Wednesday evening I got an email saying that my cucumber plants had been shipped, with a tracking number.

Thursday afternoon I got another email saying no, they've combined them with my (nonexistent) order for shrubs and perennials, and will be shipping around June 1st -- more than two weeks later, even disregarding the oddity of getting that after the other. There was a "contact us with any questions," so I did, but have so far had no reply.

However, there is light on the horizon: [personal profile] jenett posted that her plant starts had arrived from Burpee's. After a little grumbling (mostly under my breath) about her having gotten the plants that the website had teased me with and then not had, I took another look. I believe I will be getting two tomato plants--one cherry tomato and one hybrid I hadn't heard of--and a parsley plant. No black Krim, alas, but I did well with cherry tomatoes in East Arlington, which is encouraging, though there I was starting with very good soil, and no basil, but we have dried basil, and dried parsley is barely worth bothering with.

I will believe it when I see it, and then see about acquiring tomato cages, suitable containers for the plants, and maybe even a cucumber trellis. The parsley I plan to grow on the porch, along with the rosemary, sage, and thyme.
Tags:
Now that we have a plant cart large enough to hold bigger flowerpots, I repotted the rosemary. The process went smoothly, without the old pot clinging to the plant (or vice versa), so I am hopeful. The thyme and sage can wait a day or two, but the rosemary that was crowding the little plastic container it came in.

Prompted by an online discussion and memories of the long-departed Moroccan Star restaurant, I put a cardamom pod in with the tea leaves when I made my last cup of tea. The cardamom worked well: the flavor was noticeable but didn't overpower the tea. I expect to do this again, though maybe not often right now: Penzey's is closed for at least another week, and I don't have another source of good cardamom.

We're already out of oregano and low on thyme, but the supermarket seems more likely to have good-enough jars of those. ([personal profile] mrissa pointed out yesterday that even if Penzey's reopens on April 13th, which seems unlikely, there's going to be a backlog of orders, and shipping takes time. I'm used to walking into their shop on Mass Ave in Arlington.) I am vaguely annoyed at this, because I looked at their "stock up for a few months" emails in February, looked at my spice cabinet, and decided we had all the herbs and spices we needed for a while.
redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
( Sep. 28th, 2019 05:38 pm)
The Boston Department of Parks and Recreation is using drilling radishes as part of a landscape restoration project.
redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
( Sep. 23rd, 2019 04:45 pm)
Mom and I went to Kew today, to look at plants and the Chihuly sculptures.

Having sought lots of advice about the Chihuly exhibit, we took most of it by starting at the Temperate House. There's some fine glass art in this exhibit, as well as scattered around outdoors, including an impressive blue-and-white sculpture if you enter via the Victoria Gate. I have seen two other exhibits of Chihuly's work, both much smaller and one of them entirely indoors; this one makes very good use of the large spaces, both indoor and out.

Then we just wandered, and enjoyed looking mostly at plants but also at birds and sculptures. I took some photos of plants and sculptures because I liked them, and of birds in the hope of using them to identify the species of duck (other than mallard) and goose (in addition to the Canada geese) we saw.

After admiring a large old chestnut tree and taking several pictures, I said 'I'm being a tourist'. I used two twigs to pry open a chestnut casing and remove the nut, which I looked at, photographed, and then put down near where it had fallen. (As you know, we no longer have sweet chestnut trees in North America [1]). I was reminded of when Maureen visited the Bronx Zoo with me and Ben Yalow: I was showing off the okapis, but what most interested her in that enclosure was the chipmunks.

[1] There has been a long-term project to try breeding a chestnut blight–resistant chestnut by crossing a Chinese chestnut species with the very few (I think less than a dozen) surviving North American chestnut trees. The last I knew, as of a year or two ago, the project had produced trees that are 15/16 American chestnut and seem to be resistant--and have run into objections from people who think that this is not preserving but attacking a species that is important to them. (This is vague because I don't have time right now to track the information down.)
Yesterday, [livejournal.com profile] papersky, [livejournal.com profile] rysmiel, [livejournal.com profile] zorinth and I went up to the Jardin Botanique to visit the greenhouses. Part of them were closed for some kind of renovation--had we paid admission rather than being members, we'd have been annoyed. But we saw orchids and flowering cactuses.

