Tips
Today is mostly a pair of creature features – deer vs. daylilies and squirrel counting comin’ right up. But first, a spoonful of recipe rescue at the request of my good friend Sue,
She called the other night in a panic –
“Is there anything you can add to make something less hot? ” Turns out she was making a big deal cioppino for a whole bunch of spice averse friends and she’d overdone the hot pepper flakes.
And this in spite of using far less than the recipe called for. Well, there isn’t anything you can add (except a great deal more of everything else). All she could do was make a quick batch of rice for people to pour their hot hot stew on top of. That and pass a bowl of sour cream, which is a horrible idea from the culinary standpoint but at least could keep people from starving. And please don’t write to say why not pasta – it doesn’t mitigate heat the way rice does.
In future, I suggested, take about a third of a cup of broth out and add the small amount of pepper to that. Then add the seasoned broth to the big pot o’ stuff until you like the result. Pause a moment between additions; it takes a while for the heat to disperse, and be sure to KEEP TASTING! This works for anything that might cause problems yet is added in such small quantities it’s easy to overdo. Truffle oil, for example, the most regrettably overused of yesterday’s trendy seasonings.
On to the deer, since I promised last week I’d give some tips for keeping them out of the daylilies.
Tip A number one is fencing. It was fencing before and it’s still fencing, but putting it on the list is sort of cheating because everybody knows it and everybody keeps hoping there’s something else and getting a dog doesn’t count.
So: repellents. Obviously, those that smell bad before they taste bad are better. Most of them keep smelling bad to deer even after they no longer smell bad to you, but it’s a good idea to try ’em out first – in – as they say of cleaning products – an unobtrusive spot.
A few brands with good reviews include: plantskydd , deer off , deer out, liquid fence, and deer chaser, but there are dozens. Those based on dried blood, garlic , rotten eggs, ammonia salts, peppermint , cinnamon or some combination thereof seem to work better than predator urine, probably because it doesn’t take deer long to figure out that the predator is not in the vicinity.
Choose at least 2 kinds and keep switching. Deer can become habituated to almost anything, so the more you can keep ’em off guard, the better. Start making the area repulsive when the scapes start growing, well before the buds develop, then spray the buds. If you have fragrant daylilies , stop when the buds are about half-swollen.
And although you don’t spray it on, don’t forget good old smelly soap: Dial and Irish Spring are favorites. Just put a few chips in a bag of cheesecloth and use a clothespin to attach the bag to a thin bamboo stake. The soap should be slightly above the lily buds. Other strategies to be posted shortly and meanwhile:
Please send me a squirrel count (ll@leslieland.com). Are you seeing more of ’em? Fewer? The same as usual? We are seeing none at all, though I hesitate to jinx things by mentioning it. Our birdfeeders have been overrun, winter and summer, for 15 years – ever since we came to this house – and this winter there are suddenly none. Zilch. Zero. Nada. Rien. I see them out in the world when I’m driving, so they are clearly still here with us on the planet…
Today’s focus is daylilies, which remind me of the old joke about fashions in Beantown: Young woman gets on the train next to a dowager wearing a beautiful chapeau. Youngster says “what a lovely hat. Where did you buy it?” Matron draws herself up and says “Buy my hat? My dear, in Boston, we HAVE our hats. ”
Similarly, almost all of us have our daylilies. Brand new garden-free houses are an exception, but any place that has had time for a few things to get planted has probably been planted with a few daylilies, and since the blessed things never die, whatever daylilies you had when you got there, whatever daylilies you planted 20 years ago when you were starting out, those are the daylilies you’ve still got.
Well, there’s a lot to be said for durability, but there are two things wrong with this. One is that daylilies do need dividing. They’re not as bad as some plants I could name, but after anywhere from 5 to 10 years they tend to get crowded and flower less. Then you have even MORE of whatever, which you must either find a place for or find someone to take them in ( in theory, you could just put them on the compost but who do you know who does that?)
And of course the other wrong thing, a natural outgrowth of wrong thing #1, is that your old daylilies prevent you from planting new daylilies – or at least daylilies that are new to you. And given that there are somewhere around 50,000 named daylilies, it’s quite likely that there are several you’d rather have than the ones you have at the moment.
