Rain Total

Rain over the past four days is 1.75 inches.

Total for the season is 15.50 inches.

Average for the entire season is 30 inches.

Water emergency declared today by California.  Individual urban water users urged to immediately decrease useage by 20%.  Mandatory conservation may be needed. 

The following article includes a list of crops grown and the percent of total US production that comes from California:  California Declares Drought Emergency

Chicken Info

As usual, the chickens began laying precisely on Valentines Day.  It is rarely later at latitude, 37 degrees north.  They are tied to the hours of darkness they receive and it has to be pretty cold and rainy for an extended period of time to delay that.  Biorhythms make them do it.  That's why commercial growers keep the lights on 12/12 imitating midsummer.  That keeps them laying year 'round until they wear out in two years then off to the compost heap or processing into chicken food although beef is the usual ingredient in commercial hen feed.  Cross feeding includes less problematic micro-organisms so hens go to cows and cows go to hens feed, usually.  

The history of the chicken industry in California is quite an interesting read.  It was the get-rich-quick scheme for the common man of its day (early 1900's if memory serves me but it often does not) like houses were recently.  That economy collapsed, too, of course, as everyone piled into it, leaving personal anguish, debris, and indebtedness behind.  Humans and their foibles...  Anyway, Santa Cruz, CA, was a center of that movement and, up until quite recently, properties with chicken coops were very common.  They have since been turned into condos because the properties necessary for raising chickens were relatively large.  I lived in one that was barely converted to human habitation when I first came to the area in 1981.  It was pretty cold during the winter but the price was right for a U. C. Cooperative Extension employee doing research on brussels sprouts and strawberry IPM.

Our hens are old and need replacing.  However, they are on social security (assuming SS is what the gov't has told us it is and it is not bankrupt like the largest banks in the world) because they don't produce like younger hens.  They will continue into old age scattering their 17 pounds per year of feces per bird  about the yard.  We will be getting a new crop of "peepers" soon which we will raise inside until they can integrate with the older hens without being eaten by them or the neighborhood cats.  That process is really cute as long as you keep their cage clean otherwise it gets old very quickly.  The old ones will be relegated to composting and providing the occasional egg while giving lessons for the new arrivals about hawks and cats.  By the way, if one of the little ones does get hit by a cat, we have found that a liberal application of sugar on the wound, assuming you can recover the victim, is very good at stopping any infection that may occur.  It certainly saved one of our chicks that was taken by a cat but saved by the wife in an extraordinary feat of fence leaping and running down of the cat.  I am still astounded by the memory as, I can only assume, was the cat.  I imagine the cat was very surprised at the vigor of the approach since it dropped the chick rather quickly.  I was so amazed at the wife's effort and I still am amazed at it.  (Years later she attempted the same rescue for a large orb weaving spider we had adopted as a pet and named Agatha that was taken by a Townsends Warbler outside our picture window in full view of both of us.  The spider had dared come out during daylight and that was its undoing.  That attempted saving was not so successful as flight is a cutoff for us as rescuers.)  In addition, it gave me the wonderful opportunity to try the sugar-on-wound trial about which I had just read as the chick had at least an inch long cut on its body from being dragged through a hole in the fence.  You don't come across that sort of opportunity readily so I seized it and it worked admirably.

I watched one of our hens kick the bucket a few years ago.  I was looking at it as it stood in the yard.  It was a Barred Rock.  Of a sudden, it said, "Bawk" and leaped into the air doing a back flip.  When it hit the ground it was dead as a rock, appropriately enough.  I stood amazed, guessing it was a heart attack at age 12 years.  I think that one was turned into apples, judging by its burial site, and good apples they are, too.

Pruning

Pruning is an art form.  It is vaguely akin to Bonsai, in some ways, but on a grand scale.

Absolutely everyone does it differently even if any two people have identical goals as their outcome.  So don't feel like you have to attain some sort of perfection when you do this.  That said, you can easily ruin a tree forever if you do it wrong.  Comfortable?  OK, let's dive right in.

Depending upon what kind of tree or bush you have, your plant will need different care in every way including pruning.  Blueberry bushes can get by with no pruning or just taking out any dead wood.  Alder trees need be pruned only to your taste as to what you want them to look like or the more practical aspect of whether you can get under them easily enough to harvest the raspberries you put there.  Apple trees...well, there are different approaches.  There is some new research out of Cornell University that shows an unpruned apple tree may produce a bigger crop than a pruned apple tree.  Masanobu Fukuoka of Japan came up with this idea during the middle of the last century so it is nothing new.  But the "quality" of the apple can be changed by judicious pruning.  So many choices, so few trees to test them on.

