“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.

So I lamented that the hawk hadn’t come up to the picnic table to say hi up close since we’d cut down and replaced the trees on the side.

Well, why hadn’t I said I’d been missing him? And so suddenly there he was. Perched on the back of the chair, all but waving a talon hi on the other side of the window as we took in each other’s presence on this fine warm (91 degree) day. He fluffed out his feathers.

I loved how he was framed by five, soon to be six blooming amaryllises; he started craning his head around and–if I’d only had my camera!–looked straight up into a deep red one bowed down just above his face.

When he was ready to go, he turned and lightened the load as birds often do before lifting off.

And the Red Lion will bloom a little brighter next year for it.

The squirrels helped plant these. Pictures taken in the morning; I stopped working last night when it got too dark to continue.

Some of the spreading ground cover-y-looking plants were still nearly flush with the dirt but they didn’t fool me anymore: I now knew their seeds are velcro spiked with a sharp blade each (see picture) and the taproot runs amazingly deep even at that stage.

Carefully find your way under the entire circle of leaves to as close to the base as you can–it grows runners and from one plant to the next, the leaves can be like felted wool together and hard to separate. But you can’t leave any leaves out–you have to be under all of them.

And then pull as hard as you can. A spade might not get it all.

That taproot will be anything from a few inches long to well over a foot but sometimes you can unroll a whole mass of interlocking plants that put too much into the spreading and not enough into the rooting and take a whole group roots and all.

I thought, I bet a raccoon would kill for these: a feast with all the work done, as I looked at a particularly thick 15″er. Potato tartare. No way could I leave this stuff out for even one night, and I packed those weeds down hard, several paper grocery bags’ worth. Out onto the curb.

My back is sore, but the thought that kept me going was picturing Madison crawling across what used to be grass before our drought began.

We left yesterday morning for the trip southward and got back well into dark.

This evening, after two days of not being out in the yard, there were not just flowers with bulges at the bases but actual cherries, lots of cherries and there will be more as more petals fall away. I am utterly smitten: homegrown cherries on our own tree for the very first time ever, with some branches just starting in on the whole process. The third year’s clearly the charm.

The old Yellow Transparent apple was gray and wintery-bare Saturday with one single hint of life that is now a fully open flower at the end of a gnarly branch. So much more now. We will have cooking apples in June.

Inside, I finished a soft MadTosh merino hat but missed my chance to hand it off to the person who will give it to its recipient. There will be more days. He doesn’t know it’s coming and the anticipation of the surprise feels so sweet.

Trying to figure out how to get produce clamshells over all those cherries–or not–I think I definitely need to find some unsweetened Koolaid packets. Dilute them in water with no sugar, and an orchard back home near Camp David when I was a kid sprayed it on their cherries to make the birds reject the taste and leave them alone. I can only hope the squirrels and raccoons (who can tear through bird netting if they’re determined enough) feel the same way.

(Edited to add, I just found a review on Amazon by someone who spreads unsweetened Koolaid in his lawn to keep the Canada geese out. He said it MUST be Grape. Alright then. Grape it is!)

The first Babcock peach of the year, with quite a few smaller ones coming along.

So. Friday afternoon the phone rang. It was the repairman’s company with a quote at last on that part.

I had expected they might pad the retail price showing on the Maytag site ($143) but I was staggered. They affirmed to my disbelieving ears that what they said was what they meant. They wanted two-hundred-*what*?

Wow. That and what we spent replacing the panel and lock a month or so ago and we could have paid for a whole brand new dishwasher!

Okay, so we could still have done it ourselves: but we didn’t even know for absolute sure that that was the only thing wrong with it, he hadn’t been about to tell us, and we’d thrown an awful lot of money down that hole already. Three control panels, three door locks, four or five silverware trays and two circuit boards already, and still it tried to burn down our house.

The favor he didn’t know he was doing us was shocking us into wanting to feel like we were done with this mess forever and that we were better off paying one big lump now and finally getting it over with. And so today we drove to San Jose to where there was a floor model to look at and we ordered our super-reliable 500 series recessed handle, three-level, etc etc. It was even on sale. Good timing.

In other words, that guy totally put the ki-Bosch on our ever having to deal with that Maytag again.

And our new one will be SO nice.

Happy Easter, Passover, and Spring!

New flowers on the sweet cherry–we’ve gone from only at the very top to continuing on down. I feel like I can never get enough of those flowers. Some of the earlier ones are starting to throw sweet confetti.

Top, right, and left, I’m trying to give a better sense of the whole of the mango. The new buds at the top? They weren’t there at the beginning of the week. We had a three-day heat wave and it actually hit 94.7 degrees yesterday–in March. So strange. The plant life took off all over the yard.

I have no idea how many actual mangoes, if any, we’ll get this year but it looks promising and the honeybees are definitely trying their best.

