Tuesday Garden Tour

The roses that I bought in the spring are all flowering madly right now, and even though it shortens their lifespan I can't resist picking them for the house. Thanks to all the trendy overpriced and filled with generally useless things garden stores proliferating around here I've amassed quite a collection of weird looking vases: 1" high glass cylindrical ones, 10" glass tubular ones that lie sideways, little glass napkin holders that hold one solitary flower, and weird glass dishes to float flowers in. Last summer I even found a pansy ring in a second hand store, although it took me a few hours to figure out that it was a pansy ring (I guess that Charm School when I was 11 wasn't such a wash-out, Mum!). So now we have collections of gorgeously smelling flowers all over the place. I've even got the trifle dish in use: filled with water and several roses floating on the surface on the centre of the table.
This first rose is a climber called Westerland. It's scent is rather fruity, the petals are slightly frilled and it glows in the back yard at night. I've got it training up against a trellis, with some cucumber plants for company.
This one is called Tahitian Sunset - I bought it because of two things: it's heavily scented and I like apricot/coral coloured roses. This not the best shot of this rose (this one is a little past its prime) but I was too lazy to go back out and search for a newer bud.





Nasturtiums. It's a good thing these plants grow like weeds because we've been garnishing our salads with them every night. This particular variety grows 10'-12' up a trellis, and if you intertwine them with scarlet runners the effect is pretty wild. They have a slightly peppery taste which can, in FDPG's some mouths, seem HORRIBLY HOT AND SPICY, but is lessened by eating them one petal at a time.

Phew. The drama around this place.




And I've finally been able to really and truly experience what the phrase "Having too many plants of one variety" means. This is The Pumpkin Corner. There are many many pumpkins here. They are overtaking the zucchinis, the tomatoes, and they are currently in Hostile Takeover Negotiations for the artichokes' spot. My money is on the artichokes though, because they have killer spikes.



This is a Compost Corner. Plants include: climbing rose (Madame Alfred Carriere), lysimachia punctata, pink roses (liberated from some of our rental experiences), a fig tree, potatoes (Russian fingerling, Desirée), Tigerella tomatoes, a pear tree with rust (check out the juniper behind it, malevolent with Rust Intent, sob), tiger lilies, and more lysimachia, only this one is the goosenecked variety.

And look who we found in the fennel the other day - a swallowtail caterpillar. He was very small a few weeks ago when I first noticed him (or her?) and I watched for a while as he crawled around, chewing thoughtfully on one particular frond. Then one week he was suddenly three times the size. And I was able to get a photo of him.

Sore Bay Updates

I've updated my hardly-ever-updated food blog with two recipes. Ah yes, I can see you're all waiting with baited rods. Err, bated breath, I mean. Gripping my food blog is, I know. 

One is a lemon verbena sorbet that really is worth the term superlative. I've posted the recipe before but seeing as how my lemon verbena is in such perfect bushy form at the moment, just desperate for a good pick (ooh, that sounds weird, doesn't it?), I posted it again, just in case there's anyone out there with a bushy lemon verbena plant in need of picking trimming. If you find the instructions too confusing to follow leave a note in the comments section. I know I can be a bit obtuse...

The other is a marbled brownie recipe I made for a Scout/Beaver event we were at on the weekend and the peanut butter marbled bits were so deliciously salty I fell resoundingly in love with it. And no, it was NOT me who picked all the peanut butter off the top. Nope. Not me at all.

Consuming Flowers Passions

This is the time of year when having a garden is all it's cracked up to be.

We've got things from the garden for salad each night: nasturtiums, pansies, marigolds, radishes, rocket, mint, chives, artichokes, buttercrunch lettuce, and oak leaf lettuce.




Even FDPG the Picky Eater is eating salad.

Because she grew it.


These were turned into jam yesterday. And the remainder were turned into our stomachs via several meals of waffles, strawberry shortcake, and vanilla yogurt parfaits (for those of us who don't like whipped cream).

But wait, there's more. Or rather, there will be more. Tomorrow. And the next day. And the next day...

Five Little Potatoes And How They Grew

Are you sitting comfortably? Then let's begin.

This is the tale of Five Little Potatoes and How They Grew.


Anyone remember this? It was a vase we were given one Christmas (by someone who obviously had no idea what to give us, sheila whispers sotto voce). It sat in the basement for a while because none of us knew what to do with it. It was big. And breakable.

I'm not Martha enough, evidently, because Martha WOULD know what to do with it.

Anyhow, a while back the kids had some projects entered in a Science Fair and this featured in the twins' section as a Guess What This Plant Is exhibit. At the time no one could guess what it was (well, someone did but that was only after she'd exhausted 30 other guesses). To put you all out of your misery I'll tell you that it's a potato. One we grew last year. It sat in the basement, forgotten under a box of onions, until I saw the sprouts peeking through. So we planted it on a bed of sand, let it sprout some more, and took it in to the Fair. It was a hit. A mystifying hit, but a hit nevertheless.