Pruning of apples can be done to strengthen the tree structure, make it easier to get inside to pick, keep it short enough to pick without using a ladder, be able to walk/work under it easily, make it look like a weeping willow to fit your yard motif, etc.  Everyone needs or wants something different from their trees.  

Here is one of the multitude of sites about pruning (half way down the page link below "irrigation") that shows some of the techniques: http://ag.arizona.edu/pubs/garden/mg/fruit/irrigation.html

Making the pruning cut angled or flat.  Used to be an angled cut was all the rage now it has been shown that a flat cut is better for the tree.  It makes sense as less inner tree branch open to the air and microbes is best.  If you are removing anything larger than what a one hand pruner can manage, you must first make a cut on the underside of the branch opposite where you anticipate the main cut to end.  Without doing this, you can strip the bark for a long way and expose the tree to infection.  Losing a tree this way is sooo wrong.  

There is weak branching and strong branching.  The weak ones can split a tree down the middle, if left as one of the main "scaffold" branches when the tree is young.  This is a critical item to become familiar with and easily avoided.  Weak scaffold branches are sharply "V" shaped and must either be changed, if caught early, or strengthened, if caught late.  Early catching means you just cut one of the branches off and work from there with the other as the main support branch.  Late catching means you have to provide lateral supports via grafting which is far more difficult.  Go with the first option although the second is fun to do and rarely seen today.  The only place I have ever seen it, beside in my yard, and where I got the idea is in a hundred and thirty year old abandoned apple orchard in the hills above Corralitos, CA.  They had made three main scaffold branches in a "vase" pruning style coming off the trunk and each of the branches was grafted to the other about a foot and a half above the confluence with the trunk to form a triangle horizontal to the ground connecting the branches.  It was beautiful.  All the trees had it.

The trick to successful pruning is to be able to visualize how the tree will look in five years due to your pruning.  You need to know how the tree will grow as it matures so you must be able to look at pictures of the growth pattern of your variety of tree and how others have manipulated it.  Get online or to the library and look it up or visit an orchard and study the pruning marks and growth pattern.  All fruit tree varieties are slightly to completely different in growth patterns.  The devil is in the details and you will live with the outcome of your understanding of the details for years to come so spend some time with this aspect of growing fruit.  Everyone that passes will see what you have done and how well you understood what you did.  Spend some time on planning your pruning.  Sit with the tree and visualize where you want it to be in five years and where you may need to make the cuts to get it there.  There's no rush.  You can always do it next year or later in the summer.  It is easiest to do when all the leaves are on the ground.  Keep in mind, it is a bit difficult to watch the knowing look of a thoughtful pruner obviously trying not to say anything about your tree other than, "Oh my, um...what a...nice tree".

Hiring a pruner can be problematic unless that pruner comes highly recommended and even then I would want to see examples of their work.  I have seen ruined trees that the customers thought were done quite well and would happily recommend the pruner to others.  

Rain Total

Rain over the past 7 days is 6.75 inches.

Total for the season is 13.75 inches.  

Historical average for entire season, which ends June 30th, is 30 inches.

News today of water rationing in Los Angeles next summer.

Rain Total

Rain over the past nine days is 3 inches.

Total for the season:  7 inches.

Mandarins

Harvested 30 pounds of fruit from the sunny side of one of our two mandarin trees.  It was not even a quarter of the potential harvest of the tree.  The rest of the fruit still need some ripening.  You can feel whether they are ripe enough to pick as you touch them on this tree.  Sunny side has the highest vitamin C amount per fruit throughout the harvest and ripen first.

30 pounds of fruit yield about a pint over 5 quarts of juice when processed through a Champion juicer.  The fruit peels easily.  Took about two hours to process and juice.  The other tree is not so forthcoming in ease of peeling even though it is supposedly identical.

One gallon was frozen, one quart put in the fridge, a pint sent to Davis with the daughter on the train.  Good thing it went with her, too, because she has a nasty cold.

Made a "pumpkin" pie with an orange turban squash for the first time.  May be one of the very best of that type of pie I have ever had.  We are definitely growing turban squash somewhere in this packed-to-the-edges-with-comestible-plants yard this year.  Those are the type of squash that look like Cinderella's coach before it was a coach and the mice were not yet horses.  The Australian Blue squash make equally tasty pies and are also "turban" squash but are blue until they turn orange, if you keep them long enough.  These things save for a long time outside under the eaves.  

