After April Showers

This is one of the most important times of the year as the bees are buzzing happily and dazed from branch to branch, flower to flower. The ‘buzzzzzz’ of thousands of bees can be heard if you’re silent for just a moment. The area around the hive smells like a million wildflowers.

After a past couple rainy weeks, things finally seem to be in bloom. Our daily “to-do” list is stacking up with sowing, planting, and picking lots and lots flowers. It feels like our first real week of flowers is here. Our blooms in season include tons of blue and white Dutch Iris, Sweet Peas, Foxglove, Sweet William, and Snowballs…all of which decided to bloom at once when the weather here in Sebastopol jumped from 60 degrees to 80 degrees in a day. It’s the realization that the wedding season is upon us and we’ll be playing with flowers all day in the near future.

We’re planting about 100 crates of Tuberose and Dahlia bulbs this week and hope that they survive the transplant without getting eaten by gophers. I bet they would taste like ice cream to a gohper… These Tuberose bulbs are from a friend of a friend from India, so there is no way to tell if they will acclimate to the cooler costal weather versus their native Indian land where the air heats up to 120 degrees. We’ll see, but we planted many of them in the hottest part of the farm and set up some drip irrigation.

An entire new orchard was planted where many gnarly quince bushes used to be. The varieties include apples that will double up as cider/dessert apples: Burgundy, Swaar, Spitzenberg, Victoria Limbertwig, Pink Pearl, and Wickson. Each of the new trees was grafted 11 months ago. Since then they’ve been growing in the ground until we transplanted them into our new orchard. The other photos are old Jonathan and Golden Delicious trees that we grafted some Pink Pearl and Golden Russets onto. We’re looking forward to some cider drinkin’and apple eatin’ this fall.