Weeds and Woodwork

    I've really neglected my garden this summer.  Simply have to make progress inside the house.  But when I took Llewellyn out I was confronted with the horrible state of the garden beds, especially how the crab grass was taking over the Brussels sprouts.  So since it was nice outside, I spent the morning weeding and mulching instead.

    I'd planned to mulch up old bagged leaves and spread them around the Brussels sprouts plants, but gave that up after the first bag took nearly an hour to do.  They're so wet they weren't going through the leaf vac grinder and into to catcher bag, they were being turned into dirt and clogging up the grinder wheel chamber.  I was constantly having to take the machine apart to clean it out.  So most of the bed is now covered with whole, if wet and decaying, maple leaves.  Not ideal, but I couldn't afford six or seven more hours at it.  Tired, and the sun was getting hot.

    Nice to have that much done, though.  Makes it look a little like I have a real garden this year.

    Progress continues on the south wall of the living room.  Got the last two coats of  shellac onto the cornice moulding.


    That was four coats and that's enough.  I'd contemplated going on today and priming the south wall and the adjacent west corner.  But I don't like the way I got primer on the lower edge of the cornice on the east wall when I tackled it in April-- it'd be a good idea to tape that surface to prevent it happening on this side.  So I'm giving the shellac overnight to harden up before I apply the tape.

    So instead I went downstairs and wielded my new Dremel and my new 7/16" Forstner bit on the broken and stuck pegs in the salvaged screen door.  Shocking how most of them just flew into powder-- no wonder the door fell apart.  The strange thing is that as they were being drilled out those pegs smelled like sweet corn!

    The old pegs were 1/2" diam., but I started drilling with the smaller bit in case I didn't hit the hole on center first time.  First knocked down any that protruded with the Dremel multipurpose cutting bit.  Probed around with the dental picks trying to work the loose pieces out, then finished it off with a 1/2" Forstner.

    Ironically, the last peg I tackled looked like it might come out with a little wiggling.  But I couldn't get a grip on it and had to drill it out anyway.  But because the wood was in better shape, it held together and my battery-operated drill wasn't making much headway.  Thankfully, my old corded drill is still working, and gave me better results.

    Tested the cleared holes with a 1/2" dowel I have sitting around.  I guess I'll cut it up to make the new pegs.

    Around 10 o'clock I thought I was almost done with all the drilling out I needed to do, just two more to go at the top of the hinge-side stile.  But the attachment of the bottom panel to that stile is a little wobbly, and considering how easily the other joints fell apart, maybe I should take my rubber mallet and separate those pieces and replace those pegs, too.

    Which would have given me up to eight more holes to clear, depending on how many pegs I could keep intact.  Nope, I've had enough for the night.

Off Hours

Remind me that I need to reset my body clock to normal human hours.  Nothing to do with Daylight Saving Time coming on last night, just a reflection on the cockeyed hours I've been keeping this weekend.  Up till 3:00 or 4:00 Friday night/Saturday morning, not out of bed till Saturday noon.  Up till 5:00 AM DST this morning, not up and getting dressed till nearly 2:30.

My excuse is that I was getting things done on the house these past two nights/early mornings, I felt awake enough to keep going, shouldn't I take advantage of the opportunity?  Whereas if I went to bed at a decent hour, there was no guarantee I'd lug myself out of bed the next day to correspond. 

But this is ridiculous.  Today by my mixed-up timing I missed the opportunity to make it to church anywhere, and I missed over half of a beautiful, bright, pleasant day.  Shameful.

I did as much with it as I could.  Got out and pruned all the roses (barring the groundcover ones) for the spring, as well as the crepe myrtles and the blueberry bush.  Tied up the tall stem of the Don Juan rose so it'll climb, and cut back a lot of the English ivy that's overwhelming the clematis and the Sympathie rose in the back.

Got the first application of joint compound into the holes and gouges in the living room north wall, and around the two corners a yard or so to the west and east.  That place I chiselled out at the upper right hand of the doorway casing is going to be really tricky to get right.  The joint compound is really too loose for the job, but it's what I have on hand.  The whole wall and the problem corner especially will need repeated applications before it's through.

