This spring, I also have to start a campaign of plunking the squirrels in the butt with a BB gun. They steal and half-eat a lot of my peaches. I am filled with hatred for them. Interestingly, I can keep them away from the tomatoes with garlic spray, but the peaches, they seem to consider them an all-night,…

Barley freaks me out. It’s so slimy. What is that about?

Way!

Even better. Even better. Even better!

Please?!?

I also have a type of peach called Saturn....

I know. It’s so weird how these things work. In the old days before the drug companies, people would deliberately go and infect themselves with illnesses that were unlikely to be fatal, but which could harm them at a later time, like when they were older or had children. I remember having measles as a child, and being…

Yes. That’s the exact stuff. So I have to mix it myself now, spray on the trees three times a year, and hope for the best. The Peach Leaf Curl manifestations are called, I kid you not, “inflorescences.” So creepy!

This is what happens when you actually ... cook.

I have wangled myself a one-floor house, too. It is pretty sweet!

That is good! My trees suffer from Peach Leaf Curl, a truly appalling-looking fungal ailment that actually causes fluorescent pink fungal growths to appear on the leaves. People who see it thinks it looks like something out of Doctor Who. You can control it with three sprayings of Bordeaux mixture every year, but…

I would watch Benedict Cumberbatch read the newspaper.

Love this GIF!

So, it’s a kind of banana? That’s good, given the banana fungus crisis! The more, the merrier! I have three peach trees in my backyard in Massachusetts — Nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah nyah!

Still, a girl can dream. I currently have too much stuff, but once the kids are gone and the hubby grows up a little, a tiny tiny tiny house is in our future!

That’s a good one. It’s religious Schadenfreude!

Same back atcha. My friend Meeghan is very en pointe. Apparently the term she taught me is usually used to describe Baroque art and architecture. I had almost forgotten it until today...

O.K., I’m really jealous now.

Awesome! I saw those big tropicals in the background and I thought maybe heating wasn’t a problem. Hawaii is so beautiful.

That’s a nice-looking house! Is it hard to heat?