Week #1 of the contest November 29, 2020

Welcome to the Mears Garden Winter picture contest, a yearly feature of the Mears Garden blog since 2006. It is one small way to  get through the winter.

Each week for the next 13 weeks I will give you 5 picture contestants from the 2020 Mears garden (mostly outdoor; occasionally indoor). You get to vote for the one you like best. There is voting in a poll that is on the right. (If you are viewing this on your phone you will have to go to the bottom and select "view web version".) Voting takes place throughout the week.

At the end of 13 weeks there will be playoffs featuring the weekly winners and a few wildcards. 

Also each week there are bonus pictures, sometimes related to the particular contestants.

Julia adds a recipe each week, something she has done since 2016, when she began providing recipes to maintain our sanity. All of her recipes can be found on their own separate blog, organized by our daughter Katie.

https://mearskitchen.wordpress.com/

For those of you new to the blog there is an archive of blog posts at the right, which goes back to July 2007. There you can review all of the contests since that date. What else is there to do in the winter?

Along the way we talk gardens and flowers and sometimes whatever comes to mind. I particularly appreciate hearing from you, beyond your vote. You can do that with the "comments" section at the bottom of each post. With many readers I send you a weekly email, announcing the post. Some people choose to respond by email. If you wish to receive that email, let me know at philip.mears@gmail.com.

Let me say a few more things about what you will find in the weekly blog.

In addition to the picture contestants I have a 'bonus section.' In that section I add pictures and commentary, mostly related to the different contestants.

I sometimes have a section called 'right now'. In that section I talk about what is happening in the garden 'right now.'

Finally there is the closing section called 'Odds and ends.' That is where I add anything that does not fit elsewhere.

With that introduction, here are the first contestants.

Week #1

#1 Oncidium Orchid 

(January 1. 2020)

In a contest with pictures from garden year 2020, I figured I would start with a picture from January 1. The orchid is an Oncidium. The name is probably Twinkle White. 

Orchids are a real part of the garden. They spend the summer outside. If you have a shade garden, orchids are a natural. Some even bloom while outside. What is particularly nice is that just when the outside garden has shut down, along come the orchids. 

I do not have a greenhouse. You do not need one to grow orchids. I have several light stands, some more professional than others. The orchids probably do better with this artificial light. (With many orchids a bright window is sufficient.) 

The orchids and many other plants use these lights during the winter. I call it "winter," but it is really the "inside season." In Iowa this lasts from the middle of October until early May. Gosh that seems like a long time. I have maybe 30 orchids. Maybe about a dozen are what I refer to as old reliable orchids. This Oncidium is one of those. These reliables do well in the conditions I can provide. They rebloom every year. This one blooms around Christmas.

With this plant the tiny blooms appear on stems that are called "spikes." The spikes on this plant start during the summer.

In the bonus section of this post there is a picture of this plant from December 20, 2014. You can see how it has grown.

#2 Hosta Liberty with bluebells

 (April 30, 2020)

At this time of the year when the garden has mostly turned brown, this picture warms my spirit. Hosta are a major feature in the garden. If you only had to have one hosta, I would recommend Liberty. It grows to a good size, and has such wonderful color. It grows rather quickly and holds up well to the elements. 

And then there are bluebells. The bonus section will give you a feel for what they are like. Bluebells appear in early April. For a month they dominate the garden. I do not remember ever buying bluebells. Some of them must have been here when we moved in almost 40 years ago. (38 years to be exact.) But there was not much of a garden then. Bluebells spread over time. 

What can I tell you about bluebells.

Bluebells last about a month. Then they die back until the next year.  

They grow from tubers, that look a little like a small carrot.

The bulbs are deep enough that you can plant annuals right over top of them when they have finished.

They start out with a little bit of pink.

You can dig them up right when they emerge in the spring. You can then move them someplace else in the garden. They will also pot up rather easily, such as for an early spring plant sale.

They grow to about 12-15 inches tall. I do have to move any plants that are too close to other short plants. Liberty is an ideal size to coexist with the bluebells. 

#3 Red Iceland Poppy 

(May 27, 2020)

I have grown Iceland poppies for a quite a few years. I grow them from seed. Mostly they are annuals. I say that because they sometimes are listed as a tender perennial. I had 2 survive this past winter. Why those? Who knows.

The flowers are some of the best in the garden. This red one has appeared before in contests. It will be no big surprise but there will be more Iceland poppies in the contest over the next 3 months. 

