Made a quick run to Costco for milk and orange juice–sound familiar?–and the glass-faced curio cabinets were nowhere to be seen.

This, meantime, had been at floor height Saturday, but now it’s not just above bumping-into height, it’s tied in place. Well done.

And here on the home front.

I noticed a few leaves knocked off the Page mandarin and wondered which genius squirrel thought that was a tree worth climbing with nowhere to go from there. I went to snap a picture or two of its growth of this past week; there’s been enough that you can see it clear from the window.

Somehow I had never, not in the unpacking, not in the planting, not in the earlier picture taking, not in the watering, not in a week of obsessing happily over my new tree, had I seen what Four Winds Growers had given to me. I had told them this story and I guess they wanted to get me my first taste of my own Page as soon as possible. It had been 37 years. Thank you thank you thank you!

Maybe that squirrel (if it was a squirrel) wasn’t so dumb after all.

(Edited to add in the morning: Richard thought last night that I should pick it to let the little tree put all its energy into growing for now. Some critter agreed with him and made it a moot point. Ah well, all the more for next year.)

One is cute, 1500 is a bit Biblical.

The box looked the size and type that would have, say, a pint of Ben and Jerry’s in it. There was a square cut-out in the lid covered in mesh.

So I expected a mesh bag inside with, y’know, a twisty tie or something.

Richard had thought that ladybugs for our yard would be a good idea, and for eight bucks towards doing good to the environment wherever they might go off to, why not, so he bought me some.  Computer scientists and bugs and all that.

So here he was Saturday night, flashlight in hand to help me watch my step out there (he’s a good one) as we went out onto the back patio. The ladybugs were more likely to stay in the area you put them in if it’s dark out.

But it was actually pretty well lit right there on the patio side of the window and I thought I’d start with a few over at the amaryllis pots on the picnic table. I lifted the lid.

And gave a small yelp and jumped back–but at least I didn’t drop the thing.

“What’s wrong?”

I mumbled something about there were bugs in there and a mass of them were coming at my hands and okaynevermindyeahthatwasstupid.

I tried to make sure they were aimed away from me at all times as we walked around playing Johnny Appleseed at nature, having no way to see if they were blowing back into our hair (don’t even THINK that!) Amaryllis. Fling! Page Mandarin. Fling! Cherry. Fling! Apple. Fling! Pear. Fling fling double fling leave the lid there too on that one and let them sort themselves out.

And some on the lemon, since I hadn’t quite been able to persuade the last of them to leave the cup part at the previous stop.

I woke up in the morning thinking, wow, did we just feed the birds dessert first or what?

But I saw at least one if not two ladybugs on every one of the baby fruit trees when I gave them a quick check, so, so far so good.

The ice cream box had little specks all over the bottom. I have no idea if there are eggs in there or if it’s all just bug poop. I think I’ll give it a few days. That I don’t have to go near it.

First thing bright and early in the foggy morning after a night’s rest, still pretty tightly tucked in on itself. (Backstory here.)

And at 6 pm.

Love and light and water as needed and promises of more for the life of it. 

It came it came!

And I wasn’t even home. I was at a carpet store way down in San Jose and Richard was working from home so he’s the one who got to answer the doorbell; he told me he called out, “Thank you!” to the UPS driver heading back to his truck, as one does.

I got the text while comparing berber vs plush and how it would feel on a crawling baby’s knees or little boys tumbling down. I tried not to be jealous as I drove home.

I took pictures of the box. Dusk never felt so far off. Hurry, hurry! I finally had to at least see and slid it out and found it looked like a NASA experiment.

A little while later, not wanting to risk drying it out or anything…I peeked some more. Cute little kitten’s-paw leaves sneaking upwards.

At last it was 7:00, Wunderground said UV was 1 out of 12, I declared it good enough, lupus-wise–but before I went outside, I asked Richard once again if he thought I should widen the back of the hole away from that pipe.

“I don’t know,” he said honestly. He offered to help but since this was my baby he let me do it myself like I wanted.

Got the spade, put the tip exactly right there and gave it one good heave ho pushing down hard with my foot.

I actually don’t quite know how the next thing that came to be was that I was suddenly facing the other way, rear end to one side of the hole and the backs of my legs–well, mostly one–fully scraped and muddy down the calf, but my feet were way over up on the other side and how did they get there and all in one nice smooth motion and I have no idea how that happened. At all.

