Here’s What’s Happening

Well, the results of my “What the Bleep am I Growing” botany contest are in, and they are highly conclusive.  First place (winner of a sock, pickles she really doesn’t need, and a January 2010 issue of Cooking Light) goes to Teresa, who identified all three of the mystery plants with ease.

Second place goes to DorothyMantooth, who, alas, was right 1/3 of the time when she guessed “weeds.”

Since Teresa did all her plant ID in the comments of each individual mystery plant, I thought I would cut and paste snippets of them here for the ease of reference and so you might be as dazzled by her horticultural mad skilz as I was.

On Mystery Plant #1:

This plant is from the family commonly called dusty millers or Artemisia. Also they are known as wormwood or southernwood. For the most part this plant provides a pretty background for other plantings if it is a low grower. They grow vigorously during the summer and can be cut down within 3 inches of the ground during the growing season to keep them in bounds. They tend to attract spittle bugs and aphids if they are in too much shade. Low maintenance and mainly just for that sage color and different texture.

On Mystery Plant #2

This is the hardiest hybrid of coral bells and will form clump of pretty leaves with either pale pink or white flower that rise above the plant about 8 inches. Heuchera family. This plant and many others of the coral bell group are mainly good as pleasings clumps of color in the garden.

On Mystery Plant #3

If the leaves of these plants do not have a fuzzy texture and display white thin roots when pulled then this is an infestation of the common weed called something like duckworth. If it growing strongly into surrounding grass and other areas thin by half, wait and determine if is just a weed. This is a prolific growth for the coral bell family. I fear a weed.

Stunning, right?  And the real irony here is that Teresa is not only quite the gardener but she is also a highly experienced pickler.  So I’m guessing a jar of my amateur hour pickles is the last thing she needs.  Too bad.  You’re getting the pickles, Teresa.  Thanks for playing!

Great news!  After a rash of warm weather in our fair city, I am now able to get into the backyard by climbing over only a minimal amount of snow.  Result?  More gardening mysteries.  Join in the fun: check out three of these surprise plants and try to guess (or use actual knowledge, whateves) what is growing in my backyard.

Winner (person with frankly, any guesses that turn out to be right come summer) gets a copy of Cooking Light from January, one knitted sock (great for puppets!), my top secret low-fat chocolate chunk cookie recipe, and a cat.  Wait, not the cat.

Here we go!

I actually know what mystery plant number 2 is already, thanks to my mother’s top secret network of garden spies (oops–not so secret anymore), but I’m adding it in anyway just for the added challenge.

And remember, if you see crocus shoots poking out of any of the above plants, ignore them.  THEY ARE EVERYWHERE.*

*Except where I planted them.

It’s a gorgeous springy day here in Madison, Wisconsin, or, as I have come to think of it over the last year, Pajama City, USA.  Yep, we’ve been here for a year now.  How weird is that?  I feel like I should be major of this town by now, or at least have a city-wide reputation as the crazy lady who screams at squirrels.  Both come with parking spaces in front of Weary Traveler, right?

Well, at least I’ve made an impact on my one little corner of Madison, the little plot of ground nestled near Olbrich Gardens, the lake, and the bike trail.  And now that the snow is melted and the birds are singing I am starting to see that there are things sprouting that I don’t remember putting there.  Many, mysterious things.  Things I’ve never seen before.

First, in the front where I planted the crocus bulbs (the 90 crocus bulbs) and then the Squirrel Army removed the crocus bulbs, we have… empty holes.  Very close to those holes, though, we have what I can only guess is… crocus!  That’s right, about three feet away from the original planting site/scene of the dastardly crime is a huge cluster of bright green stalky leaves shooting up like it ain’t no thang.  I mean a huge cluster.  I have no idea if it’s going to turn out to be daffodils, or crocus, or maybe some neighbor from down the street was fool enough to plant tulips and I’m reaping the rewards, but either way something bulb-like is growing with abandon in my front bed.

I’m pumped.

Meanwhile in the back, I see this:

I had to take this picture through the window because we are still snowed out of our backyard.  (Yes, a huge mountain of snow blocks the gate into our yard.  Yes, we put it there ourselves.  No, we didn’t think about how we would get back there all winter long.)

But even through the grainy photoage you can see that something is alive back there.  Looks likes lilies to me.

