Random Twits

I don't really have a Twitter account, but I like the idea of posting random little tidbits that stand out during our days.

Overheard: FDPG reading Marguerite Makes A Book aloud to Dominic, in an English accent. "Mahhhguerite went into the town..."

"What is this thing? Look! The handset is attached to the box! Wild!" Listening to Max learn how to navigate the intricacies of that old-fashioned implement: the dial telephone. Apparently a thing out of prehistoric days.

"This is a LEGO magnetic stick. I made it so that I can slide it underneath pop machines. All the coins people drop will stick to it! I will be really rich." Dominic, AKA The Money Magnet Boy.

"Only 31 days until my birthday!" FDPG, plotting her birthday cake, her birthday present list, and her birthday party. I think this kid is looking forward to turning nine.

Making Things From The Garden

If you like saving herbs this is the time to be gathering them; once they flower (and from there go on to set seed) the taste of the herb can really change for the bitter.

It's easy to dry your herbs - what you do need is a space where they can dry without getting cramped or squished, because that encourages mold. Here's what I usually do: the day before I douse all my herbs with a thorough shower from the hose. This way you aren't rinsing and cleaning in the sink after cutting (and thus filling your sink with dirt or bits of garden debris). The next day, with the herbs dry and clean, I snip all the clusters I can and put them in biggish paper bags, which I then clothes-peg to a line in the basement. Sheila's Tip #29: write the name of the herb on the outside of the bag. One summer I harvested bag after bag of garden herbs, not realizing until much later that I was collecting the same plant every time. There I was, with 10 bags of dried oregano. Lovely. Sigh.

This is also the time to be picking flowers for medicinal salves or flavoured oils. If you've never done this before, here is a site that gives some basic salve recipes as well as some ideas as to which herbs to use. Here is a jar of St. John's Wort flowers, sitting in some olive oil. I add this oil to a skin salve. If you've never put St John's Wort flowers into oil, it's a very cool experience because the flowers turn the oil golden red.

Other plants that work well in a salve: plantain, comfrey, marigolds, apricot pits, sage, and mints. I like to add cayenne for the vitamin C/ skin-knitting aspects it has but this is not for everyone.

Calendula flowers sitting in oil. Yes, we do have a lot of bowls and glass jars sitting around the house right now. Mullein oil, plantain oil, you name it, I've probably doused it in oil at one time. Just don't leave them where someone might tip them over or you will have a Major Mess on your hands. Don't ask me how I know this.

My Hanging Gardens of Lavender.

If you want to dry your lavender, wrap the stems with elastic bands before you clip them to a drying line. As they dry the bundles shrink a little, allowing some strands to slip out (which can lead to the entire bundle falling onto the floor in a big messy pile, but again, don't ask me how I know this). If you use elastics the elastic will expand and contract with the widths of the stems. No more lavender all over the floor!

Love, Nebuchadnezzar.

Things To Do With Dried Lavender:

Baking: get a big jar of white sugar, and crumble several teaspoons of lavender into it, then seal it up and leave it for a few weeks. The lavender will give the sugar a lovely scent and you can use the resulting scented sugar for lavender shortbread, sugar cookies, or to enhance Earl Grey tea. Purists insist that you clip the bud before the flowers open. Some years I manage this, other years I leave it for the bees. The scent is certainly stronger before the flowers open but since I don't camp out in my lavender garden this is one of those Hit Or Miss Projects for me.

We've sometimes sewn it into sachets for clothes drawers. If you sew a little loop of ribbon on one end you can slip it over a hanger and scent your clothes that way. Add a little orris root and the scent should last that much longer.

FDPG likes to glue it onto her flower collages. You can also just leave it on the plant and let the birds pick it apart they want. Be warned, though: lavender is one plant that needs a good prune at the end of the season. If you don't you'll often end up with raggy bits that don't flower and a misshapen shrub.

Finally, here is the bird suet we make every whenever we accumulate enough bacon fat. I realize this has nothing to do with the garden per se but our family does a lot of catering to birds and insects, so this kind of fits in, right?

I freeze this stuff in sandwich bags because they exactly match the shape of my suet feeder.

