October: I Love You

 

 'Buff Beauty,' back in bloom after a long, grouchy hiatus

Love, love, loving the lovely weather.

Things are blooming again.  Not that it's raining, mind you.  They're just so relieved that it's not 113F anymore. I think it's like those investors that keep buying US bonds despite the downgrade in our credit rating. They're so relieved that we haven't had a complete meltdown that they've decided to take our continued solvency on faith. So with the plants. Sure, we've had a downgrade in our weather quality for the past few years, but at least the climate's still capable of doing autumn at all, right? At least we're not Namibia.

And we've been planting again, also on faith.  (We're like those big corporations that took stimulus money and are now taking a chance on the economy by hiring agai--oh, wait.)  Anyway, we're really happy with some of our new additions.

For example, this 'Victoria' Salvia farinacea.  My phone tends to be a leetle over-enthusiastic about saturating its colors, but this deep indigo isn't too far off from the real thing.

 

 

Salvia farinacea 'Victoria'

And another gorgeous treat from the Salvia genus: bog sage (S. uliginosa).  I didn't get a very good picture of this tidy, upright, ~2ft perennial, but it is almost that vibrant and luminous, except that it's prettier in real life. Once Matt has propagated it, I'm going to put this one all over the place. That's how much I love its cooling brightness.

 

Bog sage - Salvia uliginosa

In the same area (the pond bed), we finally got a vine for our third trellis, the evergreen wisteria (Millettia reticulata).  It has a faintly Asian flavor to it, but I don't think it will be too incongruous with all the buddleia and butterfly weed--not to mention bog sage--that will ultimately fill these beds.

 

Evergreen wisteria (Millettia reticulata) and Matt's Insta-Fence Solution: 'Red Shield' hibiscus

Also, I'm trying a little experiment around the pond.  I bought a maidenhair fern (Adiantum capillus-veneris) at the Ladybird Johnson Wildflower Center's plant sale the other day, and I unpotted it, divided it, and rolled each root ball into a sort of burrito made of the shreddy coconut matting stuff that people use for hanging plants.  Then I crammed (really--it wasn't a very dainty process) each burrito into the waterfall wherever they could be fit. So the experiment will be (1) can they survive that much pummeling? (2) Will they stay sufficiently moist? (3) Is there enough soil in each burrito to provide the plants with whatever sustenance they need? (4) Are they strong enough to withstand winter, especially considering that our last two winters have involved snow(!). 

 The pond seen from the gazebo.  Click to biggiefy--half a maidenhair is right by the edge of the water in the waterfall

Two other super-strong performers in this difficult year have been 'Hot Cocoa,' a recent grandiflora release by Weeks Roses, and 'Pam Puryear' Turk's cap, the beautiful shell-pink variant of the more familiar Camaro-red Malvaviscus arboreus.  

I planted 'Hot Cocoa' last spring--it's one of those new off-color roses that have brown or tan or silver undertones.  I really like them--Matt thinks they're rather vile. Color issues aside, HC has been a surprisingly shapely, robust, free-blooming, and low-fuss rose, despite some hiccups with our watering system and the horribleness of the summer.  I think Matt may have been right that it's a little to corporate and rigid-looking for the G-n-R bed, but it's been so unstintingly doughty and cheerful that I think it's earned the right to stay there.

And 'Pam Puryear'--which is one of Matt's favorite perennials--is just knocking our socks off (constantly. We put on our socks--boom!--they're gone. Just. Like. That. That's how this plant is.)  We planted it this summer in the middle of the Awfulness--which was deranged of us--and it's grown faster than all the salvias and bachelor's buttons and buddleias planted with it.  From a one gallon, it's now a good 2' x 2' shrub and it's covered in just the prettiest little peachy-pink baubles.