Just about everybody sells them, and there’s an extensive list of sources (along with lots of other nifty info.) at www.daylies.org, the website of the American hemerocallis society. But no matter where you shop, don’t forget to notice bloom times: different nurseries go into this in greater and lesser detail, but at the minimum the listing or tag should say whether the plants flower early, midseason or late. It should also tell you whether the cultivar is a diploid or tetraploid.
Those terms refer to the sets of chromosomes in each cell, and they matter to you as well as to breeders because they tell you things about plant habit:
Diploids are closer to old-fashioned daylilies. They tend to have smaller flowers and more of them, and they tend to be less imposing, easier to integrate into mixed borders, sometimes floppy but almost always graceful .
Tetraploids are – well, beefy would be a word. The plants are usually robust. Stalks are stiff. Flowers are large and substantial and often very strongly colored.
The latest prize-winning introductions can cost as much as a good Paris hat – 2 or 3 hundred dollars for a single division – but there are gazillions of others in the 10 to 20 dollar range. Plenty of places offer plants for less, but as usual, there is a bottom price below which you are likely to get either low quality, very common plants or divisions so mingy you’ll have to wait a long time before much of anything happens.
Okay, what haven’t I mentioned? If you already have daylilies, you know: deer! They eat daylilies – or, more accurately they eat the flowers. Some tips on how to prevent this will appear here next week.
Once it’s too cold to just go outside in whatever you have on, it might as well snow, as far as I’m concerned. From the garden and home design point of view, snow is the great freebie of all time.
For one thing, it’s wonderful insulation, like tiny bubble bubble wrap. A thick layer on the garden keeps soil temperatures even, so you don’t get the freeze-thaw cycles that lift soil and rip roots from the ground. It also protects tender plant crowns from drying sun and wind. And old-timers know your house stays a lot warmer when there’s a good heap of snow all around the foundation. Of course, it will also stay a lot wetter if that foundation has issues.
But enough of practicality! the truly great thing about snow is it’s gorgeous. Even when it isn’t frosting dark tree limbs and setting off the statuary, it’s simplifying the landscape, unifying discordant elements, covering dead weeds and patchy grass like an act of natural forgiveness.
Of course nothing is perfect. There are two ungreat things about snow: one being that the stuff is heavy, the other that you usually have to remove some. Specifics vary but there is one huge big general rule: sooner is better than later, and the wetter the snow the truer that is.
Removing snow from trees and shrubs:
*Start by being sure you have to. Ice is a lot more likely to cause problems; most plants have lots of natural bending capacity, and being whacked is not frozen bark’s idea of a good time. But branches that stay deeply bent for more than a couple of days may never spring back, and if they must bear additional snow they may break under the load.
* When snow-removal is called for, use the brush end of a broom to gently and slowly push branches UPWARD until the snow falls off. The natural inclination is to push down, but of course that means the poor branch is getting hammered double.
* When you get done, consider bundling anything that’s especially vulnerable – arborvitaes, hemlocks and boxwoods, for instance. It only takes a few minutes to apply a loose wrapping of wide-mesh netting and secure it with a few twists of twine.
Removing snow from walkways:
* Even walks that appear to be on level ground often have uphill and downhill sides. Don’t forget to pile the snow on the downhill side, to minimize runoff over the path, and don’t forget to throw that pile well off to the side, so the runoff has somewhere to run. Are there thick shrubs in the way? Make a note on the April calendar to do something about that. I will too, and we can talk about solutions then.
* By now I hope it’s no longer news that using sodium chloride to melt ice is right up there with driving a Hummer for environmental bad behaviour: the stuff corrodes metal, flakes concrete and mortar, damages soil structure, wounds and kills plants, then pollutes both surface and groundwater. Regrettably, alternatives like magnesium chloride and calcium chloride aren’t all that much better. Yet having an icy walkway is also on the anti-social side. What to do?
Two choices – or three, if you’re feeling flush
Choice 1. After shoveling – or even better, before it starts snowing – use a de-icer based on Calcium Magnesium Acetate (CMA to its friends ). It’s still not great for the surface water, but it doesn’t tend to keep seeping down; it’s a lot less corrosive than the chlorides and it seldom damages plants.
