A flower in December

Fair Amaryllis, wilt thou never peep/From forth the cave, and call me, and be mine?

Or, you know, peep forth somewhat earlier than expected. I guess this one was pre-chilled when I bought it, because I stuck it in the library to stay cool, and it sent up a flower stalk within days, and now look at it. The other two have just come out of their dark cave, and hopefully will break dormancy soon and bloom in January or February, but hey, I have a Christmas amaryllis, so I'm thrilled.

Everything outside is frozen. We haven't emptied out the deck railing boxes yet; we'd better get to that.

Ice

We had a snowfall yesterday, a few gentle and beautiful inches, and then ice on top of that. Ice is a force of nature that's aweful in the old sense, both destructive and terribly lovely. To which the modern response is pretty much, oh hell I hope the power's not going to go out and how will I drive in this, and - because we are not completely devoid of wonder - better get the camera out.

It's fascinating and transitory and worthy of capturing before the sun comes out and melts the fairytale glory, and also it's not quite enough that I have to worry about branches breaking everywhere, so, all good.

I wrote a book!

Announcing (for the few people who read me here and not other places) my novel!

This is the first book in a series of time travel adventure novels that I've been writing since 2002, finally available - in ebook form only for now, though in print in a few weeks, I hope.

You can find sample chapters and purchasing information at my website. It's chock-full of smuggling and literary quotations and romance and sailing ships and fistfights and the past and the future, and I hope you will check it out to see if it's… your cup of tea. Ha.

And no, this has nothing to do with gardening, aside from Camellia sinensis being a plant (which I tried to grow, once. Dismal failure). But it has everything to do with me, so.

Garden Bloggers' Where-Have-All-The-Flowers-Gone Day

This is all I got.

I think there are still some calendulas blooming at my community garden plot, but it was too much effort to go over there especially since we've been alerted to a huge soccer tournament with buses parked in our usual spots. (Perils of gardening in the largest youth soccerplex on the East Coast.) We've had a few days of really serious well-below-freezing weather here in Maryland, and that does it for most of the flowers, though the yellow chrysanthemum that accompanies this one (I don't have names for either. I get all my mums handed down from other people. I guess they're stepmums) still has some blooms in serious need of deadheading (if I ever got around to that). And probably there are a few roses hanging on too.

But mostly, we're done. (I have three amaryllis chilling in the library. With the lead pipe and the candlestick.)

Colors

I've been posting over on Grow It Eat It about how I managed to make a green cake using purple sweet potatoes, and today I made the first attempt at overcoming the problem: sweet potato muffins with yogurt and lemon juice to counteract the alkaline baking powder and baking soda. Except… the recipe involved molasses, which when combined with the deep purple turned a nice dark brown that totally failed to reveal any other color, whether purple or green or anything in between, and also created the expectation of a chocolate taste which is entirely not present. Though they taste pretty good anyway.

I guess I'll have to try again, with a sweetener in a lighter hue. Meanwhile, I think I'll make a sweet potato pie, which (from the photos I've seen) will be reliably and extraordinarily dark purple.

Speaking of anthocyanins, have some red oak leaves:

I'll get out and take some more leaf photos when the wind calms down a bit.

Plot twist

First, my mom's cosmos:

photo by Lucy Edwards

since she nicely sent the photo to me, and they are awesome.

Next, we are probably having a frost tonight! First frost is kind of like the anticipated plot twist in a novel; it can turn out just like you expected and still be exciting, or it can take you by surprise by not being what's predicted. In other words, it may get down to the 30s tonight but not actually freeze, and still we'll find some dead bodies in the morning, or it may hit the freezing mark but not actually kill anything. In any case, it's signaling that yes, this is autumn now, and inevitably the air will be cold and plants that don't like that will have some trouble.

I prepared over the weekend by: a) picking all the remaining tomatoes (not many) and peppers (quite a few, most of which I roasted yesterday), and pulling out the plants, along with the spent okra and the basil; b) repotting as necessary and bringing in the potted plants that I wanted to save (lime tree, baby fig tree which surprised me by putting out some new leaves at its base recently, stevia which I am babysitting for a friend, scented geranium); c) putting the other geraniums, which I really do not have room for inside this year, into the shed, pots wrapped in bubble wrap. I am aware this is not the best solution and they will probably die, but I don't have an unheated garage and our basement is a dirt cellar which we may end up having major work done on this year (there's already a bucket full of yacon crowns down there and I'll probably add dahlia tubers to that next week; dunno where they'll go if we have the "sealing" done). I still need to put something over the oca planter on the deck, and over the salad table, and we'll see.

And the bulbs are coming today! So I'll need to get those in the ground soon. Also garlic, at the community garden. Lots of fall prep work to get done there; the greens I planted a while back are doing well, and we've already eaten some collards, pak choi, Chinese broccoli, and rapini. I may go by today and throw the row cover back over the plants I took it away from because there were aphids somehow and I thought the ladybugs needed all the access they could get, but the plants are hardy enough to take a frost, even in the cold valley pocket where my plot resides.

And that is the news of the moment. (I think I prefer posting when I have something to report, rather than trying to do it every day.)

Well, somehow I forgot...

... when I decided to post every day for a month, that I was traveling at the end of that. And I suppose I could have managed to keep going, but driving through all that rain in MD and PA discouraged me (I missed most of our somewhere-between-5-and-8-inches-depending-on-who-you-believe at home, though).

I missed GBBD on the 15th, with the reasonable excuse that I was on the road between 9 and 4:30 and rather tired after that, though I did sort of mean to photograph my mom's amazing cosmos and post that, but I forgot. They were similar to this one:

but far more lush and enormous than the ones (somebody else's) I snapped in the community garden today.

I'd forgotten, also, how enjoyable cosmos are to grow. I grew orange ones this year, which I have apparently failed to take any photos of, but they're hard to capture anyway.