A Shortage of Wildflowers

Last year was such a great year for wildflowers. We had multiple kinds for months, starting in May and going through until about September.

This year? Not so much.

We just didn't get rain. At least, not early enough. It was so dry in the spring that nothing grew. No grass, no flowers, no nothing. The rains finally started, but too late for most of the flowers.

What has been coming is late, small, and underwhelming. Last year at this time, the roads were lined with exuberant yellow clover, vibrant orange globe mallows, and lots of other things. I made so many arrangements. For the dining room table, for the bookcase in the living room, for wherever I felt like putting flowers.

This year everything is stunted, sparse, and limited.

But still! I do have some flowers.

Early-morning arranging.

I do appreciate that the silver nightshade (the purple flowers) has finally recovered after getting mostly eliminated during a poorly-timed hailstorm a couple of years ago.

 

The bookcase flowers are harder because they have to be taller.

The yellow clover and apricot branches do most of the heavy lifting.

Even in lean years, there's always something. A good lesson in general, I guess.

Easter Altar Flowers

A few years ago I started buying fresh flowers for our church for Easter. I love fresh flowers, but this is the only time I buy them. Easter is the most important holiday in the Catholic church, and I feel like the altar decorations should reflect that.

Arranging flowers is one of my few hobbies. This is convenient, because buying all the arrangements I make at a florist would be several hundred dollars. Buying random assorted bouquets at Walmart and arranging them myself is much cheaper. Also, then I can make them exactly the way I want them.

Gathering the materials.

I bought all of these on Thursday and transported them home in buckets of water I brought with me. These stayed in A.'s relatively cool office until I was ready to put the arrangements together on Saturday.

I started by taking all the bouquets apart and putting like colors together.

Poppy helped me with this.

Staged.

I use the same box every year for the main altar arrangement. Last year, the plastic liner in it was leaking. I discovered to my great satisfaction, however, that the big plastic container of salad greens I bought awhile ago is big enough to function as a liner in this box, so I didn't have to buy a new one.

I don't have any of that foam florist's stuff to stick the stems into. I hate that stuff, anyway. It always falls apart. This year I tried using some of the sheep's wool we had from shearing, but when I got that wet, it compacted too much.

Last year I used criss-crossed branches inside the box to support everything, but that didn't work this year. I think because last year I was using a lot more lilac branches, which are stiffer than flower stems. I ended up finding a piece of chicken wire in the pasture and using that inside the box for structure.

I had several fits and starts with these flowers. They were fighting me. It took me awhile to figure out how to put them together in the way I wanted, with the right shape, height, and color mixing. I spent a little more than two hours on four different arrangements.

The central altar:

The lectern:

The saints' pedestals on either side of the tabernacle:

And then the potted flowers:

I'm not a huge fan of Easter lilies, so I only get a few.

And the bigger picture:

The view from our pew.

This is so much work, but it is also so worth it to me. It's an act of service that has the selfish result of making me very happy when I turn on the lights on Easter Sunday and see all those flowers.

Snapshots: Easter Prep

Happy Easter! We spent much of yesterday preparing for today, including . . .

Dyeing eggs.

This year I just used the light green eggs that were in the ones I get from my friend, rather than buying white eggs at the store. Because I use natural dyes--beet juice, curry powder, and paprika powder--they don't get as dark as if we were using one of those kits. That plus the green eggs made for some pretty subtle colors, but that's okay. They're still good for the egg hunt.

Poppy volunteered to iron the linen napkins for me.

She prefers to do this on the floor.

I had my nimble-fingered children help me skin a lot of chickpeas in preparation for making the hummus that will be a part of our Middle Eastern Easter dinner.

Middle-Easter dinner? No? Okay.

I made a pie. 

Strawberry-rhubarb. The rhubarb is up in the garden but not big enough to cut yet. I used the last bag in the freezer from last year's rhubarb for this pie.

And of course, I arranged the Easter flowers for church. That took a long time, as always. I'm going to do a whole post about that on Tuesday, but for now, here's the mess I made on my floor while I was doing it.

I just let the leaves fall where they may while I was in the middle of it and cleaned up later.

Because I just buy pre-packaged bouquets of flowers at Walmart and then take them apart to arrange them, I always end up with some that just don't fit with the arrangements I'm making. I had quite a few that I separated into different vases at home.

The tiny jar was for Poppy's dresser.

Well, I guess I can show you some of the church flowers, since I didn't really arrange these ones much. This year I bought some potted flowers and set them up in front of the Holy Family.

We can plant the hyacinth and tulip bulbs in our garden after I take them out of the church. 

There you have it! My Easter preparations, snapshotted.

Plants and Things

When we got back from our five-day trip to Colorado, the flowers that had been on the table were wilted and sad-looking. I was quite busy getting dinner and unloading the car, but I made sure to dispose of those sad flowers and find a couple of lilies to put on the table before we sat down to eat.

Simple, but at least not wilted.

Later in the week, I managed something a bit more involved.

We're waiting on the sunflowers. In the meantime, I mostly have a lot of clover and grasses.

These flowers I had on the big bookcase in our living room.

The ornamental sage is starting to bloom, yay!

I actually grabbed that vase and brought it with me to church to put it on the altar by the lectern. I figured it might as well decorate the church during Mass and then I could just bring it home again. There are no other services at our church during the week, so there would be no point in leaving it there.

