Archive for June, 2007
Do you sprout?It’s not just for hippies anymore.
I have been sprouting for years. Radish sprouts. Broccoli sprouts. Onion sprouts. These are mung bean sprouts.
There are many beauties to sprouting:
- No weeds.
- You can sprout any time of the year, even in a snowstorm.
- It takes up very little space.
- It’s WAY fast. You can get a harvest in as little as two days.
- The sprouts taste yummy and can be used in a wide variety of cooking.
- It’s very inexpensive.
- They are really good for you.
As you can see, I don’t have one of those fancy sprouters advertised in the magazines. This is just a mayonnaise jar that is fitted with a lid that I found about a hundred years ago at a health food store. You can accomplish the same thing with a bit of screen or even cheesecloth and a rubber band.
Here’s what you do.
1) Find the sprout seeds. This, I’m afraid, is the hard part. You can look in health food stores but even they, I’m afraid, are often deficient on this score. Surfing the web helps. I recently got two FIVE POUND BAGS of mung beans from the wife of the fellow who owns the wine shop (did you follow that) because they shop at an Indian grocery store near their home about an hour from here.
2) Measure out a modest portion of the seeds into your sprouter. They will expand like mad, so don’t fill it very much. For this mayo jar you see here, I only had about 1/2 cup of mung beans.
3) Soak the seeds in tepid water overnight in a dark location. I put them in the cabinet where we keep our glasses. This way, I always am reminded of it because that’s the cabinet I visit most frequently.
4) Each day, rinse the seeds in tepid water. I rinse in the morning and in the evening. Allow to drain upside down, giving the jar a little air space. I prop my jar sideways in the aforementioned cabinet, still allowing the drops of water to run out on a paper towel.
5) Eat when ready or save in the refrigerator. Sprouts will keep up to 1-2 weeks refrigerated.
Mung bean sprout, tomato, cucumber and goat cheese salad.
Oh, and Ben’s grilled filets with lemon butter topping.
(Ben says thanks for the book, Vennie!)
Each seed type has its own unique flavor. I particularly like mung beans for their earthy and nutty flavor. I use them in salads of all types. They can also be mixed with tuna, chicken or other meats.
Onion and radish sprouts have a zesty flavor that I adore. Broccoli sprouts taste a bit like broccoli. You can, of course, mix sprouts too for a mix of flavors.
So there you go! A very easy way to garden in your kitchen cabinet. No experience required!
Ciao!
Robin
I was (more or less) tagged by Carol over at May Dream Gardens to post seven random things about me. Carol was tagged by Colleen at In the Garden Online. It’s a meme.
The original idea is steeped in science. You can read about memes on Wikipedia. In the context of the blogosphere, a meme is about propagation of an idea–in this case seven random things about me (or whoever). You state seven random things and then “tag” seven other people to do the same. In this meme, the responses are supposed to be related to your blog.
I hope it’s not like a chain letter when you drop dead if you don’t fulfill your end of the bargain. I’m not sure that I even KNOW seven people with blogs who will do this. So if you’re reading this and are willing to post seven things about yourself, will you please let me know in the comments area and include your URL so we can visit?
Okay…seven random things.
1) I have always loved plants. When I was a kid my mom would take my brothers and me to the Great Big Greenhouse in Norfolk, Virginia. It was one of my favorite places in the world. It felt magical to walk in and be surrounded by such an astounding variety of plants. And the smell! It was so fresh! So moist! So earthy!
Mom allowed me to drag home any number of plants, which I set up all over my room. At one point she threatened to evict me if I brought home another plant.
I continued this love affair through college and into adulthood. In college I was the only girl living in the dorm with DOZENS of plants. And a rocking chair. And a coffee pot. Moving days were hell.
2) I cannot STAND to listen to music when I garden. And I LOVE music. In fact, from the time I was thirteen until after I graduated from college, I wanted to be an opera singer. I kid you not. I studied voice, piano–even organ–for YEARS. My parents spent an absolute FORTUNE on music lessons. Sadly, the reality is that I do not have the DRIVE that it takes to compete in the world of music. Also, the neighbors pounding on the wall from the apartment next door when I moved to Monterey and tried to practice singing didn’t help.
Anyway, about the garden…The birds are my music. When I am outside in the garden, I listen to the sounds of the birds. Every day is different. I have come to recognize some, although not nearly as many as I would like. I always know the crows, of course. And the “plunk plunk” of the cow birds. I also recognize the Pur-DEE Pur-DEE of the cardinals. I bought a software program with bird songs a while back but have not had time to indulge. That will be winter time activity.
