still, although there are only a couple left – both of them big gaudy Dutch hybrids. Then all will be quiet until the promising papilios bloom (or don’t) sometime in early to mid summer.
This is a stem of Benfica, reputedly the deepest, darkest red. It's much darker and redder than this picture suggests.
or this one either, for that matter.
Thus we arrive at the moment for talking about long-term amaryllis care. Questions have been coming in, so here’s the drill:
Yes, yes, I know: “for dummies” is just a convenient code that means “for non-experts, in non-technical language,” but if I live to be a million I’ll never understand what’s dumb about wanting that.
part of our Hudson Valley vegetable garden
In Kitchen and Garden has always been In Garden for Kitchen as much as anything else, so there’s a lot about growing vegetables tucked in among the posts about flowers and shrubs, preserves and pastries and architecture and wild mushrooms and coyotes and
where was I?
Giving pointers on food gardening, I think. Here are a few posts that may prove helpful as we teeter on the brink of the 2010 growing season:
So, fellow food gardeners, have you started your celeriac yet? Surely the artichokes, leeks and onions are growing strongly by now, and you have the flats all set so as soon as you finish reading this you can rush off to plant the broccoli, kohlrabi and spring cabbage.
Uh huh. Maybe someday, but if you’re anything like me your supply of well-lit warm space won’t support that many plants, even if your supply of ambition is adequate to the task.
I’m lucky; we have a small greenhouse. But finding room in it for the tomatoes, peppers, basil and other necessities that will be soon be needing light is going to be hard enough without asking the cauliflower to move over
At least I hope it’s after the snow. Today has been warm right through and sounding like rain, every gutter running, every eve dripping as the compacted layers slowly sink.
After the 1st and 2nd snowfalls, before the 3rd and 4th. That’s a 12 foot ladder
Up until a bit more than a week ago, I was in a pro-snow mood. Seemed like everyone else in the Eastern half of the country was having piles and piles of white beauty, while we had ugly patches of bare brown ground and nothing to ski on.
Be careful what you wish for.
When all is finally revealed, this viburnum will be about half as tall as it used to be. Those three broken leaders were due for pruning but I’d have preferred to choose where to cut without quite so much help.
Spicy Messy Coconut Shrimp – Thai(ish) fast food from Maine
Good News! Maine shrimp (Pandalus borealis), is starting to get around. Delicious, affordable, wonder of wonders sustainable, the only thing that has ever been wrong with it is that you pretty much couldn’t get it unless you lived in coastal Maine – or ate in extremely expensive restaurants.
That’s changing. More and more high end fish markets are carrying Maine, aka pink, shrimp, and it’s getting a little easier for those far from the shrimp boats to miss a few of the middlemen. Port Clyde Fresh Catch, a fishermen’s marketing cooperative, is now selling in Brooklyn, New York and (go figure) Pawtucket, Rhode Island.
Gray Tree Frog (Hyla versicolor) *
The way to blog brilliantly has been being demonstrated for a couple of years now by Margaret Roach, over at A Way to Garden. You wouldn’t necessarily know it from looking at my efforts, but she has been an ongoing inspiration ever since she started.
As the upgrades here continue I keep thinking I’ll find the right time to say thank you – after I get the new link list up, say, or post the long planned shopping page. But how bogus is that? The time to say thank you is always right now, so Thank You, Margaret, thank you very much.
If you know her, you know why the gratitude picture is of a frog. If you don’t, that’s one more reason to trot over there and have a look.
* I’m saying it’s Hyla versicolor on account of the markings and because it was tiny, about an inch long, max. But it might be a small Green Tree Frog, H. cinerea, not so much because it’s green (the gray ones can also be green) as because it was right there in the garden on a hollyhock leaf instead of hiding where it couldn’t be seen.
This year’s first to flower, a Butterfly (Hippeastrum papilio), opened about a week ago.
Butterfly amaryllis, photographed yesterday
There are 5 more – 2 papilios and 3 Giant Dutch Hybrids – in various stages of budded up. Also, par for the course, we have 4 in healthy-but-not-promising mode; 1 pot of 3 robust papilios that has “wait ‘till summer” written all over it and 6 bulbs that have refused to green up well and will not be with us much longer.
They may be harboring bulb fly or simply be discouraged by last year’s cold dark spring.( It didn’t get warm and bright enough for them to grow until it was almost time for them to stop.) On the good side, they’ve underlined a lesson I probably should have absorbed some time ago.
One more misery for this week: The valiant radicchio that made it through multiple nights down to 5 and 6 degrees was no match for the hungry voles, voles no doubt obscenely cosy in the warm double tunnel that was protecting the row. Wretched creatures have gobbled every single head.
Notice the nibbled edges on this baby and the large dark hole where a full sized head used to be.
I haven’t had the heart to look at the row - on the other side of the garden – that I harvested extra carefully and then left covered in hopes of a super-early spring crop. (Cutting the heads off just slightly above the base often results in regrowth, so if the weather is with you – and the voles aren’t – you get a flush of leaves and sometimes a whole new head as soon as the garden wakes up.)
Complete and utter carnage; somehow the scraps where a healthy root should be cause particular pain.
Too late now for the radicchio, but a good reminder to go out and check the viburnums and plums and
Winter is orange city around here. Quantities of peel get candied. The zest adds flavor to stews, enhances the stuffing of roast fowl, perfumes custards and cheesecakes and lends its zing to pastries from pound cake to gingerbread. Result: the fridge is frequently full of naked oranges needing to be used up.
Orange and Avocado salad, one way to use up the oranges.
Juniper in winter garb
Beautiful big snowstorm on Sunday, not predicted but not minded. Glittering blanket smoothing the world, nowhere to go but a chair by the fire and nothing to do but read and try not to eat leftover cookies – until it was time to shovel a foot of it off the driveway.
Today it’s still bliss-productively white, white white everywhere. Including in my head where after Sunday’s catalog wallow I’m looking eagerly ahead to spiffing up the white garden
A corner of the white garden (in Maine)
and that brings us to the story of my adventures with Fragrant Angel,
'Fragrant Angel'
in all respects except one an enormous improvement over good old White Swan.
White Swan
