Yellow leaves

A couple of days ago I was looking out the kitchen window at Climbing Maman Cochet, and the sight of several solid yellow leaves made me catch my breath in alarm. My reflex response to every new situation is near panic, but it quickly hit me that the yellow leaves simply meant that there was new growth pushing out behind them, a natural result of my feeding her three weeks ago. I searched and searched her canopy for tiny new sprigs of growth. I saw one and hoped the squirrels didn’t see it, too.
 
Don’t get me started on the subject of squirrels!
 
The sight of yellow leaves need not be a cause for alarm. In fact, the longer you grow roses the less upsetting it will become, because you’ll become comfortable with the idea that they mean the old is being replaced by the new. Yellow leaves are good, harbingers of new leaves and beautiful new roses. They have nothing to do with disease and everything to do with the life of the rose.


You may see a black spot or two on them, but on a disease resistant rose when energy is diverted from old leaves for the sake of new growth, vigor and immunity diminish. The leaf becomes less resistant, and disease sometimes appears. But it’s not a communicable problem, because the green leaves are still resistant.


New growth appears even while old leaves linger. Roses don’t do anything instantly. They’re all about the process.


And the process can look pretty discouraging and even frightening as in the rose below. I forget which rose it is. It’s not there anymore, but it’s a young rose. You can see the whole new cane at the bottom left, but all over the plant there are leaf bud eyes swelling on older canes in their effort to usurp the space of the old leaf. It will fall off unless you remove it first which isn’t a bad idea. After all, even though it’s weakening, it is still drawing energy that could be going to the new growth. And anytime you cut a rose it jumps into full gear to defend itself and to grow.


The newest growth on ‘Bermuda’s Anna Olivier’ is bright red while probably the old leaf is still hanging on, and older new growth is green and bearing flowers and buds.



Big disclaimer! I admit it. This blog topic is Carol Green’s, the acclaimed editor of Rose Rambler, the newsletter of the Marion County Rose Society of which I am a truant member. I received her email this evening and stole her idea instantly. Thank you, Carol.

My apologies to all for missing yesterday’s meeting. I was deep into the master bathroom’s plumbing this past weekend. DH and I finally had had enough of the old leaking faucets and ugly glass vessel sinks.  I won’t bore you with talk of the endless hours of internet surfing for replacements. We wound up getting them at Lowe’s. Since DH’s back is in no condition to be contorting under a sink, I became the apprentice plumber who labored under his supervision. Got it all in late, late Saturday night only to find leaks in several places. You already know my reaction – panic and alarm! But on Sunday DH had a plan...silicone caulk and silicone X-TREME TAPE. I didn’t like the plan at first since it would mess up the look of those pretty pipes plus it seemed like admitting failure. Then I remembered that the original pipes, installed by a professional plumber, were covered with that glop, so I figured it must be standard plumbing procedure. We still have one tiny drip – on my side naturally, and the backsplash needs to be finished and the mirrors shifted. But it’s over, including the dirty looks I was getting from DH for brushing my teeth in his sink.

Be wary of labels

Labels can be wrong, and looks can be deceiving. Well, that’s not earth-shattering news, is it? Have you ever tried to buy white paint to match the white paint you already had without having a swatch with you to compare? There’s white, and then there’s white. And don’t we feel dumb when we get the new paint home and see that the two whites aren’t even close. Similarly, if we need a half-cup measure, we grab a half cup measure, but we don’t grab two half cup measures in order to verify the truthfulness of the first. We don’t do that, and neither did I.

What I grabbed was a scoop to scoop my cake flour (you remember my cake flour, don’t you?) into the sifter (oops, didn’t need a sifter, did I?). Then when I needed to measure my cake flour – well, why dirty two utensils? The scoop is a half cup, so I used that.

