Harvest Time!

Today was harvest day for both my Bartlet pear and Satsuma plum trees!

I'm really happy with the plum tree, as thereby hangs a bit of a tale...

When I was a kid, I LOVED the dark, sweet plums you could find every so often at the grocery store. But more and more over the years, the only plums you could find were the tart ones. Okay, but not the amazing sweet ones I grew up with.

So when we moved here in 2012, I determined to find the right kind of plum tree so I could have those danged plums again. LOTS of online research later, I settled on a dwarf (I'm short and gotta be able to reach the dang things) self-pollinating Satsuma plum...it sounded like the right one...

When we installed our backyard landscaping/plants in 2015, I was able to find ONE of those at our local greenhouse center. Here it is, in the center:

Then...I waited.

For eight years.

Over the last couple of years, the plum tree has flowered...but no fruit.

Then suddenly this May--yay, fruit! And a LOT of it! Nobody was more surprised than me, I'd long since written the tree off.

 Cue more waiting, because long about July the plums just kinda reached a ripening point...and plateaued. They never got bigger than this.

They got redder, but just--stopped doing anything, it seemed. They were fairly hard and TART, not the deep purple, sweet plums I was hoping for. At the chicken swap in July, another lady was selling little baskets of the same Satsuma plums as I had...and they were just as tart as mine.

Sigh...

Damn. Well, at least the chickens enjoyed them--in fact, we couldn't keep them out of the tree.

As evidenced by Exhibit A, Garibaldi and her plum-covered beak.

 Cleaned her up a bit for more pictures. She sure is cute, although has gotten to be so obnoxious lately we've taken to calling her 'Garibitey'.

Obligatory Communist propaganda poster pose:

So anyway, here it's September and I've given up on the tree. I finally decided to make some plum jam out of the fruit. Went out to pick some to get started sorting so I can make jam, this is about 1/3 of the amount of fruit on the tree...

 Tasted a couple, just to make sure...

...and WHAM! Dark, SWEET plums! 

 Exactly as I remembered!

They didn't get any bigger, but the taste...is amazing! The kind of thing where they never make it into the house, you stand under the tree and gobble them down.

Now with some of our eggs for scale. The plums are roughly the size of ping pong balls.

I'm gonna sort out 'eating' fruit from 'canning' fruit--the bruised/damaged ones will become jam. Also some of the nice ones will go with my husband to work tomorrow to share with coworkers.

Can't wait to taste the jam from these, so proud of my little Satsuma plum for coming through for us at last!

My Bartlett pear tree, meanwhile...

Well--it's the struggling kid of the family. This is its entire crop, but I will say it's doing better than last year. The fruit isn't much bigger than the plums, and I wage an ongoing war with coddling moths. I don't spray/treat any of my fruit with insecticides, I settle for Tanglefoot-coated muslin strips wrapped around branches at strategic spots to stop the coddling moth larvae from crawling up to infest the fruit. It mostly works, but I know I'll still find some damaged fruit when I cut these open. Not sure if I'll get enough pears to make jelly with, but we'll see. In the future I may have to cave when it comes to the pear tree and spray it when it comes time for it to set fruit.

But overall, I'm really happy tonight! The Macintosh apple tree out front has maybe a dozen apples on it--it's a struggling child, as well--but they aren't anywhere near ripe yet.

Looking forward to jam-making this weekend! 

The next day, September 29--Post script--the kid and I just picked another 23 pounds of plums, just like yesterday and the tree is stripped of fruit...so our yield is around 46 pounds of plums.

Canning, ahoy!

 

Lockdown!

Because *all* the cool kids are doing it!

We ended up with 7 eggs with chicks inside, with another 4 I'm not sure about but *may* have chicks. I removed 5 other eggs that had quit.

So our hatch this year should be between 7 and 11 chicks!
I've stopped turning the eggs in the incubator and moved them to the bottom of the ReptiPro, and upped the humidity to 65%--all of this signals to the eggs that it's hatchin' time!

Two eggs have pipped already, #32 (you can see the crack across the number in the picture) and #10--but haven't started unzipping yet. Right now they are in the 'venting and drawing down' stage, where the chick is getting fresh air through the pip it made in it's shell, and the blood supply to the veins lining the inside of the eggshell are drying out as the chick draws the blood into it's body.

Since our high-altitude chicks always hatch a day or two early, I'd guess that the hatch will begin sometime around 11PM (PST) tonight and into tomorrow, April 10th.

