Garden randomness

I keep meaning to take another set of garden update photos, but it keeps getting put off for one reason or another.  Either it's raining, or I haven't done the weeding, or the grass needs to be mowed, or I don't get home until after dark, or whatever.  I can't seem to get it all together at the same time.  So instead, here are some random shots of interesting things in the garden today.

The pak choi has bolted and is flowering, so its days are numbered.  The leaves aren't bitter and are still very edible, so I plan to pull out the plants soon and freeze them for adding to soup, but the flowers are so pretty and the bees love them SO much that I can't bring myself to get rid of them just yet.  Maybe I'll just cut and freeze most of the leaves, and leave the flower stalks as long as possible.



The spinach has also bolted, but the bees don't seem to care about those flowers, so the whole plants are getting pulled and frozen tomorrow.  So far the lettuce is holding on without bolting.

The peonies in the back yard are starting to bloom, in a rampant explosion of magenta.



Remember the pretty blooming apple tree?  Well, I now have dime-sized baby apples!



The purple irises in the corner of the front yard continue to be gorgeous,



And here's a view of the whole front flower bed where all the columbine are.  This picture doesn't do it justice. At all.  The bed contains columbine, flax, two kinds of iris, forget-me-nots, multiple kinds of hosta, daylilies, lavender, hens and chicks, golden currants, blue-eyed grass, ornamental grasses, rushes, yarrow, four colors of violets, ferns, tulips, daffodils, crocus, bleeding hearts, and I'm sure there are others that I've forgotten.  This bed delights me as the season unfolds.



And the big clumps of iris next to the driveway have started opening!  I had no idea what color these would be, I could just tell from the buds that they would be dark.  What a surprise when they opened this amazing deep burgundy-salmon-purple color!



Sigh.  I love my yard.

Columbine variations

Columbine flowers look like origami.  I love all the variation in shape and color in my front flower bed.

The first pairing is especially charming.  Both are pink and white, but one has small flowers, short spurs, short plant; the other has large flowers, long spurs, tall plant.

So much pretty

I love my yard.

After renting for so many years, I am so happy to be able to GROW things and PLANT things.  I feel rooted!

And I love all the thrills of discovery as the established plantings in this particular yard pop up and bloom.

giant purple columbine

small purple double columbine


Rhododendron


tall purple iris


Flax


More purple columbines because they're just so amazingly pretty.



And the last one for today, a plant that I bought because I saw it near the cash register in the greenhouse when I only went in to buy a couple herbs and it somehow got added to my total and it followed me home and it's not my fault really it was just so pretty. Ahem.

This is a Clematis texensis 'Princess Diana'.



Seriously, though, isn't that a splendid flower?!

Om nom nom...

Rice bowls for dinner!



Chicken, red bell pepper, carrot, onion, pak choi (from the garden!), and mushrooms sautéed with garlic, ginger, turmeric, and coriander. Served over brown rice and topped with fresh cilantro (from the garden!), lime juice, sesame seeds, and coconut milk.

Great googly moogly that was good.

All the kinds of soap

More soap again today.  Because of this:



That's my laundry soap jar.  Sadly, it is empty.  I sent Emma downstairs last night to do some more of her giant pile of laundry, and she came back up very quickly, telling me in triumph, "I can't do laundry, there's no soap!"  I could hear the cheering inside her head.

Well.

I have been mixing my own laundry soap for two years now, and it's great.  I did the first batch in May 2013, and then a second batch in May 2014.  The second time around, I left out the baking soda and made up the difference in volume with washing soda/borax, and couldn't tell that it made a speck of difference.  Each of those 9-cup batches lasted us a year, so here we are in May again and it's laundry soap time.

This time around, though, I paused before buying a bar of Fels-Naptha.  Soap... hmmm.  I can MAKE that!  Without fragrance or color or extra chemicals!

So I got out the lard and lye, and mixed up a quick batch of soap.  The other soaps I've made were cold-process batches, where the mixture is not cooked but rather left to sit for 4-6 weeks after molding to allow the soap to harden and fully saponify.

Today, though, I needed to do laundry immediately and couldn't wait 4-6 weeks for curing. So I did this batch as hot-process.