Okay, maybe not so much on the widening thing. It’s trying to tell me something there and me, I try to be a good listener. Really, I do.

I looked at the hole. I looked at the dug-up dirt to the side, which was full of now-dry clumps and gravel and it would all need to be figured out which was which: the former owners did love their (now deeply embedded, 50-60 years later) gravel path. The obvious hit me at long last–I definitely needed better soil than what I had there and I should have thought of that sooner. Dad and his rhododendrons and all that.

So I was glad I’d gotten an earlyish start and headed over to the hardware store less than a mile away. Bought two bags, organic, pasteurized chicken poop, the works. The fellow they asked to help me to my car with them looked bored and like he couldn’t wait for that work day to be over so I thought I’d lighten it up a little by sharing in brief my sense of anticipation: the commissioned truck. The Page mandarins you couldn’t get any other way. The thirty-seven years since I’d had one, and finally, “My tree came today.”

Suddenly he had this big surprised grin all over his face and he teased me that I was going to have to bring some of those mandarins back to that store for him to test out, y’know! To make sure they were good enough!

Richard got those heavy bags out of the car for me and over to the spot and I got back to it.

And…I didn’t have enough soil, clearly, from trying too hard not to spend too much money on my hobbies….  But you only get one chance to start that tree off right. I checked with him. Orchard Supply Hardware was still open. Back I go.

The guy did a doubletake as he spotted me going past his aisle again: “Back already?!”

“Yeah, needed more soil,” I said to him. “Just, don’t fall in the hole,” and I did a quick below-the-knee skirt hoist  to show him the row’d rash. He started to gasp but then since I was laughing a good one he about fell over in relieved guffaws. It WAS funny.

“You’re REALLY going to love those oranges now!” he told me.

Y’know? He was right.

I have a gardener and his helper twice a month to do the outside stuff I can’t, and today happened to be the day.  They came after the stump grinders were gone and marveled at the changes in the place and loved it when I asked for opinions and advice on what I should do next here and here and here.

I told them about the tanangelo (the computer still doesn’t like that spelling but it’s correct) tree and where I was going to want it to go in–they thought it a good spot–and would it be okay to ask for help digging the hole?

Sure!

I had no idea…. I glanced out the window and thought oh, they don’t have to prepare the hole that much, the tree’s not here yet, although maybe adding water makes it easier to dig? Not aiming it very well, you don’t want it spraying the fence like that. ! Wait, where’s the hose?! How are they doing that?

Just then one of them started coming my way.

A whole lot of years ago Richard, with help from the kids, dug up and put in a watering line with a master control switch in the garage. Which got damaged and was never replaced and a gopher had bitten through the line over on the left anyway and the whole thing had essentially been forgotten about.

That water line on the right side was still live–who knew? There’d been no sign of it. So we had a few minutes there where we were trying to cut it off as it sprayed out of the hole and against the fence. The line to the house? Didn’t do it, it just meant I had no water inside. Huh.

In the no-coincidences department, my husband wasn’t feeling great yesterday and told his boss he would probably work from home today. And did.

He knew there were two water lines whereas I had no idea. He knew where the plumbing supplies were in the garage to cap that thing off, too, and soon all was well.

Wasting water is a $500 fine in California these days and that fence got doused nicely while that thing was going wild, which thanks to his being there, wasn’t more than ten minutes.  On the other hand, one of the tests for whether you’ve picked a good site to plant a fruit tree is to fill the hole with water and see how long it takes it to drain out–if the water just sits there, forget it.

We seem to have just the right spot. Um, except for that pipe crossing the edge. Clearly, it won’t be hard to get water to that one. I think I’ll just spade out a bit at that far edge there….

My next-door neighbor was walking past my house as I was coming out and we both stopped and chatted a moment.

They always plant quite the garden, but it had not been very productive this year; maybe, he said, it was that they watered it less in the drought. He marveled though at how much brighter and sunnier it is there now that my tree folk have done their work.

“Maybe it was my trees that were the problem,” said I, with a new reason to be glad the problem ones are gone now.

“But they were there before.” He was ever the diplomat.

“But they were taller this year than ever before.”

He conceded the possibility.

Then I told him the story of the Page oranges and that a three-year-old Page tree was on its way here and it was fun to watch his face break out in a huge grin like that. I knew they’d planted their own orange and nurtured it and watched it come to fruiting and he knew how much I was going to enjoy that process.

