Tag Archives: squash

Carpets fresh and clean.

bees, creativity, home, my garden, , , , , ,

The most encouraging news of the day is, the sun is shining, and the garden is growing. There is already a little Delicata squash on one of the two plants I started from seed in March.

I hired a man to clean about half of my wall-to-wall carpets. Last night and this morning I pushed and hauled furniture around so that I could thoroughly vacuum all the places beforehand. “Kyle” came this morning and was a very conscientious worker with a good deal of experience, and also lots of information for me about the various fibers he’d be cleaning, and how carpets wear, and how stains are removed. He told me that he usually vacuums himself, and was reluctant to skip that step. He asked if I had a good vacuum…? I do, but I let him do that part everywhere again with his machine, for his peace of mind.

Hall carpet just after installation.

I am so happy to have this job done. I don’t have pets, and all the grandchildren have been trained by their parents to remove their shoes in the house, so my rugs get along without frequent shampooing (this is an understatement which I won’t elaborate on); but I had reasons for deciding that this was the time.

While this thorough maintenance was happening over the course of several hours, I cooked up a pot of split pea soup; I roasted eggplant, toasted walnuts and made a batch of quinoa. The flannel bedsheets went into the washer and were replaced with the summer type, and I checked off several other tasks around the house, some of which have been delayed a couple of weeks, and some for months. It’s uncanny how every time I whittle down my to-do list, a few more things break or come due for maintenance.

Checking off the carpet cleaning, which should have been done years ago, felt really good. But — there was a little problem, which immediately added another task to my list. A solution that Kyle used, on a spot barely visible before, reacted with something I evidently used sometime in the past, and left a bleach mark in the middle of my hall. I usually only use water on spots, because they are most often just garden dirt, and I have no memory what it was I put there. Anyway, I will be contacting someone who can patch it, and I’ll have to take a piece from the back of a closet in order to match it. It will probably look fine, and anyway, people are not taking time to notice the carpet when they are walking down the hall. It will give me the pleasure of checking one more thing off the list — yay!

This Sunday we Orthodox will celebrate Pentecost, and I am getting excited thinking about the day. We decorate with greenery of all kinds; in our temple it’s often whole trees that are brought in for the feast, and in some parishes around the world they cover the floor with grass and wildflowers.

Pentecost in Poland

The thought of decorating the church floor takes me back to my new problem of an ugly spot on my floor. It makes me think about how many times I covered a stain on some garment or bath mat, etc, with embroidered flowers. My mind did immediately go in that direction when I saw the small bleached area in the carpet, wondering (very briefly) if there were a comparable fix that I could accomplish in a homey DIY way. It’s not easy to give up doing those creative things, especially when Chesterton’s words linger in my mind: “Thrift is the really romantic thing; economy is more romantic than extravagance… But the thing is true; economy, properly understood, is the more poetic. Thrift is poetic because it is creative….”

See the golden bee curled up in a ball?

I’m so happy that I can still be creative in the kitchen and garden. That is about all the creativity I have time for anymore! The borage (pictured just above) is blooming and the bees are loving it; they don’t mind having to hang upside down to drink. So many things are blooming, but I will just show you one more, the mock orange. Two bushes were planted on either side of my patio so that their scent would drift across the space where one might sit of a spring evening. Alas, spring evenings aren’t conducive to being outdoors in this neighborhood, neither does this particular mock orange have a strong scent; I have to put my nose right in the flower to detect it. So nothing is lost! And the loveliness of these flowers to the eye is great wealth. Thank you, Lord.

A batch of cookies and summer loves.

books, friends, my garden, summer, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Crape Myrtles are in full bloom in my neighborhood, including on my own property. Mine is not more than five years old, and in the last year it seems to have doubled in size.

I’ve been walking down to the creek bridge and beyond several times a week, and all the trees and plants growing in and on the banks of that stream also seem to have mushroomed, so that I can barely see the water below the bridge.

I love the summer, because it’s only in the occasional heat waves of the season that I can feel fully at home and in sync with the earth. In this climate with marine influence, where the evenings get cold and breezy even in the summer, it’s a treat to fully sink into the warmth and stay there all evening; even when I climb into bed I am relaxed, and don’t have to pull several layers up to my chin against the chill. Of course, this sounds crazy to those of you who live in high-humidity summer zones!

Even when it was over 100 degrees last week, I was able to spend a lot of time in the garden morning and evening, and then work on other projects in the middle of the day. I have plenty of paperwork and sorting yet to accomplish. If I ever finish that — Please God, help me! — I could sew, or read, or get back into writing book reviews …

When I read on my phone, I’ve started taking screen shots of quotes that I don’t want to lose. And I often look up words I don’t know — On Substack there are so many good writers with vast vocabularies — and take screenshots of the definitions.

Spider in the plum tree.

