Good morning, and happy birthday! Welcome to Saturday Morning Garden Blogging.
As we head into the Birthday Weekend of the US of A, Denver's been having a hot streak — after last Sunday's cool down into the mid-80s, we shot right back up and have been hanging out in the mid-90s.
Ick. However, with July comes the hope of a good monsoon season — the forecast is for scattered thundershowers during the upcoming week and cooling down into the 80s. We had a little taste of it yesterday afternoon. Clouds started rolling in about 2:30; we had a few spits of rain; and by 3:30 the clouds had rolled right on out again. Here's hoping we get a real monsoon season this year.
Meanwhile, a hen and chick in the front beds has burst into positively Seussian bloom. I guess it really, really likes it out there.
Of course the most pleasant day of the weekend is forecast for tomorrow, when we'll be trooping down to Pueblo for the Fourth. In preparation I've been making ice cream this week — the lemon custard and raspberry cheesecake recipes I discovered last year, and a new one, dubbed "cappuccino" by the recipe book I received from my mother-in-law last year. I'm afraid I'm going to pass on all the frou-frouness in the recipe that would make change it from "coffee" ice cream to "cappuccino" ice cream:
To serve, whip the remaining cream until it holds its shape. Scoop the ice cream into wide-brimmed coffee cups and smooth the tops. Spoon the shipped cream over the top of each and sprinkle with unsweetened cocoa. Decorate with chocolate-coated coffee beans
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Yeah. Right. What I did like about this recipe, though, is that it calls for heating the milk with ground coffee to obtain the flavor, rather than relying on either instant coffee, or using cold brewed coffee, which would mean adding water to the cream. In any event, the coffee ice cream custard was cooked last night, and will go into the ice cream freezer today. If it turns out well I'll post my much-modified recipe next week (the instructions made it all much more difficult than it needs to be).
I didn't get everything planted last week, as I decided to tackle another icky job — cleaning all the spilled soil from out of the landscaping rocks. I tried screening it, but some of the rocks are small enough to slip through the hardware cloth on our sifter — I ended up with a wheelbarrow full of small rocks and dirt. After various attempts at adapting the shop vac so it would pick up the dirt and leave the rock behind (unsuccessful — anything I covered the hose with which had a mesh small enough to leave the rock behind clogged almost immediately. So I converted the shop vac to its blower mode, and blew the fucking dirt out. It worked, but made a helluva mess. Today I'll attack again — I think I try just blowing all the shit out towards the sidewalk where it can be swept up and skip the screening part. If that doesn't work, I'll have the Mister get some finer hardware cloth and go back to screening it.
But before doing that, I'll get the thyme plugs put into the back lawn patch — joining the roman chamomile in my effort to make a sweet-smelling mix of turf and low-growing herbs, then water it all in. I still have a delphinium to put in the ground, too — last year I planted a couple of small delphiniums, and they both survived to this year, so I think I found the sweet spot in my yard for them (after killing at least a dozen over the years). Perhaps, like the Curse of the Columbine, the Doom of the Delphiniums will be broken.
One thing that I'm missing this year is the giant datura plant which had survived, against the odds, winter after winter next to the front porch. For whatever reason it didn't come back this year — the winter wasn't very harsh, so it rather surprised me that it's finally gone. Perhaps it just succumbed to age. I'm sorry it's gone but... I'm also happy that that very warm sweet spot is now available to be filled with some other tender treasure. I think I might be able to get a passion flower vine to thrive there, as the datura did so well. But that will wait until next year.
That's what's happening here? What's going on in your gardens?