Garden
Before getting started on the virtues of angels’ trumpet, one of the most gorgeous, most rewarding, most pain-in-the-butt flowers available to the average gardener, let’s put in a good word for keeping a plant on the back of the toilet. Nothing fancy, a pot of ivy will do nicely, or ferns, which appreciate life in the bathroom. Point is simply that you get a big mood-boost when you see something green and growing every time you turn around – or reach over, as the case may be – to flush.
Okay, on to brugmansia, aka angels’ trumpet, a tender shrub with huge, well, trumpet shaped flowers and an amazing night time perfume. The angelic part may be that fragrance , one of the strongest in the garden, but it might also be because brugmansias are strongly poisonous – eat some and you could end up with the angels.
Flowers are huge, 8 to 10 inches long , and come in singles, doubles, and ruffled multi’s that look like quadruples, in yellow, apricot and pink as well as white, but the single white ones are the most fragrant and to my eye the loveliest. They used to be rare, but now they seem to be everywhere – or at least in every catalog and garden magazine photo shoot – and although they’re not cheap, they’re not that pricey, either.
What they are, the first year you buy them, is small. It takes several seasons to get the kind of height and mass that makes brugmansias so astonishing, and that means everyone north of zone 9 must be willing to keep them indoors in the winter. My biggest one ( now deceased) took 5 summers – admittedly, summers in Maine – to make it to 8 feet tall and 5 feet wide. Every March I vowed ” this year is the last,” and every September, faced with saying goodbye to the ever-larger tree, festooned with dozens and dozens of blooms, I said – and still say, to its descendants – ” Oh all right, back to the cellar with you. ”
Brugmansias bloom in cycles, though not always, as is sometimes said, with the full moon, covering themselves with flowers and your night garden with exotic scent that may or may not be psychoactive but is beyond intense… My first plant had 3 flowers on it when I brought it home from the nursery and I was so woozy by the time I got out of the car I had to go for a walk.
Years later, an Argentine visitor who saw the 8 footer told me the plants grow to tree size there, but people know never to fall asleep under them because ” the spirits will come to them in dreams… ” Moral of the story? Plant brugmansias by the path to the front door or somewhere else you’ll walk by them each evening, but DON’T plant any under the bedroom window. More on Brugmansia care below, and a sense of the range of what’s possible here but while we’re on the subject of save-worthy plants, don’t forget cannas and hot peppers.
CANNAS: Saving these over doesn’t give you much of a leg up on individual plant size; what it does is give you herds of them for very little money. Like dahlias, they increase obscenely each year, so you can get the dazzling effect created by huge patches without spending dazzling sums of money. And like dahlias, they’re easy to store – you just let the leaves die of frost in fall, cut them off, then store the rhizomes in a cool closet. Restart in mid-march for full sized plants in June.
HOT PEPPERS: We think of pepper plants as annuals, but they aren’t. And many of the tastiest, like habanero and aji amarillo, don’t start to bear significant crops until they’re about 6 months old. They don’t adore life as houseplants, but they will make it through on a sunny windowsill and your reward is a huge head start on the summer pepper season.
BRUGMANSIAS:
* Spring to Summer: Order or buy for late spring delivery, so you can put them outdoors right away. Plant where they will have plenty of room and think of Audrey 2, the ravenous plant in Little Shop of Horrors. ” Feed me!,” she cried, “! feeed meee!” If it is possible to overfeed or overwater a brugmansia, I have not yet found how much it would take.
* Fall: When frost threatens, dig the plants, transfer them to large pots (or plastic-lined bushel baskets) and bring them inside. If you happen to have a cool basement or other spot that stays around 45 degrees, put them there and don’t worry about light. Otherwise they need all they can get. Either way, they’ll drop lots of leaves ( if it’s dark, they’ll drop them all.) Water sparingly – hardly at all if they’re cool and dark, enough to keep the soil moist if they’re in light.
* Late Winter/Early Spring:
If they’ve been in light and slowly growing, by March they’ll be very leggy, and unless you’ve been faithful with the insecticidal soap, very buggy as well. Cut them back , clean them up and start fertilizing weakly every 3 weeks or so.
If they’ve been semi-dormant in the cool dark, the jig is up: next time you go down to put something in the dryer you’re gonna see ghost growth , creepily pale sprouts with a few wan leaves, groping blindly upward in search of light and – in all probability – already sporting a few aphids. Bring them into the light and proceed as above.