After a late dinner, got the west dining room window lintel gooped up with wood filler where the big splinter came out Friday night.  How long did I say it was?  At least a foot in reality.

    Was planning to do something else on the living room tonight, but I guess not.  What it is, either my POs or the POs-1 (I think it was the former), when they repainted the ceilings, got ceiling paint on the cornice moulding.  The cornice is dinky enough as it is, but the white paint along the top of it reduces its effective height by about a quarter inch.  I don't have the time or money right now to replace it with the more robust moulding the living room and dining room, if not the front room, should have.  So for the time being I've planned to paint over that white with the same cooked mushroom brown color (the can is downstairs in the paint locker), then go over it with shellac so it'll more or less match the rest of the trim.

But as it turned out, the remaining quart or so of the mushroom brown is covered with mold.  OK, Plan B!  There's an unused quart of a warmer medium brown down there, and I think I'll repaint the cornice entirely with it, with the shellac over.  But it's been sitting so long it's badly separated.  No point in me trying to stir it up myself tonight.  After work tomorrow I'll take the can to Lowe's, where it's from, and get them to put it on the shaker.  And maybe I can remember to ask if they can order the kind of wallpaper paste I need while I'm there (Roman's "Golden Harvest" GH34.  Wheat paste. "For English wallpapers."  Well, there ya go.)

Thinking about the cornice again.  If I actually have some money for frivolities someday, I want to get cornice moulding of a more appropriate size and nail it up using the existing as blocking.  What's there is 2" high if it's lucky, so it shouldn't get in the way.

What's More Exciting Than a White Wall?

Two white walls.  Well, one and three-quarters white walls.

Tackled the basement laundry room this evening.  Sherwin-Williams' "Pearly White" with perlite added.  With a brush because the texture on the bricks has to be vertical to match the existing.  I don't trust myself doing it with a roller.

It looks really weird having that greeny-creamy-tanny-bricky wall white now.  I almost feel like I've obliterated an historical monument.  (I'll get over it.)

Knocked off when I ran out of gritty paint.  Brush was a mess anyway.  Good idea to finish up in the daylight when I can see the places I've missed.  Already noticed one when I was cleaning out the brush.

Anyway, what is more exciting than a white wall?   I mean, really?

A green vegetable garden.  And impatiens planted around the maple tree.

Quick Update

I have been working on the house the past two-plus weeks; I just haven't been working in the house.

Nope, time and the growing season waits for no one, so it's been yard and garden, garden and yard, since the 19th of June.

Grinding up last fall's leaves to mulch the vegetable beds, mostly.  How long I could do that each day has depended upon three factors:  1) the relative wetness of the leaves to be chopped, 2) the battery life remaining in my lawn mower, and 3) the energy remaining in me.  Nos. 1 and 2 are the most determinative, since I'd be tempted to keep going until I dropped (though I know I shouldn't) if the mower would keep going and if there were enough dry leaves to do.

This process has really done a number on part of my back lawn.  Set the mower low enough the mulch the leaves, and there goes the grass.  What I really need is one of those leaf-grinding machines, but you know what they say about wishes and beggars.

There's been a lot more planting, too.  Local nursery had a good sale on flowers annual and perennial a week or so ago and I took advantage.  Put in some impatiens under the kerrias by the back gate, and it looks so nice, I wonder why I never did it before.

Got some pruning in, too, late last week.  My weeping cherry needed a haircut, badly, and I confess to taking my pruners to the shrubs of the neighbors to the west, here and there, to clean up where he'd done a crudely quick-and-dirty hack job on them about a month ago.  I mean, I'm the one who's gotta look at them, right?

Week ago Saturday, the neighbor across the street brought over his ladder and cleaned the maple seeds out of my back porch downspout.  We thought he'd got them all, till it rained hard that afternoon and the gutter was still overflowing.  I was watching the spout over the rain barrel, when whoosh!!!  the last of the clog cleared and that water exploded out of the spout and, completely missing the barrel, made a small temporary pond in my back yard.

