My Stella sweet cherry. It looks like it’s going to be a good year for it again. There is an Erva cage protecting its trunk from the rabbit in the bushes.

I had two apricot seedlings last year whose growth tips got killed by a heat wave not long after sprouting–they didn’t make it past two inches tall. But I knew from experience that if I just kept at it, winter would hit the reset button and they would grow normally this spring. A leaf or three was enough till then.

And they did, they are making up for lost time. It’s so gratifying.

Yesterday I saw a couple of leaves along the branch on one that seemed…odd. But they were too small to really see and I figured just let them grow and show themselves, I mean, typically you get a tiny new leaf tip and it grows out to a whole new branch when they’re at that stage.

This evening there were a lot more of them and it definitely demanded more attention.

I squinted. I got close. I found myself keenly aware that the retina surgeon is next week. I took pictures so I could embiggen them, but the camera kept focusing on the actual leaves and the breeze kept moving the thing and this was the best I could get.

I stayed there with my face right in it, trying to see–when suddenly the teeniest, tiniest clear wing went up. I went after it and found myself with green bug squish on my fingers.

There it was. I knew I’d better deal with them fast before they spread. But how? I didn’t have any Safer soap.

I ran in the house and grabbed a Kleenex. I very very gently held it around that fragile little branch and slowly carefully killed the lot of them. What was either black bug poop or bug eggs showed up against the white tissue as well. As far as I could tell I got everything.

I walked around the outside of the house to the city’s lidded compostables bin to get rid of it to try to make sure there were no escapees, then went over my four other apricot seedlings ages 1-5 years but found no trace of the little monsters.

Dr. Google says green aphids.

I am getting me some plant-friendly Safer soap from the local nursery pronto.

I was walking around the back yard to see what the first warm day of Spring had wrought.

The buds on the cherry trees were finally starting to bulge. Their winter had gone on and on, but not today!

The side of the tallest peach towards the pathway of the sun was in its glory with the rest soon to sound the amen.

I was stepping away from it, turned back to see–and was just in time to see a Cooper’s hawk swoop up and land on the telephone line just behind that tree right there in front of me.

If it were our original Coopernicus, who loved to people-watch during breeding season, he’d be about 15 by now; I wondered how many generations this one represented. I stood there with it tolerating me and silently beamed all the love I could its way. I know the tall trees to either side of the yard are gone now; I’m sorry about that. Maybe you never even knew them. I’m glad you’re here. Please stay. Please visit often. I want to have a new fledgling hopping among my amaryllis pots being cute again. I just want you here, and in this moment you are, and I am grateful.

And then too late I went inside and grabbed my phone so I could at least show you where it had been.

Did better today, thanks, everyone.

So how was the eclipse for you all? The only way you could tell there was one here was that the wild rabbit popped out of the bushes as if it were daybreak or dusk and started mowing away at the weeds. Which I thought was pretty funny.

It’s conference weekend. There were two two-hour sessions and one ninety minute one, and Sunday there will be two more two hour ones.

I had finally reached the part where I was doing one color straight across, the exception being the soaring raptor to come and then somehow I got all of that done, too. (Even if crumpled in the embiggened photo.)

The afghan has been taking 4.5 rows an inch, I did nine rows, and the tape measure says that today I added…black hole alert…0″.

Re the conference. During the first two sessions today, there were, as always, beautiful flowers at the podium.

But one kept grabbing my eye. It was an anthurium, and the camera kept hitting it just wrong: in trying to focus the lighting on the speaker, it turned it into a large floral eyeball looking back at the audience in Ukrainian yellow and turquoise, complete with a dark pupil where the spadix split the spathe (plant part definitions in link) up the center.

In the third session it appeared as if someone had moved that one plant. Just a bit.

I put one of my tomato starts in a pot a couple of weeks ago just to give its roots room to stretch out and get a bigger head start. (Side note to Ellen: this is the pot your apricot seedling was in.) The idea was that I have more than enough and a single tomato plant in its own soil would be easily giftable to those with little room or gardening experience.

