A Quest for Red Threads

 We've managed to get a decent amount of potatoes this season, even though I hadn't planted any starts this year. Apparently, I missed some itsy bitsy taters when I dug them out last fall and they turned into sizable plants that gave us red and white potatoes of questionable varieties. The choices are Yukon Gold, Superior White and Red Norland. Red Norland would be the default for the red type and I'm thinking that the whites are a mish-mash between the other two. Far more red potatoes grew than white ones.

Hopefully I've thoroughly cleaned out the potatoes from the tub because this fall I've planted crocus bulbs. You're probably asking yourself why I would plant crocus bulbs instead of potatoes, but there's one simple reason: Saffron! I've planted Crocus sativus, the crocus that gives us the spice, saffron. I love to cook various Mediterranean cuisines such as paella and Persian dishes both of which call for copious amounts of saffron. Upon emptying out my tiny jar of the last of my saffron, I've decided to try and grow my own.

Spacing out the bulbs before planting.

Now saffron isn't only expensive to buy, it is THE most expensive spice on the market, and with good reason. It takes approximately 200,000 crocus stigmas to get a pound of saffron. That's 12,500 stigmas in an ounce. Now I didn't go out and purchase thousands of bulbs to plant in my yard. At around thirty-three cents a bulb at the local nursery, that would have cost around the price of a new car. Plus at 4 inches apart, that would require around 7400 square feet of garden space (at 9 bulbs per square ft.) or 616 claw foot bath tubs packed in without pathways (at 12 sq. ft each). So, I settled for 30 bulbs and spaced them between the cat proofing slats. At three stygmas per flower, I figure I'll get around 90 to 180 stigmas (with double flowers) which will probably fill up my tiny jar some. The next year I should get a greater yield because the bulbs will have multiplied, producing more flowers.

That is, if they don't rot from all of the rain we get around here. If you think about it, Saffron comes from arid climates; Spain and Iran. The PNW isn't exactly arid on this side of the Cascade Mountains, even when we haven't had much rain for the last several months. However, I've read that generous spring rains and drier summers are optimal. This year is a great example. Since this crocus variety flowers closer fall, I'm hoping that the flowers won't get beaten up by rain like tulips around here do in the spring.

Because of it's out of orbit cost, Saffron is one of the most counterfeited spices around. What is passed off as saffron by unscrupulous vendors is often really a type of marigold or safflower petal. You may see this  product coming out of Mexico on this side of the pond. Also, the Caribbean folk like to call turmeric saffron and turmeric is also passed off as saffron to unsuspecting tourists abroad. Unfortunately, even some fine restaurants try to dupe the customer by passing turmeric off as saffron. The best defense is to purchase it from a reputable specialty store, especially where folk from the Middle-East shop because they would know.

So, how do you tell if it's real? First of all, it should cost some scratch. If you think you're getting a bargain, chances are you're getting shafted. The litmus test is easy. Simply drop a few threads in a glass of warm water. If it takes a few minutes for the strands to diffuse a dark color, then it's the real thing.  If the stuff immediately colors the water yellow or a murky orange, then it's a fake. There's also a distinct flavor and scent that real saffron possesses.

So, I've decided to give it a go myself, and see what I can get. Watch for me next fall in the veg garden in the morning hours, bending over a claw foot bathtub with tweezers in hand to collect my bounty of Crocus sativus stigmas. Hmmm. Saffron, medicinal poppies and lavender. Do I detect a theme here?

When Cold Frames Aren't

When Roland built a cold frame out of recycled windows over one of the raised beds I was thrilled with the fact that I would have a place to harden off veg starts in early spring and germinate some more throughout the season.

I even prepared for warmer weather by cracking open the doors enough to vent out any hot air. We had beautiful starts of cucumbers, beans and other veg and even some ornamental plants coming up. Roland spent a bit of time planting and labeling the pots. Then one morning, when checking on things, the pots were bare soil!

Yep, something decided to munch down everything nestled in 4 inch nursery pots we had cultivated. Gone. This discovery prompted one of the few times that I wished I had a shotgun. But then I would have to sit up all night into dawn to catch the marauder, and I wasn't about to do that. Only gardeners who grow giant pumpkins do that. And that's on the East Coast.

You'd think our lazy, well fed mogs who love to lie around in there during the day would have been on guard, earning their keep. Of course any number of urban wildlife could have helped themselves: raccoons, opossums (highly unlikely) or squirrels. Much too much pest for a domestic feline to handle, of course. Since the doors were open just a couple of inches, I'm guessing a rodent of some sort or a herd of snails had their feast. What I should have done was close the thing up each night and then vent it during the day. What's interesting is that none of the outside crops got mowed down like that. Phooey!

