July 12, 2020- Thinking about time

As the weather is hot and summer roles along, the days do get shorter.  You cannot help but think about time. I try to put those thoughts in the context of the garden.

Sometimes time is slow.
If I am waiting for a bud to open in a favorite plant, it can take forever.
The pink orchid cactus flower buds that bloomed this week seemed to take months to open.
Particularly when the weather is cool, flowers such as daffodils or a favorite tulip will bloom for weeks.
Winter is all about waiting for the weather to finally warm up so the snowdrops will come up.

Sometimes time is fast.
That same orchid cactus flower is gone after only one day.
If you do not see the flower when it blooms you just missed it.
You have to wait for another cycle to come around.
Or you have to wait for what is next in line.

Daylilies are special when it comes to time.
That wonderful daylily flower lasts one day.
But there are many many flowers.
Ruby Spider had about 25 scapes this year. (A scape is a stalk.)
Each had 5-6 flowers on it.
You can do the math.
But each day as you remove yesterday's spent flower, another day is done.
After maybe 10 days you get to the last flower on a particular scape. A few days after that there will be a last flower on the entire plant.
Then the plant is done for the year.
Pretty soon it will be winter.
Wait. Wait.
That was/is not the message here.

Daylily season is just that.
A season.
There are seasons before it.
There are seasons after it.

So what do you do with these thoughts, other than fill up the time between 4-5 a.m. while it is still dark?
You remember the seasons that are over, the flowers that have finished.
But the snowdrops will come again.
Spring is glorious.
But so is high summer.
There are late daylilies that are just now starting to bloom.
So what if July slips away.
At some point there will be toad lilies and tall anemones.

There is still much work to do.

Last Week

Here were the top two pictures in last week's voting.

This Week-once again you can vote for 2. 

You can do that by voting and then refreshing your browser and you can then vote a second time.

#1 Orchid Cactus fireworks

The video further down will show you the buds on this plant late on Tuesday afternoon. You just knew that after all that time spent waiting for the bud to do something, it was going to bloom that night. It was not yet fully open at 10 when I went to bed. Here is what it looked like at 5 a.m.
I put both this picture and the next one in this section because I really did not know which I preferred. I thought you might have views. Of course since you have two votes, you can vote for both.

#2 Orchid Cactus in daylight

#3 Red Coneflower

I do not know if there has ever been a flower that was so red. There were some poppies that came close.
I begin to think about entire garden beds of just different coneflowers.

#4 Yellow trumpet lily

A good deal of the garden this week was about 6 feet high. That is where these later lilum bloom. It seemed that the yellow ones go first. Now the bronze and pink ones are starting.

#5 Pink Oriental lily

This one is probably called Spain. I have had it for quite a while. It comes back every year, despite only getting 4-5 hours of morning sun.

#6 Mears own hybrid daylily

It is so easy to breed your own daylilies. Since they are only open for one day you just take the pollen from the stamen from one plant and put it on the pistil of the other one. When the flower is done you cut the flower part off. But you only do that leaving about an inch above the place where it meets the stem.
When I was obsessing about daylilies in the 1990's I would try different crosses.
If fertilization worked you would know that in a week. A seed pod would have begun to form.
I would harvest the seed and plant it the next spring. In 3 years, if you were lucky, there would be a new flower. There really is nothing quite so exciting as waiting for that first flower to open. Will it be interesting or will it be mud.
This particular flower was sort of interesting.

#7 Daylily Volcanic Explosion

There are a lot of daylilies so there are a lot of names.
I have had this daylily for about 20 years.

#8 Pizzazz, the lily

Up there about six feet is one of my favorite lilies.
Pizzazz, not to be confused with Pizzazz the hosta.

#9 Robert Batt- the daylily

This daylily is enormous. If I had gotten this one a few years before I got Ruby Spider they might have exchanged positions in the garden.

#10 The blackest daylily

Posing for the picture required a little help.
A second flower was in the way.
I have several black daylilies. This one is about the blackest.
The center is really amazing.
I have cropped the picture, which appears in the bonus section.



