Photos
For Earth Day, bees on the elderberry and the avocado.
This HUGE bumble bee really wants the Toyon flowers to open up! Been buzzing around for several minutes.
Today’s Clarkias and Poppies.
Homemade Naan atop a piping hot Baking Steel.
First bloom of our backyard California wild roses (Rosa Californica)!
Today, first time in weeks flour and sugar could be bought 🥳 go King Arthur flour!
Snakefly hunting insects on a bed of elderberry flowers.
Warmer than usual weather means Peppers are rapidly sprouting. We direct seeded this year as an experiment.
Yarrow is now in bloom and the carpet beetles are gorging themselves on pollen.
Seen at lunch: iNaturalist guesses this is a Leafhopper Assassin bug on our California grape. Assassins in our back yard! A good bug!
The swarm in our little blue oak is getting a new home.
With [Watchsmith](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/watchsmith/id1483088503), I get a hamburger when my move/exercise/stand goals are met.
When your yards are a pollen and nectar paradise, this can happen. Time to get in touch with a local apiary!
Bee butt on a front yard Gilia 🐝
This western toad is why I carefully cut back the parsley. I knew it was in there somewhere. I stopped at the toad and gently covered with trimmings to maintain shade and moisture.
Got to pay attention to notice avocado flowers. Our “Bacon” Avocado tree is flowering. Our “Mexicola” variety is not— too bad because they’re type A and B so would have pollinated each other.
Falafel soft tacos tonight since we had dry chickpeas, the herb garden was begging for it, and we always have corn tortillas. Topped with red onion quick pickle and herbed buttermilk 🧆
Think we might get cherries in mid to late May! A few tree branches have extremely undersized leaves because of bark beetle damage starving the branches of resources. Mainly from metallic bark beetles. Two branches completely died last year so they got lopped.
Got a few Apricot fruits to set... in a few weeks they may drop as the tree balances its energy.
First elderberry flowers in the backyard.
