Centennial Lake in August 2014 (part 2)

I posted about the lake and wildlife in part 1 of this post. The focus today is plants. At the very end there was a wasp on a flower of Queen Anne’s Lace. I found myself more intrigued by the bundle of blossoms before they opened and wondered how many of them would complete the process to seed before frost.

The Joe Pye Weed was past its best looks. In previous years I’ve managed to catch the large flower heads when they were at their most attractive to butterflies - but it hasn’t happened this year. It seems like none of the butterfly species are as plentiful this year.

The water lilies are not plentiful at Centennial Lake and they too are showing the wear of the summer. Some of the lily pads are already beginning deteriorate and there are few flowers.

This thistle may mature before the first frost but what about the bud beside it?

Some plants have already made seeds. The image below is of an amaranth and was captured with the 10x loupe.

All of the plants I photographed were in areas of the park that are not mowed frequently. They are mowed occasionally to keep them as meadows rather than young forests.

CSA Week 12

It’s hard for me to fathom that we managed to eat the entire week 11 share from the Gorman Produce Farm CSA except the potatoes and garlic - which will easily keep. I even cleaned out some things I had frozen from the weeks I was not in town earlier in the month: the squash, cucumbers, and fruit beety.  I was surprised at the amount of tomatoes we consumed. The large yellow ones looked beautiful and tasted excellent atop chili.

Now we have another week - another large crop of tomatoes (there were no yellow ones in the bin by time I got there….but the large red ones will be just as good). I traded the 2 poblano peppers for 2 banana peppers. I did get 2 jalapeno peppers and plan to make homemade salsa.

Ten Days of Little Celebrations - August 2014

Noticing something worth celebration each day is an easy thing for me to do. The habit of writing it down reminds me to be grateful for these and a myriad of other things in my life. This month has been full of ‘little celebrations;’ here are my top 10 for August 2014.

The weekly pickup at the CSA. Somehow the pickup every Wednesday afternoon become something to look forward to….a celebration of the food bounty near at hand.

Weight. I decided to take off about 8 pounds and am thrilled that my diet/exercise plan I used a year ago to take off a pound a week...still works. I am celebrating the loss of over 4 pounds so far!

Tomatoes of any varieties are abundant in the CSA shares now. I find myself drawn to the tomatoes that are a change of pace from the traditional red one. Somehow the large yellow or purplish heirloom tomatoes seem extra special….worthy of continued celebration.

Fruit beety. This was on my celebration list last month too. I had frozen a batch I couldn’t eat right away - and I enjoyed eating it this month!

 Watermelon. I discovered that watermelon, mint, and frozen cucumber smoothies are one of my favorite summer afternoon treats…and it is even better because it fits on my weight-loss diet.

Home again. Being away from home for two weeks in late July/early August caused me to appreciate returning….a homecoming celebration.

Photography class. I celebrated the online photography class from several perspectives: the learning experience, a new source of courses, and as an activity I shared with my husband.

Symmetry and tiles. The Symmetry class I am taking on Coursera has led to other activities and I am still getting more ideas!  I am enjoying the course plus the historical books about tiles I found on the Internet Archive plus I’m going to take a local class on tiling to enable some creative projects! I’m celebrating the serendipity of it all.

Centennial Lake. My husband walks around the lake on mornings when the weather is good. I went with him last weekend and celebrated the place: the natural beauty, the wide diversity of people enjoying the path and fishing….and the prospect of seeing the leaves turn over the next few months.

Robin. The robin that has become territorial about my deck may be misguided….but I appreciate the bird’s presence. She has become part of the place. 

The Deck Garden - August 2014

The deck garden is probably at its peak this month in terms of foliage. The mint is overflowing the pots that also contain butterfly weed, a few carrots, and a tomato plant.

The cucumber plant is gone but the beans that were in the same pot are blooming again.

The marigolds and zinnias add color. Occasionally the morning glories have a flower although they have not done particularly well on the deck this year.

The sweet potato is still growing rapidly and the soil in the pot is beginning to heave - a sign that the potatoes underneath the plant are growing too. I have some peppers that came up from the ‘not quite decomposed’ compost; hopefully they’ll get big enough to be worth picking. I am starting to get the second crop of tomatoes from the deck plants.

