Tag Archives: Japanese anemone

Rain on zinnias, seeds on crackers.

October 1, 2023bread, food and cooking, my garden, wildflowersapples, Beowulf, crackers, greens, hikes, Japanese anemone, lemon verbena, portulaca, rain, Richard Rohlin, snapdragons, sneezeweed, sourdough, tarweed, Thai basil, tropical sage, zinniasGretchenJoanna

It was hard to keep up with myself last week, and with all the friends, projects and tasks that fill my life to overflowing. I guess I was somewhat playing catch-up after my mountain retreat the previous week. The garden got gently rained on three times that last week of September, which is unusual. Combined with fog on other days, the dampness caused mildew in the planter boxes, but mostly the lower leaves of the tall zinnias have been affected.

When I noticed the Japanese anemones looking better than ever, it occurred to me to plant a few more this fall, maybe some pale pink ones — but I corrected my impulsivity in time, and won’t be taking on one more project, what with so many others unfinished. A more reasonable goal would be to try to take better care of the anemones I have, and see if they can be encouraged to be taller and more robust. It’s a sign of their middling health, that they do not ever spread and multiply, and their flowers are few and small.

The sneezeweed I grow in a pot looks as well as it ever has. I bought it a few years ago at a native plant nursery, because I love the mountain versions of the flower. I put it in a pot so I could be sure to water it enough; the irrigation settings for most of my garden are set for drought-tolerant plants, and sneezeweed is not one of those. My type is pretty plain, or at least monochromatic, compared to the mountain ones.

In search of fancier kinds, a few months ago I browsed sneezeweeds online for quite a while, and ordered seeds for this one, Purple-Headed. When I am looking at seed catalogs or even plants in nurseries, all the options seem so do-able and desirable. But once the time comes to get on with the actual work of planting… well, I literally drag my feet. So who knows what will happen with these seeds…

I used my sourdough starter twice last week, first to make a large pan loaf of seeded wheat-and-spelt bread. This is the recipe I have been trying to perfect, but perfection hasn’t happened yet. I may have to pause the sourdough project while I branch out and reach back, to other breads I have made or have wanted to try, like chocolate bread, Indian flatbreads, and applesauce rye.

Buttery Sourdough Crackers was a satisfying recipe that used a bit of starter. This picture shows the dough as it was resting overnight, along with leaves of the lemon verbena that I am drying, after pruning my plant for the first time ever.

I used this recipe for: Rustic Sourdough Butter Crackers as my jumping off place, substituting half dark rye flour, and adding sesame seeds to one half, and poppy seeds to the other. I baked them a lot longer than the recipe called for. The resulting crackers are nice and crispy and easy to eat. The butter ingredient plus the sourdough tang is a great combination.

My friend Lucy and I took another one of our monthly walks, up in the hills again but to a park she hadn’t been to before. It’s mostly very brown up there now, but the poison oak is making red splashes in the landscape. And my old friend tarweed!

The Seek app tells me this is not either of the species I saw on my way up the mountain last month, but Hayfield Tarweed. And it seems to come in white or yellow versions, in one case growing side by side:

The third online Beowulf class was this week, and I spent more than two happy hours in the company of the most delightful teachers, Richard Rohlin and Jonathan Pageau. They both love the subject, and Richard is definitely a Beowulf scholar from way back. I will have to at least quote a couple of lines from the poem here eventually, though it seems that unlike me, most people I’ve talked to got an introduction to Beowulf in school. So you may already be more familiar with the story than I.

At the end of the week, I remembered: apples! It’s time to make a trip my favorite apple ranch, and see which of their 30+ varieties is available now. I squeezed it in on Saturday afternoon, and added a stop at a nursery out that way, hoping they would have starts of some kind of leafy greens I could tuck into spaces in the planter boxes after I take out zucchini and tomatoes and eggplant. They did!

So here in the back of my car is a mix of apples Empire, Jonathan and Macintosh; and six packs of Swiss chard and collards. I do have chard growing right now, but I think I need more. And I wasn’t able to get collards started from seed in August.