3) I went through our county’s Master Gardener classes, but didn’t take the final test. Similarly, I went to graduate school, wrote my thesis and NEVER TURNED IT IN.
The reason for the thesis-incompletus is that I landed a very lucrative two-year writing project with a big-named pharmaceutical company that swallowed me up. The reason for the Master Gardener-incompletus was a bit more complicated. And since I have a positive policy with Bumblebee Blog, I will refrain from outlining my reasons. But I do I plan to become involved at some point in the future.
4) I suffer from serious garden envy. I try really hard not to compare my yard and garden to those of other people, but I still do. I often feel inadequate. Or competitive. I am working hard to just BE.
5) My manicure looks like crap 90% of the time because I have the habit of digging into the dirt with my fingernails. In fact, when I travel on business, I will often realize on the airplane that my hands look like those of a farm hand. As a result, I have DRAWERS full of nail care products that I have purchased in panic mode at airports across the country.
6) When I’m not gardening (or working), I am reading or cooking. I LOVE to cook, although I perhaps don’t LOVE it every single night. I do insist on a family dinner. I am a HUGE advocate of the family dinner. Our little family of three sits down together six nights a week. Benjamin, my teenager, orders pizza on Friday nights.
Although the experts quoted in the newspapers extol the importance of the family dinner in family communication, happiness, keeping kids off drugs, kids getting better grades, kids not getting obese…the list goes on…we do it because we just ENJOY our family dinners. We talk about what is happening in the news, why we believe what we believe, history, what is happening in the garden, things we hope to someday do–you name it. In the summer our dinner are most often al fresco.
Managing a family dinner has meant that we eat at 8:30 p.m. because my husband doesn’t get home until 8. Some of the people who come to visit and have dinner suffer mightily, even though I offer tiny treats to tide them over.
7) When I die, I want to go like my Grandpa M. An avid gardener from the time he had to quit coal mining because of black lung, he grew flowers. As many flowers as he could possibly manage to squeeze into his tiny lawns. My most vivid memories were of him escaping family get-togethers to hand water his garden–always wearing his little-old-man-hat.
When he died, he was outside hand watering his garden. Grandma M. said that it looked like he just got tired, stretched out in the grass and pulled his little-old-man-hat over his eyes for the shade. That is how he died.
And that’s seven random things about me.
Robin
Aren’t these brand new baby bluebirds amazing!?! There are four. They hatched sometimes between yesterday morning and this morning.
Just are we are supposed to, we checked under the nest for blowfly larvae. No evidence that I could see. I declined to inspect the hatchlings because they are so very tiny, but as they get bigger, the experts say you should check under their wings and remove any parasites.
Here are some interesting facts from the Stokes Bluebird Book: The Complete Guide to Attracting Bluebirds by Donald & Lillian Stokes:
- The female lays about an egg a day until the full clutch is laid. She doesn’t start incubating the eggs until all the eggs are laid.
- Once the female begins incubation, she remains with the eggs nearly constantly, only taking short breaks for food.
- If something happens to the female, the male cannot take over the duties of incubating the eggs. The eggs die.
- The young will fledge within 16 to 23 days. So for us, that means they’ll be fledging between July 11 and July 18.
- We will stop monitoring the box when the birds get to be around 11 or 12 days old to prevent them from bolting from the box prematurely.
Other facts:
- Bluebird eggs incubate for 12 to 14 days and then stay in the nest for 16 to 21 days before they fledge.
- Even after they fledge, they depend on their parents for food for a couple of weeks.
Sadly, the Stokes say that the first few months of a bluebird’s life are the most difficult because of all the dangers and their extreme inexperience. They say that an estimated 50% of fledglings do not make it past the first few months. If they DO survive, they have a good chance of living to be two or three years old.
There don’t seem to be records of potential longevity, but they could, possibly, live to be 10 years old in the wild if they are very smart and very fortunate.
I certainly hope that Maryland bluebirds are smart and fortunate.
And by coincidence, I happened to pick up a book on my shelf today, The Laws of Nature: Excerpts from the Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and happened on this apropos quote:
When I bought my farm, I did not know what a bargain I had in the bluebirds, bobolinks, and thrushes; as little did I know what sublime mornings and sunsets I was buying.
Too true.
Ciao!
