Week #4- December 20, 2020- more light is coming

More light is coming. 

I looked it up. The Winter solstice this year is at 4:02 am central standard time on Monday December 21, 2020. From that point on the days will get longer. It may be hard to tell. But it will be there.

This week was colder,  with it seemed like hardly any sun. It was dry, which is about the best. By the end of the week it had gotten above freezing. The 3-4 inches of snow from last weekend was disappearing in places. Yesterday I even went out and did a little of yard cleanup. Yes there are still so many leaves around. I looked for early snowdrops but did not see any.

This past Week in the contest your winner was Henryi, the clematis. This was its first appearance in the picture contest. It is a glorious flower. I makes you want to find a trellis and get some more clematis.

Here was the full vote:

We are now up to Week #4.

Invite your friends. Don't be shy. 

#1 Red and Yellow tulip

 April 28, 2020

Red by itself is good. Bright yellow is good. When they get together the result can be grand.

Tulips are perhaps the best known of all the spring bulbs. There are tulip festivals. There was of course 'tulip mania'. 

The other choice for the best known spring bulb would be the daffodil. See contestant #4. Judging by the number of pages in the bulb catalogues tulips and daffodils have about the same number of varieties and popularity.

Certainly tulips come in more colors.

I have a few tulips in the garden. The more colorful ones are short lived. Most are good for one year and that is it. But there are a few individual plants that for what ever reason come back year after year. 

This flower is one of the long lived ones. 

 

#2  Yellow and White Lantana 

May 25, 2020

Lantana is a wonderful annual flower. That means it does not survive the winter. But it will bloom from May to October, giving you some of the most interesting patterns of color.

I bought plants this year in May. 

#3 Blue Siberian Iris 

June 1, 2020

Blue.

Sometimes on this blog I have had team competitions. I let the colors compete with each other. How would you pick if your choice was red flowers versus blue ones?

How close would yellow be? Black? White?

Do those same color preferences carry over to what you wear? What color car you have?

This glorious blue appearing today in a Siberian Iris. Siberian Iris time is a great time in the garden.

That time is part of the great Iris spectrum in the garden.

Iris really are special. You already had the bearded iris in Week 2.

Iris bloom lasts for almost 4 months in the garden. That is longer than any other flower except the annuals. There are little iris bulbs in April. The bearded iris last from there until early June. The Siberian iris bloom for maybe 3 weeks, and then there are the Louisiana and Japanese iris. All are part of the same genus, but all very different. 

#4 White Daffodil 

April 26, 2020

I picked this picture in part because of its simplicity. All that white and then the colorful center.

Daffodils are about the best. They come in many shapes. They reliably come back every year. With the right conditions they will multiply.

And they taste bad. Deer will mostly leave them along. (They will go right to the tulips. I do have to spray tulips when deer are around.)

Did you know that daffodils and tulips have different chemical compositions. If you pick flowers to come inside in the spring you are not to put daffodils and tulips in the same container. Something will happen that I understand is not good. Who knew?

#5 Orange Asiatic lily

 June 18, 2020

Asiatic lilies are the first of the lilium to bloom. They can be some of the most colorful. 

There also can be spots. 

With their arrival you know high summer has started.

There are your contestants for Week 4. Have fun. Tell me why you liked the one you picked. Daffodil or tulip? Or will blue be the big winner?

Bonus Pictures

Tulips

I do not have the space for mass planting of tulips. For that you will have to go to a botanical garden, (I have been to quite a few) or I suppose to Pella. (I have never been there.) (For the non-Iowans, it's a town south of Des Moines settled by Dutch immigrants in the nineteenth century. Hence the tulips.) 

Most mass plantings are treated like annuals. They get planted every fall. This picture was taken at Longwood Gardens, outside of Philadelphia. Go there if you get the chance. Remember travel? 

We were fortunate to have been there twice when they were planting bulbs. It was truly amazing.

While we have never been to Longwood to see the tulips bloom, we have been to the St. Louis Botanical Gardens. It would be such fun to design the beds each year. You would have to know which ones bloomed at the same time. Then you could decide what other bulbs would go with the tulips. Here there are hyacinths. 

I did get 20 of one variety which I planted all together on the front parkway. I can't wait for spring.

There are certain single tulips that do come back every year. This one lives right next to contestant #1. I have pictures of this odd pair of tulips back to 2006. Reliable, colorful, different, that bloom at the same time. I cannot tell you the names.

This pretty thing would have made the contest it it were not for that drain pipe. The internet wants me to believe that there is a photo shop program that would fix this. Maybe there is. Not for me.

I have shared this video or one like it before. It is of a garden in Holland called Keukenhof.  There are longer videos if you look the garden up on the internet. It is a magical place.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUeI2iINhpY

Lantana plants do like sun.

Here are more pictures. 

I have never tried growing lantana from seed. I do wonder. I will be starting some seeds very soon.

I found a source. They advertised that they ship around the world. I worried that I was getting seed from someplace far away. They were in Nevada. 

Right Now in the garden, which includes plants inside

The orchid from Week 1 has started its Christmas bloom.

This slipper orchid is going to bloom any day now. The color will be a surprise.

These phalaenopsis buds should also open soon.

