And then there were peaches. Babcock, homegrown, and ours.

The bird spikes, the cinnamon-covered clamshells that made the whole thing smell like peach pie, the squeaky styrofoam to scare inquiring claws, the bubble wrap are all put away till next time. I had to unthread a handful of leaves that had grown through one slit in a clamshell.

All totally worth it.

Three of the seven peaches gone overnight, of course all the ripest ones. The remainders are even more barricaded in now.

There were some Costco grapes in the fridge we hadn’t quite finished off in time. Most looked mostly okay but it only took one mistake in that last smoothie to doom the rest. Putting them out in the bin though meant risking the sun time or waiting for evening–so they were still in the fridge.

Coming home from knit night I thought, well wait, we could use those after all. Going out by flashlight long after the diurnals out there had turned in for the night, they’re now a decoy in the center of the yard away from the fruit trees: no clamshells, no hassles, come and get’em. Eat your fill. Leave my peaches alone. (Go where the Great Horned owls can see you.)

You know they won’t still be there when the squirrels start to stir.

Suddenly thinking…hopefully that was not a mistake…we haven’t had midnight fights between the raccoon and the skunk so far this year like so many times last year. But if it works, hey, anything to save my Babcocks. Murphy’s law of course is surely rubbing its paws with glee.

Meantime, Sunday is solstice (not to mention Father’s Day), which means we usually see the hawk a lot and in the best years, his mate. It felt like it had been awhile. The ravens seem pretty much gone after fledging, with one lone caaah caaah overhead last night just to make sure I didn’t get too sure of myself on that one.

You called? This afternoon I looked up just in time to see the Cooper’s do a magnificent wide-wing swoop around the hanging suet cake right on the other side of the window from me, in no great hurry and with no one around to pursue, simply a statement that this territory was his and his alone.

A minute later I saw the scrub jay dart into a tree at the neighbor’s and the hawk diving in after.

A jay did show up awhile later but it had the sense to keep its distance.

Tonight: bird spikes in the branches and the base of the trunk, should have done it sooner, and another packet of grape Koolaid dribbled over and into the clamshells.

Our first taste of homegrown Babcock peaches. Three more weeks. Hang in (literally) there…

Last year a raccoon climbed my August Pride in the night and broke two thirds right off the top of that little tree, stripping side limbs off too on its way tumbling down. It still didn’t manage to get at the peach inside the fallen clamshell but it knocked the tree straight back to its bare root start. It was awful.

It’s growing back quite nicely. It’s half the height of the Tropic Snow peach and not the pruning job I would have done, that’s for sure, but I will have a better tree for it: there are and will be a lot more limbs closer to the ground because that’s all it had left to grow from and they will be easier to pick.

My middle peach, my Babcock, is the one that’s producing a lot this year. Clamshells, grape Koolaid, cinnamon sprinkling–I’ve been trying them all.

Plus one other thing: a big doubled-over length of bubble wrap tucked gently around its trunk like a shawl. Not taped nor tight; I want the wood to be able to breathe. But I also want mini airbag explosions at the claws and unfamiliar textures for that nocturnal climber who goes mostly by its whiskery sense of touch in the dark.

And it’s worked! One edge of the plastic got shredded at a bit, so I know it tried but it just couldn’t climb it nor over it. Pull at it and it pops back up.

And what really proved my No Trespassing sign had worked was the completely unexpected flash of orange under a cluster of leaves.

All this time and I had not seen that there was a seventh peach–untouched! The scrub jays have started pecking at the Yellow Transparent apples that aren’t enclosed (no Koolaid over there). But wow. An actual unprotected peach growing unseen and undisturbed all this time long enough to gain some coloring and somehow I had missed it. Well, as long as the critters did too, hey!

There’s of course now a clamshell with shipping tape strapped around it. Yellow becoming orange, faint red freckles at the top and a nice pointy bottom for now. Just hang in there a few more weeks…

So we bought this handy dandy tree limb trimmer thingummy with a telescoping handle a little while ago.

The camphor tree Chris’s crew trimmed back last summer now had watersprouts, long, gangly growths with poofs of leaves at the top–and those twiggy limbs are fragile and a hazard in a windstorm. But the unforgivable part is that they were starting to shade my mango, a mandarin, and a peach.

