The Titan and the Fireflies

This week I am writing two blogs: There is just too much going on! With Philadelphia in the World Series, Halloween and all kinds of art openings, the Philadelphia social scene is off to a very great start. My friend Eileen Tognini has curated a show like few have seen before. In an adapted old mill now called the Sky Box Studios where the walls are splattered reminders of Jackson Pollock, new creatures have come alive from very simple drawings. Jason Hackenwerth has taken the art of making poodles out of balloons into another galaxy. Here, in a darkened room, carefully lit creatures appear to float dazzling one and all. If you want to see all the images from the exhibit go my Picasa Web Album: http://picasaweb.google.com/renelctorres/TheTitanAndTheFireflies?feat=directlink

I leave you to enjoy what I shared with a lucky few hundred guests: “The Titan and the Fireflies.”

Inspiration drawing for the Titan

Firefly

Titan

In the midst of all this wonderment, this child preferred reading a book rather than gaze at fireflies.

Cassoulet

Cold wet autumn has arrived. It has been raining for two days straight. Last week it was a little warmer but the signs were all in the air. I decided that it was time to take out Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking and make a little Cassoulet. I must clarify: there are no little recipes in Julia’s book! Cassoulet is a French peasant dish that consists of several meats (vegetarians might want to skip the blog this week) stewed in juices with beans. In Julia’s recipe it is one rather complex recipe with over six pages of directions and two subordinate recipes for preparing some of the items to be included! It is a rather hearty meal and the French normally eat it for their main meal, lunch. In my case it was meant to be a start of a hearty weekend so I prepared it for Friday dinner starting on Wednesday. I don’t know how French peasants managed to eat if they needed to start cooking something 3 days ahead of when they were due to eat it. I envision some kind of kitchen assembly marked Monday for Wednesday, Tuesday for Thursday and so on and so on.
I brought out my old worn out and stained book and proceeded to read and reread all of the steps and make lists for the items I would have to acquire in order to make this plain country dish. I have a small but organized kitchen that was put to the test with every pan I called to duty and just about every square inch of space enlisted in one way or another. I think French peasants must have eaten a different version than the one our infamous Julia concocted. I will only give you some of the highlights that may well explain the accompanying images.

Collage view of my kitchen during cooking process

In essence this Cassoulet consists of four to six dishes which are each cooked individually to acquire their own flavor and texture. At the end they are assembled in a large Cocotte (Dutch oven) where they imbue each other’s flavor and arrive at the grand dish that is Cassoulet. This was a pork and lamb Cassoulet but you can make it with anything and everything. So you have a recipe for pork, another for lamb, there is a sausage component whether you make it our buy it, a bean element, all flavored with bacon, salt pork, lamb and pork bones for creating a sauce with stock and wine to accent the flavors. Of course there are spices, carrots, onions and everything you can almost think of stuck in cheesecloth to create an infusion of flavors.

Collage view of process: Background Beans, Top Left: Lamb,

Top Right: Pork, Bottom Left: Bacon, Bottom Right: Sausage

The grand moment comes, after three days of cooking, when you assemble it in layers and set aside until you are ready to bake for a final hour and a half and you add the final bread crumbs and clarified lard (that you extracted from the cooking process) to create the final crust on the casserole. It may sound unusual, but it tastes divine.

Voila! Cassoulet
The Guinea Pigs: Vori, Beth, Paul, Gayle, me, Julia, Elena

At table

We were seven who barely made a dent, even with multiple helpings, in the 8 quart Staub Dutch Oven, leaving almost half for the rest of the weekend. Consumed with a wonderful Rioja and a White Burgundy that fit the palate. It was followed by a simple salad and then with a scrumptious Red Velvet Cake for dessert (that I forgot to photograph). We spent hours at the table talking and laughing as we had not for a while. If it sounds mouth watering, it was. Now, a rest and then let’s see what’s next. Happy autumn!

Some of the final bounty from the garden

Fall at Reptiland

My friend Vori is a multi-talented individual. You have seen him photographing and drawing in the garden. Besides these talents he makes his living in store design and display. Given the nature of Retail these days he has to go further to get work; and it comes in the strangest packages at times. You should check out his blog for his version of our trip: http://alifeinretail.blogspot.com/. He had been called to review a gift shop for ways to improve its efficiency and increase sales. The client was Reptiland in Allenwood, Pennsylvania. As the drive was long and I had the time, he asked me to keep him company and go along for the ride. It was almost a four hour drive from Philadelphia in one of those places you wonder what is going on.

The drive along the turnpike was not the prettiest but once out of the cities and suburbs we were in some pretty wonderful landscape that was in fall color. It was not only in fall color but also had a nice dusting of the first snow of the season. We were off the turnpike and following route 80 west along the ancient southernmost limit of the last ice age. This we did to get to another road to get to another road… The ride, even though monotonous by the repetition of the same was interesting and with the two of us talking non-stop for four hours we had a great time.

