Cherry Jubilee

 

Rainier cherries ripe for the picking.  We went up to the Leona Valley, about 15 minutes from Palmdale, CA to pick cherries on Saturday.  I’ve been doing this for the past few years.  Cherry picking is pretty painless if you’re just doing it for your own use.

The Leona Valley Cherry Growers Association has directions and picking conditions, etc. They will be open this week and weekend June 10-16th, at least.

Last weekend, the valley was under evacuation due to the Powerhouse Fire, so they lost one of their three or four annual opportunities to let people pick fresh pesticide free fruit.  We went to one of the smaller orchards and picked 15 pounds in about 20 minutes!

We hear good things about the Mexican restaurant at the crossroads in little Leona Valley.

Very inviting! Find your tree and pick!

They warned us about the cannons that go off periodically to keep the birds off the crops.  Probably cheaper than pesticides, too.

Hydra’s haul.  It’s hard to stop picking!

I mixed Big Utahs, Rainiers, and Bings randomly.

The lane leads to where you weigh and pay.  Some farms are big enough that they offer trams to the orchards. Some are small enough that you don’t have to walk this far.

Is that a sink full of joy, or what?

Do Not Argue with Me About Chicken Wire

My gardening this year is both early and late.

My friend Barb gave me six onion starts in March I think.  Really early for Acton, where our frost date is April 15.  They do not have a frost date in Camarillo, where Barb lives.

I put them in the ground and the rabbits ate all the ones that weren’t behind the fence, and then some of them didn’t survive in spite of the protection.

Here’s the one yummy onion that I grew.  My first onion!

And how tough am I, huh?  Flaunting said vegetable almost in the face of the wild onion-eating bunny!  (See her, she’s so jealous right now.)

I braised the onion with some cabbage and carrots from my farm bundle.  So flipping tasty.

And guess what?  Leftovers.

People who don’t like leftovers are beyond me.  Some things are actually better on the second day.  Plus they are right there waiting for you when you want them.  What’s better than that?  Not much, I tell you.

I also planted sugar snap peas from seeds very early this year.  I prepped the garden space really well and the Earthboxes, too.

Then The Harmonistas got some gigs, and we were practicing or performing, and I organized Songmakers camp outs in April and May, and it was either too hot or too cold, or that one day it rained…

So here’s the late part. I just put my three Persian cucumber and two Paul Robeson tomatoes in today, June 4th.  Looked for Juliette grape tomatoes several times to no avail, which also put me behind.  Those  can take the heat in my back yard.

It feels weird not to have a better garden at this point, but whatever we get from this will be good.

Oh, I also found a garden center in Santa Clarita on Sunday that I will never go back to, where the staff made me feel like if I asked for something they didn’t have I was stupid for wanting it. They probably thought I didn’t know that it is very late to plant and that seeing as it was 100 degrees out it was not advisable to breathe deeply let alone tuck plants into the soil.

All irking enough, but then the guy told me that the fencing in this photograph is not chicken wire.  He said chicken wire is not hexagonal, it’s square.  I said, nicely, “I think you’re thinking of rabbit wire.”  “No, you’re mistaken,” he insisted, and described them backwards with quite a bit of ego in his voice.   (Go ahead, do a Google Images search if you must, I’ll wait.)

I did not go all “I AM A HOOSIER AND I GREW UP IN FARM COUNTRY AND I FREAKING KNOW CHICKEN WIRE WHEN I SEE IT, AND FURTHERMORE I KNOW THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN HAY AND STRAW AND I USED TO BE ABLE TO WHISTLE USING A BLADE OF GRASS” on his scrawny hide.

But I was this. close.

Elephants Charging

My friend Shu-Ju Wang of Fingers to the Bone Studio allowed me to print out this collage of a drawing in progress that she did while hanging out at a gallery at which her work was on display a couple of weeks ago.  I just love it.

Now it’s inside my writing notebook, because it says something to me about the creative process that I’m not going to mess up by trying to articulate.  You probably get it just from looking at this.

My writing group has reformed with new members.  I am feeling like I’m coming home to my writing again after spending some time freaking out  in the wilds, then finally focusing on other creative outlets like music, cooking and gardening.

Like I say to my fabulous nieces and nephews, defend your art, whatever it is.  Participating in the creative process, even if you have to change your approach to it, will get you through tough times like nothing else.

LDub’s Hideaway

The Harmonistas met up at LDub’s house to rehearse and enjoy each other’s company.  Of course, I snuck out into the yard to take some photos. Here’s living proof that tucking everything away out of sight isn’t always necessary.  Love this!

The trumpet vines that cover Ldub’s pergola ruled the day.

Oh, how the mighty are fallen.

Tucked away in a quiet corner.

Nice little table tableaux.

Backyard, Bunnyfied.

Yeah, I went out and sat around and took pix of the critters in the back yard again.  This is the bunny edition.

I started calling this one Scratch because she has a black line across her forehead.  She’s the only one I’ve named.

One of her bayyyybeeees!   (Oh jeez, did I just write that out loud?)

I dunno, I like this one.

Is this cute?  Is it?  Sometimes it’s like they’re posing just for me.

This is why we have chicken wire around everything.  They are not as destructive and greedy as the ground squirrels.

Happy Hour is for the Birds

Work’s done for the day.  Hydra cut the yard, I sanded a bench in preparation for painting. We decided to bring Dodger out in his travel cage and sit at the table on our little deck.  After the sprinkler ran, the critters came by for happy hour.

House finch is on the fence.

Disputes do sometimes occur.  “Are you looking at my sweetheart?!”

The dove is aloof on the roof.

It’s windy up at the top of the slope.

So quiet that we can hear the raven’s wings beat the air as it passes over head.

Yeah, we like it here.

Signs Along the Way

 

 

On the way home from running errands, I asked Hydra to drop me off about a mile from home, and I took the trail home.

 

 

 

 

 

Found this sign about 50 feet from the road.  I don’t think they’ll have any trouble enforcing this.

 

 

 

 

 

A buried real estate sign along the path.  From the days when the area code was still 805, more than 12 years ago.  A local who didn’t want to see the land developed may have, erm, moved this.

The Light That Day

The sun played hide-and-seek with us all the way to Pasadena.

Riding shotgun means I get to try for shots I usually can only dream of.  In the 210 tunnel, almost there.

Downtown Los Angeles from the first turnout on the 2, on the way home.

This is the kind of day Ansel Adams waited for.  This was taken with my little Lumix point and shoot.  Ansel would have made hay with this day.

Fall Color in Van New Eyes

The English lady on our new GPS has gotten it into her head that Van Nuys is pronouned Van New Eyes, which caused quite a bit of levity in our vehicle yesterday as we used her to find a place to eat before the Songmakers board meeting.

For those of you not from these parts, it’s pronounced Van Nighs.  Wait.  Did that help at all?

 

Pomegranate Love

Pomegranates.  Worth the effort.

That bowl was filled with a pomegranate from the farmer’s market, but we hope to some day have our own  home grown fruit.  My brother, Bauer, grew this pomegranate sapling from a cutting and sent it home with us last month.  It spent a couple of nights in Santa Fe on our way home. We plead with the agricultural officer at the California border and he kindly brought out a wheelbarrow and cleaned the dirt off of the roots along with a fig and two coffee plants.  We stopped at the first place we could, a Rite Aid in Needles, CA (about six miles from the border) to buy a bucket and a bottle of water to get them the rest of the way home.

Some of the bottom leaves turned yellow and fell off, but now he little pomegranate that could looks happy in it’s new home, with two little coffee plants.  The fig didn’t make it.  Maybe in a few years we’ll be showing off home grown pomegranates!