Walking the Line with Garden Ornaments

I've always been skeptical about garden ornaments.   Maybe I've  seen too many florescent whirlies,  plywood cut-outs showing  gardening grannies' underwear  and {gasp},  the garden g-nome!  Then there's the "no sucess like excess" approach of a neighbor - at last count there were 47 "decorations" in one small garden.

It's a slippery slope - too many doo-dads, or tacky doo-dads and POOF- you're in line with the crazy cat-ladies, and your once -lovely garden looks like sale-day at Big Lots.  But I went on a pocket garden tour recently and was struck by how the creative use of interesting ornaments really punched up the garden's impact.  I loved the use of "found" stuff - parts of old machinery,  little piles of glass or pottery,  beautiful ceramics (although even tasteful little statues of bunnies seem perilously close to going over the edge- just my opinion)!

I looked around my gardens and decided to embrace the decoration:

Terra cotta AND numbers - what's not to love?

My tea-cup garden.  I saw something similar in a garden last year and made my version using old stair spindles and thrift-store cups.

 These are all pieces from a broken  cast-iron chiminea.

Terrarium, minus the glass sides

A final word about the gnome .  When your two-year old granddaughter gives you a little-bitty gnome, you put in where you can see it every day and everytime you see it you smile!

A Gem of a Book

I just discovered this wonderful garden book by Katherine S. White.   It is a complilation of columns on gardening that she wrote for the New Yorker between the 1950s and 1970s.  The book is a  combination of  gardening advice, grammar and language policing, and strong opinions, all written  with a writer's appreciation for words.   I found myself trying to pace my reading to make it last. 



 Mrs. White reviewed garden catalogs  and gardening books with a critical eye for every detail - photography or art work (she much preferred carefully drawn sketches to poor color photographs), the quality of the paper used to print the catalog, the font,  and of course, the actual seeds and plants for sale.  How could I not love this book?  Here is a woman with opinions about everything and it was fun to recognize how many opinions we share;  font matters, enough with the bigger and bigger blossoms,  and that some flowers , like gladiolas, are just plain hideous :   "The sad truth is that I have never been able to really like these showy, impersonal, unfragrant blooms" . "Hideous" is my more succinct opinion!  And this gem " Last summer I grew a packet of mixed seed of some of Park's California Giant Zinnias ....soft harmonizing colors with all the jarring oranges, purples, and magentas screened out".    Amen!

I love her digressions on the writing in garden catalogs.  In discussing the variety of snapdragons listed in the Burpee's catalog, she has this little rant: " 'Snaps" is Burpee's word, not mine.  I detest the cozy flower abbreviations. "Mums"  is probably the most repellent of the lot, unless it is "Glads", but 1959 gave us "Dels" for the lordly delphinium".  Guess she might agree with one on my "detest" list - "veggies" for the perfectly acceptable, grown-up word it replaces.

The columns written in the 50s show that the gardening world was not immune from the frenzy to "modernize" everything.  She laments not being able to find "earthenware" flower pots as all plants came potted in ugly plastic pots- many decorated with pink stripes.  Thankfully we can easily find terra cotta pots so we can rescue our nursery plants from their sad plastic cases.  And we're spared the pink stripes.

Her winter routine for caring for houseplants by checking them several times a day for water or  to move them to better lighting or temperature or humidity made me rethink my delusion that moving one Peace Lily to catch some sun qualifies me as a plant-whisperer!

I love her review of old garden books and now I'm on the search for one she  recommended,  Gardening on Main Street, by  Mrs. Buckner Hollingsworth (it was the 50s after all - no informal FIRST names !).    Hope it's another gem.



Chickens!

 I made this page for last year's family calendar, not expecting that we'd have some hens of our own.  The Captain has talked about getting chickens, but I was most certainly not interested.  I knew a family that had an egg business, which meant they really had a chicken business.  All I remember was the pungent odor  stench and being pecked by some aggressive old biddies.  No chickens for me!  But our local farmers' markets have beautiful blue eggs which I happily buy at over $5.00 a dozen.  So it came about that I agreed to have a few chickens, but only if they laid those lovely blue/green eggs and did not wander all over the lawn. 

