The new leaves (which started this day) turn reddish before they turn green at full size.

The burn marks on the outer edges of the older leaves are from when I only had a black garbage bag to put over the tree at night–where the leaves touched it they were not happy after that exceptionally cold week of twenty-something-degree nights. The frost cover is much better, breathing, letting light in and still keeping it warmer, but better still would be to put some narrow stakes around the tree to suspend the cover above and off it. It’s above it now with that stake it came with, but it’s catching up to it fast.

Craft store? Where would you go? The 2x2s at the hardware store are a lot more massive than I want; I’m thinking more a size 15 knitting needle on stilts.

I can see the day coming soon when I will have to sew a bunch of frost covers together to make one giant one. (There are rocks on the bottom edges on the small chance of wind.) There will be more non-LED Christmas lights on it by then.

But it just amazes me how much our Alphonso mango has grown in the five weeks since we planted it. In winter! It seems to me that buying a vigorous variety in this climate, even though we’re going to keep it far shorter than it would do in its native one, is probably going to be protective against minor dieback like those leaf burns.

I missed it before. January did more than just flowers.

An O’Neill blueberry quietly doing its thing, waiting for the others to catch up. (As I look at the yarn and the calendar and realize Stitches West was almost a year ago and the next one is in two weeks and how on earth did that happen already?!)

I got me some knitting to do.

Rain is in the forecast oh thank goodness after 30 dry days and freezing is not.

I almost didn’t see it. I was walking past it and did a double take.

Blueberries. Blooming. In January. Not profusely, but hey.

I didn’t know they could do that.

Needed to buy some birdseed, and since it was right off the freeway stopped on my way home by Yamagami’s Nursery to check out the fruit trees.

And boy did they have nice fruit trees. If you wanted cherries or peaches this very year it looks like you could have exactly that.

No Lorings in stock, though; they would have to order and find out if one is available. I texted messages with Richard and came home, for now.

But when the sun was low I picked that spade back up and dug that planting hole a little deeper and now, at last, that spot feels ready for whatever will go in. It will not stay bare for long.

A side note: I know vaccination is a hot topic right now and that there are strong emotions on both sides. Hear me out, if you would. Measles is *the* single most contagious virus known, and if you simply walk through a room hours after an infected person did you can catch it. I have an immunosuppressed friend from my knitting group who got quarantined from work this week because a co-worker had been exposed to someone who’d been exposed to someone who’d been exposed to someone at Disneyland, the disease leapfrogging up the state. That’s an awful lot of quarantining and lost wages and lost time.

Our daughter the microbiology PhD was telling an anti-vaxxer the other day, Sure, if you get German measles you’ll be sick and you’ll probably recover and you probably won’t be one of the unlucky ones who goes deaf or gets pneumonia or meningitis and all that. You’ll probably be okay.

But you don’t do it for YOU. You do it for every pregnant woman. Because it is horrendously dangerous to a fetus in utero at any stage of pregnancy and extremely likely to kill or brain damage them for life. You do it for them. Because you’re a good person.

As I knit some Abstract Fibers yarn, needing lots of bright colors against the winter fog and in celebration of the fact that Stitches West is less than a month away.

I could not talk the camera into focusing on the limb rather than the fence, but here goes. Variety: Tropic Snow, an apt name given the storms back East this week. (Throw a snowball for all us weather-deprived out here, will ya?)

There was no spark of green or new growth to be found yesterday at all–I looked for it. So I certainly wasn’t expecting to find green tips everywhere today but I did, just on this one tree,  always the earliest. Peaches! It’s leafing out!

We’ve had a forlorn and bare spot in the raised bed where the bird-killing heavenly bamboo was taken out last summer and I used that burst of happiness to finally go dig there in preparation for the next tree to go in. It’s ready. I came in and told him.

Last Valentine’s Day, he took me on an expedition to Wegman’s and got me the big, healthy Comice pear of my dreams. He was anticipating as happily as I was as we talked about what this year’s version should be.

Chris was coming at 11:00 to give me a quote on a few more trees.

The doorbell rang at about ten. I wasn’t expecting him at that hour…

It was the city utility workers, here to clear limbs away from the power lines, and when the guy said that I had to laugh and ask, What trees?

They walked around the yard and went Oh. Oh wow.

But there was one limb from the camphor that had grown back up close enough to give them something to do; it didn’t take long.

And then the one who was clearly in charge casually mentioned that he does tree cutting privately on his own time, too, and he’d be glad to give me a quote on that other stuff over there. Sure. So, the yucca (it wasn’t a yucca), trim the olive, take out that and that, he gave me a verbal quote.

Nothing was written down, details could be forgotten and misunderstandings could happen. He came back later with a business card but that was as far as it went.

Just minutes after they left the first time the doorbell rang again, and there was Chris.