All these happy surprises outside are getting me riled up for spring, but inside the growing season isn’t off to such a great start.  The Aerogarden isn’t exactly dead, but it isn’t exactly alive either.  After all my love and good press for the Aerogarden herbs kit, the Salad Greens kit is going on its third month and there’s still nothing even remotely harvest-worthy to show for it.  And my dirt-gardening isn’t doing all that much better.  Here’s a snapshot of the collection of seed-starting projects I’ve been working on:

The only thing that cares to grow in my kitchen window appears to be parsley.  Not that I mind seeing that–I use a lot of parsley–but I can see my cooking getting kind of dull with just the one herb.

Still, the fact that I started anything from seed makes me a little proud.  There’s plenty of time to buy plants in May to fill in my window boxes and planters, but I hold out hope that I will be able to squeeze some life out of a few more seeds yet.  I am especially hopeful about the delphinium that may or may not be germinating in those compostable pots on the left.  Ever since my wedding I have been a huge fan of delphinium (before my wedding I just called flowers by the color they grew in.  As in, “I hope my bouquet has some curly pinks and pointy blues and maybe a few stems of purple.”  My poor sainted florist-gardener).  Whether or not I can grow it from scratch remains to be seen.  Since I have zero idea what I’m doing, anything that does grow will count as a minor miracle.

Now, some of you (the people with common sense, probably) may be reading this and thinking to yourself, Kelly, just take a class on gardening.  Talk to a few experts.  Buy some living plants and see if you can keep them alive.  Get some of that squirrel fencing stuff and a few liters of coyote pee.  Invest some money in this project and you’ll have better, faster, results.

And to you people I say PSHAW!  For me, half the fun of learning to do something new is doing it the hardest way possible.  When I decided I wanted to learn how to knit I bought two balls of pre-used yarn from the Salvation Army and fashioned needles out of a set of Chinese take-out chopsticks (okay, not quite, but it was pretty close).  I got instructions out of a book published in the mid-sixties called “THE RIGHT WAY TO KNIT.”  It had no photo illustrations.

And now look at me.  I’m a knitting fool.

Though, come to think of it, there were a lot of very ugly scarves between then and now.  Scarves I gave as gifts.  Scarves that some of you may, even as you read this, be wondering if it’s okay to throw away, now that years have passed and I have publicly acknowledged the amateurish nature of the scarf (or in Jennifer’s case, the hat).  Answer: no, it’s not.  I made that ugly scarf for you.  CHERISH THE UGLY SCARF (or hat).

Also, would you like a jar of pickles?  It has extra parsley.

So I just clicked open my weekly stat email from Sitemeter and was aghast to discover that the posts about Priscilla Pufferson got about 85 times more clicks than posts on such far more intellectual subjects such as my fatwa on squirrels or the height of Kid Rock’s entourage.  Harumph.  In the interest of giving the people what they want (JUST THIS ONCE) I present:

MORE GOOFY PICTURES OF THE CAT (and one recipe for spinach dip)

Here is the cat, surfing the web with her second best friend, Bucky Blanket.  (First best friend, Twist Tie, not pictured.)

Here is the cat having a little nap in the place that makes the most sense to her.

And here’s a picture I took that I will probably save until the cat is older, say, sixteen, and then I will bring it out at her first boy-girl party, and pass it around, and that will be my revenge for the time she pooped in my lap.

Now, spinach dip.  On Tuesday I accidentally got a look at myself sideways and this led to all sorts of dark thoughts, the kind brought on when one realizes that hibernation is not really meant to involve both lying down for four straight months AND eating constantly.  At this point I realized I couldn’t remember the last time I had let a green vegetable cross my lips.

To fix this, I got some cheese, and some bread, and, oh yeah, spinach, and made this:

Spinach Spread for People Who Have Time to Floss Immediately After Eating

Ingredients:

• Package of frozen spinach, thawed and squeezed dry
• Two Tablespoons of that weird Neufchatel cheese that we just call cream cheese because it’s not like you can get real bagels in this state anyway.
• Two Tablespoons of mozzerella (or whatever softish cheese you have in the fridge)
• Two cloves garlic

Instructions:

Whir all in food processor about ten seconds longer than you think necessary.  Spread on five minute bread.

There, I feel thinner already.

It’s snowing today in Madison, WI.  As of Monday, our snowfall totals were at 45ish inches, putting us about eight inches higher than the average for this date (and at exactly the height of Kid Rock’s sidekick, Joe C).

