Tag Archives: fountain

Fresh crackers and paint.

family, food and cooking, my garden, work, , , ,
March 2017

It’s an exciting week for me, because many dinged-up walls and doors in my house are being painted, along with the black metal stair railings. These were set to be done several years ago, before the workers were interrupted by wildfires, then by covid. When normality returned, I didn’t seem to have the wherewithal to get started again. But now my new handyman James, a friend from church, is doing the work. During son Pathfinder’s visit over the weekend I was encouraged just to have him to talk with about colors. Now things will be so lovely and clean.

Pathfinder and I did a satisfying amount of work in 24 hours, including a big tidying-up of my utility yard and all the scraps of wood I keep there, which I turn into kindling. There are always pieces that are too long for my stove and need sawing up, and I don’t want to use a power saw; he took care of those fast. He even cut my old manzanita stump into a few pieces to take home for his own wood stove, because he heard that it burns nice and hot, and wants to find out.

We cleaned the fountain together, and Pathfinder leveled it perfectly afterward. The easy way to drain the green water from it is by siphoning it out with a garden hose, but that takes two people to manage.

It’s has been wanting a good clean-up for months, and I had been hoping for this family assist. We managed to do all the tasks before the rain began, which was the morning that he left.

Today it poured, then the sun came out, then the wind blew rain in again. Between downpours I was able to go out twice and gather fallen pine needles enough to fill the big green bin for trash pickup tomorrow. The zinnias watched me with their bright faces as I walked by, so I came back and picked another bouquet of them. These wet blooms don’t last as long as the sun-washed ones, but they are cheery as long as they do. My fingers were all wrinkly when I finally came indoors again, because everything I’d been handling was sopping.

While picking up blankets of pine needles off my plants, I discovered that the Sweet Box, Sarcococca, has shiny red berries on it. I haven’t been impressed with the scent of that shrub’s flowers — it isn’t very potent. But these berries are lovely.

The flax crackers I was working on last week turned out pretty good. I had to leave them in the dehydrator about 28 hours. They need more salt and fewer pumpkin seeds, in my opinion, but I’m enjoying them, and gave some away. I’ll make a new batch soon, with improvements, and eventually will share the recipe here.

Today I made two kinds of soup with various leftovers in the fridge, and I like them both as well. Soup and crackers are just the thing for rainy November days.

Busy, with mouse.

bees, food and cooking, my garden, , , , , , , , , , , ,

Getting things done. It’s so much fun to check off a few boxes on my “After Greece” list. One of the tasks was to get the fountain leveled. Just before the stonemason was going to come to do that, the pump motor died; I’m glad that happened just before, not after, the leveling. The man who always cleans my fountain when I let it turn green, about once a year, got me a new motor and installed it while I was out one afternoon. That was easy! The stonemason leveled it last night, and gave it a more secure brick-and-mortar base.

I returned from Greece two weeks ago but haven’t got back in the cooking groove. Part of the reason is, I hadn’t made it to the store to buy supplies, and was trying to assemble meals with whatever I could find in the cupboards and freezer. This morning I took my one onion, a can of tomatoes, a small container of mixed sauteed vegetables I’d stored in the freezer, and my home-grown fava beans also stored in the freezer, and made a really nice soup. “Before Greece” I’d roasted all the peeled garlic cloves in the fridge, which was a giant bag — I threw a bunch of those in, too. The soup was good hot, and also cold, as I found out later when the day had warmed up and it didn’t seem necessary to warm up dinner as well.

Recently I decided I wanted to mulch my vegetable plantings with rice straw the way I did ten years ago. So this morning I drove to the feed store where I hadn’t been since then, and was pleased to park next to the shed where baby chicks were peeping. While waiting for the bale to get loaded in the back of my Subaru, I noticed that they had not only rice straw, but rye, wheat and teff as well. The fibers of the teff straw were different from all the others, appearing to be fine and fluffy; I’d like to try that for mulch sometime.

In the past it was a hassle to keep the straw bale dry in the winter and at the same time prevent the rats from bedding down in it and chewing on the tarp that was protecting it, so I thought I’d keep it in the garage this time. Problem was, there was no space for it, unless I would get rid of the plastic storage bins that have been piling up in there as I empty them one by one. So I took them all out and put a notice on our parish email list asking for takers.

My goddaughter Esther came over midafternoon to get some lavender to use in cosmetics. I loaded her bag with rosemary, oregano, and yerba buena herb as well. She said that everything she cooks, if she puts oregano in it, it tastes better. And she’s not even Greek!

I have several types of English lavender growing here; she thought the small, darker purple blooms had the nicest scent, so I made her a couple of bundles of those stems only.

While she was still here, another parishioner stopped by to get some bins. She took almost all of them, and later another person took the remainder.

