Last year around this time, I wrote about my future orchard. I'm happy to report that, after a year, I've made some small progress towards my dream of picking fresh fruit from the back yard. Some of my older trees have made some progress towards fruitfulness, and I've added a couple of new trees to the mix. Best of all, all my fruit trees survived the summer. I think my fruit tree murdering streak is finally over.

The Panamint Nectarine I planted last February still looks like a stick most of the year, but it recently produced some gorgeous light pink flowers. I have my doubts that it will make any fruit this season, but I'm hopeful it'll branch out a bit and perhaps produce some nectarines in 2011. Fruit trees are all about patience, I've learned.



My old-timer navel orange produced quite a few little green babies last month. But now is the critical time when the fruit will either set and grow or harden and fall off. I am trying my best to tend to this tree so the fruit can mature, but citrus can be fickle. I also feel like the naval orange got confused by some warm winter days and fruited at a weird time of year. So, I'm not sure if I'll really get any oranges from this guy or not. Time will tell.



On the bright side, the year-old Desert Gold Peach is covered in baby fruit! I am so excited by the prospect of harvesting tree-ripened peaches that I can hardly wait for summer. So far, the fruit have continued to grow bigger and I really really hope they hang in there and make it to maturity. Unlike the nectarine, which was bare root, this guy was a potted tree. Maybe that's why it's fruiting after only a year in the ground.



My Pink Lady Apple is currently in bloom, but still shows no sign of fruit. I gave it a good pruning in early January, hoping that would help, but it hasn't made much of a difference. There are still buds forming, though, so perhaps it'll make some baby apples in a couple of weeks. I'm not sure what schedule apple trees should be on. The weather has been so variable lately that none of my trees seem to be following a normal schedule.



I picked up another apple in late January at a Tree People giveaway in my neighborhood. The variety, Anna Apple, is supposed to do well in warmer climates with fewer chill hours. I planted this bare root tree just before we got all the big rains, and it's thriving already.



In fact, I was stunned to discover a baby apple on it this weekend. This tree has only been in the ground for two months and it's already fruiting! We'll see if this guy makes it to maturity, but either way I think the fact that it's fruiting at all bodes well for future crops. (Perhaps my Anna tree should have a little chat with the Pink Lady and show her how it's done.)



In other orchard news, I planted a bare-root peach tree, courtesy of Tree People, at the same time as the Anna Apple. It's still a stick. The fig tree is looking good, though, as is the lemon tree down by the chicken coop.

I'm hopeful that, after a summer of careful watering, plus a good stretch of winter rains, this will be the year when my backyard orchard dreams start to come true. If nothing else, I really hope I get to pick a couple of sweet, juicy peaches in a couple of months. Wish me luck!

Every once-in-a-while, someone contacts me through this blog looking for advice about chickens. Since I am always happy to lure more people into the life of backyard chicken-keeping, I usually set up a little meeting with my new blog friends (if they're local), and proceed to lay all my chicken knowledge on them. Hopefully, they find it helpful.

A couple of months ago, while preparing to meet with my new chicken-friend Noah, I started thinking about my top chicken tips. What have a learned in my two years of chicken ownership that would be worth sharing with others? After mulling it over for a while, I came up with the following random assortment of tips, all pulled from personal experience. I hope any of you who are contemplating chicken ownership find this advice useful.



Be careful where you purchase your chicks or chickens.

Unfortunately, I learned the hard way that it really matters where you get your chickens. My first two hens, Jackie and Lisa, died of Marek's disease, which I suspect they caught due to the less-than-sanitary conditions at the feed store where I bought them. I lost another pullet, Becky, to respiratory disease because of similarly shady sanitation at a different feed store. These losses were very sad, but you can avoid my mistakes by making sure you get your chickens from a clean feed store or directly from a hatchery.

At the feed store, make sure the day-old chicks are kept separate from other animals in a clean, well-ventilated brooder. Examine the chicks or hens carefully before you buy them. Look for signs of disease--listlessness, funny smell--and overall cleanliness. Ideally, get your chicks from a place that only sells chicks. Just-hatched chicks are usually disease-free; they catch diseases from the older fowl around them.

Start with at least 3 hens.

Hens need friends, so you should definitely get at least two chickens, but three is safer. That way, if you lose a chicken to disease or predators, you won't end up with one lonely hen. You can always get a replacement chicken, but hens that are raised together from the beginning tend to get along better. Plus, three hens are really no more trouble that two. In fact, odds are you'll be lusting for more chickens by the time your first batch gets to laying age--if not sooner.



Plan for predators.

When it comes to predators, chickens are, um, sitting ducks. They don't really have any way of protecting themselves, so it's your job to keep them safe. The best way to do this is to build a very secure coop and run, considering all the possible predators that might come after your girls or their eggs. In most urban/suburban environments, these include: raccoons, skunks, rats, dogs and snakes. We also have foxes and coyotes in our neighborhood, although I've never seen them in the yard. Still, I'd rather be safe than wake up to a bloody chicken crime scene.

