Wordless Wednesday: When I Was a Gardener

not any more

5 on Friday: July 24, 2015

Boy  we've had some hot days! There were several days I didn't even leave the house. Walking out to get the newspaper in the morning was enough of a taste of the heat and humidity for me. So what went on? Not much.

1. I like chocolate; I like coconut; and I've learned to like iced coffee way too much.  This drink, found on Pinterest, is on my to do list.

Chocolate Coconut Coffee Seltzer

2. I had my first peaches! they were from South Carolina and 99¢ a pound! It took another day or so after buying to get them fully ripe but they were good!

3. On one of the sweltering mornings, I finally got my summer plants all planted and my planting table cleaned off. It was only bothering me and telling someone (telling a husband) where and how to plant would have been more of an effort. That's just how it goes... Let me tell you, it feels good to have it all done and see it done. Worth the sweat.

4. With the air conditioning running all day downstairs, I actually did a slight bit of cooking - even using the oven once. I made a banana bread that turned out to be a not so good banana cake. It did use up those bananas that were quickly going south.

5. Finally got my iPhone6 filled with my music and backed up to my computer. Now if I could only get rid of all those Backup to the Cloud messages. No, I don't want to buy Cloud storage tyvm,

Five on Friday: April 3, 2015

Where was my brain last week, I don't know. Five on Friday came and went and I was not on Friday.  As I've said with the Daylight Savings change, my mind has been scrambled. I think the brain cells are settling a bit now though! Here goes.

1. Elise has this terrific new daily planner for pre-order. Check it out. Seriously, it's really good looking and goes from mid July onward.

click image to get details

2. The flowers are finally blooming, both indoors and out. With some good sunshine as well as not 'too' warm temperatures, I may have a chance at getting the garden clean up done before the 'below the surface' weeds start to sprout. I really no longer like garden work but it's the price one pays for having a house.

3. With family scattered and the only nearby daughter vegetarian, I had to disappoint my dh with his wish for an Easter ham. "There's nothing like a good ham..." he said wistfully. But with just one person eating the leftover ham, it can hang around for a long, long time. The last ham had to be tossed when the portion not frozen had come to the end of its edible time. This is what I'd really have liked on the menu...

That's a Maryland Stuffed Ham - click for more information

4. Back to my tv watching. I picked up a dvd of The Borgias at the library earlier this week. When I put it into our old dvd player/recorder, it loaded but would not play. Just as well as I then saw that while it was Season1, it was the 2nd dvd in the series. I'll have to check Netflix one of these days for it as I think our dvd player is almost toast.

5. My friend permanently loaned me her popover pan recently. This is the kind of thing where one of you keeps it until the other one wants to use it and then it changes home. There are many great kitchen items that benefit from this kind of status. Another friend has my raclette maker which I should have borrowed back this past winter. It was a good winter for raclette but alas I didn't think of it during the days of sub zero temperatures. Perhaps I should put it on the calendar for a November pickup this fall. Maybe that will guarantee a milder winter. I only wish.

For those of you celebrating Easter, have a wonderful holiday!

Dirty Nails Day

A relatively quiet Thursday. There were a few places I was scheduled to go today but my 1pm meeting was cancelled. Yea!   A  lot got done on the computer in the morning because I knew that I wouldn't have to stop mid day and leave the house. That's a nice feeling when I feel I want to get some things done without a deadline over me. I am not one of those people who likes deadlines though when I was working, I could certainly work with them. But I mean I would start a project as soon as I got it and not wait til the 11th hour.  I could prioritize what needed more attention and not just work on something because I just got the assignment.  I do not like the adrenaline rush of waiting til the last minute on things. At all! My heart thanks me for that aversion.

So lunch was over, the sun was shining, and it wasn't hot.  A perfect time to get out in the yard and pot up/plant a batch of the annuals I bought last weekend. We've had so much wind lately that I worried they'd dry out...before I got in the mood. My interest in gardening has waned as I've aged so this wasn't a project I was jonesing to do. However, we've had a goodly amount of rain since I bought those plants and they were in perfect shape to plant.

old pots needing new flowers

But that meeting I was going to that got cancelled? Well, it was quite near a K-Mart and I'd planned to buy a couple pairs of cheap gardening gloves. Gloves just good enough to keep my nails fairly clean. I used to always drag my nails over a bar of soap before gardening but bars of soap are rare in our house. (I need to keep one of those mini hotel soap bars downstairs for just this kind of occasion.) So out I went, without gloves as my true gardening gloves are too think for transplanting those petunias with their flimsy roots.  Two scrubs later, my nails are getting back to normal and my hands are getting quite dried out.

But now that I remember the soap trick, I hope the next round of planting keeps me a bit cleaner.  That 2nd meeting? Fortunately, not so important so I'm taking a bye tonight. Gardeners need more than Happy Hour food and truthfully, I really don't ever need Happy Hour food, nor do I often like Happy Hour food. Tonight will be healthy and I'll be happy. Just a couple more nail scubs and I'll be clean again.

The Reluctant Gardener

Some days, she looked out across the garden and wondered where to start.

