Spring Babies

Every year at this time I am overwhelmed with desire for animal babies.  I miss the goat kids that used to make the place come alive with their hopping and jumping and general delight at having landed on this amazing planet.  I long for a little donkey, one with big eyes and long soft ears and tiny hooves that I could take on walks and perhaps, when it was grown, even ride side-saddle like the little old black-clad women I used to see on the roads near my grandparents' farm in Catalonia.

Failing a donkey, I would love a couple of geese.  I am perilously close to getting a couple of goslings, the kind that would grow low-slung, bulldog-like bodies with gray backs, white bellies and bright orange beaks.  To me, a goose waddling and honking in the yard is the very essence of country living.  What holds me back?  The lack of a pond and of adequate fencing, and the mountains of poop that a pair of geese would produce.

Short of a goose, I could get more hens.  I was at the feed store picking up grain last week and there they were, the year's shipment of day-old chicks, cheeping and running around under the heat lamps.  What kept me from scooping up a half dozen and taking them home?  Only my near fanatical belief that a peaceful, healthy flock is a small flock, and that I owe it to my hens to keep their numbers low.

So I've become resigned to the thought of no new babies at the place this year.  But that's not quite right. There is new life here after all. 

As if to reward me for my restraint the potted lemon tree has just presented me with eight little  lemons.  This is the tree that, as you may recall, I had so much trouble shaping and acclimating           ( http://mygreenvermont.blogspot.com/2013/02/shape.html).  I was surprised and grateful when it suddenly covered itself in blooms, then dismayed when most of them dropped off.  But I became a dedicated pollinator (I was going to write "husband") to the remaining few.

Every morning after breakfast I would pick up an old watercolor brush and tickle the innards of each flower, hoping that I was doing it right.  The petals eventually dried and fell off, and I kept peering at the base of the pistils, looking for the slightest swelling that would tell me that I had succeeded as a bee.

After days of looking in vain, I decided to enjoy my lemon tree for its foliage and abandon all thoughts of a crop.  Then suddenly yesterday there they were: deep green and less than a quarter-inch long, but definitely lemons, my own little lemons in whose procreation I had played an active part. 

I feel such a fatherly kind of pride in every one of them, that I'm not sure I'll ever bring myself to make them into lemonade.

Shape

When I ordered my lemon tree online, this is what I had in mind...

except for the elegant planter, of course, and the palace of Versailles in the background.  I didn't expect it to have that perfect shape, either, since mine would be in its comparative infancy.  But I did assume that it would have been pruned in such a way as to have some hope of growing into a decent shape.  Sort of the way you take a puppy to puppy classes so it will have the best chances of growing up to be a good dog.

When my tree arrived it had indeed been pruned--you could see the stubs where former branches had attached to the trunk--but it looked like it had been pruned by a tribe of drunken monkeys.  Branches were growing at crazy angles, pressing against each other and looking scraggly.  Getting this tree was a bit like adopting a dog from the pound--neither one arrives looking its best.

But, as with a new dog, at first my attention on the tree was focused on survival issues--giving it just the right amount of water, putting it in a spot it liked.  This must have worked, because the next thing I knew the tree was covered in flower buds, dozens of them on every branch.  Many of those buds fell off, but many clung to the branches and started opening, filling the kitchen with their scent.

Much as I loved the blooms, however, every time I went near the tree all I could see were those clumsy branches growing at ugly angles.  I badly wanted to do some pruning, but I held back because, 1.  you're only supposed to prune while a tree is dormant, and mine was exuberantly awake;  and, 2.  by chopping off the offensive branches I would be cutting my potential lemon crop in half.

 I didn't want to harm the tree, and I badly wanted every last lemon it could produce, so for a couple of weeks I controlled myself and tried to focus on the flowers, which I was hand-pollinating with an old watercolor brush, and their smell. But I wasn't satisfied. To me, the flowers were decorative and thus contingent, but the shape of the tree was essential.  And the shape was all wrong.

Then one morning I was impersonating a bee, dabbing pollen onto pistils, when suddenly, out of nowhere, I had pruning shears in my hand and was slicing off branches right and left.  Decimating my potential lemon crop.  Possibly harming the tree.

I threw the branches (all those flower buds, such a pity!) out on the snow and took a good look at my newly svelte tree.  It was no longer covered in blossoms, but now it had shape, design, intention.   It no longer looked like a refugee from the pound, but like a tree that was loved.

March is almost here, and the little apple trees on my patio are looking scraggly, full of suckers that cry out for the secateurs.  By the time I'm done with them they will be nicely pollarded, the main branches coming off the trunk at wide angles, the interior of the tree trimmed free of clutter so the sun can reach the fruit.  They will have the well-tended, cared-for look of a freshly bathed dog and whoever sees them will think, "these are trees that somebody loves."