Hydrangea smack down

So the mow-blow-and-go crew came, and unfortunately they didn’t just mow the lawns.  They also decided to buzz cut the hydrangeas, which had just started to leaf out.  I’m particularly bummed about the one in our boggy back garden which looks awful, due to the lack of sun back there.   It still manages to flower late in the fall, but never gets very bushy or full.  It has impossibly huge flower heads on spiky thin branches. I usually cut them since they just look so weird.  It doesn’t look like a bush at all.

The sadder case is the hydrangea on the side of the building, though.  The last two or three years it hasn’t bloomed at all.  It was the only one of the three that wasn’t leafing out yet, as they had cut it back hard in the fall, although not quite to the ground like they did the previous years.  So I don’t think they trimmed it again.  It just doesn’t seem to have enough energy to get blooms out by the end of summer.  It’s a slower starter and doesn’t really get that much sun either.  But it usually manages to get bushy and full of leaves.

I’m also a big irked about the azaleas.  Once again they trimmed the one that they always trim, and left the other one a ratty mess.  They don’t seem to realize they are the same type of plant!   It’s somewhat comical.   I also have grown to dislike the round shape they trim it to also, just because it clashes a bit with the mid-century modern building.  Those often had square-trimmed topiary.  And indeed there are a lot of square boxwoods and some other azaleas in the back that have that shape.   Oh well.  I’m sure they are a very economical landscaping crew.

On another note, I got some flower pots filled up with pansies and herbs and primroses this weekend.  They are massed around our front stoop, and it looks very cheerful.  My sun put some plastic Easter eggs in each one.

The flower boxes on our balcony were falling apart.  One of them was leaking soil and losing chunks off it periodically, so I tore it off.  It was nailed on, but it was so rotten I had no problem getting it loose with my bare hands.  I used some of the soil in the pots and still have a good amount left.  I may dump it in the parsley patch, where the soil had turned rock hard.  Or I may need it to fill in holes that the squirrels dig in the pots.  That bugs me, but I’m not sure what to do about it that doesn’t look bad.  Right now I have a hair net over one of the pots that I was sprouting spinach in.  It looks quite silly, but I don’t want them to dig up those sprouts!  They seem to leave alone the ones that have bigger plants in them.

I’ve also started some aji amarillo peppers from seed.  That is on my windowsill at work.  Three of them have sprouted so far.  I’m hoping I won’t kill the starts.  Those peppers are really hard to find.  They sure taste great, though.  I’m going to have to see if my parents can grow them for me, though, because we don’t get enough sun around our place to do it.

Parsnips

We cleaned out the community garden plot for the year.  Omar ate some of the last carrots while we worked.  We dug up the parsnips.  There are a lot of them.  Milad cursed the whole time, yet he has decided he still wants to do the garden again next year, because Omar likes it.  I was ready to give it up. I don’t want to do as many tomatoes and peppers.  My idea for next year is to fill the whole plot up with giant pumpkins or some other squash.  But probably we’ll do fava beans and carrots again.  Omar is really fond of the carrots.  And maybe spinach.  No doubt the chard will reseed itself as it has the last few years.

The summer was not hot enough for many of the tomatoes to ripen this year.  There were a lot of small green ones on the vines when we dug them out.

Now I need to think of some things to do with parsnips.  They seem like they might be one of those fussy vegetables like squash that need a lot of prep work to make anything out of.  Some of the parsnips are quite large and probably have woody cores.

Garden winding down

The garden is starting to wind down for the summer.  The zucchini plants mysteriously died, so we didn’t get too much zucchini this year.  The winter squash all ripened early, too.  They are done for the year.  Got about 7 delicata squash and 3 pumpkins. I think two of the pumpkins were stolen, because there were more green ones that that in July.

The chard, tomatoes, peppers, chard and parsnips are the only things still growing in the garden.  I’m waiting for a frost to harvest the parsnips.  Once we cleaned out all the dried up squash vines we found there were quite a few more carrots under there too.  The rainbow carrot assortment was pretty tasty.  The colors range from white to red and they all taste the same.  The red ones had red leaves also.

