I've always wanted to have an orchard. Ten peach, ten apple, and twenty small pear trees are on the way. Thin as a pencil and three feet high, it's going to take a few years of work and waiting before anything sweet happens.

From what I can tell, the key to peaches is spraying for worms; the key to pears, proper pruning. I don't have a clue for apples. My peaches are Red Haven, pears, Bartlett and Anjou, apples--Cox's Orange Pippin. Apples aren't generally grown here, but these are rated for our zone.

I also bought some shrubs and poplars. I like the Lombardy Poplar a lot. It catches the eye, rising like an exclamation point in the landscape. It also catches canker and is short lived. So I bought a bunch of the Theves Poplar for a screen--same columnar form, but more disease free and longer lived than the Lombardy. My other additions include Smooth Sumac, Chinese Wisteria, Late Lilac, Beauty Bush and Toringo Crab Apple.

Friday night found me sitting by Sara's grave watching the comet Hale-Bopp inch through the sky. It's the slowest looking 25-mile wide icecube I've ever seen. Actually, in the big picture it's clipping along at 40,000 mph on a 4,000 year orbit of the sun.

Comet Hale-Bopp was discovered by amateurs (Alan Hale and Thomas Bopp) on July 23, 1995 outside of Jupiter's orbit. The earth gets as close as 91 million miles away from the sun. Comet Hale-Bopp won't get any closer than 122 million miles from Earth, and that happened on March 22.

Scientists believe it formed more than 4 1/2 billion years ago on the edge of the solar system. Swirling gases and stardust clumped together as an iceball that grew over time.

Then, millions of years ago, something happened - perhaps a collision with another object or the gravitational tug of a star or planet - which kicked it out of its frozen environs beyond Pluto where a trillion other comets may reside.

That put Hale-Bopp in the sun's gravitational field and on a looping 4,000-year journey. Fortunately it's not on a collision course. Were it to hit, scientists say Hale-Bopp would smash with 64 times the energy and mass of the object that wiped out the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago.

"It would devastate the Earth. This thing is so big that if it hit in the mid-ocean range of our planet, the front edge of the comet would hit the ocean floor while the back edge would still be in the stratosphere. It would probably destroy most of the species on Earth."

Hale-Bopp will gradually fade until mid-May, when it disappears from sight. (from unknown author on Internet)

It's the comet of the century, and I watched it slip away next to a dog's grave. Everyone watches life pass by from their own little world. 40,000 miles an hour, yet we can't see it move. It is, it all is.

Before grandma left for Tomball, she told me to take the sycamore. Two feet tall, it somehow sprouted in her patio bird bath. Maybe Me-maws two hundred miles away, but forty feet out back that sycamore has her growing closer and taller every day.
1998