July 11, 2021- High Summer is here

Saturday morning- 6am.

It is raining, a gentle rain. This time Iowa City had gone about 9 days between rains. We needed the rain. It is also cool, not Maine cool, but comfortably in the upper 60's at the moment. The windows are open and the rain is punctuated by the grunting of the bullfrog in the pond. Such a wonderful combination.

The rain will end in a few hours, which will be the time to weed. (We got over 1.5 inches on my rain gauge.)

Weeding can be so rewarding. Plants can be hidden by weeds at some point. One of my favorite images from literature (and the occasional movie) is the novel "The secret garden." Sometimes you do not even know what is there until you get started. I love just bringing a little bit of order to some  corner of one of the garden beds. (I do not set my sights too high.)

It is the time for the high summer garden. The daylilies are peaking. The lilium are right behind. Many of the lilium are fragrant. 

Daylily time

  

The real stars of the week's pictures continue to be the Shirley poppies. They are near the end of their run. They just keep blooming, even at a reduced rate.

I played with some settings on my camera phone. This setting blurs the background. The fact it picked up the seed pods was purely accidental.

The same image was cropped and given this black frame. The second picture was from the same plant a few days later. 

Here are another flower from this past week.

I am saving the seed from the Shirley poppies. So far I have not specifically saved certain colors. Maybe I should.

As time marches on, it is now time for the pardancandas, sometimes called blackberry or candy lilies. They are actually iris, the last iris to bloom, if you do not count the rebloomers in the fall.

These plants self seed, with volunteers showing up all over the place. 

I do not have as many volunteers as I would like. I do collect the seed every fall. I did figure out that I had several containers of seed in the basement. So I planted two flats last weekend. I recall that it can take several weeks to germinate.

The zinnias have started. I was not so good at putting out my zinnia seedlings this last 2 months. The list of what has not been done would be long. 

I did just plant the last zinnia seed in the packages I had ordered in the winter. They will bloom in September.

The lilium are all over the place. I seem to have a lot of them. There will be even more when I divide the two clumps that need dividing this fall. 

These next two are lilium Pizzazz. I have perhaps a dozen of them. Here is a little insight. They will grow in part shade. They get taller with more sun.

I always show you flowers. Let me try in the next few weeks to introduce you to parts of the garden.

Here is the front yard.

Julia's recipe

Another good semolina cake

Sometimes the universe moves mysteriously and all together in a new direction. Sometimes this is a good thing; other times, not. It can happen in fashion (flannel, torn-out knees, hush puppies, big hair) and in food (kale, cilantro, chickpeas). I had never encountered semolina as an ingredient in desserts, or as an ingredient at all outside of making one's own pasta which I don't do. And now I have come across another semolina cake, this one more along the lines of a snack cake, good for eating out of hand.  The recipe is from the Milk Street cookbook, part of Christopher Kimball's latest enterprise. The Milk Street  recipes are sometimes a bit fussy in terms of ingredients, but otherwise straightforward. Milk Street says this is a Burmese cake. I would not know, but I like it. 

The ingredients:

1cup cream of wheat (a substitute for semolina);

1/3 cup plus 2 tablespoons of unsweetened coconut;

1 14 oz. can unsweetened full fat coconut milk; 

1 cup packed brown sugar;

4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) regular butter, melted and cooled;

3 eggs; 

1-1/2 teaspoon baking powder;

1 teaspoon ground cardamom;

1/4 teaspoon salt;

1/4 cup raw unsalted cashews, roasted and chopped. 

The first steps are to melt (and then let cool) the butter and to toast the cream of wheat and most of the coconut. I turned the oven on to 350 degrees.

I put the cream of wheat and the 1/3 cup of coconut on a piece of parchment on a rimmed baking sheet, and I put it in the oven for about 10 minutes. 

After 10 minutes or so, the coconut was light brown and the cream of wheat looked about the same, to tell the truth. 

I used the parchment like a sling to dump the cream of wheat and coconut into a bowl and then I added the coconut milk and stirred it around. I set the bowl aside for 15 minutes.

I put the parchment back on the rimmed baking sheet and spread the cashews onto the paper. I put the cashews in the oven for maybe 7 minutes to toast.

When I took the nuts out, I turned the oven up to 375 degrees.

While the nuts were toasting, I added the eggs, melted butter, brown sugar, baking powder, salt and cardamom to the bowl with the cream of wheat mixture. 

The cream of wheat mixture has thickened up with the cereal absorbing a lot of the coconut milk. 

I let the mixture sit a minute while I chopped the cashews into smaller pieces. 

And I prepped the pan. The recipe called for a 9" round pan. Which I do not have. I have 8" round pans. High school math tells us that the area of an 8" round pan is about 50 square inches. The area of a 9" round pan is about 63 square inches. Not even close in the baking world. So I used an 8" square pan whose area is 64 square inches. 

I lubed up the pan and then (as instructed) used parchment and sprayed that. Not necessary. Lubing up the pan with cooking spray is sufficient. 

I whisked the mixture, which was thinned considerably by the eggs and melted butter, and poured it into the pan.

Then I sprinkled the last 2 tablespoons of the coconut and all of the cashews over the top. 

The cake was alleged to bake in 28 to 33 minutes (how do they know so precisely?). In my oven, it took more like 40 minutes. It was done, as is so often the case, when a bamboo skewer came out clean. 

The cake on a serving plate.

An individual piece. The cake had a nice (but not too much) coconut flavor along with the cardamom. It held up for a few days while we sliced off pieces and carried them into the back yard to eat while admiring the garden.

Odds and Ends

I have gone a little overboard making plants from cuttings.

It started when I got a couple flats of impatiens that were a little leggy.

What I did was to cut off the too long stems, and put them in water.

I do that over the winter on the kitchen window sill with certain annuals. 

Well, I started putting the cuttings in little glass jars. In a year when you could not buy spices in bulk, we had many more of those glasses. Actually I just counted. I have 46 currently in use.

This is the south facing windows above the kitchen sink.

This is the west facing window. It now has the overflow jars.

Well the big revelation in the last month was that I could put more than one cutting in a jar. So at this point they have 2-5 cuttings in each jar. You can almost do the math. I have about 150 impatiens cutting going at any time.

It takes about a week to grow enough roots to move to the next step.

I put a single stem into a tiny pot. That goes into a tray after 24 hours of being soaked in a plastic bucket.

Then the trays got out into the front yard to harden off.

After a week or so they are ready for the garden.

Sometimes the first two steps are easier.

At this point I have almost four flats ready to plant.

I have to plant some because I have run out of tiny pots.

I am also getting 6-10 rooted cuttings per day. 

I am just about out of too long stems.

By the way, when I have cut off all the leggy stems from a plant, then I plant the original plant.

The deer continue in the neighborhood, even though the smelly stuff seems to keep them away, for the moment.

There are not far away.

This is across the street at the dentist's office. I would put this picture right besides the next one if I knew how to do that. The mother and the young one are a pair.

Here is the second half of the couple.

The Japanese Beetles are here. I spray a few plants, like the hibiscus. (We only have about 7-8)

I think the worst thing is when you find 2 beetles on one flower, as they say, making more beetles.

I got a flat of coleus at the farmer's market today. You weed the bed, and then plant annuals.

There is always something.

Stay cool.

Philip