Questions for the Garden Gnome

(In order to give Annake some time to finish bits and pieces of projects and samples for upcoming posts, this time we are dragging the Garden Gnome out of his hole to answer accumulated  garden-related questions that have piled up since the end of last growing season...)

Clary sage in the herb garden

How did the planting in the straw bales go?

It ended with mixed results. It depended upon how much water I could get to each one. The ones around the former compost pile did exactly what they were supposed to do and have all but disappeared. The remains can be mixed into the compost or plants can be planted into them directly. The ones that were half-successful will be broken down into compost or used as mulch on the raised beds.

All that's left of properly composted straw bales

Leftover straw used as mulch in the raised beds

Unfinished bales for garden borders

Are you going to do it again this year?

There were some bales that were placed too far for the soaker hoses to reach. They are largely intact. A few of those will be used this year as borders for other planting areas. They will get water when the interior plantings are watered and I will experiment with planting seeds in them again. However, the current severe drought will determine how much water we can use for that purpose. The rest may be made into compost.

What happens to the straw bale after you harvest the plants?

They disappear. They become dirt. This is a good thing, because good dirt is expensive and straw is cheap.

Fennel

Are you selling any new and different herbs this year?

Two, fennel and clary sage. Fennel isn't really supposed to over-winter here, but ours didn't “get the memo”. Maybe it was the hay bales? Fennel, a member of the carrot family, has been used from ancient times. Roman soldiers ate it to give them strength and spread its seeds across Europe. Roman women used it for slimming. The Anglo -Saxons revered it so much they even used it as a charm against evil. It is popular in Mediterranean cooking. Fresh leaves and stems are used in salads, sprinkled over meat and fish dishes, and used in sauces. Like dandelions, all parts of the plant are edible. The roots (bulbs) can be eaten like celery or thinly sliced for salads. For a recipe and suggestions for use of this herb, see Annake's addition at the end of this post.

Much maligned, but wonderfully versatile dandelions

Speaking of dandelions, most people consider dandelions as weeds, but they don't know about the plant's good qualities. For example, the flowers are used for flavoring wines and liqueurs. The leaves are edible if you use young, fresh ones. (Please don't spray the plants with anything if you plant to use any part of them!) The roots can be roasted to make a hot beverage, although I recommend that you add other ingredients. The roots also break up hard ground and the plants seem to prefer hard ground. I seldom find a dandelion in a prepared bed. I'm perfectly willing to let them break up the hard ground for me. The flowers make a slightly orange-yellow dye and the roots make a russet brown one. Besides, the flowers brighten up the world when few other flowers are blooming.

Clary sage (pictured at the top of this post) is a very old herb, also originally from the Mediterranean. For those of you who know the folk song (or remember the Simon and Garfunkel rendition) Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme may be interested to know that it — not our Thanksgiving sage — is the “sage” meant in the song. It can be used fresh or dried to flavor breads, stuffing, cheese dishes and vegetables. Its aroma and flavor are much more like its mint relatives than our Thanksgiving sage. It has attractive spikes of lavender flowers. Annake tells me that it is used as a fixative in perfume-making and is really nice in home-made potpourri. She also says a few crushed leaves in your bathwater makes for an invigorating soak. (I'll take her word for that.)

Oregon holly grapes

Are the fruits of the Oregon holly-grapes edible for people, too?

Yes, but they are really sour! With enough sugar, they taste a lot like vine grapes. I recommend mixing them with vine grapes to make an interesting, tart jelly. They are loaded with Vitamin C.

What can you do with rose hips?

These are also sour and also an excellent source of Vitamin C. Once removed from the rosebush, they dry quickly and keep for a long time. Early settlers used them to ward off vitamin-deficiency diseases like scurvy. They are commonly used in teas and jellies.

Our new columbine

Did you ever find out what this year's gift from the birds was?

Yes, in fact we found two. The first was a handsome pink and yellow columbine. I think we have shown you a picture of the cream-colored one they left us a couple of years ago. (April 20, 2017 post) The second was a pink sweet pea vine coming up in the rock pile near where Rasputin, our rhubarb, lives and plots world domination.