It settled down and filled the barrel, and we got another good barrel-filler the 23rd.  Hope we get another soon.  That's the last it's rained worth a darn around here.

What else?  Once the leaves were gone from their spot in the west border, I moved the broken bricks I put there two years ago, then dug out the river rock and took up the landscape fabric.  Discovered a cool thing when I did:  the previous owners, when they put in the board fence, lined the foot of it with brick pavers.  Funny, it's only like this on the west side.  Looks like it keeps small creatures from burrowing underneath.  I laid another row of bricks over that, since the fence has shifted a bit.

That done, I was able to turn my compost pile.  Lots of nice dirt on the bottom, which I'll have to decide where to use.  Maybe I can fill the depressions in my front lawn.  Heaven knows that with this dry spell the grass in those areas might be dead already. 

Anyway, tonight, even though there were more leaves to mulch (raked out from the dark and mysterious side yard), I elected to come inside and strip old shellac off the stairs to the third floor.  Don't think I've tackled that since the 12th.  I knocked off about twenty till midnight, even though I only have two treads and risers and a certain amount of stringer left to do.  My sensible reason is that I have round two of chemotherapy in the morning and should get a good night's sleep beforehand.  My real reason for stopping is that my hair is falling out, and although I got it cropped short a week ago, it got really annoying with the hairs sticking to the sweat on my back and shoulders.  If I didn't have more heat gun work to do, I probably would have pushed through.  But I'm not feeling that dedicated.

So I'll try to add a picture or two to this post, then it's off to the shower.

Making the Beds

In the kitchen garden, that is. No time to do a full post: I have to get to bed at a somewhat decent hour, since I'm due to start my first round of chemotherapy in the morning and I need some sleep beforehand . . .

So here's an After picture, with the narrative to come later:

Twice-Guessed Potatoes

Am I the only one who does something with her house reno or in the garden, and then spends hours afterwards on the Internet trying to confirm if she did it right? Even if the thing is done and not about to be undone?

Today I transplanted potatoes. (It's nice being cleared to exert myself again!) If I'd done a better job last fall digging my potato crop, the matter wouldn't have come up. But I didn't get them all, and it did. Or they did. Come up, I mean. Potato plants, in all their green, promising glory.

Couldn't leave them where they were. Don't they say not to plant potatoes in the same place two years running? Time for relocation.

Besides, that south bed looked terrible. I got a late start mounding my potatoes up last year, and when I got around to it I made a cage of sorts with green plastic chicken "wire" stapled to wooden stakes all round. Then I dumped into it all the finished compost I had. Towards the end of last year, when I took the enclosure down, the composty-dirt stayed put, but oh! wasn't it lumpy and bumpy--! Not to mention encroaching a good way over the edge of the garden path. The bed was a mess, netted with weeds, edged with two-year-old red onion plants going to flower, and here and there, some volunteer leaf lettuce and the volunteer potatoes.

After the fact, I read on the Internet all sorts of dire things about transplanting volunteer potatoes. That they won't "take" and you'll lose your work. That they might harbor tomato/potato blight, if you had it last year (did I? I don't remember. I know the potatoes I dug looked and tasted good!)

Well, too bad. It's done. I put the seven young plants into the north bed, in a more or less symmetrical arrangement with the three towers of snow peas I already have there, mounded them up with some of the excess dirt from the north bed (probably another no-no?, and mulched them in with last fall's ground-up maple leaves.

But given that I used the volunteers, did I transplant them right? The sites that talk about transplanting (I think they're assuming potatoes from seed) say you're supposed to put them in the garden at the same level they were in the pot.

Oh, dear. The four biggest volunteers were nearly 16" high and looking to get taller. Sorry, I don't want my garden to look like I've buried a giant in a shallow grave. It's too small for that. I dug those holes down deep in my sandy soil and once I had those plants in, I wished I'd dug the holes even deeper. With the mounding I had to do, that bed's already looking like Paricutin redux.

