The tension of summer is upon us. We relish the beautiful days, like today, with an ocean breeze and high temperatures in the upper 70s to low 80s. The nights are cool enough to be our air conditioning. We awake to cool houses that slowly warm as the day progresses until the (welcome) onset of cooler evenings. The crickets are loud, the birds silent in the midday warmth, and cicadas fill the heat of the day with their one note, incessant, high metallic-whining song.

The magnificent pulse of pleasantly warm days and cool nights used to be normal, for decades it was normal. Recently, there is a prickle of worry that the HEAT will arrive: days of above 90s when the night never cool. We’ve had 4 of those in the last 3 years, 1 right before the 2020 fire and one just after. Those are tough. We might get one of those this weekend. The Weather Service can’t say. While they predict 110F inland, ”readings along the coast are a bit more tricky.” Sigh. All we can do is get the irrigated ground as wet as possible to buffer our poor crops against what might be wilting, damaging heat.

Pomelogically Speaking

Meanwhile, in the cool shade of apples trees…We gaze across a lush and happy orchard filled with quarter-sized fruit peaking out from beneath the protective cover of deep green leaves. The many hands of orchard collective workers have thinned almost the entire orchard to well-spaced fruit that is gaining girth expeditiously. By taking off most of the fruit and leaving a few, we relieve the mother trees of too much work. You can almost hear them sigh and relax.

The apple trees are growing so well that their bark is splitting, the first furrows appear on our aging tree trunks. So, this is how trees show their wrinkles. We are only a month away from the first apples ripening: The Gravensteins. We will have just two of those types of apple trees bearing this time around, but there are many more small ones getting bigger – 3 more years and the crop will begin to burgeon. After that, the Gala apples will be on hand in 2 months, and that’s the beginning of the big apple party. Apple trees do not like warm roots, but this spring saw the canopies grow so much that there is good shade across most of the orchard floor. The edge trees suffer more, but we’ll dispense thick mulch over their tender roots soon enough.

Plum Nothing!

Soon, there will be plums but none right now. The challenge with plums is netting them. We need to create an easy-to-deploy single tree netting system, so we can get plums this year. There is a promising fruit set.

Maw and Caw Update

Taking my morning stroll this morning, I heard a raven scream from down near the netted cherry grove. ‘Oh NO!’ I thought…’What’s wrong?!’ Perched on the cherry net structure were 4 ravens, not just our farm pair, Maw and Caw. Did they have twins this year? Was that single scream an obnoxious raven yell, so typical of their adolescent young? More study is needed.

Other Wildlife Observations

Foxes and coyotes calling, fledged barn swallows, frequent Lazuli song. It sounds like someone is strangling a cat, but its just a gray fox calling. It was very startling, though. It’s the first sign I’ve had in a long time that the foxes are still around. Uh-oh for the fruit, though.

Sylvie woke one night to the pitched song of coyotes.

One of the 4 fledged barn swallows from my porch hung upside down like a bat for an hour yesterday. What’s up with that. I worried that it was sick, but then saw it idly preening itself while hanging upside down. Odd bird! It seems to the smallest and is quite a rebel. The other three fly one way, it tilts its head at them going that way, chips, and flies a different way.

The laughing calls of lazuli bunting are very common on the farm. They well compliment the high giggling peeps of the many lesser goldfinches that are feasting on Madia seed happily.

Farming

Dusty clouds billow in the wake of mowing tractors, weed-tilling tractors. Bent forms slowly hoe their way down the rows in the morning heat. Shimmering waves of warmth bend the images of quickly growing crops, not yet covering the ground, but soon! This is the time of cash outlay, the gamble that the harvest will bring the returns to pay back all the labor going into the crops right now. Killing gophers, weeding, watering…repeating…over and over, the harvest weeks away.

Walnuts

We have a lot of black walnuts growing on our farm, never harvested. Still, they are beautiful trees!

-this post also placed at the Molino Creek Farm web space.