I have finally seen, in the wild, a snowy egret in the breeding plumage that gave it its name and nearly caused its extinction a hundred years ago. It was preening, showing off quite nicely.

While standing on top of a light pole over the freeway during the rush-hour crawl. Urban wildlife.

Meantime, my Sun Gold cherry tomatoes recommended by my sister went from a bit of curled-over emerging white to green leaves flung upwards in a Ta daaah! all in the course of the day, totally beating out the Brandy Boys. See what Janice started last year?

(Still working on that email problem. My apologies.)

The email’s been wonky for a few days and despite some work by the resident geek last night it failed altogether–so if you didn’t hear back from me, I apologize, and we’re hoping (again) that it’ll all be good to go by morning.

The trees, however, were not stumped; when the grinding crew is ready they’ll let me know.

Years ago we had a volunteer fig right up against the fence on the far side of the yard and it grew from seed to two feet above that fence and with a few actual figs on it all in a single season. But it was already proving that living, growing wood is stronger than dead planks and that had to be the end of that.

That same year, the neighbors over thisaway whose house we now have a better view of had a fig sprout up, too, and they, too, reluctantly had to take it down. The birds just don’t quite plant them in the right spot. They never did get around to planting one of their own, after all, a whole tree makes for a whole lot of fruit and of taken space.

I’m remembering that tree and looking out the window here to the unaccustomed view of their upper windows and thinking, y’know, we could probably fix that visual opening, or at least the part I most want to, in one season. Maybe, with the requisite pruning, two. And I know they like figs. I want a variety that’s somewhat dwarfed so as not to be too much trouble keeping it down to size, to about the height that other one got to. You just need the right thing planted in there.

A local gardening and knitting friend says she has several and her Black Jacks are the best. “Naturally small” tree, says Dave Wilson.

But nothing is set in stone, much less dirt yet, and there is definitely room for more than one tree anyway. Making me wait a few more days where all I can do is learn more and ask more is probably a good thing.

The first thing the two tree guys did, to my surprise, was to make a beeline for my Alphonso in great excitement. “That’s a mango, isn’t it!” as they took in the possibility that such a thing could actually grow here.

A taste of home, I wondered?

“See how the cord is tangled in the growth here?” (Looking back up at me.) “You need to set up a frame of something to hold up the lights, not on the tree.”

I’d known that for a long time but hadn’t figured out what to do nor how to make it work as the thing grew, but as he said that he could see it dawning on me: “Like a tomato cage,” I answered, turning to look at the (too tall for my frost cover, that one won’t work) very heavy cylindrical one across the yard that a friend had made us. I got it now: it didn’t have to be perfect forever, it just had to work well for right now.

“Yes.” And then the older guy wanted to know, re the tree, “Where did you buy it?”

“Florida.”

He both laughed and winced–a little hard to zip over there to check out the specimens, okay. They wanted to know about the temperature setup and the fact that you still have to put a frost cover over every night–Christmas lights for the heat, though, eh? And I wondered how long it would be before they’d be growing their own. I mentioned that we’d planted it the day before a 24 degree night, but hey, look. They approved.

A neighbor over thataway was having tree work done too and the younger guy and one of theirs apparently recognized each other and stopped to say hi across the fence in what was clearly a happy moment.

And then they got down to work.

The dracaena palm–out. The privet–out. The buckthorn–out.

There was a volunteer juniper bush, not very big yet but I was clearly not a fan–the guy motioned through the window at me and held a section upward, questioning? Yes?

Yes!

Alright! One whack of the chainsaw and it was gone and good riddance to the prickly little beast.

Then came the olive. It was to be trimmed downward a quarter and the deadwood cut off.

Except, with everything else out of the way we could finally get a good view of it and that really left nothing but trunk and a bit of froth and I didn’t see how it could survive–it had been near dead as it was.

Chris the boss man happened to stop by right as they got to that point, in just the most perfect timing; “How much to just finish it off?” I asked.

