Currently reading: A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin 📚

I finished reading: The Power by Naomi Alderman ★★★★★ 📚

How it started (Mar 2020) and how it’s going (Mar 2021) in the backyard. All lawn is removed! Garden rows are ready for our indoor started peppers and tomatoes. 🌱

Sunday dinner: Sous vide Arm Roast followed by Boston Cream Pie.

roasted brussel sprouts, popovers, medium rare arm roast, au jousboston cream pie - yellow cake

Slowly preparing the backyard garden rows over the past few months 😅 Almost time to plant the peppers, tomatoes, and direct sow the herbs. No more lawn!!!!!! Tilling is amazing at removing thatch and dead lawn. 🌱

before most of the lawn removal, showing three garden rows but not yet preparedtilled and rocked with three garden rowscompost atop the three garden rows.

This is quite the year for catchweed (aka bedstraw aka genus Galium). It is everywhere! It even manages to grow in thick mulch with impressively long taproots.

Our “Bacon” Avocado flower buds are developing nicely. Also, the fig is waking up. 🌱🌳

avocado flower budsfig showing leaf growth

First apricot bloom. Hopefully, as in past years, far more will follow. Figure this flower puts pollinators on notice. 🌳🌱

The front yard blue oak has awakened! 🌱

This should be my last nectarine flower photo. This year. 🌳🌱

pink to magenta nectarine flower

Easiest way to deal with (perhaps) hundreds of mandarins once ripe: juice them. These have brightened to very red-orange I wonder if they are closer to tangerines?

mandarins cut in half. they're very seedy.mandarine juicemandarin tree ringed by rocks

The nectarine is up and at ‘em with many glorious blooms. 🌱🌳

Pompasetting nectarine.

Not my favourite 3/4”-minus gravel as the rocks definitely didn’t come from rivers with their headwaters in the California Nothern Coast Range but it’ll do in the backyard. Just as back breaking 😝

One of these days I’ll paint the PVC pipe to hide my poor PVC cementing job and a few barcodes. 🌱

First bloom today of our nectarine! 🌳 🌱

In 2012 our baby kitten (aka The Annie Cat) was just as clumsy as she is today (though she is more cautious now).

A banana slug from a 2010 trip to Jug Handle State Reserve, California (the north coast).

Got a warm spell in California so now I expect the nectarine to bloom any day now. The local almond trees already have.🌳🌱

There are so many colors in a landslide. This slide complex is at Bar Creek on the Mendocino NF, dropping a main road a dozen or so feet and topping it with mudslides - all in a day. Wish I got to the top but slopes were too steep and very slick. Quite the mess. Gorgeous day.