“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.

A band-tail pigeon a few days ago, briefly away from its flock, dwarfing the mourning doves. I saw a spotted towhee today, all dressed up and ready to go.

Still not up to getting much done (I tried not to breathe on the plumber yesterday) but the fever part seems over. I knitted for the first time since this started and it felt like a coming home.

Walked around the yard near dusk and breathed in all that growing life. The sweet pea seeds I pushed into the dirt just downstream from the cherry tree in hopes that something more useful than weeds might take up the overflow? Other than an occasional handheld gallon out of guilt, I totally left them on their own. Bad gardener.

They’re blooming. Not a bite nor blemish on them anywhere.

I didn’t take its picture. Bad blogger. Just let me say it was a perfect cherry red with a faint, deeper stripe running down the center: big, plump, a work of art.

Written descriptions of Stella cherries that I’d seen call them almost black, and that was going to take at least another week. The battle with the critters had been ongoing and we’d been losing and looking at that pretty color I decided on the spot that, forget waiting for it to put on a little black dress: if it’s too underripe we’ll leave the other one a little longer. (Yup. We were down to two.)

Note that we had eaten grocery store cherries a few hours earlier.

I took my homegrown prize in the kitchen and sliced it down that stripe. The pit came out easily. I popped a half in my mouth…

…That would do. Wow. That would definitely do. For three years I’d wondered if I should have bought one of the varieties that had won the taste tests at Dave Wilson rather than the impulse-purchase tree at Costco. Did Costco get the unpopular leftovers? Had I, after all that work and water, deprived us of what we could have had?

As if.

I came around the corner and offered my sweetie the other half. I watched his face marvel as mine had. Wow that was good. “That’s definitely better than the ones at lunch.”

My thought, too, there was just no comparison. Next year we will definitely do the bird netting, in metal if need be, now that we know what we’ll get so much more of if we do.

In great self-restraint I left the other cherry in its clamshell on the tree for tomorrow.

We are savoring the anticipation.

Our Stella had a single cherry growing in a spot where a clamshell wouldn’t easily snap over it, so I doused it in grape Koolaid and hoped. It certainly wasn’t going to rain–they say you have to reapply the stuff after rain.

It rained. Not that I’m complaining. At all.

Given that the first branches of cherries had been stripped while still tiny and green and I would have thought far from tasty, it amazed me to get to watch this one fruit gradually turn big and yellow in anticipation of turning red and openly taunting the wildlife. (The rest are in clamshells, and the critters have still managed to reach in at a few of those so I reinforced them with Koolaid, too.)

And then of course yesterday’s .63″ happened. I still had that same mug of fake-grape in the kitchen and when the skies let up a moment I took it outside to reapply to the otherwise-unprotected cherry.

Of course it was long gone.

He’s been working from home this week, fighting the edge of a bug (so am I) and keeping it away from his co-workers.

But this afternoon he suddenly realized he had a prescription we hadn’t picked up yet; was I up to going and getting it?

I was in better shape than he was, so, sure.

We’d just had a bit of end-of-season rain-blessed-rain earlier in the day, .16″, but looking at the sky and the weather report, that all seemed over with and the forecast said there would be no more. I reminded myself to be grateful we’d gotten that much, such as it was.

I drove home through a total cloudburst. In May? In California? Not that I’m complaining! The gizmo on our roof recorded .54″ by the time I got home and it’s at .58″ now. The yard is muddy. Water! (Edited Friday to add, and it rained some more overnight even though Wunderground said it would not. The total became .63″.)

Oh, and. I was going to tell you about that other cowl I stuffed back in the bag a week ago. It was done in soft Malabrigo Finito, knitted up in a twisted infinity scarf.

Sunday I went to see my friend Edie, as I do every Mother’s Day.

She surprised me with red and white miniature carnations and perfect, deep red farmer’s market strawberries.

