Right on time, the first tulip-sized California poppies have opened. Unusually, and a month early, the sky lupines have started blossoming, as well. The habitat areas, field margins, the hedgerow, and the orchard are starting to fill with Spring blooms. We hope for the return of rain before Spring’s beginning date arrives.

For a few nights, the air has carried a winter scent, like snow; frost decorates leaves in the grassy areas and wild radish leaves wilt from cold damage. We check the margins of avocado and citrus leaves to see if they are damaged. But, its only been evaporative frost- we still haven’t hit critical freezing temperatures! The cool temperatures are helping some fruit trees to sleep well, but others are waking up. The Santa Rosa plum popped into bloom – it only needs 250 accumulated hours of temperatures below 45 degrees Fahrenheit. Other stone fruit trees are budding and/or blooming in the orchard.

The semi-cacophony of blackbirds continues, and other birdy things are happening, too. The blackbirds mostly gather in one tree but as you look around, the party has outliers as bicolor blackbirds court one another away from the crowd. I watched for a while as one outlier male bicolor blackbird did his thing: the trilling scree song while bowing slightly, wings shrugged out, flashing his bright red wing patches. A few feet away, a female watched in rapture…it was just this pair alone at the top of an isolated tree, though they kept glancing towards their flock in the tree nearby. Buzzing by, not entirely oblivious to the blackbird antics…hummingbirds, up to their own shenanigans.

Somewhere, I heard that the blossoming of the flowering currants triggers estrous in hummingbirds. Allen’s hummingbirds returned with those blooms from somewhere Way South. I’m not sure how the year-round resident Anna’s hummingbirds like them. Bright flashing throats and aerial sparring is constant around our yards and up and down the hedgerow. Flowering currant isn’t common in the wild around here, though you can find other, less showy species in that genus in the forests surrounding the farm- the hummingbirds like those, too. With the early nesting of hummingbirds under way, it is time to closely inspect any brush we are clearing before chopping it down. There never seems to be enough time to cut out brush for fire safety, especially when being careful with nesting birds.

The farm fields are sleeping…the cover crops have slowed down with so little rain. The soil surface is dry, road traffic makes dust again. Limes are ripe, tangerines and oranges have color but no sugar, yet. Meyer lemons are hanging heavy and ready to go into lemonade or pie.

The Molino Creek Canyon has changed so much since the fire of August 2020. Big trees and many burn damaged redwood branches have crashed down across the hillside around our farm’s beautiful wintertime waterfall, which is flowing and noisy still. It is difficult to hike there, but we’ll open up the paths again soon with chainsaws and muscle. I’ve been exploring Molino creek, which was heavily scoured by the big rains in December. Now, it is so much easier to walk by the creek- no vegetation and a rocky sidewalk of a path alongside the clear running stream. There are potential dunking holes for the summer and wide rocky beaches. The large expanse of sandstone bedrock has accumulated a covering of redwood seeds. Last year, the redwoods made an Epic Cone Crop, with cones much larger than anyone had seen before. The branches were heavy with cones. For the last month, those seeds have released from the opening cones: dropping and scattering onto the ground. Now there is a red-brown scattering of the delicate seeds. In moist cracks, the seeds are germinating: a new crop of redwoods, just as their mother intended- a rare sight as redwood seedlings only ever get going on bare ground following a fire.

-I published this at my regular blog at Molino Creek Farm’s webpage.