I thought I would lead with this wonderful red.

What is your favorite color in a flower? This bright red is certainly one of mine.

I try to plant the seeds in the first week of January. 

That means that it actually is time to get the seed. Buying seeds does give you an appreciation of the past turning into the future.

These annual poppies do want sun. 

I find they bloom in May but really will not last the summer. Too bad.

UPDATE: I obtained my Iceland poppy seeds Friday. I will start them right around January 1. That is really not that far away.

#4 Black daylily 

(July 11, 2020)

Daylilies carry the garden from late June to August. One favorite is this really black daylily. The black is particularly good with that yellow center.

The era of daylily enthusiasm in the garden was 1995-2005. I kept track not only of names and dates planted, but even the number of "scapes." Scapes are the long stems on which the group of daylilies grow. A scape might have anywhere from 4-10 flowers.

Daylilies do require a decent amount of sun. That is at a premium in our garden as we have many mature trees. "High shade" is the term.

#5 Tri color crocus 

(March 17, 2020)

I long for spring bulbs to appear. Sometimes they actually show up as early as February. The first two bulbs that emerge are snowdrops and aconite. They are white and yellow. The flowers/bulbs with the first real color would be the crocuses. 

This little beauty is actually named "tricolor." This bloomed in 2020 on March 17. The first recorded crocus in 2020 was on March 3. That is not so far away.

There you have the 5 contestants for this first week. Sometimes if the contestants include a "ringer," I can predict the winner for the week. I challenge you to not only think about which picture you like the most, but to also consider which picture you think will get the most votes.

But seriously I really like to hear back from each of you. I not only want you vote, but also some of your thoughts. Consider either commenting or replying to the emails I send out. If you do not get those emails, and wish to, let me know and I will add you to the email list. My email address is philip.mears@gmail.com.

 I think you can also subscribe to the blog by entering your email address near the top of the blog on the right.

Bonus section

Each week I add extra pictures, often related to the contestants.

Here for example is the Oncidium from December, 2014.

This is a closeup of the tiny flowers.

The plant did get to be the center piece for our dining room table.

Here is this year's centerpiece for Thanksgiving.

Here was the first crocus of 2020. It bloomed on March 3. I do not think it is coincidental that it was white, the color of snowdrops. You wonder if brighter colors would attract critters that would eat it.

I do understand that snowdrops and aconite do not taste good. That makes so much sense. The good tasting early bulbs were naturally unselected rather early on.

Here are more bluebell pictures.

I cannot wait until the bluebells appear again.

Here is a cropped picture of the center of the black daylily.

Right Now in the garden

In this part of the blog I talk about what is going on in the garden (as extended into the house), 

I still have a few herbs, grown this summer in our rented sunny garden plot. It was nice to be part of a community garden. You got to see what other people were growing. You could watch as their tomatoes also got away from them.

Pansies grow in the fall, not really caring about frosts. It will have to get down to maybe 10 to end their blooming runs.

They also mostly survive the winters. They might be perennials if it were not for the heat of the summer.

I planted many fall crocuses in September. They have lived up to expectations.

Hellebores can sometimes set buds late in the fall. This does not happen often. Sometimes it has even bloomed at Thanksgiving. One plant is close this year. This picture was taken yesterday as the temperature got into the mid 50's.

It is to get cold in the next few days. It could get to 15 at night. That might be a challenge for these buds. Maybe I will do a controlled experiment. I will leave one on the plant and bring the other inside. I think the bud is mature enough that it will bloom if I bring it in. I will let you know.

Julia's recipe 

Cranberry lime pie

Every once in a while a food enthusiasm arises at Thanksgiving. I remember some years ago it was brussels sprouts. I was shopping at the Co-op during the few days before Thanksgiving, with a bag of sprouts in my cart, when the produce manager stopped me to ask why was there a run on brussels sprouts? I answered that roasting with olive oil and kosher salt was now a thing. Which it was and we have served them ever since.  

This year it seems to be cranberry pie. There are recipes in Cook's Illustrated, the NYTimes, and Parade magazine (the weekend newspaper insert). And also in the Iowa City Press-Citizen, where the recipe is credited to the epicurious website. I made the one from the IC P-C, with a few simplifications. The pie was not too sweet (because of the lime) and different. The crumb crust was crisp and flavorful.  

Here are the ingredients. 