Robin
I don’t believe that most people who meet me think first of a farm girl. So I’m particularly delighted to report on my latest farm girl activities–just to prove it IS so.
I started this weekend by starting my second batch of cheese. My first batch was neufchatel, strictly following the book’s recipe. This time I made the same recipe, but omitting the cream, making a lighter version of the cheese. Both are–if I say so myself–fabulous.
Benjamin and I have eaten all of the first batch ourselves. I mixed it with garlic and herbs from the garden and we have eaten it on crackers as snacks. The second batch will be used for an absolutely sinful Italian Creme cake in lieu of the cream cheese in the frosting. (I might even post the recipe–one of my favorites.)
Home made neufchatel cheese
Who knew cheese making could be so easy?!? So far, at least, it seems to consist largely of having the right ingredients (starter, good milk or cream and various other things such as rennet), a REALLY clean kitchen and utensils (not a problem, as my mother-in-law has a favorite “out, out damn spot” joke about me) and waiting around, at which I happen to excel.
I bought the ingredients for creme fraiche today. I am also ordering more supplies from the New England Cheese Making Supply Company to make mozzarella and ricotta.
Embarrassment of riches–farm girl style
Next, I was faced with an embarrassment of riches–a whole bunch of cucumbers. I considered (briefly) giving some away, since our little family of three couldn’t possibly eat them all since there are even more on the way. So I pulled out my latest book purchases from Barnes and Noble and found a new bread and butter pickle recipe. (I plan to post a review of book soon.)
I have made bread and butter pickles a couple of times before. The first time, I was in my twenties and was living in an un-air conditioned house in Norfolk, Virginia. I was DYING with the heat in the kitchen from the huge canning kettle and the gas stove. When I had finished, I had about 20 jars of pickles that I had originally planned to give as gifts and share.
Hah! After all the work of planting, growing and pickling, I DID NOT SHARE A SINGLE JAR. I ate them all myself!
Well, this time wasn’t so bad.
Cucumbers and onions in pickling brine
I had the advantage of air conditioning and a mandolin grater this time that made the preparations so much more convenient and comfortable. In the end, I had about 10 jars of pickles. Will I share? Maybe. Just just a little. Even with a handy dandy Japanese mandolin grater and air conditioning, it’s still a lot of work!
Bread and butter pickles
Finally, just to top off my farm girl report…
I was watering in the garden yesterday and what did I find? MY FIRST TOMATO OF THE SEASON!!!!
I have been a very avid fan of heirloom tomatoes. But this year I planted a couple of varieties of hybrid tomatoes, including Better Boy and Early Girl. And waddaya know? The Early Girl produced the first tomato.
First tomato of the season, 2007
She’s not really all that impressive. Harry tried to put her in the salad last night and I objected STRENUOUSLY. Really, it would have gotten lost. I will eat her tomorrow from my hand with only a little salt for dressing.
Ciao!
Robin
Yesterday was hay day around here.
That’s when Farmer Rudy, the fellow who tends to our hay field, shows up to mow down the hay. The sight of a newly mown hay field is wonderful. And the SMELL is absolutely glorious.
Farmer Rudy is a local good ole boy, who owns a nearby farm and raises cows. He is probably in his sixties and yesterday, while managing a GREAT BIG wad a chewing tobacco, told us about the orchard grass blight and how his plan to let the field go to seed was working.
It’s all fine with us. For the most part, we worry about the hay because of 1) aesthetics and 2) the agricultural tax credit. Because of the tax credit we only pay a pittance on a good portion of the property.
Here is Maryland there’s a point system for maintaining your ag tax credit. We have to get five points. I’m probably not getting it all absolutely right, but the point system goes something like this.
-A point for each acre that is farmed
-A point for each cow or horse.
-A point for three sheep
-A point for 20 chickens
-Etc.
You can mix and match your points. So you can farm three acres and have two horses. Or you can have forty chickens and three cows.
For a while I toyed with the idea of raising chickens to help out with the points. I read books about chickens and visited the Calvert County Fair, where I ALWAYS enjoy the chicken barn the best. But frankly, 20 chickens is WAY too many chickens for our little family of three. I’m not about to open a roadside stand to sell eggs. And although Harry and Ben would probably enjoy the chickens at first, I can guarantee that they wouldn’t like them once they had to pitch in with the feeding and cleaning while I traveled for work.
So we figure that farming five acres of hay is easiest, at least as long as Farmer Rudy’s around.
