Rancho Springo

Meet "Lovey Dovey". She's our new neighbor and hopes to raise her young here.

To the right is "Maggie the Wonder Dog" doing what she usually does....watching the world go by an inch at a time. Notice the raised hackles, ferocious stance, and glistening fangs all set to defend her turf. Between her and the Lord, we feel pretty safe.

To the far left is garden box #1 then #2. #3 is barely visible to the right and #4 is in the rear. Box #2 is also bearing a thriving crop of Bermuda grass. Guess what will be happening on our next day off? Did you know that some of those grass plants have roots 12" long?!

A little better shot of box #4. We just reloaded with 6 bags of fresh compost.

This is actually the neighbor's pomegranate tree but he does all he can to ignore it.....so do we.

This is the #3 box but looking from the other direction toward the back of the house. It is filled to brim with strawberries. Yes...they do taste wunnerful, wunnerful, wunnerful. That's a small apple tree standing guard. Notice how it leans into the job thereby showing great interest in its charge.

Box #1 with its newly planted tomatoes. Connie has since planted many more tomatoes. A friend just gave us a bunch of his "volunteers" from last year's crop and he had no room for them. We have them. Look out, canning jars!

These are the peas in box #2. Connie is pea'ing all over the place. There are more to come so we'll have a continuing harvest for awhile. It won't get cold here until mid-December so stuff grows on and on. We had tomatoes growing almost until Christmas last year.

Can you spell C-O-M-P-O-S-T ? We're trying to do our best to feed our dirt so that it's not just dirt or just compost; it's SPAYSHAL dirt and compost. Uh-huh. This batch was from Lowe's.

Our bees be happy. This is the "Leaning Tower of Beeza" in case all you unlearned individuals didn't know. They are all happy and healthy that we can tell and the ant issue has been permanently resolved. We placed the legs of our pallet/stand in coffee cans half filled with water and oil. Works every time. I haven't checked for honey yet but since the bloom has been decent, my guess is that we will make out like Pooh Bear this year.

The pole barn with "Heffalump" the big white trailer in the foreground. The aluminum fishing boat, El Rafto, is next, and the "Ranch Rino" is after that. The last stall is supposed to be for the little trailer but there's just too much STUFF blocking the way. I'll have to get a man right on that. Looking south towards the back of the barn.

Here's the ex-burn pile. You can see how it did a really professional job of blocking the sunlight and protecting the dirt from getting any vitamin A or other nutrients. A few passes with the scraper and the stage will be set for a healthy patch of dirt. The oranges in the rear don't look too badly after having been abused for awhile. I need to get a man right on that issue too.

Aqui....Senora del Rancho Relaxo. She was covered from scarf to sandals in garden materials so I was tempted to call her "Dirty Connie". I thought better of it.

The "Jack" of the shack: an ICOM IC-R7000 VHF/UHF receiver. It's a beaut. It awaits but the erecting of the antenna, a spot in the shack, and someone to read the manual to program it. The position of "King of the Ham shack" is reserved for the soon-coming Ham radio HF transceiver.

Even our carport anchors are blooming! Ain't it great! Leave it to "flower child", Connie!

Just "peachy"!

The wishing well near the front driveway.

It's a good thing that our house isn't for sale. The walk up would sell it in a heartbeat! We got flowers!

 

Well….spring has sprung and it’s mucho greeno around here (at least for awhile). It’s actually pretty in these parts in the spring. Those folks who move to Springville (named after an artesian well and not the season) from other parts of the country in the spring realize in a few weeks that they are on another planet when the sun comes to town. We have to take pictures and glue the memory of verdant hills to our noggins because this glory will fade only too quickly. If we had no such hope for a new spring next year, we would all move to someplace better like Oklahoma or the Serengeti.

 This is also to say that we’re in the middle of a drought. It’s not the only drought that Kalifornia has experienced. But, it is one of the worst ones. Our rainfall for the season is the 7^th driest on record. What rain that did fall was so meager that we had to stand out in it for an hour to get wet (well….maybe not that long but it seemed like it).