* Spring: Start hardening them off as soon as you can – cool weather ( 45-55 degrees) won’t hurt anything, and the sooner they can leave their pots and go back in the ground, the happier everyone is going to be. If you get overconfident and plant too early , protect them from light frosts with a thin sheet and just prune back anything that gets clonked.
Before getting started on the virtues of angels’ trumpet, one of the most gorgeous, most rewarding, most pain-in-the-butt flowers available to the average gardener, let’s put in a good word for keeping a plant on the back of the toilet. Nothing fancy, a pot of ivy will do nicely, or ferns, which appreciate life in the bathroom. Point is simply that you get a big mood-boost when you see something green and growing every time you turn around – or reach over, as the case may be – to flush.
Okay, on to brugmansia, aka angels’ trumpet, a tender shrub with huge, well, trumpet shaped flowers and an amazing night time perfume. The angelic part may be that fragrance , one of the strongest in the garden, but it might also be because brugmansias are strongly poisonous – eat some and you could end up with the angels.
Flowers are huge, 8 to 10 inches long , and come in singles, doubles, and ruffled multi’s that look like quadruples, in yellow, apricot and pink as well as white, but the single white ones are the most fragrant and to my eye the loveliest. They used to be rare, but now they seem to be everywhere – or at least in every catalog and garden magazine photo shoot – and although they’re not cheap, they’re not that pricey, either.
What they are, the first year you buy them, is small. It takes several seasons to get the kind of height and mass that makes brugmansias so astonishing, and that means everyone north of zone 9 must be willing to keep them indoors in the winter. My biggest one ( now deceased) took 5 summers – admittedly, summers in Maine – to make it to 8 feet tall and 5 feet wide. Every March I vowed ” this year is the last,” and every September, faced with saying goodbye to the ever-larger tree, festooned with dozens and dozens of blooms, I said – and still say, to its descendants – ” Oh all right, back to the cellar with you. ”
Brugmansias bloom in cycles, though not always, as is sometimes said, with the full moon, covering themselves with flowers and your night garden with exotic scent that may or may not be psychoactive but is beyond intense… My first plant had 3 flowers on it when I brought it home from the nursery and I was so woozy by the time I got out of the car I had to go for a walk.
Years later, an Argentine visitor who saw the 8 footer told me the plants grow to tree size there, but people know never to fall asleep under them because ” the spirits will come to them in dreams… ” Moral of the story? Plant brugmansias by the path to the front door or somewhere else you’ll walk by them each evening, but DON’T plant any under the bedroom window. More on Brugmansia care below, and a sense of the range of what’s possible here but while we’re on the subject of save-worthy plants, don’t forget cannas and hot peppers.
CANNAS: Saving these over doesn’t give you much of a leg up on individual plant size; what it does is give you herds of them for very little money. Like dahlias, they increase obscenely each year, so you can get the dazzling effect created by huge patches without spending dazzling sums of money. And like dahlias, they’re easy to store – you just let the leaves die of frost in fall, cut them off, then store the rhizomes in a cool closet. Restart in mid-march for full sized plants in June.
HOT PEPPERS: We think of pepper plants as annuals, but they aren’t. And many of the tastiest, like habanero and aji amarillo, don’t start to bear significant crops until they’re about 6 months old. They don’t adore life as houseplants, but they will make it through on a sunny windowsill and your reward is a huge head start on the summer pepper season.
BRUGMANSIAS:
* Spring to Summer: Order or buy for late spring delivery, so you can put them outdoors right away. Plant where they will have plenty of room and think of Audrey 2, the ravenous plant in Little Shop of Horrors. ” Feed me!,” she cried, “! feeed meee!” If it is possible to overfeed or overwater a brugmansia, I have not yet found how much it would take.
* Fall: When frost threatens, dig the plants, transfer them to large pots (or plastic-lined bushel baskets) and bring them inside. If you happen to have a cool basement or other spot that stays around 45 degrees, put them there and don’t worry about light. Otherwise they need all they can get. Either way, they’ll drop lots of leaves ( if it’s dark, they’ll drop them all.) Water sparingly – hardly at all if they’re cool and dark, enough to keep the soil moist if they’re in light.
* Late Winter/Early Spring:
If they’ve been in light and slowly growing, by March they’ll be very leggy, and unless you’ve been faithful with the insecticidal soap, very buggy as well. Cut them back , clean them up and start fertilizing weakly every 3 weeks or so.
