Peeking into the rock

One thing you can say about plants is they tend to be pretty optimistic. Stress them, and what do they do? Set seed.

It hasn't rained all season but a fraction of an inch back there in October, right? But the lemons are ripening on time and there's green stuff sticking up all over (where are they getting the water?) and my quince monster is covered in scarlet flowers. This is not, unfortunately, the eating kind of quince, but it makes the birds and the bees pretty happy.

I guess I'm an optimist too because yesterday I planted an Italian Prune tree, mainly for Zack because he likes them better than he does the Satsuma plums and you cannot buy them around here but by infinite cleverness and sweat. I also planted artichokes and oregano. Yes, I planted oregano again. I am having a lot of trouble finding the spot.

Yesterday I fetched my banjo back from upstairs at Union Grove and started trying to figure out a Macedonian dance song ("Dedo mili zlatni")on it. Why shouldn't I? Boundaries are antithetical to music. My banjo is very happy to be cleaned up and tended to. It holds a tuning very well now, too, which is a relief. I used to barely make it through a rendition of "Roving Gambler," which is not exactly a very long song. Tomorrow my new autoharp (excuse me, chromaharp) is supposed to arrive. I shelled out more money so I could have the 21-chord kind because it does make a difference in what songs you can squeeze on to it. I mean, "Wildwood Flower" is a very fine song, but there's more to life than that.

Spent a much longer time today than I should have daydreaming on the onlinbe fabric store sites. I have become such a consumer now that I have clothes.

from Botanical Latin, by William T. Stearn, with reference to certain 18th-century descriptive botanists:

"Vaillant's other new terms have long been forgoten. Such apparent wastage of words occurs throughout the development of a terminology and is by no means regrettable: the greater the production of seeds by a plant, the stronger is the chance of a few seedlings reaching maturity."

(page 32)


Of course, there is the other reproductive strategy, which the French academicians use: few offspring, intensely nurtured. K strategy, versus R . . . I admit it, I always have to look up which letter goes where, since I don't know what the letters stand for. K is few offspring: I will say it stands for Kindergarten. R is many offspring, I will say it stands for Radiolarians.

I think my plum and apricot hybridized this year. The apricots and plums were both milder in flavor. The apricots never got to the melt-in-your mouth stage. The plums mostly have a dapply, pluot-looking skin. They're right next to each other. Most years they overlap in bloom time, but this year they overlapped a lot more. I keep hurting my head trying to figure out whether the F1 generation is the fruit on the original tree or the fruit from the tree that comes from that fruit. This is because I am vague.

Plum and apricot taxonomy: order rosales, family rosaceae, subfamily prunoidiae, genus prunus, subgenius Bob subgenus prunus, and _then_ section prunus for plum and section armeniaca for apricot, my plum being salicina X "Santa Rosa" and my apricot being "Blenheim."

Anyways, I'm up to my eyebrows in plums. So far:

1 quart of dried plum wafers (not prunes, which are prune plums dried whole)
2 quarts of canned plums in apple juice
6 half-pints of low-sugar plum jelly made from the leftover plum/apple juice, low-sugar pectin, and sucralose-sugar blend
and buckets and buckets to be made into one five-gallon carboy of wine: I believe that doubling the batch was part of my problem in the past (we're using montpelier yeast this year. Ellie at Portable Potables says we should ferment the wine dry, then kill the yeast with campden tablets and introduce enough sugar to sweeten the wine to taste.)
and I'm going to make Chinese plum sauce, and plum chutney, but only a little bit of each.

Notes about these things.

If you measure out four quarts of raw plums, plus about a pint or so extra, and you do a hot pack, you will end up with two quarts of plums and about 12 oz extra, and 5 cups extra juice, if you heat the plums in about a quart and a half of apple juice. And the jelly you make from the extra juice will not taste quite plummy enough but will be a very pretty color. If you use one and a half cups of sucralose and two and a half cups of sugar to five cups of juice it will be about the right sweetness but the sucralose-bitter is a bit more prominent than perfect -- not enough to ruin the jelly, though: but next (mast) year, if you do this, (1) use eight quarts of plums for the canned plum stage and a quart of apple juice: (2) cook the plums a minute less: (3)use one cup of sucralose to three cups of sugar.

Four dehydrator trays filled very tight with .3 cm or thereabouts slices of plums makes a quart of dried plum wafers.

Also, we're getting a new refrigerator today so I have to make the house navigable (i.e., move laundry and furniture and clean the old refigerator out). It has glass shelves, supposedly sturdy parts, and to please the nice fellow, it's black.

It's Day 14, and the last two days I have been losing my focus, and I bounced up three pounds, which leaves me at a 19 pound loss (4 since Day 1), but grr. Today I will struggle to regain focus. It's hard to handle all those plums without eating them, though.  And I keep thinking of sandwiches, though I can't honestly say I crave them exactly.

Oh, and:  a thickish letter from Prague arrived yesterday.  In Czechlish!  With information!  And a formal invitation!!!  To take a test and have an interview.  He must be at the testing place at 8:00n in the morning on Sept. 12.  That's less than a month away. . . . (not enough time for his job to pay for his plane ticket and hostel stay, and the money he's getting from the Shadowrun people won't be enough and dog knows when it will come,  so I guess we're it again)

Degeneriaceae

What a great name for a family of plants.






< a href="http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/FLORA/newgate/cronang.htm">Found while trying to find out if the ipomoeaceae are related to the solanaceae. Still working on it.


On another front, we went to the back of Cowell and found: 2 small and 1 large shrimp mushroom (the nice fellow's gone to bed so I can't confirm that these are the only russulas we think are worth eating) and 1 funny-looking little king bolete. It had a tiny head and a big trunk, but sometimes boletes do that.

The forget-me-nots are about as long as my hand. It sprinkled on Wednesday but other than that it hasn't rained in a long time, but the ground is damp.

I hate desktop wallpaper in general, but I found the astronomy picture of the day and I couldn't find a feed I could stick in lj like I do the botany picture of the day (you can get it too at the bpod lj profile. What you can get, and I did, is a program that downloads the astronomy picture of the day to your computer as wallpaper. The first picture wasn't all that inspiring, but I just got a new one that sends chills down my spine. The one bug I see is that setting the preferences to show the explanation (that is, an icon you can click for information) doesn't seem to stick at all, and you have to keep going into the program to reset it and get the explanation.