Good morning, and may you have had a storied Thanksgiving. Welcome to Saturday Morning Garden Blogging.
Denver (and Pueblo) had spectacular weather for Thanksgiving. Temperatures have been in the upper 60s — or higher — for the last several days: yesterday at the weather station nearest our house, the thermometer hit 75°. It doesn't matter for record keeping purposes, as our "official" weather (69° yesterday) is read at Denver International Airport, 30 miles away from Denver, and under a different weather pattern.
A cold front rolls in today and temperatures will drop into the 40s and 50s — the normal range.
The orchid was grown by my mother-in-law: she says she doesn't do anything to get hers to bloom. Just buys cheap plants at the grocery store, plops them in her west-facing window, and waters them.
Before I get to the main event of Garden Blogging, I want all ya'll to click on this link, then vote for the room designed by Gary P. (the last one) — our own Missy's Brother — so he can win a Restoration Hardware brickmaker's table to cram into his already over-stuffed living room. It will totally destroy the ambience, but who am I to quibble with the desires of Missy's Brother? If he doesn't win he'll end up on a street corner shouting at random women to "sew my buttons, bitches". It's all up to you. Voting ends tomorrow morning at 8:00 a.m. (time zone isn't obviously stated on the site), so do it NOW. Let's show the mighty muscle of the dKos garden bloggers.
And now we will continue with our regularly scheduled programming.
The holidays are a time for families, and for trotting out family stories. Recently medical marijuana has been in the news here in Colorado, and it reminds me of a story of Grandma and her medicine.
Grandma lived with us when I was little — she died in 1968 when I was 9. She had been born in 1887 to German immigrants: German was her first language, and her English was very heavily accented.
To the best of her ability, Grandma was a very proper Victorian-age woman, and had a very rigid Bible-based, Missouri-Synod Lutheran code of behavior. It's just that Grandma's ability wasn't all that high: during the 1930s she had been committed to the Cherokee State Hospital in Iowa. It's likely she had bi-polar disorder, and was treated with a recently-developed therapy: electroshock. It left her circuits pretty well permanently scrambled, and by the time I came along, when she was in her 70s, Grandma definitely wasn't hitting on all cylinders.
Or perhaps I'm being overly-charitable in finding a reason for the divergence between what Grandma preached, and what she practiced. I remember one evening when we girls (there were 5 of us) were cleaning up the kitchen, and Grandma was lecturing us on the Bible — the Ten Commandments, specifically. A large beetle was crawling across the floor, and she emphasized the importance of "Thou shalt not KILL" by bringing her slippered foot firmly down to squish the bug.
Grandma also was very — fanatically — frugal. Left to her own devices she'd wear the same clothing, day after day, until it fell apart — it had to be taken from her for laundering. Giving her new clothing as a gift was a useless exercise, as she'd just pack it away "for special" — which never came. When she died, she had in her closet a trunk filled with unused gift clothing.
The only gift Grandma would use was fifths of Jim Beam whisky, and every Christmas, and birthday, Grandma would receive a few bottles of Jim Beam.
Not that Grandma drank — oh, no! Spirits taken merely for pleasure were sinful; and ladies did not drink! That was medicine, to be carefully measured and taken when one had a bit of some loosely-defined internal upset.
When Grandma was feeling poorly and in need of medicine, she would shuffle out to the kitchen with one of her bottles, get the largest serving spoon out of the drawer, hold it over a juice glass and carefully measure a spoonful of whiskey, add a teaspoon of sugar, then top it off with water.
Fifteen minutes later the dose would be repeated... and repeated... and repeated.
As the dosing went on, the measuring became less and less exact: one can spill a hell of a lot of extra whiskey into the glass when half-snockered. As Grandma was very thin and quite frail, it didn't take a whole lot to put her in her cups.
By the end of the evening, Grandma would be very well pickled, and whatever the upset was — whether physical or mental — would have been drowned.
So as you go about the festivities in the coming month raise a toast and remember Grandma: it's Medicine!
That's what's happening here; what's going on in your gardens?