So, instead I just shut the doors and ignored it all in a sort of denial that gardeners get when they know they've been outmaneuvered, sort of like that farmer in Shawn the Sheep cartoons. But that decision would also come back to bite me. After a cold, wet June we finally got some hot weather starting July 5th. Great, only that I underestimated how much heat nursery pots can take. I finally looked inside the cold frame on a hot summer day and noticed that a flat of empty nursery pots stored inside had turned into a Salvador Dali still life. I now have a flat of melty-pots. I guess you could also say that they were divinely inspired by the ghost of George Ohr. Instead of the "Mad Potter of Biloxi," I could become the "Mad Gardener of Ballard." Mad is the operative term here.

Note to self, #6 plastic melts in a cold frame turned hot house.

There's a New Mog in Town and Nobody Likes 'It' Except Snorky

The first day we brought him home at 12 weeks.

Since we lost three of our herd in the last several years, I've been thinking about how 6 mogs is a good number. Of course the universe was listening in on my brain waves and decided that 6 must be too even a number. The other week, a gal in one of my Hort. classes asked us cohorts if anyone would like a kitten, otherwise she was thinking of taking them to a shelter. "Kitten, did you say?" as my ears perked up. I don't like the combination of kitten and shelter spoken in the same sentence. Why she didn't get her cat fixed in the first place could send me on a rant about how shelters are so overflowing with kittens right now that she'd be hard pressed to find one that had room, but I held my tongue and before I could consciously turn off the emoticon of my face, "I will" came spilling out of my mouth almost like a reflex reaction of "ouch" when someone hits you upside the head.

It's been in our history that we never have had to go looking for cats because sooner or later, cats find us. However, we have been long past due for another opportunity. I arranged a time with Antoinette to come pick one out, driving down from my house in Arlington since she lives in South Everett. Before I left, I realized that all of the cat carriers were at Roland's house, so I grabbed the next best kitten transporter; a pillowcase. When I arrived at Antoinette's, only two of the three kittens were left - a male and a female. One, fortunately, had been successfully adopted. The female was light gray with a tortoise shell face and the male was a tuxedo.

My friends, Nancy and Mary have been tuxedo cat enthusiasts for a long time, both owning two of them. They tell me how laid back they are. I've never owned a tuxedo, so I decided to try one myself and put their theory to the test. He has classic markings with a white chin and white paws, so I named him Marcel after the mime. Roland calls him 'morsel'. I stuffed him into the pillowcase and headed for Mog Cottage.

Assuming the usual position

He was handled a lot by kids before I adopted him, so turned out to be any easy purr and pretty much lays in any position you hold him in. I kept him in the bedroom for exactly half a day and he immediately made himself at home in the rest of the house. Unfortunately, the rest of the gang became very disgusted that I would bring that home into their house. Mamah refuses to come inside now (she pretty much schmoozes all the neighbors anyway) and Vinnie and Furbert hiss mostly when they get ambushed. They come in because neither fits through the cat door well - too fat- and they both like to eat. Deirdre growls and hisses at the mere site of Marcel, but is a perpetual house cat, so doesn't feel that she should have to leave. The others don't know he exists because they stay in the laundry room, with in and out privileges through the cat door.Marcel has been sealed off from that part of the house for now. No going outside until he's over his stupid kitten stage.

Marcel attacks toes and had produced some lovely welts on Roland's feet by chewing on them when Roland was asleep on the sofa. Being a kitten of course, Marcel makes every effort to wreck the house...um... more wrecked than it already is if that's possible.

The one beast we have that showed copious amounts of enthusiasm for our new charge has been Snorky. He immediately saw Marcel as a new dog toy and wasted no time engaging him in the chase game. They constantly play with each other, tearing around the living room and through the kitchen. Best dog entertainment next to the squirrel that sits outside the living room window.

Of course I had to brag about our latest addition to some of my friends, one of who replied that I need some grandchildren.

Invasion of the Poppy Hatchers

A sea of red in the parking strip.

We've been invaded! Not by the typical bugs or weeds but by poppies and not the typical California kind. Red and purple poppies have sprung up all over the front yard, seemingly out of nowhere. The red ones have flowers that look like a type of Oriental Poppy (Papaver orientale) and the purple ones are of the medicinal type (Papaver somniferum). Granted we had purple poppies in one tiny corner of our lavender beds last year (that also magically materialized). They really haven't been too proliferous this year but the red ones are everywhere! We can hardly see our blueberry bushes in the parking strip and these interlopers have shaded out the rhubarb.

What's interesting is that they have not invaded anyone else's yard around us. Maybe some prankster committed a guerilla gardening act for kicks and giggles. We have a lot of admirers in the area that like to walk by to see what's up in the yard. In fact, I was snipping and giving away poppy heads to anyone interested that came by.

