Daffodil Hope

Today and tomorrow are biodynamic flower days, so Phil and I, with the boys, headed out this morning as soon as it warmed up enough to thaw the frost. Except for a short lunch break, we worked steadily until dusk.

The apple orchard is slow going, but Phil spent the afternoon planting in the peach orchard. In the time it took me to ring ten apple trees, Phil not only ringed 17 peach trees, but also popped about 20 bulbs in the ground between each tree. We hope that bulbs every six inches will keep down the weed load on the swales.

When we headed down the driveway, we figured we had put about 1000 bulbs in the ground.

This is why Phil has not been stressed about the daffodils. While I've been watching the days of fall fly by, calculating every day how many days it has taken us to plant what we have done, and extrapolating that out to see how long it would take us to finish the planting if we kept up the same pace, Phil calmly finished various other projects that needed to be done (get Buttercup into the freezer; get the cherries down to the lower pasture; get dry lot and shelter for the cows completed). Somehow he figured there would eventually be a day to spend the whole day planting bulbs.

And when that day came—today—his relaxed attitude proved tenable. We are almost halfway done with all bulbs, and if we can find five or six more full days to plant daffodils this fall, we should be fine.

Why did we order 10,000 bulbs?

Let me go on record to say that, had I known it would be this hard to plant them, I am not sure I would have been so voracious. I had hoped for an easy 200 an hour, and expected the entire project to take little more than a week. But even if it did take a long time, I had hoped for them to arrive a month before they did. Had I known the shipping delay, I would probably have just waited until the end of the season sales. (As I fully expect to do in all future years.)

But why 10,000? Well, daffodils are both grass and rodent repellent, and, as such, excellent shields to fruit trees.

They also bloom a few weeks before apple bloom, which both lures the bees to the orchard where they'll be needed during blossoming, and feeds the bees during the early spring when their winter stores may be low. And since I love my bees, I am happy to aid them however I can.

Furthermore, after our nightmare weed troubles this last year, we are hoping that, by planting daffodils along our swales, we will begin to take control of those wild areas. Not only in the peach orchard, but in the market garden, too.

It wasn't until we had the daffodils in house that Phil suddenly asked, "Why did we just order daffodils? We could have ordered tulips or other beautiful flowers." And, happily, before we had long to regret our purchase, friend Melanie pointed out that daffodils are remarkably unappetizing to rodents who might choose to feast on the (apparently) more scrumptious tulips.

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As we transplanted the peaches, we dug up two trees that the chickens had absolutely girdled. Apparently, trees can survive a good bit of damage, but if a tree loses all the bark all the way around, like a donut of destruction, this gap eventually kills the tree.

On one of the peaches, the chickens took off every bit of bark from the ground to above my knee: stripped bare.

I hesitated to declare them a complete loss, so I put the two trees in some water and covered their roots with a wet bag until I could figure out what to do. So, after a quick tutorial on how to graft peaches, I headed out today to take cuttings of 1/4" to 3/8" diameter branches.

Happily, Phil the engineer has calipers. There were surprisingly few branches that were the right diameter. One tree had plenty of larger branches. Both trees had branches closer to the size of noodles than pencils. But I now have about twenty cuttings, wrapped in wet paper towels, waiting for me to figure out where to store them until the spring.

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And for something totally different: as the older boys worked with us this morning, we were talking about multiplication. Phil's trick of multiplying eleven by a double digit number is to take the number, split the two digits, then drop the sum of the two in the middle. Using 11 x 21 as an example: put the two in front, the one at the back, and the sum (3) in the middle: 231.

Jadon shared his own method of multiplying single digits by nine. If he wants to multiply 9x7, he goes to 60 (the ten below what 10x7 would be), then calculates 9-6 (using the six from sixty), and adds that to 60: 63. For 9x3, he goes to 20, subtracts two from nine, and gets 27. How did he come up with this? I have no idea.