I pulled about 10 lbs of them out of the pond filter, and spent an hour power-washing them out of the fiber filter mat. Glug! They’re all over the drive and patio, not to mention everything else. Hawthorne is one of the prettiest blooming trees, the Maxfield Parrish sort of blooms, red or white, but the dirtiest flower: sheds petals, then hulls, then fruits and sheds the berries (which are a laxative for dogs that eat them) and then the leaves. It has a gift for every season. But it’s so pretty.
Also planted a tomato outdoors in a pot, and because I happened across a nursery while buying cat food, I picked up a bell pepper, another tomato and an Anaheim pepper plant for the same pot. Combined with the lettuce garden indoors, we should have salad if these succeed.
I’m trying to start a couple of cuttings from my fig tree for neighbors, but the very gusty trade winds keep knocking them over in the pots. I had a brainstorm and pulled out the stems from my old aloe flower spikes, then jammed multiple stems into the pots to hold the cuttings upright until they develop roots.
I’ve got a honey locust tree in the back yard (or rather, my landlady does). When it drops the beans it is a big mess, plus the seedlings come up everywhere. They’re almost as bad as the durn “Tree of Heaven” trees.
We have some of those ‘Tree of Heaven’ (Ailanthus) in Hawaii. They look pretty, but are very brittle, and prone to drop big branches or even fall over completely during storms. After the last couple of tropical storms came through the Big Island and tore up a lot of them, the county ran a campaign to get them out of places where they were likely to damage things if they got uprooted.
CJ, maybe I should send you some seeds for jacarandas and silk oak. Jacarandas are brilliant purple blooming trees and silk oaks have curly yellow-orange interesting blooms. They often bloom at the same time upcountry, and the contrast is beautiful.
Fortunately jacarandas are semi-tropical and won’t take that kind of cold.
(Fortunate because the flower drop is incredibly messy, though they’re fragrant and full of nectar. It’s the season “Jacaranda” in L.A. right now: purple trees and usually-gray mornings.)
I have a youngish hawthorne tree (about 3.5-4 meters tall) in my back garden, and this year it’s very full of flowers for the first time. The whole tree humms with bees all day, as soon as the sun hits it.
Now the garden all around it looks like it’s snowing from the shed petals.
It was a replacement for my plum tree that was used as an aphid farm by ants, irritating the neighbors as the aphids made her clean laundry drying in her garden sticky, and the plums attracted lots of wasps.
I’m hoping all the shed petals and bees won’t be such a bother to the neighbor!
That sounds nice!
Here on the mainland… or at least in New England, Ailanthus is considered an invasive species…. I have managed to rid my yard of it (although 1-2 little seedlings keep appearing each year where I hadn’t seen them before) and I try to yank it out wherever I see it on my now frequent, constitutional walks around my neighborhood.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crataegus
Salads! Jams! Jellies!
Good idea, Tommie! I like making jam, so if the birds leave some for me I’ll try that.
The berries of my trees are mostly eaten by the birds. There’s a small flock of starlings that come by once a day in late summer/early fall, and very quickly, noisily and messily strip off a lot of the berries at once from my rowan tree in the front garden. After three visits by the flock there’s not much left on the tree.
I expect they’ll do the same to the hawthorn.
They always drop lots of berries on the ground, and never pick them up, so the ground-feeding birds get those.
I like getting fruit from my garden, and the raspberries and tomatoes are definitely mine, but I also like having a garden that’s good for the birds and bees, so the other things are a toss-up: I get most of the redcurrants but the blue tits and thrush get some, and the (thornless) blackberries are mostly eaten by the birds, as well as the not-for-human-consumption berries that I planted specifically for them, like the firethorn and honeysuckle. No-one really likes to eat the small crab-apples, though I can use a few in making jam.