I’m beginning to think more about what I want to grow next year on the deck. Right now I am leaning more toward plants with color (flowers and leaves) rather than vegetables. The CSA is supplying plenty veggies!  The sweet potato vine has been better that previous years in terms of growth and color (the new leaves are a deep red) so I may try to propagate cuttings from the vine after I harvest the sweet potatoes this fall.

Chaos Garden - August 2014

The Chaos Garden gets relatively little attention from me. I pull plants that I recognize as not wanting at all: grape vine, stickers, honeysuckle, blackberry canes.  Everything else I simply leave alone.

The hydrangea is recovering from the late (and hard) frost last spring that killed all its buds. It has no blooms this year but is coming up from the roots and should be almost back to normal for next spring/summer. I'll trim away more of the dead stems in my next weeding pass through the chaos garden.

There is lemon balm but it is not as overwhelming as in previous years. I cleared a lot of it away last summer. I like it in salads and to add to mint ‘tea’.

The chives and onions come back every year. I need to remind myself to harvest them more frequently.  The chives bloom in the spring and the onions are blooming now.

There are some flowers that are remnants of the butterfly garden phase of this plot: cone flowers and black eyed Susans. There don’t seem to be as many butterflies these days but they do attract the bees.

The rosemary I bought last spring has grown quite a lot and I am hopeful that it will overwinter. Last winter, all the rosemary plant in my area dyed form the repeated blasts of very cold temperatures.

The sycamore is shading the chaos garden more all the time. The hydrangea won’t mine - they thrive just fine in shade - but many of the other plants will not do as well. The old patch of day lilies never blooms any more but its progeny bulbs are doing quite well in the front flowerbed where I moved them last summer.

Gleanings of the Week Ending August 23, 2014

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

In Old Blood - Looking at the changing that happen as we age…starting with the blood of a 115 year old woman from the Netherlands that donated her body to science.

Food Preservation - As this post comes out, I am hearing the author talk about the topic! I am always looking for new ideas on processing the surplus of food during the summer to enjoy in the winter.

Global Burden of Disease (GBD) Compare - This is an interface to visual epidemiological trends and levels worldwide from the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (an independent global health research center at the University of Washington. There are lots of ways to look at the data. In the snapshot below I set the Bottom Chart to ‘Map’ and then clicked on ‘Migraine’ in the Top Chart.

Would you live in a shipping container? - A collection of websites curated by Marcelle Sussman Fischler on this top on Learnist. Some still look like shipping containers….others are transformed.

Most of What You Need To Know About Planet Earth, in Seven Minutes - A short animation from Kurzgesagt.

Profiles in Xeriscaping: The Chocolate Flower - Something to think about for next summer’s garden.

10 Tips for Eating Healthy on a Budget - Good ideas! I would add: 1) keep in mind that there are other sources of protein than meat (and almost all of them are less expensive for the nutritional content) and 2) be mindful of lower cost veggies that are high in nutritional value (sweet potatoes are an example).

Why Did Plants Evolve These Weird and Horrific Flowers? - I can’t resist the botanicals.

Providing futile treatment prevents other patients from receiving the critical care they need - Futile treatment (i.e. unbeneficial medical care) in ICUs is not good for the patient….and this study shows that it is hurting others. Perhaps a tangential take away from this article is that patients and their families need to be in a position to decline unbeneficial medical care.

Exploring the Waterworks Deep inside the Inner Gorge of Grand Canyon National Park - A video about the springs in the Grand Canyon. 10 of the 12 spring types are found within the Grand Canyon (see the 10 here).

3 Free eBooks - August 2014

It’s time again for the monthly post about eBooks that are freely available on the Internet. The three below are my favorites for August 2014.

Shelley, George Ernest; Keulemans, John Gerrard (lithographer/llustrator). A monograph of the Nectariniidae, or, Family of sun-birds. London: Published by the author. 1876. Available from the Internet Archive here. The illustrations are the best of this book and there are other books that have the same lithographer also available on the Internet Archive that are worth a look too (although I think the sun-birds book is the best).