Hit me up in the YouTube chat during the hatch with your chicken name suggestions, the goofier the better! If your name suggestion has been used already I'll let you know ('Dinner' and such are taken). I'll make a list and as each chick hatches, we'll draw a name out of a hat--one name to a person, use your imagination and make it a good one!

Chickam 10th Anniversary Chicks!

We ended up with a total of 8 chicks--5 are bantam Cochins from eggs I bought off ebay, 3 are from our own flock's eggs.

First, some pictures of Club Flamingo in full swing!

The marbles in the water dish are to keep the chicks from drowning, after about a week it's safe to remove the marbles. The water dispenser has electrolyte solution in it for the first few days, hatching is VERY stressful and the electrolyte solution is great for giving the chicks a bit of a boost. We feed medicated chick starter since our area has tons of wild birds and things like coccidiosis are a real problem.  The octopus gives the kids something to cuddle against since we have no broody mama this year. The flamingo lamp wasn't *quite* providing enough heat so we put in a second lamp, the base is weighted with rocks so the thing doesn't fall over and burn my house down.

Some of the chicks may get a food color spot on their chest to make it easier to tell them apart at this stage, the food color is harmless and will go as the chicks molt their chick fluff all over my house over the next few weeks.

Now for the chicks, in order of hatch from oldest to youngest with their egg number.

#37, Nora, a chick from our flock. I suspect that Cam is daddy and Pie or Rambo is mama.

#23, Fireball, a bantam Cochin

#21, Bobo, a bantam Cochin

 Bobo is wearing his superhero mask, please do not reveal his secret identity.

#24, Luna, a bantam Cochin. Luna is the chick that had pipped at the wrong (small) end of her egg and got stuck.  I had to assist her a bit by *carefully* removing the membrane that had dried and stuck to her face, then partially unzipping her shell about 1/3 of the way before returning the egg to the incubator and letting her finish up the rest.

#26, Pongo, a chick from our flock. I suspect that Milton our banty roo is dad, Popcorn or Tater Tot *might* be mom. Pongo's face isn't lopsided, just the dark markings on her beak are.

#19, Gumdrop, a bantam Cochin who is actually pretty big for a banty.

 

#25, Pickle, a tiny bantam Cochin

And finally #29, Zuul, a chick from our flock. Groot, our large Dark India Cornish roo might be dad, mom might be one of our Brahma mix girls--I suspect Cluckadorkle.

Zuul just had to poop during picture time...

All the chicks are doing great, there are still unhatched eggs in the incubator that I suspect are quitters. We'll run the incubator for another day, then remove any unhatched eggs and shut everything down.

We Have Embryos!

Welp, it's been 10 days and time to check for embryos, so tonight I candled the 39 eggs in the ReptiPro!

...and we have embryos, yay!

Right now we have a total of 15 live, oh-so-squirmy (they do NOT dig the bright light of candling) embryos. Of those, 3 are Dark India Cornish Bantams, 7 are Bantam Cochins (with a possibility of Frizzles) and 5 are eggs from our flock--mostly larger eggs but there is one *tiny* banty egg that we added to the ReptiPro at the last minute.

Further, there are another 13 eggs that I'm *pretty* sure are duds--some have detached aircells--but I'm leaving them in the incubator for now and will recandle them in 4 days; I'll pull any duds at that time.

Eleven other eggs were duds for sure and had never developed, I pulled those. Of the duds, three had a broken yolk (shipped eggs, likely scrambled by the USPS), one was bad (one of ours, I suspect bacteria got in through the shell), one of ours was infertile, and the rest were fertile but never developed.  Three (all Dark India Cornish) had detached aircells, more victims of rough handling in shipping.

Twelve days to baby chicks!!!
...or a bit less, given that there are banty eggs in there, and the little buggers like to hatch at 19-20 days instead of the standard 21--!

Origami On The Sly...

Welp, off to the dentist...they have their Christmas tree up, every year they have their patients who are scheduled take an ornament off their tree as a gift.

Today I'm going to sneak these two guys on to their tree and see if they notice. Heh...

I did the same thing at our local library last year, gotta get over there and add something else this year!

I've got a slew of other little doves that I hide in plastic Easter eggs to protect them against the weather and leave at the park and at other odd little places we stop by...loads of fun!

And just 'cause I like him so much and ran across him sitting on a table today, here is a very fancy turkey fellow I folded about two years ago.

So dapper--!

Etsy, I Am Here!