Despite the hardships, we do have “critters” here. A glance around the place shows the place crawling with coyotes, bunnies, worthless yard-mining pocket gophers, frogs, snakes, an occasional bear, deer, goats, cattle, dogs, cats, bees, ants, and worthless, stinking, hole-digging, garden destroying, plum eating, pestilent, lousy, furry, ground squirrels. We call these vermin, Rancho Fuzzers. They make for great target practice but you can’t eat the buggers. They are making our property look like a molybdenum mining operation. I’m looking for some C4 and caps to help with the matter.

 These bugs and buggers are so prosperous that I can’t help but think they’re all on food stamps. In Kalifornia, the food stamp program is simple: if you can show up, you can load up. And…..you don’t even have to speak …..English (which is why the coyotes are grinning when I see them, I suppose).

 Connie has been up to her armpits in compost, plants, and seedling starts. She loves showers so all is well. Also in the ground are her bell peppers, a Mexican province full of tomatoes, and even her peas. "Ol’ Pea’in’ Connie", we call her. Has kind of a nice ring to it, eh? I’m wondering what would happen if she planted leeks so she could…..take a leek. Well…maybe not. I’m wanting to say that I would probably have to buy back some of my body parts from the Gypsies if I got involved with that gig. In any event, there will be no end to the canning of love apples and our salsa supply will be unlimited! Zowie!

The strawberries are already set and prospering. The zucchini should be ready for the dirt shortly as will be a few other items that can be canned or frozen. Nothing like fresh veggies when making a nice hot soup.

 

We have a new “pet” at the ranch. She’s a cute little gray dove! We call her “Lovey Dovey”. She and her mate built a nest right at our back door on the steel shelf rack that we have parked there. There are a couple of items we won’t get to use for the duration since she’s camped on top of them. I’ve got options and back ups though. We haven't seen the male bird in awhile. If she starts collecting food stamps at our address, we'll know what happened.

Of course, we don’t just crash our way out of the back door since it opens up only a few inches from her nest. So, we just slip quietly out and she just sits motionless on her eggs. We know what she’s thinking, though: “Don’t look at me. I’m not here. My camouflage is working well and I’m invisible. You can’t see me…..don’t try to touch these eggs, you big white gorilla! You don’t even want to see me when I’m mad! I’ll rip your head off, peck your eyes out, and then I'll hurt you!!”. 

Spring has seen another improvement: the “burn pile” that we’ve been babysitting for four years is finally gone (never do today what you can put off until next season, I always say). More accurately, it has been me doing the honors since Connie declined to be part of the job. She said that it had something to do with me being more qualified at trash tending or words to that effect. Did she just call me “trashy”?

A friend and neighbor of ours hired a gent to haul off some stuff and recommended him to us. He has a pick-me-up truck with side boards and a trailer so we hired him to remove the pile to help alleviate our suffering (and I wasn’t getting paid to baby sit piles of anything). It worked out a lot better having him do it, I should think. I was almost dreading the fiery blaze and huge column of smoke and seeing me with my hose flailing about trying to douse the mess with a 5/8” garden hose. It was easy to envision a nearby oak tree turning into a flaming signal flare for the fire department to come and haul me off to the rubber room.

At dear Connie’s behest, I converted the second story family room back into a second story family room. It had been an overflow area for the computer shop and had been overtaken with…growth. Hey, you’d be surprised to know just how fast computers and eBay items can multiply! Anyway, the area is livable now which is a good thing since Pastor John Appiah from Ghana Africa is going to be staying with us for a week or so in May. He’ll have the huge bedroom up stairs in which to camp and won't have to stumble over a bunch of computers, parts, and pieces.

Little by little the office/radio shack/fishing tackle depot in the barn is starting to look less and less like a wrecking yard and more and more like a usable space. The warming of days is now seeing a laptop in place on the big office desk and it is replete with a nice three- piece set of powerful speakers. A printer is staged for installation. Nearby and nearly ready are the VHF/UHF monitors/scanners and the short wave radio equipment.

My big 25 amp and smaller 5 amp power supplies are ready for use. Just need to coordinate the equipment. I may just run a mobile CB unit from the smaller one and hook it to a mobile antenna for now.

