first snow

But still, it was snow. Our first real snow of the season. So before heading out into the country, the heeler sisters and I wandered the yard, and recorded the event.

As expected, the two not-yet-ripe nectarines on the nectarine tree had shiveled and browned in the cold night air. But I was surprised to find the green peaches on the white peach tree were just fine. Just a little damp.

I wonder now if the fuzz on a peach actually serves a purpose, to keep moisture and cold away from the fruit itself.

The sloe aren't fuzzy, but they also survived, with only a few casualties on the ground.

All of our sloe trees came from the same source. Many years ago, on the opening day of deer season, the boss brought down a grocery bag filled with fruit from the sloe tree in their front yard. Most of these I promptly ate, but the wife managed to steal enough to make three or four small jars of sloe jelly.

The pits from this endeavour all ended up in a small compost pit in the middle of the garden. From whence sprung up a dozen or more sloe trees. A half dozen or so of these I transplanted to the back fence, but the rest have formed their own small copse in the middle of what used to be our garden and raspberry patch (and is now a haphazard orchard and brush pile).

But this year, I learned the tallest tree in the midst of that sloe patch, the one that didn't produce any slow at all last year, will never produce any wild plums.

'Cause it's an apple tree.

With all of two tiny apples on it this year.

The cherry tree was bare naked, of course, the robins having stripped it of any edibles way back in August. (I managed, I think, three cherries.)

The stump below it, placed to give the masked heeler a launch point for getting out of the garden (her sister doesn't need one, and she herself doesn't need it to clear the fence going in, since she has a running start) was solid white, a backdrop to a branch of the trespassing hedge that somehow transplanted itself (a seed in the turd of a bird, no doubt) from the front by the driveway to the back gate.

And then it was time to get to work.