We do worry about Farmer Rudy’s health, as he’s in his sixties, has diabetes, melanoma and COPD (lung disease). As he explained yesterday, farming is “fun,” but the hazards of the sun and the chemical and diesel fume exposure will eventually kill a farmer.
Today, Farmer Rudy is supposed to be back to bale the hay. Actually, he rolls rolls the hay into these uber-bales that sit at the edge of our woods until his cows need them.
I’m thinking of painting cheery and silly faces on them to greet us when we go up and down the driveway. I wonder what Farmer Rudy would think about that?
Robin
I want to believe in miracles. I want BADLY to believe in miracles. Especially the kind that help you lose weight while eating everything you want, “turn back the hands of time” and be more productive “than you ever dreamed.” Heck, I would settle for a miracle plant food!
So when I read about SUPERThrive and the extravagant, if unrealistic claims, of making plants grow seemingly overnight, I had to give it a try.
But then, there’s the heavily marketed Miracle Gro. (I spent MANY YEARS working in a multitude of advertising agencies and grew to HATE cute spellings and words that are JammedTogether with an ExtraCapital. But I have made every effort to overlook that shortcoming of these products.)
SO I PUT THEM TO THE TEST. THE CHALLENGE:
–Three identical plants from the same grower.
–Raised in identical conditions of light, soil, pot and equal amounts of nurturing and neglect for 12 weeks.
–The difference: The water. One plant would be given only plain spring water from our well. One plant would be watered with water spiked with Miracle Gro. The third watered with water spiked with SuperThrive.
I first read about SuperThrive in James Dodson’s Beautiful Madness (a review of which you can read here). Although he was a skeptic, he reported on an extremely successful grower who SWEARS by the stuff and buys it by the barrel full.
On looking into it further, it seemed a bit of a modern aged snake oil. The product label is full or verbose claims. There are some good ones:
–Used by thousands of governments, state universities, leading arboretums, botanical gardens, park systems, U.S. States and cities in multiple drum lots.
–Lifts the world!!
–Added to 21 fertilizers by 21 growers.
And my favorite…
–Used by FIVE U.S. Departments to help win World War II.
As you can see, it’s difficult to take a product like this seriously since the claims are so outrageous and wholly unsubstantiated.
Nevertheless, in the interest of science, I will suspend disbelief.
The company is fairly vague as to the ingredients. The label claims that it includes “unique, normalizing vitamins-hormones.” In fact, when I embarked on this experiment I happened on a website that had conducted a chemical analysis of the product and confirmed that it does, indeed, have vitamins. It was unclear whether the vitamins were ones that plants need and, alas, I can’t find the website any longer.
The typical application of SuperThrive, according to the crowded label, is about a teaspoon per gallon, which can be added to other fertilizer.
Miracle Gro, on the other hand, simply states that it is a “Liquid Plant Food.” It states that the composition is 8-7-6 and offers a guaranteed analysis of the nitrogen, phosphate, potash and iron content. Application is 10 - 20 drops per quart of water for this particular Miracle Gro Product.
On the left is the plant only given spring water from our well.
In the middle is the plant fed with Miracle Gro.
On the right is the plant fed with SuperThrive.
THE RESULTS:
As you can see from the photo, the plant that was given only spring water from our well did not fare nearly as well as either the Miracle Gro or the SuperThrive plants. The plant is smaller, there is less new growth and overall the color is less green. The plant is clearly less vigorous than the other miracle food plants.
Left to right: Plain water plant, Miracle Gro plant, SuperThrive plant
After that, the judging becomes somewhat more difficult. My impartial (because he doesn’t give a hoot) observer, Benjamin, says that the SuperThrive plant appears to be bigger, healthier and more vigorous.
Yes, the SuperThrive plant has more new growth, more leaves and is a bit greener. On the other hand, the Miracle Gro plant is also vigorous and the growth is more mature and leaves are larger.
In the end, the SuperThrive plant is probably a bit more vigorous.
But is it a miracle? Sadly, no. Clearly, something in that outrageous bottle works, but it’s no more a miracle than Miracle Gro. And the price is outrageously higher. On Amazon the price was about $32 for a PINT. The 8 oz. bottle or Miracle Gro still has a tag on it from the local nursery for $2.49.
So, in the end, I vote for Miracle Gro. It has a good result with a value price. And you don’t have to feel entirely taken with their marketing pitch either.