Her son’s picture was on the mantle as always, forever the handsome, gregarious, blond 18-year-old who had been my daughter’s classmate. Her son-in-law greeted me with a warm smile, as did her other one when he arrived soon after. Her grandchildren were playing in the kitchen and the back yard, and I was suddenly glad that I’d grabbed a bunch of hand knit Peruvian finger puppets for my purse; I fished out five, one for each little one. A zebra and an alpaca and a…

She was wearing red. The cowl was red, and she exclaimed that it had been her son’s favorite color as she put it on in delight. “I’ve heard of these, but I’ve never owned one–and now I do!”

Adrian, Edie, and me. Why I come. And now I know why it had had to be that one. I can just picture Adrian looking over my shoulder as I picked out the yarn and then among the finished projects, knowing what would help his mom feel him close by.

Several years ago she’d given me a dwarf hydrangea plant and it had brightened my back yard ever since–but, I confessed to her in embarrassment, when the tree guys took out the olive it had been next to and the tree next to that while it was dormant they had moved some large rocks around and I’d lost my landmark of where it was. It had to have been under those rocks, because I’d never seen it again.

I sent her a photo yesterday. Mentioning it to her had gotten me to go look again–and there it was, coming back up, now, finally, after it had been dry for so long, against all the odds. Right there between my mandarin orange and my sour cherry tree, how could I miss it.

I can just picture Adrian grinning.

The second time it happened, I knew exactly what it was.

But that first time a few days ago I could not for the life of me figure out that large bright white blob in the air (definitely not part of the tree in the background) hovering, hovering, now wobbling up and down just above the far end of the fence over on the neighbor’s side. It was almost round but for that one part–I willed it to come closer so I could see what that was.

Yonder squirrel stumblingly, awkwardly obliged.

It was a masterpiece of a huge white rose, just a showstopper that some gardener had clearly been proud of, with the sun dazzling it full on against the backdrop of the small black animal whose small face it utterly dwarfed. He finally stood still a moment halfway down my property line up there and tried to eat that thing. Like a teenage boy with a pizza–no, make that a Chez Panisse banquet, look at that presentation–all to himself.

One upper petal was askew from the otherwise still-perfect formation as he chomped on the center. He had plucked the entire rose from the bush quite nicely. He looked for all the world like he was holding a whipped cream pie against his face.

I have roses, and I’ve never seen a squirrel do such a thing before–they simply don’t eat them. Trying to figure out if it could be the drought? But then why…? Maybe all that rain in December led to a bumper crop of young that can’t find anything to eat now.

The second time, he went for a flower half the size. Don’t bite off more than that with which you can leap.

The Black Jack fig tree has suddenly, in the last week, turned a noticeably deeper shade of green and the leaves have finally started getting bigger as we’ve gotten closer to summer sun. It had been in kind of a suspended animation for awhile, I imagine waiting for its roots to heal and grow after I had had to cut them with pruning shears to free them from each other. Having bought it when bare root season was over and it was still stuck in that sheath, it had come severely root bound, the ends curled back up somewhere inside that box. (Hey, ten bucks. The right variety. We could work with it.)

It’s looking a lot happier now.

The silk oak next door (hey, Wikipedia, what the heck is a “dry rainforest environment”?) that the hawks have raised their young in year after year but that flowers during nesting season, inviting raven aggression: two of the flowers fell into my yard today and out of curiosity I picked them up and sniffed. I expected perfume. Not so much. But the colors clearly are enough to get the attention of many types of birds, and when the big ones are away the finches play.

The Indian Free peach tree two weeks ago and today: clearly, we won’t have to wait a very long time for it to reach out to Adele. I am so looking forward to that and I love how this grows.

And… We lost our one single tiny green mango today. I think it snagged on the frost cover as I was taking it off this morning. The tree isn’t done flowering yet, so maybe we’ll get a second chance.

Definitely next year we will.

“You’ve always liked to garden,” he said today.