That is me. I used to be quite a gardener. I am the daughter of a gardener. When I was young, my mother used to have me out there with her and I got to know the names of all the plants. Those were also the days when plants went by their Latin names as well as their English name. My mother told me what was good about each flower and  how to deadhead them. One of my earliest jobs was deadheading. I can still recall the scent/odor of marigolds and zinnias when I popped the spent flower off. Later, I also had the task  or was it a punishment? of taking all the Japanese beetles off the rosebushes and plunking them into a jar of kerosene. Hot, yucky and smelly work. I hated it.

But, once I had my own home, albeit one leased by the US government not owned by me, I was ready to garden. My first garden was in northern England, a land of temperate weather and  plentiful rain! I also learned that my soil was really rich because the houses had been built over land that had once been a pig farm. Rich, rich soil was what I had. From British magazines and books, I learned how to turn the soil, double dig, and learn what would grow in a climate so different from my native Maryland. The mainstays of summer, the zinnias and the marigolds, the portulacas were no longer part of my vocabulary. The roses that my mother fought to grow, despite those wretched Japanese beetles, flourished. England was my land of roses. I put them in and watched them thrive. I also never had to have the Peace rose which I had never liked. I could have the roses bred for looks and fragrance. I learned, despite my misgivings, to prune those roses nearly to the ground so they would come back the next spring happy and healthy. (I will admit it took one 'butchering' by my xh to convince me of that kind of pruning. There were a lot of tears and a lot of yelling. I was wrong.)

England also gave me wallflowers, primroses, lupins, etc.  The UK also gave me my first taste of homegrown new potatoes. I was stunned by the taste since I've never been a great fan of potatoes. But pulling the plant up, stripping off the ones of the right size, and then after replanting….having amazingly delicious little knobs of goodness to eat, dressed in butter of course.

I had seven years of good gardening in Yorkshire, and felt I really had learned the craft that my mother had nurtured in me as a child. Then I moved to Bangkok. Roses? no way. Spring bulbs and tender perennials? not likely. But there were orchids, orchids that were $2 a plant and hung from every tree and branch in my garden. And what kind of trees did I have? Rubber trees that were not potted plants but trees that grew two stories high. Mango trees that had to be seriously guarded from 'mango thieves' who would try and snatch the precious fruit. There were banana 'trees' that our maid's husband cut down. Once again, I did not know the reality of a plant. A banana plant cut down today will grow back by tomorrow - well it will in in a tropical climate! I also learned that all bananas are meant for human consumption. I learned about 'bird bananas' - small bananas filled with seed, not fruit. Next time you eat a banana, look at those tiny black spots in the center of the fruit. Imagine them as seeds filling the peel instead of fruit!

More moves and less gardening because I either lived in an apartment, or in a desert. I did have one period of time when I 'managed' my gardener who maintained a vegetable garden for us. He came with the house, was excellent except for his preference for DDT. There was no explaining to a man in east Africa that this spray that killed bugs was harmful to us too. Long term heath concerns were not clear to a person who faced hunger when the rains didn't come. What could I do? Some of my fellow Americans still believed that you could wash the DDT off. Fortunately, I had only two years of being a stern taskmaster regarding DDT.

Fast forward to the present. My dh and I are able to travel a good bit. Is the garden happy? not at all. Every gardener knows that there are seasonal windows that if missed put you behind for the whole year. Miss putting the garden 'to bed' in the early winter, and you'll regret it as you face the weeds in spring. Don't keep an eagle eye on the bamboo and you and your saw will get up close and personal for a lot longer than you like. So that is why I sometimes look like the woman in the picture. Wishing I had been home for that bamboo window. Wondering if I can ever get the weeds and the couch grass out of the driveway border. I'm no longer a real gardener. I'm a controller. I do my best to keep nature in check but right now nature is winning. "Now she wonders when she can quit". Anyone have an answer for me???

Taming the Jungle

Yesterday was spent doing more work in the garden. Crowd control. So many weeds sprang up in the month we were gone and then were well nourished in the week or more of daily heavy rain. It was daunting. However before we left we realized our weed whacker had died and so that was one of our first purchases upon return. I don't usually like to do the brick driveway that way but sometimes it's a necessity. When I first starting pulling the weeds about a week ago, my right thumb went slightly black and blue so hand pulling had to slow down.


Then there is the front yard. Very very small (~20x20)fortunately with a cover of pachysandra under the flowering cherry tree. Well the pachysandra is now being covered with ivy which is being covered with variegated vinca. And..the pin oaks are springing up in that density, and I have finally come to realize the two I had let grow have to be cut. There is no way they can survive there without doing damage to the sidewalks and the house foundation in time. They were to be moved to the back when they were smaller but we missed that window. Such is the nature of gardening.


Dick spent most of the day putting the icing on the cake together - a new grill to replace our older one which blew over in a wind and had also lost its auto ignition.
Dick also (!) cut the back grass when he was done and I got exhausted just watching him. By late afternoon we realized we would have to pass on a party on the Eastern Shore. A test of the new grill with hamburgers, As Time Goes By and our serious yawning set in shortly afterward. Bed really felt good - bed and the air conditioning.

And how has YOUR weekend been?