When we dug the shaded ones to move them we found huge giant knotted rootballs the size of refrigerators. So we divided them and had even more peonies. Three kinds of peonies: dark red, pink and white. (Read more about them – and get some growing tips here)

Theoretically you can’t have too many peonies but I’m here to tell you you can have enough – if they are all the same damn 3 colors. And having a few extra early ones that are magenta does not help, on account of their being magenta.

But we also inherited some fern leaf peonies (read about them – and the lowdown on ants - here) and the fern leafs, more properly Paeonia tenuifolia, were so beautiful and so different they opened an irresistible door.

At least that was my excuse 3 years ago, when I bought a nifty woodland peony at Trade Secrets.

Japanese Woodland Peony, P. japonica. At the time it had I think 4 leaves and zero flowers. It would be nice if this one also developed refrigerator sized roots, but it won’t. As soon as they’re bigger than produce drawers I’m going to divide them.

Those shirred silk petals really knock me out, and the foliage is nothing to sneeze at, either.

Lulled into hubris by this success, I thought last year I could get away with buying a moderately expensive seedling of P. mlokosewitschii, instead of a seriously expensive guaranteed division. The guarantee was that the flower would be pale yellow, a rare color in peonies.

And nonexistent in my plant. I was warned the seedling might turn out to be magenta and you can guess the rest. Bill thinks it’s beautiful. I do not. But the leaves are absolutely gorgeous and the flower is fleeting, so it’s not a total catastrophe.

Seedling of P. mlokosewitschii. The cheapskate’s reward. There is a better picture of a magenta flowered seedling - and one of the real deal - over at my almost neighbor Margaret Roach’s blog, A Way To Garden. But as you can see by comparing the pictures there is a lurking mystery; her seedling’s leaves look so different I’m not sure we have the same plant. (She got hers from Seneca Hill. I got mine from Hillside Nursery.

Next time I head for the hills I’ll pay full freight, though I may have to hock my toes to do it. There are around 2 dozen species peonies that could grow here, and more and more of them are making their way ( expensively) into commerce.

Blonde morels, Morchella esculenta, get ‘em while you can.

The place to get them is in open woodlands or hedgerows, where the soil is alkaline. They frequently keep company with dead elms and dying apples (and poison ivy, I’m sorry to say.)

Bill Bakaitis photo
Morels in a typical habitat. Look to the left and back of the one in the middle to see more. They hide.

Field cleaning ( shaking out bugs, trimming dirt from stems) is essential, and it can be enough if the morels are growing through matted leaves or thick new growth. But a lot of them are in sandy spots or open ground where dirt has splashed up. Always carry a separate bag or basket to put the dirty ones in, so they don’t contaminate the rest.

The little heap at left in front are the dirty ones from this expedition. The little heap at the right is trimmings. Morels last a long time in the fridge if you trim off anything nasty before you put them away, loosely wrapped in waxed paper so they can get air without drying up.

When you get this many, they will dry up before you can eat them all. We used to do this on purpose, threading them on string and hanging them in the greenhouse. Morels are thin fleshed and dry quickly, concentrating the flavor. But for the last decade or so we’ve been mostly stewing them in butter and storing them in the freezer. They keep better texture that way and are much more versatile.

That heat produced a premature explosion of new growth, tender young succulent stems, leaves and flowers defenseless against cell bursting ice.

Result? The magnolia of course got trashed - what was left of it. But the plum and apple blossoms were spared and to my everlasting surprise and delight, the Viburnum carlesii came through unscathed, every perfumed petal intact.

However. Carnage was visited upon: a large clump of trumpet lilies, wisteria almost in bud, the Miscanthus ‘giganteus’, which was already going great guns, and a beautiful Japanese maple, new last year, that has been my pride and joy.

It also made mush of the bleeding hearts,

Before frost, under the viburnum.

and heaven help us a peony. Just one, and not too badly, but still. A PEONY! Is nothing safe?

The answer, unfortunately is no. Most of the worry about global warming is focussed on droughts, floods and overhot summers, but there’s more to it than that. Unwanted warmth followed by VERY unwanted cold is going to be a fact of life from here on out. To deal with it:

* Plant new spring bloomers as though they were fruit trees: on a north slope, so heat comes late and frost drains away.

