May 6, 2018 - Dry, warm, and moving fast

Tuesday, May 1
Dry
What is the first place you go when you turn on your computer? Do you check your email? Do you look at a newspaper? Do you check for those late night sports scores?
For some time, the first place I have opened is the weather radar. That was followed closely by the regular weather place.
It is dry here in Iowa City. The last measurable rain was about a third of an inch on the weekend of April 15. Actually not all of that was "rain". We had about a half of an inch of precipitation for the month of April. Average is almost four inches.

So Spring is way behind where it should be, and it is now dry. We went from having winter weather advisories several weeks ago to having fire advisories this week.

Aside- I am writing this at 5:20 in the morning on Tuesday. We are not going to work today as we celebrate Julia's birthday. It is still dark. But the birds have started to sing. There are cardinals. I recognize that call. Then there are  crows. Who could not know that one. Then there are the birds that just chatter, particularly when mixed in with other birds. Some say the same thing over and over and over. Cheep Cheep Cheep.

May 4
Warm and finally, some rain.
It rained over an inch Wednesday evening. We needed it. Everything seems fresher.
The last three days have gotten above 80. That first day it was so warm, it never really cooled off at night. Our house, which was built a long time ago heats up during the day, particularly on the second floor.
At least since it rained it has cooled off at night.

Spring is  accelerating.
A week ago the star magnolia trees were blooming. They are done. The saucer magnolias are done. The crab apples have started, as have the red buds. Some of those red buds are so vivid.
The bluebells have exploded in the garden. If you want to see the bluebells you need to come by this weekend.


Check out this panorama view of the backyard.

I have the hose out in the backyard. It was that dry.
Watering with one of those water wands can be quite soothing. You wander around watering one bed at a time, looking over that bed to see what is blooming and what is coming next. You spend more time with a particular bed that you might otherwise.

This is a time when you can make changes in the garden. As I mentioned before, in one bed I had some under performing astilbe. So I dug it up, and put the astilbe into maybe a dozen pots. When the plants are still small you can dig up many things that way. Do you know what you get when you are done?
Holes. Glorious holes. Empty spaces. The gardener's dream. These are the holes that do not normally exist in the garden. Let me be more specific. They do not normally exist in my garden. That is because I have too much of everything in the garden. Plants are always over top of other plants or bulbs.

So when a hole appears, it gets the gold start treatment. It gets all reworked with an addition of some kind of manure.

Holes can be just the size to put a new hosta. (I have ten new ones.) It can be the size to plant several dozen Iceland poppy seedlings. I planted those on Wednesday morning before work.


Back to holes.
I have actually been a little more aggressive this spring in preparing holes. If a hellebore was too close to an epimedium, then I have just dug the entire plant up and put it in pots. I have some nice hellebores for sale if anyone is interested.
It is quite the win win event. I move along an under performing plant or group of plants. I can reset that portion of the garden bed. I can give room to plants that needed the space to perform. And I can have holes.


Waiting for the leaves to come out.
Particularly with that rain it seems the leaves on the trees are finally appearing.
Of course we have a Walnut tree and a Sycamore tree in the yard, two of the last trees to get their leaves in the Spring.
Many of the indoor plants would like to enjoy the wind and the rain, but remain inside. Without leaf cover they would sunburn, something that happened to a few outside this week. That is particularly the case when the temperature spikes into the 80's.


Let's do pictures.

Last week's voting
The most liked picture was the orange orchid, by a nose.

The full vote
Orange orchid 19
Double bloodroot 18
start magnolia 12
Blue chionodoxa 12
raspberry Splash pulmonaria  6
Trillium cuneatum  6
Primrose  5
Anemone blanda 5
Dutchman's breeches 4
Little white trillium  4


Here are a few pictures from this week.
Once again please feel free to vote for however many you like. You could vote for all of them if you really liked them all.

#1  Mitsch daffodil

Grant Mitsch was the premier daffodil hybridizer of daffodils for over 50 years. Google him to see his many contributions. The next generation ran the business after him. They closed a few years ago. You could get a daffodil from his company for $50 a bulb, a feel like it was worth it. (I did not do this.)

Many times in the past this flower bloomed, but only after a rain had splashed dirt up onto the flower. Not this year.




#2 Red Iceland poppy

This is blooming while still in the pot. I planted about 2 dozen of these in one of the new "holes" in the back yard. I have about 3 dozen left to plant.









#3 Yellow tulip

#4 Hellebore

#5 Daffodil -probably Pheasant's Eye

This daffodil is an old one, having been developed in 1850. It is recurved, meaning the white petals lean back.


#6 Monsella tulip

This is Julia's favorite. This particular flower has such nice interior detail.





#7 These next two pictures together present this flower

Where is the flower of interest you ask? We this is the world's tiniest daffodil. It is right down there next to the drainpipe. I have placed a brick to the left of the flower.

Here is that daffodil, right next to the brick. It is not much more than 2 inches high.

How very remarkable.













#8 epimedium brevicornum

#9 Bluebells

#10 White Anemone Blanda

#11  Wonderful big tulip

There is no trick photography with this picture. This west facing big tulip greeted us as we pulled into the driveway Thursday afternoon.
Look at the three versions of this picture in the bonus section. I left this one regular size to give the prospective with the background.


There you have the pictures from this week. Please select as many of them as you really like. You can vote for 1, or 10.

Bonus section

We did get to Ryerson woods last Sunday. We went late in the day, when the sunlight was starting that angle thing. The sunlight was really nice.

There were May apples everywhere, like some marching group of something. They flowed down the hillside.

Sometime the flowers seemed staged. This is a little dog tooth violet.

Not all of the early flowers are white. Here there is a little pink anemone.

Bloodroot were around, but slightly passed their peek.