Here's our recipe:

bacon fat (I collect it every time we eat bacon and store it in the fridge in glass bowls)
peanut butter
bird seed
other seeds & grains (oatmeal, flax, millet, sunflower, etc)

First you melt the bacon fat in a heavy pot over low heat, add almost equal parts peanut butter (I always freeze when it comes to adding equal parts because it seems like the peanut butter DISAPPEARS faster this way) and stir until the mixture is entirely melted. Turn off heat. Pour in lots of bird seed and whatever else you have handy. The idea is that you add enough seeds to make a thick, gloopy, stodgy mess. Mix it well then bag it. Then freeze it.

Mid Season Fillers

I'm trying to distract myself from watching Argentina get routed by that well-oiled German machine.

If you're looking for ideas to add spots of interest to your garden, particularly as the summer progresses and your garden looks a little tired, try this: dig up some of those perennials seeding themselves everywhere right now and pop them into clay pots. Keep them in a shady spot for a few days so they can get used to the shock of having been dug up, watering all the while. Here is some ornamental sorrel (which is an absolute bugger to control - it seeds itself while you're not looking), some Creeping Jenny, a little feverfew, and some Irish moss.

Oh no. Another goal for Germany. Sob.

Thank You For Your Coropotion

We got some new dry erase pens the other day, which turned FDPG and Dominic into Scribbling Machines, as you can see. Nothing like a fresh dry erase pen, is there, especially when there are so many colours to choose from, not to mention that great big blank canvas.

Dominic: do not erais my cool D if you want to erais this you have to tell Dominic do not erais wrighting

FDPG: Please do not erais the things drawn in green blue red and orange without Katie's permission thank you for your coropotion

And now back to your regularly scheduled programming (Argentina vs. Germany)...

Making Salsa Out Of Ant Hills

I see from my friend Heather's blog that she's also mulching. It's definitely that time of year: the weather is getting hot, the garden is getting dry. Mulching is the way to go if you want to keep the garden moist without constant watering. I use straw: it decomposes into the garden and saves me having to find other things (weeds, grass clippings, etc). It's also relatively cheap, considering. A bale of straw is ten bucks. I don't have a lot of grass in the yard anymore. Besides, the snakes like the straw. I have to think of the snakes, right?
Today I went to work tucking it into all the dry spots of the garden. Here we have the tomatillo border. Tomatilloes = good salsa.


I also laid it near the border of my Neighbour Who Never Weeds' garden. They have lots of quack grass and dandelions and while I do like dandelions, I do not like quack grass. Tragically, quack grass likes me. Sigh.

(In the oak barrel: cantaloupe and ornamental gourds)

It wasn't until I was mulching the plants in the greenhouse that I noticed all the leftover plants, sitting forlornly on the shelves. I had 4 eggplants, 26 tomatoes, 3 hot chilies, 9 cucumber starts, some pots of carrots and lettuce, and a couple dozen sunflowers. If I didn't plant them then and there I knew I'd leave them to languish to death. I might be a stalwart Jane Austen Heroine but I am also constitutionally unable to leave a plant to strangle in its roots in a pot too small for normal life. So I did what I could: I planted the eggplants in pots of compost against the heat of the house wall, planted the cucumbers around my new arbour, planted the sunflowers where they are likely to be noticed when the twins have their birthday party (we always have sunflowers for their birthday), then stared uneasily at the tomatoes. Twenty-six tomatoes is a lot of tomatoes when you have a garden like mine. I live in a city: my yard is big for a city lot (it's a quarter of an acre) but truly, it's not big enough to handle hundreds and hundreds of plants. At the moment I'm pushing it...

Luckily that's when I remembered my crumbling old compost bin. The one the ants have sequestered. It's at the end of the garden, all by itself (which is probably why the ants have taken it over). It's one of those black plastic ones the city gives out for a nominal fee. I like them well enough but they aren't useful for a big yard. They fill up too quickly but don't rot quickly at all.