One morning as I set out on my usual walking route, I passed by the house down on the corner, where a vegetable garden has been carved out of the lawn, next to the sidewalk. For months I have been admiring the health and size of the plants, and that morning I spied a dozen beautiful yellow summer squashes peeking out from under the leaves, several of which should have been picked days earlier; on my way back I debated about whether to inquire about them. If the owners didn’t want them for some reason, I would take them… and if the gardeners had suddenly been incapacitated and couldn’t pick their own squash, I could offer to do that for them….

It sounded reasonable… and one hates to see beautiful vegetables going to waste… but what if I got involved with people I found disagreeable? Or who were needy beyond my abilities to help? I stood on the sidewalk and thought a while, then walked up to the door and knocked. The result: I made a new gardening friend.

Dee gave me three overgrown squashes, though none of the size I’d have preferred, and she invited me to come back for more. She enjoyed talking about her garden, and told me about her family that she lives with, including her recently widowed mother, who she said is the cook of the household. I wondered if that cook prefers overgrown zucchinis…. On one of the less sweltering days I did cook the squashes into a spicy, satisfying stew, which I was glad to have..

That’s my own chard and collards in the picture above, the leaves that were not eaten by insects or mollusks; I picked almost all of my greens and now my own little squash plants are spreading out in the planter boxes. Recently I transplanted the tarragon out of a pot into one of those boxes where it will get more regular watering, and it is thriving.

I used several sprigs of it to make Anytime Apricot and Tarragon Cookies from the Dorie’s Cookies book. They were in the chapter called “Cocktail Cookies,” and the recipe includes no sweetening beyond the dried apricots and tarragon.

I baked those savory shortbread cookies to take to friends who’d invited me for lunch, who I knew didn’t care for sweets very much. But they are winemakers, so I thought they might like the kind of savory cookies one could nibble on while sipping a glass of wine. We all thought they were really nice; it was amazing how much subtle sweetness we tasted in them; I think the level of saltiness helped bring it out.

I got together with several women who are collaborating to share homemaking skills; for our first meeting we focused on knitting. I had two cotton dishcloths I’d knitted a while back, which I decided to join together. I tried crocheting them together but I couldn’t figure out how to do that while at the same time chatting with everyone, so I just sewed them together with a blanket stitch.

I don’t have hopes of becoming an expert knitter, but I like to be with these women. And their babies! (At church there is a new family with a little guy just turned one, and he is the friendliest love bug. He loves me! And I never tire of holding him.)

Our host had an awe-inspring jar of kombucha scoby on her kitchen counter, and two of our group were happy to take home a quart of it to get their own kombucha production up and running again. My own fermenting experiments stalled decades ago with yogurt-making, and a succession of three yogurt makers that never satisfied. I never tried making sauerkraut, because that was a food I have been prejudiced against ever since it made a regular appearance on our table when I was a child; I did somehow manage to enjoy kimchi when my son “Soldier” brought it into the family’s already international culinary repertoire.

But I have made Lemon Verbena Sugar Paste!  Lemon verbena is one of my garden treasures, but I haven’t pruned my plant often enough or used its leaves much, and it has gotten very leggy. So when I saw a young and well-shaped specimen in the grocery store, I brought it home and now have two such treasures. When I pruned the older plant, I took all the leaves to make Lemon Verbena Sugar Paste. There were more or less potent recipes online; I used the one with the highest ratio of herb to sugar, 2 cups to 1/2 cup.

I stuck the paste in the freezer and hope I will remember to bring it out to add to tea, sprinkle on desserts, use as a glaze, etc. Maybe I’ll also remember to tell you here if I do.

After I asked my friend Cori what were her summer reading plans, naturally she asked me back. I should have anticipated that and not asked her to begin with — because I have no real plans, and feel like an imposter. I have been reading less than usual. I see that of the nineteen books I pictured here five months ago, I have read just two. Only one of those I got to the end of was from the stack I was going to “try extra hard” to read this year. Well, the year is half over, so it doesn’t look promising for those selections. I took new pictures of the “summer books” to show Cori, because it was easier than typing out the titles.

Four of those I have at least started reading, and the Undset book is my current reading-while-falling-asleep choice. I have, typically, read several books that I didn’t anticpate back in February, and some of them were not worth talking about, or even reading to the end.

But let me just mention a young adult novel I did read to the end and liked a lot, What the Night Sings. Written by Vesper Stamper, who was one of the speakers at the Symbolic World Summit I attended earlier in the year in Florida, this is a coming-of-age-in-the-Holocaust story, illustrated by the author. First I listened to the novel, and then I borrowed the hard copy from the library, because I wanted to see the illustrations, which are many, and are very well done, as is the whole story. Stamper’s Berliners, is at hand, too, waiting for me.

If you have read — or even scrolled — this far in my ramble, I’m impressed! There is some reason you stayed so long, though there were doubtless some topics along the way that didn’t interest you. Whoever you are, I appreciate you very much.

Flora, fauna and future of the garden.

birds, my garden, quotes, , , , , , , ,

“From December to March,
there are for many of us three gardens –
the garden outdoors,
the garden of pots and bowls in the house,
and the garden of the mind’s eye.”

