Two Percent

The weather has been stunning, brilliant. Clear skies, upper sixties. An absolute joy and privilege to be alive and outside.

Phil and Jadon laid out the new contours for the peach orchard (Isaiah helped near the end). We get excited looking at the beautiful S-curves across the land. Phil has the vision for two little pocket ponds, and we know better how to manage access and potential parking for guests. The eagerness and expectation increases, I feel, daily, as we get new, exciting ideas for how to properly manage the land.

With the peach orchard laid out, it was time to dig up the cherry trees. After digging three by hand, Phil switched to the backhoe, and that went quickly and easily. As each comes out of the ground, the roots go into a five-gallon bucket, get covered with soil, and doused with water. Tomorrow the trees will move to their new home.

I had a great day, too. Shortly after noon I went out to plant daffodils (with faithful companion Joe). I calculated that, in order to get all the bulbs in the ground before Christmas that I'll need to get about 350 planted per day, which seems ambitious but possible.

I experimented with different planting tools. The shovel is, perhaps, the easiest, but it cuts such a large plane, I fear for my trees' roots. The Dibbler, a skinny shovel which my Dad used to plant chestnuts, went into the ground to the proper depth, but made such a slim trench that I couldn't get the bulbs in the ground.

And so I stuck with the Radius Bulb Planter. Sometimes it went into the ground very nicely, but most bulbs required about five jumps (or more) for me to get the tool in the ground. More often than not, I couldn't get it all the way down, either.

Phil came by to see what I was doing. He happened to come right as I started the smallest tree in the orchard. He planted all twelve bulbs around that tree in record time. He practically just had to stand on the tool and it sank into the ground. If he jumped twice, the tool was below ground level. It was uncanny.

So I ended the day with 17 new trees surrounded with rings of 12 bulbs each, nicely spaced about 6" apart, forming a lovely three foot circumference of tree protection. It's very satisfying, even if that used a mere two percent of the daffodil bulbs.