Spring/Summer/now Fall Projects.....cont'd......

Looks great!

Yes many recipes should specify the glass of 'refreshing beverage' to help it along LOL! Love it!
I was dumb and did not grow a single Basil plant this year--Of course one child asked to please try a homemade Pizza margherita- fresh tomato slices and fresh basil leaves on it. Gritted my teeth and paid , oh, $2.49 for a miserable looking pack of 'fresh' (not so fresh) basil at the store. And I call myself a Gardener?? Next year, basil galore--I plan to try a large purple Basil in place of the (naughty) Red perilla I had .

Gita, Thank you so much I can't wait to try this. I will have my wine glass handy as well. When you cut your basil do you only use leaves, no stems right?
Heading out side in my grubbies for some serious digging, weeding and such.

I found the new thread!

There are both green & red pesto (w/sun dried tomatoes) recipes in one of my first DG articles, together with directions for bruschetta.

Get the most from your herbs II: Eat what you pinch! http://davesgarden.com/guides/articles/view/110/

With the hundreds of packs of seed I've shared over the past several years from my favorite Italian basil, it should be easy to find seeds available around DG... I may try to harvest a few seeds this year, but I didn't have extra plants that I could let go to seed early as I've done in the past. In general, I don't anticipate doing much seed collecting this year. ;-)

HMMM... wonder why :) Blessings to you.

Holly,

I just pulled the leaves off my Basil plants. Some of the leaves had a little bit of stem attached, but it did not seem like a big deal--as it all gets "smithereened" in the food processor anyway.
NO! i do not use the bigger stems the leaves grow from. However--one COULD cut some of the more succulent, smaller stems and freeze them for use in soups and sauces--just for the flavor.
I do that with fresh Dill--as I use Dill in almost everything.....The stems go into my soups and the 'fronds" go in more dainty cookings.....:as well on garlic Bread......:o)
Try sprinkling Dried Dill on your Pork roasts as well as on Roast beef. I also make little knife-holes in the top of the roast and punch Whole Allspice in them and always add a few small pieces of Bay Leaf here and there. Basting with the juices distributes the flavor all over.

Try rubbing some caraway seed on the roasts! Not beef--but definitely Pork. A new flavor burst! Trust me! You will learn to love Caraway Seed. A little bit (it is a powerful spice!) is also great on Lima Beans--along with crumbled bacon and a bit of the bacon drippings in which sliced onion is sauteed.

Another seasoning I cannot live without is Onion Powder. It goes ON and IN everything.......as fresh onion is great--but it just does NOT impart that onion flavor to dishes. The powder does.
Just MY way of cooking......Haven't gone "wrong" yet!
Ric--you need to believe me on all this!
Do you ever make Beef Stroganoff? Need any help??????? I have pictures--step-by-step!

Gita

Gita, thanks for the pesto instructions. I will try it.
I have been using a caraway, cumin, coriander, and celery seed rub to braise my pork roast for years. I lightly score the fat with a knife and mix up my seed with a mortar and pestle using onion and garlic power as a base. After applying the rub I sear the surface with a good high temp oil to a golden brown and pop it in the over.
All this is making me hungry. LOL :-) Ric

Ric--just watch the salt amount in the Pesto, as the grated Parmesan is salty also. I already told Holly on a different Post to use only a good pinch--NOT the 1/2 tsp. ...or none at all.....
Mine was a bit too salty. of course--you might like it that way....just don't salt your pasta?

Made a grilled cheese sandwich for breakfast this morning with fresh Mozzarella, tomato and pesto. YUMMMM.....

G..

I play all kinds of games with my herbs to make pesto. You all got me started here. My "NOW WE'RE COOKING' class chefs all come and make pesto to go with their teaching of the main dishes. I don't think there is any combination I would not try. Certainly we all come up with a favorite in due time. I'll try this combo next time I play. That will be soon as I clean up my plantings for the fall season.

Being of Dutch background I started out thinking one pot meat and tatters was the only way to do the fixins. I still think pot roast or stews and chicken corn soup are the fore runners to Gormet Foods. There were pig feet and pig ears or double breasted stears selling serloin steak at sixteen cents a pound. Remember that song? Touching the gormet arena later in life I quickly discovered the practices that fattened me up all to soon. Olive oil is healthy but does not come without calories. :) My challenge now is to eat less better. Fattening the hog should not relate to me!

