I know, I know, don’t leave it like that!

It really was too small to bother with this morning. It will really be too big tomorrow night. It’s pretty Goldilocksed right now.

What the plant really wants is to vine all over the ground, shedding yellowing leaves behind as new ones grow green in front while creating a thousand vegetable baguettes (aka baseball bats) in their wake.

But it’s confined to a pot to keep it up and out of rabbit reach.

I may have to rethink that after I pick it. As long as I get that one zucchini free and clear of critter bites, I can take the gardening win and let the plant do its thing from there so that it doesn’t stop and think it’s done.

(Forgot to hit post last night.)

It’s been a month since some of my second rare apricot batch came up and I’d thought the last few were a lost cause and nearly tossed them. But the camera could see what happened today that I wasn’t quite sure of: we are going to have first leaves tomorrow, which just makes me all kinds of happy. To life!

Meantime, Momma falcon flew past her young dangling prey to try to induce them to fly today, but they were too well fed already and it was too hot. Naah, you eat it, Mom. Not going.

Which means their feathers will be that much longer and readier when they do start fledging. 77F Sunday? Now that sounds more reasonable!

Last one to fledge is a raw egg! Neener neener!

For the first time there was a third scrub jay begging at momma today. The other two tried to get in on it but were ignored and yet they all stayed close together, a family of four flitting around my small yard keeping all others at bay–and between them those jays have learned, for the first time since I planted this tree, that mandarins are edible. They even peeled it out by sections.

I stuck a small bird netting cage on kind of sideways over some of the untouched ones as best I could to at least make it hard to perch there. The ones that look like this, well hey, they’re welcome to come back for seconds.

The baby falcons in San Jose, meantime, with nature pressuring them to try out this flying thing they didn’t feel ready to spend the energy and risk on in the 95+ heat were not so cheerful.  That was quite the tantrum! Wow!

A scrub jay. Its favorite spot seems to be in front of my recently-planted apricot: it offers a little clearing where it can see under the bushes to the sides and anything coming from above with the young tree protecting its back from attack.

Where did it get that orange thing… What is that? Curiosity got the better of me and I went outside to see. The jay dropped it and scrammed.

In my astonishment I said quietly but quite out loud, Where did you get that?!

It looked like a tiny, ripe mango exactly like one off my tree, miniaturized. Maybe an inch and a half long. A slight wrinkle that said it was ripe, and it smelled faintly like a mango, to0, but not with those round black seeds. I tossed it back where it had been, went inside to wash my hands and before the door was even shut the mama bird had snatched it back up.

Instantly two more were right there, just as big as she was (as fledglings are), acting like babies as they begged for food: fluttering their wings with bodies lowered and heads stretching upwards, beaks gaping wide. Like teenage boys towering over me in the kitchen back in the day. (One was 128 pounds and 6’2″ at 12 when he had seven more inches to go. I am 5.5″. I totally related to that jay.)

She pecked at the loquat like a raptor going after a carcass, ripping into it with that long sharp beak, feeding them bits. Such a small amount of food to me but everything in that moment to the three of them. I knew that was a sight you wouldn’t see a day or two from now: she was already starting to fly away when they begged, but for a loquat? This was to be shared and Momma was going to make them.

I have no idea where it had come from.

I did notice that the young ones acted afterward like they owned my little yard specifically, and I checked the mango flowers they’d gone after previously to make sure it was still covered.

And then I looked up loquats.

I had tried buying them once, been unimpressed, and that was that.

There are kumquats, which are in the citrus family, but loquats are in the–rose and apple family? Huh.

And there is one particular variety, well spoken of, that looks like and tastes rather like a champagne type mango. So now I know one of my neighbors is apparently growing a Yehuda loquat. They’re so soft and fragile when ripe that you can almost never find them in grocery stores, you almost have to know someone with a tree or grow your own.

Nope, nope, nope. I am not planting one. At least not before I’ve tasted what they’re really supposed to be like. I’m not taking it on word of beak.

The mango tree April 12 after the top half of it had frozen over the winter: this was after my first attempt to cut off anything obviously dead while leaving a chance for any wood that was still alive to make a comeback. The normally dark green leaves it still had were so pale.