Here was a bloodroot with some merry bells to the right.

The Dutchman's breeches were also all over.

Back to the garden. Here is the clump of hellebores from which the picture in this week's voting group was found.

So here are 3 different pictures from the same original. It will be difficult to pick the one that you will see this fall/winter. I like the one with the full background. That gives you an appreciation of how big is the flower.

The lupine are doing well, and appreciated the rain. I am finding newly sprouted lupines all around the bed. They will be the plants that bloom in 2 years.

The lupine leaves have wonderful water drop patterns after a rain or heavy dew.

Here is the group of Monsella tulips

Julia's recipe

Lemon Meringue Pie

I have spoken of my fondness for lemon desserts, and the best of them all is lemon meringue pie. We made such a pie this past weekend, and as is usually the case, I started with Betty Crocker and made a few adjustments. The result was delicious.

First, I had Philip make me a 10" pie crust, which was baked ahead of time in a 375 degree oven, first for 15 minutes with pie weights and then for another 10 minutes without. "Pie weights" means a piece of aluminum foil bigger than the pie shell filled with something like dried beans. There are, believe it or not, professional pie weights, beads made of stainless steel or ceramic. Dried beans are fine. At the end of each use, they can be folded up in the aluminum foil and stored in a little plastic container until next time.

Okay. So we have the baked pie shell, plus the players: 2 big lemons, sugar, cornstarch, 5 eggs, butter and a bit of salt. First, I grated both lemons and came out with 1 tablespoon of zest; squeezed the lemons (and added a bit of bottled lemon juice) to get 2/3 cup of lemon juice; separated the eggs, putting the 5 whites in a big bowl off the one side and the 5 yolks in a smaller bowl.

Then I started the cooking by measuring 2 cups of white sugar and 1/2 cup of cornstarch into a saucier (a nice saucepan with rounded sides, which make stirring/whisking easier than in a straight-sided pan). I added a pinch of salt and whisked the dry ingredients together, then added 2 cups of water and turned on the heat.  I cooked the mixture, whisking pretty much constantly on medium-medium high heat until the mixture came to a boil, which took maybe 8-10 minutes.

Here is the mixture at the boil. I whisked and boiled the mixture for 1 minute, then took the pan off the heat.

Next I ladled some of the boiling (or recently boiling) cornstarch mixture into the egg yolks and whisked it in. I added about 1/2 of the total amount of the cornstarch mixture to the egg yolks one ladle at a time.

After whisking thoroughly, I poured the yolk stuff back into the pan with the remaining cornstarch mixture.

This back-and-forth business is called "tempering the eggs", which means to slowly raise the temperature of the egg yolks by adding a hot mixture to them gradually. This means the egg yolks do not curdle or scramble or otherwise misbehave as they might if dumped willy-nilly into a boiling pan of cornstarch goo.

I returned the pan to the stove, brought the mixture to a boil whisking all the time, and boiled the mixture for another 2 minutes.

After the mixture had boiled again, I took it off the heat and whisked in: the 1 tablespoon of lemon zest, the 2/3 cup of lemon juice and 4 tablespoons of butter, cut into little pieces for faster melting.

I set this aside for a few minutes and turned my attention to the meringue. Meringue can be temperamental - weepy or stiff or both. It turns out there is a trick. Early on in the cooking, I asked Philip for help and he obliged. He measured 2 tablespoons of white sugar, 1 tablespoon of cornstarch and 1/2 cup of water into a little saucepan and brought it to a boil. The resulting mixture was kind of syrupy. We set that little saucepan aside.

I had the 5 egg whites in bowl, to which I added a pinch of salt and 1/2 teaspoon of cream of tartar. I beat the egg whites until the were frothy. Then I started adding sugar (1/3 cup total) gradually, beating all the while until they achieved soft peaks (that is, little mounds when the beaters were lifted out of the mixture). Then I added the cornstarch syrup gradually, beating all the while, then the rest of the sugar and 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla. The egg whites were a little softer than sometimes when one makes a meringue, but held their peaks (ie, did not flop over) when the beaters were removed.

The lemon filling was still hot; I poured it into the pie shell, and immediately covered it with the meringue.

Here we have meringue work.

This is the pie ready for the oven (400 degrees for about 10 minutes - keep an eye on it). In the background are 1 million cookies Maggie was baking for a hospital volunteer function.

And here is the pie fresh from the oven, with nice brown swirls. If you let the pie cool thoroughly, the slices will be perfect. If you do not eat it all, the pie will be lovely the next day, even the meringue.

Odds and Ends

The new Siberian iris are all coming up. I got ten new plants last fall. As with everything in the garden this spring, they took forever to show signs of life. But they are all fine. I try to give them some extra water. I do not know if they will bloom this year. They should make a wonderful display in a year or two.


Waiting- My own tree peony adolescents should bloom sometime in the next ten days or so. These are the ones I grew from seed. 3 of the 4 plants bloomed last year. The first one opened on April 26, 2017. The year before was the first bloom ever. That year one bloomed on May 5, 2016.
Tree peonies do bloom significantly before their herbaceous cousins.

Ducks- there is a pair that I have chased now a dozen times away from the pond in the last week or so. They just fly over the fence and pretend I cannot see them. They are picturesque. But they can eat all the fish, when I get some, and pull up the water plants, including the lilies. They have even been staying around so much that that they are making a mess all around the edge of the pond.
I put down some tree netting across the pond. I think they now realize that they should stay away.


Coming soon- We saw some little bearded iris on our walk this week. They should be starting sometime soon.

Lilium- are coming up all over. This is good because until they are up I really worry about stepping on them.

Hosta- Now is the time to lift and divide.

Have a quiet week.
Philip and Julia