garden : clean up

It has finally begun to rain again, which means that the plants are less brown and the rain barrel is filled up again. I was surprised to empty it, and it definitely came in handy during the dry spell. We have yet to set up the second one, although we could have used it. The indoor plants seem to like the untreated water just fine, so that’s a bonus use as well.

Now that the daylilies are done blooming, I took some time to cut out the dead stalks. They now look tidier, but much shorter. I also cut the flowering stems off the lavender, which was time-consuming as I didn’t want to simply shear the plant down. Perhaps in future years; at the moment it looks nice and bushy and more like it belongs in its spot (in contrast to when all the stems were growing nearly horizontally in their attempts to be in the sun at all times).

Besides those two efforts, I have done very little in the yard lately. It’s been brutally hot and humid, but also dry so not much has been growing. The big excitement has been the insects that have discovered the milkweed: we have a whole slew of orange milkweed aphids, and just last week I returned to see a female Monarch flitting around. It appeared as if she were inspecting greenery, but I couldn’t locate any eggs so we’ll have to wait and see if she laid them. On the butterfly front, I’ve had several other small visitors to the garden now that the liatris is blooming, a Horace’s Duskywing and a Silver-Spotted Skipper.

It’s my hope that we’ll get back out in the yard and finish clearing it of weeds in a few weeks, after we go on vacation and the weather cools down. Of course, around here we could be a couple of months waiting for cooler weather. Plenty to do inside as well!

garden : clean up

food : CSA bounty and the gardens of friends

Our CSA is swinging into full summer gear, and we are overflowing with potatoes, basil, tomatoes, a variety of cucumbers, and two kinds of squash. To be fair to our farmer who works hard not to overwhelm us with what he perceives to be the less desirable of the summer vegetables (squash), this week’s surplus results at least in part from my choice to buy a second box at a discounted rate. Showing up exactly when the farmer is delivering has a few advantages, and being offered an orphan box is one of them. So I have twice as many tomatoes and squashes as usual, and am trying to decide what to do with them.

Although many people complain about squash, I like them and will probably just continue to eat them as a regular part of meals. So far this summer we’ve had yellow squash sautéed with olive oil and tarragon (my personal favorite way) and yellow squash fritters. The fritters were an experiment, the result of combing through Simply In Season and studying all the recipes marked with ‘summer squash.’ The fritters were quite tasty, but consistently soft. We’re going to have them again tomorrow—three cups of shredded squash is less than I thought it would be, so I have some squash pre-grated and ready to go—and I’m hopeful that smaller and thinner will lead to a crispier outcome. I’m also tempted by a pickle recipe that uses yellow squash, but not terribly motivated to hover over a pot of boiling water again so soon. Maybe later in the summer if we have another big yellow squash week. In the meantime, the green and white courge will go into muffins, and we’ll munch our way through the variety of cucumbers.

On the tomato front, I have a row of smallish red tomatoes lined up on the windowsill, two pints of cherry tomatoes in the fridge, and two large Cherokee Purples ready for eating. I’m thinking I’ll just stew and freeze the red ones, despite their suitability for sandwiches, which will save me the trouble of figuring out an actual dish to make with them once cooked. Freezer space is now at a premium, however, which means that recipes involving chicken stock need to start appearing on the menu forthwith. Not to mention that the actual chicken needs to be thawed and stewed, although that will do nothing to address the chicken stock surplus. It’s not exactly soup season, but I have some ideas involving rice and vegetables that could use some up.

We’re also getting a decent amount of lovely basil, but I’ve been too slow to use it and it’s quite wilted. It’s currently soaking in an ice water bath, which the internet assures me will revive it; I suspect that much of it has crossed the line from wilted to dried, so I’m unlikely to ‘revive’ enough for the pesto I was hoping to make. We did use the lovely lemon basil from the folks we know in Frederick for pesto last week, and I’m sure there will be more to come. I just hate to see it go to waste. Speaking of the folks we know in Frederick, they sent us home with some delicious selections from their garden. So far we’ve had dragon tongue beans and escarole, and are looking forward to the radicchio, which will be likely just sautéed as a side for salmon, and cabbage, which I’m going to make into Sweet and Sour Cabbage even though it’s white rather than red.

Not only is this making me hungry, it’s reminding me that there is a lot of chopping, dicing, stewing, sautéeing and baking to be done in the kitchen. Prepare for winter, indeed.

food : CSA bounty and the gardens of friends

garden : no rain, no weeds

After one of the coldest and wettest months of June in a decade, we’ve had a cold dry month of July thus far. As a result, I traveled a sine wave of worry and stress about the weeds. They took off in the month of June, creeping into the side beds that I’d covered with leaves and was barely keep clear. At the same time, the clover was overtaking the yard, which is fine in itself but the combination of nitrogen-rich clover clippings and buckets of rain made the lawn a jungle in that needed to be mown far more frequently than I’d like. So, the weeds were neglected and grew and grew along with my stress about whether we’d ever be able to beat them back again.

Then July came and I began to consider the nuclear option. I rejected that choice, but remained stressed about the amount of time the actual weeding was going to take. Enter my partner. Once it was established that we were not going to be poisoning the weeds, he took the weekend before last and went outside and weeded. For two days straight, everything that could be dug out was. He cleared 85% of the side beds, generating two trash cans and four contractor bags full of weeds and returning our backyard to a state more reflective of the hours (and hours [and hours]) of work we’ve put into it over the past three years. I was so pleased!