I forgot to tell him, though, that this was going to be one tree that wouldn’t shade his garden like the ones that are gone: there will be no twenty towering feet high and twenty across but rather half that at most. But then, he probably already figured that part out. And that our trees will help each other be more productive, self-fertile or no.

And here I am writing about Pages again because I can’t do anything else to make that new tanangelo come any faster–hurry, tree! I’m waiting!

Chomp. “Looks like they got that one.”

Understatement alert, hon, but yeah.

And yet. I haven’t stopped planting more fruit.

When I was a teenager they were building a Mormon chapel closer to home and the locals were asked to pitch in and do fundraisers to help speed things along. (These days, it’s all handled from Salt Lake City to even out the resources between communities.)

Dad had heard of a friend of a friend who really knew his citrus and who was driving truckloads of a type of mandarin none of us had ever heard of from Florida to the DC area for fundraisers for various groups–they get their fundraiser, lots of people discover what was/still is said to be the best-tasting citrus there is, he gets paid for driving his truck, everybody wins. So Dad asked for the guy’s phone number.

And that is how he and Joe Ney became good friends with a shared enthusiasm and purpose. After that building in Potomac, Maryland was finished, Dad continued to commission a truckload every Christmas.

Because everybody who’d bought a case of those juicy Page oranges (technically, tanangelos, a Minneola cross crossed with a mandarin) came back for more whenever they could; there was nothing like them and they were too small to go big commercially and I don’t think they kept particularly well so you couldn’t get them unless you had some kind of a connection to them down South. Dad wasn’t about to let go of enjoying and sharing the best of the best every December, so, if it was a truckload he had to order, a truckload it would be–sign the sheet and state your number and give everyone on your gift list a box and know that they’ll never forget it and they’ll forever be grateful.

Then a major freeze hit Florida. For all the misting and wind-machining and whatever all else they could do, most of the Pages didn’t survive, and since it was such a niche market to begin with and young trees were the most susceptible to the next frost, most growers simply didn’t replant them.

Then Joe Ney dropped dead of a heart attack. (And I hope his family somehow sees this post and knows what a great gift he shared with so very many people and how grateful we all are.)

And I have not had one of these beautiful, deeply colored, juicy, paper-thin, easily peelable almost always seedless little balls of exquisiteness since. The Cuties they sell every Christmas? That’s like an old Hersheys vs. Scharffenberger, or even more now that those two have the same owner, vs. the fantastic upstart Tcho’s.

I wrote here Tuesday about whether anyone had any fruit varieties to recommend for my newly-cleared fenceline. I got a private note asking me if tangerines could grow where I am?

Ding ding ding. That was it!! THAT was what some corner of my brain had been struggling to dredge out of the depths! Richard! We could grow our own PAGES!!!

Oh I cannot tell you how excited I was.

Which quickly got tempered by not being able to find a single source outside of Florida that night, much less one anywhere that would ship to me. There’s a quarantine on citrus trees around southern California, no help there either.

I tried again the next day. Help me out here, Google.

Google came through. Google is my friend.

And so it was that there is a grower in northern California who sells three-year-old Page tanangelo trees for $40 and says that they’re large enough that they should be producing the next year after planting. Wow!

Monday Chris’s stump grinder guy comes to give me a bid on how many stumps I want taken out and where. Monday Four Winds Growers mails out my tree by third-day UPS. Not wasting a moment here, and I had to call my mom, and when Dad wasn’t home I had to call back later to talk to him directly: after all those years after those last boxes, we are going to have Page oranges again!

The one glitch? That no-freezing thing. But if the next-door neighbors can tent their young and vulnerable orange tree with a giant lightbulb inside last January, and they did, and they celebrated their 50th anniversary something like ten years ago, seems to me I should be able to manage doing that just fine myself. Or ourselves. (And let’s see, if I get a Gold Nugget variety too we can have mandarins in winter and spring and early summer…)

Just one tree for now. Pages are also rare in that they’re a citrus that is nearly thornless–and I have grandchildren to keep from getting scratched up. I’ll keep it short enough to stay inside one of my new walk-in-size fruit cages; that should thwart the raccoons at least for a little while. (My brain is suddenly singing Little Boxes.)

Some part of me knew when I wrote that throwaway line ending that blog post that I really really did want…something….

Imagine looking forward to your first bite of chocolate in 37 years. It’s like that.

