June 12, 2022- so much is happening

It was a pleasant week in the garden. Temperatures were comfortable. There was a nice rain on Tuesday which made pulling weeds actually easy. Almost every day there was something to write about. Let me take you through the week.

Sunday

After going to Grinnell College for several days for our 50th College reunion Sunday was the one day during the weekend when I worked in the garden.  There is lots of work to do.

Sometimes I spend what seems like a long time trying to find something that is lost. Often it is one of the garden trowels. Sunday I could not find my favorite garden spade. I had been using it and left it stuck upright where I had been working. It must have fallen over. Now so many parts of the garden are completely covered with plants. I have no idea where it is. 

I was reminded of a farmer neighbor when we lived in the country after college. (1971-1977) The neighbor had a grade B dairy farm. We would help from time to time. We would help with milking and even killing turkeys. He lost a tractor at one point. It was probably a small tractor and the weeds ate it. 

Well the hosta have eaten my spade.  Hosta do tend to get bigger over time. There comes a point when you can no longer see between the plants. It is one giant mass of hosta. This is less than idea. But of course there is no easy solution. One plan it to try to determine if any plants have side divisions that can be dug up and potted for the plant sale.

Monday- 

Meet Bartzella, an Itoh peony.

Bartzella joined the garden 2 years ago. This was its best flower so far. 

An Itoh peony is a cross between a tree peony and a herbaceous one. This was difficult in part because they bloom at different times. The tree peonies bloom at least 2-3 weeks before the herbaceous ones.

Dr. Tochi Itoh, a Japanese botanist, was the first person to produce a plant from the cross. He did that in 1948, in the aftermath of the second world war. Sadly, he died in 1956, before any of his plants had bloomed. His family brought them to bloom in 1964. Four were brought to this country and patented. 

Here is a longer story.

https://www.americanmeadows.com/perennials/peony/all-about-itoh-peonies

I will certainly try to find another one of these Itoh peonies. I will be on the lookout for another one. It may have joined the short list of special plants to get to people with new gardens, particularly if they live in Maine.

Tuesday- a real rain

It rained over an inch on Tuesday. Someone said this was the first real substantial rain in 8 months. I do know it was a good rain, even if it did beat down some of the last of the lupines. With a few supplements throughout the week, it has kept the ground reasonably moist. Weeds pull up. Seeds germinate. That includes weed seeds.

With all that rain the frogs came back. It was cool enough to have windows open to hear them. 

The lupine did manage to still be good this week.

Look at this wonderful bi-color flower.

Wednesday- serendipity

Some plants are just destined to bloom at a particular time. The Night blooming Cereus sometimes will bloom on the exact same day, both in the front yard and in the back. 

I remember a particular Asiatic lily I shared with a neighbor who lived 3 blocks away. The shared plants would bloom the same day as the friends in our garden.

This year the yellow clivia, including 1 of the two from Pat, bloomed at the same time. This was despite the fact some were in the front yard and the other was in the back. I had even brought them outside at different dates.

This second picture is one of two yellow clivias from Pat.  The second on it now budding.

Thursday- mom's tall iris

Sometimes there are plants that just jump out at you that you have not noticed before. This iris just kept getting taller and taller. In the last few days it started to bloom.

This gives you an idea of just how tall it is. It is taller than Julia's jeans.

Here is the flower.

We believe it is a spuria iris.

I think it came from my mother's house in Springfield. 

Spuria iris bloom after the Siberian iris but before the Japanese iris. I must remember that the blackberry lilies are really an iris, and are really the last to bloom. 

Sometimes of course, bearded iris rebloom in the fall.

I love how there are some sort of iris around and blooming from April 1 to at least the middle of August.

Friday- amaryllis report

I am up to 12 amaryllis plants with buds plus one actually blooming. I planted some of the non budding ones last month over at the sunny garden plot (the farm). 3 of those plants promptly started to bud. They have returned to the garden for their bloom. After that, they will go back to fatten up for next year.

Here are plants at the farm, including one of the ones that sent up a bud.

Here is the group picture. I have suggested that I could rent one out for the bloom. Then it could come back to fatten up for the summer.

This is the one that started to bloom. This plant actually  bloomed in January. I did not know they would bloom again the same year.

Saturday- so much to do- but so much other stuff to report.

The first waterlilies have bloomed. Once again I have leaves growing out of the water, hiding the flowers. Something must not be right. Could there be too much nutrients?

The two largest new dogwoods are blooming.

The first zinnia has bloomed. I grew this one from seed. I think it is in the zahara group. That means it will stay small (under 9 inches) and bloom all summer.

My other zinnia seed, planted directly in the garden, has germinated. I anticipate many plants in August and on to the frost. 

Then there are the martagons.

I will wrote more about them.

I have been getting 2-3 plants each year for about 3 years.

They are starting to get to be nice. None have clumped up, which I understand will happen.

They all face down, which makes taking their picture a challenge.

This is blue-eyed grass, which is a native. I talked to a person yesterday who only grew natives. He identified all my weeds, telling me which ones tasted like parsley. Sometimes people tell you things and you know there is no way you will retain the knowledge.