* When you remove winter mulch to avoid smothering fresh shoots, keep the mulch material nearby, so you can rake it back over them if/when frost threatens.

* Resist the temptation to prune the roses. You don’t want to encourage the new growth, and leaving the dead and weak stems in place helps keep frost-produced dieback above the wood you want to keep.

* be sure you have a supply of floating row cover aka spun-bonded crop-protector. It’s much lighter than bedsheets, far easier to use, and although it’s ungreenly made of plastic, it lasts practically forever if you take good care of it. Sources include Pinetree Garden Seeds and Johnny’s Selected Seeds
This doesn’t mean you can turn those sheets to rags; the row cover is only good down to about 28 degrees; if you fear even greater misery, use sheets. Either way, remember the purpose is mostly to trap ground heat; a hat that simply keeps frost from touching tops won’t help unless the frost is very light.

For more tips, see the advice posted last fall; a lot of it is useful at planting time.

But then every year about this time I’m glad the people who owned this house before us – in some cases WAY before us – believed in planting the usual.

Actually, for our first decade or so I DID have mixed feelings about the magnolia, which would routinely just start opening into a huge glorious pink cloud and then there would be a frost and believe me a huge brown cloud is not glorious. Then things got warmer and it routinely escaped; we got a whole month of being happy that this giant unit eats about half the side yard. This year, however, after about 10 days of splendor it’s already going over. Eighty degrees is not a whole lot better than 29 from the magnolia longevity point of view.

The amazing thing about plum blossoms is that they smell exactly like the cheap plum incense that perfumed so many groovy abodes in the 60’s. Bees love them, though, so when you stand under the trees you see and hear a very cheering assortment of these threatened creatures.

In contrast to the plum, the viburnum smells wonderful. Like itself and only like itself, a sweet, non-cloying New Englandish perfume that fills the entire yard on warm evenings and justifies the existence of an otherwise unexciting shrub and if it really does freeze on Tuesday night and clonk it when it’s only about half-open I’m going to put face in my hands and weep. This post hints at my addiction – and offers a few seasonally appropriate garden tips. (Appropriate if you’re in the lower Hudson valley, anyway. And it doesn’t up and snow)

In the house:

* great for cleaning narrow-necked bottles and vases. Crush a shell, working it between your fingers so the bits aren’t stuck together. Stuff it into the bottle, add a small amount of very hot water and swish/shake vigorously until all looks clean. Pour out, catching the shell in a strainer in case you missed a spot and have to shove it back in.

In the garden:

* Dig one or two thoroughly crushed shells into the soil around tomato plants. The lack of calcium that causes blossom end rot is usually a result of inconsistent watering but a little extra insurance never hurts.

* Rinse and dry shells, then crush to roughly rice grain size bits and spread a carpet of them under hostas and similar plants to discourage slugs and snails. Many advisors say “sprinkle” the bits, but a sprinkling won’t have much effect in the deterrent department. This carpet is not beautiful. You can make it a little less sock-in-the eye by soaking the crushed shells in strong tea for several days to stain the white parts brown.

* Excellent in the compost. No need to crush if you don’t want to bother, but as with everything else, the smaller the piece the sooner it rots.

* substitute for peat pots. NOT. In An Island Garden (1894), Celia Thaxter charmingly describes starting poppies in halved eggshells. It sounds like a great idea: Biodegradable, easy to transport and free. In my experience, however, it’s difficult to get the shell halves reasonably even, even when you hard boil the eggs so you can slice them across. Then you’ve got to bore a drainage hole ( darning needle better than icepick). They don’t hold much soilless mix, so they won’t support plants for long. And then you’ve got to fracture them before planting so the tiny roots can get out. Applying just the right force to the squeeze is an art all by itself.

Well-treated chickens that are not fed things you don’t want to think about produce tastier eggs year ‘round, but the eggs that are really worth crowing about are super-fresh local eggs from hens that spend a lot of time outdoors getting exercise and fresh air, eating bugs (concentrated protein, lots of minerals) and green vegetables. ( Many kinds of dark green leaves are rich in carotenes, precursors to vitamin A and a much better way to have deep yellow yolks than putting annato – a spice that acts as a yellow dye - in the chicken feed).