Choice 2 : provide traction with coarse gravel, (non-clumping) kitter litter or anything similar. These products are benign outdoors and won’t come in if you keep a stiff bootbrush beside the door. On a somewhat grander scale, most big hardware and building supply stores sell stiff cleated traction mats. You do need to have a place to store them but other than that they’re effortless, and do not require you to nag anybody about entrance etiquette.
Choice 3: go for hot rubber – the electrified rubber mats used by restaurants and stores. At anywhere from 4 to 6 hundred bucks for a 3×5 or 6 foot section they are certainly the expensive spread; they do draw a fair amount of power; and they work best if you turn them on as soon as it starts snowing. But they last a long time, can be left in place all season, and if you love someone who has fragile bones, may well be worth every penny.
As a gardener whose life is nurtured by, centered in , moored to the earth and the passing upon it of the seasons, I have to say all this flapdoodle over the name of the evergreen in the living room really rankles my curd. Here’s what: it’s a holiday tree; the holiday is the winter solstice; and people have been celebrating it with these trees for more millennia than Christianity can claim.
The decorated holiday tree is a symbol of life in the midst of darkness that belongs to everybody, atheists included. The only people who might reasonably claim it has been hijacked are Druids – and at least so far most of them have had the good sense to just keep quiet and eat cookies ( another aspect of the celebration that is WAY older than certain religions).
‘nough said. And since by now you probably have your tree if you’re planning to have one, I will say only don’t forget to keep it watered, to minimize the risk of fire and to make sure it smells good for as long as possible.
THE COOKIE PART – SHORTBREAD DIVISION
Shortbread is “cookie” reduced to the absolute basics, you can’t get any closer to eating sweetened butter unless you do it with a spoon. And recipes don’t get much easier, either. This one spends a lot of words on the fine points , but the bottom line is a short ingredient list and about 5 minutes of work.
Because the ideal texture is extremely tender and crumbly, recipes typically call for mixing all purpose flour with something like cornstarch or rice flour to lower the overall gluten content. It’s easier to just use cake flour, which every baker should keep a supply of for just these occasions. (The good side of its being devoid of any meaningful nutrient content is that it keeps forever).
For about 40 cookies, depending on how you shape them:
½ pound butter – freshness is more important than either salt or fat-content
¼ cup brown sugar
¼ cup white sugar
¼ teaspoon salt or a pinch more for unsalted butter
2 ½ – 3 cups cake flour ( amount needed will vary with the moisture content of the butter, the way you measure, and how rigid you want the finished cookies to be. The less you can get away with, the better – within reason, of course. )
ok,
1. Take the butter out of the fridge and let it soften until it is claylike, neither slump-squishy nor hard.
2. Put the sugars, salt and a few tablespoons of the flour in a processor fitted with the metal blade. Process until you don’t hear any brown sugar lumps. Add enough more flour bring the total up to 2 ½ cups. Give it another whirl or two.
3. Cut the butter into 8 or 10 pieces, scatter them over the flour, then pulse until the dough forms large clots and is just about to make a ball. This is lots of pulses.
4. Let the dough sit in a cool but not cold place for at least half an hour, up to half a day ( remove from processor and wrap in plastic if opting for the latter).
5. When ready to bake, heat the oven to 325. Roll about a tablespoon of dough into a ball, then lightly flatten it into a cookie. Put it on a piece of foil; put the foil in the center of a small, flat pan ( bottom of a pie tin works fine) and put it in to bake. Check after 6 or 7 minutes. It won’t be done yet, but it will have done enough of what it’s going to do so you will know whether to knead in more flour. Do so if necessary – freestanding shapes often need a bit more to avoid puddlehood.
6. Shape the dough (see below) on an ungreased cookie sheet, preferably the double kind with the air-layer in the middle. Bake until the shortbread is pale gold clear through , 15 minutes for pressed cookies, 20 to 30 minutes for classic wedges or little molds. Do not underbake; if it looks like the edges are browning too fast, just turn down the heat.