I took a few pictures tonight, looked at them…what was going to grow was growing. What wasn’t never would. Out with the pruning shears.

It was too dark by the time I finished to take After photos, but I just kept marveling at what an incredible flush of growth it’s doing now and how healthy it looks. No sign in the new leaves of last year’s fungal disease that had put it in survival mode with no blooming even before that frost. It had been holding its breath for so long and so had I. Look at it now!

For probably five years I haven’t been able to see nor reach through the dense growth to replace the string of incandescent Christmas lights that helped keep it warm in the winter nor to check more than a few of its sockets, and by the end of this past season it was down to a single working bulb. We were having such a mild winter that it didn’t seem to matter.

Till those two nights when it did.

But by that density, the upper half protected the lower half when I missed getting the frost covers in place.

And down here where that last little light bulb was: look at it now.

And over on the other side, too, in the new growth, and hey! A third set! And they’re actually starting to set fruit!

A fried light switch out of a set of three outside the kitchen. A package delivery. Time to play electrician. He had as a teen done the wiring for the addition on his parents’ house, the work duly signed off on by the inspectors, so a simple light switch shouldn’t take very long.

Mutterings commenced.

That plate had a really terrible edge on the inside where nobody was supposed to ever see it: sharp and wavy. The wrong lights flashed on and off when he was sure he hadn’t even touched that wire. The insulated screwdriver hit the floor.

He looked at me and in a self-mocking tone pronounced, Tarnation.

Now there’s a Southern cuss word for you, I told him. Thinking further, I wondered if I’d ever heard a northerner Yankee type say such a thing (we lived in New Hampshire for four years.) I was pretty sure I had not.

He thought maybe yes they had.

The short, great linguistics debate of the evening (feel free to chime in–that way one of us will find out we were right.)

And now I have my kitchen lights back and everything works the way it’s supposed to and nobody can see the inside of that plate.

Meantime, my new zucchini stem had twins this morning. I have never heard of such a thing before.

The sour cherry that was wearing a tutu has now changed into a bridal veil.

While down below, same tree, the petals have become a ground covering and the first of the fruit is on its way. 

One thing about pomegranate flowers: they are not shy. They start shouting in color before it’s officially spring and keep on coming till the earliest fruits are already ready to pick. Carefully.

Dandelions are nature’s cheerleader pompoms. Pomegranates are her bullthorn.

Looks like there will be a lot of sweet cherries this year. So many flowers!

Last year with all the rain was the first time it produced more than the critters could raid. I had never had any reach overripeness before–it was instructional. Once those Stellas turn deep red it’s time to invite friends to come help pick quick before they get any darker.

I’m sure they won’t mind.

A note in my inbox. Oh good, it’s not a phone call nor telling me to come in to hear the news so this can only be good, right?

The needle missed and came up empty on endometrial cells altogether. Inconclusive.

The ultrasound is a month out (for now) and then surgery on the zombie fibroids and we’ll see what all else.

Meantime, I took a picture of February’s apricot sprout next to the third-year tree planted in the ground about that time. I chose the naturally dwarfing one for our yard: less work over time and it seems more resilient than some–its roots were fine with those recurrent atmospheric rivers when another one simply drowned.

I got a message asking if I had an Anya seedling I’d be willing to share? So the little one has been claimed.

And then I planted six more. Wherever they may end up, today needed a declaration that I wanted to put more trees into the future. So why not a fantastic apricot variety that can’t be gotten any other way.

(The wire racks were saved from an old double oven to make it uncomfortable for the rabbit to step on to eat the tree bark. So far so good.)

The blossoms continue upwards and my sour cherry tree is dancing for joy in a hoop skirt.

Meantime, my old friends Ron and Theresa at thebuffalowoolco.com have been selling the last of their bison/silk socks. They’re my husband’s One True Sock and we stocked up when they announced the cost of silk now is ending those and when they’re gone they’re gone.

But then the mill, using up the rest of the yarn, made a few more pairs.

The catch was that they were seconds.

Ron and Theresa and crew personally went over every single pair to make sure they were okay, and they were, but seconds are seconds and they knocked a chunk off the price.