My next question: Is that Alaskan fish fertilizer better than either one? Frankly, the only reason I didn’t include it in this test is that the local nursery didn’t have FOUR plants. But I have seen some amazing new growth in the weeks following when I pour on the stinky stuff. (And boy, does that stuff STINK.)
Ciao!
Robin
Benjamin and I were sitting in the family room yesterday afternoon around 5:30 p.m. when there was a large collision into one of the big back picture windows. A bird had crashed into the window. And Miss P (our cat) happened to be on the scene to pick up the casualty, a mourning dove.
We love the sounds of the mourning doves in the trees, with their soft cooing. They always appear in lazy looking pairs at the bird feeding station, like little old couples out for a stroll.
So fortunately, Ben saw Miss P in action and ran outside to retrieve the poor bird from where she had dragged it under the deck. Ben seemed to think that the sudden action of several birds flying into the direction of the house from the feeding station several yards away meant that Miss P was not just there by coincidence.
Sadly, cats will be cats. But fortunately, I think that Ben saved this bird.
It seemed to be in shock from the collision, as there were not apparent external injuries. (Miss P had not had time to do her dirty work.)
It reminded us of the time when Sarah, our younger Papillon, was a puppy and plunged from the upstairs balcony 15′ or so from the second floor. She was dazed and just crouched on the floor trying to regain her senses for several minutes. (I’m not sure she ever did!)
We put Poor Bird into a bucket and into an out-of-the-way, cat-free zone outside.
Later, he seemed to perk up a bit and started hopping around. That wasn’t actually a good thing since it put him in harm’s way. In fact, Miss P took another run at him before I could capture her and put her in the house. Then Sophie, our other little Papillon, chased Poor Bird underneath the butterfly bush.
The whole time, Ben spent hovering over the bird to keep away all the hostile beasts that live in our house.
Poor Bird finally hopped under the tree and later disappeared. There were no pools of feathers and all the killer Papillons and cats were inside, so we’re hoping he regained his senses and was able to fly away with his friends, and perhaps back to his mate.
I will always be on the lookout now for a mourning dove with a slighly askew tail feather–our Poor Bird.
On the bluebird front…Our couple is happily tending to their four little eggs. I expect we’ll have hatchinglings in about another week or so.
It’s a humorous site to see Bluebird Mom’s head sticking out the front door of the bluebird house, waiting patiently for Mr. Bluebird to return with some goodies.
We have stared putting wiggly meal worms into a platform feeder a few feet from the bluebird house. They are a BIG HIT–at least the ones that don’t wiggle down and fall on the ground into my squash patch.
Such is the life here in the country. At least Ben is not a part of that cohort of children who, according to an article in the Washington Post this week, are “losing touch with nature.” He even told me during our mourning dove escapade that Poor Bird had scampered under the hydrangea bush. HE KNEW WHAT THE BUSH WAS!!! Go figure. I suppose that sometimes he actually IS listening.
Ciao!
Robin
When you’re living in the Dark Ages, you don’t really know it. Remember rotary phones? No one thought, “Gosh, I wish I could just push the numbers instead of taking all the time to dial.” And remember walking to the television to turn a knob to switch between your whopping THREE channels? (Okay, you have to be over the age of, say, 40 to remember that.)
Well, same goes with computers. After all my fretting and after TWO DAYS of hideous angst while I tried to get all my files back and my programs operational, I feel like I have entered the Age of Enlightenment. Do you know that they have computers with little tiny slots on the front where you can just load your little camera memory cards so you don’t have to deal with spaghetti wires and cables? Who knew?
And now that I have this fast-o dual core processor computer with a 22″ flat screen monitor, things seem so much more beautiful. The virtual world is so colorful!
But alas, the delay meant that I missed Bloom Day on Friday, June 15. That’s when garden bloggers post photos and information about what’s blooming in their gardens. (I don’t believe that this Bloom Day has any relation to the Blooms Day, June 16, that is celebrated by James Joyce fans by reenacting Leopold Bloom’s day-long trek through Dublin and told in the incredibly painful read Ulysses.)
I will celebrate with my own personal little Bloom Day +6 with a show-and-tell of the many photos I took yesterday when I walked away from the madness of the computer switch.
This is the bee balm that I have been worrying was going to take over the garden. Our friend Lucia gave me a couple of little clippings from her garden last year. Lucia never seems to know the names of things and always gives me these little gifts with the explanation that “It’s beeeyoootiful.” Often she also gives some little explanation of other virtues. In this case. “It keeps away mosquitoes!”