We’d bought and potted those two trees in anticipation and hope of this day happening.

They planted my cherry tree today–and since it had recently been repotted by our friends, it had only barely started to grow through to the ground. Theoretically, as an ultradwarf, it shouldn’t get too much taller than this but rather more outward.

Well we’ll see. That’s good soil in that bed. I remember my dad trying to replace a broken six foot Blue Peter rhododendron a painter had fallen onto and having been told, Blue Peters don’t grow six feet!

Mine do, he told them.

I hope to take as good care of my fruit trees as Dad did his rhodos.  Although, having a backhoe in and adding six feet downward of great soil before planting–okay, Dad, you win. (That was when their house in Bethesda, MD was being built when I was three; he asked the builder to dig a little extra along the front for his future flowers.)

The surprise was the Comice: it was a mere bare root on February 14th and already it had a good taproot squeezing through one drainage hole and smaller ones through all the others. (I drilled about 20–the Costco pots had come with none.) They had a good firm grip on the ground below.

The men checked that thing out and knocked on the door for me: would it be okay with me if they cut the pot away? There seemed to be no other choice.

I want a tree, not a pot, yes please.

They made sure that where they’d prepared was where I wanted it. I thought, eh, I might have nudged it six inches thataway but that’s just way too picky–the hole was ready and it was good so it was just right. “Perfect.”

That was when one of them asked me about that sunjacket I always pulled on every time I stepped outside.

“I have lupus,” I said, sure that that would mean nothing to him–most people have no real idea.

“One of my co-workers, his wife has lupus. Sometimes she’s in a wheelchair.”

Ohmygoodness, so he did know–I winced in sympathy. I told him sometimes I’d been in one, too.

I came away hoping that it would give comfort to whoever she was out there to know one could go through whatever she was going through and still get to be older with this disease, and I wished I could introduce her to 92-year-old Rita.

They set part of the taproot in the carved-up pot for me to see. That tree had wanted to grow freely. And now it can. Pears have no rootstock options that dwarf them as much as you could an apple or a stone fruit, so we put it in the one corner where it would not shade the solar and it would not be too close to the house. It can take over there freely in the space we opened up for it. (Dying cypress, gone at last.)

And now that blank expanse of fence on the other side has some green to it, too. I love the long lush leaves of cherries. I pulled up a chair and my knitting and stared at the loveliness and the relief of having a tree in there already. It’s a great start.

Chris came to inspect the job in progress and as we spoke in the yard, movement high above caught my eye and I pointed it out to him: there he was, Coopernicus, right on cue (always the showoff.) I told Chris we’d gotten to see him courting with his mate perched on the silk oak next door through our skylights this past spring. He thought that was so cool.

Some hunting places gone, the new begun already.

Green. Real green.

Speaking of which, kudzu is a beautiful plant. We drove past stands of it again and again last week, including a row of what had to have previously been trees with half of one crepe myrtle still visible but disappearing fast, desperately reaching branches towards the highway in a plea of Save me! as the kudzu slowly took it down, took it all down–it was impressive. The stuff simply smothers anything in the South no matter how tall and no matter how wide. Kudzilla.

We saw one area along the road that looked very familiar in a Western way: lots of narrow dark grayed stumps going straight up throughout a swath of land and everything around it still perfectly green. You see that blackened cajun seasoning searing this patch, leaving that patch raw all over the dryer parts of the West in the summers as of late–but why…?

It took me awhile to figure out that someone had done a controlled burn to take out the kudzu in the only way to really get rid of it, I guess.

Speaking of invasive species…

I told the tree guy giving me an estimate two weeks ago that the berries of heavenly bamboo kill the native birds here. He was immediately stunned at the enormity of what that meant, turning to me, his eyes big: “But it’s everywhere!”

Yes.

And that is why, as of today, our fifty or sixty year old stand of the stuff is gone; if I want a six foot tall decorative line of plants, there is no good reason not to have them be blueberries instead.

The weed trees that were starting to threaten the fence are gone, too. The sawing went on all day. It was either pay for that, or pay for that anyway and for replacing the fence next year, so, out it went. The bird center people had asked me to wait till August and we did but it could not wait another growing season.

The workers left me, at my request, the already-dead many-holed stump near the corner: it is Nuttall’s woodpecker habitat. (Besides, better they hammer there than the house.)