I planted some more spinach.  It should be big enough to harvest by early October.  We’ll clear out the garden in October sometime and put down newspaper to keep the weeds down over the winter.

Death to Fruit Flies

I didn’t find a single fruit fly in the kitchen this morning.  There were at least a dozen of them in there last night.  Maybe they were hiding in the house plants.  Maybe they don’t like to get up early.  Maybe they were sleeping in today.  Or maybe my husband finally had enough and killed them all.

It’s hard to get rid of all their food sources. We finally made room in the fridge for all the tomatoes from our garden, so now it’s just some pears and bananas in the fruit bowl, and the jar of sourdough starter that they seem to like.  My husband really hates fruit flies.  He saw them swarming around the fruit bowl yesterday and was seriously thinking about refrigerating the bananas, even if it does make them turn black.  I tried to talk him out of it.  The lid on the sourdough jar is not tight, so I put a towel over the whole jar to keep them out of it.  So now they just land on the towel and bask in the odor.

I haven’t had any luck trapping them in dishes of vinegar or alcohol or any of the other organic home remedies.  They tend to migrate to the damp soil of the houseplants once we get rid of all their other food and water sources.  It’s hard to convince my husband to let the soil dry out between waterings.  Watering the plants is sort of a comforting daily routine for him.  He even waters the cacti every day.  He claims I never take care of the plants and they’d all be dead if he didn’t water them.  Never mind that some of them have been with me for decades – long before we got married.  Sometimes he’s as fruity as the flies around here, but I still love him.

Vegetable garden update

The zucchini plants seem to have a white powder all over the leaves, and there were not any large fruits, either.  A few had some rotten fruits that had fallen off, though.  One had none.  I guess this won’t be a bumper year for zucchini, which is actually okay by me.

There are lots of green tomatoes, but weren’t too many ripe ones.  The yellow ones have ripened first.  There aren’t even that many that are nearly ripe.  I didn’t get very many large starts this year, so that was probably the problem.  The Thai pepper plant is very prolific this year.  Milad says he is going to wait until they turn red, against my advice.  There are lots of jalapenos also.  The bell peppers seem to be doing pretty good this year too.

The pumpkins are already turning orange.  There are four of them on the vines.  The vines seem to be dying back around the mother plant already, but the outer ends of the vines are still green.  Probably next weekend there will be at least one pumpkin that is fully ripe.  Way early this year!

There are also a number of delicata squash that are nearly ripe.  They are white with green stripes, and fairly good sized.  I’m not sure, but I think they may turn more golden when they are ripe.  I’ll have to look into this.

The parsnips are getting larger.  The carrots – I don’t know what happened there.  I didn’t think we harvested that many of them, but there aren’t that many left.  Milad is of the opinion that somebody stole them.  It’s hard to prove, but I think they did take our fava beans too.

Well, probably nobody is going to steal the parsnips.  It’s probably time to dig up one and see if they are ready.  Or I may leave them in the ground until fall and see if there is an early frost to sweeten them up.

Huazontle

I think the huazontle I had growing in the garden has mostly gone to seed, now.  I did find a few smaller stalks that still had buds, so I took some home and used some of the ricotta and feta cheese mixture from my spanikopita to make a small tiropite with the huazontle instead of chard.  It was good, but it’s hard to say what the huazontle tasted like.  It was overpowered by the feta cheese flavor.  So apparently it is mild-tasting.

Since the rest of it has gone to seed, my husband took it out.  No doubt I’ll find sprouts of it coming up next spring.  I may try for some fall vegetables this year.  I may see about putting in some more spinach where the fava beans used to be.  Or beets.  Is it too late to start beets?

More Zucchini and Other Meat and Veggie Tales

The vegetable garden is ramping up for the usual late summer boom.  Milad picked the last of the fava beans, I gathered up the (hopefully) last bunch of chard, along with 5 zucchini and a few early tomatoes.  I shredded the three largest zucchini this weekend, and made a batch of zucchini bread.  Then I made fried zucchini cakes for dinner.  They are sort of like crab cakes, but with shredded zucchini.  They tasted pretty good, but didn’t set up very firm.  Also, I’m lousy at frying stuff, so they got a little bit dark on the outside, too.  But my husband ate 3 or 4 them and didn’t complain.  When I asked him if he like them he said they were okay. I only made a half recipe, because I didn’t think he would actually eat them.