Mostly, I'm a grown-up lady now, and my favorite color is green, and I love weird, off-colored roses that look like a cross between a pomegranate and a bruise. So my inner 8-year-old doesn't get a lot of gratification, is what I'm saying.  But when I look at PP, I completely love it, both with my grown-up eyes and my inner 8-year-old eyes.  Sophisticated. Strong. Prolific. And pink.  Lots and lots of pink.

'Hot Cocoa' in the middle of the grass bed (not the purple, of course--that's sweet potato vine), and 'Pam Puryear' Malvaviscus arboreus in the foreground--looks a little washed out here.  In real life, is much more vivid.

Speaking of off-color roses, we lost funktastic (and rare!) 'Wedding Cake' earlier this year to the weather and a faulty irrigation timer. I scoured the internet again and found a source of 5-inch "bands" (a small, deep, square pot that seems to get used a lot for mail order roses). I would have really preferred a nice, stout 2-gallon, but you take what you can get.  Anyway, this time, I bought two.  Here's one of the little babies.  Looks so helpless, doesn't it? Fingers crossed this time.

In other essays into strangeness, we were both captivated by the toad lily (Tricyrtis hirta) at Emerald Gardens last weekend (also the source of the Millettia, incidentally.  Which was $15 for a great big thing.)  If it does well over the next year, I'll be tucking them all over the shade bed.  I love their orchidy weirdness, and all how they draw attention to themselves, but in a mannerly, non-overwhelming way.  They'll add oomph without dominating, I think.

Toad lily Tricyrtis Hirta - looks like an orchid, but isn't--is a lily, just like the name says

We've also got some well-established garden heroes, like the fantastic 'Souvenir de la Mamaison,' possibly my favorite rose in--brace yourself--the history of the entire world.  Yes. I like it that much. It has gorgeous, huge, cabbagey pale pink blooms on beautiful little shrub with immaculate grey-green foliage, and it acts as though we had perfectly balanced summer in the 80s with a couple of inches of rain every month, plus fertilizers and fungicides. Instead of which, we give it irrigation and nothing else, plus a side of bermudagrass and torture by fire on the west side of the house. Nicely done, S de la M.  Nicely done.

 'Souvenir de la Malmaison'

In conclusion: I love October.  It feels nice.  It looks nice.  I love it.

 Glass slag in the mellow light of an October afternoon

Mlle. Franziska Outdoes Herself

Happy Roses
Such good weather for roses and taking rose pictures. They--like all living things in the area, in fact--have been loving the moderate temperatures we've had for a solid month now (highs in the upper 70s, lows in the 50s and 60s). They have great, fat, happy plentiful blossoms at their peak of shapeliness and color.

And today's overcast, Novemberish sky was a bright grey that was gentle on the colors.

A most triumphant--if unusually muted--Mademoiselle Franziska Krüger bloom

I'm especially pleased with 'Mademoiselle Franziska Krüger,' who is revealing unexpected depths of infinite variety. Her buds are larger and fatter now than they were in the summer, and their color is more gently shaded-less aggressively pink. They've also taken on a more autumnal mellowness of form--not the pointy, jagged shapes of summer. And the shrub is covered in copious large, peachy-gold balls that look as pretty from the street as they do up close.

A nice, fat Mademoiselle Franziska Krüger bud

The weather particularly favored 'Mutabilis', often a difficult rose for me to capture--its mottled pinky-apricots often look washed out in photos.

A really particularly nice picture of 'Mutabilis,' though I say it who shouldn't

This is the first time I've paid any special attention to Mutabilis's buds, which, intriguingly, are striped.

A striped 'Mutabilis' bud

The matchless 'Souvenir de la Malmaison' is also making unusually large, abundant flowers this autumn. Here's one of her dense, heavy blossoms in front of an orange bulbine. Her fully blown flowers are so hefty, they weigh their stems to the ground.

'Souvenir de la Malmaison'

I still struggle to capture the deep crimson of '4th of July,' but this may be as close as I've come to getting the color right. In real life, it's darker and richer than this.