I have some difficulty with African violets. It expect it is just a matter of understanding the rhythm and the location. Rhythm includes correct watering.

As the temperature got to about 35 yesterday the parsley and sage got to spend some time outside. 

We are going to have our first really cold weather this coming week (single digits). The plants hanging out in the garage will have to come further inside.

Julia's recipe

Old fashion cookies

All of Julia's recipes can be found at 

https://mearskitchen.wordpress.com/

This recipe came from Michael Knock who writes the occasional local cooking column for the Iowa City Press-Citizen. He attributed it to Evelyn Birkby from Sidney, Iowa who wrote a column (including recipes) for the Shenandoah (Iowa) Sentinel for 70 years, retiring in November of 2019 at the age of 100. This reminded me of Johanna Beers who wrote a cooking column (source of the butter almond cake, most notably) for the Iowa City Press-Citizen for 67 years, ending with her sudden death at the age of 88 in 2004. Her last column had been filed, and so it was published after her death. In the past, small town newspapers were folksier than the metropolitan papers, at least in Iowa, and included neighborhood social news (who had visitors from out of town, who had dinner with whom, who had a baby, who got engaged, etc.) as well as local household advice and cooking columns. A different age. This recipe is called "Buried Treasure Cookies" which is weird in my opinion. I prefer "Old-fashioned Cookies" to honor the lineage. 

The ingredients: 1 cup butter; 1 cup peanut butter (commercial, not the natural stuff); 2 teaspoons of vanilla; 2 eggs; 1 cup white sugar; 1 cup brown sugar; 3 cups of all purpose flour; 1 teaspoon of baking powder; 1 teaspoon of baking soda; 1/2 teaspoon table salt and some candy.   

The recipe called for whatever candy you have on hand, which is not accurate. You will want some chocolate-based candy. I used cut-up Reese's peanut butter cups and when I ran out, I used tiny m&ms and white chocolate chips. No sweet tarts or twizzlers or good 'n' plenty or starbursts. My reasoning will become clear below. 

  

I started by softening 2 sticks (1 cup) of butter by leaving it on the kitchen counter for a while. When it was workable, I put in in a big bowl and added the peanut butter - smooth or crunchy are both fine. 

Then I added the white and brown sugar and used a hand mixer to cream these ingredients together. 

Next I beat in the eggs (just before this picture was taken). 

Next I added the vanilla and the baking powder, baking soda and salt and mixed these in, followed by the flour in 1/2 cup installments to avoid the flour blizzard that comes of adding too much flour at once. 

Part way through adding the flour, I switched to a big wooden spoon as the dough was too stiff for the hand mixer. 

Here is the bowl full of dough and 6 small (snack size) Reese's peanut butter cups. 

I used an apple corer to cut out the middles of the peanut butter cups. We sometimes use the apple corer to core apples but more often we use it for other things. Carving pumpkins, for example. The apple corer makes perfectly round holes for eyes or noses. But I digress. 

I cut out the middles and then cut the rest of the candy into 6 pieces. The idea is to have candy bits about 1/4" in size.

I used a small disher (tiny ice cream scoop with a sweep mechanism to release the scooped substance) to portion out uniform balls of dough. Then I flattened the dough slightly, popped a piece of candy in the center and sealed the dough around the cookie. 

When I ran out of peanut butter cup pieces, I switched to tiny m&ms and white chocolate chips. I used 3 of the little candies, assorted however I picked them up.

While I was in the cookie forming stage, I turned the oven on to 350 degrees. 

I baked the cookies 12 to a sheet, 2 sheets at a time. No need to lube up the cookie sheet or use parchment. 

I baked them for a total of about 9 minutes. After 5 minutes (yes, I used the oven timer), I rotated the pans, top to bottom and bottom to top and also front to back. 

I let the cookies cool on the cookie sheets for about 5 minutes (I have 4 cookie sheets so this resting time did not slow down production). Then I slid the cookies onto cooling racks. 

The cookies are tasty, as a butter and peanut butter cookie would naturally be. And there is the bit of candy to be encountered in the middle.

This recipe makes a lot of cookies - I ended up with 7-1/2 dozen both times I made them. That's 90 cookies. It would be easy to make a half recipe - everything would come out even. 

And the cookies keep. Thank you Evelyn Birkby and Johanna Beers and Michael Knock. 

Odds and Ends

Apparently the solstice can be on December 20, 21, 22 or 23. No wonder I was a little confused. 

I am smarter now. Our friend Pat answered the question in her 'comment'  from last week. She  explained why botanical names sometimes end with the letter or letters "i". Here was her comment:

Thank you Pat.

For those of you who do not know this, Pat and her husband Stewart have a wonderful blog about words. It can be found at

https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog

This actually explains not only Jackmanii but also Henryi. 

We went by what has to be the best decorated fence in Iowa City yesterday.  It is over on 3rd Avenue near the east side HyVee. (All directions in Iowa are given in relationship to the nearest HyVee grocery store.)

That is all for this week. Everything still seems the same. But the Solstice is also know as "Midwinter." It has been a long time since the plants came inside. In just one more month we will have a new president. 

It is almost time to plant some seeds.

The light is coming.

Philip