Enjoy them. It may be possible that they will bloom this year but it will probably be a couple of years. Most peonies sold in this country are sold as red, white, and pink. It is nice to know the name but not necessary for your own personal enjoyment. I have a whole bank of peonies that I had labels wash away before I could add them to my diagram. Some animal also helped by removing some of the labels. After the plant blooms or late this fall after the foliage dies down sprinkle arround the plants with a general fertilizer say 10-10-10 or 12-12-12. If you fertilize just after the plants bloom you should be increasing the amount of nutrients that the plant stores. If you fertilize in the late fall you will be feeding the small white roots the plant sends out. If you fertilize too early in the fall you might have a lot of fresh growth that will freeze. If you like your peonies you might want to join your Canadian Peony Society. You can receive information on peonies and discounts on plants. Who knows you might even meet your neighbor two blocks over that you can trade plants with.

I'm so glad you put the pic up. I can't remember how. I had this plant 3 years ago and thought cool a wild flower a bird poop left me. Then the 2nd year I had 200 of them. killed most but still loved the anise like dried seed heads. Then this year around 500+ I had to mow them down and they only come up in my veggie garden about a space 10x20 every year. The flowers are pretty and I'd like to know more in case they are endangered wildflower. I just found 3 new babbies Friday. Help would be nice. I've never seen them in the wild and I'm always fishing in the country. But on another note I Have a new wild flower this year way prettier, let u know next summer how that turns out. Tree

When I was growing up on a farm we farmed with horses and at the ripe old age of 8 years old I began mowing hay with a team of Belgian Draft horses and and old McCormic Deering Sickle Bar Mower. (The next year I began operating the Grain Binder). I located a picture of a new Sickle Bar Tooth similar to the one you have, then I made up a composite picture in an effort to show you how they work. Although your tooth is severely coated with rust you can see a circular light colored area on the blunt end where the mounting hole is. Also on the sides you can see an indention where the slot for the blade should be. The individual teeth are mounted on the Sickle Bar with flat head stove bolts. This leaves a nice flat surface for the cutter bar to slide in. While modern combines have cutting heads that are up to 36ft wide or more, typically the old hay mowers had a sickle bar that was 5 to 7 feet long. The cutter bar is the same length as the sickle bar and once the cutter bar is slid into place there is a gearbox on the mower that has an offset cam wheel and a "Pitman arm" which reaches from the gear box to the end of the cutter bar. As the wheel rotates the pitman arm pushes or pulls the cutter bar back and forth through the teeth in an oscillating motion about 4 to 5 inches on a stroke. In fact it works in exactly the same manner as a pair of barber clippers for cutting hair. You had also wondered how this could have been buried so deep. I think I figured that out as well. Although it is the custom of farmers to use commercial fertilizers today, back in the day that simply was not done. Instead farmers relied on a technique that was first figured out by George Washington Carver back before the civil war. They rotated the crops. You begin by planting a grain crop such as wheat, oats, speltz, barley or rye and you top seed that with red clover. The grain was cut with a binder and both the grain and the straw was taken off the field in mid summer. The clover would continue to grow and you could get a second harvest of clover hay off the same acreage. That fall we would sow timothy hay seed, which grew through the winter and into the following summer. Normally we would get two cuttings of hay, and in a good year we might get a third cutting of hay off the same acreage. Throughout the fall and winter we would spread the manure from our livestock on the fields as fertilizer plus the Red Clover captures nitrogen from the atmosphere and stores it as little nitrogen nodules on the roots, further fertilizing the soil. The third year we would plow those fields and plant corn. Corn requires a lot of nutrients and depletes the soil so you then repeat the rotation to build up the soil. (Today they call this method "organic farming" and charge you an arm and a leg for the grain".) I suspect that tooth that you have fell off or was replaced and the old one just left laying in the field and it was later turned under during the plowing operation, which would account for the depth were you found it.

Just looked it up in my bird book and it could be either a Sharp-Shinned Hawk or a Coopers Hawk. They are really hard to tell apart. The Coopers Hawk tend to have more ticking on the breast, where the S-S is more solid. Nice picture! I feed the LBBs (little brown birds) here to attract the birds of prey. I have a huge spruce tree in my front yard and have seen Cooper's and Kestrels fly in there for a meal. We are overrun with English sparrows, pardon me, politically correct HOUSE sparrows, starlings and Eurasian collared doves and do anything I can to get the numbers down. We also live out in the high desert and worry about hantavirus and need to keep the rodent population down. The guys at the feed store looked at me like I grew a third head when I told him "my hawks thank you" when he loaded up the 40# of sunflower seeds. "I didn't know hawks ate sunflower seeds". "Nope," I told him, " they eat the birds that eat the sunflower seeds." I left him speechless!