mears garden: August 11, 2019 moving forward

August

I would like to think that the summer heat is behind us. Maybe I am just reacting to several cooler mornings this past week. I call it sleeping weather. You can have the windows open all night. This brings the bird sounds into the house when you are going to sleep.
Who is awake and making sounds at 10 o'clock?
Friday night there were owls. The was one owl that must have been right there in the front yard in one of the big trees. It would make its call. Moments later there would be answers from actually several different directions. This must have gone on for 15 minutes.

Wildlife- There is a scorecard for the garden.
Owls are good. Deer are bad. Ducks are bad. Foxes are good. Raccoons are bad. I think we just found where the raccoons have been living. It is under a neighbors back porch. As they say, steps will now be taken. I just want to be sure they are not removed from that location and go far away.
A neighbor swears she saw a mink. I do not know about that.

It is in the mornings that I mostly see the garden these days. After work there is dinner preparation. By the time the kitchen is cleaned up after dinner I am ready to collapse.
I should add that with cooler temperatures it is comfortable to go out and weed at 8 in the evening.

Mornings are getting shorter. Sunrise this morning is at 6:10. It is pitch dark at 5:30 as I add some final comments to this week's post.
Gone are the days when I could be out in the garden by 5:15.
But that is how it goes. It is not as if complaining would make any difference.

Friday I had to drive to Mason City. That is about 160 miles north and west from Iowa City. While that was even more exhausting that usual, it did give me a chance to see how beautiful Iowa can be.
This is helped by the fact that north central Iowa there has been plenty of rain. After several trips north in the last month it seems that there are intentional plantings of wildflower mixes in more places than I remembered. The beebalm and the black eyed Susans make a wonderful combination.

We had two small rains this week. (There was a third at 4:30 this morning. ) While they were not large amounts, they did give a break from watering. The cloudburst in the morning on Thursday came to about a quarter of an inch and came out of nowhere. It was appreciated even while I worried about windows being left open at home. (There was no harm.)

There are still a few daylilies, which are even more appreciated as there season ends.

This one below is really nice. It is Lady Neva. She does not get enough sun where she is at the moment. I will move her as soon as she finishes blooming.

Now for the gems, and they are gems.
Let me show more of the Pardancandas.
They are actually in the iris family. They bloom starts in mid July and lasts a month.
If you would like to know more about them here is a link

https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/143433/Pardancanda%20norrisii%20Alyssa%20Schell.pdf?sequence=1

The first ones I got for the garden were the orange ones. They I got the yellow ones. They there were these great combinations of colors.

I added this picture so you could see the foliage of these plants.

I should add that the seed is quite fertile. I get new plants all over, including in the garden paths.
I have made a point of informing myself of where particular colors are located. That way when the seed becomes available I can label it by color.

I have now learned about the hybridized varieties of these plants. I have obtained several from Joe Pye Weed Garden, a nursery I must one day visit, outside Boston. This was the same place where I obtained by double bloodroot.
Here is the link to their webcite.
http://www.jpwflowers.com/

By the way I checked. All their pardancandas are sold out for 2019. I will certainly plan on a significant order early next spring.
I will also carefully collect the seed from these special plants.

I showed you this one a week or so ago, which I think is called Summer Candy.

This one bloomed yesterday...or if it had bloomed a few days before that, I missed it.
It was cause for one of those exclamation moments in the garden.

I wish there was a way to explain the size. It is about twice as big as Summer Candy. It is maybe 2.5 inches across. It looks like a perfect miniature Siberian iris on a long stem.
I think the name is Lots of Fun.

One flower that is just about ready to start is the fall anemone.

Here is the first flower. There will be more.

I love the buds on the anemones.

Julia's recipe

Braised eggplant

Here is the link to all Julia's recipes that have appeared on the blog.
https://mearskitchen.wordpress.com/

This recipe is almost straight from the latest issue of Cook's Magazine, from an article entitled "What to Do with Eggplant." What indeed. There's eggplant spaghetti sauce and baba ganoush and eggplant salad and moussaka, just to name a few. But we are always in the market for new things to do with eggplant, and this certainly qualifies. It's easy, with a pretty limited set of ingredients and is ready, start to finish in about 45 minutes, some of which is time while the dish is simmering away by itself. Not fussy.

Here are the ingredients. For the braise, 2 Japanese eggplants maybe weighing in at 1 to 1-1/2 lbs. altogether (more on eggplant parameters later); 1-1/2 teaspoon smushed garlic; 1 teaspoon grated ginger; and 2 tablespoons of regular oil.

For the sauce, 1-1/4 cup water; 1/4 rice wine or dry sherry; 2 tablespoons soy sauce; 4 teaspoons white sugar; 1 tablespoon Asian garlic chili paste (or "broad bean chili paste", whatever that is); and 1 teaspoon cornstarch.

For the garnishing, 2 or 3 scallions sliced thin and 1/2 teaspoon toasted sesame oil

I started by whisking the sauce ingredients together in a bowl.

Then I prepared the eggplant. I cut a slice off both ends, cut the eggplants in half cross-wise and then cut each half in half length-wise. Last I cut each quarter into thinnish wedges - not uniform in size because eggplant does not play that game.

Next, I smushed the garlic and grated the ginger. I heated the oil in a big skillet and when the oil was hot-ish, I added the garlic and then the ginger and stirred until I could smell them both, maybe 1 or 2 minutes - on medium high heat. Then I dumped the eggplant in and spread it around.

As soon as the eggplant was in the pan, I gave the sauce one last whisk and poured it in.

I turned up the heat to high and brought the stuff to a boil. Then I reduced the heat so that the sauce was simmering, covered the pan (with a glass lid - handy for seeing what's going on) and set the timer for 15 minutes. At the end of that time, the eggplant had cooked down a bit so I could jiggle the pan and have the eggplant move into a single layer.

Then I uncovered the pan and let it cook for another 15 minutes to reduce the sauce. Actually, the sauce was still a bit soupy after that so I took the eggplant out (with a wide spatula, carefully, so as to avoid breaking the eggplant pieces) to the serving plate and turned the heat up so that the sauce boiled and reduced some more. It only took a couple of minutes.

I poured the reduced sauce over the eggplant, drizzled the little bit of toasted sesame oil next and then topped with the scallion bits.

This made a nice vegetarian main dish when served with rice. And salad and blueberries with yogurt.

This dish would also be a good side with baked chicken or grilled fish - a protein thing that is not highly seasoned so that the eggplant is the star, taste-wise.

A word about eggplant: don't use round ones. Or giant oblong ones. The Japanese ones are a nice size. You could also use smallish Italian ones - I like the mottled purple and white ones. But not big - the big ones are harder to cut into wedges and also tend to be seedy.

Happy Eggplant Season!

Odds and Ends

The evening after I write about cool evenings we had another warm night. That is what August is all about. Sometimes you get a glimpse of cooler days ahead. Sometimes not.

There is nothing better for the gardener during a dry period than an unexpected rain.

With our rain this morning at 4 am, I cannot wait to go look at our rain gauge. Do you have a rain gauge? I recommend one.

One hard to garden place is right next to the curb on the street. That is particularly where the hard clay will be located. I went to plant some annuals there on Fairview the other day. I could not get my trowel more than about 2 inches into the ground. So we reset the bed yesterday. Mostly I was the director. My garden helper Ron did the work.
Here is the end product.

Those are moss roses there at the moment. They were there before the makeover. I just dug them up and set them aside. They went back in after we were done.

I will put tulips there this fall. I can spend some enjoyable moments thinking about which ones.

Here is a picture of the hoya flower on the plant that came from my mother's kitchen.