is that why there was so little fruit this year? How about you do a big burst again next spring? One needing some thinning, and then help harvesting? I want an excuse to see them again and to let them come have all they’d like.

Meantime, I sent them off with some pomegranates, and they were as delighted at that as I was at being surprised with their lemons.

I could see why Marian spoke so highly of them. I liked them from the moment we opened that door.

We have an apparently fairly large mystery yardguest whose new digs were discovered today. I wondered whether I could borrow the neighbor’s dog to bark at it, since the thing probably moved in here to get away from it over there. Although, for the dog’s sake, maybe not: it reminded me of a friend’s tale of skunks having territorial fights under her living room to the point of soaking her rug above them with their spray. Let’s not.

The dirt got shoved back to where it had come from and a large object was placed on top of the hole to encourage the thing to move elsewhere.

Definitely needs a trail cam.

But meantime I got six rows of afghan done so far plus a new cowl cast on at the doctor’s waiting room that I continued on while waiting for his doctor across town, and the thing is 1400 stitches along already.

So what I’ve been told is that if your apricot tree’s growth tips get disturbed for any reason they stop right there and that’s it till the next spring: no side branching from below that point, no new leaves nor fruiting tips, nothing. And it’s easy to tell, because the new leaves and limbs start out red.

It went from pot to ground in the spring and almost immediately that was that. Would the limbs or trunk stretch out a bit, at least? I took a measuring tape out every so often but the answer was nope. August was the same as April. I figured after four years in a large pot, it was concentrating on stretching out its roots in their new digs. I certainly hoped so.

We had a heat wave of a few days and then a couple of cool nights and maybe it decided to call it good, that’s a winter, it’ll do. Maybe?

Because a few weeks ago it started doing this. Not the whole tree, just these two limbs. A few days ago  the upper one started adding a side shoot.

The lower one, meantime, got its end chomped off by a bug and I thought, Well, that’s that, then.

It took a deep breath for a couple of days and then sent out a do-over from the node.

I don’t know what I don’t know why it’s doing all this now, but I like it. Did it get its equinoxes flipped? It does make me wish I had the botany degree I almost chose in college.

Last night at dinner our daughter was recounting some experiences and thanking her daddy for teaching her that science is about the how, religion, the why.

Today one of the speakers at church was a scientist at Stanford. He came bounding up to the stand with a little planter full of beautiful small white flowers, like he couldn’t wait to share this! He talked about discovery and learning and how glorious it was to gain new insights into this beautiful world G_d had created for us to live in.

And then he held up his pretty little flowers for all to see. They were petunias (clearly one of the mini varieties).

But what made them different, he said, though we couldn’t see it yet, was that they had been given the gene from a firefly: they glow in the dark.

Then he invited everybody who was curious to come to the mother’s nursing lounge (where I bring chocolate every week, that’s my assignment) because that was the darkest room in the building that could hold a number of people. (I wondered for a moment about kids finding out what else that room held, but I don’t think any noticed.)

First he had one of the women knock on the door and peek in to make sure we weren’t interrupting anybody.

That is the first time in my life that my camera, not my mom or dad from when I was little, scolded me to hold still for the picture. It managed to capture this much.

So. Cool!

(Ed. to correct what my hearing missed: this NPR article says the firefly gene didn’t take well enough so they used other bioluminescence genes from a mushroom and a fungus. But you can actually buy these now.)

Edited again to add after reading NGS’s comment: so if animals eat them, will their poop glow?

The bright red orb caught the setting sun brilliantly. The camera only wanted to pay attention to the apricot and washed it out but in real life that cherry tomato was striking against that dark soil and I did a double take for a split second: how did that get there?!

Bird or squirrel? Something out there wanted jewelry to dress up the young tree for the Homecoming dance.

(Edited to add, Well, huh. If I click on the photo it goes sideways but shows the tomato.)

Her mother had an apricot tree and she misses it.

Which is how the latest Anya seedling very happily found its new home. Funny how a random conversation can lead to fruitful discoveries about each other!

Welcome to August!

This very tall sunflower bowed over in an arch to welcome in the best of the summer with a nod and hello.

(Fusses with photos, wonders why they’re not posting.) You’re just going to have to take my word for it that those two cherry tomato plants are going all out and it’s a good thing that one of my friends is looking forward to being shared with because even the zucchini plants can’t keep up with their output. (Edited in the morning: Okay, there it is!)

Giving or receiving warm ripe homegrown tomatoes–that is one of the best parts of summer.

It’s summer, the finches and doves are foraging for weed seeds where once there was pre-drought lawn and I’m cheering them on because those non-natives are stabby.

And then I stumble across a discussion about how a rare and huge squash is the best of all the squash, that it makes a pumpkin pie that almost doesn’t need any sugar, that it easily keeps for six months, that more gardeners should grow it to keep it from going extinct because it has the best taste and texture.

So I go from the gardening forum to the seed company and check through the comments.

There are pictures of the North Georgia Candy Roaster hanging from trees it was not planted near. One guy said it looks like kudzu, another that theirs vined twenty feet to either direction, and many many saying, you need space for this one!

And I’m looking out the window and thinking, y’know…those big leaves could shade the noxious weeds right out of existence. Sounds like it wouldn’t take very many of them. How many plants did that guy say he had for his 200 pounds of squash in his yard? Hello Second Harvest food bank?

One said his grew so fast that he was afraid to walk out there and stand still too long.

Four bucks and free shipping. Yeah, I did it. Might even plant a seed for this year to see if I can still get anything.

Now I’ll just need a machete to go with it to protect my fruit trees.

A bare spot in the yard over here, a small stray struggling plant seeded by the birds in a corner over there in the way of the peach tree I wanted to plant: would I like him to move this over there? (Motioning across the yard.)

Sure!

And now every summer I look forward to watching the hummingbirds darting in and out among the tall mound of flowers, grateful for eyes that could see what could be that I could not.