It's been so hot and dry up till now that after I picked a few things and watered a few things I was wilted myself. This week, the temperature cooled down enough to give me the urge to work outside. With September being a transition month, it was time to pick some things, deadhead other things, pull out a few things and plant some new things. So, I had a sweet helper for a couple of days and we went out to Lattimore to pick the last of the crowder peas. We froze eight more pint bags so I have 16 pints in my freezor. Daddy and I laughed because it made us think of the Little Red Hen in the children's story Mama used to read to us. The moral of the story (Mama's stories almost always had a moral) was to have a good work ethic. Mama could be pretty animated when she read stories to us. She remembered a line from Little Red Hen at lunch the other day and recited it with enthusiasm and a head's up attitude and sounded just like when she read it to us. "And so I did!"
Back in my own yard, we pulled out the cucumber plants and my one little squash plant and generally weeded everywhere. I got out the pruning clippers and cut a lot of dead wood from the azaleas. Our house was owned for many years by Dr. and Mrs. Lampley. Carol says that in Shelby, your house isn't known as your house until you move out of it. So even though we have lived here for nearly 15 years, sometimes people still call it the Lampley's house. In the 1960's, Dr. Lampley propagated his own azaleas and camellias and we are lucky to have quite a few still in the yard.
We pruned alot of other vines and bushes and kept on weeding and it is amazing how fast you can fill up a wheelbarrow with stuff that needs to be cleared away. Then I went to Lowe's to buy a few bags of pine bark mulch. As the saying around here goes, "one trip to Lowes is two more trips to Lowes". So true. I bought a few bags of mulch and while I was there they had some very fallish mums in yellow and burgundy so I picked up a couple for my front porch. When I got home, I moved the geraniums to the back yard and put the mums on the porch. We spread the mulch and decided we needed more, so back to Lowes where I bought a few more bags of mulch and a couple of other fallish plants. So we planted those and I keep thinking of a few other perennials that were at Lowes. We still have mulch to spread. Mulch is amazing because it instantly makes everything look so much neater. As Dr. Gebel at Shagreen Nursery told me, "Mulch can cover up a ton of errors".
Arugula started springing back up from seeds I planted last spring and some pretty zinnias came back too. I could hear Mama Crowder calling these volunteers and I always liked that. Volunteers should be appreciated so we mulched around them and they look really pretty.
The tomato plants had pretty much quit in the heat of the summer, but little yellow flowers are sprouting again, so I can't bear to take them out yet. I am still getting tons of cherry tomatoes but fewer romas and better boys now. What few better boys are growing are smallish and ripen slowly so they are perfect for fried green tomatoes. Green tomatoes are sliced and fried alot like squash. You don't put them in ice water and I like them sliced a little thicker than squash, but from there on you fry them just like you would squash. They have a tangier taste to them than squash and are a good appetizer with a horseradish sauce or on a BLT. (Fried Squash recipe on July 7, 2010 blog)
Fried Green Tomatoes is also a great movie and I listen to the soundtrack a lot. All of the songs put you straight into a southern, nostalgic mood with Cool Down Yonder and I'll Remember you and What Becomes of the Broken Hearted. They do two versions of Cherish and Patti LaBelle does a really sultry version of a song called Barbeque Bess that I played the other night when we had BBQ in the Big Cooker. The songs emotions swing from nostalgia to sultry to gospel with one called If I Can Help Somebody and then the very soulful A Charge to Keep I Have. It's a great soundtrack. I may need to fry some green tomatoes.
No comments:
Post a Comment