Now looking at these two measuring utensils, one can see an obvious difference, just like the obvious difference between our hypothetical new white paint and old white paint. However, since I did not have the benefit of this side-by-side comparison while I was preparing my Tender White Cake, I had no clue that I was relying upon an unreliable label. Today the light dawned as I was doing the dishes. With DH as my witness I poured a pre-measured amount of water into the “half cup” scoop. Guess what. It required six ounces of water to fill it. That’s three-quarters of a cup, a fifty percent error.

So when preparing my Tender White Cake and measuring two and three-quarters cups of my cake flour, I actually got almost four and one-quarter cups of cake flour! I believe that was more than enough to sabotage the Tender White Cake, far more flour than the prescribed leavening and flavoring were capable of handling. That explains the thick, flour-paste consistency of my batter, the heavy density of the finished cake, the lack of taste, and probably the inability to achieve “paste”.

Plainly and simply, I was duped by a cheap dime-store scoop and the non-English speaking, foreign company that squirted it out of the extrusion machine that some American company sold for pennies on the dollar because it was obsolete technology. Politically speaking, we sold them the rope with which to hang our economy and my Tender White Cake.

The upside of this fraud is that I will confidently retry this Tender White Cake recipe, because apparently I am not the sorry cook I thought I was.

Finally some roses... and daylilies on sale

Between trying to replace the master bathroom sinks and faucets (what a struggle that’s far from over!) and the slimmest rose pickings I have seen since that first horrible summer, I have not had much to blog about. Throw in the heat and humidity and I am barely crawling to the finish line of summer. I am ready for mid-October’s break in the weather. R-E-A-D-Y !!

This evening was a good time to run out to the front garden with the camera. Instead I fell asleep on the sofa until it was almost too late. Still groggy I put a strong battery in the camera and dragged myself out into the waning light. In a mere fifteen minutes the light was going, going, gone, and focusing became impossible, but I managed to capture a few beauties among many deletes.

‘Le Vesuve’ is starting a show after a long, unusual drought of blooms. Two and a half weeks ago I fed the front roses with a complete organic rose food. Then on Sunday it occurred to me that I hadn’t applied any epsom salts since spring. Perhaps that is why the rose bushes have looked so dreadful, leaves scarce and not green, flowers substandard and even deformed. I’m not very scientifically knowledgeable about this, so I can’t say these are signs of any true deficiency. It’s just a heat-weary gardener grasping at straws and trying to stay in the air-conditioning. Tossing out ten pounds of epsom salts in the cooler evening on Monday required little energy, thankfully.

The flowers of ‘Le Vesuve’ are just as big and fluffy in person as they look in these photos. He’s definitely trying to cheer me up.



‘Bermuda’s Anna Olivier’ has struggled this summer. Feeding and sulfur applications don’t seem to perk her up. I think her deepest roots must be down into the native limey sand that looks like road bed, and being less than eight feet from the curb this ground may well be road bed. In taking this wide shot of Anna and ‘Softee’ in the pot , ‘Enchantress’ snuck into the picture, and I didn’t even notice but I'm happy she did. Her tiny bright magenta flowers really pop against her deep green foliage. Anna’s leaves are normally more of a yellow green but not this yellow.

“Bermuda’s Anna Olivier’ has always had the same impact on me as ‘Maman Cochet’ because of her lovely fat flowers. Lots of petals in there – just the way I like them.

We’ll just call this type of photography dreamy rather than out of focus.


I can’t show you ‘White Maman Cochet’ even though she has some lovely blooms on her. By the time I got over to her bed the dim light demanded an absolutely steady hand with the camera which I don’t have, and my monopod was inside. It was blur city! So I went back to ‘Le Vesuve’, hoping for a bush shot. Don’t panic. Your eyeballs aren’t failing you. No light, no focus.

Here it looks like it was raining roses, doesn’t it? This is what happens when you shoot and lower the camera while it’s still trying to suck in all the light it can with it’s slowest shutter. Kind of a beautiful mistake, don’t you think?