I have cabin fever something awful.  It won’t be long now before I start posting pictures of the cat dressed as famous nineteenth century authoresses.   When that happens, send the firemen.

On Saturday, exhausted from a week of shenanigans and what is surely going to be a fatal Vitamin D deficit, I decided to give into the urge to sit down in the snow and wait for death to take me.  Metaphorically, that is.   Carol Goodman’s THE LAKE OF DEAD LANGUAGES, the book I picked up around nine am, is so terrifically ominous and atmospheric it was the literary equivalent of getting trapped in a mountainside hotel with modern-day old man Jack Nicholson.  You know you could probably overpower him, and yet, still creepy.

The book is narrated by a recently separated Latin teacher who ends up returning, with her daughter in tow, to the boarding school she attended as a yoot.  It’s one of those boarding schools where girls are forever slitting their wrists and plunging themselves into freezing water (why do parents send their kids to boarding schools again?) and there are all sorts of juicy secrets, past and present, to unravel by the reader, along with some useful pointers on elementary Latin and lots of classics references which, thankfully, are aimed well below the heads of the sorts of girls our narrator would teach and therefore hit me squarely between the eyes.  Best of all, it’s set in the upstate NY winter, where 90 inches of snow is no big whoop (that’s more than a full Kid Rock even with his stupid hat on).  It makes Madison’s winter look positively Southern.

Here’s the cool thing about this book:  even though it made me feel smug and clever when I could figure out the its puzzles forty pages before the narrator, I still couldn’t put it down, and didn’t, not all day, or all night. (Thank goodness Josh brought me foodstuffs and news from the outside world.)  I haven’t been this into a story since Jodi Picoult’s last release and we all know I’m still in treatment for that.  I think THE LAKE OF DEAD LANGUAGES is so compelling because there are plenty of puzzles to solve, just the right number of clues with which to solve them, and because you will find yourself caring a great deal for the characters, no small feat on the author’s part, considering most of their problems could have been solved with a strict regimen of hugs.  And the vividly sensory narration is so rich and engrossing that you totally forgive the author for the bizarrely cheery epilogue.

If you have a day to curl up with a book in the dead of winter, you’d be hard pressed to do better than this one.  As for me, I might check out the author’s latest next time I’m snowed in.  Wait… that’s odd.  It’s set in an upstate NY boarding school where a recently divorced teacher and her daughter uncover the school’s sinister secrets.  Really.

Thanks, everyone, for the welcoming comments for Petunia Pufferson or whatever her name is.  She would appreciate it, except that unlike all of your cats, she cannot read or write.  Yet.

The latest on the cat is that she STANK to high heaven, so Josh took her into the groomers and now she is a naked but far more sweet-smelling cat–and, it surprised us to discover, she is not nearly as fat as we first assumed.  As soon as the fur was gone she started grooming herself, which quickly took the cat-hoarder smell in our basement down to a more manageable level and made her far more appealing as a lap cat.  Or a near-the-lap cat, which is more her style.

Now, before and after pics, as is my wont…

Smelly cat before:

And after, with her lion cut:

Here is the miniature mountain lion we adopted Sunday from the Humane Society.

We don’t have a name for her yet but we’re open to suggestions.
Likes: Sitting between ceiling joists, pooping, being scritched on her head.

Dislikes: Sitting anywhere besides between ceiling joists, retracting claws, playing with cat toys.

Also she is enormously fat.

It’s snowing big fat frosty flakes here in Madison, Wisconsin today, so naturally I’ve been planning my vegetable garden. It’s fun to think about all the delicious foods I could plant in our lovely new yard, and also kind of fun to take the list of a zillion items and pare it down to just two or three favorites and hope for a more reasonable first foray into the botanical arts. I’m also very much looking forward to discovering what might already be alive in our garden, since we took possession of the house after most everything had died back. I think we might have some rhubarb (woot!) and I know I spotted peonies, but have no idea what to expect out of the rest of the yard. I saw some mysterious crowns whilst poking around with a shovel last November, so one never knows–there might even be asparagus. Dare to dream.

The problem is, I think the Squirrels are already on to me. They’ve been congregating in clumps in exactly the spot where I want to put my tomatoes, and I sometimes see them whispering to each other and rubbing their tiny Squirrel hands together and then pointing at the house. And they are fat, too, despite it being the deepest depths of winter. Fat, I am 100% sure, on CROCUS BULBS.