Well, as you might guess, it is also invasive. I have let it go this year. I even let a garden club lady take a bunch. But next year, I will SHOW NO MERCY. Oh, it’s beautiful alright. But I would like something besides bee balm in the garden!
Also blooming here is ice plant and little miniature petunias. That’s a peony next to the bee balm and obedient plants in the background.
Then we have the cucumbers. Every year I think, “Fewer vegetables, more flowers.” Ever year, no matter how much I try to restrain myself, we ALWAYS have too many cucumbers. AND WE LOVE CUCUMBERS!
These plants have hardly made it up the bamboo supports and already I have a stack of cucumbers in the kitchen. I will likely be carting them around to the wine shop guy, mail store lady and other people I see on my daily errands. I am my own version of “Meals on Wheels.”
A proper Colonial garden always mixed herbs, vegetables and flowers. The type of garden I’ve been more or less modeling mine after is the type you might see on the edge of town, perhaps owned by a moderately successful merchant.
I have also been experimenting with intensive planting–squishing more plants into an area than the seed package calls for. Sometimes it works well. Sometimes it doesn’t.
My bush beans and swiss chard don’t seem to mind the crowding. Tomatoes, on the other hand, insist on having LOTS of room or they get sick.
This is the herb and lettuce patch. The black seeded simpson is starting to bolt, but the red sails lettuce is so far still hanging in there. In the middle are hollyhocks. The purple cone flower is also blooming. Also there is basil, dill, oregano, parsley, tarragon, lavender, chives (just past blooming) and garlic chives. It’s a regular salad bowl!
Then, here’s an overview of the garden from the ground.
Those are day lilies in the foreground. On the trellis over the gate are wisteria and clematis. Yes, one on one side and one on the other. I can only explain that I didn’t expect the wisteria to grow. My mom warned me that I should tear it out before it got out of control. But like in most things, I don’t listen to my mom and will probably live to regret letting it go so long. For now, I still think it’s beautiful. It just stopped blooming a couple of weeks ago.
Then we have a few mixed flowers. This is pretty much the area where I stick all the plants that I don’t have another place for or that people give to me. I found this lovely bird bath online at Smith & Hawkin.
The tomatoes are still just babies. They will grow to nearly 8′ high. I have brandywine, but also planted some hybrids, just to see how they compare in growth and hardiness and also to prove that I’m not a snob.
You may be able to see the marigolds planted between. I stared those in my super-duper indoor light garden this year. I also planted lots of other flowers, such as bachelor’s buttons, cock’s comb, moon flowers, black eyed susan vines, pink spiked cleosa, coleus, yadda, yadda, yadda.
Then there’s the squash. Actually zucchini and musk melons too. That’s my henryi clematis (yes, I spelled it correctly) to the left. It has already grown too large for the tuteur, so I need to figure out how to propagate and grow more little Henryis.
Well, enough for today. I need to go check on the mourning dove that flew into our back window. Ben pulled him from Miss P’s (cat) cluthes and we have him in a bucket out back. We’re hoping he’s just in shock.
Ciao!
Robin
As I settled down for my coffee this morning I was reading the latest Plant Delights Nursery catalog, Gardening Jihad.
I was doing this instead of watching the birds, as is my regular habit, because I couldn’t bear to look at the sight of the ravaged bird feeding station.
Those wicked, wicked raccoons have nearly broken a branch off my zelkova to reach the bird feeders, which they smashed on the ground. I thought, perhaps, when I installed the new feeding station, with raccoon baffle, that I should move it a bit further from the tree. But I DO seem to learn things the hard way and this is yet another example.
So rather than reminding myself so early in the morning of how very stupid I can sometimes be, I was thumbing through the pages of this clever catalog. I enjoy it when I stumble across humor in unlikely places. I mean, who thinks to read a nursery catalog for chuckles, right?
But Plant Delights offers a few good ones.
In their ordering information section there is a subsection on “How To Be a Good Customer.” It says:
We realize that most folks have never been trained to be good customers, so we decided to offer a few pointers…Our nursery uses a thought process called logic. Logic dictates that if you order plants and forget to open them for a couple of months, don’t ask us to send free replacements. If your plants are fine when they arrive, and are later eaten by a vole, die from drought, or look like a fire hydrant to your dog…don’t ask for more…to quote Trek’s Spock, “It is illogical.”