Apparently the squirrels had buried one of last year’s sunflower seeds in there.

The nights have been in the 40s and even with the pot in a protected spot near the house, the tomato’s been waiting for warmth.

But that sunflower that popped up has no problem with cool weather and is racing ahead–and I haven’t been able to make myself remove one or the other. In my experience, trying to gently pull a tomato out with a bit of soil around the roots is how you kill it; the sunflower’s roots are probably already big enough to damage the tomato if I tried to pull it out.

Hey, let the tomato grow up with a built-in live stake! Right?

Oh wait. I bought seeds for eight foot tall sunflowers for this year but last year’s were mere 18″ ones. Oops.

Well, at the current rate of tomato growth that would be about right. Though I do expect there to be a summer this year.

Flowers and butterflies and birds (and squirrels)? Or tomatoes?

No cancer. Future risk estimated at 5 point something percent. Come back in a year.

Cool.

Meantime, I stepped outside this evening with rain about to start, suddenly thinking there might be few petals left tomorrow and wanting not to miss fully appreciating them.

They are the thinnest- and easiest-peeling mandarins there are, with no seeds and very nearly no whites.

The critters had been leaving my Kishu tree alone–till last night. So with about a pound and a half left of those very small mandarins (this was its first real harvest), I picked every one.

I knew there was an orange almond cake recipe out there that was very good but I didn’t remember where I’d found it.

Given the size, I wanted a recipe that didn’t just say throw a seedless orange in a blender–I wanted a measurement. I wanted weight. I went looking till I found it, and the fact that the author specifically says don’t throw in extra just because you have it made it easy to figure out that she’d played with this enough to know what she was talking about.

After it went in the oven I did my usual bowl scrapings onto a small plate and into the microwave for twenty seconds to get an idea of the taste and texture this was going to turn into.

Definitely what my Kishus had wanted to be when they grew up.

Fruit, almond flour, eggs, sugar, baking powder. No butter.

I have about five ounces of leftover mandarin puree to experiment with later.

Even my timer wanted it to hurry up: I set it for fifty minutes and it heard fifteen. Not so fast!

Update: it was very good. But next time I’ll put a parchment round on the bottom of the pan.

Today:

1. Enjoy the sunflower sprouts.

2. Be glad the twice-a-month gardener day turned out to be the day after the neighbors’ guy pruned their stuff and saved labor by dumping it all on my baby peach tree on our side of the fence and leaving it. Debate telling the neighbor, who would surely never know otherwise. She’s about 90. I offered my guy a bonus for the extra time spent and he just waved me away with a chuckle: it happens. The peach tree only lost a branch or two, thankfully. (Not that it had very many in the first place.) It will have extra sunlight for a couple of months, so that’s good.

3. Get a visit from Richard’s sister who flew in this afternoon to see the California relatives, take her out to dinner, have a fine time, take pictures (not posting her picture). Wish for better lighting, resolve to finally fix that entryway one that blew in the power failure.

4. Find slightly more sympathy for the neighbor’s gardener. But not a whole lot. (Honey, you got the entryway, the edge of the living room and family room, the kitchen, and the top of the dining room table.)

5. Be glad it fell after he stepped far enough away from it that none of it hit him.

If you want instant gratification, fourteen out of the eighteen sunflower seeds I planted Thursday afternoon were growing and greening by the hour this morning.

This evening, there on the other side of the tray were the first two of the Park’s Junior Whopper tomatoes.

It’s like they’re trying to encourage me to plant a bigger garden this year or something.

It…looked like maybe a sunflower plant was coming up in the fabric pot I’d cleared the dead ones out of? But in December?

It had its own take on that.

