[ Lost in the Landscape ]

birthday seed-card

A card showed up at my desk, a few days early for my offi­cial birth­day. Some peo­ple can restrain them­selves from open­ing cards until the appointed day, but I’m not one of them!

The card was one of those that has wild­flower seeds incor­po­rated into the paper’s fibers–Maybe you’ve seen them? The basic idea is that you can enjoy the card, and then plant the pieces of paper and end up with flow­er­ing plants as the seeds ger­mi­nate and grow. I really like the idea.

Tree-Free Greet­ings of Swanzey, New Hamp­shire made the card, and the back of the card lists the species of seeds: sweet william, pinks, rocket lark­spur, can­dytuft, baby blue eyes, corn poppy, forget-me-not, wall­flower, columbine, zin­nia, lemon mint, five spot, catch­fly, Eng­lish daisy, sweet alyssum, spurred snap­dragon and black eyed Susan. At least two of them I rec­og­nize as being Cal­i­for­nia wild­flow­ers, baby blue eyes (Nemophila men­ziesii) and five spot (Nemophila mac­u­lata).

After my real birth­day, I’ll plan on cut­ting up the paper con­tain­ing the seeds, putting a small piece in each of sev­eral lit­tle pots, cov­er­ing the paper with a fine layer of seed mix, water­ing them in, and see­ing what comes up. I’ve always won­dered what effect paper-making–a wet process–has on the via­bil­ity of the seeds that are incor­po­rated into the pulp. By now you prob­a­bly know how much I like lit­tle exper­i­ments and adven­tures like this. This should be fun–I’ll keep you all posted!

December 11 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: birthdays • greeting cards • seeds | 4 Comments »

citrus birthday presents

My father’s 92nd birth­day was last week, and some of my fam­ily con­gre­gated yes­ter­day to cel­e­brate at his house in Ocean­side. He’s not one to make much fuss about his age, main­tain­ing he doesn’t ever feel old. I think he appre­ci­ated that we’d switched the dig­its on his birth­day candles.

His cur­rent house is on a res­i­den­tial lot planted with a guava tree and sev­eral kinds of cit­rus. When we left, we were sent home with a cou­ple bags of tan­ger­ines and tan­ge­los, sort of a reverse birth­day present. Here’s the counter this morn­ing, after we’d already helped our­selves to sev­eral of the presents.

Because of the warm win­ters, we strug­gle to grow cer­tain kinds of fruit–apricots, for instance–but at least cit­rus does well. Unfor­tu­nately, where my father lives, along with much of San Diego County, is under a cit­rus quar­an­tine against the Asian cit­rus psyl­lid that pro­hibits mov­ing plants around. [ My post on this last Octo­ber ]

For a while plants van­ished from the local nurs­eries while they were off get­ting “treated.” The plants returned with labels detail­ing their treat­ment, and ver­i­fy­ing that they were legal to sell. Also, there’s a require­ment that any com­mer­cially grown fruit must be cleaned prior to sale. But for­tu­nately there’s no restric­tion on trans­port­ing and shar­ing home grown fruit.

Unless you have a young or dwarf tree, shar­ing fruit is some­thing you almost have to do when the cit­rus trees do their thing. I was pulling grape­fruits off my tree this morn­ing, think­ing about doing some shar­ing myself, when I saw this unusual fruit in the mid­dle of the tree, cour­tesy the kids next door.

Dri­ving home from my father’s the after­noon ended with some birth­day bal­loons. Here are just a cou­ple of more than a half dozen that were air­borne for the sun­set rides they offer out of Del Mar. My father is a cau­tious human being and would never be caught dead in any­thing like a hot air bal­loon, but it seemed like they were help­ing him cel­e­brate his day…

March 08 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: Asian citrus psyllid • birthdays • citrus | 3 Comments »

birthday chocolate

I was still in bed yes­ter­day when by birth­day cel­e­bra­tion began. John brought in a lit­tle stack of presents and set it down next to the cat. If you’ve lived with a cat you can guess how much help she was as I began to open the packages–attacking the pack­ages, shred­ding the wrap­ping paper as soon as I pulled it off the presents…

Sev­eral of the pack­ages con­tained choco­late. (John how did you know I love choco­late?) This year they were all from Chuao Choco­latier an arti­sanal choco­late com­pany here in San Diego County that is begin­ning to get wider dis­tri­b­u­tion. One of their spe­cial­ties is cre­at­ing choco­late with spicy/hot fla­vor notes.

Chuao’s new treat this year is this Fire­cracker bar, which com­bines dark choco­late, salt, chipo­tle pep­pers and “pop­ping candy.” You put a tiny piece in your mouth and the fla­vors just start to explode. And then the pop­ping candy starts fizzing and crack­ing, acti­vat­ing your tongue to expe­ri­ence the fla­vors even more intensely. It’s a bril­liant piece of mol­e­c­u­lar gas­tron­omy com­ing out of a choco­late shop.

If you saw the film, Choco­lat, it was exactly this com­bi­na­tion of choco­late with a heady spici­ness that won over much of the town’s pop­u­la­tion to the uncon­ven­tional ways of a new­comer. Unfor­tu­nately here ways proved too uncon­ven­tional for some of the pop­u­la­tion, and she was dri­ven from town. In the same way, this choco­late bar won’t be for everybody.

After the presents, there was cof­fee, then break­fast with the Sun­day paper unfolded before us. Being mid-December, it occurred to me that it might be time to begin think­ing about get­ting hol­i­day cards out to every­one. Maybe we needed to do one of those form let­ters this year, I thought. After all there was a wed­ding last June, and there was other big news most of the card list needed to be apprised of. But being a birth­day day I wasn’t suc­cess­ful in get­ting motivated.

Two days after my birth­day, after the choco­lates have been put on their shelves and all the wrap­ping paper recy­cled, it’s John’s turn to cel­e­brate his birth­day. A lot of you saw the recent con­junc­tion of Venus, Jupiter and the moon in the night sky. That’s pretty much how it feels to have Decem­ber birth­days: John’s and my birth­days are the two lit­tle plan­ets, and then there’s this gar­gan­tuan moon of Christ­mas that dom­i­nates the scene.

Unfor­tu­nately, clouds last week ate up the view of the con­junc­tion, but the sky for my birth­day was one of the bet­ter ones this month. Another spicy present!

But Sat­ur­day night we did some hol­i­day par­ty­ing after my gallery open­ing. I had John’s lit­tle pocket cam­era, so there was no tri­pod to keep the pic­ture still.

It didn’t help that the tree last night was on a revolv­ing stand, though the revolv­ing going on in this photo was the pho­tog­ra­pher being less than suc­cess­ful in keep­ing the cam­era still…

So, lit­tle by lit­tle, we’re work­ing on get­ting into the hol­i­day spirit. And now I know what spe­cial choco­late some of my spicy-food friends need in their stockings!

December 15 2008 | Categories: rambles | Tags: birthdays • chocolate • christmas • Chuao • holidays | 3 Comments »