SHAPING SHORTBREAD DOUGH
Classic: Gently roll into balls the size of tennis balls. Flatten into circles a bit more than ¼ inch thick in the center, slightly thicker at the edges ( they get more heat). Circles should be about 5 to 6 inches in diameter. Use floured fork tines to punch into 8 wedges, then punch the center of each wedge. Leave everything attached. After baking, repunch wedges while the cookies are still hot, then separate when cold.
Molded: This is a good dough to use in the tiny fluted metal cups – about 1 inch across the top – intended for candies and Swedish sandbakkelsen. Roll teaspoon size pinches of dough into balls, put ’em in the ungreased cups, then go back and press down in the center with your thumb. Dough should come about ¾ of the way up the sides. ( It will smooth out in the baking but still be a bit dimpled.) Be sure to let them cool completely before trying to unmold. Serve as is or put a dollop of tart jam or chocolate ganache in the dimples.
Pressed: Standard advice for pressed cookies is to use a cold sheet and warm dough. With these, it works better to have both items at room temperature. If you can’t get the pressed shapes to stick, use the star opening and make rings.
(Shortbread-Molded: fancy cookware stores sell clay shortbread molds with elaborate patterns. For best results, use the recipes that come with them. )
Now that the dominant Northeastern color scheme is evergreen with red and white accents , instead of orange and gold and brown; now that there is Christmas music in the supermarket (gaaak), and the scent of holiday baking has replaced the scent of autumn leaves, it’s tough to stay focused on making sure you’re ok in the apple department. But this is the about the last chance to do it. Any minute now, specialty orchards will close; the last of the local oddcrops will be gone and although there will be apples galore; there will not be many – if any – northern spies, winesaps, Jonathans, Greenings…
Stock up if you have a cool spot to store them: it’s best to keep apples in a humid place that hovers around 34 degrees and does not have any onions, potatoes (or flowerbulbs being forced) in it. If for some reason you don’t have such a place, make and freeze a large batch of Chunky Roasted Applesauce. It isn’t just that homemade tastes better than boughten, it’s also that homemade from new crop, local apples tastes better than homemade based on supermarket fruit.
CHUNKY ROASTED APPLESAUCE
Cheesecloth/ aluminum foil/ plastic freezer bags
Enough apples to fill a 3 inch deep , non-reactive roasting pan that’s at least 12 x 14 inches. Choose an assortment for best flavor and texture: Spies, Winesaps and Cameos, for instance, or Rome Beauty, Baldwin, Jonagold and Macs.
A glug of cider, a little salt, (maybe sugar, but probably not)
1. Heat the oven to 325 . Peel and core the apples, reserving about a fourth of the debris.
2. Cover the bottom of the roasting pan with a generous ¼ inch of cider. Cut the apples into rough chunks about ½ inch square. Tie the reserved debris in a square of the cheesecloth. Put the apples in the pan and bury the cheesecloth bag in the middle.
3. Cover tightly with the foil and start baking. Check and stir at 15 minute intervals until you have a mixture of very tender apple chunks and fallen apart apple mush ( proportions of each will depend on the varieties of apples, their relative age, and the year’s growing conditions). You may need to add more cider if all the apples are dry-fleshed bakers, but don’t add any more than necessary to prevent burning. If the apples are swimming after a half hour, remove the foil and roast uncovered until things thicken up.
4. When the applesauce is done, in anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour and a half or more, take out about a half cup of it and leave the rest to keep warm in the turned-off oven. Stir a tiny pinch of salt into the half-cup and chill rapidly (outdoors or in the freezer) until it’s at room temperature. Taste. If it absolutely screams out for sugar, now is the time to add some to the warm applesauce. Otherwise, just stir in a bit of salt. ( Salt is optional, of course, but it does a lot to bring out the fruit flavor.)
5. Let the applesauce cool, then fish out the bag of peels and pack the sauce in the freezer bags, allowing plenty of headroom. Put the bags on their sides on cookie sheets and smooth the sauce so it makes flat packages of even thickness. Freeze. The flat packages mean quick freezing, which is better for flavor and texture, and they thaw quickly too, which is handy. But they are also vulnerable to breakage (and getting lost). Once they’re frozen, pack them in a larger bag.