Julia's recipe

Salmon Patties, a/k/a Salmon Bun Cha

This recipe is from the Sitka Salmon people, telling us something tasty we can do with "salmon burger meat" which is ground and flaked salmon that they harvest from their salmon frames (no, I don't know what salmon frames are) and send along in 1 lb. packages. I did not have any exposure to fresh salmon until I was pretty old, as I have always lived in the upper Midwest. I did encounter canned salmon, which was not a good experience. So I came to appreciate salmon over time, first baked/roasted and later in more inventive preparations like this one. Apparently, people make salmon patties as a variant on ground beef or other ground meat patties, to be eaten on a bun. This is different, southeast Asian in inspiration. It's a meal in a bowl, to be built of and garnished with what's available.    

The ingredients:

1 lb. ground salmon;

1 egg;

4 tablespoons fish sauce (divided);

4 tablespoons white sugar (divided and not shown);

2 teaspoons smushed garlic (divided);

2 tablespoons or so finely chopped onion or shallot;

2 tablespoons rice wine vinegar;

1 hot pepper (serrano, in my case);

1/2 cup water (not shown);

2 tablespoons of regular oil (not shown); and

1 package thin rice noodles.

Garnishes: some matchstick carrots; some thinly sliced scallions; some sliced cucumber; some herbs (basil, mint, parsley) (which I did not have!) 

In order to make patties of any kind, one has to mush the ingredients up with one's hands. This is not my favorite cooking activity, but there it is. 

I started by smushing the garlic and dicing the onion (actually, I had a shallot on hand so I used it).

I put the salmon into a big bowl, and added the egg, 2 tablespoons of the fish sauce; 2 tablespoons of the sugar; 1-1/2 teaspoon of the garlic and all of the shallot.

Adding the sugar.

Measuring and smushing garlic.

Mixing it up by hand.

More mixing. After the salmon mixture was mixed, I put it in the refrigerator for about 20 minutes. It can be kept in the refrigerator (covered, of course) for up to a day. 

While the salmon mixture was resting in the refrigerator, I prepared the garnishes, peeling the carrot and cucumber and cleaning the scallions. I cut the carrot into matchsticks and sliced the cucumber and thinly sliced the scallions (white and green).

I also cut the serrano in half length-wise, cleaned the seeds out of the pepper and sliced it cross-wise.

 

Then I made the sauce: I mixed the 1/2 cup of water with the other 2 tablespoons of fish sauce, the rice wine vinegar, the other 2 tablespoons of sugar, the rest of the garlic and the hot pepper. I stirred it a bit to help the sugar dissolve. 

And I put a pot of water on to boil so I could cook the rice noodles.

Ready to cook.

I used a biggish disher to create sort of equal size salmon blobs. I put the blobs on a plate.

I put the oil in a big non-stick skillet and turned it on, medium high. 

I waited until the oil was kind of hot (but not crazy hot) and plopped salmon blobs around, flattening them slightly as I put them in.

The big pot is full of water to cook the rice noodles. The pan with the eggs has nothing to do with this recipe - I just like hardboiled eggs. 

It took maybe 3 or 4 minutes per side to cook the salmon patties. I had enough salmon to make about 10 patties. Maybe mine were a little smaller than the recipe (which said it made 8) expected. 

I cooked the noodles which did not take very long, and when they were done, I drained the noodles and ran some cold water over them to stop the cooking and cool the noodles to room temperature. 

Assembly time!

I put a dollop of noodles in the bowl, and then I added 2 salmon patties. 

Next I started garnishing - scallions, carrots, cucumber.

The last step was to stir up the sauce and ladle about 1/4 of it over each bowl. 

If I had had some herbs on hand, I could have chopped them up and sprinkled them on for a final touch. Cilantro or parsley or basil (Thai or Italian) or mint would be good. 

On the table. 

It's a pretty dish. We served it with green salad and berries with yogurt. 

There were salmon patties left over. We made little salmon patty sandwiches on slider buns for lunch (with a little mayo) a day or two latter. Very tasty. The leftover noodles were used as the starch base for pork chole. And the last of the noodles were good, heated up with the last of the sauce. 

This dinner took maybe an hour, counting the time the salmon mixture sat in the refrigerator. 

Odds and Ends

Weed report

They continue to grow. Thank you to Just Gale,  who added some quite relevant notes about weeds last week. I will have to step up my weed patrol to finish my rotation having made any progress at all.

Over at the farm, weeds exploded. They have surrounded the poor basil in just about a week. 

I am not sure what these were. Julia suggested pig weed. It was if the weed seed descended on every piece of dirt and then germinated.

I did take the swivel hoe to them. What a wonderful tool. I do have to be careful using it a home as there are so many spring bulbs within a few inches of the ground. At the farm there is no such concern.

I did try just working on paths this week. That was an alternative to just going for buckets.

One scary prospect is that the heat is coming back. There are quite a few 90's in the coming week, including a 98. Particularly I do not like it when it does not cool off at night. 

I do find weeding with a reward at the end to be helpful. Yesterday I weeded one bed. (Well, all but one end.) After that weed job I planted a few of the coleus in the bed. I have a flat of impatiens still to plant, along with another 20 calla lilies. 

Deer- I really must spray some more. They seem to stick to the paths. But yesterday I discovered one very nice lily bed where most of the buds were just gone. They will not be growing back.

The spring bulb catalogs have begun to arrive. I must remember to order Monsella tulips right away.

I found a source for small hanging baskets. Many new hoyas now have secure outdoor homes for the summer.

Speaking of hoyas look at these blooms

I will close with more Shirley poppies. They really are amazing.

Pray for peace, including peace in our schools.

Philip