Now, go grow something and make the world a better place...

J.D., Annake's Garden Gnome

Annake's Recipe
 for

Grilled Fish with Fennel

Clean and salt the fish. Lightly stuff it with fresh chopped fennel and sage. Slit the sides of the fish twice. Coat the fish with oil. Make a bed of fresh fennel stems and leaves in a pan. Put the fish on top. Cook, turning the fish and brushing it with oil. Serve garnished with slices of lemon.

Fennel is especially good with bass, but also with other fish, especially fatty ones.

Other Uses for Fennel:

• Snipped fresh leaves or minced stems are good additions to salads. Try them sprinkled over fish, pork, cheese, eggs, beans, lentils or rice. Add the fennel just before serving.

• Fennel is good with dishes of any of the cabbage family: broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, etc.

• Add 3 T. of freshly chopped fennel to an omelet of 4 to 6 eggs.

• Add sprigs of fennel to canola oil, extra-virgin olive oil, or saffron oil for a tasty cooking oil.

• Use 1 T. chopped fennel to flavor butter or mayonnaise.

• Fennel roots and lower stems can be cooked and treated like carrots or new potatoes.

• Use fresh fennel flowers, which have a delicate licorice (anise)fragrance. Mixed with nasturtiums and calendulas, they make a pretty bouquet — and you can eat it as a salad, too!

• Make a fennel sauce with ½ cup mayonnaise, 1 T. light cream, and 1 t. chopped fresh fennel leaves and stems. Good over fish.

Sweet pea, bloomed out and ready to move to a better location

 This post by Annake's Garden is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Summer Questions & Answers, 2016

Orange butterfly picture by J.J.

“I made a hot-iron transfer from the Butterfly chart (June 1, 2016) according to your directions (October 6, 2013). I did the pattern with X's and did the embroidery in cross-stitch. My colors weren't all the same as the ones one the chart, but they were close. I put the butterfly on the back yoke of a denim shirt and I really like it. Now my 12-year-old daughter wants a butterfly on the back of her shirt and my pattern is too big. Do you have a smaller butterfly pattern I could use? It doesn't have to be the same butterfly.”

Thank you for telling me about the interesting way in which you used the pattern. I love to get information like that! I'll be glad to give you a pattern that should be small enough for your daughter's shirt. This one should be enough smaller to fit. I hope it does and that she likes it! This pattern is for the smallest of the three butterflies on the wall hanging (March 21, 2016). The colors represent those of a real butterfly, but you are free to use any colors you choose.

Small butterfly from latch hooked wall hanging

If your daughter wants her butterfly in the same colors as yours, you can do the following steps:

1. Leave the body of the butterfly (F) brown and the antennae black.

2. Substitute violet for the darkest brown (A) on the wings.

3. Substitute lavender for the light orange (B).

4. Substitute purple for the dark orange (C).

5. Substitute cream, white or whatever you used around the edges for the light tan (E) on the upper wings.

6. Substitute mauve or rose for the medium brown (D) on the lower wings.

Click here to download Butterfly Needle Arts Chart #3

Here's the chart.

Readers, look for a chart for the third (center) butterfly from the wall hanging on one of our autumn blog posts.

Butterflies come in a huge variety of colors, but the colors are not evenly distributed worldwide. Here in temperate North America, the main colors are black, white, yellow, orange and brown. Purple and blue are less common and true red and green are rare. However, those colors can be found on many butterflies from the tropics. In fact, you can make up a fanciful fantasy butterfly and later find out that a live one very similar to it exists somewhere on earth. I'm beginning to think that fact applies to flowers, too. A couple of years ago, I did a large needlepoint of a daylily, giving it all sorts of unusual shades of color. This spring I opened a garden catalog and there was “my” daylily being offered as a brand new variety!

"Dayglo Daylily," framed needlepoint from our Etsy shop

“The little lion on checked gingham (July 31, 2016) is so cute! What stitches did you use?”