Finally got my origami shop opened on Etsy!  Now to see how it goes...

Here it is!

Gonna sell stuff like this...

and these...

these...

I Have Pears!

After only two years in the ground, our Bartlett pear tree is producing, yay!

Tonight the kid and I harvested 16 of them.  Growing pears is a first for me.  Other than soap spray for bugs/disease in the Spring, we didn't use any chemicals, so of course we get some wonky fruit in there...but for the most part they look OK.  To check and see if they are aready to pick, you cradle the fruit in your hand and tip it horizontally to the branch--if it comes off easily, it's ready.  There are still another 10 or so pears on the tree.  Now to wait for a few days while they finish off ripening--you don't want to allow pears to ripen on the tree or they get mushy and mealy.

So in a few days, we'll see!  Can't wait!

...and YES, we had an anxious chicken audience below, praying we'd drop just one....

Lilacs! I Have Lilacs!

Well shoot.  Might not be a big deal to anybody but me...

But *I'm* excited, because the lilacs that are blooming and growing were tiny starts that I bulldogged out of my mom's yard last year, transported home in 100 degree heat and planted as wilted, shriveled twigs in my yard last summer.  They did NOT take kindly to being transplanted and I really didn't think they'd survive our extra-long and harsh winter this year...

But dang, not only did they make it, they are thriving and one of them is blooming!

Extra impressive because the entire plant is only about a foot high!

I've got this one planted outside my bedroom window, when I looked out the window and noticed the flowers I actually squealed, "I'VE GOT LILACS!"

My husband just kinda looked at me, like, 'You know that's treatable, right?'

Oh well.  Heck, I'm excited.  There is one more plant out in the part of the property that will someday house my raised-bed vegetable/flower garden (hopefully it'll attract pollinators to the garden) but no blooms on it so far.  I'm just happy it lived!

Spring Is In The Air!

OK--so actually, technically Spring is in the ground.  Hey, whatever, the bulbs I dug last year from my mother's house and transplanted into my front yard--daffodils, lovely bright red tulips and delicate little muscaris--survived both my brutalist guerilla gardening and the winter and are starting to make flowers!  I planted them in an area where there are already bearded iris creeping over from the neighbor's yard, so over the years they can go nuts and fill in the space, I'm not worried about them spreading.  As a matter of fact I think I'm days away from my neighbor knocking on the door asking for some bulbs!

I already have hollyhocks, California poppies and dwarf snapdragons from my mother's house that I started from seed practically the first week we moved in 5 years ago (first things first, after all!), they come up beautifully every year.  The lilac starts I got from her yard last year are starting to bud out, so it's good to know that they made it, too!  Now if they'll just flower...

The tulips are still tight buds but should progress in a few days, so no pics of them yet--but the muscaris are getting a great start!

The mini daffodils, again, give 'em a few more days...

But hey, I officially have my first flower! 

 Every time I look at the flowers I got from my mom's house it gives me a wonderful, warm feeling; I'll always think of her when I see them...

Our weather is still giving us at or below freezing nights, but at least for the next few days our daytime temps are supposed to be in the low to mid 60's--best part, no damned wind. 

A chance for flowers to actually stay on the plants, yay!

Happy Howlaween!

This year our little werewolf is evolving!

The furry sleeves were easy enough to sew and are elasticized at the top, the handpaws I made from a pair of white knit gloves and added paw pads ("Human ones, mom!"  "Huh...?"  More than just 4 pads, more like finger paw pads, you know?  "Oh. Okay, got it.").  The plastic claws were painted black, then I just snipped a tiny hole in the end of each glove finger, pushed the claw through from the inside out and hot glued it in place.  More fur hot glued to the tops of the glove makes them furry while still being able to use your hands.

Because long about midnight on Halloween Eve, the culmination of working with monsterous fluff-producing fun fur for three days pretty much ceases to be any fun whatsoever, the articulated mask was purchased (I'm not out to lose my sanity, after all).  Watching the thing move when she talks pretty much makes me giggle every time.

Because masks aren't allowed at school, for school she simply wore her little ears.  The vest may come into play tonight since it's supposed to get down into the low 30's.

At any rate, the kid is happy and looking forward to trick or treating with her friends tonight!

Update:  It was really dark tonight with no moon tonight and -zero- street lighting.  The costume was great, except about 30 minutes into trick-or-treating, she had to ditch the mask. When I asked her why, she said:  "I ran into a mailbox."

I couldn't help it, I laughed.  Bad mom.  BAD.