These eggs come from Ilana Nilsen, who sells her backyard eggs from the farm (ilana677@gmail.com for info.), and at a store in Millbrook, NY called Best Creations. This is nice to know if you happen to live near Millbrook, but what’s nicer is that there are good local eggs just about everywhere, if you bother to look, and there are likely to be more and more because Ilana isn’t the only person who just wanted a few heirloom chickens and wound up with more than she bargained for.

Ilana Nilsen
“These girls are Javas, or Mottled Javas,” Ilana said when she sent me the pic. ”They are about nine months old here. Very independent birds. The second oldest American breed and used to create other American breeds. They also come all black. There was a white variety that seems to have gone extinct. “

Want to see where this sort of thing can lead? Ilana sent her quite amazing current list. It’s posted at the end so that we can get to the recipe

which was originally going to be rich cup custard, a neglected classic that’s not only beyond delicious but also almost obscenely easy. But then I was browsing through the Times and happened on a Frank Bruni restaurant review …

Words fail me. Suffice it to say it describes a version of Eggs Benedict that is actually a pure yolk custard, accompanied by cubes of deep fried hollandaise and garnished with “an ultrathin, ultracrispy chip of Canadian bacon.”

Very impressive in its way ( the dish was part of a tasting menu and the portion was extremely small), but when I described it to Bill, feeling very nostalgic for good old Eggs Benedict made the way normal people make it - and eaten the way normal people eat it, for brunch on Sunday with a few good friends - he just said “oh, egg mcmuffin.”

Well, no.

Eggs Benedict is an assemblage*, not a recipe. But you do need hollandaise sauce, more or less a major food group once asparagus season really gets going, so here’s a

Fast, Easy Hollandaise sauce in one pan without machinery

Which my mother taught me how to make and I’m sure is from some totally known cookbook but I have no idea which one. In theory, you make this in a double boiler as insurance against curdling the eggs. In practice, I use a heavy pan, low heat and vigilance, which I think is what Moth did, but I wouldn’t swear.

I don’t remember who taught me the best way to separate eggs, but assuming you don’t have killer nails, hands are a lot less likely to break yolks than the edges of eggshells.

For a little less than a cup, 4 servings:

3 egg yolks

2 tsp. water

2 to 3 tablespoons lemon juice

¼ pound (1 stick) butter, right out of the refrigerator, cut into 8 pieces.

salt

you make this with a wooden spoon, but it’s good to have a wire whisk handy in case you get into trouble. Any time the sauce starts looking grainy or god forbid you turn up a lump of cooked egg yolk, take the pan from the heat and whisk like crazy.

1. Put the egg yolks in the pan with the water and a teaspoon or so of the juice and stir until smooth. Add 2 chunks of the butter and put the pan over very low heat or barely simmering water, as the case may be.

2. Place the spoon edge firmly on a butter chunk and use it to stir the yolks constantly. As soon as it start to get away from you, add another chunk and repeat.

3. Continue until all the butter’s used up, then keep stirring until the sauce thickens to unctuous pouring consistency. Shortly before that, add salt and lemon juice to taste. If you’re using the heavy pan/direct heat method, stop when the sauce is still a bit thinner than you want.

(A pan heavy enough to prevent curdling is going to keep cooking the sauce after it leaves the stove. I had to get the rest out mighty quickly to forestall disaster)

If you add a bit of shredded orange rind and about 1/4 cup of orange juice you’ll have Sauce Maltaise and if you use blood orange juice said sauce will be a beautiful melony peach color.

Eggs Benedict: crisply toasted half of a Thomas’s English muffin topped with a gently heated slice of tender no-nitrate Canadian bacon topped with a poached fresh local egg topped with Hollandaise sauce made from same.

One warning: backyard and small farm eggs are ungraded; a dozen may vary a great deal in size. Doesn’t usually matter, but it’s something to bear in mind if you’re going to be baking cake.

