August 26, 2023- A long month is alost gone

Weather Weather Weather- All you ever hear is something about the weather. I will try to be brief.

It was very hot. There was no rain. There is no rain in the forecast. It is cooling off.

That sort of says it all.

Early in the morning is the best time for the garden. I think that is true for most of the outside season. When it is very hot, the early in the morning time is even more precious.

Saturday morning, yesterday, was quite pleasant. Last night we slept with the windows open.

We moved more kale to bigger pots. We are now engaged in a controlled experiment. There are maybe 75 plants still at the greenhouse, most of them having been bumped up one pot level. We have planted perhaps 50 along Fairview, where they get half day afternoon sun. (Pictures are later in the post.)

We are going to see how the greenhouse finished plants compare with those in the ground. 

In last week's vote here are the pictures with the most votes.

Here are the best pictures from the week August 20-26, 2023

I was rather surprised at the color that was available this week. Here are 6 nice pictures from this past week.

#1 Blooming tillandsia

You saw this little bundle of airplants last week. It was getting ready to bloom. So here is the bloom.

#2 Blue Rose of Sharon

We do not have many bushes. This Rose of Sharon is almost twenty years old. We brought it back from Kansas City after a trip to a wedding reception of Laura and Sedat. It gets east sun and has done well.

#3 The first white Japanese Anemone

I am more used to seeing this plant in September. But I guess it is almost September.

#4 Jack in the Pulpit seedpod

What a bundle of color. It had been green a month ago.

#4 Phlox

#6 Multi colored Lantana

I say it over and over. I should grow more Lantana. The plants are so expensive. You used to be able to buy them in flats. Now they come in single 4-5 inch pots for $5-6 each. I do now understand you can make cuttings. They take 2-3 weeks to grow roots. I will have to include them for fall cuttings, like the Persian Shield.

This week in pictures

I thought I would write more about voodoo lilies this week. 

Amorphophallus Konjac is their formal name. It is in the philodendron family

They came to the garden sale last year and were all sold by the end of the year. I was somewhat disappointed as I had wanted one for myself. If no one buys something, I will take it for the garden, paying the price others would not pay. That is my burden for pricing something too high.

I shoud add that we are now over $5400 for the year from the plant sale for the food banks.

We received 11 voodoo plants this summer from the source up the street. Once you have them you get a lot, as they really produce offshoots.

What can I tell you. Here are things to know

The foliage is remarkable. It is almost 18 inches in the plants I received. It can grow to 5-6 feet.

It likes to be moist, and is known as a heavy feeder.

It grows from a bulb, probably a corm. Sometime I will write about the difference bewteen a bulb and a corm.

The bulb is not hardy below zone 6. I do think Iowa is moving towards zone 6. I would imagine that certain parts of the back yard, up near the south side of the house, is zone 6. If any are left at the end of the year, maybe I will see if one would winter outside. 

The plant goes dormant with the frost. You then store the bulb the way you would store an amaryllils, dahlia or canna. It should be in a cool place, perhaps in a pot or out of a pot in peatmoss.

The remarkable thing about the plant is that the flower grows first. It grows without the leaves. The flower can get 3-4 feet tall, and smells like rotten meat. Oh boy, you say. The plant has to be 3-4 years old to bloom.

After the bloom dies back the stem and wonderful foliage grows.

Here is a picture of three plants from last July 11. These are all leaves, emerging.

The plant makes many side shoots. Our neighbor Bob bought a plant last summer. This spring the original plant grew foliage bigger than last year, with three little side shoots. I do not think the plant he got was big enough to bloom. I think I would have heard about that.

Here is an article about them from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

https://hort.extension.wisc.edu/articles/voodoo-lily-amorphophallus-konjac/

Here are current pictures of voodoo lilies.

This is one of Bob's little side shoots this year.

As long as you can set them outside in time to bloom these wonderful plants should be in every garden.

Other pictures from this week

Here are some of the kale, recently planted in the ground.

Here is the video of that stretch along Fairview. Between the kale and the anemones and the Persian Shield is a nice stretch.

Those cabbage moths are out there. A little dust should address that.

Julia's recipe

Spicy Eggplant and big cous cous

I have spoken before about my fondness for eggplant. I recently posted a recipe for eggplant pizza! This recipe (from the NYT) is a bit more conventional, and it is a nice vegan main dish for farmer's market season. It does not require the oven, and it can be ready in about 45 minutes.  

The ingredients:

1 biggish eggplant (I had 4 cups of cubes);

1 cup chopped onion;

3/4 - 1 cup chopped fresh or canned tomato;

2 teaspoons or so smushed garlic;

2 cups big (pearl) cous cous;

2 cups water;

1/3 cup olive oil;

1 teaspoon cinnamon;

1 teaspoon ground cumin;

1/4 teaspoon cayenne;

1 tablespoon tomato paste;

1/4 teaspoon smoked paprika;

salt and pepper; and

some chopped parsley.