Huh. I was in the middle of emptying and getting rid of those pots; they do help plants grow great root structures as advertised but they dry out every day and we just can’t spend water like that here. But I decided that one stayed for now because I was curious–which was easy to do as I left it on its own. This rainy season was off to a worryingly slow start (even if it’s made up for it since.) But still, there it was, and in that fast-drying environment no less. I tried to move the pot under the safety of the awning–but even though it was not tall, the roots had grown through and into the soil, and they held. Ah. Now I understood. It stayed.

We had frosts, and of course the low light of winter. It survived.

According to The Internet That Thinks It Knows All, sunflowers can take 25F temps as long as it doesn’t stay that way too long; the flowers and buds won’t bloom nor produce seed, though.

And yet. The big bud on top, the one that took every frost, it’s even trying to seed, too. So we’ll see how it goes. But of all my summer plants, to see this one come up, to watch its uncommon and unexpected resilience against the coldness and the diminishing of light, it does me good to see that it is the flower of Ukraine that made it through the winter. Blooming, despite all that says it can’t now. Because that is simply what it’s going to do. 

Mid-afternoon we found ourselves having the first warm day of the year along with our first peach blossoms. It was 75F.

I celebrated by knitting a few more of my own on the left after snapping this picture (a bit scrunched together on the 40″ needles.) Side edges to be added later.

 There are a lot of palm products out there these days, which means there’s a lot of coconut coir looking for a market. It’s being sold as a substitute for peat pots for gardeners, among other things.

But according to one gardening forum, it removes potassium from the soil, which keeps your plants from being able to create leaves. They’ll be stunted at best.

Which is why this apricot seedling grew all of three inches last year and looked like this.

Once I’d read that warning, I peeled the coir away from the two apricots so afflicted and hoped for the best. (Most of my vegetable sprouts in those pots simply died.)

It also explained why nothing ever grew within five feet of the trunk of the date palm we used to have and not a blade of grass grew there for five years after it was gone. Bare dirt. Even Californian weeds couldn’t take it on.

In its first day of the new season this Anya descendant grew leaves that are about as big as last year’s ever were and it was such a treat to see the first sign of spring–and from that particular plant. I think it’s going to be fine.

The good news is that if you pay for Priority Express Overnight they guarantee it will get there when they say it will.

The bad news is, when it doesn’t, you have to wait seven days to file while they hope you’ll forget or lose the receipt or interest and go away.

The good news is that the apricot tree arrived safe and sound.

The bad/good news is, but not till this afternoon, which means I now have to remember where that receipt is (it’s tucked in my Sierra Club Engagement Calendar by the computer to make sure it stays right there and in mind.)

So that splurge of a shipping fee won’t have been after all. If they only refund to the difference between the timing I paid for and what I got, I’m fine with that, but it sounds like the full fee.

It came! She got it!

I am grabbing onto a little sunny Spring here before the new atmospheric river goes Niagara on us Wednesday through next Wednesday.

This was taken four days ago; the oxalis is a solid blanket of blossoms now. They were the first thing I saw when we were house-hunting, absolutely celebratory. Sold.

There was a flock of crows yelling in the air. I looked: nope, they’d picked the neighbor’s overripe persimmons clean weeks ago. Thought so.

To the left, there it was: the hawk they were screaming at, soaring higher than they dared go, but they were making sure it knew they could take him on, for sure, them and their best buddies down here. Go! Shoo!

There were reports from San Jose that the peregrine falcons have begun the countdown towards the eggs to come.

And then of course this guy suddenly showed up. Hadn’t seen one of them in awhile.

Maybe the hawk noted its escape route past the mandarin tree, since rabbits always run for the same exit. Cute little guy. Future raccoon food. Or great-grandparent by August.

Last year there was a rabbit that would dash under the mango, and I’m guessing it chewed on it because the tree’s not been doing so well ever since. Not dead, not growing, no black spots of sickness but not deep green anymore either, not flowering, just sitting there on the edge of the bed deciding whether to wake up along with everybody else.

A little fertilizer for the season’s breakfast and we’ll see if that makes a difference.

