Category Archives: my garden

Coming into glory for Pascha.

friends, my garden, ,


Yes, there are still lots of flowers in my life. I’m trying to get the house — at least the downstairs — clean in time for Pascha so that I can bring in some flowers and have the whole thing look good and festive together.

It’s been raining, and that makes the plants look refreshed and happy. This is the first time the gaudy bearded irises have bloomed. I mostly like them for their color; otherwise they are a bit messy looking for me.

 

 

 

 

The tulips are still blooming. Every night they close up, and in the daytime they open up more and more. But none of the petals have fallen off yet.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the Dutch iris bed, these pale yellow-and-lavender flowers dominate the view for a few weeks, and later on when they are spent the cobalt variety open up.

Centranthus ruber

Our friend Art has a nursery in his back yard, and a few months ago he gave me this Centranthus ruber plant that he had propagated. It took forever to recover from being transferred into the pot in which it still lives, but now it is blooming, and coming into its common name of Red Valerian.


It appears that the kale, and arugula in the background, are making their bid for Tallest Blossoms in the Garden. About the time we turn the calendar page to May they’ll be out of there and tomato plants will be in their place, so I’m letting them have their days in the sun – and rain.

Forget-me-Nots, calla lilies, cyclamen and daffodils — I’m so happy to see them, I’m not worried at all about the hours and days of garden work that will need to be done once the rain stops. A lone and miniature red salvia bloom also greeted me this afternoon, and I can’t recall even noticing what were surely profuse weeds behind it.

In only a few days the ground may dry up enough for me to dig around, and the joy of the feast will strengthen me to do it — in every way we’ll be in Bright Week!

Pre-feasts Here and There

my garden,


We Glads just returned from tropical isles where the flowers were a feast for the senses, and an earthly foretaste of the beauty and glory of Pascha soon to be upon us. But when we arrived home the tulips I planted last fall were also out to welcome me, and lend some comfort to the travel-weary.

I hope to send along my Maui Diary blog after our Orthodox Easter, which is a week later than Western Easter this year. Too many blessed preparations to be making until then….

I promise that the following is not unrelated to everything else in this post: Were any of my readers sad and aggravated (as I was) when Longs drugstores were bought and replaced by CVS? To one or two people who write to me on that topic, at the e-mail address on my Blogger profile, I have a useful and whimsical thing I would like to give, if you include your mailing address. I’ll tell you what it is before I send it, so there is no risk involved — only fun. 🙂

Those of you who are preparing for the celebration of the Resurrection of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, my heart and prayers are with you.

Tree Collard

my garden

Overall the plants in my garden look as though the gardener has been absent. Too true — and the sky is lacking rain. So I at least did take the hose to everything yesterday, and found one “tree” that seems to be thriving under neglect.

It’s the tree collard that a dear friend gave me. I knew that these perennial vegetables grow very long and tangled stems, so I had planted it in a corner of my cramped yard, out of the way of annual beds.

My photo doesn’t show much of the curly stalk, and the pictures I found online are of plants that grow tall and straight, not like the more recumbent ones we seem to have around here, which get very complicated twining around themselves. The trunk-stem gets longer and longer and the leaves grow mostly at the end of it.

If I had more room I’d love to have a large plantation of these hardy greens.

Pimientos from the October garden.

food and cooking, my garden

Have you ever seen a fresh pimiento pepper for sale in the grocery store? No? That’s why, if you have a garden, you should consider growing them yourself. The little jars of diced pimientos that are the only experience most people have of them — sorry, but they are not to be compared to the fruits you can expect to harvest from your back yard.


I went around the garden this afternoon snapping pictures of the prettiest things, including the peppers.

What first caught my eye was the way the color of the Mexican Sage coordinated so nicely with the Red Russian Kale. Some parsley is peeking up at the bottom.

Arugula (with the white flower) is a real self-starter and has come back up through the basil, and the nasturtiums are still going strong.

But about those pimientos: It was about 30 years ago I encountered a fellow gardener’s planting of them, on a sunny hillside growing alongside beans and tomatoes and other more common things. Ellie said, “Pimientos are marvelous; they are good with everything. We just love them!” It was at a time in my life when I was very suggestible regarding any homemaking idea, and the garden was a big part of my homemaking.

Since then, I don’t think a year has gone by that we didn’t grown some pimientos, though one time we ended up with plants that had an odd shape and slightly different flavor. That’s when we learned that there are different varieties called pimiento. But the shape of the fruits in my photos here is what we think of as standard.

Pimientos have a richer taste than the standard sweet red bell pepper that the supermarkets carry, and the wall of the fruit is probably twice as thick. For 20+ years I would mostly serve them sautéed with mushrooms and/or onions and garlic as a vegetable dish. The skins would often slide off before I got the skillet to the table, in which case sometimes I’d sometimes manage to remove some of them. Mostly the skins got eaten.

 

But now that I have a gas range I can easily turn them around on the stove with tongs while they hiss and sputter, and have fire-roasted peppers. (I also did this with poblano peppers this summer.) After they are blackened all over, you stick them in a bowl or something with a lid — I tried a plastic bag but the peppers were so hot they melted holes in the bag — and let them sweat a few minutes until the skins rub off easily under water.

Meanwhile, the house starts to smell like a Mexican restaurant!

Once they are bare and thick slabs of sweet flesh, it is so easy to chop some up into soups or stews or salads. Lay a pepper on top of bread and cheese, or just bread…or feel really indulgent eating one all by itself. I freeze some flattened between waxed paper to use all year long.