Tag: recycling

Where is my mind?

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I was in the kitchen and went to grab an avocado from the fruit basket only to encountered a bumble bee (these things happen when your kitchen is outside). Then a few minutes later I went up to the road to cut a sprig of rosemary and saw honeybees in amongst its purple flowers. “What’s going on,” I thought, “have I been asleep?” The weather is changing and everything around me is waking up – I’m just a few steps behind. I resolved to spend the rest of the day being a little more observant/productive than usual, and this is what I came up with:

eggs

I love the colors of eggs. I’ve decided that if I ever paint the walls somewhere, I will just use the colors of different eggshells and possibly the color of good butter from a grass fed cow, too. That top right egg is the very first egg from one of our Copper Maran hens – we hatched those chicks last summer. What a lovely, rich chocolate brown! I am still waiting on the Ameraucanas, hatched at the same time,  who will lay bluish eggs – another lovely wall color…

daphne

This is a box of Daphne odora Aurea-marginata (a.k.a. variegated daphne) cuttings. As you can see, they are flowering and the smell is heavenly. You don’t even have to stick your head in that box to smell it — the whole greenhouse is deliciously scented. That would be enough to make these special, but there is a story behind these particular cuttings.

Outside my aunt and uncle’s house in Portland OR, there is a variegated daphne. It’s right in front of the porch and it’s huge. When my aunt died way back in 1998, we started to  flap ever so slightly about the daphne. Would it survive? My aunt had been the gardener, after all. But the daphne proved that it could take care of itself, as did the cosmos that sprung up along the side of the house. Other plants didn’t fare so well, but my uncle gradually took over the back yard and grew Chinese chives and tomatoes every year. daphne1917

That’s the daphne behind me, to the left. Incidentally, that photo was taken in 1980 when I was 5. It was the year of my first unaccompanied  trips on an airplane (although I did have a traveling companion in Blue Bunny, also pictured above). I flew from NY to Portland and back – a not insignificant 5 1/2 hours of air time. Back then, your parents could come right on to the plane with you to get you settled in, which seems hard to imagine now. I asked my mom how she didn’t completely freak out just putting me on a plane and she shrugged and said, “Your father said you’d be fine.” And I was, of course. I mention it because it looks like this year might be Baki’s first solo trip – from NY to Istanbul, no less. I’m not sure how I feel about it just yet, but Baki can’t wait. I tried to break it to him gently, but he was whooping it up when I told him. But I digress…

When my uncle died, the flapping over the daphne began in earnest. My mother had gone out to visit him a few years back and brought a cutting, but it struggled and didn’t make it. The house was going to be sold, and I hated the thought of losing our connection to that daphne. So my mother appealed to my cousin Pamela to send some cuttings to her in NY, and she received a package of them, each with its own little capsule of water attached. My cousin Elaine has some of them, and the rest my mom brought out to Turkey and that is what you see in that box. So that smell is a sweet one, indeed, and for more reasons than one.

veg bed

And lastly, it is the time of year when I haul out my early spring allies — the plastic bottle cloches. I’ve got lettuce and bok choy under those ones. On the periphery of the bed there are shallots and garlic. This is my new method of planting alliums — I’ve got them dotted along the edges of all the beds. I thought it might be a bug deterrent. We’ll see how that goes.

Well, that feels a little better. I’ve got my ears to the ground at last, and it’s humming with activity. It makes me buzz with excitement a little myself.

A cola bottle that only a mother could love

On By Garden CorrespondentIn Uncategorized6 Comments

Whenever I hang out with my mother, she makes me feel as if I am the funniest person in the world because she laughs like crazy at all of my jokes. (I learned long ago not to expect this type of response from anyone else in the world.) When I was little, I asked her who the best artist in the whole world was, and she told me I was. Little megalomaniac that I was, I believed her.
My mom is a fount of unreserved enthusiasm for my every pursuit. She is the one that people are talking about when they say only a mother could love something/someone. So it came as no surprise that my mom flipped over my oil bottles.