Crab apples are an excellent source of pectin. Cook them, mash them add water and simmer them for a few hours, strain the mash and let the fluid cool. If the pectin needs further thickening, you can stir in fruit or grain alcohol and use the clumps that form. It occurs to me that this might be a nice way to make fruit candies, if one added the alcohol to a high pectin, flavor dense compound. Must try something like this with the next bumper crop of meyer lemons or satsumas.
Crab apples are also incredibly fragrant, although hard to eat without adding sugar.
Oooh. I have a crab apple here that makes sweet red-fleshed apples, tho too small to eat… hadn’t thought to use ’em as pectin source for other jellies.
Mine are bright yellow, the size of cherries, very hard and sour – more ornamental than edible.
Even the birds don’t like them much.
Maybe one day I’ll plant a small sour cherry (morello) instead.
They’re still useful to cook some along with other, low-pectin fruits like cherries when making jam.
I like to make a cherry-redcurrants-strawberry semi-sweet jam, and sometimes it stays a bit runny. Adding some crabapples helps it to set properly.
I try to grow cherry tomatoes most years from small starter plants, as I’m no good at all with seedlings. They’ve never yet come up on their own from discarded fruit; that would be very nice!
Tomatoes will go feral very easily; I have volunteers (sometimes by the hundreds) in my garden every spring, and I’m in Montana. Just toss seedy scraps somewhere with dirt, and stand back. I get more tomatoes than I can use, and a lot go unseen in the jungle, become overripe, and fall into the dirt, to repopulate next spring. They’re very good about not coming up til after the last frost, but soon catch up with pre-started plants, and are much tougher. (BTW ditto watermelon.)
This year I completely redug everything, so only got one feral… who knows what variety. Some breed true (even starting from hybrids), some don’t. Try a VT100 “Supersweet” cherry tomato for a great producer with wonderful flavor, that will reliably inform you when it’s ripe (falls off into your hand).
I’ve had a bumper crop of Apricots this year. We’ve put up fruit and made jelly and have called on all our local relatives, friends and fellow church members to take the excess, and still, the birds and the lawn have had their fill.
The birds are still 1:1 with me on getting any of the ripe figs from my tree. I got half a dozen once, but that was the high point, and the season seems to be winding down, as I only see a handful still trying to ripen. Mangoes this year look to be on the sparse side as well.
I had an experience while making bay rum which inclines me to the alcohol extraction method. As I let the bay leaves marinate in the rum, the liquid got thicker and thicker. On doing some research, I found that this was because the alcohol in the rum was liquifying the pectin in the leaves. This was 80 proof/40% rum. I have yet to try Everclear, a 198 proof/99% grain alcohol, but I’d bet it would be faster and more thorough.
No, I don’t drink it, but I have used it to make perfume. That’s why I don’t have it on hand to experiment with.
That’s fascinating! I’ve run into a few things like that in the course of making soap; nothing like having the soap go from fairly liquid to pudding in a matter of moments. My main problem is that the essential oils I use don’t stick around; after a couple of weeks, they fade and you can barely tell I used any. I’ve tried several suggested binding agents, but none do the trick.
I found this: http://www.basenotes.net/threads/314182-perfume-formulas-recipes-using-glycerin
Glycerin seems like a very suitable fixative for a soap.
Actually glycerin is one of the valuable things that a soap recipe makes on its own when it saponifies (changes from lye + fats to soap). If your recipe goes through a stage while hardening where it changes partly or completely to a translucent gel before going opaque, that’s the glycerin being generated and a sign that you done it right! Alas, it does not necessarily mean your scents will fix!
/derail 😀
But are you extracting the scents from the basics in warm glycerin?
Mmmmm, lemme think about that for a minute (BS Chemistry, CSCLB, ’67)… Yes, I think I have one suggestion to do with what you are choosing for scent.