So, we planted the potato, we took it to the Fair, we brought it home again. Exit Everyone's Interest.

Since then it's been sitting on the back deck in the sun, getting more and more crowded in its little home. Today I took pity on it, perhaps in part because of Richard's repeated "Jeez, just how long are you going to torture that thing?" comments, and planted it in the garden. And when I carefully shook the sand off the roots in preparation for sinking it into its new hole, what should I find but these...

Dinner!

What We're Reading Thursday

This is part of Jill's (The Well Read Child) What We're Reading Thursday meme. For more What We're Reading reads, click here.


We’re reading Hugh Lofting’s The Voyages of Doctor Doolittle this week. I found it in the second hand store a while back and could not resist the 25¢ price tag. Nor could I resist the memories I had of Rex Harrison as the genial singing Doctor, sitting on that giant snail, not to mention the PushMe-PullYou. Boy did I want one of those PushMe-PullYous when I was a kid. And yes, I wanted to talk to animals too.

There is always the risk, when one reads an older book to one’s kids, of difficulties with language. And by difficulties I mean style. Think of the last Jane Austen book you read: how much of that would be easily understood by your average seven to nine year old? Not much, methinks. And so, when I picked up Dr Dolittle and said “This is our next read!” very brightly to my kids, I had a little of that trepidatiousness about style and language in my heart. It’s the same when I bring home one of the Disney movies of my childhood, movies which our library seems to have in abundance: Blackbeard’s Ghost, The Parent Trap, The Cat From Mars, The Three Lives of Thomasina. Movies my brother and sister clamoured to watch every Sunday night on the Wonderful World of Disney (I was a tagalong on these evenings, too young for anyone to take seriously). There is a part of me waiting for the kids to scoff, because they are so very very dated, but thus far they’ve loved everything, particularly if there is a charming cat involved.

But I worried for naught, really, because this is an extremely accessible read for any kid. Well, almost any kid. There are bound to be a few kids out there who don’t dream of sailing off into the sunset, off to seek their fortune (even if it means a shipwreck). Kids who don’t sometimes wish they could speak the language of the animals. Kids who don’t like hanging around with eccentric adventurers or opinionated parrots. I’m sure there are. But they aren’t my kids. My kids are hanging on every word of this book, even when some of those words are rather, err, quaint. I’m reminded of Beatrix Potter every now and then, because Mr. Lofting is very fond of the word “presently,” a word I remember quite well from the thousands of times I read The Tale of Peter Rabbit to Max. There is a bit of the old ‘colonial mentality’ as well, but I think this is something adults would be more sensitive to than most kids. Where I might see aspects of British Imperialism, my kids see strange clashes with different groups of people. It is, after all, a product of its time, having been written in 1922.

So we’re all greatly enjoying this story. Max loves that there’s always plain old sausages and tea for every meal, while Dominic is thrilled by the idea that a ten year old is sailing off with an eccentric Doctor, a chimp, a parrot, and a peculiar African prince named Bumpo. FDPG loves the idea that all the really smart animals are female. I’m sure there’s more, but that really stands out for her. That and the erudite polyglot abilities of the Doctor. But we haven’t yet met the Giant Sea Snail. Wonder what they’ll make of that.

Wednesday Night Garden Tour

It was so warm and balmy after dinner tonight that we all repaired to the back yard, me to spot water some plants that were missed by the soaker hoses, Katie to dangle from the boat float hanging from the willow tree, the boys to whack the poor poor stand-in for a shuttlecock (an old Waldorf wool ball) REALLY hard against their badminton racquets and shriek with laughter when the old woollen ball got caught in the trees. Try as I might, I cannot get them to play softly, and this year I even sprang for decent badminton racquets instead of the cheap dollar store crap I usually buy (gosh what was I thinking).
As I watered I came across this little geum. It's a lovely garden flower, blooms early in the spring and lasts forever in a vase. This particular variety is called Mrs Bradshaw. Who were you, Mrs Bradshaw? And why do you have a flower named after you?
This is Lysimachia punctata. Yes, it is loosestrife, but it's not that loosestrife. It's yellow loosestrife. It's almost as spreading, but it's not classified as an invasive plant. I like it a lot; it's also a long laster in a flower vase. Stands up forever, even in murky water (I know this because I just checked the vase in the bathroom and let me say that this flower will last in just about anything...ahem).

It also keeps its colour in a vase forever. And the bees love it. So do I.








My dad left these on the doorstep for my birthday last November, and instead of chucking them out I stuck the pot in the garden and promptly forgot about it, horrible daughter that I am, and what should I see this spring but this: burnt orange blooms, glowing in the noon day sun.













My Georgia O'Keefe flower. I won't say which part of female anatomy this might or might not be, because I'm still in my Jane Austen heroine phase and I think this would scare the bejeesus out of the JAH, don't you? That naughty naughty Georgia, none of us can look at a circular flower anymore without thinking of...well, I'll leave it to your imaginations.