We also saw two things that were new to me. One was that among the many poinsettias on display, several were in flower. They flower in small clusters of tiny red and yellow flowers, easy to overlook among the huge red leaves.

The real novelty was a Wollemi pine. According to the label, it has been there for a few months. These trees aren't actually pines, and have few close living relatives. There is one stand of them in the wild, somewhere in Australia--location deliberately not published--containing less than 100 adult trees. They're being propagated for gardeners as well as botanic gardens, in part because a single population of any species is at risk.

It's an attractive young tree, not yet much taller than we were, that might not get a huge amount of attention if you saw it in passing, without the labels.
Yesterday, [livejournal.com profile] papersky, [livejournal.com profile] rysmiel, [livejournal.com profile] zorinth and I went up to the Jardin Botanique to visit the greenhouses. Part of them were closed for some kind of renovation--had we paid admission rather than being members, we'd have been annoyed. But we saw orchids and flowering cactuses.

We also saw two things that were new to me. One was that among the many poinsettias on display, several were in flower. They flower in small clusters of tiny red and yellow flowers, easy to overlook among the huge red leaves.

The real novelty was a Wollemi pine. According to the label, it has been there for a few months. These trees aren't actually pines, and have few close living relatives. There is one stand of them in the wild, somewhere in Australia--location deliberately not published--containing less than 100 adult trees. They're being propagated for gardeners as well as botanic gardens, in part because a single population of any species is at risk.

It's an attractive young tree, not yet much taller than we were, that might not get a huge amount of attention if you saw it in passing, without the labels.
[livejournal.com profile] cattitude and I celebrated his birthday today by walking in Central Park and then going out for dinner. We'd considered the Botanic(al) Gardens, but both of them were doing Halloween stuff today, and transport looked iffy [1], so Cattitude decided he'd like to just walk around Central Park and enjoy the warm afternoon and surprising amount of green. And such fall colors as have developed thus far, the occasional tree in orange, red, or yellow standing out against the green background [2].

We entered at Columbus Circle and walked north. The Parks Department had decided it had been dry long enough to open the Sheep Meadow; I decided it was warm enough to go barefoot. There are few places I'll go barefoot outdoors in the city, but this is one: the lawn is lush and well-maintained, basically free of glass, rocks, and even acorns. There were some squishy bits underfoot, and my feet got wet, but not excessively so.

What neither of us expected to find was wild strawberries, next to the fence. Cattitude spotted the yellow flower first, and bent down to take a closer look. Yes, the leaves matched. I said it wouldn't last long enough to produce ripe fruit, and then he spotted a bit of bright red. The seeds were still sticking out, in a "this isn't ripe" way, but yes, on the next-to-last day of October, in New York City, there were two developing wild strawberries and one strawberry flower.

No dragonflies, though we looked, nor lilacs.

The Ramble was nice, though we didn't hold still long or have binoculars with us, and saw nothing more surprising than a hermit thrush (the bird I added to my life list earlier this month). By then I was tired, so we sat a bit and read. When I got chilly, we took advantage of our memberships and went into the Museum of Natural History for a (not very good, but much-needed) cup of tea in the basement cafeteria, and the exhibit on new dinosaur discoveries.

If you follow dinosaur news, there won't be any surprises here, though I enjoyed looking at the recent fossil discoveries from Liaoning, China. They have a mix of actual fossils and photographs. The one thing that startled Cattitude wasn't a dinosaur: it was a slow-motion film of a running alligator, whose motion resembled that of a frog hopping rather than of a crocodilian walking. We stopped into the Hall of Vertebrate Origins to look at coelacanths--the exhibit needs updating (it still claims there's only one living species), and I hadn't realized how big the contemporary coelacanth is. The model that's about the size of my tattoo is of an embryonic coelacanth, with yolk sac still attached, taken from the belly of the fish that showed the species to be oviviparous [3].

For dinner, we went to the Silver Swan, because German food is one of his comfort foods. We both ordered a complete dinner--I overestimated how hungry I was--which comes with a choice of several appetizers. I was thinking I'd probably get either the duck pate or the smoked mackerel, but I had to ask what "ochsenmaul salad" was, because I didn't think it could actually involve hitting oxen over the head with hammers.