I heard a very convincing Harvard doc talking about what he has been researching, that refined food calories are way more available than the same food in unrefined form. Not trying to speak to anyone specifically here!! But he claims that you burn more calories eating and digesting the unprocessed forms than the refined forms. Kind of goes with the no sugar no white flour diet idea? Just passing along what I heard. If he wasn't a Harvard doc I wouldn't pay any attention to him.
The Ronzoni Smart Taste whitewheat pasta is great. I also like the whole wheat pasta now but one of my kids is resisting. My mom thinks my white-wheat King Arthur Flour is weird. Now 'real' white flour looks fakely white to me--as it is!

Lowe's clearance was no good . even at 50 cents. The blue Salvia was sold as annual so I passed, . I thought maybe it was perennial., Black and Blue? , I'm not 'up' on newer salvias. I saved one coleus for 50 cents that I didn't buy this spring . The rest was pretty much annuals. No seed heads to salvage. I wouldn't mind diving their dumpster for the pots and soil though.

The gentleman from Harvard is right on target. We lived that way and a much better way for a few years after the 1929 depression. As time progressed we all forgot how good and healthy non-processed foods really are for us. My mom went nuts with each new bag, tin or box of new processed food offerings. We went from using blurps of honey right into the bags of processed white baked goods and white sugar. No one ever read a label in my childhood days. The height of all insults came when Wonder Bread became a cake baked with enough chemicals in it to start a new company reusing the processing chemicals. It would as claimed not fail to seem fresh for about a month on your shelf. Some folks thought two slices of Wonder Bread and a slice of spam was a gormet sandwich.

The Harvard doc is right on but only professing what our grandparents knew way back at the turn of the century. Well maybe they did not know it but they lived it. Grandma baked about ten breads twice a week. The wheat was farm grown. Two slices of that whole wheat bread with homemade apple butter was indeed a gormet meal. The sweetener she used was either honey, silva leaves or maple syrup. She also grew her own yeasts.

We who are retired can at least return to some of those solid good practices. It sure is helping me drop pounds from fifty or more that I really should not be walking around with. We are likely 30% improved eaters. today. Last evening we had wild salmon, home grown tatters, salad and snow peas. Can't get it much better than that. This AM I had a whole wheat made corn fritter and one egg with Lite coffee. Now if I can stay out of Ronald's house I'm into a good twenty four hour eating pattern.

Sally, 'Black & Blue' is a perennial salvia, but not hardy for me here (maybe in Baltimore? not sure), so that's probably why it was with the annuals.

Might be the "Black Adder" we talked about so much in the Spring....
I had gathered seeds from plants at HD and, as it turned out, none of the chaff a ctually had seeds in them.

Sally and I both tried growing this plant with nada results...

G.

doc , that dinner sounds delish! I can't blame your mom for embracing all kinds of new conveneint products. Can you believe the size of the frozen prepared food cases these days?
My whole , natural diet would have to include 'whole' chocolate LOL
~~
There's no picture of Black Adder in Plantfiles. The ones I saw at Lowes could have been Black and Blue, listed hardy just to 7B~~looked pretty much like the PF picture

Talk about fall flowers! My BIL grows these for marketing in NH. He is trying to teach me raw shooting and Photo Shop Elements 7.

Doc,

I owe you a correction. I was not aware of this myself until yesterday.

The plant I gave you that I called "Night Blooming Cereus" is actually "Epiphylum Oxypetalum"
I have been posting a lot of back and forth on the Orchid cactus Forum---and I have been corrected.

Here is the link they provided from PF. http://davesgarden.com/guides/pf/go/2443/
which is a night bloomer and apparently extremely fragrant!

I have had mine for about 5 years now. It just grows and grows--but has never bloomed.
I am now wanting to find this a new home for also. Any takers??? You would have to come and get it.

Another "monster" that I just do not have room for in my house. Since it hasn't bloomed--I really have no reason to hold on to it.

Here's the whole plant by now. Look at that skinny stem going upwards. I will show you the rest of that "shoot" in the next picture.

Here is where that long, skinny stem has gone to. On PF it says these grow 8'-10'. Out of MY category!

The skinny stem can be cut off and cut up and rooted. Doc--you got one of the rooted ones. I have more......

Gita

I would love to take that off your hands. My kids school - where im on the plant care PTU, decided to throw out all of their indoor plants (I could have died) b/c of a bug problem - so now they are looking for donations. I wish I was a bit closer to you!!