-Katherine S. White

I received a Christmas gift of flower seeds, which made me realize that I really do need to get busy and finish the upgrading of my greenhouse that was begun by my neighbor Bob in October. He supplied it with electricity and installed grow lights, but it remains for me to set up the heater, thermostat, fan and timer.

Then I can get seeds started a little earlier than would be otherwise possible during this season when the greenhouse sits in the shade of my two-story house. In the meantime, neighbor Terri and I can talk about our gardens past and future. Yesterday she gave me this heavy Pink Banana squash she grew last summer, evidently a good keeper!

I can eat one thing from the garden currently: collards — and I found a wonderful, vegan recipe for collards in coconut milk that I will try to post here. Fruit from the arbutus or Strawberry Tree got spoiled by the rain this year, but before that, at least it didn’t have anything like the mysterious pests or diseases of last year, which was a big relief.

Not my photo!

I received New Year’s gifts in my garden, not plants flowering or fruiting but birds visiting. Their energy and personality are even more welcome when the landscape is dark. On New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day a pair of Northern Flickers came by; they got my attention fast, such big birds acting like woodpeckers on the pine tree, but nothing like any woodpecker I’d ever encountered before. They hopped around the garden for hours, pecking in the bark mulch, so I had plenty of time to leaf through all the pages of Peterson’s guide until I found them. This was the most exciting Bird Event (repeated this morning!) since my first sighting of Hooded Orioles at the hummingbird feeder some years ago.

A different sort of event was when a bird flew into my slider and sat stunned on the mat for such a long time that I was able to take its picture. I had been thinking that these were some kind of sparrow, but once I got such a clear image, it was hard to fit the little creature into that family.

Attached to a suggested blog post in my WordPress feed that very evening, I glimpsed a photo that looked very much like mine. It was a blog post about Pine Siskins — what do you know! It’s Pine Siskins that I have been enjoying here for a couple of years at least.

They feed alongside sparrows, finches, and warblers, while chickadees and bushtits enjoy the suet feeder nearby. Juncos and titmice, jays and doves fly in and away. Occasionally a towhee visits… then the Cooper’s Hawk swoops down for the kill and adds drama, only three feet away from me across the glass. If I don’t take a break from watching these busy birds, I won’t get any seeds planted. Yes, that could happen….

…because the world is full of delights.

Fallish like nightgowns and pumpkins.

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

One of my favorite categories and species of food is Cucurbita, that is, its squashes I have known; in the garden that’s nearly all been zucchini and butternut. But last month I got a vision for pumpkins trailing the paths of next summer’s garden. After browsing seed vendors online and debating with myself till my eyelids drooped, I narrowed the field to two romantic French varieties. Probably their long French names contributed to their appeal. One is often nicknamed the Fairytale Pumpkin and the other the Cinderella Pumpkin. But those names are not consistently applied.

Did you know that there is no botanical category for pumpkin? It’s more of a cultural or linguistic grouping, and at least in English seems generally to be based on its shape. The majority of pumpkins are Cucurbita pepo, but there are pumpkins in the C. maxima and C. moschata species groups, too.

In this Wikipedia photo, they note that the two bright orange ones in center right are C. pepo, and all the others C. maxima. The botany of squashes, as seen in brief on that Wiki page, is complex and historic!

The one above is what I bought this year at Trader Joe’s, and it was merely called “Heirloom.” I think it is a Rouge Vif D’Etampes. Last year I found one at a farm stand, and was impressed by its sweet, deep orange flesh.

I decided on seeds for the Rouge, but it was nip-and-tuck until the end between it and the lovely Musque de Provence, which is a Cucurbita maxima:

Last week I tried these Carnival squashes and my goodness, aren’t they tasty, right down to their crispy and colorful skins. I began to wonder if I should plant them to grow on my trellis….

But they do say that of all the Cucurbits, butternut squash are the best keepers. I must keep that in mind; after all, I want to store other things in my freezer besides squash.

It’s the time of the year when I start to have wood fires — now in my new stove, an Ironstrike — and to discover how many flannel nightgowns need patching or cannibalizing. Always the sleeves, at the elbows, get thin and holey while the rest of the garment is just fine. All of these pictured have the same need for mending, and only one of them is too far gone, so I will use pieces of it on the others.

Four newly refurbished nightdresses will be restored to use, after having sat in a basket, some of them for years, poor neglected things.

A church in southern Oregon, at which I have worshiped at least twice, is renting space in a strip mall while they work on building their permanent temple. In this year’s Alameda Fire much of the town of Phoenix, St Gabriel’s current locale, was burned, but their space was untouched. Here is a photo of the land where the new church is going in. The fire came so close to the icons and cross marking the spot, I thought it worth sharing:

I put my air purifier in the closet today, and thought, Wouldn’t it be so truly normal if I don’t need it next year…. We are getting a little rain this weekend, and cozying up to the hearth.