I worked at it some yesterday, waited for today’s path of the sun across the yard, went nope, not done, and I trimmed some more tonight, thinking, I’m getting better at this.

Um, except for that last one. There was a particularly ugly limb that was mostly over the neighbor’s yard, not too big, I could do that one, and I was sure I could grab the heavier end as it hit the fence and thus improve her view. Y’know, be a good neighbor and all that.

In practice, this is a little harder to do when you’re also holding a twelve-foot pole with a long curved knife with a mini-guillotine at its bottom–and I’m the one pulling the string around here, I’ve seen what those blades can do. Survival instinct got the better of the moment as it fell down her side.

Can’t just leave it there. Even if it’s not very big. I walked around the block to go knock on Mrs. M’s door to fess up and to offer to remove it from her property.

Only, it’s been fifteen years since I’ve been in her house. Paint jobs and landscaping changes have happened, and on her street I was going, now, wait, which one…

That one didn’t seem quite it maybe but the trees I could see beyond made it a possibility. And the lights were on (it was close to sundown), so, hey, I knocked.

There was the dad at the window, washing the dishes as his teenage son opened the door.

I managed not to say anything that would sound really stupid and old to a kid as I realized in astonishment, You’re the cute baby in the stroller while your dad was walking his dog every day!

I told the kid what I’d done, apologized, and said if it landed in their yard I’d be happy to go retrieve it. He chuckled and told me no problem, it was fine. I asked, partly to make sure they still lived there, Are the Ms next door? (And if you read the post in that link, this one is the follow-up: Adele got hers after all, our fourth peach.)

Yes they are.

The limb might have landed in their yard, I’m not sure, I told him.

Turned out the Ms weren’t home–and I don’t have a phone number for them.

And so I have yet again avoided having a conversation with Mrs. M about her large falling-apart Snoopy weathervane she impaled on our fence that, when it broke, she turned the broken side to face us.

It shades my August Pride from 1:30 to 3:30 pm and has been reducing its blooming. Which would delight her if I told her. Um. I was kind of hoping–scratch that, I was hoping a lot–that I could break the ice tonight: I had to talk to her, so starting the conversation, any conversation, would be a done deal. And I could make amends for dumping an unwanted thing on her side.

It’s not like this should be so hard.

(Edited to add in the morning, having written the problem out of my system: of course it’s not. I’ll go talk to her today.)

One hundred and six. When last week was in the 70s. Thank heavens we were able to add air conditioning to this house awhile ago.

Monday is not one of our allowed watering days but on the other hand we are allowed to hand-water on other days. Says the city’s website–but not the flyer they put in our utility bills. Don’t let the word out, I guess.

So I took a gallon of water over to the fig in the pot this evening because I wasn’t going to have that tree damaged for twelve hours’ sake. If I had to, I would have, but I didn’t have to. Sometimes the fine print is on our side.

I couldn’t help noticing…

One single week since I watered the peaches and apples and there were new weeds over in that part a foot wide and deep with runners hopping around madly. I went from zero plans to weed to an hour of putting my entire body against taproot after taproot after taproot, ripping random leaves when I flubbed it. Felt good.

Then I came in too tired to do anything but sit down and finish the very last of the previous knitting project so it could hold no guilt. Done. Karin’s blue merino and stella yarn was already wound and ready to go. And we’re off!

The day did not start off at its best and I admitted to a friend at church that the Crohn’s had been nagging at the edges since I’d come down with those germs. It had tamped down a lot but it wasn’t gone–I needed to finally make that doctor appointment. Part of it too was that it is June, and there is always more UV exposure this time of year.

Having said all that out loud, I almost sat down to knit after lunch but decided to be sensible and rest. I set an alarm and slept right through it. It did help. As does the happy anticipation of working with Karin’s yarn.

