July 14, 2024- an exhausting weekend

The local garden club, Project Green, is having its annual Open Gardens event this weekend. Our garden is one of 20 which is open to visitors from 4-8 on Saturday and 10-2 on Sunday.

Of course our garden is open all the time. I have suggested that visitors go to the other gardens first. They can always come to this garden outside of the published hours.

We have pointed to this weekend for a month, planning on getting the garden all ready for visitors. 

Scott tells me the garden looks good. I still see weeds. I also see various plants eaten by deer or rabbits. I guess the glass sometimes is half empty to me and half or more than half full to others.

(Saturday night) ....14,000 steps later I am tired. I was mostly on my feet for over 4 hours. I drank lots of water. It was close to 90. But the backyard has lots of shade. And I stayed outside most of the time. It is the going in and out of airconsidtioning that can be hard.

I think 50-60 people came through the garden. Some were people I knew. Some knew me from the IC Gardeners facebook posts. One person was particularly knowledgable about hoyas.  While I have maybe a dozen varieties I am not so good at their names. 

Four more hours today (Sunday). The day will be hotter but the hours, 10-2, might be cooler.

Here is a little of what they saw. This is a little orchid called Dockrillia wassellii is starting to bloom. It is a dendrobium. I showed it to only a few people. I was more impressed since it hardly ever blooms. 

Plant sales were decent yesterday. People liked the caladium, particularly the white ones. Next year we will do the caladium again.I will get more of the white ones. The name is candidum.

Speaking of caladium, the 50 new ones arrived this past Monday. They were planted by Tuesday. Some are already coming up, with the heat and humidity. It again rained a few inches in the middle of the week.

It really does make you tolerate the hot weather if you have plants that will thrive in it.

The coneflowers continue to impress.

Here is an view of the garden from the upstairs window. The paths did look good. Thank you Scott.

This is a Japanese Anemone, getting ready to bloom. Normally that does not happen until August.

This orchid cactus still has 4 buds on it. This bud will have opened over night. The visitors today will see it blooming.

I spend some time looking a lilium catagloues. This lovely double oriental lily is named Exotic Sun. I will definitely get more. I should do that today as the term "sold out" does begin to appear.

Julia's recipe

Summer fruit upside-down cake

It's stone fruit season. I gather that's what produce people call apricots and peaches and plums and nectarines and for that matter cherries. I like all kinds of stone fruit, and the season is not that long, as stone fruits don't keep. I found this recipe in a recent copy of Better Homes and Garden. It's a retro magazine, in so many ways, but I have had a subscription for many years and it doesn't cost much and it has pretty pictures of homes and gardens and it occasionally has a recipe worth trying. Enough defensiveness. On to the recipe. 

The ingredients for the fruit layer:

some stone fruit (I ended up using 1 apricot, 1 plum and 2 peaches);

1/4 cup butter;

3/4 cup brown sugar; and

2 teaspoons lemon zest (or 1/2 teaspoon lemon zest powder).

The ingredients for the cake layer:

2/3 cup almond meal or almond flour;

1/2 cup white flour;

1/2 teaspoon baking powder;

1 teaspoon cinnamon (or ginger);

1/4 cup butter;

3/4 sugar;

2 eggs;

2 tablespoons olive oil;

1/3 cup buttermilk or sour milk; and

1/2 teaspoon salt.

I used dark brown sugar, which led to a somewhat darkened final product. Tasted great, but if one used light brown sugar, the fruit slices would have shown better. 

I did not have a lemon, but I did have a little jar of Penzey's ground lemon peel. It was okay; fresh lemon zest would have been more assertive, flavor-wise, in a good way. 

I don't understand the olive oil. I think bumping the milk up to 1/2 cup and leaving the olive oil out would be fine. 

I don't keep buttermilk on hand. So when a recipe calls for buttermilk, I put 1-1/2 teaspoons (or so) of lemon juice in a measuring cup and fill the cup to the amount called for with regular milk. It curdles and becomes the functional equivalent of buttermilk. 

The recipe said to bake the cake in a 9" cake pan that is 2" deep. I don't have such a vessel. So I used my old (seriously old - a wedding present from a neighbor) castiron skillet, which is 9" across and 2" deep. 

I started by turning the oven on to 350 degrees. It was actually a bit cool last weekend so turning the oven on was not a ridiculous thing to do. 

Then I put the first 1/4 cup of butter in the skillet and put the skillet in the oven to melt the butter. 

While the butter was melting, I mixed the brown sugar with the lemon peel powder. Then I took the skillet out of the oven, swirled the butter around to make sure the sides of the skillet had some butter coverage, and sprinkled the brown sugar mixture all around. 

Note the potholder covering the skillet handle. Safety first. 

Next I started slicing fruit and arranging it on top of the brown sugar.

Apricots are free-stone, meaning that you can cut them in half along the seam, twist the halves in opposite directions and the fruit will come off the stone in two nice pieces. 

The plums were what might be called semi-free-stone - a little more trouble and the peaches were free-stone. Clingstone peaches are frustrating unless you are just eating them out of hand.

Anyway, I cut the apricot into thin wedges and put 5 slices in a line in the cent of the skillet.

I put 4 slices around the middle and ate the rest of the apricot. 

I added a ring of plum slices around the apricot and then used 2 peaches to make a border all around the edge.

I set the skillet aside and mixed the dry ingredients (both flours, the baking powder, cinnamon, and salt) in a little bowl.

Then I put the butter in a bigger bowl. It had been on the counter softening the whole time. I beat the butter to break it up (it wasn't completely soft!) for less than 1 minute, then added the sugar and the olive oil and beat the mixture some more. Next I beat the eggs in one at a time. 

When the eggs were beaten in, I added the dry ingredients. 

And finally I stirred in the sour milk. With a spatula. 

I used the spatula to scrape the cake batter over the fruit and to spread it around a little to make sure all of the fruit was covered.

The cake baked for about 45 minutes. I started checking at 35 minutes. I used a skewer to test. No glops of batter. Either nothing on the skewer or maybe a crumb or two. 

I let the skillet sit on the counter for maybe 10 minutes. Then I ran a knife around the edge of the skillet to make sure the cake was not sticking to the edges of the skillet. 

And I asked Philip for help. I was pretty sure I would not be able to invert the skillet onto a serving platter, so Philip did it for me.

On said serving platter. The cake tasted of the fruit and the cake layer was tender and mild and sweet. We served it in wedges with whipped cream, because who doesn't gild the lily when offered the opportunity?

A wedge with whipped cream.

Odds and Ends

The garden walk will soon be over. I did a good job cleaning up the back driveway.

More potting work will begin tomorrow.  

One of the Night Blooming Cereus has buds.

It did not cool off last night. It is 75  degrees at 6 in the morning. I find that to be the worst part of hot weather. 

Pray for peace. 

Philip