And then, look what I found when I dug up the tallest volunteers:

Hurray, baby potatoes! I carefully pinched them off and put them in the harvest basket for dinner. I figured that the transplants needed to use their energy for the next little while to get reestablished; making potatoes will come later.

But the Intertoobs say the spuds just begin to form when the plant is in bloom. My plants have buds-- but no blooms yet. They also say that if you harvest potatoes when they're new, you won't get many more off that plant.

Oh.

Well.

But isn't that why I planted potatoes last year in the first place-- so I could get really fresh, really new taters? I didn't eat all the mature ones I stored last year, anyway.

Of course there were all those pimples on the leaves of the two medium-sized transplants . . . They didn't seem to be affecting the shape of the leaves or the overall vigor of the plants, so in they went, anyway. Haven't been able to find anything online yet to make me second guess my decision about that; maybe there'll be something in one of my gardening books, which I'm too lazy to run downstairs and fetch. It looked like an insect problem rather than any sort of disease, but did I violate yet another potato-planting rule?

Never mind! I had a panful of lovely little buttered potatoes for supper tonight. And whatever I in my potato-growing nescience may have done today, I recall last year when I did so many things wrong-- like using sprouted supermarket spuds in the first place-- and it all came out so delightfully right.

Worth the Effort

Considering that my stoopy tumor turned out to be a Stage 1C, Grade 1 ovarian cancer, and considering that it was 1c instead of 1A only because it ruptured during surgery, there certainly is a little voice in me that questions whether it would have made a difference had I been able to get it all out on March 25th as originally planned.

But accepting that the bad cold I got prevented that, I have to be glad for the four additional weeks I had to do things and get ready before I went in.

Like getting my hollies planted. I am so grateful that I made the effort to get those rocks out and get that job done.

Here's some pictures taken today:

See that? That's berries. Meaning that the clerk at Lowe's was right: It was okay for me to plant two female Blue Angel hollies on my property, provided there was some kind of male holly bush within a block. I don't know the paternity of these green offspring, but there they are!

The second bush that didn't come through the winter as well is nowhere close to catching up to its sister, but it sports new growth and berries, too.

In other garden news, all the roses have buds on them and in a week or two I should have blooms.

The white lilac I transplanted two autumns ago is very happy in its new position on the east side of the house and promises to present an abundant display of blossom pretty soon.

The year-and-a-half-old blackberry bush is running riot in the east back garden border. It looks like I should have berries (yum!)-- if the birds don't get to them first.

The kerrias are the best they've been so far, and the bearded irises and the clematis lift up their heads for joy.

It's really chilly here in southwestern Pennsylvania today, in the 40s and 50s, and they say it'll get below freezing tonight. I heard on a radio garden show this morning that my perennials should weather that just fine; it's annuals, only, one needs to cover. Makes me wonder if I should put sheets over my leaf lettuce and snow peas. But both of those like being planted before the last frost, so unless I'm feeling really energetic after evening service, I'll let them take their chances, too.

Got This Done!

When my surgery was scheduled for the end of March, it bugged me that I wasn't going to get the Blue Angel holly bushes I bought last fall planted. I heard it needed to be done by mid-April, and one of them didn't look like it'd gotten through the winter that well. Lots of dry leaves and desiccated berries on it. I didn't think they'd survive till June, when I'll be allowed to lift heavy objects again.

If I can lift heavy objects by then . . .

And somehow, I couldn't see asking some random neighbor to come over and dig out fifteen to twenty cubic feet of landscape rock, extract deep and persistent arborvitae roots, test the soil, amend it as needed, and plant those hollies for me by income tax day.

But with my operation being postponed, and a day yesterday when I didn't get called in to work, I was able to finish digging out the river rock and get those shrubs planted myself.

This evening, I mulched them in.

Yay!!! Finally, finally, got that job done!

Here a Little, There a Little

This evening-- o the excitement!-- we have primer applied to the wood trim inside the hall closet. Usually I wouldn't tackle that till the wall surface painting is done. But with the faux finish, I thought I'd do primer first so that if any random drips ended up dried on the walls, the final glaze coat would provide some camouflage.

