Ratios

It's shaping up to be another scorcher today. I walked Little Princess to the university and hung out with her for a while in the physics lab where it's air conditioned before venturing home again (not to mention the half-hour I spent in my office playing spider solitaire) and she showed me some animated GIFs she's made to demonstrate the surface fluctuations of a white dwarf. Where did I get such a smart daughter from?

This is the summer of vegetal fecundity around our house, it seems. Not only the Siberian apricot is producing fruit for the first time, but the Arctic kiwi that I planted around the same time (one male plant, two females) is laden with an abundance of berries. The sour cherry is full of green fruits and of course the currant bushes are going to be heavy with berries (white, red and black) as always. I will never be able to keep up with them.

Inside the house there is also an interesting phenomenon occurring. I have citrus trees in pots that started in the compost (from all the lemons I use) and there is one in particular that has flowered and fruited on occasion. What is significant is that it has only ever produced one blossom at a time, once developing into an enormous lemon which we left on the tree for appearances' sake (when I finally harvested it and cut it open, it was totally dried out inside). This same tree has surprised me. It flowered, one solitary flower, which is now a little green proto-fruit about 2 cm. long, and then it flowered again, a clump of three this time, which have little bulbs just beginning, and there is one more solitary blossom on another branch that has just dropped its petals, meaning yet another fruit. I am flabbergasted, flabbergasted I tell you!

I have two other trees, one started from a lemon seed, another from a grapefruit (I hesitate to say what the trees are because the seeds do not necessarily breed true) which have never flowered. I guess one out of three isn't so bad.

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