“A hundred fifty.”

I called Richard. Alright then. Out with it.

They cleaned up the job site, Chris having already gone on to the next, and that was that. The stump grinders will come later.

I never, ever, would have thought we could get that much sun in that part of the yard. Never. It has always been in dark shadow. But the afternoon sun was reflecting so brightly off the now-bare fence that my eyes complained. (But then, I’d spent too much time outside–I’m just glad it wasn’t June.)

We’ll have to plant something right away to fix that. Now that I know it’s got direct sun from 2:00 to sundown, and I’ll watch tomorrow to see how many more hours it will be, we have a whole lot more possibilities than we’d thought. Pomegranates, mandarins, a fig kept very small… We’ll see. They could easily grow there, and I never would have thought.

A squirrel perched on the empty fence line, staring, demanding that his personal escalators reappear, darnit.

All in good time, little guy, all in good time.

This is going to be hard. I like having that green outside the window, and it will take a few years for the new to fill in the blankness.

It shades the neighbor’s garden and our solar. It needs to be done.

The first time the tree people put us on the schedule, I both had the flu and was passing blood–just not the day to deal with one more thing nor to be around anyone. I’m fine now, and they called asking if tomorrow…?

Nesting season has begun but there are no discernible nests in that tree; that chickadee I saw with the moss was heading to some place beyond the fence, as have all the others as far as I’ve been able to tell.

I will replace it immediately with a dwarf citrus that will never get much higher than the fence, even if we never prune it.

We are also taking out a small volunteer palm whose roots threaten both the garage and the neighbor’s redwood. Out.

Chainsaws in the morning.

The awful and ironic thing after yesterday’s post was finding a very still honeybee with a foot snagged in the mango tree cover today. It was quite cold but I don’t think it was the cold. (Cue McCoy: “He’s dead, Jim.”) I will keep that cover further away come the mornings henceforth from anything flowering.

I’ve been checking the new peach every day for any sign of breaking dormancy and at two weeks after planting, at last this evening there was a bit of green here and swelling pink buds there and there–my apologies that I cannot hold my hands steady enough for the camera to zero in well. One concern had been that the Indian Free produces so late that I was hoping the flowering would still overlap with at least the Babcock, since it’s the only one that needs a pollinator.

Well there you go. Looks like we’re going to do just fine. Whether I let it set fruit so young or not, I love that I didn’t have to wait another year or two to find out.

Meantime, I woke up this morning needing to knit something pretty. I didn’t know what and I didn’t care but I needed to knit and I needed lace and I needed something colorful and pretty and NOW.

The end result is that after looking briefly at some promising yarns, I sat down with the endless slog of dark steel blue in boring 2×2 and made major progress on my brother’s hat, neglected during this flu till now. And I actually got to where I could see the end of the thing coming at me. That feels huge. It is actually rewarding me with progress in exchange for time spent. It did not feel so for so long.

I can’t end without mentioning my sense of loss, like everybody else’s sense of loss, at Leonard Nimoy’s passing. My favorite tribute to him comes from President Obama himself:

“Long before being nerdy was cool, there was Leonard Nimoy. Leonard was a lifelong lover of the arts and humanities, a supporter of the sciences, generous with his talent and his time. And of course, Leonard was Spock. Cool, logical, big-eared and level-headed, the center of Star Trek’s optimistic, inclusive vision of humanity’s future.

I loved Spock.”

As did we all.

If you haven’t seen it yet, don’t miss Mr. Nimoy’s explanation for the origins of the Vulcan greeting.

The first two plum blossoms opened today, joining with the tea roses and the blueberry, peach, and mandarin flowers, and it has begun to be heavenly the moment you step outside. I marveled this evening thinking, but it’s not spring yet! But then I walked across the yard taking note of how, yes, actually, it’s beginning to be. California, remember? Apples, cherry, lemon, raspberry, more peaches–there will be far more to come. There is actually a fruit bud on the Comice pear, and they only bear on three- to ten-year-old wood.

