One quality that makes the numbers so present is their bigness: On a yearly, monthly, and even daily scale they can be daunting.  To be on track, we need 615 calories each day from the yard — a threshold that has consistently proven difficult to reach.

In fact, we never have.

Yesterday we got as near as ever, consuming 606 calories from the yard.  On top of that, we shared 106 additional calories with our good friends Paul and Amy, who have a fine garden of their own.

What we ate is a good lesson in how hard the daily number is to hit: seven eggs and 2.5 pounds of tomatoes.  Two of the eggs went to pancakes for breakfast, and the other five to excellent egg salad sandwiches for lunch.  We made a raw tomato pasta for dinner, using four kinds of tomato (Yellow Pear, Ace, Roma, and Cherokee Purple) and basil from the yard.  All good, but we couldn’t, and shouldn’t, eat so many eggs every day, nor could we stomach so many tomatoes no matter how varied the flavors.

What worked in getting close to our daily goal was a little bit from the yard in each meal.  What we need to work on is creative ways to use what’s available at the time, in some cases tucking an edible we’re tired of into a larger dish so it’s not so present.

We would also benefit from an additional, reliable source of calories, something like the eggs — but not.  I’ve been considering keeping bees for honey and as pollinators, but will likely wait until our daughter is a bit older before massing stinging insects around the house.  A pair of avocado trees that fruit in alternate seasons might work, supplemented by something high-calorie that keeps well, like a nut.  Another option would be devoting more space to grains or successive plantings of potatoes.

Likely, a combination will best suit our palates and needs, while garnering us more 600-plus days like yesterday.

I have been dutifully waiting for the apple trees to go dormant so I could do a little grafting.  However, in my waiting for the last leaves to drop I forgot something that I have gloated about on several occasions this winter: the character of my hometown.  In San Diego we don’t really get frost, I can grow most things most times of the year, and some trees that shed their leaves in the fall and winter elsewhere never quite do so here.

My plan has been to graft a few branches from the Anna Apple tree in my parents’ yard onto the Gala Apple in ours.  It performed so well last season that the load of giant, delicious apples left it permanently deformed.  Our Gala Apple produces, but is not nearly as successful.  And grafting seems like one of those skills it might be handy to have.

However, when I stopped by my parents’ place two days ago to borrow a tool or three, there was their Anna Apple — in full bloom, bees buzzing everywhere.  Having read nothing about grafting, I watched a nine-minute YouTube video on saddle grafts, then drove back the next day and cut the last two branches that hadn’t yet budded out.

The steps for completing this type of graft are few and relatively simple: After sterilizing a pair of pruning sheers and a sharp knife, I cut a few three-to-four-inch pieces from the Anna Apple, referred to as scion wood, including the tip of the branch; then I trimmed a few inches off of a Gala Apple branch, making sure the thickness, or caliber, of the branches at the cuts was roughly the same; next, using a sharp knife, I split the Gala Apple branch with an inch-long cut down the center; using the same knife I carved the end of the Anna Apple branch into a “V”.  After all the cutting and carving, all that’s left is to insert the Anna Apple “V” into the Gala Apple center cut, tightly wrap the joint in surgical tape (or any adhesive tape that will break down in the sun), and then paint the grafted piece with wax to keep it from dehydrating.

The graft should be shaded for a few weeks.  If, at the end of that time, the scion branch begins to bud out — success.

It’s too soon to tell if my grafts will take.  But the process of grafting seemed to go off without a hitch. I ended up grafting two Anna Apple branches onto our Gala, and four D’Anjou Pear branches onto our Bartlett.  Grafting saves space on a small property, since many varieties of edible trees require a pollinator, or second tree.  The same effect can be accomplished with a few grafted branches.

The experience of grafting felt like visiting a place you’ve read about in National Geographic.  This integral agricultural technique has been practiced for thousands of years.  So, it was like applying ancestral knowledge — despite having acquired the know-how from a YouTube video by a guy named Tom.

The Butternut, Pink Banana, and Table Queen Acorn Squash has had several weeks of robust growth.  Vines burst through the netting that covers my raised beds, climbing and unfurling 15-inch-wide leaves of deep green, the vines healthy with flowering female fruit.

But the squash that grew rapidly to the size of a sneaker have all but stopped, the growth arrested by something, many of them shriveling and softening and slipping off the vine.  It’s not a total loss.  There are several massive Pink Banana Squash that increase in size daily.  But our plans for Butternut Soup in the winter and the clipped recipes now seem presumptuous.

Of most concern is the lack of female fruit to replace what has been lost.  In squash these females have big flowers attached to perfect miniatures of the mature fruit, basically an ovary, on a short stem.  As of now, there’s nothing but fruitless male flowers, high on their slender stalks.  They stand tall and bloom, attracting hordes of pleasantly surprised bees with their out-of-season pollen.  Damn happy bees.

The most likely culprit, as far as I can tell from my reading, is insufficient pollination — which seems an odd problem for the sausage fests that are my raised garden beds.  This would never happen on a college campus.  Insufficient pollination can result in deformed fruits or fruits that grow a bit then die off, and it can occur even if there seems to be an ample pollinator presence (the damn happy bees).  Apparently the number of pollinators present can affect the ultimate size of the mature fruit, too.

What does this mean for me?

At any time over the next several weeks you may find me out in the garden, hand-pollinating the squash.  This can be done by picking male flowers, peeling the petals back, and then rubbing the exposed pollen over the female stigma.  Another, less aggressively sexual method would be to use a small artist’s paint brush to pick up some male pollen and then dust the female.  You have to be an attentive hand-pollinator, though.  The flowers open in the morning and are receptive for only one day.

The male squash flowers just can’t get it done.  I guess it can happen to anybody.