Head of lion on checked gingham

Basic blackwork (October 6, 2013) is done with 4 small, straight stitches: a vertical stitch in the center of the squares a horizontal stitch in the center of the squares, a stitch slanting from lower left to upper right, and a stitch slanting from lower right to upper left. If you combine the first two, you get a plus sign (+). If you combine the second two you get an x (a cross-stitch). The more of these stitches you place in a given square, the darker the area of stitching appears. The darkest area of the lion is that of his back legs, which were made by stitching a cross-stitch in each square and then stitching a horizontal stitch across the middle of each x. All the patterned areas were designed this way. Each individual area was outlined with plain chain stitch. The eyes, nose, tongue and fangs are done in solid chain (October 31, 2015), sometimes called Beauvais embroidery. You begin by outlining, but continue stitching around and around inside the outline until the area is completely filled with stitches. I'm glad you liked the little fellow!

Finally, some gardening questions, which I will turn over to J.D.

“What have you been able to grow in your straw bales? (April 30, 2016)”

Spice basil growing in straw bale

The bale gardening experiment has had mixed results: in one batch of bales, I seeded summer savory, curled cress, sylvetta, chervil, and mustard spinach quite successfully and transplanted some fennel plants, all of which are doing pretty well. In another set of bales, things have not gone as well, though I do have one batch of a special spiced basil variety doing fairly well. In the third set, zilch. The limiting factor has been how thoroughly I could soak the bales regularly both before and after planting. The soaker hose setups popular in much of the literature simply can’t do the job in our arid climate. Fortunately, I can try again in the infertile bales next year with a new watering system.

“Your irises are so beautiful, and seem to grow so well! I haven’t had much luck with irises, but you’ve inspired me to order some from a catalog – they’ll be here in the fall. Any advice for me?”

Well, if you saw the collage of iris pictures in our July 10, 2016 post then you probably saw my instructions for transplanting in the same article. The only things I would add are: 1) Make sure you don’t cover the rhizome (the thick, gnarly part) when you cover the roots (the skinny, dangly parts) – the rhizome needs to breathe; 2) Make sure your soil has good drainage, irises don’t like wet feet. If you have clay or other heavy soil, add some sand or other amendment to be sure excess water drains and doesn’t stand where you’ve planted; 3) Don’t baby the irises, they seem to thrive on benign neglect.

Iris, out by the alley...

A couple of years ago, Annake got three fancy batik irises of different colors. Two of these were planted in selected special locations, and carefully nursed along. They do all right, giving us a couple of nice blooms each year, but that’s about all. There was no good place for the third plant at the time, so I stuck it out by the alley, just out of the gravel, in a location that gets irregular sun and absolutely no irrigation. Of course, it has thrived – it’s multiplied and needs dividing now, and throws up multiple heavy blooms from every stalk.

“At one point you mentioned that you were going to try some new methods for starting plants. Did anything ever come of that?”

J.J., my sister, did forward me an article about starting cuttings in raw potatoes; so, I got a sack of cheap russets at the grocery store before I bothered to do any real research on the subject. I found out that many grocery store potatoes are treated in some fashion to keep them from sprouting in storage, and that these should NOT be used to start cuttings. Sure enough, not a single potato from that bag ever developed any ‘eyes’ (sprouts), and I tossed them all when they started to rot.

However...

About the time I brought those potatoes home, we found a stem broken off one of Annake’s potted geraniums on the greenhouse floor. Since I didn’t yet know any better, I bored a hole in one of the potatoes and stuck the stem in to try to salvage it, and put the whole assemblage on the back of the greenhouse bench. After my research, I knew nothing would come of the whole exercise, but I never got around to tossing the stem and potato on the compost pile. So, I was flabbergasted when Annake showed me the cutting a couple of weeks ago, not only growing but blooming!

Geranium cutting blooming in a potato

It seems that the geranium never bothered to read the articles that said you can’t use treated potatoes.