There was a wry moment of checking the UV rating and dinner time vs when it would be safe to walk outside to harvest. I threw on the sun jacket. Picking well after dinner and putting it in the fridge for the next day–no. My autoimmunity doesn’t get to make every decision. (I know…)

One fit-between-your-outstretched-thumb-and-fingertips round zucchini, halved, scooped out, nuked just a bit, filled with Alfredo sauce, bacon bits, and a good sharp cheddar and then baked for a half hour. Snap peas (I thought I picked–there are more? Yes!) in olive oil.

It still amazes me, this idea of trading seeds and water (not too much!) for real-life food. My spinach sprouted today–there will be more.

The peaches and apples are slowly, steadily growing, safe inside their clamshells. I picked a few raspberries and the first of the Top Hat blueberries and we shared a small handful each, red and blue warm from the last of the sun on a definitely-summer evening.

And they were very, very good.

So of course after writing last night’s post I went looking this evening behind the lemon tree and the fence where I rarely go for the tree’s thorns and the prickly perennials back there. Just not a lot of incentive.

To my very great surprise that fig stump of quite some time ago had two sprouts going again, both about 18″ high. They’re gone now, and I would not have known they were threatening the fence again for another few feet’s growth had I not found last night’s new volunteer seedling, triggering my thinking about the old. That definitely worked out well. (Photo is of the Black Jack variety we planted on purpose. I kinneared it with hands high.)

There is, meantime, one young and particularly clueless black squirrel that has been a nuisance. He thinks that if the bird feeder is empty there will miraculously be more if he can just reach it and that any surface is fair game to try from.

No it’s not.

I resorted to plastic bird spikes for the first time ever. He tried taking a long flying leap this morning from the one amaryllis in bloom, which was placed such that it hadn’t occurred to me as a possibility–and I seem to have come around the corner just after he ran as it crashed to the ground, because, seeing me, he acted like, Aagh! Caught!

He did the fast leap leap leap they do when they’re in a hurry but not really screaming fleeing for their lives–and jumped up right smack into the center of the birdnetting part of that tent. It sproinged him straight back to where he’d leaped from.

Wait–what WAS that? While I was just helpless with laughter. Since he was clearly fine.

That tent has street cred now. Not a single squirrel went anywhere near it the rest of the day.

I want to mention: I got a get-well card and a get-well package in the mail today from my friend Karin (I finally got to meet her in person the day in that link) of The Periwinkle Sheep in New York. Lovely, lovely stuff: superwash merino with glittery stellina, superwash merino/silk, superwash merino sport weight. Soft, pretty yarns that my eyes and hands can’t wait to get to, and I’m going to wind the first one up as soon as I stop typing this so I can get right to it. I find them all very cheering; thank you, Karin!

Our sour cherry tree that on its own just couldn’t shake off what was eating it? It’s looking so much better now (and see how much it’s grown back just in the twelve days since that picture!)

I know just how it feels. Recovering is wonderful.

Maybe ten years ago I saw something behind the lemon tree that was not your usual weed. It was quite close to the fence. Those leaves–I was sure it had to be–and as more of them grew and the tree grew bigger it was.

The critters had planted me a fig tree.

And that fig tree went from a seed in the ground to seven feet tall with two fruits on it by fall.

But at that point it was already pushing against the fence and there was nothing for it but to cut it down. I’d wanted to grow a fig tree ever since, and so as I’ve mentioned this year we finally did and we’re both quite happily anticipating our Black Jacks to come. I went outside tonight specifically to look for any signs it might set fruit this year and in three places I think it will soon.

We had carefully picked out a dwarf variety. None of this seven feet in a year stuff.

I then went over to the mango tree.

That distinctive angular growth pattern, the leaves just starting to grow into the right shape… It couldn’t have been there more than maybe a week–I mean, I look pretty much every day to keep weeds away from there and it wasn’t–when I laid that mulch down a week ago it was not there.

I opened the slider and said to Richard, Guess what’s growing right at the 2×4 behind the mango? (That I use to help block the flow of water to the immediate mango area only.)

What?

The critters planted a fig tree.

(Pause as he too remembered.) You’re joking. (With an unspoken, how…?)

Nope!

And then I grabbed a trowel, a gallon of water, and filled up an empty clay pot with soil and worked the water into it. The pot was too small by far for anything past maybe the first month but it’s what I had.