Not quite. Other end of the ox. "Ochsenmaul" is oxtail. I said something like "that sounds weird, I have to try it." It was weird and good, a slightly vinegary rare meat served over a bit of lettuce, with a little raw onion and a couple of tomato wedges. ('Twould have been a better salad in tomato season; as was, the only thing wrong with it was that there wasn't enough salad-stuff with the meat.) After one bite, I said "you'll like this," and gave Cattitude some. He did, enough so that I gave him probably about a third of it. He said it tasted like tongue, and we discussed the possibilities of a tongue sandwich at the Second Avenue Deli, though it wouldn't be like his Mom used to make--she served it with a sauce based on crabapple jelly.

[1] Getting from our house to the NY Botanical Garden, in the Bronx, involves two buses, and getting downtown for dinner afterward might have been tricky; the TA was messing with service on the best train line for the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

[2] The tree directly across the street from the Indian Road entrance to our building was red this morning.

[3] They lay eggs, but carry them in their bodies until they hatch; once the egg is laid, the mother is providing protection but no further nutrition, unlike a placental mammal.
[livejournal.com profile] cattitude and I celebrated his birthday today by walking in Central Park and then going out for dinner. We'd considered the Botanic(al) Gardens, but both of them were doing Halloween stuff today, and transport looked iffy [1], so Cattitude decided he'd like to just walk around Central Park and enjoy the warm afternoon and surprising amount of green. And such fall colors as have developed thus far, the occasional tree in orange, red, or yellow standing out against the green background [2].

We entered at Columbus Circle and walked north. The Parks Department had decided it had been dry long enough to open the Sheep Meadow; I decided it was warm enough to go barefoot. There are few places I'll go barefoot outdoors in the city, but this is one: the lawn is lush and well-maintained, basically free of glass, rocks, and even acorns. There were some squishy bits underfoot, and my feet got wet, but not excessively so.

What neither of us expected to find was wild strawberries, next to the fence. Cattitude spotted the yellow flower first, and bent down to take a closer look. Yes, the leaves matched. I said it wouldn't last long enough to produce ripe fruit, and then he spotted a bit of bright red. The seeds were still sticking out, in a "this isn't ripe" way, but yes, on the next-to-last day of October, in New York City, there were two developing wild strawberries and one strawberry flower.

No dragonflies, though we looked, nor lilacs.

The Ramble was nice, though we didn't hold still long or have binoculars with us, and saw nothing more surprising than a hermit thrush (the bird I added to my life list earlier this month). By then I was tired, so we sat a bit and read. When I got chilly, we took advantage of our memberships and went into the Museum of Natural History for a (not very good, but much-needed) cup of tea in the basement cafeteria, and the exhibit on new dinosaur discoveries.

If you follow dinosaur news, there won't be any surprises here, though I enjoyed looking at the recent fossil discoveries from Liaoning, China. They have a mix of actual fossils and photographs. The one thing that startled Cattitude wasn't a dinosaur: it was a slow-motion film of a running alligator, whose motion resembled that of a frog hopping rather than of a crocodilian walking. We stopped into the Hall of Vertebrate Origins to look at coelacanths--the exhibit needs updating (it still claims there's only one living species), and I hadn't realized how big the contemporary coelacanth is. The model that's about the size of my tattoo is of an embryonic coelacanth, with yolk sac still attached, taken from the belly of the fish that showed the species to be oviviparous [3].

For dinner, we went to the Silver Swan, because German food is one of his comfort foods. We both ordered a complete dinner--I overestimated how hungry I was--which comes with a choice of several appetizers. I was thinking I'd probably get either the duck pate or the smoked mackerel, but I had to ask what "ochsenmaul salad" was, because I didn't think it could actually involve hitting oxen over the head with hammers.

Not quite. Other end of the ox. "Ochsenmaul" is oxtail. I said something like "that sounds weird, I have to try it." It was weird and good, a slightly vinegary rare meat served over a bit of lettuce, with a little raw onion and a couple of tomato wedges. ('Twould have been a better salad in tomato season; as was, the only thing wrong with it was that there wasn't enough salad-stuff with the meat.) After one bite, I said "you'll like this," and gave Cattitude some. He did, enough so that I gave him probably about a third of it. He said it tasted like tongue, and we discussed the possibilities of a tongue sandwich at the Second Avenue Deli, though it wouldn't be like his Mom used to make--she served it with a sauce based on crabapple jelly.