If they’ve been semi-dormant in the cool dark, the jig is up: next time you go down to put something in the dryer you’re gonna see ghost growth , creepily pale sprouts with a few wan leaves, groping blindly upward in search of light and – in all probability – already sporting a few aphids. Bring them into the light and proceed as above.
* Spring: Start hardening them off as soon as you can – cool weather ( 45-55 degrees) won’t hurt anything, and the sooner they can leave their pots and go back in the ground, the happier everyone is going to be. If you get overconfident and plant too early , protect them from light frosts with a thin sheet and just prune back anything that gets clonked.
Update: I’m sure Mary (see comment) isn’t the only one who wonders how to manage all this in and out without damaging the roots. The answer is that it’s impossible. Roots will be damaged, in some cases – i.e. when you’re digging up huge ones – quite severely. No problem. Brugmansias are weeds, and pruning the roots, like pruning the tops, has no long term ill effect.
Loveliest of trees, the maple now
Is hung with
…buckets along the trunk, actually.
Thus the poetic rhythm of north-country life. No matter how cold it is, spring has arrived. We are in sap season, the alternation of freezing nights and warm, sunny days that brings sugar-laden “sweetwater” up through the dense wood of maple trees to nourish the swelling buds.
You can make syrup from the sap of many different maples – in fact, you can make it from birch – but the sweetest and most delicious comes from sugar maple ( Acer saccharum) and black maple ( A. nigrum), beautiful trees that glow like fire in autumn and, as if sweetness and light weren’t enough, are the “maple” of first class hardwood and figured wood like tiger maple.
These days, alas, sugar maples are also a flock of red-feathered canaries, weakening and dying in droves. Many factors are involved, but acid rain is one of the big ones. And because hard maples are cold climate plants, they’re on the sure victim list when it comes to global warming.
In other words: get it while you can. Buying from a local producer means sweet support for open space – and if you have access to a few trees, consider making your own. Our family did it for years when Celia, my stepdaughter, was small. The ritual was one of her favorites and she was always the first to notice the buckets on roadside trees.
Making maple syrup is ridiculously easy and doesn’t call for any expensive equipment. The most important thing you need – other than access to a few trees – is an outdoor heat source like a campfire to do the boiling down. It takes 40 gallons of sap to make a gallon of syrup, and that means a whole heap of steam, as we discovered the first year we tried it and incidentally stripped the wallpaper in the bedroom above the kitchen.
Every year, the syrup is syrup but every year it’s different. Sometimes smoky, sometimes honeylike , sometimes with a hint of fruit and sometimes a whiff of leather. The taste depends on how long the sap runs, on how much sun the trees got last summer. It depends on which trees gave much and which ones little, on the wind and the rain…
Celia is grown up and gone now; we haven’t made syrup for years. But we still have quite a bit of it left, a reminder of happy times; and every March those trees hung with buckets say ” remember, remember.”
Maple syrup is generally resistant to being used in recipes – the best thing to do with it is to just pour it over something ( or put a drop in some unblended scotch). But we are all big fans of Les Grandperes, an easy, down-home cottage pudding that’s basically biscuits on syrup. It’s good with vanilla ice cream and great with sheep’s milk yogurt.
Les Grandperes
This French Canadian recipe comes from Alice Perron, a fine home cook and the woman behind the stove at Bien Fait Fruitcakes
.
for 6 servings:
dough for Aunt Ida’s Biscuits ( below)
1-1/2 cups maple syrup
1/2 cup boiling water
1. Heat oven to 425 degrees. Lavishly butter an 8x8x2-inch baking dish and pour in the maple syrup. Pour in the water, then put the dish in the oven until the syrup is bubbling, about 8 to 10 minutes.
2. While syrup is heating, roll out dough 3/4 inch thick and use a biscuit cutter to cut out 9 1-1/2-inch discs. ( Refrigerate remaining dough. Use it to make biscuits within 24 hours)
3. Place the circles side by side, just barely touching, on the bubbling syrup. Bake for 10 minutes, then lower heat to 350 and bake until the biscuits are richly browned, about 5 minutes more.
Alice’s Aunt Ida’s Biscuits
For 12 large or 18 small biscuits:
2-1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon sugar (optional)
4 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/3 cup cold butter
1 egg, beaten
2/3 cup milk
1. Heat the oven to 425. Thoroughly combine the dry ingredients.
2. Cut in the butter until it resembles small peas. Beat the egg with the milk and stir it in, stopping as soon as all the flour is dampened.
