Reading is Good

Love books. Books are good. Reading is good.

We built a reading nook into our living room for doing just that. It has a bookcase and a comfortable armchair and a carefully positioned wall sconce for the best light to read by. There's a basket for magazines and catalogs and there's a handy side table with a big removable tray top for tea and biscuits and pencils and Post-it notes. There's also a clock on top of the bookcase, but it's hidden behind a big stack of gardening books. You don't want to see what time it is. You want to focus on your book learning—or your interwebs learning! Hubby even installed an electrical outlet with laptops in mind. Hubby learned his electrics from a book. Now he knows how to do stuff with the magic lightning in the walls.

Obviously, big knowledges come from books, so I have been building a collection of books on plants and gardens and landscaping in an effort to absorb aaaaall the big knowledges of gardening. Then I will become green-thumbed genius. Yesss!

I also like looking at the pictures.

Unexpected Winter Color

Here we are at the ass-end of the year, a time when much of the garden is dry sticks and sickly-looking yellowed leaves. It's times like these when a cluster of colorful evergreens would be a welcome sight from any window in the house. I don't actually have anything like that, but it would be nice. What I do have is a few scattered blue spruces and some tiny hollies. Yawn.

And then there are the 'Sweet Tea' heucherellas. Just a couple of colorful little blotches tucked away in an otherwise brown and crispy corner. Anyone who's been bitten by the hoochie bug knows that heucheras and heucherellas come in a rainbow of fantastic and surprising foliage colors. 'Sweet Tea' has dramatic dark veins and beautiful cinnamony orange colors in the summer. I picked up a couple of them from the Home Depot just when summer had given way to fall. The leaves were lovely then, with their spicy oranges, cidery yellows and peachy pinks contrasting with magenta undersides. You should have seen 'em ... but I didn't think to take pictures.

Then the weather really cooled down and most things in the garden started looking rather tattered and soggy. That's when 'Sweet Tea' took the opportunity to grab the spotlight and went totally and brilliantly ... red.

 What a delightful surprise! Now, in late December, these gorgeous little beasts are still dazzling in bright, bold reds and rich, raisiny burgundies. I'm so glad I thought to take pictures this time. Clearly, I'm going to be needing some more hoochies in my garden next year.

Notes on Quick-Drying Hydrangea Flowers

This post is a follow-up on the wreath of dried flowers that I made last month.

For anyone curious about drying flowers and maintaining them in a decorative arrangement, feel free to learn from my abecedarian experience. (Also, feel free to look up the word abecedarian, a fun little gem from Merriam-Webster.) As you may remember, I wired freshly cut hydrangea flowers to a wreath frame without first removing the leaves or going through the drying process. Feeling like a prize idiot, I then resorted to quick-drying the wreath, leaves and all, with a desiccant in a dark closet.

In my research I found that desiccants frequently used to dry flowers include silica gel crystals, a mixture of Borax and cornmeal, various cat litters, and calcium chloride. Being in a bit of a hurry, I chose the product that seemed to me the simplest to acquire and put to use. DampRid is a calcium chloride based product that is relatively cheap and required no mixing on my part. I didn't have to fill an entire box or bag with the stuff and I didn't have to risk crushing the flowers with the desiccant itself. Product reviews suggested that the DampRid hangers, which are meant for keeping closets fresh and dry, yielded faster results than the higher-capacity buckets from the same manufacturer. Also, it was convenient to have them hanging right up next to the wreath, which I clipped to trouser-hangers and hung upside-down from the closet rod.

I was pleasantly surprised that the quick-drying method worked. Otherwise, the wreath would have turned wilty and disgusting after a few days. That would have sucked.

Quick-Dry Timeline

Day 1: I cut the flowers, wired them to the wreath frame and hung the whole thing in a closet in the late evening.

Day 2: I bought the DampRid hangers and put 2 of them in the closet with the wreath.

Day 10: Nine days after harvesting the flowers, they were dry. The leaves had curled in the drying process and some of them weren't yet completely crispy. Good enough for me, though. The wreath went on the door. This is the day I took the pictures featured in the previous post.

Day 19: The front door is adequately shielded from the weather by the porch roof. Wet-hot days and late summer thunderstorms have not managed to damage the dried flowers. However, morning sunlight has bleached the subtle pinks and greens to ivory and the sunburned portions appear brown. If you want your flowers to retain their color, be sure to place them somewhere they will be protected from the sun's rays throughout the entire day. The following pictures are from Day 19.

So, I guess this means you don't have to wait until fall to harvest your hydrangeas for dried arrangements. I wonder how long the flowers would have held their colors if they had been protected from the sun. Krylon makes a clear UV-resistant aerosol spray that comes in glossy and matte. Perhaps it would be worth a try ...

Do you have a flower-drying experience to share? I'd love to hear about it!

Rhapsody in Orange

Two weeks ago I cut a bunch of flower heads from my Phantom hydrangea and wired them to an 18" wreath frame. Then I realized that I should have removed the leaves and dried the flowers before assembling the wreath. Crap. So, I did some research (Hello, Internet!) and decided to try quick-drying the whole wreath in a closet with DampRid hangers. Ta-daa! Success. Check this shit out.

Those ivory, green, pale pink and rusty orange colors are the original summer colors of the flowers. They faded very little in the drying process. The leaves dried nicely, too. The rust color is from sunburn, but I like it. I think it works well against the terra cotta of the door. Meanwhile, the Phantom has flowered so prolifically that you wouldn't even know I'd removed some of the blooms.

In other news, the carving pumpkins are coloring up from yellow to orange and they have just begun to develop ribbing. They're not huge, but they are big enough to make into jack-o-lanterns. I'm so pleased that these two have made it this far. That's one for Flan and one for her man. We just love Halloween, and pumpkin carving is an important part of our traditional family festivities. Of course, if I don't get enough "meat" for baked goods out of the small sugar pumpkins, these two will end up being roasted and pureed instead! We can always buy pumpkins to carve, but homegrown pumpkins are so much better for eating than store-bought.

P.S. The powdery mildew was slowed to a crawl by my timely and thorough application of neem oil. I plan to administer a follow-up dose late this evening when there's no chance of leaf burn. Big thanks to the Green Light Company for this excellent product. None of my pumpkins were harmed. I'm gonna put that experience in the win column, especially since all the neighbors' pumpkin plants look worse off than mine. Sometimes it just feels good to see some evidence that your efforts are paying off.

The Plant of Many Little Golden Fish

My goldfish plant has finally flowered!

This Nematanthus gregarius started out several years ago as a cutting only a few inches long. (Thanks, Mom!) The cutting was easily rooted in a glass of water and eventually transplanted into this hanging water hyacinth basket. It seems to enjoy its location over the kitchen sink. It gets all the light this east-facing window can offer. I water it regularly and it gets some humidity. Over the years it has grown plenty of glossy green foliage that trails over the edge of the basket (and into my face while I'm washing dishes), but it has never flowered for me. Not once.

So, what did I do differently to suddenly end up with all of these amusing goldfish-shaped blooms? All I know is, I've watered it deeply a few times this summer and I vaguely remember offering it a little fertilizer once. That's all that's changed. I guess the poor thing had been feeling neglected and just wanted a long drink and some food! Silly me. Now I know. I think our relationship will improve from here.

*GASP!* Gimme a drink!