I took it over to the baby tree. The mango’s side of that 2×4, good and moist soil we’d put in, the fig’s side, bone-hard clay as if it hadn’t seen rain in its life and it was surprisingly hard to get that trowel down in there. But I knew if I didn’t that seedling would overpower my mango’s roots very fast–one way or another, it had to go. And why waste a perfectly good game of surprise?

Where it is now it will be out of direct sun in the morning to let it recover from the shock. Having had to cut apart the Black Jack’s roots, I knew it would recover. Figs are resilient.

I’m still in a little bit of shock of my own. The tree in the neighborhood that I assume our earlier one had come from? We’re quite sure it was cut down some time ago.

Maybe the compost pile next door?

I read Dave Barry’s description a number of years ago of the damage to his house after a major hurricane swept through Florida. His enclosed patio had simply ceased to exist.

Except for its door to outside and the frame it was attached to.

The door his dog was used to having the family open for him so he could go out in the yard and do his business.

No matter how many times Barry walked his dog around that door, trying to the left, to the right, to show him, Look! There’s nothing in your way now! You can go in the yard All By Yourself from this point!–the dog didn’t get it. Oh no. One does it properly. They had to walk over to that orphaned door and open it to let the dog walk through it or the dog simply wouldn’t go.

It was just like that here, too.

I saw a squirrel combing through the leaves of my Gold Nugget mandarin, looking for a meal. Its fruit isn’t going to grow to the size of ripe for at least nine more months–this was ridiculous. It’s a very small tree and so ordering a 36″ cover was a cheap fix and it might even still fit next year. (And after a year of using a NuVue and the Gardman cages, when I need a smaller one, I like the NuVues better. You do have to anchor them.)

I ordered one from a large retailer. They sent me two. Oops.

And so I set one over the mandarin and that was the end of that–the critters left it alone. We’ve been picking blueberries since January and they are apparently conditioned to the idea that they can’t get past structured bird netting. (They can, but don’t tell them.)

It would have been great if I had been able to use the second to cover my tomato patch but it was too short to go over my tallest support structure (well, tomato cage, to use the traditional but at this point repetitive term). The plan has been to set up my biggest Gardman over them but it will take two people and time to do and the set up will be a major pain and with us taking turns being sick these last few weeks, we simply haven’t pulled it out of last year’s box yet.

I did put some grape Koolaid on the tomatoes right after the first few to set were raided. That seemed to do it.

Then those new cages showed up last week: you just had to take one out of the box, walk out the door, untie four ties, and poof! The NuVue pops open, done! Last year I bought one in the biggest size and it arrived with a broken frame and I just used it anyway no matter what it looked like, but this smaller size came perfect and I like it. (The one in the photo is deliberately a little scrunched in rather than all the way open–I wanted it tight up against those plants.)

The squirrels like to come to the bird feeder area by way of sneaking carefully around things from the side farthest away from where I can see them out the window, as if that would make it so I wouldn’t notice them. And so I leaned the second cage in tight against that far side, with bushes covering the area behind.

Yesterday we had quite a wind for an area that rarely gets much of it and since I certainly hadn’t tied it down, that cage played tumbleweed and rolled well out of the way.

What happened next just had me staring in disbelief: a black squirrel decided within minutes that the coast was now clear and came in to the middle of my plants via that side that had been covered for a week. Sniffing at my coveted tomatoes.

Which, mind you, have been wide open all along at the other two sides.

I chased him away and set the cage firmly back where it had been and everything went back to normal. And it stayed normal today, too.

They stay clear. They know they can’t get in there. No matter what their eyes tell them.

Snap peas and round zucchini: last week we ate green veggies from our own back yard two days in a row and aside from tomatoes I don’t know that we’ve ever done that before in all our married lives. The few times we’ve tried, we had poison ivy winding up around each plant back East and the broccoli I grew here one year tasted horrible nibbled right off the plant. Cooked? All those tiny flowerlets opened up to show a tiny now-dead beetle in each. Yow.

But that explained it. I still have zero desire to plant that ever again and the lack of bugs in farmer-grown broccoli inspires for me a certain reverence.