3. Turn the dough onto a floured board and knead 2 or 3 times, then roll out 1/2 to 3/4 inch thick and cut with a sharp cutter. ( Scraps are lightest if baked as-is; re-rolling the dough makes it tough.)
4. Place biscuits, well separated, on an ungreased baking sheet and bake until risen and nicely browned, about 15 to 20 minutes.
Rereading Vita Sackville-West ( see below) reminds me to say a good word for spiraea, specifically the early bloomers that just had a sort of bloom-time preview because they were covered with snow. The ones in our yard are Spirea arguta, the old fashioned bridal wreath, and S. vanhouttei, which runs it a close second in the grandmother’s garden department. Soon enough they’ll be flowering in earnest, along with thousands of others just like them, in untidy great white arching hedges all over the Northeastern spring.
Like lilacs and forsythia, they lack a bit in year-round charm. But in their season, they’re glorious, they’re very easy to grow, and there are so many cultivars you’re bound to find one that will work at your place. ( One cultivar, that is. I can’t imagine one white spiraea looking like much except lonely.)
To get a better sense of what’s out there than any local nursery can provide, a sense more sensible than Google’s omnium-gatherum, go to Plantinfo online,
a service of the University of Minnesota. It provides access to:
” current sources in over 700 North American nurseries for over 88,000 plants, an estimated 250,000 – 300,000 citations to current plant science literature, listings for more than 2100 North American seed and nursery firms, and an evaluative review of 75 CD-ROMs and web sites of plant images.”
What you do not have is the human voice , which leads us back to Ms. Sackville-West, whose real name was Victoria Mary. She was a novelist and poet, a member of the British aristocracy, the lover and friend of Virginia Wolf and a whole lot else that we won’t go into now because I want to get right to her garden writing, and point you toward her white garden, at Sissinghurst, the most famous white garden in the West and inspiration for countless others.
Few of those others approach it in beauty, partly because they are not located on the grounds of Kentish castles and partly because – all too often – they’re just collections of white flowered items, rather than carefully designed gardens in which all flowers are white.
More on garden design to come, but for now, a few words from Vita Sackville-West. They come from A Joy of Gardening, a collection drawn from two of her books ( In Your Garden Again and More for Your Garden) published by Harper and Row in 1958 and now out of print. But that doesn’t mean much. Those books – and the others based on Sackville-West’s garden columns – have been and continue to be more or less continuously recycled, as a quick check at Amazon or your favorite used book store will reveal. Whatever form you find them in, these short pieces are inspiring and entertaining in equal measure and who can say fairer than that?
” One of the prettiest and easiest of spring flowering shrubs is surely spiraea arguta, more descriptively known as bridal wreath or foam of May. In a warm season it may well start foaming in April ; and foam it does, for every one of its black twiggy growths is smothered tight with innumerable tiny white flowers. In fact you cannot see the plant for the flowers…
Obviously the pure candor of its whiteness would look best against the dark background of a yew hedge, or any dark shrubs if yew is not available. There comes a moment at twilight when white plants gleam with a peculiar pallor or ghostliness. I dare to say of white, that neutral tint usually regarded as an absence of color, that it is every bit as receptive to changing light as the blues and reds and purples. It may perhaps demand a patiently observing eye, attuned to a subtlety less crude than the strong range of reds and purples that we get in, say, the herbaceous phloxes which miraculously alter their hue as the evening light sinks across them. I love color, and rejoice in it, but white is lovely to me forever…”
We are back in the cold again, but there’s something temporary about it and the snowdrops are here already, earlier this year than ever before in our 15 years in this house. They must have came up sometime around New Years’, because they were in full bloom when we first saw them, on January 31st.
It’s just one valiant little clump – over on the north side of the yard, underneath a group of tall hemlocks, beside the now- pointless privet hedge that used to screen a patio. That little slope will soon sprout creeping phlox and forget-me-nots and columbines and willowy hyacinths from the forced pots of years and years gone by, but in the early season it’s just green – or brown or white , depending – and those chaste-looking little flowers: white bells with dots or strokes of green that you must tip them up to see.
They’re probably Galanthus nivalis, or elwesii, I’ve never taken the time to see for sure. There are about 13 species of Galanthus, whose name comes from Greek words for milk and flower, and dozens and dozens of cultivars. Most of them bloom super-early, often through the snow. But according to the RHS , ” snowdrop” is not an environmental reference; it comes to us from the German Schneetropfen, a style of earring popular in the 16th and 17th centuries.