It is so very strange and a bit of a wrench to look out the window and see naked fence. It’s also pretty cool. Like having a brand new house: we get to choose what we want and start over!

I stuck a spade in one spot and asked Richard if he thought the potted cherry should go in there.  The workers already dug a large hole for the pear on the other side of the house. We will add an English Morello near the first cherry, the tart but not too sour type that I think is what Costco has been selling that we like so much. Five hundred chill hours–we can definitely plant that.

So much to look forward to. Even if it’s hard to have those trees gone.

I watched a gray squirrel run down the fenceline next door towards our side, and about five feet short he slowed and stopped. Stared. Wait. There WERE trees here, I KNOW there were! It tried, but it could not conjure them back into existence and it slowly turned and walked–there is no other word for it–away.

A black squirrel later was so rattled by the changes that he took a flying leap for one of the remaining trees and actually missed. A wild scramble and he caught the other part of the doubled trunk behind it just before he would have hit the ground.

It kind of feels like that, doesn’t it, little guy?

Now to pick out varieties that won’t grow too tall, that won’t take too much work, that won’t shade the solar, whose fruit will, best of all, be sweet in the hand.

Any favorite varieties of anything you want to recommend, I’d love it if you let me know.

Thirty tomatoes, one Gardman fruit cage, zero success on the part of the animals trying to get through to them now that they’re under there and my blueberries in another one the entire season have been fine, too. The mesh has not been chewed through. They cannot scoot under the bottom edge. (It helps that the ground is flat where I have them.)

I’d bought the smallest cage because, hey, price, wishing I could afford the unzip-and-walk-in size that you could put over a small fruit tree if you don’t mind maxing out at 77” high.  But at $139.95, no way.

Tonight–and this may change by morning if the things suddenly become popular again, Amazon likes to play ping pong with prices, but tonight, that biggest one was suddenly $49.95. One peach tree and one extra dwarf cherry, I checked with Richard and then ordered two.

It was auto-checked at $72 shipping. Or, free! Uh, let’s click free, thanks.

I know there’s another brand of these on the market where the mesh is so fine that honeybees can’t get through (I presume so that mice can’t) and the wind catching them like a sail is a problem. I watched a bee hover in and out of my tomatoes today and away, free as a breeze.

So in case anyone else wants one I thought I’d mention.

August, pried. (Milk jug offers perspective on size.) Animal-repellent cinnamon branch against the trunk, knocked way over thataway.

On the other hand, I really did want to plant a Loring peach but I just couldn’t justify having two trees producing the same kind of fruit in the same month.

It got so close. We now have two almost-ripe peaches inside on the counter next to Sunday’s tomato knockoffs. After taking out some smaller branches, the raccoon simply lopped off the top more-than-half of the entire tree by its weight, thus putting the August Pride back to about what it was when I planted it with about a third of the leaves it started the spring with.

That was a heck of a pruning job, Rocky.

Should have tracked down and bought some of those bird-netting tree-trunk-protection things I’ve seen a few times.

(p.s. But at least he left my tomatoes alone last night.)

This is the before picture from a few days ago. (There were a lot more tomatoes behind those leaves.)

I had the plants in pots on top of a small table. I taped many strips of mylar bird-be-gone tape to hang from the top of it and it seemed a really good idea; the squirrels raided the neighbors’ but left mine alone.

All it was missing last night, though, was the tablecloth to yank on. One good leap and the table tilted hard into the parched ground on the far side and every single pot came crashing down.

Presumably on the critter’s head.

Oops.

With the actual tomatoes all apparently accounted for this morning as far as I could tell, clearly it didn’t get much for all that. Whether the plants will survive the abrupt depotting and smashing, one can only hope. They are definitely hanging loose.

Richard helped me separate and pick up so I could get back out of the sun faster–and he encouraged me, when I gouged myself on some rusty metal with dirt all over my hand, to go look up when my last tetanus shot was.

Scanning down the screen for the magic word… 2004. Oh. On the phone, the clinic told me not to risk a delay, so I went in after church (with mental apologies to them for my coming in on a Sunday. Everybody deserves a day off.)

The nurse was about to give me the shot when her computer beeped at her. She did a doubletake.

The tdap booster on my chart that I’d skimmed right past? 2010. That t was for tetanus. (Oh of course.) Dodged it this time.

We have a hummingbird-friendly people-unfriendly cactus-level-sharp-spined flowering don’t-know-what-it’s-called in our yard.