Say, for example, you chose limonene, which comes in two forms: the D-isomer is the main component of orange and citrus oil, nice, the L-isomer has a piny, turpentine scent, e.g. Pinesol. The problem is it’s a volatile, small, hydrophobic hydrocarbon, C10H16. There’s really nothing to it that a fixative can “grab onto” to hold it. (It does oxidize in moist air, oops, and then you lose the scent.)
What you need is something with a bit of oxygen, e.g. -OH hydroxyl, substitution, e.g. methyl salicylate, oil of wintergreen, C8H8O3. It would be somewhat water soluble, not too much or it wouldn’t volatilize, but still somewhat oily to the touch. These substitutions would be attracted to the hydroxyl moieties on the glycerine, and acid moieties on the stearic acid if you’re using beef tallow, or oleic acid if olive oil, etc.
So, many scented chemicals are going to be just as you’ve observed, others would have a natural affinity for the components of your soap.
Okay… after doing more research, I been doin’ it wrong… Some scents are notorious for not surviving the soapmaking process well. Best practices suggest mixing it into the binder, like orris root, arrowroot powder or even cornstarch, before adding it to the soap when it traces (goes from liquid to pudding). Using a complementary scent with good sticking qualities, like clove with orange (orange disappears, clove stays) also helps (so Paul, you were right, coming at it from an organic chemistry view). Next time I make my herbal blend (rosemary, mint, tea tree) or Christmas blend (the aforementioned orange and clove with frankincense and myrrh) I’ll try this.
I was thinking more on the lines of putting your orange zest into a closed container with glycerin to cover, cooking it at a low temperature until the zest goes transparent, cooling it, pressing out the oils and skipping the aerosol phase altogether.
Paul probably has the right of it though. He has the background; I only have experimentation and cogitation. The experimentation is old, and the brain ain’t that young.
Actually, you bring up something else; I might want to try dried orange zest instead of using essential oils, or ground herbs and spices. Helps with exfoliation too 🙂
My daughter’s first attempts at soap making …. the soap had a very strong perfume …. of bacon ;). She’s since gotten much better at filtering the fats 🙂 With allergies in the family, she doesn’t bother trying to add another fragrance.
“[A] very strong perfume …. of bacon…”
You say this as if it’s a difficulty, not an advantage! I do not understand.
😉
Depends how friendly you are with the neighbor’s pittie, golden, chihuahua… 😀
CJ, is it the Wabash iris that you hunted down a few years ago for your garden which your father used to grow? A friend just posted one to her FaceBook page which she (originally) got from her Grandmother’s garden, and it is gorgeous with its white top and purple beard!
We have some of them growing along the edge of an embankment at the old homestead; we also had some smaller iris, yellow with maroon beard (Berried Treasure?), and a couple all purple and all white ones. Loved them!
Chondrite, one of my experiments was with yarrow. It has antiseptic, anesthetic, and fever reducing properties. The last would be no use in soap, and it smells and tastes rather awful, but it might work well with camphor.
Pick the whole plant with the sun on it. Chop and simmer in oil for several hours, then strain out the larger pieces. I used olive oil and thickened it with cocoa butter to make a salve, which was very useful.
It always made me shake my head in wonder that people would poison out or uproot the yarrow from their yards, then go buy the same plant at a garden store for $6 per plant and put it in their flower beds. They might have transplanted…
BTW, as a medicine, it bears a close relation to the aspirin family.
When I lived in the Midwest, I was an amateur herbalist and familiarized myself with a lot of the plants in the area. I was thrilled when I found growing wild in the neighborhood goldenseal, wild ginger, jack-in-the-pulpit, mayapple, and wintergreen. Now that I live in HI, I’m having to learn a whole new la’au lapa’au.
Plumeria, shell ginger. Lychee is astrlngent.
Awapuhi is shampoo ginger; you squish the blossom head to get a soapy liquid. Lots of the useful plants produce wood or textiles. Awa (kava) is a traditional beverage, the Pacific answer to coffee. And of course everyone’s favorite ‘what the heck?!?’ food, poi from the taro (kalo) plant.
