Dragonfly Ranch

This is the tree that bloomed in January, long before any of our other trees. It’s an early blooming and early bearing variety, I find. We could have apples as early as June. Since it has to pollinate with a different variety of apple, one of our neighbors must have another early blooming apple.

Taken from her door. Luckily, she hasn’t fallen into the pool yet while stumbling around with her eyes half open at 7:30 in the morning. If she did, she could be eaten by the kraken (which is what we affectionately call the pool cleaner).

Yesterday I dug out a 4 by 10 foot garden bed. There are a number of these on the ranch — nicely built, with wooden sides and wire underneath to keep the gophers out. They’re completely overgrown, though, and it took me a good 45 minutes to dig this one out. In fact, it’s just one of four contiguous beds. The other three are also in the photo, but they’re unrecognizable. This should be a great bed for melon or squash.

While I was digging I uncovered a western skink with a bright blue tail (http://www.californiaherps.com/lizards/pages/p.s.skiltonianus.html). I’m glad to say I didn’t hurt it, but I got a good look before it zipped away into the grass.

The deck, as we might have expected, turns out to be full of rot. A large part of the deck and stairs is being rebuilt.

The old gutters were useless too-short leaking plastic crap. We now have beautiful aluminum seamless gutters, including the length of the garage front, which never had a gutter before. Now Betsy won’t have to walk under a waterfall when she leaves her apartment in the rain. And it does rain, though not enough.

We have two espaliered pear trees. I wondered if they would ever blossom, since most of the other fruit trees blossomed long ago. Here they are, finally.

We’re putting in an electric gate as part of our improvement plan. In the last few days the track has been laid and conduit has been installed to bring in the electric supply. The gate is being fabricated and should be installed in a couple of weeks.

Fritz is at the left between the fence and the trench. The electric cabling will originate in the potting shed (at right), which already has power, and run to the box marked with a yellow flag.

Two guys re-roofed the 30 x 80 foot garage in two days.

In a couple of months two thirds of this western side will be covered with solar panels.