Reptiland is an unusual place where various animals ranging from emus, to alligators, to all sorts of snakes, lizards and frogs. Amongst the bigger beasts were these Galapagos Tortoises that have quite a personality and all are very well cared for in their environments. The place is a properly accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums.

Of particular interest to me was the landscape in the 4 acre park. Particulars habitats had been created for the beasts when the weather permitted them to be outside. The rest of the landscape was rather well done with assortment of bamboos and rogdgersias and other tropical or primeval looking plants to create a great effect.

A new butterfly exhibit was exhilarating as you walked around a very balmy 79 degree habitat filled with flowers and butterflies flying about. Here we both had fun photographing the wonders and colors of the butterfly kingdom. The exhibit featured a place where the chrysalis were kept until becoming butterflies and released into the garden. Unfortunately the life of a butterfly is rather limited lasting about two weeks for some of these species or due to the constraints of the habitat.

I have always wanted to go to Northern Mexico to follow the greatest migration of the planet – that of the Monarchs. These arrive around Halloween after months of traveling along both the east and the west coasts from Canada to winter and breed. Surprising, it takes one generation to get from Canada to Mexico while three generations to get back home. Millions upon millions cover the trees that seem to come alive with butterflies fluttering.

Chrysalises hatching case

A Monarch and her court of beauties

The return trip was more of the same with a brief stop for gas and food where I got this photograph of cherry pickers. Minutes after taking the photo, a scruffy man (a character who could have come out of the film Deliverance) came up to us to ask what we were doing? I wonder the logic of stacking a dozen cherry to pickers to get attention and then asking that question?

More fall garden chores...

My neighbor's entry garden has come into bloom just about as everything is out of bloom. They planted Shasta Daisies (Leucanthemum x superbum) and later added some Chrysanthemums. The Shastas have been growing all summer with the promise of the show currently going on. I used to plant these in California where they put on a spectacular show and kept going all fall and into winter. Here I planted them one year and they did not survive the winter even though they are supposed to be perennial in zones 3-8. I guess my swamp was more than they could handle and winter too!

Another plant that I used to grow in California was the Mexican Sage (salvia leucantha) for its spectacular fall blooms. Here, it is just getting started blooming. My plan was to contrast its beautiful purple blossoms with the multitudes of orange nasturtiums creeping about along the gravel walk. The show is quite wonderful but as soon as frost comes the Mexican sage will say Hasta la vista baby. Last year, in a major attempt to save them, I dug them up and repotted and trimmed them back and got most of them to survive over the long dark winter. This year, I will leave them in the ground a bit longer and if I get around to digging them up, so be it; otherwise, I will just enjoy the fall show as planned and buy new ones next year.

It is quite and enterprise moving all these wonderful plants into the house. First of all, they are too big to survive anything but a properly lit greenhouse. Not having one of those, I make due with my glassed in porch which is heated. I have to try and shape the plants down in size so that the available light will allow them to survive. Normally, I prune back to half the plant size and leave them outside to recover and debug then. I take all my elevated surfaces and move the plants on these. Normally this will get the bugs to leave the potted plants. Invariably some stay including spiders which annoy me to no end. After a week or so outside after they are pruned they start rebudding and are fairly bug free to be taken inside. In the warmth of the porch they will grow very slowly and some will even bloom over the winter.


Other plants are destined for the basement to go into dormancy. These I just lift to debug and let them dry out as much as possible. As soon as they are clean and dry I take them into a corner of the basement and wait until spring to bring these out. Here are some elephant ears and calla lilies which are big bulbs, corms or the like that just go dormant and stay put. I don't cut off the leaves as these will feed the bulb even as they are dying. Later, when totally dry I just remove the leaves and even stack the pots on top of one another.


As official protector to my Kois, I am always on the lookout for wildlife that might harm them. Since the passing of Taxi, they don't have their official guard dog and I have not brought myself to get another dog while unemployed. It is a terrible wasted opportunity as I could be training a new pet friend during all this time. I keep a have-a-heart-trap in the garden that seems to catch all kinds of strange predators. This big possum was not too happy to be caught, but he is now living in a not so neighboring Woods.

My porch, which during the summer is filled with furniture for entertaining, becomes a warehouse for most of my indoor plants. It is wonderful and filled to capacity with tropical jasmines, ginger, scented geraniums and lemon plants that will bloom and get me to survive the gloomy winter.


Here amongst the plants, I leave one chair and my sofa where I cuddle up under a blanket to read in a sort of a Victorian splendor. Funny, I never have liked much that is Victorian, but this aspect of a garden conservatory room is certainly a wonderful place to escape during the winter.