Walt, our 2 (grandson and his PopPop) Walters entirely agreed that bacon soap was a GOOD idea, as did the pack of dogs … but it made for hectic mornings lol. Bacon is the kid’s favorite food. He used to shake us awake IN THE DARK in our camper with the words “PopPop get up … it’s time to make THE BACON” … he was 3 lol.
It’s great when you find useful plants in the wild. We used to spend time at a cabin in a remote corner of the Catskills, I was delighted to find watercress, wild oregano and marjoram everywhere.
Speaking of experiments, here’s one that turned out well:
Marmalade Cookies
1 8 oz block of cream cheese
1 4 oz stick of butter
1 cup sugar
2 cups marmalade
2 cups well chopped nuts
3 cups whole wheat flour
Cream together cheese and butter. Cream in sugar. Thouroughly blend in marmalade and nuts. Stir in flour until smooth. Form into logs and refrigerate. Slice thinly and lay out on greased cookie sheets.
Bake at 325F for 15 – 25 minutes.
I told DH about this recipe. “Cookies, with marmalade!”
“Ooh!”
“And cream cheese!”
“OOOHHH!!”
Guess next time I can get marmalade on sale, I will have to try this 🙂 Thanks!
Are the nuts necessary? Neither of us like them to excess, unless they re the Costco cashews.
I really like pecans in mine. I have never tried this recipe without nuts, but I see no reason it wold not work, and certainly cashews should be just fine!
Oh, I dearly adore marmalade! WhenI was a undergrad at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland (now years ago), I lived my first year at a “women’s residence hall” that had its own “refectory ” (dining hall) for all meals but weekday lunches. Marmalade would be put out for breakfast every morning to go with the traditional, British cold and dry toast. I used to shock the staff by asking for marmalade for my slices of bread (not toast) we were served at High Tea on Sunday evenings too. Turns outs, jam belongs at High Tea (really, a light supper as we had had a big, and formal Sunday dinner at 1:00 earlier), not marmalade, in Scottish opinion, but I was an ignorant (if indulged) American.
Marmalade, one of the two things I’ve heard, “If you find someone who loves marmalade or gooseberries, you can count on them having some sort of British connection.” I like marmalade, but unfortunately the only brand easily found and affordable, Smuckers, is flooded with sugar. Also like gooseberry pie, but the same criticism may apply–it SHOULD be TART! Connection? Dad was born near Turin. No, not THAT one! Turin, Alberta, Canada.
Trader Joe’s has a fantastic, tart Seville Oranges Marmalade. I adore its non-sweetness.Can’t remember if you have access to Trader Joe’s or not, but if you do, try it!
And now I am missing (and mildly worrying about) Blue Cat Ship. BCS, how are you doing and are you in the process of moving? Hope you and cats are well. Let us briefly know.
But look at how many of the “old regulars” are now participating, since he hasn’t been monopolizing her blog.
True, and I am hoping for some type of happy medium.
That would be nice, respect. Old habits die hard.
Not sure if I can be brief enough. I haven’t heard about the house in a month, and I’m going to apologize and cancel the deal. It’s now 3 months since we started. I can’t wait any longer; my apt. lease must be renewed by the 22nd or else I must move. I’m discouraged beyond words.
I fogged the apt. and have been cleaning up. Repairs still need to be made. The new kitten won’t quit nibbling / gnawing / nipping me or Goober, and Goober has only twice given him the smack-down. Nothing I’ve done helps. Timeouts in the carrier only make him anxious. Any advice I’ve gotten hasn’t made him learn yet. I haven’t quite given up, but I’ve been so discouraged, I’ve considered giving him away twice. I still hope he’ll learn. I don’t want to give him up, but my fingers and temper can’t always take it. So far, still OK at night. I think it’s still attempting to play and make friends, not anger or spite.
He can’t seem to understand it hurts and we don’t like it.