You’re their best but also worst nightmare, he told me over dinner.

Me: –?

Basically, he said, because I was a nice person to deal with–but could I imagine having to deal with every.single.plant.sent. individually?

Here’s what happened. You know they would have looked at me funny if I’d said she’s an in-person friend, but she is, and she lives in Oregon now. And she and I wanted to get one of those super-rare super-good apricot seedlings to her.

So I looked up what the rules are, because the last thing I would want is its being confiscated at the state line and destroyed after I’d nurtured and grown it this past year, not to mention the disappointment to her.

Oregon has a long, long list of banned plants you cannot bring in. That’s okay, California does, too–like the gorgeous understory-level mountain laurel that I grew up with that is a silent carrier for the Sudden Oak Death disease that began in the last 30 years or so, and they’ve discovered that the redwoods

I seriously had to stop typing a moment

but it’s true, Sudden Oak Death kills the ever-unkillable towering, majestic redwoods, some of which are older than Jesus’s time. We could lose every one. California has been throwing money at research to solve that and experimenting with tossing antibiotics around tree drip lines.

I’m not about to mess with Oregon’s forests nor crops. There are so many variables added when it’s not just a kernel anymore–I wanted to do this right.

Our county agriculture office seemed a bit bemused that I was so enthusiastic about my particular apricots–and maybe at my willingness to follow the rules? How many people do? But for respect for the redwoods if nothing else, was my point of view. Do unto others. Etc. (Maybe I was atoning for those kernels I did mail the last few years?)

They were certainly willing to help. No, apricots did not show up on the banned list. Soil was, though, and inspection for a long list of diseases was required.

They told me the fee for the phytosanitary inspection. No problem.

They walked me through my part of the forms: I was being an exporter because I was sending it out of the state. Yes write one box and one plant in that one box and how I was going to ship it. (Unspoken: because that’s so not what they usually deal with.)

Then just before I went there I had to carefully take the baby tree out of its pot, get rid of every bit of dirt bigger than the equivalent of a hole left by a size US 8 knitting needle without shredding the roots, wrap them in damp paper and then into a 2 gallon ziplock zipped most of the way for the transportation time, and I was off to San Jose. Across the street from the hazardous waste plant.

One of these things is not like the other…

They had told me they would prepare their form and mail it to me afterwards, shouldn’t take too many days.

Visitors were clearly rare. Signage was sparse. I climbed the steep stairs and went oh okay, there’s where I’m supposed to go.

You call via a wall phone with a number posted by the desk opposite, once you find it, and wait for someone to come out of the locked area.

I did and pulled out my knitting.

A few minutes in, someone came out to use the restroom across the hall. On coming back, she stopped a moment and asked, Was I making a cowl?

The secret word!

She told me with a big smile that she was a knitter, too, and you could just hear the capital in that K.

I told her, I miss Stitches, wondering if she got the reference; she instantly responded, Oh, I do, too! We were in strong agreement that someone had to re-start that business. There were so many of us! Clearly enough to make it worth someone’s while, and with that she headed back through the door I was waiting by, having enjoyed the conversation thoroughly.

I don’t know if that made the difference. I don’t know if word was conveyed by the five other people who went through that door in that time that I would not be antsy at the wait, to say the least.

All I know is that a new person came out that door, inspected my plant with its roots dangling nakedly in her hands and healthy as could be, she made me wait awhile again–and then chucked that thought, opened the door again, and invited me back there while she finished the form and double-checked with me on the name and address it was to go to.

I paid. I was done. It was done. I was free to mail it, just make sure that paperwork is inside because it could be opened at any point along the way and checked for that phytosanitary report and certificate.

I had been saving a long narrow box and the cushioning for it since Christmas.

Between yesterday’s full dormancy and this afternoon’s 64F, it had started to show the first tiny signs of spring and it could not safely spend three days in the dark.

They promise me it will be in Portland tomorrow.

Bonne Noel!