Ilana’s inventory as of March 27th, as described by Ilana:

“We have, approximately,
9 Golden Comets ( a red sex link, very chatty lovely hens), 8 are “Tammy”
and the last is “BeBe”
1 Cuckoo Maran rooster, Oliver, very dignified and handsome
1 Mottled Java rooster, Theo, one black Java cockerel, stunningly handsome,
yet unnamed, will probably be something like Rhett, four mottled Java hens
(surprisingly good broody hens, as three of the four have already sat on
eggs this year) and one black Java hen. From at least three sources, so I
don’t think these will be inbred for awhile.
7 Dominique hens
11 Amerucana Hens and one cockerel “Rockstar”
5 black Wyandotte hens and 9 white Wyandotte hens. If we need one, a friend
has a barred Wyandotte rooster. They’re very sweet birds, rather portly and
a bit shy.
2 ornamental type feather footed bantam ladies, a mother & daughter.
Absolutely useless for anything except dusting - they are referred to as the
Dust Mops. Maybe buff cochins or d’uccles. Very sweet.
One nasty silkie hen, Mama Silkie, who is a fabulous mother. She lives to
sit on eggs. One horribly nasty probably cockerel of hers, Lemondrop - it’s
nearly impossible to tell gender with these. One Blue Splash silkie,
“Splash”, who looks like a cross between a chicken and a llama. One lovely
silkie cross, “Peachy”, who is the object of affection for Splash and
Lemondrop.
Three white cochin hens
Eileen - a silkie/amerucana cross that should have been a hen
Four Nankin Bantams. Tiny birds, look rather like Thrush and are on the
endangered list. Very social with people. Three hens and one rooster. Lay
tiny eggs.
One small Modern Game cockerel
A pair of adolescent Black Copper Marans that are stunning. She will lay a
dark, chocolaty brown egg.
Eight seven week old chicks - four Black Copper Marans hens and four
crosses. A dominique cross, an amerucana cross, java silkie possibility and
who knows about Mystery Chick #8.

And this week’s sweetness is so far 17 chicks being raised by a Java and of
course Mama Silkie. They bicker over who sits on the eggs.”

Ilana Nilsen

You may think this picture is about Ms. Java teaching the children to eat apples, but what it really means is that having both hens and roosters is probably a mistake.

Tropical orchids, ferns on steroids, fragrant blossoms dripping from vines and trees - even the smallest of these places puts spring flower shows to shame. And small can be especially beautiful. Displays will be far less polished but publicity is nonexistent, which means they’re seldom crowded. Call ahead to find out the slow times and you might be the only visitor.

What a deal, especially in raw, cold March. What’s not to like about peaceful warm rooms filled with tropical beauties that somebody else has been taking good care of for years and years and years?

This staghorn fern, more than 6 feet across, was not built in a day.


It also takes more than a moment to grow a good sized flock of birds of paradise.

Oddly enough, seeing one’s familiar home companions in this new light is more energizing than depressing and there is almost always something to learn: When a fiddleleaf gets old, the bark gets gorgeous; dormant orchids don’t look any better when there are 60 pots of them; pruning matters as much indoors as it does in the yard; and whether camellias are worth the hassle may be a function of heritage. Could be you have to be southern.

Oh right, I forgot to mention fruit. In addition to proving dwarf citrus trees CAN produce something that looks like a crop (those are ponderosa lemons, not grapefruit), these places harbor edibles most of us can’t see without buying a plane ticket.

Papaya tree at @ 16 feet ( those dark footballs are the papayas)

The base of the tree is fat, gray and gnarly; the roots go right through the gravel floor, deep into the deeply alien Hudson Vally soil.

But not for much longer, and thus we come to the carpe diem part. These pictures were taken at the greenhouse that belongs to the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, in Millbrook New York. It will be closed before the end of March, its collection dispersed, the building dismantled. Gone forever after more than 30 years.

And it’s not likely to be alone. Glasshouses cost a lot to heat; older models cost really a lot to heat. As the price of oil sails ever upward while funding for public institutions shrinks and those institutions start thinking about greenness in a different way …

A bit of creative googling is likely to turn up at least one that’s close to you, but you might as well start with the advanced garden search at the American Public Gardens Association and the international list at Gardening@Closerange.com.

Soda bread fresh out of the oven. The funny looking butter pat is because the very good cultured butter is packaged in a fat plastic tube (the better to preserve its freshness, I assume), by Vermont Butter and Cheese.