Boh on packing / unpacking and other personal stuff, no real progress. I’ve tried writing and no real success, deleted a bunch. I haven’t worked on fonts in weeks. I chip away is all. But hoping to make progress next week and new the lease plus re-resubmit for repairs, new and old.
The kitten and Goober had a vet stay on the 3rd when I fogged the apt., with the kitten’s first shots and deworming and a flea bath for both. They’re due for a follow-up on that on the 17th.
I appreciate that a handful of people care and wanted to know if I’m doing OK. My personal situation is not good, too precarious.
Paul has precisely stated what too many others have claimed. I have never had any such bad intent, and it is both hurtful and angering to see that again. I’d rather lurk or go away entirely than for anyone to feel unwanted or unwelcome to post here. I’ve never wanted to bother people, and I resent that some think I act like that on purpose. So I have only checked in a few times, and I’ve lurked. I hope things will go OK in the next few weeks, but it’s going to be rough for a long time, if it gets any better.
I intend to avoid posting unless I have something specifically on-topic, or some good or important news, or something very short. Thanks again to those who’ve been concerned, and to CJ and Jane for having always been gracious. I hope I’ve never bothered them. I’m sorry to have to state how I feel plainly, but dang it, I don’t like people claiming things about me that aren’t true. Those folks don’t get it at all. They clearly don’t know me and don’t understand me, and they don’t want to try. I guess it’s better to keep to myself.
@BCS, don’t cancel on the house unless you’ve got something better lined up. The Corona distancing would have interrupted any other arrangements just as much, and will still cause delays if you try for another house. That is not the fault of this seller or this house.
It still sounds like the best option for the future, but you have to accept that in this pandemic time it will take longer to arrange a house sale and a house move.
For the kitten, I’ve read two things that might help.
One, never use your hand as a toy. Don’t wriggle your fingers to attract him or let him play with your fingers, always use a toy.
Two, if he does nip, yell OW loudly and take away your hand, refuse to play with him for a bit. That’s how their siblings teach them that biting hurts.
If he persists, use “the paw of nope”, gently flatten him and hold him down a bit until he calms down. That’s the way the gentle old tomcat Grandpa Mason at TinyKittens socialised overly rambunctious kittens and taught them to respect others’ boundaries.
This might work better than the anxiety-inducing time-outs in the carrier, which is not the place nor the immediate moment where the offence happened (so it’s hard for him to connect cause and effect), and might just teach him that the carrier is a place he doesn’t want to go.
Tommie, thank you for that recipe! I have a jar of blood orange marmalade and I can scale the recipe back for the 2 of us. I have a lot of walnuts and pecans, thanks to miscalculating size of Costco bags I had delivered LOL. Right now I’m trying to keep the sourdough starter from taking over the kitchen 🙂 Husband is doing remarkable with his broken ankle and leg bones; scootering all over the house, and sitting to bump up and down our 16 steps too. Doesn’t need Tylenol anymore, doctor gave us a reprieve from therapy, till at least 2 weeks from now, as he’s doing more at home; effective therapy can’t really be done till the ankle is safe to move more. BCS, kittens are always challenge; try the water spritz when it misbehaves. And PUSH to get into that house … it would SO help you :). Be well, all.
BCS, I second Cathy about pushing for the house. It might not be perfect, but it would definitely be better than the current arrangement. Don’t let ‘perfection’ get in the way of ‘better’. You said you could re-up the lease and break it if necessary without too much ado. You might also point out that they haven’t exactly been coming through on required repairs.
Given Ben’s physical abilities or lack thereof, I’m not so sure he’s cut out to be a home owner. Repairs? Guess who! If one can’t do all the simple things oneself, hiring it can get expensive fast.
Paul, I believe BCS has been a homeowner before, so he is likely familiar with the ins and outs. Don’t know how this house compares, size-wise, to his previous abode, so smaller might be better.