* There have been enough cold nights to toughen up late garden stalwarts like parsley, kale, and chard, but even tough stuff has trouble when it goes below the mid-twenties. In some years, these things can hold on until Christmas, but it doesn’t hurt to cover your bets by covering some plants; there’s still quite a bit of warmth in the ground. On the other hand, you can also just pick everything that’s left, give away whatever you can’t use and call it a day until March.
* The onset of cold weather is also a reminder there’s no time to lose in the window-washing department. This loathsome chore doesn’t sound very gardenly, but you’d be surprised how much light you lose when the windows are less than clean. Any houseplants that count on those windows will be very grateful you bothered and of course there will also be a little more light for you.
* If you were on top of it and put your pots of amaryllis into dry, dark storage sometime back in late August or early September, they can be pulled out now and revived. If you were not so on top of it, file this away until it has been 2 to 3 months since you DID do the dry dark deal, the goal of which is to make them think it’s winter in South America.
Amaryllis don’t like root disturbance, so it’s better not to divide them, but they can’t bloom well if they’re choked, either. Take a deep breath, make a decision, then split apart any bulb clusters so fat they’re bursting out of the pot.
It also pays to remove the pups; just cut them off at the soil line unless you want to start an amaryllis farm. Refresh the pots: discard the top inch or so of old soil, loosen what’s underneath with a fork, then put on an inch of new soilless mix like pro-mix.
Water well – just water, don’t add any fertilizer – and put in a warm, bright spot. Then wait, resisting the impulse to water again, either until you see signs of growth or a month has passed, whichever comes first. The accepted rule is that any bulb that made 5 leaves or more last season will be strong enough to flower this time around, but as far as I can tell from my ever-growing 15 year old herd of amaryllis, this rule is complete hooey. Pixies tell amaryllis when and whether to flower, so there’s no point in getting too het up about it.
* Before you put leftover seeds away, go through and discard everything more than 3 years old …unless it’s some kind of rare heirloom bean or what-all that you’re SURE you will plant next year, before the seed expires completely. Next, applying the same criterion in the rarity department, throw out all the asters, parsley, onions and delphiniums, which seldom last more than one season. Not every old seed is a dud, but in the North, the window for second tries is small, so there’s no point in risking failure unless you really have to.
* While you’re seed-sorting, supplement your notes ( if any) about how all this stuff did. Start next year’s list – catalogs are already coming in. And if you didn’t map this year’s vegetable garden; waste no time. You won’t get far with rotation planting if you forget what went where..
* If you potted up some spring bulbs to force for winter bloom, don’t forget to buy some winter rye seed now, while it’s still available. About a week after you bring the bulbs out of storage, scratch the grass seed into the soil surface. There should be a pretty green lawn around the stems by the time they bloom.
* It’s almost too much to bear when you’re right in the midst of cleaning up and looking forward – eagerly! – to not thinking about the whole thing, but now is the time to prepare a few beds for early spring planting. The soil is usually too wet to work in March and April, optimal planting time for peas and sweet peas, so it really helps if all you have to do is set stakes and plant seeds. Choose spots you can reach from paths or lawn. Clean out all the weeds and put on a good thick layer of compost.
* The “get ready now” advice started with peas because they take up the most space ( and happen to be favorites of mine) but it also applies to onions, Bibb lettuce and fava beans.
* If you have spread straw mulch over newly planted garlic, marginally hardy flower bulbs, or recently divided perennials, it’s likely the rains have rewarded you with a lawnlike crop of young oats, and that they appear to be worrysomely hardy. Worry not. Even though frost doesn’t bother them, winter cold will kill them down.
After frost blackens the dahlia tops, wait for a dry day – hah! HOPE for a dry day – within the next week or so, before you dig up the tubers. Turn the clumps upside down to dry in the sun, then remove any damaged tubers and lightly brush off loose dirt. Pack in plastic-lined cardboard boxes, surrounded by packing peanuts. If you give each variety its own container, any old marking label will do, assuming you use indelible ink.