We talked trees a little while. He took detailed notes of what was to be done and gave me a written estimate. When I asked about the Fuji apple, he confirmed what I was pretty sure of: my gardening guy had pruned nearly all the fruiting tips off. He was trying to keep the tree down to a good size for us but he’d been a little too enthusiastic.  Chris talked about one year wood for the plum but two year for apples (and I know it’s three to ten for pears). Now, this, he said, pointing out the much smaller Yellow Transparent next to it, you’ve still got a lot of fruiting wood on this one.

But I like Fuji apples a lot better. So now I know, at least, and next year will be different.

On the other side of the house, I am a bit reluctant to see those other trees go, but they are shading the solar panels by morning and the neighbor’s garden by afternoon and we need something shorter and my apologies (again) to the birds. But at least we’ll get them out before nesting season and will replace them immediately.

Chris’s crew is booked solid for several weeks out so we have time to decide what will go in instead. I’m thinking ultradwarf sour cherries and summer-producing dwarf mandarins. Maybe.

So far today, the mango tree has grown more than the knitting. So I’ll post a picture of the one and then get going on the other.

It seems we will have room for yet more fruit trees, with a call in to Chris at Shady Tree for a bid on two more weed ones that are shading the solar panels (and my mandarin and mango. Richard stood by the Page with a UV meter and it read zero at 2 pm, thus the yellowing leaves and my willingness to let a little more bird habitat disappear for a few years till the new catches up.) Montmorency? Lorings at last? Let the plotting commence.

And then.

We were at Costco, looking at a monster package of cherries. Rainiers–I’d like to try them, but that was a month’s supply. Now it might have been different had they looked like they hadn’t just traveled a long way over a long time and then been left out unrefrigerated, but as he wondered how we could eat them all it yanked my thoughts to our Stella cherry, to all our fruit trees as they grow up. That box (which we did not buy) potentially represented only a few branches’ worth.

For a brief instant the sheer volume to come overwhelmed. Countered instantly by, but see the difference is that we’ll be eating and freezing however much we want and then giving just-picked totally ripe homegrown to all comers, and surely there will be no shortage of those. A sun-warmed, dripping-ripe full-flavor peach is hardly the proverbial and much-maligned foundling zucchinis abandoned on doorsteps in the dead of the night. ( A side note: make zucchini bread, using butter, brown sugar, baking powder not soda, and, the most important part, substituting ground pecans for a quarter to a third of the flour. That will justify any zucchini planting you might ever do.)

And the picking of that fruit means this necessarily sun-deprived lupus patient will have reason to be outside at dusk for many a day, getting some badly-coveted fresh air and the satisfaction of doing good in the process. It’s like you cast on and then the trees do all the knitting for you.

Cherry on, then.

Got my computer back. There was a woman wearing a gorgeous handknit cowl at the Apple store as I waited for them to retrieve it, so I sat across the table from her and pulled out my own cowl project, figuring there’s no way a knitter would fail to notice. I wanted to compliment her on hers, whether she’d made it or not–but she had her face deep in her phone and never looked up. Ah well.

And I got the plant covers from Mr Garden, coming via express delivery. I guess they figured if you wanted frost protection in the dead of winter you wanted it right now! True that.

I pulled one over the mango as the sun went down, and thinking there was no way that fabric with all those little holes in it could seal in enough heat from the lights I ended up putting the thick plastic bag I’d been using previously over it to double-layer it. The forecast was officially for 45 tonight, but we’ve gone eight and nine degrees colder than the daily local forecast pretty consistently. Good enough for the Page mandarin, not so much for the Alphonso.

I kept checking the remote reader in disbelief and finally grabbed that black bag off so as not to cook the tree. I was impressed: okay, this thing does work. I expect it would not have the condensation problems of the other and, fungus-wise, to be much healthier for the tree.

Hours later it is still 19 degrees warmer than the ambient air. But we’ll see in the morning if it’s dry under there. Letting in 85% percent of the weak levels of wintertime UV is not enough longterm, but it is good enough that we could leave it on for a day or two should we need to before spring and that alone makes the purchase worth it.

It is, though, compared to the black cover, kind of like having a nonstop full moon out there.

I was looking for a cover for the tropicals that would let the UV get to the plants, and found one that, looking at the manufacturer’s page, allows 85% of the light in. Hopefully it will hold in enough heat, too–I’ll be testing it out first. Having such a thing do so would mean being able to leave the mango and mandarin safe and sunned without having to be there as the temperature rises and falls each day: catch a flight before dawn to see the new granddaughter and the last flight back at night without having to leave the more fragile mango under black plastic in between.

But I’m thinking maybe I could also cover a small peach or cherry tree with these when the fruit is ripening to keep the birds out. Cool.