 The Captain and our son built this chicken ark out of scrap lumber and chicken wire, then painted it with a mixture of all the off-white/yellow paint dibbles left over from other projects.  There was some pressure to get this done - our granddaughter is coming to visit next month and she is expecting chickens!!

 We found three chickens on Craigslist - two Aracaunas that lay those lovely blue/green eggs and one Polish hen that lays smaller brown eggs.  That's the Polish hen above - we named her Lady Gaga for obvious reasons!  The Aracaunas are Thelma and Louise.  Here's a picture of what those ladies look like because for some reason I don't have a picture of our pair.

 We got our birds last Wednesday and as of this morning and they have settled in nicely.  (Well, there was that one instance of Lady Gaga literally flying the coop ark and wandering about the lawn as pictured above).   We're learning all kinds of things.  I Googled "the best chicken feed" and went to the local feed store where the clerk was less than amused by being asked if the chicken feed had any other whole grains besides corn!  Really, does she just think handing over a bag of nuggets with no label, no information is going to satisfy the Queen of Researching Information on "the Google"??  We're going to find the organic version - geesh, even our cat food lists all the nutritional information in great detail! 

The hens have been very busy.    Seven eggs in less than four days - not bad for "stressed" chickens!   

The color of the inside of the shells is so pretty!







Bright yellow yolks, super-fresh from the ark to our  breakfast!  Eggs from the Aracuana hens have a slightly higher cholesterol content than most eggs because of their higher ratio of yolk to white.  Since we don't really eat that many eggs, I'm not concerned and think the freshness and better quality feed will still make them better for us than commercially farmed ones.  We already have people asking for blue eggs, so I don't expect us to go over our "eggs only on the weekend"  rule.

Just a thought - never say never.  Here I am with chickens in my back yard.  What next?

Great Summer Salad

I've been celebrating my release from my temp job at the cube-farm by recreating some of the great salads at our local Whole Foods - wannabee.  Their salads are quite tasty, but I always think I can make a healthier (and less pricey) version.  So far I've made the farro salad and the Greek pasta salad - both definite keepers!

I saw this recipe on Ezra Pound Cake.   I love panzanella and the idea of making something similar with corn bread was too tempting.   The EPC version is from Jamie and Boby Deen's book, "The Deen Bros. Get Fired Up".  

Here is the recipe and some changes I made - minor for sure - hard to improve on the Brother's great recipe.

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Start with 1/2 to 1 corn bread - I used  a basic corn bread recipe and added the kernels from a leftover grilled ear of corn.  Cut corn bread into 1 inch cubes.

Next, prepare the vegetables:

2 cans black beans, drained

1-2 red peppers, diced.   I used several baby multi-colored peppers.

1/2 cup thinly sliced scallions, white and green parts.  I used fresh garlic and baby leeks from our farmer's market.

1/4 cup chopped basil.  I'd like to try this with cilantro, but my son has the cilantro tastes like soap gene, so I stuck with  basil.



Here are the vegetables ( minus the beans) getting acquainted with the dressing.  To make the dressing, whisk together:

6 Tblsp olive oil

2 Tblsp red wine vinegar

1 Tsp salt

1 Tsp freshly ground pepper

Drizzle over vegetables and stir to coat well.   I let the vegetables sit for a couple of hours to mingle the flavors.

Spread the cubed corn bread onto a cookie sheet and broil until golden.  I sprayed the corn bread cubes with a bit of olive oil for additional crunch.  Watch very carefully - I'm here to tell you they go from golden to blackened very quickly!

The recipe says to gently stir the corn bread cubes into the vegetables and toss to coat.   Since cornbread is pretty fragile, I used the the cornbread cubes as a bed for the salad - arrange some of the cornbread on the plate and top with the vegetable mixture. This keeps the cornbread relatively intact, plus eliminates  soggy cornbread should there be any leftovers.  The Deen brothers do recommend adding the toasted cubes to the salad at the very last minute to preserve their toasted crunch.

This was yummy and makes a great summer meatless dinner - enjoy!