Tag Archives: violas

Pests, popcorn and pie.

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

I didn’t bake this apple pie, and I won’t be at the event where it will be eaten this evening, but it is a product of my kitchen and came out of my oven, so I feel invested in it. Its beauty is obvious, but its butteriness you can only imagine.

After the pie went out the door, I popped some popcorn. I have taken to eating this snack in the last few months, whereas I didn’t for many years previous. I like to cook it in beef tallow in a heavy saucepan, shaking it frequently as it pops away on the gas range. How do you pop corn? And do you like yellow or white popcorn? The last time I bought it, I tried the white variety, and was disappointed to find that the popped kernels are smaller than the yellow. I can’t decide if I like the relative softness better or not.

You can see behind the popcorn that I have my sewing machine on the table. This used to be a common sight, in the long, long ago. Yesterday I tried to start on a Christmas sewing project upstairs in my Sewing-Morning Room, but the old Kenmore in a cabinet there is not working right. So I took my other old machine out of the cupboard and after a little oiling it is running like a dream.

This machine I bought when a freshman in college, at a sewing and fabric store in Santa Barbara. It had been retired from its first life in a high school home economics class, and sold for $40. I am very fond of it, as it has been the most reliable of all the machines I’ve owned. But little things show its age. The pads serving as feet, that might project one’s table from the screws, are hard as rocks and crumbling. I don’t know if any shop would want to attempt a refurbishing of them…. I have the machine sitting on a towel for now.

The ferny asparagus of summer 2021

Joyous news: All the work I did to “sanitize” my asparagus bed last fall seems to have paid off. I was trying to mitigate the horrid infestation of aphids my plants had suffered in their ferny stage, two years in a row, forcing me to cut them down several months earlier than is best; one wants them to carry on photosynthesis for the nourishment of the crowns underground.

What I did was to remove all the mulch, apply a fresh layer of topsoil, and finally a thick layer of fresh mulch. This year the fronds are naturally turning yellow, at the appropriate time, and I haven’t see a single aphid. It is such a relief. This picture of the neighbor cat on the renewed asparagus bed is from last October.

On the subject of pests, you might remember that I was wondering why the fruit of my fig tree was dropping when still hard and unripe. Nikkipolani suggested that Black Fig Fly might be the problem, and after researching online and looking carefully at the fruit and my tree, I discovered both the larva and the fly on site. Ugh! It seems that sanitation is once again the main thing I can do to try to solve this problem, so I’m going to remove all the (wood chip or “arbor”) mulch and old fruit from under the fig and keep the soil bare. I will spare you photos of all the damage done by these insects. It’s not pretty.

My sister Nancy was visiting recently from California’s agricultural heartland, and she and I shopped at two nurseries. I bought some heuchera plants that are just the thing I was looking for to put in this area where I also had planted white Japanese anemones and violas and some blue grass. Other finds from this fall I will wait to show you when they are looking like something next spring. I replanted the area by the front door just before the rains came.

In the pot by the doorstep, I popped in more of those orange violas with succulents. I’m thinking I need to find a tall box or planter to put there, in which I can display whatever pretty thing I can find, even if I have to switch it out every month when it fades. The current pot-within-a-broken-pot system leaves something to be desired.

I don’t have much fall decor, but I did put up this garland that my daughter-in-law Joy made for me several years ago. We were given a giant pumpkin that we kept by the front door for a few days, and then Bea roasted it into 29 cups of puree for the freezer. So far we’ve used it for muffins, pumpkin chia seed pudding, and pumpkin pancakes.

I baked hefty loaves of Chocolate Banana Bread, the recipe for which I’ll try to post soon.

When I was waiting in an office the other day, I was seated just opposite this painting, which appears to be a depiction of the local scenery right now.

It’s a glorious autumn!