Here are some coop-building tips that have kept our chickens safe from predators for several years:

• Elevate your coop to keep predators and pests from burrowing underneath and/or making their homes below your chickens
• Bury wire or metal at least 6" deep around the edge of your run to keep predators from digging under the walls
• Put a protective barrier--metal, wood or hardware cloth--up to chicken-height around the base of your run. This will keep raccoons from reaching in and grabbing your hens (it happens)
• Lock your doors and windows. Some animals are crafty enough to open coop doors that are simply closed and not latched
• Chicken wire is too wimpy. Use a heavy-gauge wire fencing that can stand up to clawing, jumping or biting

If you follow these rules and build a secure coop and run, you'll save yourself a lot of worry. Our run is such a fortress that we don't even have to close the coop door at night, or wake up early to open it in the morning. We can even leave our chickens for the weekend without hiring a sitter.

Never chase a chicken!

As I learned during the Great Chicken Escape of 2008, chasing a chicken is usually a bad call. They may be small, but most hens are both quick and wily. If you try to chase a chicken down, you will likely end up out of breath, frustrated and yelling swear words your hen. So, if you need to get your hen to go back into her run, I highly recommend using trickery or bribes.

One of my best tricks involves pretending to find something extremely exciting in the dirt or straw. Basically, I scratch around in the soil with my hands and act all excited. Chickens are pretty curious--and greedy--so they'll probably come running to see what you've found. The scratching in the dirt trick works pretty well on my hens, and as you get to know your girls, you can discover what peaks their interest and use it against them later.

To bribe your chickens, food is the obvious choice. This can range from a handful of weeds to a special treat like meal worms or their favorite fruit. It really depends on your chickens' taste and how much they want to stay outside. Sometimes, you can even trick your hens with a fake bribe by shaking their feeder or bringing out the scoop you use to refill their feed. Chickens aren't as dumb as you might think, though, so don't use the fake out too often or they'll stop trusting you.



Well, I think that's all the chicken wisdom I can dispense for today. I have a few more thoughts that I'll share in a second post soon. For now, I hope you find this information useful and that perhaps it starts you on the road to getting some hens of your own. It is baby chick season after all!

It's amazing how a scrubby vacant lot can transform into a thing of beauty thanks to the random scattering of seeds and some good winter rains. The hillside below our house has exploded with blue lupines in the last couple of weeks. As I drive by this lot full of wildflowers every morning, I'm reminded of how great Springtime can be in Los Angeles.

I also really hope the developer who bought these lots a couple of years ago never manages to get the money and permits to build his planned six identical stucco boxes of hideousness on the hillside. If the current recession has had one upside, it's been to stop guys like that from ruining views like this.

Due to some unexpected craziness in my life, I was away from my garden for almost the entire month of February. In that time, several storm systems blew through Southern California and deposited several inches of rain in our yard. The timing was excellent, because my vegetable plots were all in the middle of their growing cycles, and it meant I didn't have to ask anyone to water the garden in my absence. In fact, the rains were so substantial that I returned to my garden at the beginning of March and found it like this.



That crazy mess of green is what happens when you leave a vegetable garden untended but well watered. At first I was kind of overwhelmed by the disorder, but when I looked closer I realized that ignoring my garden for a month meant I could now enjoy the satisfaction of some pretty hefty harvests.

My first harvest is pictured below: three baseball-sized turnips and their green tops, a handful of peas and two eggs. (Yes, Peggy finally started laying again at the end of February, perhaps to welcome me home.) We cooked up the turnips with some carrots from our produce delivery box using a delicious recipe for braised root vegetables from How To Cook Everything. The peas were delicious raw, pods and all. Fresh-picked peas are so much sweeter and crisper than the ones you buy at the store. There's really no comparison.



Subsequent trips to the garden provided us with a delicious salad mix of oak leaf lettuce, arugula and cilantro--which Dakota and my mom both raved about--and this lovely bunch of chard. The chard went into one of my favorite simple winter recipes, Bacon and Swiss Chard Pasta. Yum.



A few days later, I filled up my basket again with more peas, a big pile of peppers and some spinach, all of which were consumed with some grilled bratwurst.



All this harvesting has been extremely satisfying. I think I'm having my best vegetable garden season ever. There are so many more crops yet to pick--beets, fennel, fava beans--and the greens and peas have shown no sign of slowing down. Dakota and I can count on at least another month's worth of home-grown vegetables in our meals.

Who knew that the best thing I could do for my winter garden was abandon it?

I'm so glad I planted my wildflower seeds early this year so they could take full advantage of the big rains we had in January and February. Thanks to those winter storms, I now have several patches of well-established California native wildflowers growing in both the front and back yards. Some have even started to bloom.

So far, the early bloomers include this Baby Blue-Eyes (Nemophila maculata), which is happily flowering in several spots in the front yard.



And this lovely yellow flower, a Tidy Tips (Layia platyglossa), has just started to bloom as well.



A few other varieties appear to be on the verge of flowering, although I'm not sure which ones. I got so many different seeds from the Theodore Payne Foundation, and my planting method involved mixing them all together and then scattering them on any available bare ground. Wildflowers are much easier to identify once they've bloomed.

I've also been enjoying the big patch of lupines--or Blue Bonnets as we called them in Texas--that's growing on the grassy slope below our house. I'm not sure how the seed originally got there, but every Spring there seem to be more plants with their beautiful blue flowers covering the hillside. Every time I drive by, it makes me happy to see them growing there, especially since I have a hard time growing lupines in my own yard.

Luckily, I've got lots of other wildflower blossoms to look forward to over the next couple of months. The good rains this year have made sure of that.