Dam, Jan Daniël van; Tichelaar, Pieter Jan; Schaap, Ella; Lins, P. Andrew. Dutch Tiles in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art.1984. Available from the Internet Archive here. I started looking for books that had tile patterns after the Coursera course I am taking on Symmetry used them as part of the introduction to the vocabulary used to discuss symmetry. What do you think of the grapes and pomegranates tiles? Notice that the tiles are rotated to create the pattern (the stems always point to the center).

an hui sheng chu si hai zong zhi hui bu. xiao mie wen ying de ye sheng zhi wu. 1958. Available from the Internet here. This is a Chinese botany book. I always enjoy botanical prints and these were no exception. It was also good to realize that books from around the world are making their way into the archive.

Enjoy these and many other books that are freely available on the internet.

Magnolias at the National Arboretum

We walked around the US National Arboretum’s Holly and Magnolia Collection. I never pass up an opportunity to photograph magnolia. The last time I got such an opportunity was a little over a year ago at Mount Vernon. The arboretum has quite a collection of large southern magnolias with blooms low enough for easy photography. This late in the season there are a lot of different stages of blooms and seed pods.

The southern magnolias I was photographing were full of color:

-- Glossy greens and felt browns of leaves

-- Green, red and black of seed pods

-- Fuzzy tan of the bud coverings, creamy white of the full flowers, and brown of the older flowers

I couldn’t resist some 10x magnified images of the pods

Or a flower near the ground that was attracting bees.

Zooming - August 2014

I was in Texas for a couple of weeks so the zoom collages are for pictures I took while traveling rather than close to home.  The themes of the collages this month are: insects/reptiles,

plants, and

birds.

CSA Week 10

I started out Wednesday morning making tomato sauce with all the tomatoes left in the crisper since I knew there would be more in this week’s CSA share. I ended up cooking all the red round tomatoes and about half the cherry tomatoes with onions (also from the CSA) and garlic and dried parsley (dried from the CSA share early in the season).  I even added some orange peel I’d dried from organic oranges from last spring!  My husband commented that the concoction smelled good.

I did pretty well clearing out everything else. The only items left from last week were a few potatoes.

As I expected there were a lot of tomatoes in the week 10 share. The heirloom tomatoes have become such a favorite that I swapped the jalapeno pepper for two more! They are delicious sliced and lightly salted. I got the black cherry tomatoes rather than the sun golds I had selected in previous weeks. And the poblano peppers were swapped for another eggplant.  Half of one of those eggplants was grilled with orange ginger sauce last night.

The potatoes were purple skinned/white flesh and small enough to be great for roasting.

The watermelon was big enough to require a second trip to the car! My daughter has been getting watermelon from her CSA in Tucson for weeks and the newsletter for them this week had some advice for using watermelon rind - either marinating it or using it in stir fry. I’ll post about my experiments in a week or so.

Lots of good eating in this week 10 CSA share!

Tomatoes

The first tomatoes of the summer were from my deck garden. I enjoyed watching them ripen. The heirlooms were a new treat. I already knew that eating a tomato ripened on the vine and eaten within hours of being picked was something to savor. So I watched both the two pots - heirloom and patio with anticipation as the tiny green fruits formed and then grew until they ripened. They ripened so that I spread the eating of that first little crop over a week.

Now I am making progress on the load of tomatoes that came from the CSA during the 2 weeks I was away. I may have to freeze tomato sauce before I pick up the next share!

But I am enjoying the bounty of tomatoes two times a day and hope that I’ll be able to finish off most of them by Wednesday morning. The heirlooms go first…then the cherry tomatoes because they are so easy to cut in half and include in salads.  I’ll make homemade tomato soup tomorrow - that always uses a lot of tomatoes.

There are more tomatoes on my deck plants (a second crop) and I’m sure there will be more coming from the CSA. Tomatoes are summer food to celebrate!

Veggie Beauty

Over the past month - I have been noticing the beauty in fruits and vegetables while I prepare meals. I’ve collected some of my favorite ‘closer looks.’

The spiral of white veins around a seed in a ‘seedless’ watermelon

The raised ridges in a freshly cut cross section of a leek

A cross section of a banana pepper

And the 10x magnification of the seeds

A cherry tomato cut in half

A cucumber cross section (I have to many of them waiting at home that I should try a couple of slices on my eyes before cutting up the rest for a salad or smoothie)

The red ridges of an onion (10x magnification)

A beet leaf with its bright red veins through its green - it was tender enough to put in a salad rather than a stir fry.

