Fruit trees loving the extra rain

All the rain we've received this year has led to an unexpected fruit boon in my household: A peach tree in our front yard and a fig tree in the back have been filled the last couple of weeks with ripe, delicious fruit.

The figs are perhaps the best I've ever eaten, fat, ripe, and full of juice. The peaches are less spectacular and some have been victimized by bugs or squirrels (who take a ripe peach, eat one bite, then throw it on the ground - bastards).

The peach tree in particular is going on ten years old and we've never before had a peach crop that generated edible fruit, partly because of the ongoing squirrel problem, but mostly because the tree never produced much. But this year's rain has the thing loaded with peaches to the point that I'm afraid one limb is about to break from the weight. We've been cutting them up to remove the bug-spoiled parts and using the peaches for fruit salads, smoothies, etc.

Strangely, squirrels have been apparently carrying peaches across our rooftop and into our backyard, where we've found a number of them which immediately become dog toys. One dog (Domino) likes to chew them until getting to the pit, which he then cracks down on like a bone. Another one (Indeaux) will throw them up in the air like a ball and presses me to use them to play "catch" (his favorite trick is for me to throw one up high and he can catch it out of the air).

There's also a pear tree in the front yard that's a little younger, but we're still not getting edible fruit from it. My wife thinks if we get one more round of rain the tree might fully fruit out.

We're really loving all the extra rain since the drought has finally broken, but the fruit trees have got to be the nicest surprise from all the extra water.

Cedar Waxwings

For the past week or so we've had a flock of several hundred Cedar Waxwings in and around our neighborhood. Both yesterday and this morning I had a pleasant time sitting on my back deck watching them swoop in a huge mass from tree to tree, hovering briefly almost like a hummingbird to peck at their food and then lighting momentarily on seemingly every available branch and twig. They tend to all arrive and leave together in a furious, fluttering whirlwind of activity.

They're quite pretty, colorful birds when they sit still long enough to observe them closely. These are probably the final weeks we'll see them before they head northward to summer in the midwest and Canada. They're really quite lovely, colorful birds and the sight of them swooping in a chaotic mass from tree to tree is really neat to watch.


UPDATE: I should also mention that hundreds of birds leave massive amounts of bird poop, which I've been dutifully cleaning off of Ty's treehouse deck every few days. There are pros and cons to this whole nature thing.