I’m so glad you stayed with me until the end to see what my tease was all about. Fifty percent off daylilies!! Fall is the traditional time for daylily sales. I had four or five tabs open on my browser last week checking out the sales of several daylily nurseries when much to my delight I discovered that Shaw’s Sunshine Gardens in Augusta, Georgia is having a sale until October 15th. I first ordered from Charlie Shaw, a true gentle-man, back in the fall of 2009. Being a total novice with daylilies, he was very helpful and patient with me, helping me choose from among the hundreds of enticing photos on his website. Choosing is a painstaking process for me of analyzing and agonizing. I remember that that sale was a buy-one-get-two-free sale, and he was just hoping to break even for the year. I sure hope he did, and since this year’s sale is only buy-one-get-one-free (or half off), I hope that means that 2011 was a better year for him. When my first order arrived, the size and robustness of the daylily tops and roots took my breath away. I just had to buy more which I did a few weeks later. I bought so many that some of them didn’t get planted until February or March.

This year I was thrilled to see many Bob Carr daylilies on Charlie’s list. They’d been there all along, I suppose, but I didn’t know just how magnificent they were until recently. Someone on the Daylily Forum mentioned that Bob Carr’s daylilies are known to do very well in the south. Naturally, I jumped on Google to learn about this man who was the hybridizer of ‘Sherry Lane Carr’, my beautiful almost-namesake daylily. I found out that Dr. Bob Carr passed away in 2007 and that he was a pediatrician here in Ocala whose very serious hobby was hybridizing strong, gorgeous daylilies. From that moment I had to have as many of his daylilies as I could find. I felt like he had created his daylilies just for my garden. I already had three of them, the other two being ‘Key To My Heart’ and ‘Pearl Harbor’ from my first two orders from Shaw’s Sunshine Gardens. So among the ten I just ordered yesterday there are three more Bob Carrs. I know…why so few? There were thirteen others (more if you count dormants), but I was choosing for color and rebloom and sadly for price. There’s always next year, right? And after all, there were thirty-five DLs on my whole list. You can imagine how painful it was whittling that list down to a reasonable number, using DH's definition of the word, of course. D'ya think I should tell him they're on the way? Nah. I’m excited about the plants that are coming next week, because I know they will be beautiful, well rooted and well packed by Charlie Shaw. And you’ll see them right after they arrive. I can’t wait!

By way of disclaimer I receive no compensation for bragging on my favorite daylily nursery. 

The Cake – first attempt

I should have mentioned in the first post on this subject that lately, that is, in recent years, the very thought of my making a scratch cake is laughable. My experience is rife with failure. Ever the optimist, however, and hungry for cake I proceeded today undeterred, feeling more energetic after a long holiday weekend and a short day at work. The taste of moist white cake was on my tongue, and I was as confident as any chef extraordinaire. So in keeping with the idea that blog-life is not real-life I became very organized.

I never lay out my ingredients, never use little bowls, and I’m never meticulous about any of it. I never read the recipe all the way through. I start at the ingredients and usually stop there. Normally – my normal, that is – I miss an ingredient or mis-measure an ingredient. I’ve gotten used to that aspect of my cooking. Nothing ever goes as planned. Maybe I became an improviser in self-defense. No, more likely that word is just a subconscious euphemism for bungler.  Besides, you can’t really improvise if you don’t know the right way a thing is to be done, can you? I’ve never felt quite adequate about the right way of doing things, but that photo of the ingredients is impressive, don’t you think? Things were going well at this point.