Until next time: go make something, grow something, and have a great summer,

 This post by Annake's Garden is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The Plants Ate My Blog Post (and Other Excuses)

Early blooming purple irises

Hello – J.D., Annake’s Garden Gnome here. Annake is taking a short break from blogging, but didn’t want to lose the momentum we’ve built these last few months; so, she’s asked me to jump in and explain what is presently occupying so much of our time and attention.

First, an apology to readers using our archived posts. Due to Google’s decommissioning of Picasa (in favor of their new Google Photo application), we temporarily lost connections to all the photographs for our older posts. It took some time and a great deal of work to restore those posts, but I believe we have pretty much fixed the problems. To be fair, it took longer than it might have because I took the opportunity to address some other issues that arose from changes made over the last three years by both Google (to the Blogger software) and in the way we use the platform.

Our archives are extremely important to us: unlike many (perhaps most) of the blogs on the Web, the majority of our content is never supposed to become obsolete. We always intended that our archives be a continuing resource for readers, old and new. We do not shut off comments for those archived posts, either; so if you encounter a problem or if you find our content useful – we want to hear about it!

On to other matters: as Annake mentioned in our 3^rd anniversary post (February 29, 2016), we are now heavily involved in area farmer’s markets. The original plan (a year ago) was just to add another venue for selling our crafts; as things worked out, we discovered a market for surplus from the kitchen and herb gardens, as well as excess from the flower gardens which Annake has struggled to give away for years. So, in an effort to make the Garden more self-supporting (a notion expressed way back in our very first blog post!), we are expanding our horticultural efforts with commerce in mind. The pictures below show some of what we are doing.

Straw bale planting - growing crops in straw bales - is an idea that seems to have taken off in the last couple of years. Since we had a good local source for the bales (a fellow Farmer’s Market vendor), we thought we’d give it a serious try. In addition to the additional crops, we've thought of other benefits this method might provide for us, such as -

Planting deer-repelling fragrant herbs among the rose bushes: even the heavy wire cages you can see around the roses don’t keep the really determined beasts out, so we’ll take any help we can – even if it’s just depriving them of places to graze from;

A “deer maze”, to discourage pregnant does from birthing more fawns in the space behind the storage sheds;

A way to contain and rehabilitate last year’s compost pile: beans, squash, and chard have already sprouted in that rich compost, and we’re planning on planting things the deer won’t like in the straw bales that surround it.

And the straw bales are not our only additions. Here’s a picture of the beginning of a new perennial herb bed we’re putting in. Up to now, our herbs have mostly been planted among other flowers and shrubs in the decorative garden areas; our aging bodies and local demand convinced us that we needed something more, dedicated to herb cultivation.

We also erected a  temporary greenhouse so that we have someplace protected to store plants we winter over in our permanent greenhouse, some of which have gotten completely out of hand despite the short days and cold weather...such as “Big Red,” the geranium shown in our last anniversary blog post or these potted herbs below.

Rosemary (left) and pineapple sage overflowing their pots; lawn sprinklers show scale

House plant "starts"

The space we’ve cleared in the permanent greenhouse is quickly disappearing under new houseplant pottings, the result of other greenhouse occupants’ insistence on  propagating themselves right out of living space. These offspring are headed for the Farmer’s Market, as well.

So, that’s a partial list of just the agricultural pursuits that are keeping Annake away from the blog at the moment. 

Additionally, we are creating more craft stock, items that are variations on things Annake has discussed in previous posts over the years that weren’t different enough to write a new tutorial on;

And, Annake is planning several new series of tutorials that haven’t gotten to the project stage yet;

Oh, and we're planning to publish several short e-books - starting this summer - based on compilations of some of the blog post series Annake has already written, complete with NEW additional content, patterns, and projects that won’t be available anywhere else (oooh, I just LOVE dropping bombshells like that in passing comments!).

As you can see, we are kind of busy around here; which is why we don’t have a craft tutorial post for you this time. But next time, we will - so keep watching!

J.D.

 Small "Jinx" irises blooming away in the Garden

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