The mango bud stalks are noticeably longer than two days ago, and I’m thinking, especially as the side shoots grow, that what I need is a better way to hold the Christmas lights up on that tree; there’s only one side branch to wrap them over and I don’t want the cord to sit at the notches where things are growing from, but for now, they are.

I know I obsess a little over the thing. It’s just, I’ve never seen a mango tree grow before.

Today I saw the indiegogo campaign for the beekeeping setup (great article there) that would require no smoke, no lifting out, no stress on the bees. Just peek in the window, see that it’s ready, open the tap and let the honey slowly fill up your jars and then turn it off. The bees get right to work resealing everything at their end.

We certainly have enough fruit trees to keep a hive busy and happy and there are a lot of urban beekeepers in the area who would surely love one of those. I’m not intending (yet) to become one–but I very much love that this thing has been invented. It’s an idea that will clearly greatly increase the number of people willing to keep bees. And we definitely need those bees.

——–

Edited 24 hours later to mention an important link re the Flow. I had no idea it could mess with the genetic diversity of the hive, but apparently it can. These professional beekeepers had some points to make that definitely bear attention.

I was knitting in the waiting room today. My choices included kidney stone, kidney cancer, or an infection that would respond to antibiotics within four hours.

Yes please on the latter.

Thank you lab work. One dose down and just like they promised, it’s already starting to kick in. Sweet success.

Meantime, we hit 32 degrees last night and it was 43 under the mango cover–just above the limit of 40F where the inflorescences (flowering sets) die, not that there were any of those to worry about but one wants no cold spots.

Oh wait. While I was sick this past week–

–looks great to me!

(Views are from one side of the trunk and the other. Future leaves and branch in this one, inflorescence in the second view: we could actually get mangoes this year.)

(And then I go to…) Huh. My iPhone isn’t sending photos for some reason, even after I just deleted a hundred or two and I have no idea why. Anybody?

Well, anyway, trust me, the cluster of buds, it’s there.

And I might actually get that monster 250g worth of merino/silk hat finished while the weather’s being terrible in other places.

Edited to add, Richard to the rescue!

Our neighbors thanked us for the extra sunlight for their garden after the tree cutting last summer.

A week ago, I was weeding and found one plant that was different and was amused that it looked like a carrot top as I yanked it out. I was standing on my side of the fence from that garden.

Oh wait. Look at that size 00000 orange thumb needle under there. Who knew.

Today I went out and near that same spot, it looks to me like a strawberry plant (and I know they grow strawberries.) Think I’ll keep this one awhile and see what it does.

First peach flower of the year. I wish I could send a whole armful to New England. (Don’t miss that second video down on the Washington Post site…)

Not quite a snowbank of them yet.

Two days till Stitches!

Before and after. Kind of horrifying but you have to do it or you get a weak misshapen tree that won’t produce well. Cut off the top at planting, the videos from the growers said, down to three to four feet, max. Leave three to five branches for scaffolding. If there’s one that twists back on itself, cut it off. You want to create a vase shape over time so that sunlight can reach the inner center to make all the fruit sweet and you want a wider angle coming from the trunk than straight upright to make for stronger branches to bear their future load–watch those angles and choose the best, spaced around the tree. Trim.

Yeah, you see the wishful thinking in those red spacers? The first photo was taken Saturday. It took me awhile to work up the courage.

This morning I managed to make myself cut them down to six. Good thing the tree is still dormant, because I think I’m not quite done yet. There is just such a twirly twig, but it’s clear it was reaching in the direction the light was most dominant where it came from and since snapping this picture I’ve been able to mostly straighten it with another spacer–and it’s growing in the direction I want.

But it’s flimsy compared to the others. It has not yet convinced me it gets to stay. (Edited to add Wednesday morning, it’s gone now.)