[1] Getting from our house to the NY Botanical Garden, in the Bronx, involves two buses, and getting downtown for dinner afterward might have been tricky; the TA was messing with service on the best train line for the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

[2] The tree directly across the street from the Indian Road entrance to our building was red this morning.

[3] They lay eggs, but carry them in their bodies until they hatch; once the egg is laid, the mother is providing protection but no further nutrition, unlike a placental mammal.
[This is mostly transcribed from an email I sent my sweeties this morning; you may wish to skip to the last paragraph.]

I've had another good physical therapy session. No massage this time--I don't know if that's a Saturday special, or an Apu special, or what. I got another new PT, a woman named Sixta who was strong enough that the resistance exercises where I was pushing against her worked well.

We're agreed that I'm progressing very well, despite the shoulder pain Monday night and Tuesday morning. Sixta says that there will be occasional times like that, when ibuprofen or similar is the appropriate response (I told her I'd taken ibuprofen).

I have a new exercise with the elastic, pulling up and across my body, which she says is a more "functional" motion than the others, since it's like reaching up for something. For that I'm supposed to hook the elastic behind the door a little lower than for the others. I also have a replacement exercise, hanging onto the top of a door (or, I suspect, the refrigerator) instead of walking my hand up the wall.

Sixta said that I should probably keep doing some of these exercises indefinitely, though maybe twice or three times a week instead of every day once I'm healed. And while I can eventually go back to, for example, the lateral raise shoulder exercise, things that involve lifting weights above my shoulder are probably out forever. Ah, well. The weight-lifting is a means, not an end. The complicated part is that it's a means to several different ends.

I'm going to call my GP and ask if she can get the insurance company to approve more sessions (also after discussion with Sixta).

After the PT session, I walked up Park Terrace East and through Isham Park to the A train, rather than down and along Broadway: that stretch of Broadway is unappealing, and Broadway is always hotter than the residential streets west of it. It was more exercise--"up" in this case is fairly literal, though the only stairway was the one down from Isham Park to Broadway--but more pleasant. The odd bit was spotting a bunch of purple flowers draped over a bush, sniffing them, and confirming that they are almost certainly wisteria. In August. Weird, but pleasant. (I couldn't check the mad thought that another bush was white lilac, because it was behind a fairly solid fence in the garden at the north edge of Isham Park.)
[This is mostly transcribed from an email I sent my sweeties this morning; you may wish to skip to the last paragraph.]

I've had another good physical therapy session. No massage this time--I don't know if that's a Saturday special, or an Apu special, or what. I got another new PT, a woman named Sixta who was strong enough that the resistance exercises where I was pushing against her worked well.

We're agreed that I'm progressing very well, despite the shoulder pain Monday night and Tuesday morning. Sixta says that there will be occasional times like that, when ibuprofen or similar is the appropriate response (I told her I'd taken ibuprofen).

I have a new exercise with the elastic, pulling up and across my body, which she says is a more "functional" motion than the others, since it's like reaching up for something. For that I'm supposed to hook the elastic behind the door a little lower than for the others. I also have a replacement exercise, hanging onto the top of a door (or, I suspect, the refrigerator) instead of walking my hand up the wall.

Sixta said that I should probably keep doing some of these exercises indefinitely, though maybe twice or three times a week instead of every day once I'm healed. And while I can eventually go back to, for example, the lateral raise shoulder exercise, things that involve lifting weights above my shoulder are probably out forever. Ah, well. The weight-lifting is a means, not an end. The complicated part is that it's a means to several different ends.

I'm going to call my GP and ask if she can get the insurance company to approve more sessions (also after discussion with Sixta).

After the PT session, I walked up Park Terrace East and through Isham Park to the A train, rather than down and along Broadway: that stretch of Broadway is unappealing, and Broadway is always hotter than the residential streets west of it. It was more exercise--"up" in this case is fairly literal, though the only stairway was the one down from Isham Park to Broadway--but more pleasant. The odd bit was spotting a bunch of purple flowers draped over a bush, sniffing them, and confirming that they are almost certainly wisteria. In August. Weird, but pleasant. (I couldn't check the mad thought that another bush was white lilac, because it was behind a fairly solid fence in the garden at the north edge of Isham Park.)
.

About Me

redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
Redbird

Most-used tags

Syndicate

RSS Atom
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios

Style credit

Expand cut tags

No cut tags