Annual caramel making. These seem 👌and perfectly plastic. Here’s a series of photos showing sugar mixture color at ~300°F, 320°F, near 340°F, after cream & butter added, and cooling to finish. Stressful making these as one errant crystal can cause it all to crystallize.
Black Phoebe! These flycatchers are elusive in our backyard.
Unidentified hummingbird enjoying rosemary flowers today. Maybe a Black Chin. Doesn’t seem to have the colorations of an Anna’s.
Split Pea Soup made with a ham hock! Love the cold season 🥰
House Sparrows frenetically bathing under the mandarin this morning.
Front yard: today and April 19. I cleaned up a lot of it today. This yard of cultivated native plants is so much more rewarding than a lawn.
Pulling out grass from the cultivated native sage is exhausting. At least I’m perfumed with sage now.
The Annie Cat maximizing sunlight.
Last year this was not our view into the backyard from the house. Now we regularly see White Crowns, House Sparrows, European Collared Doves, Scrub Jays, and less often Lesser Gold Finches. Thanks, bird feeder! What this means for spring/summer tree fruit harvest… 😬
New bird in our backyard! Yellow-rumped Warbler. A pair was feasting on our cultivated California Grapes that now have raisins.
December 2nd, 2013: at the Dresden Christmas Market.
Partner made Naan today (along with Turkey Tikka Masala).
Stuffing waffles. So crispy & savory.
Mandarins and Meyer Lemons are ripening nicely. Maybe one more month until the Mandarins are sweet enough.
Leftovers 🎉. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
The makings of Thanksgiving dinner for a couple is bread for stuffing and Turkey stock for just about everything. My partner is very busy; I don’t cook! ❤️
Pecan Squares instead of Peacan Pie. And as we’re not having Thanksgiving with anyone, dessert is a day early! 😋
Sunset during our isolation vacation at the North Coast of California.
Fox Sparrows (?) enjoying the cultivated California Grape raisins. We’ve also perhaps identified House Finches… in addition to the many White Crown Sparrows (not photographed).
Cistus × purpureus (Purple-flowered Rock-rose)
We brought ribeyes and a cast-iron with us (and the rest of what’s on the plate. Yeah that’s canned baked beans, so what?)👌
Hot chocolate on the North Coast of California.
Moonlight over the Pacific. Above the moon, Jupiter and then Saturn.
Sundown at Trinidad, California. We’re hunkered down here for a few nights, completely self-sufficient and not likely to go anywhere. Not a bad choice with this view. I have a feeling this is the last time we’ll risk going somewhere until vaccinations.
Good morning. This morning’s sun rise almost makes up for my neighbor being obsessive with their sheet metal shelters and sheds.
11/15/20
This last orchard growing season, I watered using daily fixed schedules that took into account average daily evapotranspiration and estimated daily plant water use. I set up schedules for each month in the summer, since evapotranspiration and water usage changes significantly month to month. Previous years I had used a dynamic schedule determined by Rachio’s Flex Daily algorithm and Advanced Zone settings. The Flex algorithm greatly favors deep waterings and the interval is guided by daily estimated evapotranspiration. The trees often suffered on extreme California summer days under the Flex Daily algorithm — it watered too deeply and too infrequently so trees couldn’t get daily access to water with very high summer evapotranspiration rates. Flex does not account for extremely hot days where available water depletes, leaving trees struggling without water until the next day or longer. Fortunately, the Rachio irrigation controller makes it dead easy to create any number of watering schedules. The results of using fixed schedules tuned for each summer month this last growing season were pretty good. While the mandarins are undersized after the previous year’s bumper crop of well sized fruit, our Valencias and Meyer Lemons did great. The pineapple guavas also responded very well to daily watering with a surprising amount of growth. The avocados, while very finicky, did fine too. But it turns out no matter how much water they get, when temperatures go over 100 F their leaves scorch (so we had to rig up shade cloth over the young trees using ladders). Besides the avocados, the trees didn’t suffer greatly from heat stress with daily watering. I do wonder if the fixed daily waterings didn’t penetrate the soil deep enough, resulting in undersized mandarins, so next year I will try watering every other day and doubling the watering times. This should encourage deeper root development and perhaps provide more water to trees from throughout the soil column.
Toad in our bird bath tonight. That’s a first. We usually empty the baths to keep mosquitoes at bay and keep cats from being too keen on the backyard at night. Not tonight!
11/11/20
I planted a replacement Lapins Cherry today. Bought it from Stark Bro’s and it has a great unblemished, no prune cut trunk. That is never the case if I buy locally, even from a family operated nursery. As planted, it’s a 42” tall stick. It’ll develop branches next spring. I finally got to use our homemade compost that’s been over a year in the making!
Pumpkin pie! And rump roast. Sunday is the best.
The rainy season in California is right around the corner, so I just cleaned the rain gage & other weather station components of summer’s dust and ash. Meanwhile, the mandarins are slowly ripening.
