Today's Blooms

It's happening now that several times a day I find myself outside, inspecting the progress of the members of my garden.  I snapped these photos this morning.

My beautiful and fragrant Lindera benzoin is budding.  This winter, we moved it from a too-sunny spot in the front garden to a shadier spot in the back.  I love this plant so much.  It's actually a Northeast U.S. native, but I justified the purchase by the fact that the dried berries can be used in the place of black pepper.  The leaves can also be used as a tea (they're so unbelievably fragrant!) and the bark has medicinal qualities.

My favorite plant in the garden.

We bought this Rhododendron from a neighbor who propagates several plants.

Non-native, garden variety rhodie.

The Berberis aquifolium we planted in the past couple of years are blooming for the first time.

The Berberis flowers have a light, buttery fragrance that I really enjoy, and so do the bees!

We now have probably a dozen or so native flowering currants in our garden.  The flowers vary from white, to light pink (seen below), to a more vibrant pink.  I love the fragrance of these guys.

The fragrance is not too sweet or 'floral', but is more clean and earthy.

Emerson's fig tree has 20+ figs already!

And the last of our three plum trees has FINALLY blossomed.

Hopefully there will be enough cross-pollination.

Andy accompanies me on my garden inspections.

I'm excited to announce that our weeping Santa Rosa Plum, which Matt and I planted in the fall of 2010, began weeping this past year AND this spring finally has blossoms!!  It's covered in them!  I hope this means it will be covered in fruit!

We almost gave up on you, you late bloomer!

Ribes sanguineum, red and white varieties.

This one has more vibrant flowers.

Dirt Cheap Cold Frame

Our vegetable beds look a little sorry.  Matt and I have been sowing them during the last few weekends, but have been leaving the greens alone until they've bolted.  Right now they're super yummy.

Silly-looking leaning greens.

I have to give a shout-out to my bud, Kittee, for this cold frame idea.  I chose to use this particular raised bed because this area is not being sown right now (actually it's for the tomatoes, which I just started in the cold frame.)  I nestled the starter pots in the soil for extra warmth and room to grow upwards, seeded them, and placed the window on top.  Not a bad cold frame for a $2 old window from the Rebuilding Center.

Grow little bebehs, grow.

I'm kind of over starting seeds indoors.  I don't like having to deal with leggy plants, losing dining room table space, nor doggles that like to knock everything over.  Hopefully this method works. I'll letchya know.

Isa's Smoky Tomato Lentil Soup

Our collards and kale have been excellent lately, so we've been enjoying them in a myriad of ways.  Last night I made Isa's Smoky Tomato Lentil Soup, but subbed ribboned collards for the spinach.

Enough left over for multiple lunches!

The soup is as you would imagine: smokey, full of good flavor, and hearty.  Just the thing for this almost-spring weather.  And for me, this meant throwing together a meal, rather quickly, with ingredients I had on hand.  I recommend making a batch for yourself!

Spring is coming! Spring is coming!

It's true!  The birds have been telling me and so have the flowers.  Take a look at what I have blooming already in the garden.

Indian plum is the first plant to leaf out and bloom in our garden.

Oemleria cerasiformis is native to the Pacific Northwest and will grow to be 5-16 feet tall. Important  as a source of food and medicine to Native Americans in this region, the Indian plum has a small edible fruit that birds, rodents, deer, bear, foxes, and coyotes also relish according to Rainyside Gardeners.   I doubt we'll see those larger mammals in our little urban garden.  We will, however see hummingbirds and bees hovering around the blooms of our two Indian plums.  I plan on taking a flower of each to work tomorrow to have our Taxonomist sex them.  If we don't have a male and female, no fruit!

The flowers will soon emerge on this and the other dozen or so rfcs we have in the garden.

Ribes sanguineum, or Red flowering currant, is a gorgeous native plant, which we have planted in abundance throughout our garden.  Soon, to the delight of hummingbirds and pollinators, these plants will be covered in pink blooms.  Rfcs are especially fast-growing, which makes them all the more exciting.  The fruit is also edible, but not too tasty to humans.

White flowering currant

Ribes sanguineum 'Alba' is a white variety of flowering currant.  Matt and I just purchased two from Echo Valley Natives in Oregon City, which we installed along the foundation in the front of the house.  I look forward to the cascading white blooms covering the shrubs as they mature to their 13 ft height.

How many fruit will you produce this year?

One of our non-native plum trees has begun blooming.  Hopefully it will save some of those blossoms for pollination with the other two plum trees.

While I was busy snapping photos of the blooms around the garden, these two were stealing collard leaves.

Matt and I are getting our vegetable beds in order.  For now we have some delicious kale and collards that are probably the tastiest they've been in a while.  Doggle approved.