And whaddaya know but the artichokes are doing excellently, despite my inept care last winter. One gardening site I checked out told me to invert a pot over them before the frost, then leave them. Another told me to mulch them heavily before the first frost. So I piled up a lot of leaves then stuck a pot over each one, neglecting to read the fine print at the bottom of the instructions, the fine print that read "Make sure you do not pile the mulch too close to the stalk because it will cause rot to set in." Poor poor artichoke. I promise not to do that this winter. Really I do. Especially if you keep doing this.








Strawberries. My dad and I have a semi-friendly game going on, where he comes over and curses my strawberries for being so robust and healthy looking and I go over to his house and mock his for looking so pathetic.

Hmmm. Don't we sound mature. It's really very amusing. Really.




Now when I first saw this it struck me as Horrifying Garlic Bed Carnage. If Toffee (our cat) had been around at the time I would have cursed him for lying all over my garlic and crushing it. I might even have shrieked at him. But he wasn't anywhere to be seen so my next thought was "OMG I HAVE ROTTING GARLIC!" It was heartbreaking, actually...well, until I dug carefully around one stalk to see the rot more carefully and discovered that it must be an early variety of garlic because there were some big honkin' bulbs under that soil. And when garlic is almost ready the stalks, uh, well, they tip over and look like, well, uh, they look like this photo. Carnagey-like.

No cat squishing. No rot. It was just garlic doing its thing. And me doing my thing. (gotta work on the overly melodramatic thing a bit, don't I?)



See? I took one out of the ground just to show you that I have not lost my mind completely.

See that bulb?

Bayyybeee!

I make the world's best garlic butter, if I do say so myself.

I'll even give you the recipe, such as it is:

Sheila's Really Amazing Garlic Butter

Cut the tops off 3 heads of garlic. Place them in a bakingdish and drizzle with olive oil. Place in a 375ºF oven until they are very soft. Let them cool for 20 minutes, then remove the skins. Place the garlic mush in a food processor and blend till smooth, then add some salt (I use Spike) and about 1 cup of unsalted butter and blend some more. Transfer to a ceramic dish and chill for a few minutes until the butter is firmer, then slather on a hot fresh baguette.

Nighty night!

Wednesday Garden Tour

The flowers are really blooming in the garden these days. Everything is awash with lush, colourful blooms, although the blast of Mediterranean heat we had last week almost exhausted my poppies. Instead of popping over a period of weeks they popped all in the same week (I tell my kids that this is why they are called poppies). This is the Princess Victoria Louise poppy. It's so delicate and feathery and beautiful that I thrill to see it every spring. And no, contrary to what Richard might say, I am NOT being a little on the melodramatic side. I really do thrill to it. I love salmon coloured flowers.

This is a Himalayan blue poppy. I've tried before to grow these things, even going so far as to buy those horribly expensive Seeds of Change packets from the store, but nothing ever came from them. They didn't even languish: they expired before they could languish. Finally I gave up. Well, until this spring, when I saw the plant itself at the place where I buy eggs. I couldn't see many disasters befalling an actual plant, so I bought it. And lo and behold but the darn thing actually bloomed.





This is a bed I built (with my own two hands, gosh, how clever is that?) with some bricks a friend of mine gave me when we first moved here. I saved these bricks for a garden path, which I never seemed to get around to, so they sat in the carport for well over a year until Richard was finally compelled to comment on them (he's a patient man, is Richard).

"Did you forget that you had a lot of bricks Out There?" he said. (he's also rather taciturn)

"No, of course I didn't," I said, rather testily. How could I forget, I thought. Honestly, does he think I'm a dingbat or something?

Better not answer that. In the interests of marital harmony and all...

Anyhow, the area in the photograph here used to be a bit of a swamp in the winter. I don't think the drainage is all that it could be, and some days the water swam over the concrete tiles. There was even some algae there. Slimy algae. Icky slimy algae. My poor perennial fuchsias were not happy. They came back last year, but I could sense their pain. So I raised their living quarters a bit, using those bricks. The fuchsias burst out of the ground this spring like, well, springs (gosh, do I have a way with words or what). And to give that little brick bed some je ne sais quoi, I planted some Baby Tears in between some of the bricks. I'd seen them spilling most artistically from an urn in a garden magazine and I wanted that Artistic Spilling happening in my own garden. But I lacked an urn. Well, an urn and the blue wall behind the urn. Oh, and the fountain they all sat in. No fountain. But I did, as Richard liked to remind me, have some bricks. Bricks sitting around doing absolutely nothing (oh the horror of it). I took one plant, ripped it into 6 pieces, and wedged a piece into six different areas. It was a good thing I started this bed in April because it took me three weeks of careful watering to nurture these little buggers bits along. We had a lot of iffy moments, we did. But now they are beginning to Spill. Artistically.