But the crocus bulbs won’t last forever. I’m pretty sure that they have a tiny calendar hidden away somewhere and they’re marking off the days until tomato season with a big red X. I just hope to heaven that they aren’t reading this blog.

Now, some of you might say to yourself, Don’t worry, Kelly, Squirrels don’t eat tomatoes. BUT YOU WOULD BE WRONG. Already my neighbors on both sides have reported tomato theft by my rodent nemises last summer. There are witnesses, people. When I asked one friend from a nearby neighborhood if she had any Squirrel issues in her little veggie garden, she said, “oh yeah. They’ll take your tomatoes if you aren’t careful.” When I asked her what she did to be careful, she told me, “sick the dog on them, at least twice a day.”

Suddenly I want a dog.

Here is the thing. I have to grow tomatoes. The whole point (okay, not the whole point) of buying a house was basically to get a yard. And the whole point of getting a yard was to get tomatoes, which would cost four gazillion dollars to buy at the market if you’re looking for enough to can, say, a winter’s worth of salsa, sauce, and ketchup, which I am hoping to do. (What, I ask you, is the point of taking out a 30-year mortgage if I can’t save money on pantry items?) So the Squirrels must be defeated. But how?

Here is what my AMERICA’S GARDEN BOOK* (first printing: 1939) says about the little bastards:

“Squirrel:  Climbing rodent; active all year harvesting and digging.  Plants affected:  Apples, pears, peaches, nuts, sycamore, beech, corn, various bulbs, lawns.  (Hey editors, you forgot TOMATOES.)”

And then here is my favorite part:  “Controls:  Raptors, cats.”

Holy Jeebus.  Raptors.  Of course!  Why didn’t I think of that!?  I need a raptor!  Or a pair of raptors!  Does anyone know a reputable raptor dealer?

Call me a barbarian, but nothing makes me happier than imagining one of the same squirrels that made off with my 90 crocus bulbs skulking up to a nice juicy red-ripe tomato only to be suddenly picked up and carried away by a majestic falcon.  It just brings a smile to my face.

Alas, I have googled “Mail-order raptor delivery service” and come up empty, forcing me to read deeper into my AMERICA’S GARDEN BOOK (which tells me on the cover it’s the only book I’ll ever need to grow my garden, so there’s no point in researching elsewhere).  And guess what else they recommend for controlling your squirrel problem:  Shooting.  Forget repellents or fencing or high-pitched noises, AMERICA’S GARDEN BOOK tells me to go for raptors and pistols at dawn.

Clearly this is my kind of garden book.  And we are about to become those kinds of neighbors.  Squirrels, if you are reading this, it’s ON.

ETA:  oops, I forgot to mention that AMERICA’S GARDEN BOOK is a Macmillian title.  So, you can’t buy it from grouchy spoilsports Amazon who I used to link everything to out of laziness.  I’ll try to get more creative with my book links in the future.

I just (a week ago) got the newest book from those crazy kids behind ARTISAN BREAD IN 5 MINUTES A DAY. It’s called HEALTHY BREAD IN FIVE MINUTES etc. and it’s the same idea as the first book, which I celebrated here and here (and in my belly), only this time it’s with all whole wheat flour.

The results are simply delicious. I mixed up a batch in 6 minutes, on Monday, when I was sick (I washed my hands, for pete’s sake!) because I was low on bread but happened to have some vital wheat gluten on hand, you know that goes, and then fixed up a one pound free-form loaf in the time it took me to toast the last piece of storebought bread in our pantry on Tuesday. Let’s call that 4 minutes. It took the oven 20 minutes to heat up, and then another 30 to bake the bread.

(Here’s the bread-sludge right after its initial rise).

That leaves me with approximately 3 more pounds of dough hanging out in the fridge waiting for me to get hungry.

Now, being a cheapskate of the first order, this also leaves me with a question. Is baking bread at home, with this ingeniously simple system, cheaper than buying it at the store? Or just healthier and more delicious?

There is only one way to find out: STINGY NINJA STYLE. (Props here go to Amy Dacyczyn, brilliant mind behind the Tightwad Gazette for being the original Ninja of Savings and showing me how to do this sort of math when I was but a Frugal Grasshopper.  Amy, if you are out there, please go on Twitter, where your powers would be ten-fold.)