SODA BREAD

Properly made, with a good proportion of fresh whole wheat flour, without any fat or sugar, this is probably the loveliest, most intensely bread-tasting bread you can make without yeast: crisp crusted, tender crumbed, the partner for which butter was invented - or so it seems when you have that first chunk. It takes less than 5 minutes to prepare and about 40 minutes to bake, so adding in oven heating time you arrive at a one hour wonder. Admittedly, it doesn’t stay wonderful too much longer than that; but omigod, what terrific toast.

A word about oven-enhancement: Putting this on a flat pan and baking it will produce delicious bread. Putting it in a heated iron kettle and covering same with a hot iron lid will produce bread that is delicious plus. (The cast iron evens out oven heat and the lid traps steam, enabling you to get a crust that’s crisp without being hard. ) This technique got a recent boost from Mark Bittman, who uses it to good effect for a no-knead “European-style boule”, but of course it’s nothing new. They don’t call those kettles Dutch ovens for nothin.’

Actually, this is a chicken fryer – terrific pan, btw, just like a Dutch oven but shorter – given the necessary height with a make-do lid.

For one 8 to 9 inch round

1 ¼ cups unbleached flour

1 ½ tsp. salt

1 tsp baking soda

2 ¼ cups whole wheat flour*

@1 ½ cups buttermilk

cornmeal to sprinkle on the pan

1. Heat the oven to 425. If using an iron pot, put it and the lid in to heat up about 5 minutes before you start the dough.

2. Put the unbleached flour, soda and salt in a large bowl and stir with a wire whisk until well combined. Stir in the whole wheat flour.

3. Using a wooden spoon, make a well in the flour and pour in most of the buttermilk. Mix thoroughly, quickly, adding additional buttermilk as needed until you have a soft, slightly sticky dough. Lightly flour your hands, reach in and knead just enough to bring everything together, then form the dough into a round.

4. Sprinkle cornmeal on the baking sheet or the bottom of the hot heavy pot. Place the dough on it, seam side down. Use a sharp thin-bladed knife to cut a cross about ½ inch deep into the top of the bread. Put on the hot heavy lid, if using, and put the pan in the oven.

Ready to bake. You can’t really see it but the cornmeal is smoking slightly. Not to worry.

5. Check after 30 minutes. The bread should be well risen and brown. If it’s still on the pale gold side, give it a few more minutes, still under cover if you’re using a lid.

Tarting it up in traditional fashion: stir in 1 teaspoon caraway seeds when you stir in the whole wheat flour and stir in 3/4 cup of plump raisins when the dough is approaching complete but has not yet come together.

Eat it while it’s still hot, if possible

* Whole wheat flour is pretty much it in the flavoring department, so quality really matters. If yours has been sitting around for a while, treat yourself to a new sack. The bread in the picture was made with a combination of King Arthur Organic Whole Wheat, available ( mirabile dictu! Who’d have thought it in the old days) at large supermarkets, and Wild Hive Farm Wholegrain Soft White Winter Wheat, which we buy - along with the butter - at Adams.

POTATOES

A garden miracle, easy to plant, easy to care for, tremendous yields, and a terrific thing to plant with kids. More about planting at planting time ( soon but not yet) . Right now, the thing to know is that time is running out for ordering from one of my favorite sources, Moose Tubers (Fedco) 45 varieties to choose from but only until March 14th. After that, there’s always Wood Prairie Farm, a far slicker but no less trustworthy establishment.

Why does this matter? Because it means you can organically grow whatever you want. From the garden’s point of view, one bundle of genetic material is pretty much like another (assuming said bundle is good of its kind and has not been treated with fungicide or otherwise messed-with post harvest).* So although organic seed is preferable when available, insisting on its exclusive use is a little like cutting off your nose in order to spite your face.

In many cases, the organic version is available, especially if it’s a common vegetable. But uncommon heirlooms are another story; vast numbers of interesting flowers have not yet been included, and the number of organically grown hybrids is still mighty petite.

I shall stand back now and wait for the anti-hybrid avalanche to roll by, hating hybrids being all the rage these days. Well, ok. Hybrid seeds cannot be saved from year to year; you have to keep buying new ones.** Like many organic seeds, they are mostly produced by large corporations whose interest in sustainability is entirely market-driven, to the extent that it exists. But this doesn’t make hybrids Darth Vader.

