January 26, 2025 Week #9

 It was an up and down week in Iowa. I am talking about the weather. It got down to -12 and -13, for two nights this week. Then yesterday it was sunny and almost 40. The several inches of snow that came down sometime in there, was melting. Melting is such a nice condition.

A special thought goes out to Sarasota, Florida, where they have this cold air, now. It is suppose to be in the mid 30's there this morning. I noticed it was 17 degrees earlier in the week in Chincoteague. I thought of that big lantana plant at the church. I guess we will see whether it survives. 

In the world, of course, it was terrible. It was the first of one of those weeks we will have to live through. 

Staying positive requires one to be positive in the first place. It is and will be a challenge.

Friends are certainly a key. And family. For me gardening will help. 

My little lettuce is growing. I think I will start to put it into bigger pots. 

Last Week in the contest, which was Week 8

the winner was......a tie. Bartzella got that late Saturday vote to send both pictures to the next round. Since that is the second tie, (Week 2) and we are looking for 15 contestants in the playoffs, there will be no wildcards this year. From here on out, it is win or go home.

Here is the final vote. What is there about the number 12? That was the vote total for the tie earlier in the contest.

I should add that on the place on the blog for the poll, the earlier polls for the contest should appear. You can begin to think about the contest playoffs which will be in 5 weeks.

Right now the top seeds would be the dogwood and the cactus. 

Week #9

#1 Clivia

 June 7, 2024

I love clivia. I even belong to a Clivia Facebook group. I find that fun as so many of the people in the group are from someplace else. Australia and New Zealand for example have some really serious clivia growers. They also have the seasons flipped. For that reason they have plants blooming now.

I have grown Clivia from seed. I think I have bought seed and grown the plants. However, they take 4-6 years to get big enough to bloom. They are not for the instant gratification folk.

So what are Clivia?
There are evergreen perennial plants that are native to South Africa. 

They are understory plants, so they do not need/want a lot of direct sunlight.

However I do remember being in Golden Gate Park at one point, about twenty years ago. There was an entire hillside of Clivias, planted in what amounted to full sun for San Francisco.

They come in several colors. I have orange and yellow. I have some that are younger (haven't bloomed yet) that might be closer to red when they bloom.

They are long lived. The put out side shoots which can they be divided. Then you have more. 

In the bonus pictures you can see one plant that we repotted this past summer. They can get so many roots that you may have to break the pot. The one in the picture had such a nice pot too. It was from my mother's garden. It survived the repotting.

I have found that they can get mealy bugs in the winter. Winter care is such a chore sometimes.

This past fall we top dressed all 10 Clivia plants and added some bug systemic. So far this winter - no bugs.

There is one wonderful thing about Clivia winter care. You are instructed to completely leave them alone, from October to March. No water. No nothing. They sit there in the basement waiting for warmer time. 

#2 Lilium 

June 27, 2024

I do not know the name of this lilium. It is a nice color combination against the green background. I remember when I was more careful with the names of plants. I kept track on the computer and had labels. 

Not so much anymore.

Liliun is a genus of perennial blubs that includes the Asiatics and the Orientals, the trumpets, and the crosses between those groups.

The Asiatics bloom first, the the Trumpets and then the Orientals.

It was a hard year for the lilium in 2024. 

Those big four footed critters took out 30-40% of the crop.

#3 Orange Coneflower 

June 27, 2024

Coneflowers are perhaps the most popular perennial currently in the catalogs.

One catalog this month had 4 pages of coneflowers.

Some are more hardy than others.

Echinacea is the genus. They are actually in the same family as zinnias. That would be the aster family.

Another aster is the sunflower.

Echinacea comes from the Greek name for hedgehog. Maybe you can see why by looking at the center disc.

There really are a lot of varieties at this point. 

Like zinnias they originally come from eastern and central North America.

#4 Orange Zinnia

 August 30, 2024

There were zinnias in the contest in Week 4 and 6. They really do put on a show late in the summer. (If they are not eaten by the deer.)

Orange is a good color.

I am looking up more about zinnias

One place said deer do not like them. Bah.

They do want sun.

I like to plant them as late as July 1. They are then fresh in September. Sometimes they get mildew as they get older.

They come from SW United States, down toward South America.

They prefer not to be transplanted.

They die with the first frost.

You can harvest the flowers before that first frost and have indoor flowers for a while.

#5 Cattleya Arctic Snow 

November 23, 2024

This is Cattleya Arctic Snow. 

I have grown orchids for 30 years. I have perhaps 40 of them at this point. Sometimes I do not spend as much time as I should with them. That probably is a lament for my entire garden. 

I always thought cattleyas were hard to grow. I have changed my mind.

As long as they get watered every two weeks they keep growing.

I have this orchid for 10 years. I have divided it at least once. They seem to bloom a seond time during the year. They reliably bloom in the fall, when they are coming inside. The flowers last for a month.

Bonus Section

Right Now

I took cuttings from the vary large yellow hibiscus in October. They all bloomed as they are waiting to root. Roots have been slow, which may be because the energy has been spent on the flower.