First we have to decide what a comparable loaf of bakery bread costs. What’s comparable? A fancy, cracklin’ crusty, soft-textured, scrumptious one-pound loaf of whole-wheat bread with no funny business on the ingredients list. For the sake of argument, we’ll say it costs $3.50 around here and never goes on sale, which it doesn’t. We’ll call that Bread A (for Aren’t you fancy?).

Also, since Woodmans sells a small store-brand wheat /white loaf with no funny bidness in it at the low low price of $1.99, and that’s probably what I would buy if I weren’t making bread myself, we’ll throw that into the mix. We’ll call that Bread R (for Real world).

Now then, how much does a loaf of Bread H (for Homemade, or Holla!) cost?

That’s where the maths get a little more complicated.

First we have to make a few assumptions:

• Assumption one: vital wheat gluten rarely goes on sale.
• Assumption two: cheapskates buy our yeast in jars, not packets.
• Assumption three: that $3.50 bakery loaf of Bread A is not made with organic flour, either.  I’ll do the math on organics another day.
• Assumption four: four cups of water will count as virtually free unless we actually open a bakery.
• Assumption five and six: you already have a bread knife, and you actually like bread, and thusly will eat it all.

Okay, are we all assumed?

Now then.

Let’s say we buy whole wheat flour, on sale, at $2.48 for a 5 pound bag.

A ten oz box of vital wheat gluten is $3.89 at the local co-op (though they also sell it in bulk, but I can’t remember for how much right now).

A 4 oz jar of active dry yeast is $6.95, full price, but they often have coupons and sales bringing it down to what I paid: $3.95.

White unbleached flour (which you need a smidge of) can be nabbed on sale for 98c for 5 lbs.

The salt is 50c for a drum. Kosher is more expensive, and called for in the recipe. But I use table salt for this. See also: cheapskatery.

Now, using my friend and yours, Excel, I’ve calculated the price per oz of each item and the number of ounces needed for the four pound batch. That involved a lot of maths and some unit conversions.  Stand back and look on in awe:

Now, I’ve left out the oz of each item required by the recipe to keep from giving away what the authors of this book are trying to sell, but that’s what would normally go in column E.  And then column F would be the cost of each ingredient actually used in the recipe (column E times price per oz).  And the total of column F would be…

$1.986

Gasp! My FOUR LOAVES of homemade whole wheat bread sets me back $1.986. That’s just under fitty cents per loaf. Bargain, right?

Well, yes. But we also have to factor in a few other things. First, the oven.

It ain’t as precise as you would think to figure out how much it costs to run your oven for 50 minutes. According to this man and his amazing hair, running our electric stove at 350’ for an hour costs about a quarter. (You are supposed to bake the bread in a hotter oven, but for some reason, our oven just doesn’t seem to want to get much hotter than 400, and even this takes a good half hour, so we’ll say 350 over the full hour seems close enough.) But, being me, I had to check with my own price per kWh, which is found on my incredibly complex MG&E bill just under the formula for calculating the weight of dark matter. And guess what! In December, 2 kWh, or an hour’s worth of bread bakery, cost me only 19c. NINETEEN CENTS!

So now we have a total of 69c a loaf. Still a bargain, one would say. But just how much of a bargain?

Well. Comparing Bread H at 69c to Bread R at $1.99, we’re looking at a buck thirty saved per loaf, $5.20 saved per four pound batch. Labor-wise, I’ll spend six minutes to make the dough, 4 minutes to ready it for the oven, and another minute taking it out of the oven, tapping on it a little, and inhaling deeply of the aroma. So we’ll say, for the four loaves, 26 minutes total. Now, if I save $5.20 by spending 26 minutes making bread, that means I’m saving (paying myself) exactly 12 bucks an hour for my bread baking efforts! Not too shabby for something as pleasant as bread bakery.

But, just for fun, let’s not stop there. What about if I were comparing my homemade bread to a bread equal in quality (Bread A), and not just the bread I would buy if I weren’t making my own bread (Bread R). What would I be “paying myself” then?

Hum to yourself for a moment. Lessie, $3.50 minus $.69 is $2.81 per loaf times four loaves is $11.24 per batch divided by 26 minutes times 60 minutes for an hourly wage of…

$26 bucks!  Tax free!

Whew. Tomorrow, join us while I calculate the cost of the running shoes I’m going to need to replace twice as frequently to make up for the vast amount of homemade bread I am capable of eating.