I managed with great effort to cut the top off, as one is supposed to do, but the cut edge was sloppy, going down and then back up again like a check mark. It was misting out as a reminder that everything I’ve read or watched says take it at an angle so that water can’t collect on the healing cut.

Richard hadn’t left for work yet so he went out there for me and did a better job of it. But that is one good sturdy tree and it’s going to grow just fine, and in a place where it has space to spread nice and wide, unlike my smaller semi-dwarfs along the other fence.

This Indian Free peach is for my neighbor. The one with early dementia whom I had so many good long chats with last summer while there was an opening between our yards while her husband was gradually replacing the fence (I want to have that kind of energy when I’m his age) sawing the lumber on his back patio and putting the boards up a few at a time, day by day. She wished I had planted one of those peach trees near enough to grow over to their side when all this was done. And she would pick’em, too, if they did! she grinned mischievously.

And now I have. The best-tasting peach there is, according to the grower, one that does not get peach leaf curl disease, one that will thrive and grow and create bonds between neighbors long after she and I are both gone. It is planted close enough to spread a bit over the top there and yet far enough away that if some future neighbor halts it at the fence line it will do just fine with that, too.

She’ll never remember wishing for those peaches nor how many times she’d said those same words. But I do.

And so these last few months I kept coming back to the thought of her sitting beneath peach blossoms, inhaling the essence of spring and of love and finding a place to feel centered come what may. Of her picking ripe or even not-yet-ripe fruit as it makes her happy.

Of offering both her and her husband a place of peace.

And so I tracked down that variety and I drove over that mountain and with my husband cheering me on, I dug out as many old roots as I could and at last I planted her her peach.

Who knew, who could possibly have known, that it would feel so joyful. I mean. Wow.

The outer pot is the one the pear tree’s roots were cut out of, and with no soil in it I’m using it to keep the Page’s from growing through the paper pot to the ground.

So. We dug the Page up and put it in there to recover from its too-dark-in-winter location (oops) that it was losing its leaves over. It needs a good year of recovery because citrus, being evergreen, especially dwarf citrus, produce new leaves slowly.

Not that that’s stopping it.

It wants to do what it wants to do. I stopped counting at 83 flower buds. Sometimes even if you can’t make it right away, for creativity’s sake you just gotta have your stash on hand. (Still. I’m pruning those off when they get a little bigger.)

After yesterday’s 82 degrees, the first two peach buds of the season swelled and turned pink on the August Pride today.

We have the sweet, sweet sound of the dishwasher doing its second load. The part was the right part. The repair worked. And it didn’t die after one round like last week. Would I go to that parts place again in that sketchy part of town where the owner had to unlock the door to let me in, um, probably not. (The guy in Fremont hadn’t had it.) But we don’t have to shell out yet another hundred-forty for the motherboard after all and that is a huge relief.

Coopernicus (pictures of him here) did a swoop around the patio and together we got to see him with wings and tail stretched wide right on the other side of the window. Gorgeous. A birdwatching trip from the comforts of home.

I did a quick run this evening to the local Trader Joe’s to buy a favorite thing for my favorite man.

Frozen green figs. Who ever thought you’d find… Well okay so I got that too.

Going to my car, there was a man sitting in his next to mine, waiting, lights on. Clearly his wife too had run in for just one thing and was being distracted by all the finds one finds in that store.

And facing the rear in the car seat in the back was a very little girl.

Her mommy had left. She couldn’t see her daddy. Bedtime was bearing down on her too and she looked like a baby who wasn’t quite crying yet, but it was sure coming.

I smiled my best grandma smile and waved hi at her.

She stared.

I waved and smiled again and put my fresh-pressed apple juice in the car. I’d bought four. It was going to be a squeeze in that fridge but my Richard likes theirs better than anyone else’s.

She looked like she might be okay with being here after all.

The man rolled down her window and I told him, Cute baby!

