One of my favourite sights of spring: larch trees in flower. The upright pink ones are the elegant, showy females in their rosy party dresses – the males are the compact pollen-bearers, in tidy yellow-brown suits, clinging to the undersides of the branches. You can see a couple of females and a male in this photo I snapped late last week.
A lightning round of links to explore this week:
Infinity is just so big that by comparison bigness itself looks really titchy.
~Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
O riotous spring! My hayfever has hayfever, and the three of us (because of course the two hayfevers are their own monstrous entities) have a cold on top of it all.
But it’s cause for celebration! Why, you may ask? Well, let me tell you:
If you embroider and are on the hunt for new patterns, I recently discovered that the DMC website has about a zillion five hundred or so available for free. Download away and enjoy stitching!
My favourite recipe of this past week? Judi’s Sweet Potato and Apple Latkes, found here. They are the ultimate in comfort food and are a breeze to make. I could probably eat these every day. I’m totally not exaggerating here; they are that tasty.
It’s a few years old now (it was published in 2013), but if you haven’t already checked out Deborah Madison’s cookbook Vegetable Literacy, go grab a copy from the library pronto. If you have a passion for cooking and gardening, you’ll delight in this breathtakingly-photographed tome. The recipes look amazing but I can’t stop drooling at (on?) the pictures. (And this one of the reasons why we sometimes find water-damaged books at the library, lol). Take a look at the author describing her book in this video.
The Spring issue of The Gardener for Canadian Climates will be out shortly on newsstands across Canada and a couple of articles I wrote are inside: “Carrot Cousins” and ” Preventing Common Lawn Problems.” The magazine also features the annual Plant Picks section, which I always love contributing to. And will you get a load of that cover? WOW. We don’t have many print gardening magazines left in Canada, and I would encourage gardening enthusiasts to support this amazing publication if possible.
Do you have any “tidbits” you want to share this week? – favourite or new recipes, interesting links or news items you’ve come across, fascinating blog posts you or someone else have put up? Feel free to mention them in the comments!
We’re in “dirty snow” mode here in Calgary, that eye-dulling time of year when EVERYTHING is grey and all the potholes and garbage buried for the past five months start materializing once again. We are guaranteed to get a minimum of 16.275 mini-snowstorms yet before June – two before the end of this week! – so the greyness will be tempered by layers of fresh, sparkling white, but right now, my brain is absolutely crying out for some colour.
So, I turned to the blogosphere, and I am immensely comforted by the fact that there is a nice bit of colour going on elsewhere in the world. For example:
Automatic Gardening and Real Gluten Free Food
A New Day: Living Life Almost Gracefully
….just to name a few.*
And then at work, I noticed that all of the pink and red Pelargoniums that one of my co-workers has saved over the winter are blooming merrily away in the huge bay windows we have in the building. Overwintered P.‘s always surprise me with their transformations: they get so robust, it’s as if they’re working with a personal trainer, and they bloom like every sip of sunshine and speck of sugar in every single cell is bursting to get out. There are about eight of them in the library right now, part of a larger collection of both ‘Regal’ and the – ahem! – less regal (but just as delightful) P.‘s that are snowbirding in my co-worker’s home. It seems strange to me that these plants are so showstoppingly vibrant in this setting, yet the customers appear to rarely spare them a glance. I would love to poll people and ask if they noticed the flowers. Do you find you actually see the indoor plants in public spaces, like libraries, shopping malls, medical clinics, offices etc.? Maybe most people don’t unless the arrangements are particularly bold. Or maybe gardeners take notice more often because we’re keyed to look for plants? What do you think?
*Please add your links to your “colourful” blog posts to the comments – the more, the merrier! Share away!
Gardening Complete: How to Best Grow Vegetables, Flowers, and Other Outdoor Plants – Authors of Cool Springs Press (George Weigel, Katie Elzer-Peters, Lynn Steiner, Dr. Jacqueline A. Soule, Jessica Walliser, Charlie Nardozzi, Rhonda Fleming Hayes, and Tara Nolan) – 2018 Quarto Publishing Group USA Inc., Minnesota
I ♥ the concept of this book! Take eight highly knowledgeable and experienced garden experts and get them to write individual chapters covering essential gardening topics and bundle it all into one comprehensive volume. Everything you need to know to start a new garden or refresh a mature one is here: understanding soil, managing weeds, planting, watering, fertilizing, pruning, composting, mulching, propagation, and harvesting. The detailed, accessible writing and sumptuous photography make this book a delight to browse AND the kind of reference you’ll find yourself going back to over and over again. The design chapters are also highly useful, addressing native plants, water-wise gardening, pollinator-friendly landscapes, and container and raised bed set-ups. This is a well-researched and beautifully-presented project – definitely a recommended read!
*Quarto Publishing Group generously provided me with a copy of Gardening Complete; as always, my opinions about the book are my own.
If you love peonies, this post about “peony anatomy” may be of interest. Or you can just ogle the beautiful photos. Either way, it’s a win.
I found a really cool site containing microscope photography by Dr. Gary Greenberg – my favourite pics are of the jewel-like sand grains, here, but the whole gallery is worth a gander.
Yummy recipe alert: these muffins are tops! Except I didn’t have ube and substituted yellow-fleshed sweet potatoes…plus, I didn’t add walnuts due to my allergies, and I skipped the glaze, as it really isn’t necessary and sort of makes them cupcakes instead of muffins, doesn’t it? They’re sweet enough as they are, but the glaze would make them special-occasion-worthy: like a “I managed to get out of bed this morning to go to work, so let’s celebrate!” kind of muffin/cupcake/whatever.
Even if you’re not a fan of Martha Stewart, her latest book Martha’s Flowers is absolutely droolicious (drooleriffic?). I know, I’m making words up here but there aren’t sufficient superlatives in the English language to describe the photography and artful styling in this book. If you can get your hands on a copy from your local library, do treat yourself. I haven’t even gotten around to reading the text yet (ahem) as I keep staring at the photos and stammering out awe-struck gibberish.
From the Boast and Braggart files…a couple of articles I wrote about herb gardening have been recently published: “Tea Time: Growing Herbs for Tisanes” appears in the Winter 2018 issue of Archive magazine, and “Designing a Meadow Garden” is featured in the Winter issue of Herb Quarterly.
Have a wonderful week!