Yeah, like the squirrels won’t touch it. Uh huh. I’ll wrap the bottom of the trunk in bubble wrap as an extra measure–that has still been totally successful at putting down lines they won’t cross.

Well, except for one time and that was today: I have it wrapped around the pole next to the bird feeder and taped at the top. The bottom edge was a bit loose, though, with a bit of the pole exposed.

Wood! Darn if that thing didn’t grab onto that one spot showing and run up the pole till his nose couldn’t push any further. I could have popped bubbles right on his back and hearing me come (I didn’t want that behavior repeated) he scrambled to try to figure out how the heck to get out of there, wriggling in the bubble wrap all the way but not popping any from that side. He looked like a little kid who can’t figure out how to find their way out of their covers in the morning.

I guffawed a long time. He thought he’d had those evil bubbles thwarted.

I’m making a blanket statement: I will defeat them on the fruit trees, too.

I did not expect to see what I saw today. Not only had my mango tree started to sprout new growth, but at the beginning of the day it had one baby-stage inflorescence. At the end of the day, in the photo here, a second green budding had grown enough that you could see that it was pointed, unlike the third–suggesting that we’ll have two sets of flowering coming out of there. If you scroll down on the Wikipedia page to the gallery, there are a lot of photos of what will be.

The secondary branch has two green buds where it had been pruned, although so far they look like they’ll be more branches. Sounds good to me.

Forty-four degrees outside, 59 at the mango. (Edited to add, woke up to 37/58.) We’re going to have to get a bigger cover soon for nighttime. I like that problem.

(Edited Sunday night to add: now those look more like they’ll be leaves. I’ve got a lot to learn and I’m having great fun doing so.)

Richard wanted, and got, a weather station for Christmas, but I’m the one who most watches it like a hawk: it turns out we are consistently a little cooler than the Wunderground pages say for this area, but then, the breezes off the Bay have a nice straight shot at our end of town.

The thing is saying that the lowest temp recorded in the last week was 24 degrees last Friday.

And yet my tropical trees continue to do fine. As I said to my sister today, they’re what I have now that need close watching over and care and attention. Much though I’d rather be immersed in the day-t0-day of watching our grandchildren, this is what I’ve got. (I’d be one of those babysitting grandmas in a heartbeat.) I do love the idea of our children and their children picking fruit at our house like the time in September when I got to hold Parker high to pick the last two apples of the year; that’s what it’s for most of all, them.

And for sharing of our abundance with the people around us: God’s handknits, created quietly day by increasing days until after all the happy anticipation at long last they’re ready. There is nothing like a warm summer peach ripe right off the tree.

I can’t wait to meet Madison in person.

Outside temp: 29. Mango tree reading under that bag: 47. Hoping the sensor isn’t too close to a light bulb, but, so far so good.

Happy New Year!

The second errand of the afternoon (I’ll tell you about the first one tomorrow) : getting a coaxial cable to go with the thermostat he already had, then on to the hardware store for an outdoor box to keep that in–but first the cable.

And so he had an excuse to browse his favorite shop. He got his ham radio license after the Loma Prieta quake, when the phone lines were down and we had twenty-four hours of Not Knowing, only knowing that his aunt and her family had been right there by the epicenter. That sense of helplessness wasn’t going to happen again.

They were fine; their house, not so much. And that is when he started volunteering with the city, county, and Red Cross communications teams, collecting a few ham radios along the way, portable here, (s0rt of) big stationary one there.

Oh but they had some big ones.

Here, let me zoom in a little on that sign on the door. “Hey Guys! Your Wife Called! She said you can buy anything you want!”

Well, but hey, yarn, so, I totally get the enthusiasm and the need to see what’s in stock now.

Speaking of which, Purlescence finally had Malabrigo as of this week and they had it on sale and after knit night tonight they have just a little less of it. I do totally get it–I’m just lucky the individual parts to my hobby cost vastly less than his.

And then we were off to the hardware store, where they not only had the weatherproofing box he wanted, they actually had non-LED white Christmas lights. We thought those had already been taken off the market.

For $4.80 a box. (!) Marked 25% more efficient, when we don’t want efficient at all we want heat for the Alphonso mango tree, but hey, just add another strand. Sold!

Turns out the salesman who found them for us has been warming his four citrus trees that way for twenty-five years and was keen to hear about how to grow mangoes.  He had room for one more fruit tree in his yard.

I told him cold prompts them to bloom but below 40 kills the flowers and fruit–but if a guy in upstate New York could do it, I could do it.

He was clearly already figuring out how to do his own setup to make that work.

You know? This could get contagious.

Clicking on a gardening forum site looking for information on mango trees is like wandering over to Ravelry and asking randomly, Do you knit?

Managed to get some of that done today, too. But it was a near thing for awhile there.