There you have it. There are so many plants blooming at the moment.
Which do you prefer?

Bonus pictures

The week featured the long awaited bloom of the pink orchid cactus.

Here is the video from 7:15 p.m. on the afternoon before it bloomed.

Here is the video from 1:15 p.m. from the day it bloomed. The bloom was pretty much over by the end of the day. It was a hot one.

The rope hoya was at its peak this past week. I counted 18 blooming flower clusters at the time of this picture.












Here is the cropped black daylily.





Here were some of the daylilies blooming yesterday.

Julia's recipe

Cucumber Salad #2

I always make cucumber salad with sour cream - salted and pressed cucumbers (with the addition of a bit of thinly sliced onion or scallion) mixed, post-pressing, with sour cream and a little vinegar and black pepper and paprika. It's delicious, and I posted the recipe (from my grandmother) early in this blog-making. But what if you have cucumbers and no sour cream? In these days of restricted travel, even to the grocery store, one needs to make do. Hence cucumber salad #2, for such times.



The ingredients are few: cucumber (in my case one big English cucumber), enough to make 4 cups os thin slices; 1 tablespoon kosher salt; 1 tablespoon of sugar; 1/2 cup of vinegar - cider or even white distilled: no need to break out the good stuff; 1/2 teaspoon black pepper. That's it.





















If you have a food processor, this is a good time to use it.

I washed the cucumber (it came from the farmer's market). Then I took some of the cucumber peel off, in alternating stripes along the length of the cucumber and cut the ends off.

Then I ran the cucumber through the slicing function of the food processor and ended up with about 4 cups of thin slices.

If you don't have a giant English cucumber, you will need 2 or 3 medium-sized specimens. Don't use huge fat cucumbers which will be too seedy. You can fully peel the cucumbers if they seem to have traveled far on their way to your kitchen. Farmers market cucumbers have tender peels. The alternating stripes of light and dark green make for a pretty salad.






After I had my thin slices, I dumped them into a colander and mixed in the salt. I put the colander in a rimmed pan.




















Then I put a big yogurt container lid on top of the slices and weighed it down with the canister of sugar.

If you don't have a suitably sized lid, you could use a piece of waxed paper or foil or parchment. The pressure of the weight will not be as evenly distributed, but that's okay as long as you remember to take the weight off and stir up the slices to redistribute them from time to time.

Let the cucumbers sit for at least 1 hour; 2 hours would be better. You should check part way through because there will be a shocking amount of cucumber juice which should be poured out into the sink.











After the cucumbers were wilted, I mixed the dressing: whisking together the vinegar, sugar and pepper.
























I dumped the wilted cucumber slices into the dressing and put the bowl in the refrigerator for about an hour. The slices wilted some more in the vinegar bath.























I drained the slices again (discarding the vinegar dressing) and put the slices in a serving bowl. Cool, tangy and still a bit salty.

We served the salad with lamb chops and baked sweet potato and melon. It has been a good year for cantaloupe in our part of the world.

Summer cucumbers are seasonal treat - so much better than the waxed and shipped ones in the winter. Eat lots of them!

Odds and Ends

There are lots of jack in the pulpit seed pods in the garden right now. They will turn red over the next month.
















There are milestones in any garden season.
This week the Sycamore tree has started shredding its bark.
Sometimes I have to actually rake up the pieces which can be 8-10 inches long at times.
I really needed that one more thing to do.

With the Orchid Cactus flowers over,  what comes next?
Well, the regular cactus flowers are coming.
Those little white things are buds.
I know the pot is broken.
Repotting a cactus is way down on the to do list.






The continuing plant sale to support local food banks...continues.
We have raised over $1200 at this point.
Yesterday there was this nice article about the garden and the sale.

https://www.press-citizen.com/story/life/2020/07/10/judy-terry-green-thumb-shady-sanctuary-with-a-sunny-side/5410939002/

That was a nice way to close the week.
Be safe.
Philip