So I lifted the entire container off the pile. It was seething with a zillion equally seething ants. Discomfited ants. Irritable ants. Worried ants. Annoyed ants. Ants with no place to go all of a sudden. Ants who made their immediate way to my arms and ankles. I felt a moment's pang ("Poor Ants!") then grabbed the garden fork and smashed the pile into a relatively sedate oval, well, as sedate as one could given all those ants. Then I plonked all 26 tomato plants on top. I swathed it with straw. Then I got FDPG, who had been standing by (quite gripped by the spectacle of zillions of ants not to mention all those baby snakes when we dug up the garlic) to aim the water wand on the entire lot then and there and give it a good long soak. Just in case the ants were thinking we might be going away and leaving them to their ant-like activities (which involves who knows what). And here's how it looked after we did that:
Then I went and gazed at all my roses, which are looking quite spectacular right about now. They were the perfect balm after all those ants. This is my Crown Princess Margarita. At Mother's Day this rose was but a shrub of stumps. It didn't look very impressive at all, despite all my grand plans. Now it's covered in little budlings. It's very beautiful and I love it. I can see myself reclining grandly under it after all.

Looking West

Yesterday morning our view to the west looked like this:

See that big View-Choking Tree there? It's a chestnut. A tree that is meant to spread its glorious canopy over a vast expanse of field. The previous owners of this house planted this tree themselves, a long time ago. So long ago that they didn't stop to think that it might be just a leeetle bit too close to the house. To the drains. To the concrete sidewalk going around the

back of the house. Needless to say, there isn't much canopying going on with this tree in this position.

So, it's been trimmed a few times since we moved in, once by a team of Wild & Crazy Tree Trimming Guys and once or twice by Richard the Man Who Can Climb Anything. And each time it grows back faster and more vigorous than before. Eventually it will have to entirely disappear, because it is now in all the drains of every house within a 50 mile radius

On Sunday Richard came back from a conference. He'd been away for five days. And right after breakfast the first thing he said was "That tree needs trimming."

I think I might have gulped. I don't like watching him climb that high, especially as he usually has a chainsaw or a large hand saw slung over his shoulder. I know this is one of your typical Manly Images but it gives me the willies. Images of wheelchairs and life insurance policies run through my head.

See, there he is. High up in that tree.

And here is that same western view after Richard the Man Who Can Climb Anything did his thing. It's hard to describe just how much more we see from that side of the house. It's a big sky view. A really big sky view. We might even see the moon set now.

Right after he'd come down from the tree and we were cutting it up into firewood, I asked him if we could make an arbour from the longer poles. I'm sure I've mentioned this before but I am rather challenged in the Building Things From Wood department. I suffer much ridicule for this within my family, because even though I am terrible at building things, I still persist, in the hopes that one day I might get good at it. My Hopeful Evidence is all over the place, still causing much glee after a couple of years. Richard, who had just spent the past 3.5 hours climbing, sawing, felling, cutting, and splitting, looked at me from under a brow drenched with sweat.

"Arbour? Now? How about next Saturday?" he managed to blurt out, much more nicely than would have. He didn't even give me an Are You Nuts I Nearly Killed Myself Up There And Now You Want Me To Build You A $#@**$&@&$ Arbour? look, which I know I would have if I'd been in his place.

I did something then, something so unusual that I apparently stunned all present: I smiled reasonably and said "Sounds great." I thought I was doing a particularly stellar version of my patented Jane Austen Heroine routine but Richard obviously thought I'd been hit by a stray branch, because he peered at me closely a few times before returning to his stacking and splitting. Then he went over to the long lengths of chestnut and said "Okay, sure, why not. Let's do it now while the wood is still wet and bendy."

And so we did. It's a little rickety, because we never did find any straight branches, and it almost looks like something I'd build, but it's big and strange looking and should be perfect holding up all the plants I have destined for it. It's got a Cabernet Sauvignon grape on one side, and a David Austen The Fairy climbing rose on the other.

A Fit of Strawberries

Richard helped me pick strawberries yesterday. We filled these bowls and finally gave up, leaving the rest for another day. In the spring my thoughts were along the lines of "Because I didn't thin out the plants this year's harvest is going to be pretty skimpy" and though I duly kelped and fish emulsioned the strawberry bed I didn't hold much hope that they'd prove me wrong.

But they did. We are swimming, albeit thickly and rather awkwardly (hard to swim in a sea of strawberries), in them. Those two larger bowls are 16" in diameter if that helps you imagine the size of this haul.

Strawberry tea, anyone?
FDPG after she saw the bowls of strawberries. In a dead faint on the floor. She's nothing if not dramatic, our FDPG.