Good morning, and it's more of the same. Welcome to Saturday Morning Garden Blogging.
While all y'all to the east have been sweltering, here in Denver we've had more of what we'd had before: highs in the 90s, and thunderstorms.
At least the thunderstorms have lessened in intensity — rather than a wide-spread deluge every night, we've been getting enough rain to cool things off, and a few flash flood warnings, but nothing like we'd had the week before.
And it's late July — a kind of in-between time in the garden. Waiting on tomatoes, cucumbers and squash to come on. Waiting for the late summer flowers to bloom. Waiting for it to cool off.
The most excitement this week has been parade of guys ringing the doorbell, wanting to inspect the roof for hail damage. After the fifth time, I put up the sign.
It's been so hot that I've haven't been doing much outside, beyond pulling purslane and crab grass.
A favorite daylily is blooming outside
And I've managed to bring a gardenia to bloom indoors (it smells really good)
Other than that, my gardening has been confined to my knitting needles: I'm almost finished with a garden themed shawl.
I received a book of traditional Estonian knitting stitches, which includes "dandelion leaf", "wormeaten leaf", and "bindweed" — if I call the "snowfall" pattern "hailstones", adapt a "head of grain" pattern into "prickly-headed crabgrass", and throw in the "lightning" pattern, I could design a "garden disasters" shawl -- perhaps with a center motif of "rain soaked and rotting peony bud". I'll have to ponder that as I knit swatches for a lily of the valley shawl.
I've also, for the first time in my life, tried my hand at making fresh lemonade. Of course I couldn't just leave it at following a recipe which called for making "simple syrup" of equal parts sugar and water, heated together, then dumping that together with fresh-squeezed lemon juice. After doing it that way a couple of times, I decided to try macerating the unpeeled lemons (and limes!) with the sugar then mixing it all together with water. Superb! So here are my approximate proportions:
Franki's Lemonade
5-6 medium lemons or replace one lemon with 2-3 limes, unpeeled, sliced thinly (discard ends; about one quart sliced fruit).
1.5 cups sugar (2 cups if using limes — they're more tart)
@2 quarts water.
Layer sliced fruit with sugar. Let set until fruit macerates enough to dissolve sugar — about 1 hour. Lightly mash fruit/sugar with a wooden spoon to finish releasing juice.
Add water and chill for a couple of hours.
Adjust proportions of water/sugar/fruit to suit your taste. I like my lemonade with a high proportion of juice to water, and a bit on the sweet side. YMMV.
That's what's happening here. What's going on in you garden?