The purples are out.

my garden, play, winter, , ,

Cold weather has returned with the sunshine, and the fountain was frozen this morning. I have two little girls here all day making good use of my toys and the playhouse. It’s interesting to see the teamwork of these females in making a home of the playhouse. The typical use that my mostly boy grandchildren make of it revolves around “cooking” with whatever they can find, but my guests requested blankets and pillows and stuffies, and they created a cozy nest. It was cold enough that they needed their puffy jackets, but they asked to go barefoot.

Up at Pippin’s place where the temperatures were a little colder midday, 40 degrees, my grandchildren chose to eat lunch outdoors:

In my garden, the rain and sun combined to bring out — the flowers! Well, a few flowers… the purple, ground-hugging sort so far. But I see some taller iris buds. In February things will start to get exciting!

The wren sings and insists.

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ebird.org

The song of a Bewick’s Wren came through my bedroom window as I was waking to the morning. I’ve never heard one of these birds carrying on so long.

If you are not familiar with it you can listen here: Bewick’s Wren

What busyness in my life all at once. June warmth makes my blood to move faster, and days fill up and empty themselves, as the thermometer on my patio rises and falls. A few of the many things:

**Half the plants in the garden need trimming already! I severely pruned the plum trees, trying to keep them small, as per Grow a Little Fruit Tree. Santa Barbara daisies, wallflower, helianthemum, gazanias, bush lupine and salvias, all needed a midsummer shearing. Then there were all those one-gallon salvias and such for which spots must be found in the ever more crowded landscape. I’ve been gardening for hours every day.

**Still seeing butterflies and wasps that I don’t know, and which I can sometimes identify. These wasps that my Seek app says are paper wasps ignore the sunflowers that are open, and hang out on the fat buds. I wonder what they are doing…

**Rats seem to be eating my garden as they did in 2016. Then it was tomatoes. This time it was the single collard plant that came up from some old seeds. After it grew back for a few days they ate it again. Then they tried the unripe Painted Lady runner beans but evidently didn’t like them. I’ve planted fresher collard seeds and am trying to figure out how to protect them when they sprout. Rats spurn Swiss chard, and all the other current offerings, though they did nibble on snow peas back in April.

So as not to attract rodents unnecessarily, I’ve been bringing the bird feeders into the garage at night. At first light finches and mourning doves and even crows are waiting for the sunflower seeds to reappear.

View from my bedroom window.

This morning, as I often do, I pulled on my robe and went out to hang their “chapel” feeder on its hook above the patio, and then I looked up into the redwood tree, because I could tell that the wren was broadcasting from there at that moment. But I couldn’t see him. A junco and titmice and a hummingbird flew back and forth from that tree, to and fro across the yard from tree to rooftop to tree; but the wren followed his routine of staying out of sight while visiting in turn every tall tree in the neighborhood, making sure he communicated to each household, insisting on joy.

**I’ve been cooking a lot. I love having fresh tarragon with which to make the Tarragon-Parsley Salsa Verde. This time I used walnut oil instead of olive oil and it’s great. The yellow in the picture above  is lemon zest.

I took all the remaining Painted Lady beans I’d stored and soaked them together. The older they get, the more they turn dark and red and shiny. The older beans took longer to soak, and longer to cook to tender.

**My computer comes and goes with my Computer Guy, and while he’s always interesting to talk to on almost any topic, the other day when he came merely to pick up the PC he wanted to talk for an hour before he even unplugged it. He has lots of ideas for how to improve the state of the nation. I told him he’d need to be king so he could make unilateral decisions.

new shower curtain

**The construction workers came back! The new bathroom is perfectly usable now, though it has a couple of details unfinished. I soaked in its tub the night after my most strenuous day of pruning. Lovely. My master bedroom walk-in closet is almost done — maybe tomorrow I will be able to start moving into it, after more than a year of shifting my belongings from one room to another. This was the closet that I basically wanted to get unextravagantly spiffed up before the major remodeling was begun. And it has been the biggest inconvenience. That is sometimes most aggravating to think about, but on days like today, the wren makes me laugh aloud.

