[sic]

I didn’t get a picture of the first ripened tomato our backyard garden produced to perfection a couple days ago, but on the kitchen window sill last night I found our second that Susan had harvested that afternoon and so snapped it this a.m.:

It’s about the size of a golf ball and a half. Many more to come, which rhymes with yum!

Sigh. I love figs. I mean I LOVE figs. Maybe not 81 of them, like the pile pictured here that I picked up around the patio this morning, but a few good fresh, ripened figs from a tree is a joy to me. Num num num. Num.

The fig trees in our our backyard produce thousands of fruit each spring and summer, but whatever the cause for the failure none of it is  ever evar ripe. Don’t let the darker ones in the bunch above fool you, they are all dry, tasteless inedible greenwaste that drop with a plop to the patio thanks to gravity or perhaps with a little help from the squirrels who sometimes nibble them before doing a squirrel version of “Ack, patooey!” and droppin’ ‘em like their hot… or more appropriately not, as in ripe. Or even remotely tasty.

And every morning throughout this time of year I have a new chore to my list in going out and picking up the pieces. Today was a record landfall (probably to be broken tomorrow), so before I pitched them into the green bin I assembled them for a group pic and to lament being the fig-loving butt of mother nature’s sense of humor.

(click to triplify)

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee . . .

Emily Dickinson

Thirteen days after planting the sunflower seeds provided me as part of my participation in the Great Sunflower Project, I finally watered me some seedlings instead of bare soil! Woo-hoo!

But when it came to this backyard encounter with a wonderfully aggressive jumping spider this afternoon, what I lacked in talking points I hope I made up for in enthusiasm:

When it comes to finding things in the backyard sometimes I don’t even have to try. Such was the case of this penny, found on the ground  near the hammock while raking leaves in the backyard this morning.

The top two thumbnails (all clickable) are the “before” shots of the front and back and the bottom two are after I cleaned them up a bit. The coin was corroded enough not to be able to make out with any certainy the third digit of the date: 19 6.” Could it be a 1906 penny, which was the year the land was originally deeded? Could it be a 1916, a year or so after the house was built? It was only from scrubbing it with some cleaners that I was shown it to be a 1946 S wheatback penny.

How long it’s been in the ground is anyone’s guess but given its worn condition I’d hazard the full 62 years or not much less.

Susan noticed it sometime over the weekend, but I discovered the fungus among us in my morning spritzing of the side yard this morning. Having popped up between a couple walkway bricks it’s almost half the size of one… sucker’s huge (click to quadrify):

Back in early April I turned my backyard spotlight on the bud that had sprouted from a one of three dismembered cactus pads that I’d found last summer and thunked into some soil.

Immediately after that first post there was some drama I never reported about. See, I moved the pot atop a fence post so that it could get more exposure to the sun and not long after that — maybe a few days or a week — damn if the pot hadn’t been knocked over into the neighboring yard, either by cat or squirrel or wind.

Peering over the fence down into the out-of-reach abyss where the pot was still intact but the cactii were strewn about it, my first thought was that unless I wanted to trespass into that backyard (which I didn’t) I’d just have to reconcile that my cactus dreams weren’t meant to be. I was appropriately bummed.

Then the next day, I got out of my wahmbulance and MacGuyver’d myself a trespass-free solution. Using the long arm of an old tree-branch trimmer I tied the pooper scooper to it and also knotted a long piece of twine from the handle of the scooper with hopes of being able to extend it to the ground on the other side of the fence and retrieve the pot and pads by pulling the twine and opening/closing its poop-scooping jaws.

Well it worked for all three cactus parts, but the pot proved to be too large and heavy for the scooper to handle (I’d later retrieve it when I opted to trespass into that yard after the incident with our cat Jiggy and the baby opossum that turned out to be a baby skunk).

Though I wasn’t sure if the fall and the prolonged exposure hadn’t damaged the pads, I still went ahead and re-plunked them into a larger pot of soil, placing it on the ground and surrounding it with some heavy-duty garden wire.

And dang if all three hearty pads didn’t rebound magnificently. As you can see below in the upper left, the first bud has turned into a prickly juvenile pad of its own, and the other two smaller pads are now hosting growing buds, too:

Amazing!

It wasn’t more than a few days ago that Susan spied our first teeny tiny tomato on the vines she’s been nurturing since March and there was much rejoicing.

Then today Susan found the first born ‘mater had an unwelcome guest that had moved in (click to triplify):

Drats, but such is life in the backyard. I hope that first fruit helps nourish  this caterpilar through its metamorphosis to whatever it’s to become. And in the meantime Susan’s gonna step up repellent procedures to prevent further invasions.

Did I see what I think I saw earlier today?

I know that a small squadron of crows set to making quite a racket directly overhead in the backyard this afternoon. When Susan and I came out of the house to investigate I counted five of them circling our smaller palm tree and immediately I figured they were giving some raptor grief that had landed up there in the fronds.

Little did I know…

Upon circling to the backside of the tree I found myself looking up about 25 feet from a magnificent red-tailed hawk looking straight down at me while trying its best to ignore the divebombings of the crows and maintain control of its prey, a medium-sized something that it clutched in one talon while holding the frond with the other.

Only when I said something over the crows like “Whoa will you look at that!” and pointed up, did the hawk get startled, unable to deal with the attentions of the crows above and me below. Upon lifting off it was also unable to maintain a grip on its meal — but the meal wasn’t dead and like a shot took off flying in a south-by-southwest direction toward the downtown skyline over the trees and outta there!

With some fluffy down feathers drifting down upon us we watched as the hawk flew north to land a palm tree closer to Sunset Boulevard with the crows in pursuit and not letting up in the slightest.

But here’s the thing: I’m pretty sure the hawk’s catch wasn’t a crow. As it all happened so fast, I didn’t get a really good look at it so maybe it was and maybe the hawk had invaded a nearby crow’s nest. But the down feathers that fell to earth were light gray and the momentary glimpse I got of the escapee bolting away was that it was a pigeon or maybe a mourning dove.

What’s the big deal about that? Probably nothing much, but to my layman’s eye it’s fascinating to consider that I witnessed crows defending against an enemy — even if the battle they wage is not for one of their own.