The hollyhocks in the garden are blooming profusely, despite being extensively damaged by the grasshoppers.

Very cheery, as long as you don't look too closely and see the holes in the flowers and the stripped greenery.

The grasshoppers continue to ravage the garden. They target weird things. Things I didn't even think were edible. Like rhubarb leaves, which are supposed to be toxic.

Obviously not toxic to grasshoppers.

They also ate all the leaves on the garlic plants, of all things. Luckily, the plants were pretty much done growing, so I just dug them all up.

They got to a pretty good size.

The grasshoppers did at least provide some entertainment for Poppy and her friends, who spent some time running through a field to watch the thousands of grasshoppers fly ahead of them.

These are some easily entertained kids.

The beet that is going to seed continues to develop. I discovered as I was bent over weeding around it that the beet seeds have a very sweet smell.

If this actually sets viable seeds, I'm going to have a LOT of beet seeds for next year.

Or maybe the grasshoppers will eat all the beet seeds. We'll just have to wait and see.

Snapshots: First, Flowers

We went down the hill last Sunday to take care of our friends' animals, which gave me the opportunity to pick some wildflowers that don't grow up here at our house.

Those white ones smelled exactly like oregano.

I thought it needed some more color, so I added clover, silver nightshade, and whatever those yellow flowers are.

And I put this on the bookshelf in the living room.

Many of the wildflowers around the house are towards the end of their life cycle, so I had a pretty random assortment later in the week that I collected on my run.

Lots of clover.

And I maybe got a little over exuberant with the height of the clover on the bookshelf. Oh well. It's dramatic, I guess.

In other plant news, I harvested the first beets this week.

There are beets under those greens somewhere.

One of the beets has gone to seed, which is perplexing, as I thought they only seed in their second year and I planted all these seeds this year. We'll just see what happens with it.

The grasshoppers continue to be horrifying. Not only are the sheer number of them overwhelming, but there are really a shocking variety.

This bright green one was unusual enough that I took a picture of it.

Poppy woke up early one morning. The oven was on already to cook pork shoulder before it got hot, so we made some muffins to go in the oven, too.

When children help in the kitchen, things often end up on the floor.

Jasper is delighted with the warm weather. It means all the people are outside with him all day.

And that means belly rubs are a strong possibility.

Early-morning baking is the only kind I want to do in the summer.

Granola and chocolate chip cookie bars at 6:30 a.m.

The strong sun and heat also means that it's sun-tea time.

The big jar has decaffeinated black tea. In the smaller jars are mint leaves, and a combination of peach leaves and mint leaves.

There you have it! My life, snapshotted.

P.S. Happy Father's Day to all the dads. I hope you have an excellent day.

Taming the Wildflowers

When we first moved here seven years ago, I was surprised at the variety of wildflowers I was seeing every year. 

I am still surprised. That's because the varieties are actually different every year.  

We have highly variable rainfall here. About the only constant is that we don't get very much of it. Our average is only around 18 inches a year. When we get it is the question. We don't really have a very reliable wet season, but we can get a heavy storm at any time. And when that rain comes determines which flowers bloom.

This year, we've had huge amounts of some wildflowers I've seen only rarely in other years. As soon as I am able, I always want to put wildflowers on my table. The flowers that have been available to me thus far are small, kind of weedy looking ones. I haven't had any larger ones yet to serve as the anchor flowers in the arrangements I like to make.

These smaller flowers are very pretty, but arranging them into something that doesn't look like literally a bunch of weeds has required some different techniques. And I'm going to show you how I do it. Whee!

The first thing to note is that I always gather way more plant material than I think I'll need. One reason I do that is because when working with smaller flowers, many of them must be grouped together to make a larger grouping of color in the arrangements. I need a dozen of the small flowers rather than one or two large flowers.

Also, these plants have a high ratio of greenery to flowers. It's this greenery that makes these plants look weedy, so much of it is going to be discarded.

This whole big pile will turn into just two smaller arrangements.

After I gather a large pile of plants, I start stripping and trimming them. I'm trying to keep the stems as long as possible, but get rid of all the excess leaves, spent flower stalks, etc. This will leave me with only the flower at the top of the stem. I'll use my fingers to strip the stem if it won't break as I do it, but sometimes I have to snip with scissors.

I do this outside, because there's a lot of plant material to be thrown out. It's easier when I can just throw it on the ground as I work.

Then I bring the stripped and sorted flowers inside to my sink, where I cut them shorter as needed and arrange them in my vase or jar. I still use something as a background screen--in this case, the yellow clover--and then I bunch the smaller flowers together to serve as my anchors.

All those flowers I gathered ended up making two small arrangements.

Yesterday I had one rose on my Mother's Day rose bush that was open. I have learned that there's no point in leaving these on the bush. They get whipped by the wind, dried out and beaten up so quickly that it's better to bring them inside so I can enjoy them for a few days. Knowing I had one big flower to serve as my anchor flower, I kept an eye out on my morning run for plants with complementary colors.

What I started with.

I stripped all the lower leaves and then snipped off the undeveloped flower buds at the top.

What I brought inside.

The final arrangement.

Dealing with these weedier flowers takes more time and care than just putting a few sunflowers in a vase, but the end result is very satisfying. And I love having unlimited flowers to decorate my home with. I currently have five arrangements of flowers in various places around the house. Too many? No such thing.

Spring Posting Continues

Hard to resist these photos: