Clivia Watch 2008 Part 1

I'm new to being a Clivia caretaker. I bought two at a potluck plant sale before a Granville Garden Club meeting because I was in love with the tough green leaves and how gracefully they drape. Apparently they are related to the Amaryllis (hence the lovely leaves) and they are native to South Africa.

To see if I could force my two plants to flower this year I kept them for 8 weeks in our front entryway. The light is low (the window in the door gets north light but is shaded by our porch) and the temp is also low (probably around 55 degrees Fahrenheit) since we keep it closed off from the rest of the house. Now the plant is a few feet from an eastern window and the house temp varies from as much as 68 during parts of the day and probably around 58-60 at night (I wouldn't know! I'm in bed where it's warm!).

Just last week I saw the tips of a possible blossom emerge from the leaves.


In addition to sitting and watching my plant grow I've also done some knitting. No, silly! I don't really sit and watch my plants grow, I just check on them three and four times a day to see if they've done something new.

Here's a hat I made for the son of some friends. Since northern Minnesota is cold, and since I wanted to protect his little noggin with good thick wool, I picked Brown Sheep Lamb's Pride worsted (85% wool, 15% merino) in "Forest Shadows." Since the pattern calls for the wool to be doubled up the hat turned out quite thick and warm indeed. I managed to coordinate the variation in the color with the two strands so it's not quite as speckle-y as it is shaded.



I had just enough left from the one skein of yarn to make the little pom on top, my only alteration to Alexis Riggs' "Toasty Topper," (pattern available free from Knitty.com. See how I'm learning the whole hypertext thing?) I was able to finish it during holiday car and plane rides, so it knits up quickly.

Updates on the Clivia will follow! Lucky for you they won't be the "three times a day" updates that I'm doing myself. Hopefully there will be progress to report!

Take a break from the ice and snow

Yes, it's been my plan all along to save these lovely summer photos for the darkest, if not yet coldest, time of year.



http://www.flickr.com/photos/7335802@N07/sets/72157603473897293/

These were taken in August at Schnormeier Gardens, a gorgeous private garden just outside the town of Gambier in central Ohio. I visited them with a group from the Granville Garden Club.

Now that gardening is over for the season, save the planning and my cold compost pile, all I can do is think about all those bulbs I planted this fall. I hope they're sending out good roots.

Still life with knitting

Yes, things have been busy! And the computer means work to me these days, so it's hard to bring myself back to it in my downtime. That means fewer posts, but I've got lots of good things stored up to share sometime soon.

Now that the cool weather is here, I'm drawn back into knitting (rather than blogging or gardening) when I have a little free time. The thing is about our cute new house, it's cold! Coming from the north I'm used to lots of insulation to keep the cold out and the warm in, but I noticed one day as I stood at the top of the basement stairs that I could hear outdoor sounds as if they were indoor sounds. Hmm, why is that lawn mower so darn loud? Did I leave the window open? Nope, there's that unfinished spot in plaster where the upper stairs meet the wall where I can see the outside siding from the inside. Huh, that's funny, shouldn't there be something in the space between the plaster and the siding? Like, uh, fluffy warm stuff?

I suppose it's a good thing, considering what you read these days about indoor air pollution. No indoor air problems here! Cuz our indoor air is just like the outdoor air!

So, instead of turning up the global warming with the furnace, I've decided to knit my way through our stay in this house. First things first, I gotta keep my hands warm. I don't know about you, but my hands get so cold when I type even when the rest of me is warm. My lovely husband (I'm pleased to introduce www.billkirkpatrick.net) would tell me to put on a hat. I just might do that. But first, I'll treat the immediate symptoms with "Fetching," these lovely fingerless gloves, pattern by Cheryl Niamath and available at www.knitty.com.

Love them I do. The first one I knit was huge, the second one I knit was more reasonably sized, and so I undid the first and remade it and it's the best of the three. Part of me was tempted to "revise" the second one too but I couldn't face it. Besides, my hands were cold! Not wanting to repeat my earlier mistake with the capelet, I bought two 50g balls of Classic Yarns Cashsoft Aran (57% merino, 33% microfiber, 10% cashmere). I used just over 1 ball (although I might have been able to make it with only one if I'd knit a bit tighter from the get go). No worries, I've got a plan for the left overs (although it's not a hat, maybe I should make a matching little set for working at home on the computer...).

See, didn't I tell you the house was cute? I forgive it for being so cold since it's so cute and since it drives me to knit. What's the bad here, really?

Knitting in the Park

After our two moves (yes, two!!) this spring and summer I'm still catching up on my life, hence the lack of recent posts.

Here I am enjoying two of my favorite things: knitting and gardens. For garden info see: http://www.halifaxpublicgardens.ca/

For info on my scarf, check out Knitty my favorite place for knitting patterns: http://www.knitty.com/ISSUEwinter06/PATTargosy.html

More new garden photos to follow soon!

Bugs and Berries

Summer in Wisconsin is about brats, cheese curds, and beer, but it's also about eating fresh foods right from the fields.

We went strawberry picking on Sunday at a farm just west of Janesville. The picking was amazing: two people, a combined 20 feet of a row of berry plants, and 30 minutes = about 16 pounds of beautiful, delicious berries.

The other reason we went to Janesville was to see the cicadas. I've grown up hearing about the 17-year periodical cicadas in northern Illinois and didn't want to miss seeing some for myself. I've never really been a bug person, despite my young fascination with those movies of the insides of giant termite colonies, so I didn't really want to see the crazy "sweep them out of your path with a broom" masses of cicadas. But I didn't want to miss them entirely.