If you don't have smoked paprika, use a bit more sweet paprika. If you don't have any fresh parsley, use basil or oregano or leave it out entirely. Adding some green things at the end is nice but not essential. 

Pearl cous cous is a kind of round Israeli pasta. Not like the tiny French cous cous. If you can't find Israeli cous cous, little pasta like orzo or fish-eye pasta (acini de pepe) or dilanti would be fine.  

I started by peeling and cubing the eggplant. It had been in my refrigerator for a couple of days, and I did not want to take any chances on bitterness. 

If you have an eggplant fresh from your garden or the farmer's market, you do not need to peel it. Or salt and press it. 

This eggplant came from our little garden, and I had not planned for it. Hence the refrigerator. 

Because I was worried that it might be bitter, I sprinkled the cubes with a generous teaspoon of salt, covered the cubes with a plate and topped that with a canister so press some of the liquid out of the eggplant. I let it sit for maybe 15 minutes. 

While the eggplant was sitting, I chopped the onion, chopped the

 tomato, smushed the garlic and put the cinnamon, cumin, cayenne and 1/2 teaspoon of salt into a little bowl. 

After the eggplant had been sitting for about 15 minutes, I squeezed and patted the eggplant to remove some of the moisture. Again, it you have a pristine eggplant, you can skip the peeling and salting and pressing and squeezing and patting. 

And then (off camera) I heated the dutch oven until it was pretty warm and added the cous cous. The pan was dry. This step was toasting, not frying. I cooked and stirred the cous cous for a few (like 3) minutes. It got toasty and kind of golden brown. I poured the cous cous into a bowl. 

Then I added the olive oil to the pan and turned the heat up to medium high. When the oil shimmered, I added the eggplant and onion and 1/2 teaspoon of salt and 1/2 teaspoon of black pepper. 

After stirring and cooking for about 6 or 7 minutes, I added the garlic. And cooked some more - another couple of minutes.

Then I added the tomato paste and the spices in the little bowl and stirred that up.

Next the cous cous, the tomato and the water. I put the lid on the pot, turned down the heat so the mixture simmered and let it cook for about 10 minutes, at the end of which time, the cous cous had absorbed the water and the tomatoes had broken down and it smelled good.  I stirred in the smoked paprika and the chopped parsley.

Here it is on the table. We had it with green salad and cantaloupe. Sometimes in the summer, we have melon instead of berries. I think that berries travel better out of season than melons do of=ddly enough so we do most of our melon ingestion in season. 

We had leftovers of both the eggplant dish and the melon which made for a nice cold lunch. 

Odds and ends

The caterpillar stories, from Maine

There were several caterpillars. One was Stripey 2. ( Stripey 1 went back outside.) It was a Swallowtail. I think you saw it 2 weeks ago.

Stripey 2 began to make itself into the next stage.

All done. Now just the wait. Apparently Swallowtails can stay in the stage until spring.

Then there was Dr. Worm, named after the song by They Might be Giants.  DW is a real monarch. It has antenna at both ends.

Along came the next stage for DW. Since monarchs have a date with  Mexico this winter, this chrysalis will make a butterfly in time for that big trip. Katie thinks that might be in less than a week.

As of a few days ago those two caterpillars were in their cacoons. 

But wait...more news

As Katie and the children were trying to get aphids off some milkweed with dish soap, they found two more caterpillars. These were also monarchs. They worried they had been damaged by the soap, they came insde for a quick rinse and a new home with Stripey 2 and Dr. Worm.

The smaller one is now named "Teensy Stripey."  Maisie named the big one "Window Sill." 

Window Sill almost immediately become a cocoon. 

In other news, the bots have been at it again.

We have averaged 200-300 page views for a while. Friday morning when I looked at the number that appears near the top of the page on the right, below the vote, the page views was 1800. 1600 were from Sinagpore. That is odd.

update: the page views now number 2,231.

update #2: the page view is now 3047. 

update #3 the number this Sunday morning is now 3855.

Did the bots find something interesting?

Words- Our friends Pat and Stewart have a wonderful blog, all about words,  located at

https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog

Julia asked Pat about the word "beef," as in a reference to a complaint. The explanation apparently will show up in their blog in the next few weeks. 

If you always wondered about a particular word, you can go to their blog and ask the question. You could also make a comment on this blog. Pat can see that and will do her best to answer it.

Pat and Stewart used to live in Connecticut. There was the story in the New York Times this week about bears in Connecticut. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/24/nyregion/connecticut-bears.html

The story makes you appreciate the animal problems you do have. Raccons, rabbits, and deer are not bears and wild pigs.

That is it for this week.

Pray for peace, and that voters in this country will see that the Emperor has no clothes.

Philip