'4th of July' climbing rose--coming out of its summer slump

And trusty 'Green Ice,' that gem among miniatures, is covered in diminutive greeny-white blooms. It often is covered in flowers--just right now, it's more covered.

Throng of deceptively delicate 'Green Ice' flowers

Plants Around Town
While biking around Elgin, I found this marvelous malvavaceous treat. We're not sure what it is--some sort of super-charged althea? But it's one of the few persuasive peony replacements we can grow in central Texas--it has those large, frilly, peony-like blooms. And, as you can see, it's got plenty of them.

Unknown tree hibiscus down an alley in Elgin

And, interestingly, even its spent flowers are kind of nifty--like pink, ruffly hockey pucks.

Spent hibiscus flower

Meanwhile, Mother Nature is signalling with increasing conviction that it really is autumn. Our neighbors across the street have an unidentified tree that is completely undistinguished all year long except in the fall, when it suddenly goes yellow from top to toe.

Unknown tree with fall color

And further down the street, there's a maple that's turned flame orange (wish I knew what kind--I don't think of this as being a maple-friendly area, so I'd like to know what exceptions there are to the rule. All I can say for sure is that it isn't a big-tooth, even though it does, in fact, have big teeth.)

Mystery maple changes color--in real life, it's much brighter than it appears here

Despite these signs and despite the droughty summer, Matt & I don't think it looks like the trees will be putting on a show like they did last year. The pecans, instead of wearing last year's exceptional clear gold, seem now to be turning their usual muddy yellow, for example. Still, there's time yet. The Chinese tallows have just barely begun to change, so more color may be on the way.

Nanosgiving

In between Thanksgiving with Mom & Dad (dry-brined smoked turkey) and Thanksgiving with Matt's folks (steak and potatoes), we had a little bitty Thanksgiving with Cathy. I didn't want it to be any huge production, and I definitely didn't want the formality (or size) of a turkey, so I decided to do quail instead: like turkey, only much, much smaller. Individual nano-turkeys, if you will.

And I've never done quail before, so that was quite exciting. They're so cute! If we have to live off the land after the final, cataclysmic economic meltdown, I'm definitely raising quail. Matt says no, chickens are more practical (he has a soft spot for chickens), but I say it's important to diversify your poultry portfolio.

For all of our Thanksgivings the weather has been almost comically appropriate: chilly, grey, and moist (no substantial amount of rain, of course, but some light drizzles just to tease the plants). And the leaves are turning nicely. The nurseryman we met at Medina Gardens, the native plant nursery in Medina, said that you generally get better color in a droughty year and worse color in a wet year. Something about the sugers in the leaves being really condensed. Since then, I've been noticing a lot of color, but I'm never sure if it's because he pointed it out, or if it really is more than usual. Matt, who is less suggestible than I am, says it is indeed much better color this year. Interestingly, even the pecans are looking unusually bright and showy--an appealing clear gold color. Below is a yellow Chinese tallow in a neighbor's yard.

A neighbor's Chinese tallow puts on a bright gold on a dull November day.

But I digress from the quail.

I have fond memories of eating delicious bacon-wrapped grilled quail at various restaurants (Royer's Round Top Cafe, the Liberty Bar in San Antonio), so that's what I hoped to reproduce (turns out my memory's faulty--Mom & Dad say Royer's famous quail is bacon-less. Oh well.)

However. There were very few recipes on the internet for quail that were wrapped in bacon, cooked on a grill, and served whole. Consequently, I had to cobble mine together from several other recipes. For the benefit of Webland, I'm including my recipe below.

Marinating quail. So cute!

Grilled, Bacon-Wrapped Quail

8 semi-boneless quail (backbone & ribcages removed)
1 container of Italian salad dressing
1 long log or 2 small logs of soft goat cheese
1 bunch of fresh sage (with at least 16 leaves)
16 pieces of bacon (I used applewood & cinnamon smoked bacon)

Special supplies: Charcoal, wood chips, grill

(1) Cut the tips of the wings off of the quail (from the tip to the first joint).