After the first batch of bins was gone, Esther and I were still standing in the driveway when I saw a field mouse run past. What? At that time of day one doesn’t expect to see such a critter, and I actually haven’t seen a mouse around here in ages, at any time of day, though we are always battling rats that come up from the creek. I could only guess that the mouse had been inside the bale of straw. Uh-oh. Now I am not sure about storing it in the garage.

Son Pathfinder has a new house, with new-to-him plants scattered around it. So he texted me a photo of one of them, wondering if I knew what it was. I had seen an almost identical one on my neighborhood walk the other day, but my Seek app couldn’t identify it correctly. We kept looking up plants and trading ideas back and forth for an hour via text (we’re very slow texters), and finally figured out that it is a yucca: “The flowers are edible and have a peppery flavor. Fruits can be roasted or dried and are sweet and fig-like.”

Here, the bees are finding the teucrium to be full of their favorite sweet food.
And with that I will say good-bye for now.

 

Frosty with ceanothus.

my garden, , , , , ,

The sun shone in a blue sky, so I braved the chill to walk the creek path this morning. It wasn’t too cold at all. But when I got back, I saw that the fountain was still iced over. Behind it you can see the newly pruned pomegranate and plum.

January is progressing pretty much as usual in the garden, with the typically surprising, commonplace glories. Most of my landscaping does not go into dormancy, so every day reveals something showing its aliveness by a changed feature. A few asparagus had sprung up in the last week, so I cut them to put into soup for breakfast, along with a portion of those greens I harvested last week.

Dan the Landscaper added to the collection of new plants that arrived in nursery pots in November, and quite a few went into the ground last week, including the first-ever ceanothus that has lived on this property. It came with buds, and they are starting to open. Ceanothus is a genus of 50-60 species, sometimes called California Lilac, and I never remember their names, but we had a large one on our former property in another town, “long ago.”

ceanothus
Yarrow flowers of this morning.

When I type that common name it reminds me of my first encounter with this plant. My late husband and I had only been married a year when he returned from a backpacking trip with a friend, bringing me a flowering branch of white ceanothus that his hiking buddy had told him was California Lilac. The fragrance of those blooms imprinted itself on my mind. I think most of the blue or purple varieties are not that aromatic.

One plant I am most excited about having in my garden is Clary Sage — and I have three of them just planted. These are the white ones, which I haven’t had before, but I expect to love them as much as the purple I’ve had in the past. Clary sage is a biennial, so I have to remember to have new ones going in every year, if I want to have it blooming regularly in June. This picture below is from the back garden, in ’23. My little starts only have about ten leaves each at this point, and can’t be expected to bloom until spring of next year.

Clary Sage in 2023

While I wait for the new landscaping to get installed and to grow up, I put in various bulbs and annuals, so that when I go in and out the front door I can be cheered by their colors. I see the leaves of muscari and anemones poking up, but right now it is the wholesome faces of the common pansies that greet me every day. This one is saying hello to you right now.

The fountain is dry, but not I.

bees, bread, my garden, travel, , , , , ,

This morning the fountain-cleaner Bill did his good work scrubbing and flushing out my fountain, and then left it empty and turned off. I am traveling a lot in the next month and don’t want it to become a swamp while I’m gone.

Out my bedroom window.

The garden is looking pretty good right now because it’s entering the flowery time of year, and because I’ve had several days to focus on it, to be out there noticing not just little weeds that are easily pulled out of mulch, but this and that glorious scent and sight.

On my neighborhood walks, too, I’m spying perfection of Japanese maples…

…and at church, just look at the wisteria! I could only fit about half of its span in the frame:

Springtime is downright boggling, to the mind and the heart.

During the few days that were cloudy and gloomy, I washed the dirt from my hands and put them into the sourdough. My recent loaf is very tasty, but it would not rise — well, not much. After several hours I gave up and hoped for oven spring, which did not happen. So I got this stunted result, shown after I had sliced it to store in the freezer, so I can take out one slice (2 1/4 inch tall) at a time.

Soon I was back outside again, planting three butternut squash starts and a Juliet tomato plant in the planter boxes. There is no frost in the forecast, and I will soon be gone to Wisconsin for a while, for the first of the grandchild weddings. My original plan was to just wait until mid-May this year to plant summer vegetables, but it seems worth the risk at this point to get them in sooner.

We Orthodox are entering Holy Week on Sunday. I will be away from my parish for most of it, and through Bright Week, and away from my home and garden, so any real-time reports I might have time for will be field reports, or travelogues. For now, I’m soaking up all the familiar and beloved elements of my world to fortify myself against the asphalt and airports that lie between me and daughter Pearl’s garden. Once I arrive there, I will be well nourished by hugs and kisses from a dozen or more family members, and won’t even think of my lemon tree or coral bells back here.

But not quite yet! When I noticed the bee with its head in the lithodora (picture at top), I was mostly looking at the Blue-eyed Grass nearby. It is so sweet it breaks my heart.