I got pricked while pruning my roses.  It’s ok though because I won’t remember my bleeding fingertips when I’ve got beautiful fragrant roses blooming.  We planted a different color rosebush for each of our female family members and tried to match each person’s favorite color.    

But I still haven’t found a blue rose for my mother. Anybody know where I could get one?

We also have a memorial orchard for our deceased family members.  Each tree in the orchard has a special nameplate remembering loved ones who have died.  Besides the person’s name, birth and death dates, it includes remarks, such as “Inventor and Father of the clan” for my Dad, and “Poet and Mother of the clan” for my mom; or the very sad memories of the children who have died much too young: Michael, our littlest angel, and Billy, Bobby and Richie. “We remember their smiles.”

We live too far away to go to their cemeteries on special occasions, like “Mother’s Day” and “Father’s Day” and their birthdays, so we have our own memory time by their tree here on our property.  I love to walk through all the trees and read the attached nameplates… and take time to remember them all.

Besides these very special trees in the orchard, we have a miracle dwarf tree that’s 23 years-old and only 36 inches high.  There are hundreds of little white flowers on our dwarf Meyers lemon tree right now.  For the last seven months we’ve kept the 23 year-old little tree out in our greenhouse where it’s protected from  freezing cold temperatures.  It’s been blossoming very well but there were no bees in the greenhouse to do their job.  That’s when I stepped in to be “the Pollinator”.  I used a Q-Tip and just buzzed around poking each of the little creamy-white colored flowers.  Then, when the outside temperature started warming up, we moved the 36-inch high lemon tree outside onto the deck where it’s nice and warm and protected from the wind.

Now there are lots of bees outside doing their job and we’re very lucky to have an active bee hive next door.  Soon we’ll see some juicy lemons on this beautiful dwarf tree.  The tree is very small but the lemons will grow to be regular size.  I can hardly wait to make my favorite lemon pie!


By Linda Monohan, Fish Springs, NV
In the April Issue

If you look all around you’ll see that spring is certainly here. There was even a big white turkey sitting on our front deck this morning when we got up. It was very interesting to watch as he seemed to be cuddling up with one of our hens. Here’s the story of a real “tail”—or is it just a “tall tale”?

Once upon a time our daughter Lisa was raising rabbits and her friend Kathy brought Lisa a tiny hairless mammal of some kind. Kathy’s horse had stepped down on some soft dirt and it caved into a Jack rabbit’s den. That’s where Kathy rescued the newly-born occupant. Since Lisa had a fuzzy Lop rabbit that was nursing a litter of bunnies at the time, she took in the wild baby Jack rabbit and put him in with her fancy American Lop-eared mama rabbit and her family of five babies.

To get the nursing mom to accept the outsider, Lisa first rubbed him in the nesting material.  It included the mother Lop’s hair and some cedar shavings.  That way the wild Jack rabbit smelled like the domestic bunnies.  He tucked in with the other babies under the mama and started nursing right away.

The only difference was his appearance.  He was tiny, only half the size of the baby Lops, and he had very long ears that stood straight up, unlike the Lops floppy ears.  When the baby Jack was about four weeks old and eating and drinking on his own, we brought him over to our house.  Our two young granddaughters from San Diego were visiting us and they immediately adopted the wild bunny as their own baby.  They named him Thumper and taught him tricks, like how to run up the sleeves of their shirts.  Thumper stayed small, but his ears grew very long.

We kept him in a hamster cage and put it outside under a large, thick Juniper bush.  After a few days of adjusting to the new location, we opened the cage door and he scampered out to explore the environment.  That’s when it happened.  The little Jack rabbit with the very long ears had turned into a little Cottontail rabbit, with very long ears.  All in one day—he grew a big, fluffy, snow-white cotton ball for a tail!  Then we changed his name from Thumper to Peter.  Now he was “Peter Cottontail”—or was it “Peter Cotton TALE”?