Tag Archive | fruit trees in bloom

Right Tools for the Job: Garden Gate Edition

Apr30

The tiny blueberry bush arrived from Territorial Seeds yesterday. It was bare rootball in a plastic sleeve, and it needs to harden off a few days to acclimate to sun and temperatures before I can plant it in its prepared container, so I put it in a clean clay pot and tamped in its special soil around the edges. I’ll keep it moving in and outside til after the next cold snap later this week, at least. Look at those tiny white bell flowers! I’ve never seen a blueberry plant before, so I was delightfully surprised by the flowers. And tiny germinal blueberries, too! But after its portrait, I snipped off all the flowers and budding berries, as recommended, in order to encourage strong root growth its first year.

I’m grateful for the gorgeous trees blossoming sequentially through this past month, and thrilled to see the crabapple so lush with flowers and buds.

I’m grateful for the right tools for the job, and for these great hinges from Lee Valley. I made a couple of small mistakes, but got the worst-sagging half of the gate hung this afternoon. I’m grateful for a socket set, a wood-bit set, a yardstick, a Makita screwgun, and the little string level I bought almost thirty years ago and used a lot while building my house. It was my ingenious trick to keep the drill bit level as I drilled through the juniper gateposts for the hinge bolts. It set perfectly on top of the bit shank with the rounded legs and I held it steady as I drilled: the bubble shimmied like a belly dancer but stayed between the lines, and when the bit was in deep enough I set the level aside.

I’m grateful for my father teaching me a thing or two about tools when I was a child. I am always grateful for this whenever I open my tool box, but especially so when I undertake a project that uses more than a hammer, wrench, or screwdriver. I’m grateful he taught me his cardinal rule of ‘the right tool for the job,’ and how to measure, and so much more, and I’m grateful that I can remember him with love and gratitude when I think of him in his workshop in the basement, where I would often sit and watch and help and learn.

Wanted Poster

Apr27

It’s been interesting to watch my mind’s permutations of the story of what happened to this necklace. The photo is from six years ago, at Felix’s One Hundredth Birthday party. I can’t imagine it’s been missing for that long, but this is the most recent evidence I can find of having it. I’ve actively searched the house, Mothership, safety deposit box, everywhere I can possibly look, for the past couple of months. Before that, I think I started passively looking for it a year or two ago, assuming it would turn up eventually, safely stowed away in one of the places I recently turned over looking for it.

When searches failed, I felt this shadowy memory creep up of having given it to someone on whom it looked better than it did on me; at the same time, I imagined myself loaning it to someone who asked to borrow it. These things would have had to have happened prior to 2020, though, because of the Covid time warp. So somewhere between six and four years ago, I misplaced, mislaid, loaned, or gave away this precious necklace that I truly valued. I bought it at an art opening, a centerpiece of the beadwork of an old, dear friend; it felt expensive at the time, but it was well worth it. Now she’d like to display it in a big show of her new and old work; hence the urgent search.

A baby apricot forms from one node as tender leaves emerge from another.
Dramatic mammatus clouds flow over between rain and hail showers this evening.

As I worked on this ‘Wanted Poster’ last night, a dark suspicion arose. Could it be? The last time I know that I wore this I was with a man I’d been dating a few months. Not long after that he ghosted me, and I discovered later that every single thing he’d said to gain my trust had been a lie. Instead of being single for three years, as he’d said on our very first date, he had been in a steady relationship for eight or nine years with a woman in Grand Junction. I agonized over my naivety for months, grappling with humiliation, rage, and shame. I still haven’t truly recovered in some way from the inconceivable depth of his calculated deception.

And so, I imagined suddenly, looking at pictures of that party, not remembering if I ever saw the necklace after he vanished, and knowing full well this is just the way the mind works, that he stole the necklace and gave it to his girlfriend as a welcome home gift. That last night he kissed me goodbye, after telling me that he had to go to Denver for a few days to be with his cousin who was very sick and probably dying: I never heard from him again. But I did hear from his girlfriend a couple of weeks later, after a chain of events led to our discovering each other, that there was no dying cousin: he’d been with her after she returned from a long work trip.

I’m grateful I have better things to think about now, like these cherry buds just waiting for the next sunny day to pop open.

I’m sad about the missing necklace, and a little concerned that I simply cannot remember the last time I knew where it was. But I’m grateful to have learned recently that our memories are far less accurate than we tend to think they are. “People believe that memory should be effortless, but their expectations for how much they should remember are totally out of whack with how much they’re capable of remembering,” says researcher Charan Ranganath, professor of psychology and neuroscience at UC Davis. And I’m grateful that I have some photos of the necklace (even though I had to crop out the creep). And I’m grateful that meditation and mindfulness practice have given me the ability to loosen my grip on afflictive emotions like resentment, shame, and clinging. The necklace may turn up somewhere, sometime: Maybe I did give it or loan it and the poster will bring it forth; its creator imagines it is somewhere “tucked tenderly & safely in a soft, dark bag – just waiting to be found.”

Three Days Under the Crabapple Tree

May9
Way back in April, honeybee in Tulipa tarda.
Drama in the dandelions
Grape hyacinths keep on blooming despite a deep freeze, and bees keep coming.
Excitement in the tulips
What exactly is going on here in the apricot tree?
Big bees and little bees. Bombus griseocollis?
Anthophora, a digger bee. For awhile, the apricot tree was ‘the bee tree.’ Thankfully, its bloom survived an 11 degree night, perfect timing, and looks like another bountiful apricot crop this year.
Bombus huntii are prolific this spring, thank goodness.

Bee sightings ramped up over the past month, from crocuses and grape hyacinths to dandelions and tulips, to blooming fruit trees. First the apricot, then the wild plum, then the crabapple. A butterfly I haven’t seen much in the past is also prevalent in the past week, the Anise swallowtail. Hummingbirds have also come to the fruit trees, but so fast I haven’t been able to catch one with the camera.

Unperturbed by the presence of two catahoulas in the yard, and a wild woman with a camera, this doe continues to browse where she pleases in the yard.

Despite the lockdown, or perhaps because of it, I am busier than ever outside in the garden. I can’t tell you where my days go, except to say that they are filled with as much color, light, love and joy as I can manage between sunup and bedtime, most of it outside in the garden. Work is of course diminished, as is almost everyone’s in this dire time, but I am doing my best to make the most of extra hours in the day. Fortunately my body is in better shape than it’s been for years, thanks to physical therapy and a healthier attitude, and I’m able to work more in the yard than now than ever before. I’m so tired by the end of the day that I just don’t sit down and post the pictures I’ve taken. Off to bed now, with more thoughts and images to come. Wishing for everyone to lay low, look close to home for joy and beauty, and stay well during this continuing pandemic. Please don’t be impatient and too quick to seek the old normal, which I hope never comes back. The planet and all its non-human inhabitants has appreciated the break from our reckless pace.