Whatever. At least, the woodwork looks better with the beige covered. And I got the drips wiped off the walls. And off the stripped wood floor, mostly.
Which wood floor is why I'm doing the closet painting now. All spots can be removed before the finish goes on.

I suppose if I were an expert painter I would have taped off the door casing and got a nice even edge to the primer around there. But that messy edge will be covered up with the stop moulding, and I have more important things to think about in life than that level of perfection.

I guess I could give the primer an hour or so to dry then slop on the top glaze coat. But I really need to do my taxes.

@@@@@@@@@

Meanwhile, in other news . . . Look what I discovered in my front border when I got home from work this afternoon:
Here"s the daffs emerging in this 34 degree "warm snap," maybe as a nod to St. David's Day this coming Monday. Hope they'll survive when the freezing weather hits again.

Long Island Cheese Pie

I've been considering whether it's fitting to post articles about my culinary exploits here, or whether they belong over on the miscellan-eous blog. I've decided that general cooking and baking stories go there, but if the kitchen adventures involve food I've grown in my garden, they go here.

That said, I had one (count 'em, 1) pumpkin out of my garden this year. Beautiful vines everywhere, but only one gourd. Variety, "Long Island Cheese." Heirloom, kind of pinky-yellowy-white, said to be good for pies.

So I offered my one-and-only up to the cause of the annual Thanksgiving feast at my friend Frieda's*.

Sunday, I cut the pumpkin in halves, put it on a greased cookie sheet, and baked it. It's really easier to scoop out the flesh that way. Peeling and boiling is just too much like work.

Then the flesh went into the blender to pureé. No, Kate, a full blender bowl will not process, especially on a machine that dates to the mid-1960s (the blender's an heirloom, too). OK, divide it in two batches and pureé each separately.

This yielded me nearly two quarts of pumpkin pureé. It tasted good and rather sweet, even with no sugar added. It was a little runny, though, with clear liquid around the edges . . . Probably not good. I could see me on the night before Thanksgiving with a pie still sloshing in the middle. So, doing the sensible thing, I-- no, I didn't read a cookbook or check the Internet!-- I called my 79-year-old mother.

"Fresh pumpkin always does that. You have to let it drain for a few hours to get the extra liquid out."

So I did. At least, I did it with the quart I hadn't put in the freezer. And by the time it was drained, I was left with 1-3/4 cups of pureé for a 2 cup recipe. (Next time, I'm draining it before it's pureéd.)

OK, get the other quart out of the freezer and thaw and drain it, too.

That gave me a cup and a half. Enough and some to spare.

Made the pie crust last night, formed it into a couple of discs, and put it in the fridge to rest. I'm pretty good with pie crust (one of the few advantages of having perpetually cold hands), but the part I dread is getting the rolled-out dough off the marble board and onto the pie plate. Epic fail my first attempt this evening, and I had to roll it out again. If anyone's listening, I would really like a pastry cloth for Christmas!

I was extravagant and used heavy cream instead of evaporated milk. I have a can of the latter in the cupboard, but I think it's something the dinosaurs left behind when they became extinct. Actually, I used the recipe out of Joy of Cooking precisely because it reassured me I could use heavy cream instead of evaporated milk.

Brown sugar as well as white, and lots of spices-- I like spices-- with nutmeg freshly grated in. Then the eggs, and all beaten with my new Cuisinart mixer. I meant to take a photo of the filling in the bowl before I poured it in the case, it looked so suave and silky, but I actually had my mind on the job and forgot. From the lickings I'd say this Long Island Cheese variety does give a different taste than the bog-standard pumpkin that goes into the Libby's can. I like it; will my friends be able to tell the difference?

The pie came out of the oven just fine-- until I knocked off a bit of the crust carrying it to the cooling rack. Excuse to eat some . . . hmm. Maybe it could have used a bit of sugar?

Never mind. I'm sure I got enough into the filling.

