Pie season

As we head out of the growing season and into the holiday season, my thoughts turn more towards food than gardening.  A few weeks ago my friend Irvin Etienne, horticulturist and blogger at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, posted a photo of a cranberry pie on Facebook and the recipe sounded interesting (and easy) enough that I decided to try it out on my family over the Thanksgiving holiday.  The pie went over so well that I made it again last night, this time two of them (along with a focaccia) for the annual holiday party of a local garden club.

Testing the limits: 2015 winners

If you're going to "test the limits" you have to be willing to take a few losses.  That was the point of my previous blog post (see Testing the limits... and finding them: 2014-2015 losers) when I wrote about the plants I lost last winter, which along with 2013-2014 brought my area's two coldest winters in 20 years.  Each of those two winters, on its own, wasn't so unusual; we get winters like that every 10-15 years and we were several years overdue.  What was unusual was getting two such winters back to back.  That makes the survivors all the more special to me.  They don't necessarily look their best this year, but considering the minimal protection I gave them I'm more than happy.

What to do with a dead tree

Garden, this time last year (note fig at upper right)

What do you do with a dead fig tree?  Okay, it isn't actually dead, although for quite a while I feared it was; it took its sweet time but it's finally putting out strong new growth from the base.  Who knows, I might even get some figs next year!  But in the meantime, what to do with the dead trunk and branches?  I suppose I could have cut it to the ground, but I kept hoping it would finally leaf out, right up until that time of year when I pretty much stop working in the garden because it's too hot, too humid, and too buggy.  (At least that's my excuse for what is probably just plain laziness.)

A midsummer miscellany

Cardoon (Cynara cardunculus), National Museum of Natural History gardens

I don't normally do a lot of walking in mid-summer, but we've had such uncharacteristically pleasant summer weather for the past several weeks that I can't use my usual excuse of heat and humidity to avoid a bit of exercise.  So come with me on a Friday evening as I walk from work in downtown Washington, DC to join my husband for dinner at a restaurant on 14th Street near Logan Circle.  This month marks 23 years since we moved here from a small town in upstate New York, so forgive me if I wax a bit nostalgic along the way!

Spring has sprung

Iris 'Buckwheat'

What a relief that spring is finally here!  In fact the last 3 days have felt more like summer, humid and with highs close to 80.  In addition to the spring perennials cheering me up, I'm seeing recovery on several plants that were badly damaged by the winter and that I thought (or feared) were dead.  To recap, this was the Washington, DC area's coldest winter in 20 years, and was a good test of all the marginally hardy plants we're growing here!  The low in my own yard was about 5 degrees in early January, with several more lows in the 9-12 degree range and several periods of temperatures well below freezing.