The short wave gear consists of a Kenwood R600, an old Realistic DX-440 receiver (it works great even though it’s 25 years old!), a sweet Tecnam PL-660 portable multi-band S/W rig, and a 15 year old Realistic DX-380 multi-band S/W AM/FM receiver (it's small but quite a performer). I use a couple of powered S/W RF amplifiers to feed these guys. I would like to set up a big high performance general coverage receiver some day soon and string a nice long-wire antenna to it. After that will be the Ham and CB radio station. If I can mount my discone (sic) antenna, I’ll haul out my big Kenwood IC-R7000 VHF/UHF receiver. That big baby is something else! The place ought to look like a space station any day now but Connie was wondering if that was a good thing. I just told her I didn’t know. It’s probably a cry for help.  

Ideas abound for antennas but mounting them is not going to be an easy task. My G5RV dipole will need to be strung between the gable of the house to the gable of the barn. That may not be viable since the coax cable will be hanging down half way and will be in the way. A nice trapped vertical antenna gable-mounted on the barn is a good idea but that may not happen due to the barn architecture. The gambrel roof is probably too steep to mount antennas on and it isn’t flat at all on top.  I may have to erect a tower alongside the barn and shove a beam antenna way up high. From there, I can string other antennas. A ground-mounted vertical is a possibility but, there again, the logistics are limiting the matter. We’ll see. It’s amazing; we have two acres to work with and no room for an antenna farm. *SIGH*. What is a communicator dude to do?

A client recently upgraded his computer system and threw all of his “old” stuff at me (I had sense enough not to duck). It included a really really nice three piece set of speakers (now in the radio shack) and I was perplexed as to why he would part with them. I’m blessed so I didn’t argue with the nice man. He also tossed a large and expensive flat screen monitor my way too! Expensive large screen monitors are my friends!

This big baby is a square one and was replaced by a new 16 x 9 format screen. However, the big square ones are required when someone is using a graphics program and need to keep the proportions correct (the 16 x 9 format doesn’t always do that and things may get skewed a bit). I have a big 19” square Sony similar to it and a few of the smaller ones so I’m good to go with graphics and such.

The Ranch Rino is getting a new battery soon. Ol’ Rancho Ran forgot to ready it for the winter and it croaked (silly me). After that, it will need a bit of work on the exhaust manifold so that the neighbors in Springville, Porterville, Strathmore, Lindsay, Exeter, Farmersville, and Visalia won’t be complaining of the noise. The plan is to use the drag scraper to level off the area where the burn pile was and cover up the ground squirrel burrows. Have I said how much I hate ground squirrels?

Connie has the place flowing with flowers. She’s quite the …um….flower girl, don’tcha know (I could be cruisin’ for a bruisin’). It’s so flowery that it’s a bee’s paradise! In fact, our bees are happier than ducks in a new pond! She’s going to make sure that the Ranch is pretty but also so our bees won’t forsake us in favor of better digs. That also means that we won’t run out of that marvelous Rancho Honey any time soon.

Our front porch and railing area are lined with flower pots bursting with colorful flowers and the anchor bowls for our car port are filled with happy pansies. She has other kinds of bloomers but it would be difficult to recount them for now (read: “Brother Ran wasn’t paying attention so he doesn’t know”).

One of our yearly jaunts in spring is to head up the road a piece (but not a fur piece) and take the Yokhol Valley Road from 6 miles north of Springville into Exeter (30 miles from Springville). The route is most scenic as it meanders through the foothills. But, it’s much more so during the springtime when the wildflowers blanket the hills almost like snow. Most are white or gold but the purple lupines decorate the roadside with much zeal.

Usually, we take a zillion pictures of the beauty and glory (OK! OK! Maybe not quite that many…but not by much). This year we may not go because of the drought. Most likely there will be a lot of flowers but it would be difficult to imagine there being the glorious splendor of previous years. Who knows….we may take the back road to town before too long or the glory will be gone altogether. This place is just plain ol’ Melba Toast dry by May. It was 91 degrees today!

Stay tuned. More to come from El Rancho Relaxo De Tortuga, a designated “Sweat Free” zone.