I also enjoyed their short treatise on invasive plants:
…While the invasive plant issue is a great area of concern to us, a proposed nationwide ban of plants that are only invasive and hardy in Hawaii or South Florida is absurdly extreme. We are very aware of a small but vocal group of plant bigots who advocate a horticultural ethnic cleansing as a means of satisfying their myopic view of nature. As with all vices, moderation and responsibility are the answer.
And at the back of the catalog I stumbled across a “Special Paid Ad” from Shady Deals Nursery, Emu Ranch, Nail Salon, Video Poker and Auto Body Repair. Their new releases for the season included some good ones:
Eucalyptus gunnii ‘Dick’s Adventure’ (Hunting Gum) $129.95 Very closely related to robust E. ‘Haliburton’, this selection can be a bit more brittle, so we recommend the use of a stint to support weak arterial branches. If you hear something pop, don’t worry, it’s probably just a limb heading your way.
Juglans koreana ‘Kim Jong Il’ (Nuclear Nut) $79.95 This is one of the strangest nuts that we have ever seen. The olive-green nuts hit the ground with explosive force and afterwards have a strong allelopathic effect starving anything nearby.
And given my current computer issues, I particularly liked this one:
- Tricyrtis formosana ‘Gates of Bill’ (Extrasoft Toad Lily) $44.95 This is the 20th new version of this popular perennial. The last one we sold would grow well, then stop growing, then start over again. We’ve been promised this is an improvement.
If you’re not generally given to reading nursery catalogs, perhaps you should reconsider and start with this one.
I’m so pleased with the morning chuckle that I’m ordering a grunch load of calix from this now.
Robin
Yesterday was so busy with work, helping Ben organize his room and preparations for a dinner guest, I completely missed Bloom Day. That’s when the garden bloggers all post photos and lists of what’s blooming in their garden.
But so I won’t miss the party altogether, I figure I’ll post a Day After the Day After Bloom Day report tomorrow!
In the meantime, I took some photos while I was out walking the other day and thought I would share just a few of the things I stumbled across.
Every morning I do a walk up and down the Eli Lilly Memorial Driveway (so named for the client whose writing project paid for it) for exercise. In the spring, we always begin to see a multitude a baby brown bunnies up at Bunnyville, the weed palace at the top of our driveway near the road. When the bunnies are quite small, they freeze at the edge of the road when they see us walking or running up. I can do 10 or 12 laps up and back and the bunny watches me every single time.
As they get older, they become more wary and dart for cover. I suppose it’s because they develop some common sense about what might be interested in rabbit for dinner.
So it’s not as frequent that I see an adult AND a baby at the same time.
So far–at least for now–the rabbits remain out of my garden. It’s probably because there is so much other fine food to eat they don’t need to wander down here for mine.
Also on the driveway, Harry, Ben and I have been watching this river of ants for the past week or so. There are so many ants that you can see them as a brown stripe across the driveway, even from a distance. There must be MILLIONS of them. They happen to be crossing where a drainage ditch is located under the driveway. But we have no real clue as to why they’re crossing here or what they’re doing.
If you have any ideas, will you please leave a comment?
And on to the bird news…
I’ve been checking the bluebird houses more frequently–nearly every couple of days–to ensure that house sparrows don’t try to set up housekeeping in one of the houses again. I just happened across this snake skin in the field on my way to House #6.
We don’t see a LOT of snakes, but we do see our fair share, which I define as >0. For the most part we see black snakes and king snakes. Although I don’t have warm and fuzzy feelings about snakes, I do leave these alone, since they help to control the mouse population–a BIG issue here in the country. I mean, the cat can only eat so much.
Finally, there’s the bird report.
When I moved the bird feeders onto a proper pole with a raccoon baffle, we seem to have gotten the attention of numerous new birds. I only moved the feeders about 4′ east, but the feeders are more in the open, which is what I suppose has attracted them.
If you’re battling squirrels and raccoons to keep them out of your bird feeders, run, don’t walk, to your nearest Wild Bird Center and buy a raccoon baffle. It works like a charm.
I may still need to move the whole contraption a couple more feet away from the tree so that the squirrels don’t decide to JUMP onto the feeders. But we’ll see. I like this location because I can sit on the couch with my coffee in the morning and watch the feeding frenzy. It’s a nice, cozy way to start the day.
Okay, so much for today’s nature walk. Back to work…
Robin
