Here’s a drooping Brown Turkey fig — means it’s perfectly sweet & tender for eating. Don’t wait too long after a Brown Turkey fig reaches this stage else it may start to ferment and/or critters will get to it first.
Here’s a drooping Brown Turkey fig — means it’s perfectly sweet & tender for eating. Don’t wait too long after a Brown Turkey fig reaches this stage else it may start to ferment and/or critters will get to it first.
Brown Turkey figs are rapidly ripening. Patiently waiting for them to start drooping as a sign of ripeness.
The birds aren’t eating the grapes, so we might as well. 😋

Here’s an adjusted/“developed” version of NEOWISE (see the original straight from Night Mode)
Anaheim pepper with a surprise mantis for scale. Then a jalapeño. Just popped out of nowhere while I inspected the peppers this morning. It’s protecting our garden!


Experimental pepper garden update: Cayenne, jalapeño, Anaheim, Hungarian wax. We will ripen all peppers to red for making hot sauce and tastier eating. Direct seeded March 29.




Scrub jay!

Comet C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE) at 04:17. Very cool. The last quarter moon washed it out a lot. iPhone 11 Pro, night mode.
Watering the front yard and this hummingbird was really curious about the water and I swear the bird took a drink.

Our cultivated native California grapes are ripening! The birds will hopefully soon find them. Or we’ll enjoy them despite their massive seeds.

Our peppers are doing okay despite the very late seeding. Just a bit of brown rot initially but some Jobes organic fertilizer seems to have stopped that.


Somewhere around Tehachapi, CA.
The last two days of 110°F heat has also resulted in our cultivated native California grapes turning to raisins on the vine.
110°F yesterday and today. The avocados we planted 2-3 years ago transpire water more than they can replenish from the ground and so their leaves desiccate and die. Especially the young leaves on the Bacon (1) variety and random adult leaves on the Mexicola (2) variety. ☹️


Scrub Jay patiently waiting for the grapes to ripen.

The makings of Chai ice cream (admittedly without the tea).

Upon a recent update to VMware Fusion 11.5.5, sound began crackling in Windows 10. For some reason
sound.virtualDev = "hdaudio"
was missing from my .vmx file so Windows 10 was using VMWare’s generic audio drivers. Added that line into the .vmx file and all is well as now Windows is using its High Definition Audio device drivers. Thanks to this AppleVis post for giving me the idea.
Follow up: I just noticed that this AppleVis post reported nearly the same issue I had and the same fix. Apparently this may be known to be an issue at VMWare.
So many Brown Turkey Figs!

Leafhopper Assassin with a meal.



Hummingbird enjoying succulent flowers.