First the crust: 4 oz. of store-bought gingersnaps (I used Pepperidge Farm which had the advantage of tasting really good, as there are leftover cookies); 1 cup of pecans (pieces are fine); 3 tablespoons of brown sugar; and 4 tablespoons of melted butter. 

The filling: 1 can of jellied cranberry sauce (not whole berries); 2 whole eggs and 2 egg yolks; 1 teaspoon of lime zest; 1 teaspoon of lemon zest; 1/2 cup of lime juice and 8 tablespoons of butter.  

I forgot to cut one of the sticks of butter in half before the picture. You will need a total of 1-1/2 sticks of butter for the entire operation. 

 

I started by melting 4 tablespoons of the butter over low heat. While that was going on, I put the rest of the piecrust ingredients into the food processor. 4 oz. of gingersnap cookies turned out to be 6 or 7. Figuring out how many cookies you will need will be a math exercise: net weight of the contents of the box divided by number of cookies will give you weight per cookie; then multiply to figure out how many cookies gets you to 4 oz. I recently bought a small non-battery-powered kitchen scale. No math for me. 

I zizzed up the cookies and pecans and brown sugar until they were finely ground and then drizzled in the melted butter. 

I turned the oven on to 350 degrees. 

And I cracked the eggs, separated the 2 yolks I needed (saving the whites for another use) and cut up the stick of butter into little pieces - all for later.

I dumped the contents of the food processor into a 9" pie pan, and I used a measuring cup to tamp down the crumbs and mash them up the sides of the pie pan. 

I baked the crust in a 350 degree for about 10 minutes until the crust looked set and the upper edges looked a little bit browned. 

I let it cool on the counter as I turned my attention to the filling. 

This is where I parted company with the newspaper recipe, which wanted me to make cranberry sauce from fresh cranberries with a reduced amount of water and the usual sugar and then zizz them in the food processor and then strain them through a sieve. Too much work. 

I bought a can of jellied cranberry sauce. I zizzed it in the food processor (because, true to form, it came out of the can in a perfect cylinder). I did not wash or rinse out the food processor. A few crumbs of the crust did not matter at all. Next, I constructed a double boiler by putting a bowl into a pot with about an inch of water in the bottom. The idea is to have the bowl above the water level. I turned the heat on to low-medium. I poured/scraped the cranberry puree into the bowl, set the bowl over the water and whisked the eggs (and egg yolks) in one at a time. 

Then I whisked in the lime zest and the lemon zest and the lime juice. 

On further reflection, I think 1/3 cup of lime juice would do it. The pie was a bit tart which was fine, but I think it would work well with a bit less lime juice. The zests are good as specified. 

Here's the thing - cranberries are so tart that they require a fair amount of sugar to be palatable. But that makes for a somewhat one dimensional flavor. So the sweetness needs to be cut by something more bracing. This is why we like cranberry orange relish better than straight-up cranberry sauce. And why we like rhubarb pie to include a generous amount (say 1-1/2 teaspoons) of orange zest. 

Back to the pie. 

I cooked and stirred the cranberry/egg/citrus mixture in the double boiler for maybe 8 minutes. It actually thickened a bit by the end of that time. 

Then I carefully (using potholders) lifted the bowl out of the pot of hot water and put it on a trivet. 

While I was thinking about it, I put the pie crust into the refrigerator at that point to make sure it would cool more or less completely.

I plopped in the butter pieces, a few bits at a time, whisking in the bits before adding more. There was enough retained heat in the mixture to melt all the butter, although the amount of time it took to whisk the bits in lengthened as I went along. 

I poured the filling into the pie crust, covered the top with a piece of saran wrap and put it in the refrigerator for a couple of hours. 

Here it is out of the refrigerator. 

And here it is on the plate with whipped cream. 

The gingerbread-pecan-brown sugar and butter crust was very good. I think that using a store-bought cookie crust or graham cracker crust would be just fine. 

The pie held up well - as custard pies do. It tided us over until Thanksgiving when more pies appeared on the menu. Pie is festive, especially with whipped cream. 

Odds and Ends

Friday I bought some Iceland poppy seed along with some Shirley poppies. I will start them right after the first of the year. Several Iceland poppies actually made it through the summer and still show some green. I will be interested in seeing if they make it through the winter.

I grow a tropical plant called a croton. That is one of my enthusiasms at the moment. I have about 10 varieties. Some are still small. Some are 4 foot tall. Many live in the living room for the winter. When they come inside often they experience leaf drop. But I have been there often enough to know they will put out new growth. That is happening now.