The pie lost a bit more crust a little later as I contrived to put it up to finish cooling out of the reach of my greedy, energetic, and enterprising dog. I'd moved it from the counter to a rack in the microwave over the stove (with the door open) and usually that's safe enough. But I saw him jumping for it just as I was leaving the kitchen and I'm taking no chances.

So the pie from my one precious Long Island Cheese pumpkin is now reposing on top of the pots in the cupboard above the microwave. I'm glad my goggeh likes the smell of my baking, but I'm not prepared to accept the compliment of his scarfing down the whole jolly thing when my back is turned.

Quince-tessence

I have quinces this year. Big ones, middle-sized ones, smallish ones; quinces picked off the tree and wind-fallen on the ground; yellow, ripening, fragrant quinces and spring-green immature quinces. I admit, they are not the "true" quince, Cydonia oblonga; they are the flowering quince, Chaenomeles japonica. I do not care. The fruits smell and cook up just like the real kind, which makes them real enough quinces to me. I'm told they make excellent jelly and other scrumptious things, and I intend to try.

Last year I had exactly one fruit of any size. The year before that, and before that, and before that, there was no fruit, period. Come to think of it, there wasn't much in the way of flowers those years, either. This shrub was a thorny nothing straggling along the ground my first spring here. I propped it up with bricks so it'd grow upright, but it was a long time before I could identify what that angular bush in the corner of the vegetable garden even was. So this year it was gratifying to see such a yield from a shrub that I'm reliably told isn't supposed to bear much fruit at all.

True, it would've been even more gratifying had conditions cooperated to keep the fruit on the shrub awhile longer. Annoying to have most of one's harvest on the ground before it's reached full size and ripeness.

But I'm not giving up my dream of quince jelly. I've been on the InnerToobs the last two evenings, trying to discover the best way to ripen up the green ones. Finally this evening I found a page called From Harvest to Table that told me I should spread the green ones out in a cool dry place, turn them every so often, and they should be ripe in a few days. Oh, yes, and they should be out of direct sunlight. Oh. That's why some of the ones I brought in first were getting kind of wrinkly on the windowsill!

So tonight I laid down newspapers on my pantry shelf in the basement and arranged my haul. Cool and dry and out of direct sunlight. Will more of them turn golden yellow and start to emanate the heady sweet essence of quince?

We'll see. At least, it'll keep the fruit away from my dog. He had two or three of the bigger ones on the floor of the front room with bite marks in them when I got home from work this afternoon. Guess he thought they smelled good enough! Happily, they're hard enough he couldn't actually eat them, and once they're scrubbed and boiled his incursions won't matter.

I don't think.

Tomorrow, maybe, I'll have my first go at quince jelly making with the ones that are already yellow and sweet-smelling. It'd be a shame if I missed the opportunity.

Food Out of the Dirt

My poor garden's definitely been neglected this past summer. I think I applied Miracle-Gro maybe once.

Still, the veggies are coming on in spite of me, and this year as in all gardening years I am continually amazed that I can go get food right out of the backyard.

What astonishes me most of all is potatoes. There they are, food in the dirt! Reach in, scrabble around a bit, and there it is-- dinner! Some say they're not worth planting. That you can get them cheaper at the store. But these came from some Aldi's potatoes that sprouted, and I've already got more than I planted, despite my neglect. And these buried gems are firm and fresh and hard and smooth, not slightly soft and contorted and covered with eyes.

Tonight's potato morphed into french fries. Or should I say, nice, fluffy-on-the-inside, crisp on the outside, English-style, Delia-Smith-recipe chips. With a shrimp stir-fry featuring mushrooms, eggplant, and yellow peppers, the last two also from my backyard larder.

I'd better enjoy it while I may. The dreaded f-word (no, not that one!) was mentioned on the weather report yesterday and while the Brussels sprouts might enjoy a spot of nippiness, the peppers, cucumbers, eggplant, tomatoes, and potatoes will not.

(Good grief, it's only the end of September; lighten up with the cold weather, all right already!)