I assembled a Spanikopita pie with chard instead of spinach.  I have made this before.  It is okay.  It seems like it needs something different when made with chard, but I’m not sure what.  It definitely has a stronger taste with the chard, so this time I tried boiling the chard first, instead of just sauteing it along with the onions.  We’ll see if it is any better.  I may bake it tonight, but I still have some other leftovers to work through.  I went all out cooking this weekend.

Steaks were on sale at Freddies, and I had a jar of Mr. Brown’s Honey Lemon Pepper Bar-B-Que sauce that I really wanted to try out.  And the barbecue hasn’t been used yet this year.  So that was my project for Sunday afternoon.  The barbecue sauce is good by itself, but I haven’t had it on steaks before.  I had some Stubbs Texas Steak House Marinade, but it didn’t sound like it would go especially well with Honey Lemon Pepper.  So I only put it on half of the steaks.  Then I devised my own spice rub for the others.  “The Joy of Cooking” had a recipe for barbecue spice rub, but I didn’t have half the ingredients.  I’d run out of brown sugar from making zucchini bread.  Also, the recipe called for a lot of chili powder and red pepper flakes, which I thought sounded like way too much.   So really it turned into something completely different, but good.

First off, I didn’t have cumin seeds, which it said to toast and grind.  So I just toasted some ground cumin.  Then I ran out of Hungarian paprika, so I substituted smoked paprika for the rest, which is also spicy, so I decided to leave out the chili powder and red pepper flakes entirely.  I substituted white sugar for brown.  I didn’t have mace, so I just left that out.  Salt was the one thing I did have.  And pepper.  But I decided to substitute 1/3 of the black pepper with lemon pepper  since the barbecue sauce had lemon.   And lemon pepper is good on beef anyway.

I smeared the spice rub on the steaks and let them marinate for about an hour and a half.  Milad fired up the grill.  I tossed some asparagus spears in oil and garlic and salt.  We grilled a hot dog for Omar.  That was dinner.  Omar has taken a liking to asparagus spears, oddly.  He used to love meat and hot dogs, but was surprisingly not very hungry for either.  He ended up with a peanut butter sandwich which he didn’t finish either.

I put barbecue sauce on most of the steaks.  I left one of each marinade-type ‘plain’ for comparison, and for Omar, since the barbecue sauce is kind of spicy.  I preferred my own spice rub, but perhaps I’m biased.  I didn’t even think the barbecue sauce added much to the steaks overall.  I still have half a jar left.  Maybe it will be better on chicken.  I’m not sure it’s the right sauce for steaks.

I think I may have to whip up some of this spice rub for my dad.  He has marinated  steaks in a lot of odd things over the years, but hasn’t ‘loved’ any of them.  Pace Picante sauce (the thin an runny kind) is okay (he strains out the solids and just uses the ‘juice’).  He tried some soy sauce mixture last time.  It was kind of too sweet.  I think he’s going to like my spice rub.  This time I’ll be making it that way on purpose.

Now what I really need to know is, “Can you freeze shredded zucchini?”

Zucchini Bread

I need to make some zucchini bread.  I have two giant zucchini from the garden to use up.  I have a good recipe, but it’s just too hot to cook this week.

The vegetable garden is reaching it’s mid-summer stride.  Milad harvested more fava beans and made some really good Libyan sharba yesterday.  Omar loved it and ate a lot of it.  Usually he prefers bland food, but he really went for this soup!  Unfortunately Milad is kind of inconsistent with his sharba, since he doesn’t use a recipe.  Sometimes he’ll make a really good batch, and sometimes it’s awful (or anywhere in between).

There were a few yellow tomatoes in the vegetable garden, so they should be ripening soon.  Milad picked a few peppers, but mot of them are not ready yet.  I see the Thai pepper plant has some long green peppers already.  Best not to let those get too red, though!  This is the variety that left Milad unable to speak and wringing his hands with distress when he first tried one!