Seed Pods

This is the time of year to look for newly formed seed pods.  The hibiscuses growing behind the fence at my parents were covered with pods that were already splitting open to reveal the seeds inside. The flowers were done for the season.

The red yucca had pods in various stages of development with the whole progression of buds to flowers on the same stalk. Are the darker reddish pods more or less mature than the greens ones?

The desert willow has pods that look like beans. The pods look fibrous and sturdy compared to the flowers of the tree (maybe that is true for almost all plants).

Gardens in the Hot and Dry

The plantings that look the best in Texas this August are ones that thrive in the hot and dry.

There were several desert willows planted around Josey Ranch Lake. Their blooms look at lot like delicate orchids. I had not seen them in the Carrollton area previously; they are popular rest stop plants along the route through New Mexico to Tucson.

There are many types of sage that thrive in high heat without a lot of water.

My favorite is the red yucca: the deeper color of the buds, the delicate flowers, the seed pods forming, and the muted green of the leaves….and they grow best under relatively adverse conditions.

The image below is a 10x magnification of the flowers.

This trend of transitioning gardens to plants that tolerate heat with less water is a positive one given the water challenges Texas is experiencing.

Texas Sunflowers

A grandchild brought a sunflower home from elementary school year ago and the subsequent generations of that plant come up every spring behind the stockade fence of my parent’s yard in Carrollton TX. The plants have reverted to a very tall wild type.

My mother cuts some stalks periodically and makes a bouget that lasts a few days….bringing the cheer of outdoors into the house.

The plants that are outdoors continue get new buds so the flowers just keep coming throughout the summer.

The flowers turn to face the sun.

The bees load up with nectar and pollen from the flowers that are open. The bees take on the color the flowers once they are laden with pollen!

Naked Lady Lilies

The Naked Lady Lilies are about at the end of their blooming where I am in Carrollton TX. These flowers are an amaryllis that blooms after the foliage dies back. The beds are clouds of pink petals atop single green stalks. They seem to survive the heat of the Texas summer as long as they get some shade and adequate water. Enjoy the slide show of the Naked Lady Lilies below!

Third Mint Harvest of the Summer (2014)

The mint is even more prolific than usual this year because our hot weather in Maryland has been occasional days rather than long slogs…..and I have watered consistently.

I was surprised to find some dense patches where I had stuck some mint stems after stripping off the leaves after one of last year’s harvest. Mint is providing the ground cover around the iris in the front flower beds.  Some of the patch was cut for this third harvest of this summer.

The pots on the deck had grown back from the previous harvest. The post with mint and butterfly weed looked a bit overgrown so I trimmed the mint severely.

I was going to trim the mint in the turtle sandbox but decided to only cut about a quarter of the mint since I already had so much to process.

There were multiple baskets of mint leaves to rinse and then feed into the food processor.

I decided to use the leaves and tender stems (and then stick the tougher stems that remained around the gardens and other pots. Usually I stop at one processor bowl full of processed mint but there was so much this time that I forged ahead had two.

The drying process started on platters in the kitchen then in a muslin bag hanging in various rooms of the house….what a joy to have a mint scented house.

I may have one more batch in the fall….and then savor hot mint tea all winter!

Ten Days of Little Celebrations - July 2014

Noticing something worth celebration each day is an easy thing for me to do. The habit of writing it down reminds me to be grateful for these and a myriad of other things in my life. This month has been full of ‘little celebrations;’ here are my top 10 for July 2014. I’ve categorized them into 4 groups: CSA (Community Supported Agriculture), Howard County Conservancy, travel and outdoors.

CSA

Kohlrabi is a new food for me this summer. It has been included in my CSA share twice and I’ve enjoyed it nutty flavor in stir fries. I may even buy it from the grocery store produce section after the CSA ends in the fall.

Fruit beety has become one of my favorite treats this summer - it is a healthy splurge to celebrate summer…..and a beautiful color to savor too.

Turnips are foods that I liked as snacks growing up but had eaten very infrequently for 30 years. I’m celebrating the re-discovery of how good a crunchy turnip can be.

Howard County Conservancy

Fairy Houses - The Howard Country Conservancy had an event for families to build fairy houses in the woods. I volunteered to help out with the crowd….and it was a lot of fun. The children were very creative with the natural materials of available!