The sense of at-long-last-success and the relief at it was instantly contagious.

And so, one new $2.79 packet later, a plastic pot a tree had come in, a bit of leftover potting soil, and voila! Way too many spinach seeds got planted tonight. Won’t take but a few cups of water a day, I hope, and the crowding will just make all the more incentive to pick off the extras at the baby-leaf stage. I’ve read that spinach doesn’t like heat but we’ve got air conditioning if need be. One more reason for the pot rather than the ground. Mobility.

That plus I’d probably have to clear away more of those tall flower stalks otherwise and having a hummingbird dance a ballet in and out of the blossoms right in front of you is incentive to let the things stay, prickly sun blockers or no. It put on quite the show last night.

Meantime, someone nearby has a peach or nectarine tree because twice today a squirrel, one gray, then one black, came running down the fence towards our yard with fruit that had just started to get a bit of color to it. What surprised me was watching this one eat till he was full. In years of plenty, squirrels have stripped my apples clean in a day, months pre-ripe, picking and biting them all trying to find that one ripe one they’re so sure must be there.

The little guy wasn’t wasting any of this precious resource this year.

(Photo of its leftovers taken with my unsteady hands above my head.) My peaches were all accounted for and untouched. I wonder whom I should be telling about the clamshells idea.

“We’re going to have to have a do-over on dinner,” as I came back in from mulching some more fruit trees.

Say what? He looked up, questioning.

I had only ever seen sprawling plants and flowers and somehow I had missed that the sugar snap peas were not only there but needed to be picked, like, now. So at 8:30, nine of them got stir-fried and I probably should have picked the smallest ones too but I was trying not to be greedy.

I’d bought a packet of seeds to maybe do nothing with; a half dozen went into the dirt below the cherry tree to catch any runoff and try to make it useful rather than just having the water go to the prickly plants with the tall flower stalks that I’m forever thinking of simply ripping out and being done with. I didn’t plant more peas because I didn’t want to commit to having to water them for their own sake.

They did grow, though, even when the ground was cracked and dry-looking, hidden well enough that you had to look for them to find them, and eventually the pea tendrils tried to grab onto those stalks that blocked a lot of their sunlight–but mostly the plants just flopped around on the ground. I figured they were putting nitrogen in the soil for next year’s tomatoes and that that was reason enough for them.

I saw a squirrel nosing around back there yesterday and thought, well, if there was anything there there isn’t now.

Today, marveling: How did it not devour these?

I dunno, but we sure did!

Almost went to knit night. But when it came down to it my voice was hoarse, I just wasn’t sure I was completely past sharing my germs, and I knew at least one person there very much needs not to be exposed. I need some time around knitting people after missing so many Thursday nights in a row but that’s not their problem.

So I mulched the Stella cherry instead. And added more grape Koolaid to the tomato plants, happily noting and dousing a new cluster of fruit. I haven’t managed to assemble the large Gardman cage to protect them yet and I know from experience that the critters take tomatoes the moment they appear–like they did the first to set on those plants.

Which I then doused with that unsweetened grape flavor and they don’t seem to have been touched since. And yet it’s only the birds that are known to be affected by the stuff. Hey, whatever works.

It was a drought year the year we moved into this house and that one lasted seven years. Then we remodeled. (After the ’89 quake our kitchen cabinet doors kept falling on our heads–they had to go.)

The contractor did damage to the aging roof and we ended up with seventeen buckets catching the incessant water leaking inside. It rained so much that winter that a beam he’d had waiting in the yard for a few days warped enough to soon crack the new window set against it–so that had to be replaced. We named the inside downpour roof juice and joked that if the legislature should ever again need to end a drought, all they had to do was re-remodel this place for us.

I’m waiting….

And then it turned dry again. So we’ve been pretty good at not wasting water for a very long time now. The San Francisco Bay Area, for whatever reason, has been better at water conservation than the whole rest of the state and is under slightly less drastic cutbacks. My one fault was frequent laundry loads, because having gone through that one good-sized earthquake I just really don’t want anyone to be out of underwear when the next one hits.