One more glad sighting of late summer I want to share, is this half wine barrel that was unplanted through last winter:

When I put in some snapdragon plants in late spring, I noticed a couple of tiny mystery plants that didn’t look like weeds, so I left them undisturbed. Now everything has filled out and I find that I have beautiful Thai basil and tropical sage complementing the snaps. Gardens are ever surprising.

Happy October!

First Day anemones.

September 1, 2022church, other gardens, waterAkathist of Thanksgiving, Blessing of Water, Japanese anemone, liturgical New YearGretchenJoanna

It is the first day of the liturgical year for many Orthodox Christians. In church we sang the Akathist Hymn of Thanksgiving, “Glory to God for All Things.” Following, because our rector had decided for several reasons to do a water blessing today, we continued to sing the hymns and psalms and prayers of that service. The giant urn such as we also use on Theophany was in the middle of the church; afterward we drank some of the water out of punch cups. All this thanksgiving and praise and infilling made for a very rich morning.

While we were singing inside the little old church,
right outside the anemones were in full bloom,
glorifying God in their own lovely way.

Under the August sun.

August 19, 2020my garden, other gardens, summeramaryllis, asparagus, beach, echinacea, Elephant Heart plums, flavor, Japanese anemone, naked ladies, plums, sunflowersGretchenJoanna

On my outing to the beach last week I snapped some pictures of coastal neighborhood landscapes. The spot I visited is by a hilly village of cottages, and in former days we used to walk up from the beach and admire the unique houses and plantings. This time I drove around slowly and leaned out the window a few times.

Things have been heating up here in an atypical way, which is what I hear from people all over. It’s not unusual to have a heat wave, but electric storms, rain showers, high winds and a series of muggy days definitely are not what we are used to at this season. I do like 90 degrees better without the dampness. Still, warm evenings — if they are calm — make me feel happy and more at home on the earth. Our standard weather, being frequently chased inside by the cold and damp summer breeze, is the downside of this temperate climate, but we’re always happy to go back to it after a period of scorching.

In my own garden the sunflowers,
white echinacea and asparagus
are creating their usual jungle.

Until this summer I had eaten exactly one plum from my two Elephant Heart plum trees, which are in their fifth season. This summer they bore five green-speckled fruits, and I doled them out to myself over last week. Each one astonished me. I know that sounds overly dramatic, and sadly it doesn’t even tell you a thing about the fruit, whose flavor deserves a poem. I’ll work on that, especially if I get a few more to do research on next summer. I must mark my calendar so I’m not away on a trip at the beginning of August.

At church there are new things the current gardener has done. I wandered around the other day when the Japanese anemones were being appreciated by a bee, and lizards ran joyfully about from one hot sidewalk to another.

I hope you all are prospering in your souls,
and that your heads are not hanging too low,
like this sunflower I saw in my neighborhood —
though it is beautiful. Have courage!

Koulourakia and Colors

August 13, 2013church, food and cooking, other gardenscookies, Japanese anemone, nasturtiums, tomatoesGretchenJoanna

first twist

At church again, this time for baking cookies for that upcoming festival. We made koulourakia, which most of us bakers can’t pronounce, so we call them “the twisty Greek cookies.”

The dough, made with seven pounds of butter, had been prepared last night and stored in the fridge. We scooped it out with melon-ballers and rolled the balls into ropes.

Japanese anemone

And outside I caught this graceful and lovely flower in bud and bloom. I haven’t looked it up yet to find out what it is….though I might have known in the past. Do you recognize it? (update: Jo tells me in the comments it is a Japanese anemone.)

GJ twisting

After being twisted, the cookies get an egg wash and then a sprinkling of sesame seeds. They are basically a butter cookie, and though some recipes include orange juice and/or zest, our current version is “plain.” But I came home with my hands smelling anything but plain.

In our back yard now we have three cherry-sort of tomatoes: Juliet (red); Sun Gold and Sunsugar (orange); and Michael Pollan (pointy green striped). So I can put them all in a salad to colorize it! Not to mention, this year I have three colors of nasturtiums, red, orange and yellow — so I put all those petals in my salad as well. That’s a visual feast as well as a feast for the palate, as last night’s guest said.