Grilled Pork Loin

Last Sunday's dinner was sooo good! Grilled pork loin that had been marinated in orange juice over polenta, a spinach salad and a decent malbec. I made the salad while my co-conspirator did the pork and polenta. The wine was one of our Wine-of-the-Month selections from Barrique's.

Serpents of Night and Day

Two more of my favorite plants are blooming! Arisaema costatum has a dark, striped spathe with a long whiplike spadix that hangs well below the pot rim. It's really creepy if you look at it. Which reminds me: Sorry for the ugly siding. It's going this fall.

A nice foil to A. costatum is A. candidissimum. This one has white flowers striped with green at the bottom and a pink flush inside the spathe. To seal the deal making it one of my favorites it has a light, pleasant fragrance. As soon as both of these multiply some more I'm going to try them for hardiness in my garden.

Nacholicious!

What kind of wine does one serve when enjoying nachos by candlelight in the garden? We tried a malbec and found it to be satisfactory.

• Blue Corn Chips
  
• Black Beans
  
• Green Onion
  
• Tomatoes and Tomato Salsa
  
• Grated, Aged White Cheddar
  

Prairie Walking

Yesterday morning we managed to get up and out of the house to join the local Audubon Society and Prairie Enthusiasts members for a field trip in the Thomson Memorial Prairie. Guided by a member of The Nature Conservancy and the grassland birds specialist with the state's Department of Natural Resources twenty-one of us waded through grasses wet and dry in search of birds. The real stars of the visit were the bobolinks. Several of them flew around us putting on an interesting show with their distinctive song and flight patterns. I had thought this was a new species for my life list but on returning home I found I had seen it before. I don't recall when and where. No worries, though. The grasshopper and savannah sparrows we saw became numbers 191 and 192 on the list. We also saw one or two dickcissels but the light was from a bad direction to really see them so I'm holding off counting this one.

At the end of the hike one of the guides mentioned that the wood lilies, Lilium philadelphicum were blooming in another nearby prairie. So we left Thomson and headed out for that particular designated state natural area. Along the way we got a closeup look at a pair of sandhill cranes just walking off the road chased by an angry red-winged blackbird. At this second prairie bird life was pretty sparse but the lilies more than made the trip worth it.

Jammin' With The Simpsons

Strawberries are here! Last weekend local strawberries were available for the first time this season at the West Side Community Market, my farmers' market of choice. I bought a load for eating and making jam. What you see here is the mashed berries macerating in lots of sugar while the pectin boils on the stove. The pectin is an unusual pink color because I wasn't concentrating on what I was doing and dumped it into the berries rather than the water. I managed to scoop it out with only a little berry contamination and proceed as usual. The jam appears to have turned out fine anyway.

The Simpsons episode that was on during this operation was "Papa Don't Leach" in which country singer Lurleen Lumpkin is reunited with her father, Royce.

Minnesota Majesty

As if in honor of my Minnesota guests last weekend a couple of my Cypripedium reginae were in bloom. The Showy Lady's Slipper or Queen's Lady Slipper, a temperate terrestrial orchid, is Minnesota's state flower. I got these plants several years ago and was surprised at how quickly they grew. They've done well for the most part and I seem to remember sending their seed to a lab at one time so chances are good that there are seedlings from my plants out there somewhere.

The news, however, isn't all good. Like my C. pubescens, this species is having a hard year in my garden. Of the five stems I have, one looks severely battered, probably from the storms we had a while back. Another two-stem clump got one broken off just after it emerged by a falling branch, the other pictured here was murdered by a rodent just the other day. Despite their delicate appearance I'm finding they're tough plants and have no reason to believe they won't recover and do better next year.

Ladyslipper Sadness

Last year my heirloom plant of Cypripedium pubescens developed some kind of fungus. In asking around I learned that this species can get overgrown and susceptible to disease. As I hadn't divided mine it's not too surprising what happened. All of the top growth turned black and died back. On digging up the plant to replace the soil and treat with fungicide I discovered the center of the clump was dead through the rhizomes. Desperate to save this plant I divided it as advised and planted it in half a dozen different places around my garden. The original plant, seen above as it was in 2004, had over thirty blooming growths on it.
Following our record snowfall winter it looks like among the five sites I planted it where it survived there are about a dozen growths. One bloomed this year. The flower was much smaller than they have been in the past, but I hope it's a sign the plants will survive and thrive once they get used to their new locations.