Since this great de-weeding, it still hasn’t rained which means that nothing is cropping up in the bare patches that we he created. It’s conceivable that we might make actual further forward progress this year; while the clear beds are nice, they’re the beds that we’ve progressively cleared each year, just with a few more stumps and saplings removed. Next up is the patch under the dogwood and sassafras, a corner of the yard that is remote from where the fence will be replaced. I’ve been loathe to add new plants in the areas that will invariably be trampled when we put in the new fence, but I can’t look at all that lovely cleared space without imagining flowerbeds.

For once, the timing has worked out splendidly and we’re looking at a ten-day stretch of thunderstorms in the area. With a little more garden luck, we’ll have a clear enough day on Friday that will allow us to get the second rain barrel installed and the poison ivy sprayed.

garden : no rain, no weeds

PG Pool

Upon the urging of my yoga teacher, I joined PG Pool, a local private pool in Mount Rainier. I’m not really a private pool kind of person, having spent nearly every summer at my local public pool, first as a swimmer and later as a lifeguard. But, neither is she, and she assured me that it’s a very open pool full of hippies. The ‘hairy-legged breastfeeding pool’ is how it was described to her 18 years ago; that might not be as true these days, since they’ve redone the filter system and the pool liner and our area has gotten a bit more hip in the intervening time. Still, though, there’s a sign at the entrance that says they won’t discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity or veteran status or disability, so that’s a pretty good indication that there are still some hippies kicking around.

Since we’ve joined, I’ve been swimming about every other day. It’s a small miracle that I am able to swim laps at all without having a nonfunctional shoulder, a result I attribute to a decade of body work and physical therapy. More recently, credit is due to the aligning and strengthening effects of 8 months of twice-weekly yoga classes. So I’m back in the pool and the pool is lovely; I’m only doing 600 meters at a time, but this is the most I’ve swum in over a decade so I’m happy. I never thought I’d be glad to have Speedo ™ tanlines, but I am! Truly, any visible marker of my progress is fine with me, and they come with my hair getting back to its ‘normal’ color. (You know, the color it is when I spend all day every day outside in the sun all summer…not something that people could confuse with brown!)

In addition to my regular swims, we’ve been going on weekend evenings to use the gas grills and hang out for the music and late night events. We keep running into people we know from other venues—neighbors, friend of a friend from college, more students of my yoga teacher—and we’re getting to know some new folks as well. We haven’t yet met any other members without kids, and that definitely makes us an anomaly there. I get the impression that the other adults who joined to swim laps go to the early morning swim; I suppose we probably are anomalies as non-parents who don’t mind spending an evening surrounded by hordes of kids.

One of the nice things about the pool is getting to share it with our friends, and we’re looking forward to another picnic dinner there on Saturday. If you show up then, you may get to witness the rare event of my partner drinking beer from a can! (No glass allowed.) Yes, it will probably be some weird imported stuff, but a can is a can.

PG Pool

food : first attempts at canning cherry jam

The first attempt at making cherry jam did not go well, at least if you wanted the outcome to be cherry jam and not very sweet cherry sauce in a jar. There were a few things I did the first time that I did differently the second time that led to the second attempt being recognizable as jam (whether it’s still runny jam remains to be seen). One, I used frozen cherries and didn’t let them thaw first. Two, I didn’t cook the cherries long enough before adding the sugar. Three, I misoverestimated the volume of cherries I had and correspondingly added way too much sugar. As a result, I got cherry sauce, more cherry sauce than I have any idea what to do with as we regularly eat neither pancakes nor ice cream.

The second time around, I did all of those things differently. I used fresh cherries, cooked them until they were all coming apart, and then added a proportionate amount of sugar. Thus far what’s in the jars looks like jam and it’s already less runny than the cherry sauce; yes, I keep tipping the jars to the side even though you’re not supposed to touch them while they gel up for 24 hours. As I was boiling and stirring the second batch for what seemed like a really long time, I did some math in my head and concluded I could use four of the jars of cherry sauce and a quart of fresh cherries as the base for the cherry-walnut conserves that I’m planning to make tomorrow, and have just about the correct amount of fruit and sugar. That will leave me with only four jars of cherry sauce—a number that seems manageable and like an amount we could work into desserts over the course of a year—and with two quarts of fresh cherries to make another batch of jam.

The very last canning-related thing that happened today was that one of my pickle jars exploded when I put it in the hot water. Which was really frustrating because (1) pickles are supposed to be easier than jam and (2) I never know whether to boil the jars in sticky water or try to skim out the stuff and add fresh water or what. This happened with one of the jars of apple chutney in the fall, suddenly the pot was full of floating raisins and bits of onion, and I went with the skimming and dilution with fresh water approach. This time around I just boiled them in sticky water and wiped down the jars when they came out.

So, tomorrow we will redo today. I will prep the cukes first, so that the four hour soak happens early in the day, for which I will also prepare by refilling the ice cube trays before I go to bed. I will then one quart of cherries and make the cherry-walnut conserves, pit two more quarts of cherries and make another batch of jam, and then do another round of bread and butter pickles. I will then be done with all of the fresh cherries I have remaining and the cherry season will be behind us; I passed on the last few quarts were at the farmers’ market yesterday due to the many I already have. My shoulder will certainly be glad to move on to a tool besides the cherry pitter, that’s for sure.

food : first attempts at canning cherry jam