Since this is for laundry soap, I also made this batch with 0% superfat, meaning that all the oil will react with the lye and no oil will be left over at the end.  Normal people-washing soap is usually about 5% superfatted, since having a little un-reacted oil left over is a good thing.  Superfatted soap isn't as harsh and drying, and feels better on your skin. However, you don't want a lot of free oil floating around in a load of laundry, so no superfatting on this batch.

Hot process soap starts out the same as cold process soap: mixing up the lye water and adding it to the liquid fat.  I used 100% lard this time, since it's just for laundry and I didn't want a soap that will be really bubbly in the washing machine.  I mixed with the stick blender until trace.

Then the difference comes in.  Hot process soap is cooked to speed up the saponification.  I put it in the crock pot, on low, and let it go until all the lye was reacted (about an hour).  At the end, it sort of looks like Vaseline, translucent and silky.



Then I put it in the mold and let it cool down for a couple hours.



And then I cut it into bars.  This was a two-pound batch, and I cut it into 6 bars of approximately 5.5 ounces each (the same as a bar of Fels-Naptha).  Since this was made by hot-process, the soap is ready to use immediately!  It's still good to let it sit for a while to harden, but the saponification is complete and it won't burn like a cold process soap that hasn't cured long enough.



But this is for laundry, so I grated a bar and combined it with the washing soda and borax.  And now I'm set for another year.  Actually, I have enough soap for six years of laundry!



Each of my bars of laundry soap costs $1.54 (Fels-Naptha bar = $4.31).  The total cost of this 9-cup batch of laundry soap is $4.41.  That's about $0.03 per load of laundry.

I love being crafty.

Turmeric soap

You didn't really think there was only going to be one batch of soap, did you?



I made this late Friday night, and cut it into bars Sunday morning.  This is a two-pound loaf of olive oil, coconut oil, and lard soap.  I divided the batch before I poured it into the mold, and mixed a teaspoon of turmeric into about a third of the batter.  I poured the white first, then the orange, and gave it a swirl with a chopstick.  The white portion of the batter is scented with rosemary and mint essential oils.

Oh, and also I had to get a soap mold.  Because toys are fun.



I'm very pleased with the way this came out.

Garden 5.3.15

First harvest!  Emma and I had a lovely salad with dinner tonight, consisting of lettuce, spinach, pak choi, and lemon balm leaves.  Garden to plate in less than ten minutes.  Love it.



The garden is doing great, despite some light frosts over the past few weeks.



The lettuce we had for supper was the result of a much-needed thinning, and the other greens were selected leaves snipped off because we couldn't wait anymore.  As you can see, the Black Seeded Simpson lettuce germinated very enthusiastically and the rows are bursting.  The pak choi (closest row to the front) is starting to form little vase-shaped heads with thickened cupped stems!



The peas are almost a foot high, and the onions are approaching an inch in diameter, though I don't think any bulbs are forming yet.



The herb containers are doing well- front to back this is oregano, rosemary, lemon balm, peppermint, and lemon thyme.



The strawberry jar is blooming up a storm, the pansy box is beautiful, and the curly willow is getting all leafy.



The half barrels are still somewhat sparse, but I planted marigolds, alyssum, a coreopsis, a Shasta daisy, lemongrass and a salvia yesterday.  The snapdragons went in last weekend and are blooming great.



I bought some freesia bulbs on a whim about a month ago, and stuck them in a conveniently empty pot on the deck.  To my delight, they are growing!  I love freesia.



The primrose pot on the front porch got some alyssum for added interest,



and I planted a hanging basket (found at the thrift store for a dollar) with three white Bacopa starts.  There's another just like this hanging in the back yard.



The columbine in the front bed is just starting to bloom, with this pink one looking quite spectacular.



There's also a couple red ones that look more like the native columbine, a bit smaller and more demure.



The forget-me-nots are also starting, with this pink clump that opened a couple days ago.



The dwarf irises continue to be beautiful.



But the stars of the yard right now are the lilacs.  I have white ones...



and purple ones.



I have all the windows open, and no matter where I go, inside the house or out, I am enveloped in a cloud of fragrance.  Amazingly gloriously beautiful.