“Yes, but I didn’t for years,” I answered, saying that I think it was because having grown up an outdoorsy type and being so sun-confined with my lupus, I think I was afraid that if I broke out of that at all I’d get more and more reckless with it and so I’d kept that side of myself tamped down hard. For years. It was just easier not to have to look too up close at that sense of loss. Years ago, when getting to see my children grow up was a long way off and by no means a sure thing and I was doing everything I could, I suddenly realized one day that I’d just spent six months without even once walking all the way around my own back yard.

Now I feel like I’m reclaiming not just it but me. I deeply need to dig in the dirt and to see life coming forth from it. I picture Parker planting the seeds of all his apples and it just makes my day every time: from my botany-loving Grandfather Jeppson who died before I knew him and yet whom my Dad says I take after to my grandson, a straight line down the ages through every circumstance.

I reminded myself of that conversation with my husband as I went out to put my tomatoes in the ground at 6:00 pm. It was a little early in the evening for May but I had a lot to do. I kept my back to the sun and hey, look! The first actual tomato!

Oops. My critter cover didn’t fit over that tall tomato cage. I need to figure out how to set that wiring around them all, it’s been wrapped too long and wants to sproing inward on itself a little too hard. Might take two sets of hands and Richard was off at a ham radio meeting.

All these tomato plants were planted at the same time in the same seed starter kit. Two were moved into a bigger pot early on and put outside in direct sun; a third awhile after; and the rest, well, they were left in front of what wasn’t a great window for sun exposure to begin with. Look at that difference, and the roots far more so: a gallon of soil held tight vs, for the smallest, no discernible side roots, only the white squiggle it started out of the seed with. Same age.

Problem was that I’d needed more soil and buying more soil meant being out in the sun at the nursery during business and non-rush-hour hours and finally I simply did it.

The little ones will catch up soon enough.

And yes, I blogged several weeks ago about planting new seedlings. They were from the same batch as these and they all died in the first 24 hours. I transitioned the rest more gently from scraggles in the window to being in bigger pots outside to in the ground and I waited till I had most of them too far along for the snails to go after.

And then I went looking for baby apples and snapped clamshell covers over all the sweet Fujis I could find and as many of the more sour, less vulnerable Yellow Transparents as I could. Some of last year’s clamshells had given up the ghost; I clearly need more. A good problem to have this year.

There’s a clamshell, it’s intact, it’s right where I put it…

…And all the cherries that were growing inside it have vanished. Just from that one. But the uncovered single cherry below that box is still there–go figure. The branches haven’t broken, so I figure a squirrel may have learned how to pry it apart just enough (while snapping on its paw) but I haven’t seen them so much as touch that tree. Clearly that fruit would have to be really ripe before they’d get over their dislike of the cinnamon I sprinkled around it.

Maybe the raccoon simply sat on the fence and pulled it to him? It’s at the top of the tree and right at that height. Time to tape the clamshells shut.

Anyway, so, the outside faucet has been failing gradually for some time and had gotten to the point that it just spins without catching on its stem while dripping crazily from around the stem and out the top. So not cool in a drought. You could only turn it on by pushing down hard on the screw as you twist–and then where the hose connected, it was stripped enough there too that we put plumber’s tape but still, that part dripped, too.

The big guys didn’t have a replacement. The little guy, at Barron Park Plumbing Supply, who really knows his stuff and would rather help you than oversell to you, said to me, “Wow–that’s a tiny one.” He thought a moment and said not only did he not have it, he couldn’t think of anyone that would. Here though is what I could buy and do and, as he continued to muse thoughtfully, here’s why I wouldn’t want to do it–I would have five, maybe six uses before it would do damage, completing the stripping. It was my choice, if I really needed it working right now.

I needed a better idea. He wrote out four names and numbers of people he personally recommended, and I knew if he said so I couldn’t go wrong. It would probably run me in the ballpark of $100, $150, he said. (Better than wasting all that water!)

And we will need to call one of them. But for now Richard kluged it with a piece he thought would help. To my great relief the faucet still drips but only a very little and not where the hose connects because that’s at the new piece. I propped a small dyepot underneath and while watering the cherries, the apples, the pear, the peaches, and the mango, I didn’t catch enough to water the potted fig tree with–that’s a huge change.