In fact, hybrids bred for disease resistance are an environmental plus when they help you use less biocide. Pesticides and fungicides approved for organic gardening are still a long way from benign.

And while it’s true that a great many hybrids don’t taste very good, flavor having been sacrificed for qualities like heavy cropping and long shelf life, it’s also true that some of the tastiest vegetables in all creation are hybrid varieties: Sun Gold cherry tomatoes, Silver Queen corn, Confection winter squash – we just had some for dinner last night. It was terrific.

Spring is just around the corner, time to get ordering.

For the full seed spectrum: open pollinated, hybrid, conventional and organic, try
Johnny’s Selected Seeds, and Territorial Seeds,

For a good sized list ( 32 ) of companies that offer organic seeds, potato sets and garlic bulbs, go to ATTRA, the National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service.

* Seeds from plants that thrived under organic management should produce plants that fare better when grown organically in their turn, but as far as I know there has been no scientific trial of this thesis. It would probably take several generations before any differences were evident and my guess is that even then a grower’s abilities – or lack thereof - would far outweigh any advantage conferred in the seed-production stage. Work is being done to create varieties tailored for organic production ( a very different thing), but this whole branch of plant breeding is still in its infancy.

** Actually, it is sometimes possible to “save” hybrid seeds, essentially by selecting and selecting and selecting again, over several generations of large grow-outs. It’s called stabilizing a hybrid and it’s a lot of work.

Lovely, as far as it goes, but like the organic spinach that goes from California to New York, most of those flowers are going a lot farther than necessary.

And of course choices are severely limited; Do not look to online flower sources for combinations like this

Bonica rose and old fashioned lady’s mantle(in garden, but it could have been in vase)

As local tomatoes and strawberries make clear, splendor and short travel time go hand in hand. Same deal with flowers: the closer you can get to homegrown the tastier your options will be.

This is not news to most of you, including Rachael and Jesse, who wrote in last week looking for

“someone in the Hudson valley - Orange, Putnam or Rockland or Westchester - that sells or uses organic or locally grown flowers. We’re having an event early July/late June and would love to support local.”

Having been out of the event racket for over 25 years, I have zip in the way of firsthand info. (if you have any, send it in!), but I can suggest something almost as good and a great deal more widely useful: a visit to Local Harvest, where the national database is searchable by location, crop and type of vendor. A trial request for farms + flowers + Warwick ( the first place I could think of in Orange county) brought up 57 listings and there was a flower farm on the first page so it’s probably one of many.

Finding your perfect match is unlikely to be instant , especially if you use the shopping tips below. It’ll take even longer if you take my advice and cover your posterior by ordering everything you need from two different farms. It’ll cost more too, obviously, but when the event is important it’s worth having insurance.

Most retail flower farms are small; weather is highly variable – a hailstorm might hit one location and leave one 10 miles away unscathed - and in real life, manure happens. Worst case, you’ll have done even more for local farms and will have extras to give away. Flowers for those who’ve helped with the event is always nice, or you could donate them to your local food bank. People who can’t afford enough to eat have probably gone without cut flowers for quite a while.

Flower Farm Shopping Tips:

* Does the grower sell by single variety or single color or, ideally, both? If so, is the price per stem or per bunch and if the latter how large is a bunch?

* Does the grower offer unusual fillers like the lady’s mantle above or the artemisia below?

That’s Queen Anne’s lace being a weed in the artemisia ‘Silver King’, an equally pernicious invader. Plant it once, have it for all time.

* Be sure timing is agreed upon. It’s best to cut flowers in the morning and keep them cool, but the grower may not have much in the way of ideal storage space. The sooner you can pick them up, the sooner you can get them home for proper conditioning.

Last Minute LOCAL Flowers for Valentine’s Day in the Hudson Valley

Yes we can! Rhinebeck’s famous violets have gone the way of les neiges d’antan, but there are two surviving hothouses that grow beautiful anemones and sell them retail, first come first served:

Battenfeld’s and Ralph Pitcher & Sons, (845) 876-3974

An anemone at Battenfeld’s