All the detritus goes back into the yard somewhere; into the soil or to the chickens.  Nothing goes into the trash.

75F today at the ocean.  This is obscenely warm for this time of year and for far to long.  No bud break yet but they are moving on several fruit varieties.  This could be a tragedy in the making for fruit trees.  Apparently, a La Nina effect off the coast is happening.  Makes Sierra skiing ice/mush, with a bit of good snow between those conditions for less than an hour, at best.  Been there in a prior La Nina at unnecessary expense and unsatisfactory experience.  Best to take a trip along the coast, instead.  You'll enjoy it more for it's intrinsic value.

Rain season:

Total rain for the year is at 4 inches.

Watering the yard has not yet been necessary.  Soil is holding moisture, so far.  During the last La Nina we had to water during the winter but we had a much different plant structure then.  It was mostly annuals.  Now it is almost exclusively perennials with the few annuals being mulched.

We received 1.5 inches during the last storm.  Average annual rainfall is 30 inches per year with all but an inch of that occuring between October through April.  We are over half way through that period with roughly about 1/8 of the usual total rainfall or 1/4 of the usual rainfall to date.  Yikes.

Raspberry Time in January

Moved the raspberries out of an old bed and into a new one.  It is time to refurbish the old bed and then use it for something else for a while.  Raspberries can use up the soil in one spot if it is not composted or fertilized regularly.  It doesn't hurt to change the crop every couple of years to give the soil a rest from mono cropping.  For that reason we move ours around the yard much like walking a very, very, old dog slowly and patiently.  If you had a movie of our yard over time the raspberries would be in constant motion.  If you want a metric to use for bed change try this:  when you notice the next years canes being smaller than last it is time to move on.  You can just move some chickens into it during the winter, if you don't want to move it around.  That works well.  Of course, there is always the mega-farm methodology but to do that you have to go buy something.

If this heat/dry spell doesn't change soon, the fruit trees are going to break bud and potentially cause all sorts of timing trouble which could culminate in a poor fruit set.  Hoping for a wet, cold February.  So are the California Tree Frogs which are making a very large noise for their diminutive size in various places around the yard.  The one inside the hollow, ceramic elephant sounds like a bull frog.  He must be pleased.

Put some more potatoes into the bed last weekend because I found some at the market I liked for making mashed potatoes.  First leaves are coming up from the prior planting.  Had a fantastic dinner of smoked Alpers trout caught at Saddlebag Lake last September and grill seared (60 seconds per side) Tombo tuna with the potatoes and a salad of baby greens. 

Garlic is about six inches tall.  

Found a peanut trying to grow that a scrub jay had planted.  Never have grown one of those before but, apparently, the birds think I should.

First Owari Satsuma Mandarin Orange harvest was January 18.  The trees will yield fruit for the next two months.  Harvested from the sunny side of the tree first.  They are the ripest.  Prepped four batches of marmalade and put it in the freezer for canning on a cold, rainy day.  Too hot to do that now.  Juiced the rest of the days harvest.  Yield is slightly more than 50% by volume of the peeled fegs.  Champion juicer makes that part of the process easy.  We have two Mandarin trees.  Same variety for both but the trees produce different fruit.  One trees fruit has a tight skin, is difficult to peel and is noticeably sweeter.  It is much like the difference between Valencia and Navel oranges.  One is better for juicing and the other easier to eat out of hand.  

Last persimmons were dried, bagged and frozen last week.  This last batch was the sweetest and most colorful of them all with the consistency and sweetness of Medjool dates.

Kiwi fruit is ripe enough to begin eating.  It has been in the crisper since harvest at about 38F.

Beneficial insects flower seed varieties were put into the old raspberry bed and a little something for the hummingbirds.  This will help with the pollination and pest control in the spring.  

Trapped two gophers out of the yard last week.  Found their tunnels while moving raspberries.  The varmints don't push up dirt hills in our yard because the soil is so soft they can just push it aside instead of mining out tailings into a gopher mound.  This makes the gopher game a little trickier in that I usually do not know where they are until a plant goes awol or declines unexpectedly.  They are little trouble to established trees and bushes but are hell on garlic, clover and potatoes.  It never hurts to patrol the grounds daily to enjoy, stay in touch with, and keep the peace.