Particularly over the winter I grow some plants from cuttings. I do that in the outdoor season with annuals, such as impatiens. Over the winter I try to start more crotons and this year, a few hoyas. Here is one little croton. It took almost a month to start growing roots. I can move it to dirt when the roots are a little bigger.

Hoyas are good. Hoya enthusiasm is right around the corner for me.

It was 50 degrees yesterday, as a high temperature. It will be 30 degrees tomorrow, as a high. It seems like that happens every Thanksgiving. The warm weather lasted for a long time. But it had to end. I can remember years when the drop off would include snow.

It really must be time for the cold season. We went for a walk yesterday, on a path just south of the Coralville dam. We counted eagles. They are back.

We counted 8. Two are in this picture. Look for tiny bits of white high up in the trees - eagle's heads. 

That is it for this week.

I hope you have enjoyed this first week of the contest. I do appreciate hearing from you.

Be safe. We know better times are coming. We just have to make it a little bit longer.

Philip

November 22, 2020 getting ready for the contest and giving thanks

Thanksgiving is this week. 

It is a time to give thanks, as best we can.

Let me make a list.

It is not snowing.

We are not sick. (I say this quietly.)

The garden was good this year. 

There are many things to anticipate in the springtime. That is really only a little over 3 months away. (I suppose that depends on how you think about late February.)

And the person, who will not be named, has been voted out of office.

The picture contest is coming.

I started writing this yesterday, very early on a very dark Saturday morning. I have been selecting pictures for the contest for about a week. That contest preparation requires me to revisit the last year. That makes me think about time. Sometimes I think we spend too much time either in the future or the past. Whatever happened to right now.

This is not just a lead into some depressive rant about politics or the pandemic. I actually want to talk about the garden. In particular I want to discuss the Picture Contest. 

I have had a garden picture contest each winter for a long time. It started so long ago that the exact year becomes fuzzy. Actually I am relatively certain it was 2006. (I looked in the archives of this blog, which is available on the right side near the top. I looked at November 2009. That post said the fourth picture contest was starting.) The first year it was conducted by email. Do some of you remember that far back? Then the blog started. This allowed paperless voting. 

In the contest you vote for a picture of the week, each week. The pictures come from the garden during the calendar year that is ending. The winners each week then have playoffs at the end of 3 months, with a picture of the year being chosen. By that time winter is supposed to be over. (It usually is.)

The contest requires me to look through all my pictures for the year. I then select 60-70 pictures for perhaps 13 weeks of voting. That of course brings back the memories of the entire year. And what a year it has been. That is true for the garden and the country.

What would be the highlights for 2020?

Pandemic. Derecho. Election. New granddaughter. Katie graduated seminary and was ordained a priest. We couldn't attend any of that good stuff.

This summer we added a little sunny garden plot, rented from the city. We grew tomatoes. 

For months we sold plants  in the back driveway for the local food pantries. Maggie started coming to dinner again (at the far end of the table) after 6 months away due to pandemic anxiety.

April 9, 2020

City garden plots at Chadek Park

 Christopher 

Maisie

There is still life in the garden. 

The hellebores are really growing. They become islands of green in a garden that has already turned brown.

The amazing thing is that every few years a hellebore bloom...at Thanksgiving.

Right on schedule I found this bud yesterday. Then I noticed a second bud and a third. Since the warmer temperatures are going to be with us this next week, I think it will really bloom on Thanksgiving.

Of course there is snow in the forecast for Sunday. It is that time.

Some of the epimedium also stay green, well into the fall.

Islands of green.

We do have a center piece for the table on Thursday. This cattleya has so many flowers, that will keep blooming for weeks.

This picture was taken on Friday, November 20, when the sun was out.

If you want fall interest in your garden fall crocuses are one thing to do. I planted these in late September.

I actually did not notice the tiny little white crocuses until I just now saw them in the picture. Can you see them? I hope the sun will come out tomorrow so I can give them some attention.

Julia's recipe 

Spicy pork-noodle dish: Mapo Ragu

Mapo ragu is the name given this dish by the New York Times cooking website. Ragu is an Italian word, meaning sauce, usually meat sauce, for pasta. Okay. Mapo is a Sichuan word meaning pockmarked grandmother. Huh? The web tells us (I looked it up) that there is a traditional and spicy Sichuan dish called mapo tofu, with a sauce including both tofu and meat served over noodles of some kind. So this name appears to be a goof on the name of the Sichuan dish. There are several backstories to explain the pockmarked grandmother, centering on it being her recipe. No explanation for the pockmarks nor, for that matter, the grandmother identification. I am sure the grandmother would have preferred not to be remembered for a skin condition. History can be cruel. So too naming in general. Someday I may talk about the naming of animals. For example the lesser kudu or the tawny frogmouth. But I digress.   

