Pomegranate Bouquet

 

This spring our pomegranate trees bloomed more abundantly than I have ever seen before.

But pomegranates are funny about temperature. If it's too chilly, the blossoms won't set. This year was one of those years. We had a sudden rash of chilly days -- cool enough to wipe out my cucumber babies I'd just planted out in the garden. Neither the pomegranates nor the cherry tree (which was blooming profusely at the same time) set many fruits at all. 

There will be some poms, I'm sure, so long as the vermin don't get them. The cherries, what few there were, were eaten by Joma and the mockingbirds. 

Oh, yes, mockingbirds. For some reason, our neighborhood has an overgrowth of mockingbirds. Neighbors across the street have a young cherry tree that did set a lot of fruit, and they got none of it because the scrub jays and especially the mockingbirds stripped it bare. "And that bird was looking at me," the neighbor said. "Looking at me, right in the eyes!" He was outraged, just as I was years ago when the mockingbird of that time stared at me while stealing grapes off our vine. Now I just stare back and when a hawk flies over, I instruct her to eat more mockingbirds. She doesn't listen, she's too preoccupied with the thought of ground squirrels, which are dumber and more easy to catch.

This farming business is risky, even when it's in a suburban setting.

But I must admit, those blossoms were gorgeous, food for the soul if not for the whole neighborhood. 

 

A Late But Welcome Rain

 

The weather forecasts this past week have been really tentative. The approaching system ... we don't know yet where it is going to make landfall, we don't know precisely when it will arrive, we don't know yet how much rainfall it will produce... We've been listening to that, and as time for the storm (or "disturbance") drew near, we covered the tomatoes in case of hail.

Hail has been known to wipe out our cherry tree's blossoms, hail has beat the living crap out of our plum tree's fruit, so hail was not going to be permitted to blast my beautiful tomato plants this spring.

Rain began to fall last night, and continued through until morning. Around seven a.m. I heard the rain stop, so I rousted Kermit and took him outside. To my surprise, a branch was down, broken off on the north-side podocarpus. What you can see in the photo is only half of it. The other half is on the other side of the little fence.

I managed to free it from the fence, and had just enough moxie left in the old tanks to drag it to the front driveway, where it took up a lot of parking space. 

After breakfast, I went out to see where the branch had broken. I thought it might be one of the branches that rise up from the trunk, but this one had been a lateral branch. Apparently the weight of the all-night rain was enough to weigh its leaves down to a breaking point. 

There's plenty of tree left -- that's one of the reasons I like podocarpus as a privacy tree: lush, fast growth. In a month or so, you and I will not really be able to see where the branch came down. 

Thank you, God, for the rain. 

 

Four-Leaf Clover Luck

 Yesterday Bernie was working on one of my garden boxes, turning over the soil and amending it in preparation for my faux Campari tomato plants (and a couple of pea plants, I think), and when he took a break, brought me a four-leaf clover he'd found in the yard. It's the one on the left, and it looks a little smushed because I immediately pressed it into Mircea Eliade's book, Essential Sacred Writings from Around the World.

We had been watching a Korean "rom-com" not long ago in which the heroine found a four-leaf clover and gave it to the man she would love. I told Bernie I hadn't seen a four-leaf clover since I was a kid back in Pennsylvania, so the man I love found one for me.

This morning, as I was setting my two rambunctious Bobcat tomato "seedlings" out in the yard for a little sun, Bernie pointed out the patch of clover where he'd found the four-leaf. He laughed suddenly, and bent and picked another one -- that's the one in the middle. Wow, there's some luck ... and then he found another oddball, the one on the right: kind of hard to see, but it is actually a FIVE-leaf clover.

"Does a five-leaf clover mean extra luck?" he asked. "Or does it mean impending catastrophe?"

Right after that I came in and thought I'd blog about the find.

And then could not get my scanner to work.

Was that the catastrophe, or was it fabulous luck that the man I love found an obscure setting in Photoshop that I had never seen before (in the 20 years I've been using it) after an hour or more of online hunting for answers to my problem.

I'd say after nearly 51 years of being very happily married to him that Bernie is the greatest luck I have ever had.