This evening I clipped a whole lot of those flowers, which are several feet long and spent and well past hummingbird prime, and poked the stems in towards the center of the table to do porcupine duty over my coveted heirlooms. Any raccoon jumping up now is going to get a snoutful.

I wonder how many broken pots we’ll have in the morning.

I read about a year too late that if you’re going to have a small fruit tree in a container you want a plastic one with sides going straight down rather than cone shaped for the sake of avoiding root rot.

Oh. I’d just simply bought what Costco had last year.

Well hey, they were now selling a larger, non-conical one and I could always use the first to put tomatoes into, and at some point I mentioned to a friend that I wondered if I should ask for help to transplant that tree to where the roots would have more room but but really I shouldn’t, so, never mind, forget I said anything. I nearly deleted the email, and said that, too.

She laughed off my hesitation after checking first with her husband and strapping boys and so, today they came over and wrestled that thing. Turns out the roots were growing out the drainage holes and into the ground–extra dwarf or no, that tree wanted room and extracting it was a handful.

They made it sound afterwards like it had been completely easy and between the three of them, with the three-year-old baby brother happily running a Tonka tractor around their feet, they did it. They even insisted on moving the new container afterwards to where the old one had been, where the sun was a little better.

They got sent home with a chocolate torte with my profuse thanks. I’ve been praying hard since then that their backs are okay, amazed and in awe that they would volunteer like that just because.

I was only able to spend a little time out there in the bright sun, mostly watching through the window, so I had to ask Richard afterwards: what happened to all that gravel I’d had at the bottom of the pot? I’d had it in there for drainage and stability and I didn’t see any later.

What gravel?

And I had more in the new pot, with a layer of dirt on top to get it all ready for them.

We didn’t see but a tiny bit of gravel.

Uh. Ohhh. That rootball must have been really heavy, then, I mean, I had a lot… Yow.

Wow.

I had some below the layer of soil at the waiting bottom of the new pot, too, and when they were done with the transplanting they scooted the thing over to where it had been previously. That tree looked beautiful when they were done.

What can I say–our friends totally rock!

Another thing that happened at Lee’s birthday celebration: I have long wanted to know whom to ask, someone who really knew, and wow, there he was.

Years ago the local paper did an article on a type of mango so fiberless and fragile and so perfect that it could not be shipped to grocery stores, and expats from India would sign up at an Indian grocer in the area for so many cases and would wait to meet a planeload’s worth coming in: picked and picked up all in a very short time frame, at astronomical prices.

I remembered the story but not the variety.

I’ve talked for two years now about buying a mango tree and about what it would take to have it survive any freezing temps here. One grower’s suggestion led to the classic protest from Richard about how he was not going to be the neighbor with Christmas lights up in March. Which is funny. But he had a point.

There are other ways. Some fairly difficult.

Lee’s friend Dani was from India and he’s done those signups. He grew up with an Alphonso tree in his yard producing one to two hundred a year, and he said it was THE mango, the only mango, the most coveted one in all of India. The perfume! He mimed waving it towards his face in blissful memory. So intense! The flavor! There was nothing like it, nothing.

Mallika was the variety I had thought I wanted. He had not heard of it. He’s been here awhile and it’s a new variety, maybe?

We emailed back and forth a bit afterwards and so he lit a fire under me to find out more.

Mallika: “Among the best.” Alphonso: “The best, the most sought after.” Ah. I had not compared them side by side before because I hadn’t known to.

But here’s the thing: at Lee’s that night, when I told Dani I’d more or less given up on the idea anyway, not quite sure I wanted another container tree (on a platform so that we could wheel it close to the house in winter–good luck with that chore) and not sure I wanted to plant it in the ground either, not sure it would survive without a lot of work–we do get some freezes, even if not many–he, having already found a 3 gallon size available (I want it a 7) via his phone by that point in the conversation, passionately urged me to go ahead and get that tree, emphasizing with each word: “If you don’t try you will never know.”

This just might happen after all and it will be because of him.

I’m now on the waiting list for notification for when the 7-gallon size comes in. Lee’s friend admitted he hopes I give him a few Alphonsos someday when it produces, and I assured him I owed him that thanks, yes. Absolutely.

I think that’s one of the reasons I put the tomato pots where I did last month: to prove there’s enough sun in that spot near the south side of the house for production. Done.