Here are the ingredients: 4 tablespoons vegetable oil; 4 cups (!) sliced onions; 1 lb. ground pork; 1 teaspoon smushed garlic (about 4 or 5 cloves, depending on size); 1/2 of a 14-16 oz. package of rice sticks or other rice noodles; 1 tablespoon grated fresh ginger; 1 tablespoon soy sauce; 1 tablespoon brown sugar; about 2 cups roughly chopped kale; maybe 1/2 teaspoon of kosher salt and 3 tablespoons garlic-chili paste. Plus about 1/4 cup thinly sliced scallions to garnish. 

The recipe specified Korean gochujang chili bean paste. I am pretty sure that's not what I had. I did have garlic-chili paste, and the dish tasted great. I say use whatever Asian garlic-chili product you have.  

 

I started by prepping the onions, garlic and ginger. 

I heated 3 tablespoons of the oil in a big skillet and then added the onions plus the kosher salt. I turned the heat down and let the onions cook for about 15 minutes, stirring occasionally.

While the onions were cooking, I washed, de-stemmed and roughly chopped the kale. And I cleaned and sliced the scallions.

Here are the onions, reduced in volume and turning golden brown. 

I put the onions in a bowl. I added the 4th tablespoon of oil to the skillet and then the pork. I broke it up and cooked it over medium heat, just until it stopped being pink. 

I added the cooked pork to the bowl of onions. 

Next, I added the ginger and garlic to the skillet and stirred them around (medium heat) for a couple of minutes. 

Then I added the soy sauce, brown sugar, and garlic-chili paste. More stirring. I added about 1/2 cup of water. Still more stirring. 

Then I dumped the onions and pork back into the skillet; stirred again and turned on a big pot of water to cook the rice sticks. 

As the water was coming to a boil, I added the kale to the skillet, stirred it around, added another 1/2 cup of water and put a lid on. It took about 5 or 6 or 7 minutes for the kale to wilt. Other greens can be used, and so wilting times will vary. 

When the water boiled, I added the 1/2 package of rice sticks. The rice sticks cook in less than 5 minutes. Thicker rice noodles will take a little longer. Govern yourself accordingly.

When the rice sticks were done, I spread them on the bottom of a serving bowl, poured the sauce on top and garnished with the scallions. 

This is a pleasantly spicy dish. And a one-dish meal -starch, protein and vegetables all in one. Apparently, one can add Sichuan peppercorns (I don't have them in my spice rack) which kicks up the spiciness considerably. 

You will observe that this is a gluten-free dish (if you are careful about your choice of soy sauce). It could become vegan by substituting diced firm tofu for the pork. I would add the tofu to the spiced sauce with the onions near the end. It reheats nicely for lunch.  

Odds and Ends

It was a difficult year for trees in Iowa. "Derecho" was the name for this inland hurricane we had in Iowa in August. Iowa City was spared the worst. There was still considerable damage, not to mention the 4+ days without power. But Maisie was born early in the morning after our power came back late the night before. It was a real reason to celebrate.

We pay attention to the trees on our morning walks before work.

This is one of our favorite trees along that walk.

Here is out little garden plot after a few weeks this spring. Lettuce was rewarding, not only growing in the spring, but also growing from a second planting in the fall. We intend to have some on Thanksgiving.

A community garden is really interesting to belong to. You can see what other people are growing. Someone grew waterlilies. Of course I was about the only person who grew amaryllis.

You can meet some of those people. 

Not everyone keeps their plot in tip top shape. 

We will absolutely do it again. This coming year we will not grow as many cherry tomato plants.

I have about 8 uncarved pumpkins, in the garage, waiting for the really cold weather to arrive. That point is when the temperatures stay below freezing.

At that point we can carve them and hang them up in the trees for the entire winter.

Here are the two front porch carved pumpkins. They are starting to sag a little.

Be safe. Enjoy your Thanksgiving in a responsible way. Give thanks that a new day is coming. At some point there will be hugs again.

And join us again this winter to celebrate the year in pictures.

Pictures are from the past. They can provide a bridge to the future.

Philip