Anyway, back to the cake. Last week I acquired the ingredients, and how convenient that the flour box had a recipe on the back. Not just any recipe but a tender white cake recipe! However, I was pretty wacked out when I read the directions. I’d never seen a cake recipe that combined dry ingredients with the butter. Apparently, the “paste method” is lesser known than the “creaming method”. While waiting for the butter and eggs to come to room temperature, I went online to check for any helpful hints and pointers. There was one mention that this cake flour is pre-sifted - triple sifted, in fact, and that additional sifting could effect the structure of the cake. Did you notice the lovely peak in my flour - and the sifter in the photo? Grrrr. Moving on. I only made one ingredient substitution. The regular granulated, non-superfine sugar was not according to Hoyle and was apparently why I never achieved the paste. Which apparently sabotaged the cake’s structure. And probably led to the decidedly unlight and unfluffy batter. I smartly had doubts that things were still going well.

Online reviewers of this recipe (5 stars) reported the inability to pour the batter into the pans, needing instead to scoop its light fluffy-ness. My batter, however, poured easily … like a thick, flour paste. Ah, ha, I did achieve the paste stage! How wonderful for me. Having been as obedient as I’ve ever been with a recipe, I broke with the instructions and used a ten-inch silicone pan, figuring it would cook similarly to the 9x13 pan. Ha! Wrong! I set the timer for 28 minutes and then reset for ten minutes at least three times and then one minute at least ten times. This produced a cake with an undone center and the surface and sound of a hollow bamboo cane. The taste was bland. The texture was sort of moist and crumbly ... and sort of not. The weight was hefty. Who knew that baked flour paste bakes up like a brick? (I went into DH’s den to weigh it on the postal scale. Four pounds ten ounces including the platter. DH said, “You’re not going to mail that, are you?”, inferring we couldn’t afford it.

It came out of the pan very nicely probably due to its tonnage, but I did actually Pam and flour the pan. The crust was nice. I think it will be good toasted with butter. DH suggested jam. I think perhaps armadillo bait.

Dare I make a trip to the bank and try again? It might be cheaper to buy the $22 Betty Cake. That’s a single iced layer, mind you.

‘Perle d’Or’

Sadly, this lovely poly-tea (having one parent that was a polyantha and the other a Tea rose) from 1884 is one I dearly wish I could grow in my garden, but my soil is just not acidic enough to suit her. I don’t even have very many flower photos to show for the time she was here. You can see from the chlorotic leaves in the second photo that she was not happy or healthy, but her peachy-pink, strappy petals were so darling, growing in large clusters of small but numerous flowers. I was always thrilled to see her in bloom. If I were more dreamy-eyed about roses as I was early on, I’d be eager to try her again in a different spot. ‘Perle d’Or’ is an Earthkind Rose, so designated for her health and vigor with minimal human intervention. I understand she can grow into a 6x6 bush, but I suspect she can be kept smaller with no problems. I would encourage you to give her a try. She’s a sweetie.

I can cook...sometimes

Monday is my early day at work, so I had immense plans for baking a cake that would (fingers crossed) replicate a local bakery’s killer cake known as ‘Betty Cake’. I have no clue how Betty gets her white cake so creamy and moist that it can be mistaken for pudding. Dear Girlfriend says you get that texture from beating it and beating it and beating it some more. And by using cake flower. So armed with that much knowledge and the tube pan and cookbook that Sister Sallie sweetly gave me, I went to the grocery store for necessary ingredients not in my pantry.



Apparently, my dream cake is an old, tried and true recipe called ‘Whipped Cream Cake’. Now doesn’t that sound to die for? Even if it doesn’t turn out to be ‘Betty Cake’, it must be mouth-wateringly delicious.



Just one problem. Grocery stores and the subsequent unloading and putting away of groceries really pull the plug on my energy. Somehow I must have thought I was stronger today when I left work than I actually was. Throw in a long phone call to Sister Sallie, and I was barely functional when I picked up the cookbook and feasted my eyes on this beauty. Too bad that was all of the feasting I did this evening. Perhaps tomorrow night. Don’t laugh. It’s possible. I’ll need a good night’s sleep though.