But what he’d wanted was for me to hear: “Bye!”

“Bye!”

“Bye!”

“Bye!”

We waved and bye’d at each other a few more times, the world a friendly place for a child too small to have more than a word or maybe two that she could reliably express yet, but by golly she got to put it to great use and she made my day.

At the last, I changed it on her to a double-word sentence of “Bye bye!” and reluctantly pulled my car out of that spot, time to go.

She made Richard happy too when I got home and told him about her.

I just looked at the remote-read on the thermometer under the mango tree. Forty-six and heading down. Time to turn on the Christmas lights to keep it warm and safe for the night.

It’s been a good day.

I’m so tired let’s see if I can proofread this right. Happy tired.

Their goofs meant I totally won. Not enough other people could find them, I think.

We had this one spot behind the plum tree that was a perfect space, now that the weed trees were gone, for another, specifically a bigger tree than some of the others I’ve put in. Not being in a raised bed meant that much more allowable height, and it likely wouldn’t shade the solar there even if it got out of hand (which it won’t.) And the neighbor on the other side of the fence there had once so hoped out loud that we would plant a peach near enough to reach over her side a bit.

If we put one there it could go that far but it wouldn’t have to–perfect.

And I could plant a standard size without having to look for a semi-dwarf.

The only problem, and the thing that had stopped me previously, was the roots I would have to deal with that would surely be left over from those weed trees.

I only considered it because I’d fallen in love with a gorgeous specimen of an Indian Free peach two weeks ago, the last one at that nursery, and by the time we decided that yeah, we really did want it it was long gone and from every other retailer I called, too. Bare root and potted both, sold out.

That’s what happens when Dave Wilson, the grower, describes it as the all-time best-tasting peach they know of.

And: Indian Free (developed and named by Thomas Jefferson) does not get peach leaf curl disease. In our foggy area, this is huge. It produces in September and October, long after my others are done for the year. The peaches are tart and presumably, like my Yellow Transparent apples, uninviting to squirrels until full ripeness–at which point, suddenly, wow. The peaches, anyway.

Once we’d agreed on it I didn’t want to lose a year’s growth to having to wait. One last try. I clicked on Where To Buy for the variety one more time this morning, even though I hadn’t found anything at all within three hours and I’d spent an hour and a half on the phone yesterday asking.

But I’d wondered about this one retailer I hadn’t called–because clicking from Dave Wilson to ProBuild had been a complete bust, a page that said they sold building (only) materials. The end. Well then why…?

How about if we try clicking “handout”? For another retailer, that had been a dead link so I’d ignored them all but let’s try it.

Turns out ProBuild does have a nursery on the side with a list of what they stock but the page is not on their site but on Dave Wilson’s instead. Huh.

Indian Free. There you go.

I called them.

Sure, we have five! Bare root. Do you want us to reserve you one?

I told them nah, I’ll be right there–well, as in, coming from… Thinking, it would only be about an hour, right? I figured I was safe and I wanted to pick it out myself. (I had to pick up the dishwasher part on the way. It was an hour and a half.)

Those who have driven the steeply twisty Highway 17 over the mountains with slow trucks and heavy traffic and quickly-alternating vivid sunshine and dark under the redwoods will understand when I say I felt like I had to pry each deathgrip finger off the steering wheel when I got there, but I got there.

More or less. There was no sign with that street number. There was no sign that said ProBuild. I saw a nursery, but I wanted the one I’d talked to and I did not want to make that return drive in rush hour traffic. I figured I just hadn’t gotten there yet. (Wait! Is that Golden Fleece?! Gunilla! It was, or at least their old place, but I did not dare take the time to find out.) I kept on going, but no, the numbers were going the wrong way. Turning back, it really was San Lorenzo Nursery at 235 River over there. No sign of the word ProBuild anywhere, not even on the construction-supplies place next door.