Gita................I stand corrected. I have come to like the sucker. We will push and shove it around a bit but we think we can house it as long as we can move it in and out. Your pix today gave us a better understanding how we might manage it. Presently it is in a hanging pot. You saw it about a month ago somewhere on the forums.

Hi barhea--if you can get to a Swap , I'm sure you could get some more plants! Let no school go unplanted! I think it's essential--just hard to find people willing to care for the plants if they have them in my experience.

Im in almost every swap ^_^ and am going to donate as much as I can since I will be taking care of them for the next couple years... I know what you mean though. I wished those plants were still there I never met a bug I couldnt defeat!!

They didn't know who they were dealing with!
I have given plants to schools but if I wasn't there to follow up they struggled -One woman just could not grasp the idea of LOOKING to see if there was Water Sitting in the cup under the plant already. And she's in charge of a whole school library??

Good Lord, Sally, are you still up?

I sit up at night and fret over unloved plants.
Just kidding. One of those nights! Not having them too much lately.
and who are you to point a finger, Miss 2:27 AM?

lol, I hear that!

WOO HOO there IS a fence at the end of the bed... LOL

WOW, looks like you needed a machete there, Holly! What's going into the newly cleared space?

Critter, That is the area along side my Veggie Garden. It runs from the clipped yew to the old corral fence 4ft wide and 46ft long. I'm sure you remember how bad that area was, no machete but hand clippers and loppers and heavy leather gloves where very much needed to finish the job. I have the upper half of the bed completed and planted. The curly willow is in and the obedient plant along with several other plants from the swap and from the Co-op. I'll be moving my goldflame honeysuckle in there I'm putting an old bicycle in the bed as a trellis for it to grow on. There are some ornamental grasses and echies, some dahilas and cannas that will need to come out next month. There is still a good bit of work to do in that area. Ric needs to move the last back RR Tie into place. It is sitting just out of the picture half buried in wild raspberry bushes. I will be roto-tilling and moving some dirt around you can see how much lower the dirt is at that end. I"ll be bringing over several wheelbarrow loads of compost I'm thinking maybe as many as 10 of them to help fill in. Then I will need to edge the front maybe buried landscaping ties, something Ric can mow over to make it easy. Ric mulched the top part last night with grass clippings you can see a large clump of lemon balm about half way down that is where the finished area stops.

This message was edited Sep 15, 2009 2:38 PM

Well, Guys!
Knocked off one of my biggest, procrastinated projects today!!!! So glad it is done!

I e-mailed this to a couple people--that I had e-mail addresses for. So--this text is pretty much c/p of the previous one....Didn't want to write it all over again.

I finally did it!!!!! After a struggle worthy of a trophy, I succeeded in removing my Clivia from it's "pot-of-ages" (about 35yrs.) and spent about 2 hrs. in hacking it apart into 12 lg. divisions and 4 small ones. Lost a lot of roots in the process--as I had to use a knife to cut most of the divisions apart.
Oh, well! They will have to survive!

I had planned to re-pot them in, maybe, 6" pots--but, obviously, that won't do.
HAH??? Just looking at the divisions, nothing less than a 8"-10"pot will do!
Do I REALLY need to go shopping for pots????? My shed is full of them! However--most of them are UGLY and USED! Since I am hoping to sell some of these potted divisions next Spring (assuming they will root in OK) they need to be in presentable pots. NOT those black, Nursery pots.....Have to now scrounge in my shed and my basement and see what I have .
AGAIN--I have created a time frame to accomplish something I had NOT planned for. And--so my life goes! (Post note--I DID accomplish it! ALL of it! Done!!! ) Doing a happy dance!

BTW--The 12" pot it was in is indestructible!

After a while of banging on the sides and bottom of this pot with my heavy rubber mallet ( I was being conservative)--I took my 4lb. sledge hammer and started hitting away--as I had come to the conclusion that I will have to break the pot in pieces to remove the plant. I hit gently-- at first--then full force--and the pot did not even crack! Kept wondering WHAT it is made of???? Some kind of a polymer???

It did, eventually, loosen the root ball enough, though, that I could pull it out. I am glad that the original pot did not break--(as I wanted to honor Helen's Mom who started this plant in it--close to 35 yrs. ago. Helen is my friend who gave me this plant 3 years ago)--by re-planting a couple of the bigger divisions back in it. Let it live another 30 years!!!!! Or even 50 yrs.! (They DO!) I will be long gone!