(2) Marinate the birds in Italian dressing 6+ hours or overnight.

(3) Start the charcoal in a charcoal starter. We (inadvertently) bought charcoal made of actual pieces of mesquite—not little briquettes. Chi-chi!

(4) Put the wood chips in some water to soak.

(5) Cut the goat cheese into disks approximately ½” thick. Put 1 sage leaf on either side of each goat cheese disk. Stuff 1 disk with sage into the body cavity of each quail.

(6) Fold the wings across the quails’ breasts: To fix the wings in place, cut a slit in the last section of one of the quail’s wings. The cut should run parallel to the wingbones and should be a little longer than ¼”. Thread the end of the opposite wing through the slit. This should make the quail look like little bitty decapitated vampires, with their arms crossed on their chests.

(7) Use the same technique to cross the birds’ legs: Cut a small slit in the meat of one leg parallel to the leg bone and thread the other leg through the slit.

(8) Wrap the birds in 2 pieces of bacon each: wrap one piece around the bird laterally. The ends of the bacon should over lap on the bird’s breast. Wrap the second piece dorsally, going between the folded legs and wings. The end pieces of this piece of bacon should meet under the folded wings, which will help hold them in place.

(9) Now the bacon should make the birds look like Sumo wrestlers. Decapitated vampire Sumo wrestlers.

(10) The internet, at this point, recommends searing the bacon in a hot pan. This will pull off a little of the extraneous fat, which will help to reduce flare-ups in the grill (a little). Also, the theory is that it will seal the edges of the bacon so they won’t curl away from each other in the cooking. Well, I guess maybe I didn’t do this part long enough, because the bacon went ahead and curled right in the pan, and I had to stab my little vampires through the heart with a wooden stake to hold the bacon in place. If it were to do this again, I’d probably use a spatula to apply pressure to the birds as they cook and sear them for a little longer than the 30 seconds or so that I attempted this go round. Be sure to sear both front and back of the birds.

(11) Spread the charcoal, sprinkle some wood chips on top of the hot coals, and place your birds on the grill. Close the lid of the grill to trap the smoke.

(12) Grill for 15 minutes.

(13) Flip the birds and cook for 15 more minutes or till the juices run clear/the legs wobble in their sockets.

Decapitated vampire Sumo wrestlers. With sage.

Some of the recipes I used were:

• Bacon-wrapped Smoked Quail
• Ben Ford's Bacon-wrapped Quail video
• GameBirdHunts.com's Bacon-wrapped BBQ Quail
• Epicurious's Bacon-wrapped Quail Stuffed with Goat Cheese
• Southern Living's Bacon-wrapped Quail
  

They were deliciously moist, tender, and smoky, if I do say so myself. We also had Brussels Sprouts with browned butter and pecans, creamed spinach, rolls, and butterscotch pots du creme for dessert. The Brussels sprouts were really almost tasty--a little sweet, a little buttery, a little nutty, barely cabbagey at all. They were a combination of two Eating Well recipes (BS with Hazelnut Brown Butter and BS with Pecans) plus about a tablespoon of bacon drippings left over from the quail.

And now that we have done Thanksgiving, it's time to start in on the Christmas season. Tomorrow: hang the lights outside and a buy a tree.

Goo on the Roof and a Smidge of Fall Color

I like having multiple projects going at once. If you get bored with one, you can switch to another. If you run out of supplies/funding/ideas for one, do something else that requires less material/money/vision.

So it is that this weekend found Matt monkeying around on the garage/shack roof, applying roofing goo. We currenly have 2 other major projects in hand (removing the last traces of paint from the antique doors Mom & Dad gave us last year and installing new gutters), but we needed a third to round things out.