P.S. Since cakes and roses are tops on my list and yours, too, I must remind everyone that the September Open Sale at Rose Petals Nursery is this coming Saturday, the 3rd. Start your long holiday weekend with some roses! The link will give you the directions. I would definitely go except that DH might finally kill me. Funny thing, my refrigerated medication arrived Friday, and DH greeted me with “Your roses came.” I snapped back, “What roses? I didn’t buy any roses.”, hoping with all my heart that I was telling the truth. When he pointed to the box in the hall, I said, “That’s my medicine!”, hoping with all my heart that he felt really ashamed.

P.P.S. Special thanks and credit go to Melissa Gray, author of  'All Cakes Considered', published by Chronicle Books, for her luscious recipes and photographs that I re-photographed. I hope everyone buys her book.

Momentary downer

August is not a pretty gardening month. In the past I learned that black spot raises its ugly head something awful in August, but even without black spot and the roses that got it, I’m seeing the ugliness of this intense summer month. The evidence is in several very bare bushes and lack of bloom. There are a few flowers but only very few. Always searching for “answers” to garden problems, I decided to feed the garden today despite the high heat. It was just necessary. It’s been a few months since the last feeding with alfalfa, and after reading that alkaline soil needs frequent feeding I decided to brave the heat and sweat and do my garden duty.

This time I used Purely Organic, a complete rose food that was last put down in February. The downer came on the way to the shed to retrieve the 50-lb bag. ‘Duchesse de Brabant’ was almost completely leafless, and I confess that my heart responded to the sight with a very negative and emotional thought. “I don’t want to garden anymore.” However, the thought did not deter my mission. Perhaps the fact that the water system in that bed had been off all week with no rain made me realize it was probably only a temporary situation. So before I did the feeding, I put the new backflow valve in place and got some water onto the area as soon as the rose food was scratched in.

That zone covers the east side of the house, front and back. After I worked toward the front and the driveway bed, my spirits were lifted first by ‘White Maman Cochet’. She’s a very young Tea rose just planted in March and already more than four feet tall and wider than that. In my experience young Tea roses are gawky and sometimes lopsided until they gradually build their structure one cane at a time. The pleasing thing about ‘White Maman Cochet’ today was that she was developing quite evenly and without the hard angles of her sport parent ‘Maman Cochet’. WMC looked very good to me, showing the early stages of a nice vase shape.

Then I crossed the driveway to feed the front circle and was greeted by a greener ‘Mme Abel Chatenay’. Lately she has been uglier than I have ever seen her with many yellow leaves and skimpy foliage. I’ve learned that yellow leaves are usually old leaves in my garden. They follow a flush of blooms when the bush starts looking very tired. This can be a demoralizing time. I think this one has been exasperated by stink bugs sucking on new growth, leaving shriveled foliage, and by grasshoppers. I’ve actually seen only a few bugs so I guess it wasn’t exactly a plague and they didn’t effect every bush, but it was enough to make me look away from my poor bare rose bushes in frustration. Today ‘Mme Abel Chatenay’ had some new green leaves and normal flower buds rather than chewed-on buds, so things were looking up even more.

Feeding up the driveway and the sidewalk and then into the circle, my next pleasant surprise was ‘Le Vesuve’. He has not been his normal spectacular self since the spring pruning, but today I was pleased to see some new growth on him, too. Then a glance at the two ‘Souv de la Malmaison’ bushes revealed lots of new leaves, and ‘Lilian Austin’ and ‘Cotillion’ were showing off many tiny new leaves. So by the time the ferts and my energy ran out, I was in better spirits and my earlier funk was gone. In fact, I’m looking forward to the next flush, hopefully in September, that will be fueled by today’s feeding. In the past I have written about the ebbing and flowing of gardens, but today I lived through the ebb and flow of one gardener. So all of this is a reminder that if we can get through August in our gardens, we can survive anything.

The opening flowers of ‘Le Vesuve’ from two days ago offer hope for better things to come in the September garden, and I’m thankful for my better mood.