The delicata squash has some green orbs.  So does the pumpkin.  The onion stalks seem to be turning brown and dying back already.  They might get shaded out by the pumpkin vines pretty soon.  The carrots and parsnips are coming along.  The leafy greens are bolting. The fava beans should be done with pretty soon too.  Maybe another week before they dry out.

I harvested some cockscomb flowers for drying.  (They are drying well in this hot weather.) They are the yellow variety, so I hope they will work the same for culinary purposes as the red ones.  I had purchased another cockscomb plant that was supposed to be the tall red variety.  Unfortunately it is an entirely different plant!  Some kind of purple and white low-growing slipper-shaped flower.  I’ve had this problem with Fred Meyer plants before – the wrong plant label being in the pot.  Usually, as with the fuchsias, it is the right kind of plant but the wrong variety –  not an entirely different species.

I also harvested some seeds from my neighbor’s white campion this year.  He usually cuts back the stalks once the flowers wilt and before the seed heads are dried.  But this year I got there while there were still flowers but a few of the seed heads had dried out.  I sprinkled some seeds in my back garden, but I doubt they will grow there.  I will take the rest of the seeds out to my folks’ house.  My mom has a whole bunch of the hot pink campion in one bed, so I’ll probably toss the seeds in there with hers.  They come back every year.  My mom likes them.  My dad, not so much!

Patio

I gave up on the garden behind our apartment.  I bought 20 oblong paving stones over the weekend and laid them down.  It looks okay.  It’s a very small patio.  Just wide enough to park the barbecue and two of those ubiquitous white plastic chairs on.  Now hopefully bluebells won’t come up through the cracks!

It may seem kind of sudden, but I’ve been thinking about doing this for a while now.  Nothing much will grow in that spot.  It is too shady, and the bluebells just make a mess in there every spring.  The fuchsias I put in there aren’t doing especially well either.  I have now moved the three of them to the back of the bed. It’s live and let die for them now.

The patio doesn’t really cover very much of the back garden.  I left alone the shade garden on the left of our back door, where there is a hydrangea and a bunch of hostas and the primroses, which do pretty well there.  There isn’t a massive bluebell problem on that side, either.  On the right side of the back door there is a large pierris bush.  I started the patio  in front of this bush and extended it up to the sidewalk.  So now all that is left of the back garden is a narrow strip along the back wall, and the sunny corner that isn’t shaded out as bad as the rest of that space.

My husband didn’t help much with this project.  In fact the only thing he did was unload the paving stones from the back of the car.  I dug out and flattened out the soil and laid in the stones yesterday morning.  It took a while.  It was hot.  I’m happy with the results.  I doubt I’ll pave over any more of the garden, though.  The rest of it isn’t as hopeless.

The Vegetable Plot – Status Report

The lettuce and spinach are done with.  They are bolting and turning bitter.  The fava beans are ready.  There are almost too many of them to harvest.  Milad filled up a shopping bag with them last week, and that wasn’t nearly all of them.  I harvest two grocery bags full of chard, also.  It cooks down to nothing, though.  The chard started to flourish late, but with the hot weather coming it will probably bolt soon, too.

There are green tomatoes and peppers on the vines.  We cut back some of the bottom branches this year.  Milad is always reluctant to prune them once they get going in the summer.  The fruit on the low branches rots where it touches the ground anyway, though.  The zucchini are coming.  The pumpkin vines look hearty.  I think it is the orange variety.  I planted seeds for white pumpkins also, but they did not sprout.

The “rainbow” carrot assortment and the parsnips are doing well.  I pulled up one carrot to check it out, and it was a small red carrot, about 4 inches long.  When I peeled it, the flesh inside was orange, not red!  Milad’s friend Mo said he had pulled one up last week and it was a white carrot.  Interesting!  The red carrot tasted just like a regular carrot.  Only the outer skin and the leaves had a reddish cast.

The Walla Walla sweet onions are doing great.  Half of them have been used up already.