The garage is a vexatious pile that causes me all kinds of indecision. Here's the thing. It's rickety, has an ugly leaky roof, and is too short. Because it's so short, there isn't really room for normal garage doors with a normal garage door opener. I haven't spoken with any garage door specialists (in fact, I don't even know what the proper name for a garage door specialist is--some sort of carpenter? A gates-and-large-doors contractor? Some dude sub-contracted out by Sears?), but I'm hoping that we could someday install non-corrugated metal doors that open horizontally on the kind of hydraulic arms that the special people in gated communities use to operate the gates that keep out the peasantry and other such undesireables.

And then, too, maybe we could replace the corrugated metal walls with actually siding. And maybe someday we'll re-do the roofline to eradicate the stupid valley where the water collects on the rare occasions that it rains. Instead of having two separate roofs that just happen to be joined, we could just have one, whole, unified roof.

The garage/shack with the Mr. Marek's rather nice Chinese tallow behind it. The garage/shack is a composite of two shacks, unconvincingly joined in the middle. The valley is right over the Studio-to-be.

But then I think, is it really worth it? We're talking about an excessively short ramshackle tin shack with antediluvian wiring, rotten timbers, and a rusty roof.

So maybe the thing to do would be to tear it down and build a new structure on the cement pad. It would be normal height, it would have new wiring, it would have a rational roof, and we could design the floorplan ourselves.

But then that would cost tens of thousands of dollars wouldn't it? Which we don't have. And then again, would it be worth it? I mean, as a structure that houses our spare crap, it currently does (most of) what we need it to do: stand up and hold stuff.

So I go round and round. In the interim, we're trying to enhance the garage/shack's functionality by enabling it to stand up, hold stuff, and keep the stuff dry, which will be a nice upgrade. Thus the roof goo. It's this weird tarry stuff that comes in a paint can that you smear into the crevices of your roof's metal sheets using some variant of a wooden spatula.

If we decide (as I expect we will) to just make the most of the structure we've got, then the roof goo is the necessary prerequisite for gutting and refitting the craft room/studio/call-it-what-you-will.

See, although short, rusty, and rickety, our garage/shack (oh, hell, let's just call it a shackrage) actually has some nifty features. It's got a spare fridge that holds our Costco provisions. It's got a two-car garage with wooden bins lining two of the walls. It's got a separate 1-car garage with a wall of pegboard. And in between, it has a third room with actual sheetrock walls and a linoleum floor. So while we don't actually use the shackrage for storing vehicles, we are able to get a lot of use out of the rest of it.

Unfortunately, thanks to a seive-like roof, that nice central room is currently a foul and pestilential fungus fest. There are holes in the ceiling where the wallboard disintegrated, there are puddles and streaks of black and green and purple mildew all over the walls and ceiling. If I have to go in there, I take a big lungful of fresh air at the door, dart in, grab whatever I need, and dart back out while doing as little breathing as possible.

All of which is too bad, because I really need a place to set up a stained-glass making workshop, and Matt needs a space (other than the kitchen countertop) to practice Gourd Art in all its dremeling, supergluing, gourd-innard-shredding glory.

So we need to tear down all the sheetrock, maybe rip up the linoleum, douse everything that remains with 100% bleach solution, and start over. But we can't do that until the roof is hermetic. So. Step 1: goo the roof. Step 2: get some rain so we can test the integrity of the roof goo.

("...get some rain..." Oh, I crack me up.)

...And that's why we've got two other major projects going on at the same time.

Grasping at Straws

Someday, when our landscape is more mature, we're going to have glorious fall color all over the place. For now, we just have tiny little smidgens of glorious fall color: one red leaf on the red oak, a bit of orangey tint on the margins of the Lacey oak leaves, one yellow bur oak leaf.

Bur oak (Quercus macrocarpa)

The interesting red petioles on our pomegranate

'Tuscarora' crape myrtle

One of our pecans

Lacey oak (Quercus laceyi)

...and the grand climax, our Texas red oak (Quercus buckleyi)