So tonight, after two weeks of not being able to turn that thing on (and of being really really glad it rained a week ago), and after it was 91 withering degrees today, I finally watered my trees.

Next step. Buy mulch.

The mango with a dab of unsweetened grape Koolaid solution to keep the birds away. The ants were starting to be a problem on the flowers; I sprinkled cinnamon around the base of the trunk and over one flower cluster where one was being obstinate about not letting go and they all disappeared and have not come back.

We learned about honeybees when I was a kid, complete with a field trip to a building that had an active hive going and a bee tunnel to outside at the back of the place so as to keep kids who have no sense and might have allergies and any possibility of stingers as far from each other as possible.

I learned that insects, of all things, dance to talk. Honeybees, anyway.

And so here I was Sunday night, flashlight in hand, looking for the center of the frost cover to get it up and positioned over the Alphonso mango tree just so when movement below caught my eye.

I got down on my knees to see.

There was a honeybee on the ground, looking, frankly, dead. Or maybe it was just too cold. But there was another one walking in rapid ovals or figure eights, I’m not sure, and wiggling just so at intervals while another honeybee circled in the air a little above. I remembered that the longer from one end of the dance to the other, the farther away from the hive the coveted flowers that had been found.

I watched. It was a very short back and forth, back and forth. Here be food (or maybe a good place to swarm to, I’m not sure). Come.

And I noticed that it was doing its dance right next to a clear white Christmas light resting against the ground looking brighter than I had noticed before. But then how often do I stare at the filament part in the dark. It offered concentrated warmth as the temperature dropped around it.

I shined my flashlight at the dancer and seemed to distract it a split second but it went back to its important work. I wondered if my tree lights flicking on automatically had confused the bees as to when the sun was supposed to set.

That morning I’d found I think four honeybees in a tight faces-in-together cluster on that cover with another coming in to join them and another over thataway. Whether I interrupted the early stages of a swarm or not I don’t know, but they didn’t mind my sending them away by, as always, patting the back of the fabric as gently as I could to help free their legs from it.

I continued covering the mango for the night and at the commotion of the movements above the ones that had missed nighttime roll call at the hive moved along to places unseen.

They say that honeybees are placid and not inclined to sting. Finally, having seen it again and again right in front of me (not to mention my hand hitting where those stingers are), I believe it. And I feel privileged to have been the wallflower watching the dance in the night.

The Yellow Transparent is supposed to go from this stage–in April–to apples ready to pick in June. That’s as fast as cherries. It’s a kind of an odd duck of a shape because the upper left is where it used to be shaded by weed trees. That other tree behind and to its right years ago sent a long, successful runner sideways, which has now been ground out along with its six or seven offspring. The parent was my kids’ climbing tree for years but nostalgia will only keep it away from the chainsaws for so long. (One single new sucker and you are so out of here.) They ran the good race but only won runner-up and then were overturned by the judges.

And this actual, for-real mango (you see that green dot? You should have seen me when I saw that green dot!) is supposed to be ready to eat some time in June or July–and the tree just sprouted a whole new bottlescrubber of buds over the past week.

I’ve been trying not to knock flowers off as I put the nightly frost cover on and, with some difficulty, off again in the mornings (they grab at it like velcro) and I guess I’m doing alright after all.

Edited to add–A week ago, the hopeful but later revised forecast was that it would rain today. It looked this morning like it definitely wanted to, and as we headed out the door together one large, single drop landed smack dab in the middle of my head. And that was our entire rain storm as far as we could tell.

I had to have Richard inspect my scalp to make sure it wasn’t bird poop. You never know.

February. I planted the Indian Free two months ago. That was then. (This first picture is when it was just starting to sprout.)

This is now. I wasn’t going to let it fruit this first year but after shedding the others it was determined to grow that one peach, already bigger than the ones on the Babcock (which had started flowering a week earlier and will be ripe two months earlier), so I let it be.

Note to the squirrels: don’t even think about it.