I looked around a bit and asked for help, and when I explained the lupus/I need to stay out of the sun thing, the guy was wonderfully helpful.

I saw four. (Come to think of it now as I write, maybe they’d put one aside for me over in the area marked Holding after all–I’d better let them know I already got it.) I picked out the one with the thickest trunk. “There aren’t any on Citation rootstock, right?” (Semi-dwarfing.)

“No,” he apologized.

I hadn’t expected one; “They didn’t make any this year, though, I don’t think.” (He agreed, with a look on his face of oh, so this lady knows!)

They hadn’t been planted in paper pots as the season had gone on. The price hadn’t been quadrupled. There was a long sand and soil bed that he pulled the one out of for me and then he wrapped up the bare roots in plastic for the drive home. The tree was still dormant. This was good.

$19.95 and no tax on food-producing plants. Twenty bucks for a lifetime of perfect fall fruit, and from a really nice group of people.

I drove back over 17 with the tree going from the far back to partly into the passenger side next to me. I knew now where the mudslide had been, where the lanes were going to be narrowed. I was in no hurry. (Yank that wheel lady and you’ll have a faceful of twigs.)

UV levels went down to 1 and it was time to start.

I hit root. Root. Another root. Chipping away at the biggest there was a sudden smell of eucalyptus. There were earthworms doing their best at it all. I pulled one way back, then got sensible and got out the clippers and got rid of it.

I ran off to get Richard. And back home again. We were losing sun time fast and you don’t leave a bare root tree drying out.

In the end I did my best and simply straddled it over the chipped-away big root down there in the dirt, knowing it was dead and this was alive and the peach would win. Not perfect but I’d made a pretty darn good big hole and it would do. I mixed in soil amendment and raised the level around the trunk to just so high below the graft point like I’d seen the pros do.

I stepped back and looked and it was suddenly just overwhelmingly gorgeous. That’s a big, healthy tree. I can’t wait.

If you’re squinting, they’re at about the same point in both photos.

There’s a big new nest, Cooper’s hawk sized, in the tree next door that they favor for its height–the season has begun.

A Bewick’s wren was tugging hard at nesting material on the patio today and flew off trailing fluff in its beak.

We were getting in the car this morning when my husband said, Wait, I forgot my umbrella, and went back inside while I waited as a few drops started to fall. And so I had a moment to look up, and there, above that tree, was one of our pair, riding the thermals and circling around its nest below, letting all who fly here know that this, this spot was taken. The tree whose sweet flowers are so coveted later in the season by smaller birds.

Including the ever-swaggering crows. But we had to drive three blocks before we spotted one and then a little further down, a pair, and they were staying down low so as to be well out of sight of that hawk.

The more our Coopers hang around the more fruit we’ll get off our trees. Wishing them a successful season. Besides, fledgling raptors meandering through the amaryllises are so cute.

And Bewick’s wrens are really too small for them to bother with.

I stopped by the local nursery today and they told me the back wall along the fence is where they kept their bamboo stakes. Six feet tall, a set of six, seven bucks. Hey.

And so the frost cover won’t rest against the mango tree leaves anymore–and I spent a fair amount of time up on my tiptoes trying to get that thing over those stakes and back down firmly to the ground all around.

With all that extra space above the tree to heat up, so far at four hours after sundown there’s only a ten degree difference between the outside temp and underneath that canopy, but unless we have another severe cold snap that should be enough and I can always take them back down again while the tree’s this small.

And I won’t accidentally break off the tiny beginning of a leaf at the tippy top while taking the cover off in the mornings now. I know, I know–that one hurt, enough to get me off my duff and to go track down those stakes. Thank you all for the suggestions.

Oh, and on a side note? My friends Mel and Kris are going to be at Stitches West again this year. YES! Buy yourself some fine pottery (I’ll bet they’ll have yarn bowls) and tell’em I said hi. I put in a special request for rice bowls with extra high sides, perfect for berries and ice cream. Save me some.