Gardening
Tree Chilling Hours and a Bad Bug
We’re around 770 chilling hours this season — almost 100 more than last year at this time. We hope this means we get a good crop off our ~800 chilll hour apricot (it was our first fruit tree and we had no concept of chill hours; with the usual climate and especially with climate change we’re now focusing on <500 chill hour trees). I put compost around the new nectarine, the new asparagus bed, and on the edible garden in advance of last night's rain; the clay loam soil needs some organic matter. We got 0.5 inches of rain last night. Meanwhile, here is a photo of the larval form of a beetle eating our poor cherry tree’s sap wood. It was a few centimeters long. Reminds me of Star Trek: Wrath of Khan.
The birds are gorging on seeds in our front and backyard gardens. So happy to provide them sustenance rather than a lawn desert!
A front yard native garden update! Fuchsias & Cal Buckwheat are still flowering. Coyote bushes are struggling to flower (tiny pollinators love them). The Blue Oak has no complaints. Poppies & yarrow are back after a couple of soggy thunderstorms. Toyon barely has berries.
Apple knew what they were doing delaying Deep Fusion photography feature in iPhone 11. After I saw real world results, I needed to upgrade from my blurry XS. Garden and cat pictures will be amazing. Deep Fusion certainly kept the iPhone 11 in the news cycle longer.