Here are baby lupines.

This is arugula.

Here is one of the stalks of Maise, the orchid.

Julia's recipe

poppy seed strudel

My German grandmother was born in a province in the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, married a Hungarian butcher after WWI who died of TB, and immigrated to the US in the early 1930's as the second wife of a German-American widower who had traveled to her village looking for a wife. Quite a story arc. Of course, she made strudels. She made them both with paper-thin stretched dough and with yeast dough, more often with yeast dough, which was less of a production than making the paper-thin stretched dough. All strudels are always filled with one thing or another.

My grandmother used poppy seed filling made by the Solo company in her poppy seed strudel rather than making her own. In nosing around on the internet, I found a number of recipes that wanted me to make my own filling. I decided if Solo poppy seed filling was good enough for her, it was good enough for me. She used other Solo fillings to make things like kolaches and other filled cookies. Poppy seed filling was her favorite for the yeast dough strudel. 

Of course, my grandmother did not use a recipe. I never saw her use a recipe. This hampered my effort to replicate her strudel. About 4 years ago, I tried. I found a recipe in a Hungarian cookbook. The strudel was good, but not close to my grandmother's. Too rich and too sweet. Recently, I had the urge to try again. This time I went to the Solo website and bingo. Very close to what I remember from my grandmother's kitchen.  And straightforward and not too time-consuming - for yeast dough. 

The ingredients:

3 to 3-1/4 cups all purpose flour;

2 tablespoons white sugar;

1/2 teaspoon salt;

1 tablespoon dried yeast (or 1 packet);

1/2 cup sour cream;

1/2 cup butter;

1/4 cup water (not shown);

2 eggs; and

1 can Solo poppy seed filling. 

If you use unsalted butter, add a little bit more salt. 

I put 1 cup of the flour plus the sugar, yeast and salt in the bowl of my stand mixture. 

I used the paddle to stir the stuff up a bit. 

 

Then I put the sour cream, water and butter in a saucepan over low heat. 

I heated the ingredients over low heat until they combined. Hence the whisk. 

When the ingredients reached somewhere between 120 and 130, they were done. 

I added the wet things to the dry things in the mixing bowl and mixed on low speed. Then I turned the mixer up and mixed for 2 minutes.

Then I added the eggs and 1/2 cup more of the flour and mixed again for 2 minutes.

Last, I added about 1-1/2 cup more of the flour. I switched to a dough hook. At this point, I had a soft dough. You might need that extra 1/4 cup of flour. I did not. 

After I had a mixed dough, I used the dough hook on somewhere between low and medium to knead the dough for 8 minutes. Let the machine do the work!

Here is the kneaded dough in the stand mixer bowl, dough hook removed and the dough smushed into a ball. 

I covered the bowl with a towel and let it sit for 10 minutes.

After 10 minutes, I gently deflated the dough. "Punch it down" is too aggressive. I put a big piece of parchment on my counter and divided the dough in half.  I sprinkled a little flour on the parchment. 

I rolled the first ball into a roughly 12" x 14" rectangle. Precision is not required but you should try to get as close as you can. 

There's my first rectangle. I put the poppy seed filling in the push up measuring cup I have for sticky things like peanut butter and shortening and the like. 

That made it easier to know I was using one-half of the can at a time. 

I used a silicon spatula to spread the filling very thinly.

Spread very thinly.

I rolled the dough up along the long side. The idea is to roll tightly without squishing the roll.

At about this point, I folded the ends in on each side to tidy the bundle up. 

You can see that the ends are kind of squared off. That was the folding. The seam was on top and I did my best to pinch it together. 

Not perfectly as it happens, but okay.

Then I made the other roll. Second verse, same as the first.

I placed both rolls - seam side down - on a rimmed baking sheet covered with a non-stick pad. I covered the sheet with a towel and let the rolls rise for about 45 minutes.

Near the end of the rising time, I turned the oven on to 350 degrees. 

The rolls baked for about 30 minutes. 

Out of the oven, a nice light golden color. You will see a bit of telltale filling leakage. Annoying but not consequential. I ate the leaked filling with a spoon when it was a little cooler. Tasted great. 

The rolls needed to cool completely. I left them on the pan for 10 or 15 minutes, then lifted them carefully to a big wire rack. 

On the plate. One could sprinkle with powdered sugar. We didn't. Such a lovely pastry. The dough was bread-like but light and kind of soft, and the filling was sweet and poppy seedy. Reminded me of my grandmother. I am sure she would have had a suggestion or two, but I think I got pretty close.  

Odds and Ends

I mostly do not garden for the smells. Lilium are about the only plants I grow that broadcast their aromas. 

In New York City this past week there was a big smell at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/24/nyregion/brooklyn-corpse-flower-bloom.html?searchResultPosition=1

Here is where I try to say something about the world and prayer and scary times.

Words hardly seem sufficient. Let me try.

Pray for the people who are scared. Pray for their children. Pray for strength.

Pray for friends, and for growing things. And clean water, and in some cases, for rain.

Philip