My last remaining chore is to dig up the Agave americana from the urn. Each year it gets bigger even though I cut off most flopped down leaves and then store it dry in a dark corner of the basement. Somehow because of its nature it survives beautifully. I give away at least 4 or 5 plantlets every fall that manage to grow during the season. Then I know that I am done in the garden for the fall.

National Parks

In 1965 my parents were on their third separation. We reassembled as a family in Florida in 1963 after exiting Cuba at different times. Chicago had not been the best choice for a tropical family to make a new life. My father, had left us in Chicago in the winter of 1964 and gone off to seek a better fortune in Los Angeles. After many a phone call my parents decided to forgive and try to forget and decided to give it another go. My mother and I boarded a Greyhound bus and traveled Route 66 to the Smoggy City in February of 1965.

That same June, as a sort of a family vacation and a make up honeymoon of sorts we traveled to our first National Park: Sequoia. We had managed a camping trip (if you want to call it that) to Lake Geneva Wisconsin on one of our two summers in Chicago. This was a total fiasco as we had never gone camping and were not equipped to do so. It is hard to imagine freezing in Wisconsin in the Summer; we did! With that memory in mind, my father had secured a very basic cabin near the main grove of Sequoias with heat, kerosene lamp lighting and a water pitcher and basin. It was marvelous. We loved camping!

On Moro Rock

More than marvelous, it was magical to be in this forest where these magnificent trees were bigger than anything any of us had ever seen. Here, located on the western facing slope of the California Sierra Nevada Mountains at an altitute of 6-8000 feet, they had been saved by the creation of this National Park. The sky was crystal clear. There were stars like no place I could remember. We visited all the groves of giant trees including the General Sherman tree, at the time, the largest and oldest living thing on the planet. We even, climbed three hundred some steps and visited a summit called Moro Rock. It was very different from the Morro Fortress in Havana harbor but we knew it was named after our Spanish heritage.

For four days, our lives became uncomplicated and my father’s drinking problem was somewhat under control. My parents enjoyed themselves and I was happy to share this great American experience that I have embraced since that magical summer in 1965.

PBS strutted out its new series on the National Parks: “a film by Ken Burns.” The episodes, however magnificent, were given to us in mega doses for six nights in a row last week. I hope you caught at least an episode. It is a shame that all that information was not left to simmer in your mind and accrue in appreciation as we became familiar with it over the span of a season. I would have gladly made an effort to see an hour of magnificent story telling, historical graphics and most of all, of some of the most beautiful landscape on the face of the planet.

Broadcast entertainment does appear to hinge on buying gadgets or services. I don’t have a TIVO or any recording devices because I don’t watch much programmed television anymore. I don’t even have cable which gets an odd raised eyebrow from friends who all seemed to be connected. There is not much to see in spite of the hundred of channels offered. PBS, the radio, a good book or a rented DVD do job for me. Now that we have digital TV, the National Parks program will undoubtedly be rerun hundreds of times as we now have three versions of WHYY, our PBS station, that needs to fill its programming schedule.

At Acadia National Park

I was 12 when I visited Sequoia with my parents. Over the years, I have camped and backpacked all over California’s mountains, shores and deserts and around the country in the National parks. There is nothing like sleeping out under the stars in places like the National Parks where you are assured an incomparable slice of nature. Years ago I camped in Acadia NP in Maine with my dog Taxi. She was supposed to guard us from wild animals, but she too, so enjoyed the camping adventure that she slept soundly while some wild animal broke into our cooler and ate all our fine German sausages and black forest ham! Happy trails to you.

Fall Garden Chores

garden path end of September

Every year the garden seems to grow larger and larger. Plants that were growing a few inches a year somehow accelerate the bigger they get. Don’t get me wrong there is nothing wrong here. This is how plants grow and eventually they slow down. The problem comes when someone with as much desire to fit every plant that he likes in a manner becoming a nice garden runs out of room and they all start growing normally into one another. The results are that you need to prune or eliminate some plants entirely.

In my California approach to life (live your life in private behind the biggest hedges you can grow) I created a walled world of plants. Most of it is deciduous so when winter comes you can readily look into my yard and I can look into others. This of course is not true either because in spite of the plants being deciduous (loose their leaves) the mass of branches and twigs form enough of a diaphanous drape between the yards to blur most of them. Back to what I was saying, so I walled in the garden with plants and surveyed the second floor windows of my neighbors to where additional plantings were needed to block their views into my garden. Eventually all kinds of deciduous and evergreen shrubs or trees were planted to take care of all suspect peep holes into my garden.