Relandscaping this past year, though, with the extra water that new trees need and with sixteen fruit trees–when they said cutbacks were going to be mandatory, I thought we were totally hosed. So I bought us more underwear. More favorite-color-blue oxford shirts for him. Bigger laundry loads done less frequently, well okay, and I have thrown some loads together that my momma taught me not to mix, but, drought, so, yeah.

Not because we wanted to, but, we bought a much more water-efficient dishwasher. We replaced that outside faucet at last, and although that wouldn’t show up in the bill yet, that will make a difference, too. And tonight, with Richard’s back giving him grief, I unloaded four monster bags of mulch from the car.

I just went to pay the utility bill and just kind of stared at it a moment. There’s a line where you can compare how much you’re using to how much you used in the same time period last year. It doesn’t show you two years ago, and that’s the number the state is comparing against, but it still definitely gives us an idea.

Our city is under a mandatory 24% water reduction starting June 1. I was sure any laundry savings was being offset by my trees.

I had to do the math to make sure we hadn’t already hit that target. We are so very very close that replacing that tap was all we needed and laying down that mulch will top it off.

Gee, maybe I could have planted that pomegranate I wanted after all.

Next year.

Hey, Jerry Brown, maybe just painting the outside and redoing the driveway would be enough this time?

Every bit of green on this tree is an act of triumph.

We bought this English Morello tart cherry tree on March 14. Bare root season was pretty much over but over there on the cool coast of Santa Cruz the tree was still dormant (and cheap!) It was the variety I wanted.

I haven’t been mentioning it since…

We planted it. And then we waited and waited and waited. Given that it’s the one we expect to grow to block the view from our windows to our neighbors’, having it just sit there mutely gray was not in the plan. It was even on standard rootstock, no dwarfing–that way it would take off faster, like the Indian Free peach has, even if it meant it would take more pruning effort later.

The fig tree we bought at the same time has leafed out nicely with new branches starting, doing what the newly planted do. It has clearly recovered from all the cutting I had to do to its roots to separate them from each other.

Eventually I was clearing away spurts at the ground from the cherry’s rootstock–that is so not the variety I want to grow. And then at long, long last we got just the beginning hints of green up above where there should be.

Then they shrank.

Grow.

Shrink.

Grow.

Shrink.

Yet I never saw anything touch it and the other trees were doing just fine.

Finally one night when it had started a flush of green yet again I went out there with a flashlight and my stars: the whole thing was a completely solid mass of black beetles stripping every bit of leaf straight down to nothing. They weren’t touching the ones from the impatient rootstock that wanted to get on with this living business, just the English Morello part.

I did what I could to clear them off, feeling just sick. Grape Koolaid anyone?

And then we went off for four days for the weddings.

Our friends Krys and her husband were at the second wedding we went to almost straight from the airport.

And they wanted to know: had it worked?

I had forgotten all about it. Back when I was fighting an ant invasion in the garden I’d read something about how the barbecued ash from charcoal briquets breaks ants’ joints and kills them and our friends had shown up at our doorstep with what they’d cleaned out of their grill for us. It had worked; the ants were gone. Wonderful!

And then I had utterly forgotten all about it.

So there we were talking and they were saying, We bet we gave you a lifetime supply of that stuff. How was it?

Oh, you bet it worked! Thank you so much and you can clean your grill any time, I’ll take it!

As the obvious hit me upside the head–Duh! I had had it right there!

We got home very late. There were the very barest slivers of maybe two leaves left, and I doused them and the whole tree with that ash. The next night I looked again and still found two beetles; one disappeared fast, the other reared up on its hind legs as I let it have it, then fell off.

But over the next few days the tips of what was left (meaning, pretty much everything) shriveled and turned black. I didn’t know if it was from the ash or a disease from having been bitten.

I went to cover the mango that night and suddenly realized I had a second cover on hand. How about a physical barrier for the night bugs?

And that, that, is how, on Memorial Day, our cherry tree is finally beginning to look like it’s early March. It’s still got a few bites but it was so very close to dying on us and now, now, it’s going to be okay. That picture is a week and a half’s worth of growth and it definitely has some catching up to do, but now we know it will.

It had just needed the right treatment.