When Richard opened the package yesterday (I got him something else too because socks for your birthday is officially a That Doesn’t Count gift no matter how much he likes them) it took me about a heartbeat. And then another.

Why they were seconds.

Their socks have a little bison motif knit across the toes and that motif is color-coded by size.

The XLs were yellow.

My mediums are yellow. His are supposed to be orange. It really speeds up the sock-sorting by a lot and I’ve always thought it was a nice touch on their part.

Ron confirmed it when I asked: someone at the mill had forgotten to change that yarn during the knitting.

I told him I’d laughed, because, of all the problems in the world right now? There’s more than one way to eyeball a sock size.

And I told him that surprising us with an extra pair that was bison/merino was very generous–and brilliant. Because someday my hubby will need more socks. And now he has a way to learn in advance that their other ones are great, too. But that was so unexpected and so cool to find tucked in there.

See? Socks *can* be a real gift!

The English Morello tree today: absolutely winter-bare on top, fully in bloom on bottom, gradually working its way up.

That is how I don’t have to do all the harvest work at once, but rather it’ll be one hour every morning picking and pitting and weighing and freezing. One morning per future sour cherry pie for two weeks; after that, I told Constance on Monday, I get tired of it and call friends to come pick the rest. She laughed.

Part of it though is that I want them to see that if it’s their favorite pie, too (and it usually is), if they have room to plant a bush they can grow their own pretty quickly.

So. I’d pulled the last bag out of the freezer to celebrate her. A ceramic pan for the crispiest crust.

Loaves and fishes, way in the back of the freezer where I’d checked three times I just found another bag.

You know that has got to be gone by the first of June to make room for the new. Such a problem. Not.

That first one: it came up not in the Root Riot plug but tucked down the side of it.

The next came up today from where it was supposed to.

I searched for images of the cotyledons of both: turns out some varieties of sunflowers do closely resemble some varieties of zucchini at that stage.

So whether those big first leaves are of the squash I planted or if that seed was plucked out and a wandering one from last year helpfully tucked back in by a jay, I’ll have to wait for the true leaves to tell.

I suddenly wondered if my nose would know and took a deep breath. It was very familiar. I’ve planted both before. Yup. It’s definitely one or the other.

I had only planted two zucchinis, then did a third Wednesday after that first one came up so oddly placed–because who needs more than one zucchini plant in their garden? Two was pushing it, but I really ought to have a backup.

Said the woman who had one long ago that vanished bit by bit and then in its entirety down a gopher hole. It was like a Bugs Bunny cartoon come to life.

That reminds me. I need to go buy gopher cages to put them to ground in. Locally invented.

I can just see that bunny out under the mandarin tree rubbing its paws in gleeful anticipation.

I knit a little extra yesterday, figuring I might not be up to much today. Good thing.

So life took up some of the slack: to my surprise, an apricot kernel I’d given up on pushed out its cotyledon towards the light.

That one had grown a root so I’d tucked its plug into a much larger pot and then it had just sat there for days. I wondered if it was starting to rot?

The move into the sunlight cleared away any sign of that.

It wasn’t a whole spray of true leaves opening all at once along with the first two like the earlier seedlings; it’s just barely started. But they are big and thick and promising. It was in the upper 30s out there the last two nights so I can hardly blame them for moving a little slowly at first–hey, today, me, too.

But that new one is growing now and hopefully will be for decades to come while creating good food, oxygen, wildlife habitat, and maybe someday kids climbing it to pick its fruit when I’m just a story in their grandparents’ memories, and the very sight of it delights me no end.

Reading up on raised planter boxes, red cedar vs all kinds of other options. Metal painted to look like wood? Um… The idea of not having to bend over sounds really tempting, but the idea of making it so the bunny can’t jump in is the real reason I went looking. (The dog next door barked. The bunny popped up in my yard right on cue while I was browsing.)

Thirty inches? Bunnies can jump that high, says he.

Straight up? Not that high, says me, wishing it to be so.

Oh yes they can.

So I thought I’d throw it out there: has anyone bought/built/used garden planters, and do you recommend what you got? Did it keep any critters away? Or would an on-the-ground be a might-as-well.