After I succeeded in getting it out of the pot--I put the root ball on the lawn and rinsed all the soil off of of it. In the bottom part of the pot--the roots must have been rotten--as there were NO firm roots in the bottom 3rd of the pot. No wonder! All the rain we have had. This plant sat totally exposed to the elements. Sun AND rain! Will know better next year!

SO! Here is the root ball right after I pulled it out....

Here it is all clean--after I hosed and hosed this mess, turning it over to get to all the sides....

There was NO hope in untangling all the roots. I did some preliminary digging and pulling--but, eventually, resorted to cutting it apart with a knife in the tighter areas.
Yes! It lost a lot of roots--but I think there are plenty left to help these divisions re-grow.

Here is the bounty! Can't believe all this was in a 12" pot!

Here is a close-up of some of the larger divisions.....Nasty roots! NO? Like big earthworms.....:o(

If you go to PF and look up Clivia--and then read all the comments at the bottom--you will learn a lot about this plant from all those people's personal experiences.....

http://davesgarden.com/guides/pf/go/2201/

I was going to post on the Tropicals Forum and ask for advice--but I don't really need it any more. The deed is done!

Laid all the divisions on my table on the Patio to dry a bit.
Went inside to e-mail all this--and then went out again and tried to find some decent pots to plant these in. I did OK on that--actually had enough of them.

This is, kind of a repeat--instead of them being on the concrete floor--they are now on my table.

If any of you have a "Good Stuff Cheap" store near you--run--don't walk--to buy some of this potting mix they have had all year. It is the most awesome mix! Almost half ground bark bits-- and soil. VERY composted! Four bags for $10! I got 8 bags last time. Will go back asap and get 8 more--or even, maybe, 16! That would be $20. What a deal!!!!
My store here has these on a palate by the front door. They are not big bags and are not really heavy. Nice and loose contents.....

And now--presenting to you all---TAAA DAHH! The finished product!

"Where there's a will--there is a way!"
My English teacher, oversees, wrote this in my Memory Book when i was 11 yrs. old.....Still works for me in MY life today! Just another version of: "Mind over matter"!

Of course--I have just created a new dilemma for myself! Now I have to find room for 12 more pots inside for the Winter....Bah--Humbug!

Here is the original, indestructible pot all this was in.

I am SOOOOOO glad this is done!

Gita

Well done!

Second that. Well Done Gita!

Wow! Great job.

Knocked out another put off project today.....Edging my lawn.

Such a cool day! I was energized--just like the "Bunny".....

Mowed my lawn and then got out the "Grass Hog" and edged it all. Took 3 spools of line---YES! I rewind them myself--saves me $5 each time. I have now learned how to do it right!

It just does not seem to be working like it should. Almost every 30 seconds--I have to stop--remove the spool and pull out a bit more line. Snap everything back and proceed......Half a minute later--same thing...and so it goes....till the whole yard/walkways are done.

Then--cleaned it all up-----Then--removed all my rabbit fencing from all the beds, since I haven't seen a rabbit since Spring. I am glad--BUT--WHERE did they all go???? Last year we were inundated with rabbits! NOT complaining!

That was all my efforts for today......enough! Everything looked clean and nice!

Can you believe this????? The third BIG bloom flush on my "Maya". WOW!
Posted it on Craig's List today....I hope someone wants to adopt it. Also my older Rose Souvelons.....
Both are now ridiculously big. If no one wants these--I truly do not know how I will deal with them???????

I have sent 3 e-mails to Rawlings and Cylburn and asked if they wanted the Maya. NO response!

Gita

Here's a project that finally got done. Some of you may remember my speaking of two Broom plants that were supposed to be dwarfs but grew to over 6' tall and flopped over and killed the dwarf conifers growing in front of them. Well last fall I cut them down to 2' tall. This year they regrew to over 5' again. So yesterday I dug them up along with the damaged conifers and redistributed the remaining conifers throughout the bed.

I don't have a sunny spot that can take plants of this size, so they will now live at my neighbor's home. DSO & I made two trips across the road and down the street with these on my low cart. My pickup is out on loan & they were too big to fit into DSO's van. Their blooms were spectacular and I will miss that, but my shrub bed is so much neater looking now.