Holy Manzanita!

Matt and I have been on a mission to find regionally-local manzanitas to introduce in our garden.  Manzanitas are the taller relatives of kinnickinnick (in fact, they're the same genus).  Bees and hummingbirds love 'em.  Like kinnickinnick, manzanitas are evergreen and have a fairly large range, occurring from southern British Columbia through Mexico.

We were looking for two species, Arctostaphylos columbiana (hairy manzanita) and Arctostaphylos canescens (hoary manzanita).   As it turns out, finding particular species of manzanita can be challenging, as this genus has a tendency toward hybridization, including between "manzanitas" and "kinnickinnick".  Short of wild-harvesting plants, the best we could do was acquire a few manzanitas that do well in our region.

Photo of  mature Manzanita x 'Austin Griffiths' from Las Pilitas Nursery website.

During a recent visit* to Echo Valley Natives in Oregon City, Matt and I picked up a wild-collected manzanita.  Again, due to the wide-variation in the genus related to hybridization, we're not entirely sure what type this is.  It's now living above our retaining wall in the front.

Last weekend we took our first trip to Cistus Nursery on Sauvie Island.  For reasons I don't completely understand it's still the slow season there for retail, so there wasn't much to see.  However, that didn't stop us from spending ages deciding on three manzanitas to bring home.

Our Austin Griffiths is loaded with blooms- hurray!

Manzanita flowers might look familiar to blueberry growers.  Vaccinium (blueberries/huckleberries) and Arctostaphylos are both in the Ericaceae family.

Arctostaphylos x 'Austin Griffiths' is a hybrid described as having "glossy green leaves and dark maroon-brown bark, forming an attractive backdrop for a large cluster of soft pink flowers.  The blooms appear in early winter, providing a valuable nectar source for hummingbirds and bees.  Over time, this upright manzanita can reach a height of up to 10 feet and width of 4-6 ft."

Welcome to your new home, little guy.

And we got two itty bitty Arctostaphylos myrtifolia to flank the steps leading up to the front door.  It's hard to tell from the photo, but they have adorable teardrop flowers and bristly stems.  Upon researching this species, A. myrtifolia appears to be a federally listed "threatened species" and is endemic to the Sierra Nevada foothills (so not quite native- oops.)  We were looking for a manzanita that wouldn't grow more than four feet and this fit the bill according to the folks at the nursery.

Love those little flowers.

*Echo Valley Natives turned out to be the only place I could find Euonymus occidentalis, or Western Wahoo.  For some reason this wonderfully showy native plant is almost impossible to find in nurseries around here.  We brought home two.  They're gorgeous in the fall, especially.  I'll take photos of ours at some point.

The Frosted Garden

It's winter and I, along with the other bees, have been less busy around the garden lately.

Crystalline fruit of the Nootka rose.

Today, however, I looked outside and was instantly inspired to leap out of bed, don my coat, grab my camera, and snap some photos of a rare Portland sight.  A crunchy walk through the crystalline garden offered an almost surreal experience.  Frost is really a neat thing, isn't it?

Foggy view from deck

We've had a few foggy days lately in the Pacific Northwest, and I've been walking around, feeling like I'm part of some fantastical movie, or at least that something fantastical is about to happen.  And I suppose it does.  The vibrant greens of Portland in the winter, including our infamous Douglas firs, paired with glimpses of snow-capped mountains on clear days and views of the city skyline are enough to make me giddy.

Okay enough gushing.  Good Dog; I love this city!

Forgotten spiders' webs reappeared today as icy formations.

Bristly Nootka rose looks especially neat with icicles as thorns.

Snowberry encased in ice.  How fitting.

My friend, Douglas meadowfoam, is preparing for its summer show.

Sword ferns and moss; keeping it green all winter.

The surprising evergreen-iocity of our deciduous Western azaleas.

A wild-collected Oregon grape. Such great color.

Vegan MoFo: Fig and Ginger Jam and Cream Cheeze

I told ya all about my Fig and Ginger Jam yesterday, right?  Well, while I was busy at work making the jam, Julian was working on the cream cheese recipe by Miyoko Schinner in the recent Cheese Issue of VegNews.  Each of these things are wonderful standalone toppings, but when spread together on a baguette, they become pure magic!

Don't believe me?  Try it for yourself.  Sooooooo goooooooood.

The jam, as you can imagine, has a nice ginger flavor that isn't too over-powering.  You get extra jolts of gingery goodness when you get a chunk of the crystallized ginger, as you can see here.  I realized after taking this photo that strangely, there weren't any fig chunks in this plop of jam. The creamy, slight smokiness of the cream cheese adds a richness to this snack.  Seriously, this is good stuff.