There weren't any cicadas in evidence at the farm where we picked the berries but just a few miles east at the Cook Arboretum we got out of the car and could hear the cicadas right away! I'd post video if I were savvy enough to figure out how to do that but photos will have to be enough for now. The sound was thrilling though. I'd heard that the sounds of these masses of cicadas were enough to drown out a conversation and that the Chicago Symphony's Ravinia schedule has been altered this year because the sound of the insects would actually interfere with the sounds of concerts.

Since we didn't have the masses of cicadas in Janesville that are present in some areas of Chicagoland (indeed it took us awhile to actually spot any bugs at all) the loud volume of the sound from the few cicadas in the arboretum was impressive. You could hear two layers in the sound: one dry, scratchy sound and then the constant pitched drone.

The cicadas themselves are pretty cute, especially their eyes. See what I mean? But the most amazing thing about these insects comes when you start to think of the scale of their lives, emerging from the ground to do their thing in seventeen-year cycles: 2007, 1990, 1973, 1956, 1939, 1922, 1905... The next time I'll get to see them will be in 2021. Wow.

Farmers' Market

As I prepare to move away from my dearly-beloved city of Madison I am trying to cram as much Madison as I can into my last few weeks here. Hence my lack of recent posting - too much to do (paint the deck, work in the garden, pack boxes, eat asparagus) and so little time!

It doesn't get much more Madison than a Saturday morning at Farmers' Market on the square (where does that possessive apostrophe go anyway? There are multiple farmers at the market, so I'm putting it there).

To top off last Saturday's Farmers' Market it was also "Cows on the Concourse." Does it get any better than this? I don't think so. Fresh cheese curds, a cool morning, content cows, the crowded counter-clockwise shuffle, and bags of produce to take home.

Here's a recipe for my favorite spring market soup from the May 4, 2002 Harmony Valley Farm CSA newsletter:

"Simple Green Soup"
2 T. butter or veg oil
1 small, diced onion
1 lb. peeled and diced sunchokes (also known as a "jerusalem artichoke" thru some awkward and historic pronunciation language gap between Italian and English. You could use other root veggies like potatoes but I strongly recommend getting sunchokes if you can since their flavor is superior)
4 cups water or broth
1 bunch nettles (or you can use sorrel or watercress, but I absolutely prefer the nettles - just wash them well to get rid of the sting)

Saute your onions in the butter until translucent. Add sunchokes and broth. Bring to boil and simmer 15 min or until sunchokes are soft enough to yield to pressure from a fork or knife. Add the nettles and the heat of the broth should wilt them. Puree until smooth with an immersion stick blender or use a food processor (but go in small batches, trust me).

Option: add some cream or half 'n' half at the end for a creamy soup. And/or add a tiny pinch of cayenne pepper for a little extra warmth.

Serve with fresh bread and fresh cheese curds on the side and you've got a lovely spring market meal. So good.

the more we change...

the more we stay the same.

I finally broke down and purchased the weighty tome that is Martha Stewart's Homekeeping Handbook: The Essential Guide to Caring for Everything in Your Home.

I don't know why I feel so compelled by these all-in-one domestic management manuals. Perhaps it's the bibliophile in me - all the answers to your most obscure and your basic mundane questions: "How to care for cloisonne" and "How to get the most out of your dishwasher," it's all there!!

Maybe it's because I actually kind of like keeping things tidy, cooking, sewing, and knitting. One the one hand I did receive the home economics award at my eighth-grade graduation, a fact both embarrassed and enraged me even at 13. Why didn't I get the geography award or the English award? I did well in those classes too! Even in high school I did fine in my classes but got an award in economics, a class I cared little for that taught skills I prefer not to actually implement in my current life because they make me think about how little money I actually make... Maybe they just drew names from a hat for those school award ceremonies, I'd like to think so.

And on the other hand, maybe it's just because these books are so darn useful. After all, I would like to get the most out of my dishwasher, wouldn't you?

I think at the root of my recent purchase is my desire for a book long out of print and now found only in libraries and archives: Catherine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe's The New Housekeeper's Manual, published in 1873. How I would love to own a copy of my very own. While I was preparing a class on American women in the nineteenth century I was able to browse a copy in the Cairns Special Collection at the University of Wisconsin. It had really great stuff in there, like how to make your own potting soil with old composted manure from your cows, how to set up a house for proper ventilation, how to make dried pea soup. You know, useful stuff.

Here's Catherine Beecher's recipe for Dried Pea Soup (paraphrased from my notes):

Soak a quart of dried peas in water overnight
Rinse them in the morning
Add the peas to four quarts of water
Add 1 t. sugar, two chopped carrots, two chopped small onions, one chopped stalk celery
Boil three hours
In another pot boil 1 pound salt pork for one hour
Remove the skin from the boiled salt pork and add the pork to the pea soup
Boil one more hour

I also copied the recipes for spongecake and potato soup. I'm a little nervous about the spongecake, given the fact that we're baking in two completely different kinds of ovens (open hearth vs. gas?), but I aim to try it one of these days. This also gets at my fascination with historical cookbooks and recipes. But that's a story for another day.

How do I reconcile this compulsion for housekeeping books with my own third-wave feminist-ness? Well, they published a domestic manual, but the Beecher sisters were no wallflowers. Since I can't have the Beecher sisters' book, I guess I'll just have to settle for Martha's. At least she talks about composting. Martha may not be an abolitionist but she's feisty. I can live with that.