It's A Mezcla Day

Have you heard about the flying car?  It's real.  Be sure to watch the video if you can.  It's only a few minutes long.

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Peaches and mold should not go together.  Again, I'm not a gardener (I can't even spell it; I keep typing "gardner" apparently to match my accent).  I was going to wash and eat one of the peaches from the second (and last) harvest, but well, I found some that were bad.  I threw out seven, but fifteen still looked good.  Out of those fifteen, we only had to pitch two or three because the bugs had made homes inside.  But, considering how little I'd done since I'd brought the peaches in, I'm pretty happy.  Just squeamish as always, but I'm working on getting over it.  The peaches are now cut in halves, sugared, and waiting for breakfast.

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Which reminds me.  After Hadassah suggested that I use my experience dealing with the peach tree and the peaches in a story sometime, I realized some things about my next novel.  (Don't worry; I'll finish Makani's Serenity first.  I'm just world and character building in my head for now.)  This next story will take place in space, but my protagonist is going to be a bit of a gardner ;-) , so she needs a garden sort of haven.  Naturally, there will be a peach tree.  The idea, combined with a delicious breakfast of sugared peach halves I ate a little while back, led to a working title for my next novel.  And let me tell you, titles and names are tricky things for me to come up with.  It is a rare thing for me to have a title for a story, especially a novel, before it's written!

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I didn't know a butterfly could look happy until I saw one the other day, sitting on top of one of the many rotting peaches under my tree.  It worked its wings up and down, slowly, seeming quite relaxed, and wasn't bothered when I walked up to the tree to watch its drunken stupor.  I hope it didn't get pulled over for an FWI (flying while intoxicated).

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Here's a fun writing exercise I found from a quick Google search that led me to this page from fictionwriting.about.com.  I haven't looked at it in great detail, but I noticed you can read what others have written and share your own work.  If you decide you'd like to try the exercise, I'd like to see it if you're comfortable sharing.  Maybe it's because I'm now working on a murder mystery, but I think the lake description is particularly interesting and has a lot of potential.

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What's your mezcla today?

Who Won the War? The Ants? Or Me?

I did, of course!  But the battle was not won without cost.

Earlier this week I made my final excursion out to the peach tree to pick the fruit.  I may have waited a day too long, but as it was, I think I got a pretty good crop.  Just look at what I stole away from the little insects!  (I used the same bowl as last time, so you can see these are decently bigger.)

What I had intended to be about a fifteen minute trip turned into right about an hour.  When I got back in the house, I was happy that I hadn't burnt to a crisp.

The fighting took place mostly with my own squeamishness, which is still hanging around.  The peaches this time were not romantic.  The bugs had gotten to more than last time (see that bowl? those were the only ones I figured were salvageable).  I found bug-bit after bug-mauled.  A few times, I accidentally stepped on an already fallen peach, and it smooshed under my shoe.  Another time, I shook a branch to make the bad peaches fall, only I placed my hand in a not so helpful spot, and an overdone peach smacked me on the back of my hand, sharing its gooeyness with my skin.  It wouldn't shake off, so I wiped it off on the leaves.

I know.  I wouldn't make a good farmer.  I'm not even a gardener.  Still, I'm looking forward to eating the fruit I managed to harvest.  They look pretty much ripe, but I think they could benefit from that wonderful paper bag, which was mentioned here, for a little bit.

I have been told it's not a good idea to leave the spoiled peaches under the tree.  Thoughts?  Suggestions?  Do I really have to pick up each and every one of the bug-eaten and rotting (and one even had mold on it..yuck!) peaches?  What else should I do to for the tree now that the peaches are gone?

Green Peaches

Have you read "Green Patches" by Isaac Asimov?  A bunch of little green patches show up on test animals in the story.  And green patches are scary.

Well, this isn't exactly scary, but I have a bunch of green peaches.  And I'm not sure what to do with them.

On Thursday I went back out to thin the peach tree some more.  I found that the tree was trying to make more, new peaches.  Too much, silly tree.  Since the peaches have grown, the limbs have been weighed down again.  It certainly can't support more.  The center branch, which stood pretty much straight up, was so loaded down with growing fruit, that it had sagged all the way down into the lower branches (which were also drooping).

I knew this couldn't keep up.  But it seemed such a waste to just pluck peaches and drop them to the ground if there was nothing wrong with them.  So I got a bowl and put the ones that seemed fine in it.  I got a good bunch, but I'm probably going to have to go back out and thin the tree down further.

I washed the fruit, discarded a few that I found problems with, and now I have small, green peaches, probably somewhere in the two dozen count, sitting on my counter, waiting for...well, something.  I don't know what.

Can I salvage these peaches for something?  Will they ripen where they are?

Please tell me I don't have to learn how to can fruit.

Sun Kissed Fruit

So, I went back out to look at the peach tree.  I haven't done anything to it since I thinned out all the branches (like I said, not a gardener), but I think it was looking pretty good.

Unfortunately, the ants have found the tree, and there were a few sections of leaves that had bug bitten holes throughout.  I wasn't sure what to do about that, so I did basically nothing.

But the peaches looked pretty yummy, if a bit small and still green.  They're plumping up nicely, especially in comparison to all the discarded ones that have shriveled up into skin covered seeds under the tree.  And, the peaches on the tree are, to my delight, quite fuzzy.  Fuzzy fruit is such a strange concept.

I would have taken more pictures, but the camera battery quit.

Tan line!

The Peach Tree

Let me just say I'm not a gardener.  But if I were a bat, I'd probably be a fruit bat.  And my family has a dwarf peach tree in the back yard.  Over the last couple of seasons, my family and I were so swamped with insanity that we didn't get to harvest that many.  I think last year we missed it entirely.  This year, this fruit bat would like to eat some peaches.

So, I decided to see what I could do to take care of the tree, at least a little, so we could enjoy it's sweet, zangy fruit when it ripens.

The first step was to reduce the tree's burden.

Our tree likes to produce peaches.  No, really, it likes to produce peaches.  More than it can handle.  In some places, I thought the fruit looked like grape clusters.  And I noticed after I went through a branch and thinned it out, it sprang back up and looked a lot more cheerful.  This crazy tree likes to try to do more than it can.

So, I went at it, branch after branch, making sure to get up close and personal all the way to the core of the tree, and in the process, I came across six ladybugs.  Now, there are not many bugs that I like, and even fewer that I will purposefully allow to touch me, but the ladybug is one that fits both categories.  So, every time I came across one, I was delighted.  At one point, my papa came out and helped, and he almost immediately found another ladybug.  Seven in all protecting our peaches from aphids.  That's happy.

We'll see what happens from here.  I don't know what I'm doing, but I'm hoping thinning out some peaches will make it more likely that we can actually eat some.

Before and After.

Note the ground underneath.