**I pulled this weed out of the germander and was impressed by the little black seeds. I think it is Black Medick.

**Yesterday morning I was surprised by daughter Pippin appearing in my front garden and calling “Mama!” up to me where I sat by a sunny open window. Such a familiar voice and word… ❤ How she happened to be here is too long a story, but we enjoyed the best hug ever — well, at least since I saw them in March. And then we sat in the garden and chatted and it was so good for our mother-daughter hearts. She and I are not phone-talkers at all; we really need to be together in person to be fully satisfied.

Violas surviving in the shade of asparagus.

**I don’t like to write much here about things that are expected to happen in the future, because they aren’t real yet. But the excitement I feel is terribly real, over the imminent arrival of Kate and her family; they will stay with me for several weeks! She is my youngest, whom I went to India to see, and whose two babies I was blessed to see come into the world, one in India and one in DC last summer. Her family actually contracted the coronavirus and got over it while cooped up in their DC apartment; otherwise they would have been leery of coming to California to see all the grandparents before they go abroad again.

We’ll see what kind of blogging communications I will be able to accomplish in the next while — maybe it will be the little boy voices that wake me morning by morning to the important realities of this particular summer season. That will also be music to my ears.

“Their voice has gone out into all the earth, and their words to the end of the universe.”
-Psalm 19:4

Fava beans, and moving on.

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It’s convenient that my next-door neighbor has gone camping this weekend, because I need his yard waste can. I forgot to ask him but I am pretty sure he will be okay with me using it to load up with all of the garden clippings I’ve collected in just two days. He has his dragster parked long-term and rent-free on a few inches of my driveway so he likes to feel that he is doing things for me, too.

The fava beans were a big job! Yesterday I cut all the pods off the 30-something plants that grew from two packets of seeds I’d bought online. I might have started the harvest earlier if it hadn’t been so rainy. As it was, I got caught in a surprise shower in the  middle of the process. Before the last week of rain the beans were overflowing their planter, thus:

But by the time I got to picking them, they had grown a few more inches and were  getting infested with insects and maybe disease, and were just a mess generally. Here are a few shots showing how the project developed over the day. By the evening I was sitting under the wisteria shelling the creamy green beans out of their pods, which I dropped on to the patio at my feet. Just the plants and the pods of these Vicia faba — also known as broad beans or horse beans — filled most of my own large green waste bin.

It was slow going, but I shelled a couple of quarts of beans. That didn’t make much of a dent in the tubful, and I needed to do some other kinds of work still before bed; the thought occurred to me that I could offer them on a county freesharing Facebook group I belong to, so I took pictures and posted them, and this morning  a woman came and took half of the remainder. Tomorrow another member is coming and maybe she will clean me out. I could eat all the beans myself eventually, but I have so many things needing doing right now besides shelling favas… like cooking the ones I did shell!

While I was waiting for the lady I thought I’d do a little deadheading – ha! I ended up spending hours on the front garden, yanking out the poppies that want to cover every other plant, shearing one wallflower bush, cleaning up the irises, weeding. Oh, yes, and taking pictures of pretty flower pairings, or trios, and the asparagus in its ferny state with Johnny Jump-ups. I dragged the neighbor’s can over to my driveway and started piling in the green and flowery trimmings.

A Painted Lady butterfly was drinking at the chive flowers, and making me think that she was showing off for the camera. Unlike most butterflies, she did not flutter away as I drew near, but did pirouettes, and flew from bloom to bloom striking different poses. Perhaps the strong drink was making her lose all inhibitions. All the while I slowly came closer…  and then she came closer to me, spread her wings on the flower right in front of me and let me watch and admire her at her work.

Her wings are a bit tattered, I can see now in the closeups. I wonder if a bird tried to make lunch out of her… Speaking of birds, I think I may have made friends with a certain chickadee. I will tell you about him later; right now I have to head to rest and sleep so that I can tackle more garden tasks tomorrow.