I was ecstatic: I’d done the taxes and I’d done them in under four hours. This has never happened before. Richard knew of one other number we needed–and it was right there, page two in the stack. Done.

The Meyer lemon burst into bloom in celebration–there were no flowers yesterday, but, look at it now. 

Crumpled sharp-edged eggshells around a trunk or stem are the easiest, most benign way to keep snails and slugs out of what you’re trying to grow.

And so I had to make that chocolate hazelnut torte. Had to. My future fresh-picked peaches depended on it.

Today’s Sunday School teacher, whom I happen to be married to, was talking about the parable of the sower who tossed his seeds along the ground as he walked, hoping for a good crop later. You’ve probably heard that one.

The text was read and then the poetry of it was discussed, metaphor by metaphor, soil types, marauding birds (what, no squirrels? Do you know how fast they dug up the sugar snap pea seeds I put down?) the part about the lord of the harvest saying, no, don’t pull out the tares or you’ll uproot the wheat along with it, let them keep growing together till they’re ripe. The growth habits of rye and wheat plants were mentioned and we had a visiting rancher from Wyoming on hand (what were the chances!? Never seen the guy before) who talked about how they are mechanically separated now at harvest with the machine being able to tell which is which.

Cool. Learn something new. While part of me was wondering, two thousand years later they’ve *still* got their seeds mixed?  Couldn’t be by much, surely. Clearly there was a lot more to ask the guy but it wasn’t the time or place.

Then the general query was thrown out there: So what did it all mean?

I raised my hand and pronounced: Having planted a few trees this past week, if you want them to produce well then by golly you’ve got to have slimy earthworms and chicken manure in there.

The tall man standing at the front of the room was amused as the room laughed. “Slimy. Earthworms. And chicken” (we were in church, the only word I would dare use there and that he would ever use anyway) “manure.”

Yup. Every life has to have some for the person to grow into the best they can become. It’s all just part of how it is.

The first Fuji apple flowers burst into bloom today–and yesterday I couldn’t even find buds, I looked.

The Stella cherry. 

Pushing around half-barrels full of soil and plants (fig, raspberry) the last two days to test sun hours may not have been my best move–I woke up at dark o’clock in shooting streaks of oh-no-you-didn’t. Wait, *I’m* not the one with the bad back.

Come the morning I took it easy and sat up straight and did all the right things and as the day went on the twinges faded out.

Y’know, I’ve really badly wanted all week to plant that Gold Nugget mandarin and it’s not healthy for it to stay in that small nursery pot too long, thought I. Dinner was ready to go. Richard wasn’t home yet. I picked up the spade–okay, that felt pretty much okay–and walked over to the spot the two of us had agreed on.

Just like the one time I’d tried before, that hardpack seemed utterly impervious to anything I could do to it; the metal tip wanted to simply ricochet off.

Just one little bit to mark the spot? This was one chore where I could simply stop any time if I needed to. I even had, once.

Yeah who was I fooling. Suddenly I was finding that it was just that top layer that was difficult, it was beautiful, soft soil underneath and there was the spade sliding right on through it. All those years of accumulated buckthorn leaves had done some real good over here and the earthworms I encountered thought so, too. I didn’t hit the water line this time.

I picked up the pot (okay, that was pushing it a bit) and set it in the hole a moment to see how it was coming along. Ideally, I should dig wider; it was wider than I thought, though. Ideally, it should be deeper. Actually, I was going to have to fill it back in a bit. And since it’s not all clay here the roots should be just fine.

Richard got home and let me drag him out there to be part of the final decision process. He didn’t tell me I shouldn’t be doing this quite yet; he knew how badly I wanted to. It’s just one day and then we have a healthy tree for life.

I sprinkled some olive-tree shavings across the bottom, added bagged soil, the mandarin, water, more bagged soil, and at last a ridge from the excavated soil to make a moat around the trunk. More water. I did cut back the scraggly old bushes that were peering over the edge of the hole in that picture earlier. The temperature hit low enough that the lights on the mango next to it clicked on in the dusk.

It is done. I cannot tell you how good it feels. Grow little tree grow!

Learned something new today. Those spacers I bought to try to reposition fruit tree limbs with just a little?

Our English Morello cherry’s pruned and shortened branches were quite stiff and quite determined to stay as upwards-facing as possible last Saturday when I planted it. Like I mentioned, that can lead to broken boughs in years to come so even though there wasn’t much to anchor them against I did what I could with some of the smallest spacers to try to stretch the wood earthward a bit.

Tonight I went out to see if by very small chance I could reposition things a little. I truly did not expect to.

I could. Rather easily, actually, I could even get a medium spacer in one place now and the angles are noticeably improved.

Who knew that making a few very small changes and allowing it some time would help it become flexible enough to accept the better points of viewing to come?