Don’t get me wrong I don’t do anything too out of the ordinary, but I like my garden private! I like to escape and read or feed the kois or not be bothered by anyone seeing me and wanting to start a conversation I may or not want to have. A dear old friend, Neil Dahlerup, from California days once told me the a story about his first house and the importance of privacy. He had purchased a little cottage in Laguna Beach. Here the houses were one next to the other and everyone lived behind their hedges in spite the fact that the hedges only hid you. Everyone could hear everything anyone was doing. Before he painted a wall or cleaned a carpet he went out and bought a series of hedge plants to make private an open terrace that faced the street. Of course, he did have all kinds of wild parties in the Jacuzzi he put in the terrace to which I was often privy to, but that is another story.

Pruned twice to bring to this height used to be higher that garage eve

I again digress from the point. So I put all these shrubs and trees that now need to be kept in shape. I had planted a Forsythia hedge between the garage and the garden. I let the hedge grow to about nine to ten feet. Each year, I had to climb a rickety ladder to trim the hedge a least twice during the season. Nothing to far up there, but I am not any younger and each time I would wobble more. So I have brought down the hedge to about 5 feet so I can prune standing on my own two feet. I started doing this in late summer and have just finished bringing it down as much as I can tolerate without opening the garden up too much. It took two major prunings and a period or recovery between them. If pruned all at once it would grow but less balanced. I intend the hedge to creep back up to six feet and hide all the woody cuts I have just created, then it will be perfect. I will be able to prune from the ground and Julia will not worry about finding me with a broken something one day!

Robinia grew out of my dwarf hostas

A second plant that has served me well is a volunteer Locust Tree (Robinia). A bird must have left the seen that has, in the last five years grown into a twenty plus foot three. It grew in an almost perfect spot. Well, almost, it grew in a beautiful patch of dwarf hostas but perfectly placed to block the afternoon sun and act as an umbrella to my outdoor table. Finally, it blocked the views of my neighbor’s second floor windows. I have since it started growing and nurturing another Styrax japonicum that is behind and is now almost 20 feet. It will soon spread its branches and create a wonderful tall wall that in spring will be covered with thousands of magical hanging white stars (meant to be seen from below). When the Styrax is finally the right size I will take out the Robinia and not worry about my constant pruning to keep it out of the gutters and growing too big.

About ten feet of robinia tops were removed

Robinia pruned back to umbrella size. Styrax is coming nicely just behind and to the left

All of this is just maintenance that needs to be done in order to keep the garden in shape and the private world, Private! I hope you don’t think it unfriendly. I really like my neighbors and get along with all of them. My neighbors on either side both have large yards filled with lawn and plantings and all their patio furniture, toys, bicycles, playground equipment, barbecues, sandboxes, abandoned plantings beds, ponds, composters, rain barrels, drainage pipes, tree swings and all their own adventures…do you get the reason why I may want a green wall?

Planetary Issues

longer shadows of approaching fall

As world leaders are meeting at the United Nations in New York City on world climate I wonder how we can manage a planet when we have so many different points of views on these issues? The idea that we have so many purposes in spite of our commonality struck me when thinking about the readers to this blog across the planet. We who read blogs have a certain level of affluence or access to computers to be able to see other points of views on subjects we share with one another. Yet, within the same countries we come from there are varying points of views and needs as to what gardening or survival might mean.

More and more we read or hear that water will be the next major world crisis that will consume our interest if it is not already affecting you directly. Price for water is expected to grow in cost everywhere. Where I live in the East Coast of the United States rain is plentiful. It is so much so, that flooding occurs more than drought. I jokingly always refer to our corner as a swamp. In spite of the abundant availability of water, I pay approximately $70.00 a month between water and sewer charges. This sum is not inconsequetial but I barely use any for gardening. I take for granted the fact that I have clean potable water coming out of the faucet. When I lived in California, rationing of water was beginning to take place because of the millions of people having to share a limited quantity of this resource. I have no idea how water is apportioned in other places in the planet. I suspect some places will be like me while in other places your water may not be metered or there may be limited access to it.

I have, in the past grown the odd tomato, eggplant and pepper plant. I tried growing apples. Now I only grow herbs. I found that food production opened the door to an array of bugs that I did not want fight. Whereas my garden was nearly bug free when in flower production, when I introduced food production there seemed to be an invitation to everything that could decimate both food and flower. I found that such food products were less expensive and tasteful when purchased in a store but sufficiently tasteful for me. I guess I am saying that I am not a farmer but recognize that many people use their gardens for food production. I have ultimate respect for farmers who produce our food and face great deal of challenges in doing so.

My garden measures approximately 150 by 50 feet (50 by 16.5 meters). The idea that I have a garden which is strictly decorative also strikes me as a luxury that comes from living in an industrialized rich nation. Although I am anything but rich in reality or by comparison to others in this country I am sure that when compared to many in the planet I would certainly appear as such.

I tell you all of this because I am rather interested in you. This blog has been viewed by people in every continent. I invite you to introduce yourselves and use this blog to exchange some commonality. In the times we are living, we have never been closer to one another through all of the advances of our technology. Let us find ways and share some stories.