Views in the Forest Shade - I celebrated the natural jewels in the shade on a summer day.

Bugs - Insects and spiders - oh my!

Travel

Travel purse - I found the perfect purse for travel at a thrift store: a pocket on the outside for my Kindle and boarding pass, good closure so nothing can fall out accidently. I am celebrating the bargain!

TSA Pre - I celebrate every time I get a boarding pass with TSA Pre; it is so much easier to go through security with shoes on and the laptop in the backpack.

Outdoors

Heron on the Lotus Pond - The second trip we may to the Kenilworth Park and Aquatic Garden in Washington DC - there was a Great Blue Heron that was so intent on fishing that there was plenty of time for pictures. The scene of bird and lotus were the celebration of the day.

Blooming sweet potato - Previous sweet potato plants have grown lots of foliage and potatoes….but this year the plant has blooms too!

Gleanings of the Week Ending July 26, 2014

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

More Phones, Fewer Doctors - An interview with venture capitalist Vinod Khosla about trends in health care. His contention is that 80 percent of what doctors do can be replaced by machines. This article was part of a series done by MIT Technology Review about our health care system. Another one talks about Big Data Mining (about medical analytics).

DIY, Zero-energy Pool Warmers Could Save You Thousands - Made with hula hoops and polyethylene film!

Study reveals 'unhappiest' cities in the U.S. - The authors of the study emphasize that it is obvious that people care about other things that ‘happiness’ when making decisions about where they will live! I’m always a little suspicious of ratings that focus on only one aspect (like happiness/unhappiness) because most of our decision making is much more complex than that. Still - it is worth staring at the map for a few minutes. Does your perception of where you live match with the color coding?

STEM Graduates Branch Out - Many of college graduates with STEM degrees are not working in jobs that are science or technology related fields according to a report from the Census Bureau.

Fluoride & Water Fluoridation – An Undeserved Reputation? - Infographic from Andy Brunning - a chemistry teacher in the UK

Cursed Warship Revealed With Treasure Onboard - A ship sunk off the Swedish coast in 1564…complete with silver and gold coins and canons.

To Measure Summer Smog, Plant an Ozone Garden - The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder CA has designed a garden that is sensitive to ozone that includes plants that grow easily in many parts of the US: milkweed, snap bean, potato, and cutleaf coneflower.

Pangolins Walk Just Like T. Rex - Scaly anteaters wall on 2 legs! Watch the video of this odd animal and think about T. Rex depictions. The head of the T. Rex was much larger but the using tail as a balance to the upper body to allow ‘walking’ on the hind legs like the pangolin is a possibility.

The bend in the Appalachian mountain chain is finally explained - The Appalachians slant along the east coast - make a bend in Pennsylvania and New York.

What vacation? Expect to work while you're away - The down side of mobile work environments.

The Deck Garden - July 2014

The deck garden is growing vigorously. My favorite plant this season is the sweet potato vine. It was started last winter when a sweet potato sprouted before I got around to eating it. I cut the sprouted end off and planted it in a pot. It did not grow very fast until it to outdoors in this summer. The soil in the pot is already being pushed upward by the tubers underneath - and the plant has two other appealing characteristics: the foliage is purple and it has occasional blooms. I’m going to root some clippings from this plant to take through the winter indoors in pots so that I’ll more the plants next summer for the deck.

Several of the other veggies have been an interesting experience but I probably go back to growing flowers on the deck next year. I get plenty of veggies from the CSA each week. The tomatoes are good picked fresh and eaten immediately. They might be worth it.

I have a spaghetti squash that is starting to grow. Watching it mature will be a learning experience. I also have a pot full of pepper plants that came up when I stirred some kitchen parings (including the waste from bell peppers) into one of the pots before I planted a squash plant in it. The squash has not done so well but I have several small peppers.

The cucumber plants are the ones that scream ‘water’ the fastest. I planted them in a pot that is too small. They need water every day - and more than that on very hot days.

And that leads me to the big lesson learned from the past 4 weeks: my shoulders hurt after only a few days of carrying big jugs of water out to deck to keep the plants hydrated. I’ve maneuvered a hose from the faucet below the deck to water the plants from now on!