Yes, it’s our old friend the cola bottles. This is my solution to the drippy bottle of oil problem. I buy oil in big 5 litre cans, and they are unwieldy to say the least, so I decant them into cola bottles and then poke a hole into the cap. I use a screw for this, or a hot skewer, depending on how I feel about fumes that day. The cola bottles are nice and squishy, so it is really easy to just squirt oil into a pan and there is no dripping — they just suck back in when you let go of them. Perfect oil dispensers. Now, I won’t be upset if you are not as excited about this as my mom was, you understand. Here’s a blurry look at that hole:

One of the best things about my mom, though, is that I can talk to her about anything. When I say anything, I mean I can call her to tell her about a fried egg that I just ate. That is one of the things that makes people really special, I think — the things that you can share with them. I miss my dad every time I read a book and I wish I could just sit and talk to him about it. And of course, the boys are so remarkable, I wish I could share them with him, too. I think that it is what is so lonely-making after someone dies — you have to try and hold up both ends of the conversation by yourself.
Still, it is best not to let people turn into flawless saints once they are gone. So, on the topic of cola bottles again, let me state for the record that my father taught Baki to say “Coca Cola.” I was adamant that Baki not have any sugar for as long as possible, and was able to fend off both sides of the family for exactly two years, and my father was quite open about how joyless he found the whole enterprise. It didn’t do much good in the long run, I have to say — Baki is an absolute maniac for sugar (then again, so am I). Anyway, shortly after he turned two, we were at the dinner table at my parents’ house in Istanbul and my father turned to Baki and pointed to his glass of cola and said to him, “this is Coca Cola. Can you say that? Coca. Cola.” I can’t remember if he gave Baki some or not, but he did it just to get me riled. I recall that he was very pleased with himself, and I was massively put out. It makes me smile to think of it now, though.

cola bottles and the tops they wear

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Out by us in Ulupinar, no one would ever dream of throwing away a cola bottle. Be it 1 liter, 500 ml or 2.5 liters, these handy bottles are used again and again. They don’t leak, so they are invaluable receptacles for fresh milk, diesel, home made pomegranate or grape syrup, and as I have discovered, great for watering.

This is the time of year when we peer at little pots of paper waiting for seeds to germinate. The paper pot, folded out of newspaper, is a wonderful thing. It’s cheap and easy to make, and pretty much any seed can be started in it. One thing that you have to be especially watchful of, though, is that they not dry out. Watering tiny seedlings sometimes no thicker than an eyelash can be nerve wracking, and is best done with a fine shower of water.

I used to have a rose for my watering can, but it was detachable, so naturally it got lost. Then I came across a couple of solutions that can be used along with the venerable cola bottle.

The first is a bottle top that screws on to the cola bottle. I got this from the Thompson & Morgan website when they were giving them away to anyone sufficiently spendy (I have my moments). It is a little fragile, though — I got four of them, and this is the only survivor. Still, it works really well, and it is serving us in the Yellow House as our seed sowing waterer.

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In the apartment in Antalya, I am starting tomatoes, peppers, eggplants and cucumber seeds in black bags. It is warmer here, since we have heat, and I am using bags so that I can grow them in the bags for a few weeks without worrying about them getting too cramped by the time I can plant them out. I have a little sprinkler cap that I got at years back. It is intended for sprinkling water on your ironing. I don’t iron, so I can’t say whether it works well for that or not, but it makes a great waterer when paired with a cola bottle, and since it’s a cork you could just stuff it into any old bottle.

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As usual, though, the best answer was staring me in the face. There’s nothing wrong with the bottle cap on the bottle itself. Here’s one that Ali burned holes in with a hot needle (a job best performed in open air, or at least with open window).

It works marvelously. Cola may be bad for you, but cola bottles are the gardener’s friend!