Purple Papaver somniferum

I like poppies, so I see this invasion as a plus even though they can look messy over time. The red ones are flopping over. The purple flowers of the medicinal variety don't last too long, but they are lovely. Seductively so.

I'll be out there judiciously cutting off seed heads so they don't go nuts again next year. I want to control next year's crop. Poppy seeds, anyone?

Yet Another Use for 2 Liter Bottles

Some bottles drained fast, others are still full after several hours

Now that the weather's warmer, I took the bottle cloches off the tomatoes. The tomato plants outgrew them anyway, becoming rather contorted in the confines of their biospheres.

Instead of storing away the bottles though, I've discovered a new use for them. I flipped them upside down and with some pressure, snugged the bottle tops into the soil enough to hold them in (like the wine bottles). I also stuck a stake through each one just to help keep them upright. Each tomato plant got a bottle planted next to it.

Now, instead of watering the whole bed, I simply fill each bottle up with water and let it slowly soak in. That does two things: it provides a steady amount of water over a longer period of time and it prevents the problems that overhead watering causes with tomatoes, i.e. fungal diseases. I know the water is going directly into the root system too. I can add some fertilizer or Epson salts to the bottle when need be. Yet another use for those plastic bottles until they are ready to be recycled or stored.

Out of the Cold Frame, But Still Out of the Cold

Roland recently - OK, recently for him - built a cold frame over half of one of our raised beds. He used old windows he salvaged off a job, built a simple frame, cat-proofed it (of course) and put knobs on the doors. Both sides swing all the way open, or I prop them open with one of the rare sticks lying around. I did a happy dance, kicked the cats out (they found a way in anyway), and put in Red Zebra tomato starts that I've raised since the seed I collected from last year's crop. Being sealed off from the weather, the trick of all this is to regularly water the contents. Several times I didn't get to that part fast enough and the tomatoes went limp, looking like a rag-tag man crawling across the desert reaching out to nowhere crying, "water." Fortunately, I did water them in time to re-inflate them back to somewhat of an upright position. I've just been testing how tough they are, ya know.

Now that it's May, I rescued them from the abuses of my cold frame care and stuck them out in the chosen bed for the season. Because the raised bed is in the parking strip, I wasn't keen on putting up a hoop house. They can look rather tacky. It's a hot, sunny location and I feel the tomatoes only need protection until they get well established. So, I did the next best thing and put bell cloches over each plant. Now, I'm not one to go out and buy glass cloches at $35 plus a pop. Instead, I re-purposed the copious amounts of 2 ltr. water bottles I've stashed after swallowing the contents.

Re-purposed water bottles over tomato starts.

I simply cut the bottom off using the conveniently placed embossed line around the circumference as a guide. Then, I just pushed them into the soil deep enough to hold them in place and, voila! free cloches and no need to worry about watering until after July 4th. Lost the lids? No problem. Use wine corks instead. I'll vent them during the day by keeping the cork off so they don't get all that tomato fungus and then to keep the heat in, I'll cork them up at night. Not too difficult to remember, right? Yeah, right.

Of course, the cat proofing had to be modified to accommodate the new configuration. That detail provides me with two more wood cat proofing grids to use as trellises for perhaps, cucumbers or some such viney veg.

Re-purposing the Re-purposed for the Peas

My quickie pea trellis tent.

Roland usually gets creative when constructing trellises for vining veg such as peas. He has dived head first into his lumber scrap stash to retrieve lengths of mahogany and white oak to create monumental structures to hold all sorts of legumes or row cover frames to keep the bugs out. A lot of thought goes into his creations.

So far this year he hasn't had time to do any garden stuff, not to mention that the weather hasn't exactly cooperated, so I devised a trellis myself re-purposing one of the already re-purposed wooden structures. I had Roland construct a cold frame over half of one of the beds, so the cat proofing was no longer needed in that area. Instead of letting it just take up space stored somewhere, I concocted an ad hoc tent for a pea trellis. I simply placed the ends of the frames onto the beds between other cat proofing and angled them over into each other. Voila! Instant pea trellis without having to lift a nail gun. To hold the top together I used the next best fix-it thing on earth to duct tape, zip-ties. I only used 3 ties, one on each end and one in the middle. Done.

In the space below, I can plant veg that can handle shadier conditions. I have some lettuce there now, but I could plant Swiss chard, spinach or radishes. With the cold weather still around, at this point, I'll be happy if the peas germinate soon. Now that I can cross this chore off the honey-do list, Roland only has to finish the tool shed roof, finish the cold frames, replace the front porch, get rid of the dead cars, paint the house, clean out the garage........You get my drift.