I’m not sure I believe this. Germans have been plant-conscious for a lot longer than a few centuries and it wouldn’t be a surprise to learn the earrings were named for the flowers. * In any case, the Society also says: “Several English vernacular names pre-date the name snowdrop, including Candlemas bells and fair maids of February, both of which are associated with Candlemas Day, 2 February, which is the peak of the flowering season.”
American bulb-sellers don’t offer anything like the assortment available to the Brits, but for a look at the possibilities, check out http://www.judyssnowdrops.co.uk. When you do, you’ll see dozens of subtle differences. You’ll also see that they’re all little white bells, and will probably be reconciled to the selections offered by http://www.munchkinnursery.com. http://www.brentandbeckysbulbs.com and http://www.johnscheepers.com/.
Because snowdrops bloom in spring, catalog sellers often put them in the autumn offerings and they often sell dry bulbs to plant along with the tulips and things. But most authorities agree that snowdrops should be planted “in the green,” and that is certainly when you should divide them, if you have access to a patch. I’ll post instructions here in early March.
Snowdrops are long lived and seldom bothered, though in wet years they get a fungus disease related to the one that whacks peonies, and in places where early spring is warm, they’re vulnerable to the narcissus bulb fly – a pernicious creature that should be called the amaryllis bulb fly. (Galanthus, like Narcissus, is in the Amaryllidaceae.) If you summer your amaryllis outside and have had trouble with bulbs that went hollow in the middle, it’s likely you’d see a fat hideous bulb-fly grub if you cut one in half. To avoid this problem in future, don’t put your amaryllis out until July, after the flies have laid their eggs.
*Note: After the podcast, my German friend Ilse wrote in to say that she grew up calling snowdrops Schneeglöckchen (snow bells). But she is only in her 80’s, so that may be the (comparatively) modern name.
Okay, 40 degrees and rainy doesn’t fix it. It’s been November for months and it looks like it’s going to keep right on BEING November right through February. Only thing for it is to work hard at getting the garden orders together, then go in the kitchen and bake something – like maybe bran muffins.
Let me start by confessing that up until a couple of weeks ago, I had not eaten a bran muffin for – I dunno – 20 years. Then my friend M., who prides herself on her bran muffins, gave us a whole plateful. VERY tasty. And very conveniently filling : have one of these mothers for breakfast and you’re all set until lunch. They were toasty tasting without being toasted, chock full of raisins, and reminiscent of gingerbread in their overtones of molasses.
Almost perfect, in other words, except for being just slightly sweeter than my ideal, and a bit less wheaty.
Reason suggests the way to deal with this is to ask for the recipe, then modify . We are not talking about fancy pastry here; muffins are among the most forgiving baked goods in all creation. You can almost always cut back some on sugar without destroying the crumb, and getting a stronger grain flavor is often as simple as upping the salt.
But no, that would be too… well, anyway, I started fooling around with recipes. Go to your cookbook collection and look up a few – turns out they call for differing amounts of every major ingredient: flour, bran, sugar, eggs, fat, you name it. Yield varies too: 8 muffins, 10 muffins, 9 muffins. For reasons that are probably related to the non-divisibility of eggs, there are very few recipes for 6 muffins or 12 muffins, numbers that are, as you may have noticed, favorites with makers of muffin pans.
I have every expectation that version 4 – coming up shortly – will finally produce my ideal bran muffin, and getting there has been half the fun. It will be posted here when it’s ready, so you can start playing too.
On the garden front, a few less-common catalogs:
Baker Creek Heirloom seeds: www.rareseeds.com. One of my favorites for the food garden. You have to read between the lines – the descriptions are sort of like olive grading, where giant is the smallest and they aren’t actually large until you get to super colossal. And Baker Creek is in Missouri, so they do much better with things like melons and eggplants than Northerners are likely to. But THAT at least they’re forthright about. The prices are fair. The service is good. And the selection is splendid: about 80 kinds of winter squash, really a lot of whacky eggplants, stuff like that.
Select seeds antique flowers: www.selectseeds.com. The name says it all, and although it IS mostly seeds, this is also a good place to get small plants of unusual tender things like blue-flowered thunbergia, a fancy ( and alas rather fussy) relative of good old black eyed Susan vine.
Arrowhead Alpines: www.arrowheadalpines.com. This guy is a master of that esoteric artform: the fabulously cranky plant catalog. It’s all text, no drawings or photos. No common names. There are no climate zones. Pot sizes are hinted at but not always given and not guaranteed. You pays yer money – which tends to be quite a lot of it, especially after you add in the shipping – and you gets what they have to send you. The kicker of course is that what they have to send you is all sorts of rare treats, grown by genuine plant nuts who really love their metier.
Responses.
As promised, more on keeping the deer from driving you to a garden composed entirely of barberries and gravel:
* Smelly rope trick: Instead of ( or in addition to ) spraying, you can soak cotton clothesline in odor based repellent and run it as deer nose level fencing around your perennial beds. Easiest installation is through eye hooks screwed into wooden posts, but if you use cup hooks for the running length and thumb-latches at the ends, it’s easy to remove the string and resoak it from time to time.
* A loose dog (confined by an invisible fence) works very well – assuming you choose a dog that doesn’t do more damage than the deer do. But it only works in good weather because it only works when the dog is out there. And of course high maintenance does not even begin to describe it. This is really just a suggestion to consider springing for the fence if you already HAVE a dog.
* Wireless fence: described and sold at wirelessdeerfence.com. This is a set of posts that attract deer, then deliver a painful shock that teaches them to stay away. Same principle as a baited electric fence and – according to the manufacturer – just as effective without all that wire.
* Hunting. If you don’t like the idea of guns on the property, consider putting out the word that bow-hunters would be welcome. Unlike the deer, whose population numbers are exploding, hunters are an endangered species. Average age is somewhere around 50, but they are still around
* Community action: Deer lovers in some communities have instituted sterilization programs. And who knows? King Canute did not have notable success at the ocean’s edge, but maybe he didn’t throw enough money at the project. You can read about one effort in this direction – and see pictures of doctors operating on the deer – here.
* Permanent Fencing ( in the end that’s where you always wind up), is well if dauntingly described by ATTRA, which also goes over a great deal else.
Note: In fairness, it should be said that Canute knew he would fail, he was just trying to prove his human limitations to a bunch of sycophants.
Today I come to you directly from a jolly therapy session; half an hour of poking around at our big orange jasmine, scraping off the scale. The therapy is for the plant, not me – those houseplant gurus are thinking wishfully when they say this kind of screwing around has a calming effect. But it does remind me to remind you to go peer closely at your indoor greenery for signs of unwanted life. Midwinter is explosion time for aphids, whiteflies and scale. Like all of us, the plants have had it with short dark days and dry stale air.
The jasmine, a murraya, actually, is also getting a course of drenchings with insecticidal soap. You know the drill: Put the plant in the tub. Spray the hell out of it, being sure to get the undersides of the leaves. Leave it in place overnight. Next day, put a sheet of plastic over the pot surface to protect the soil, weight it with a few shampoo bottles or whatever, so it doesn’t slip, then draw the curtains and give the plant a long, gentle, tepid shower.
Is that it? No it’s not. Once there are enough bugs to see, there are enough bugs to breed, and it usually takes 2 or 3 treatments to get rid of them. Why bother? In the case of the murraya, fragrant flowers all year round, in batches every couple of months. The full name is Murraya paniculata, and they are not all that uncommon – I got mine at a local nursery that offers them every winter.
BTW, the shower part is a good idea even for plants that don’t have bugs… not only will they look better without dust, they’ll be able to absorb more sunlight. Needless to say, this advice does not apply to cactus or to damp-hating succulents like aloes and jades.
* Nothing like fooling around with the houseplants to make you want to head outdoors, to refill the birdfeeder if nothing more. And while we’re out here, allow me to recommend the hanging wire mesh conical collapsing basket model, currently playing at a hardware store near you. They’re terrif: unobtrusive, welcoming to multiple birds and difficult for squirrels to get at – — also hard for larger perching birds, as we discovered by watching one poor female cardinal ( the winter’s loveliest bird, in my opinion) swooping hopefully by the sides without being able to land. To solve this problem , stick a few lengths of thin bamboo stake through the mesh, letting them protrude just a few inches on each side. As long as you choose a very thin stakes, the perches are too flimsy to support anything bigger than a bird.
* And finally, a nice tidbit for lovers of Jamaican food: there is suddenly quite a bit of goat meat around, probably a happy outgrowth of the goat cheese boom. This is not tender young kid, it’s grown goat. Wonderful for curries and stews, but tough and I do mean tough. You’d think a 2 inch piece of anything would get tender after 2 and a half hours of stewing, but if you were thinking about goat you’d be wrong. Don’t forget to start dinner early.
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.
