leder legends

It is finally a pleasant evening.  The heat is down and so is the humidity.   I've been busy as well- making birthday cakes is rather more stressful than I realized. I slept really well  last night. Haha. I did have plans to work in the yard today but that did not happen. I did go grocery shopping and cooked a great dinner. Good enough! I just took a walk around the backyard and was surprised that things are not as ugly out there as I thought they would be.  Four daylilies are reblooming.   The obedient plant, phlox, turtlehead, black eyed susans, guara, hostas and shasta daisies are all showing off!   A hardy begonia is huge and in bloom.  There are 3 daylilies that are not done yet. I also found a cute lily with one small bloom. I thought it might be a toad lily but it’s a blackberry lily. The hibiscuses are gorgeous! A lot of things really need a good trim and that will happen Monday. I guess the August uglies are not so u...

 Three weeks ago today I mailed a letter to Anchorage, Alaska. It was a birthday card that had exactly two weeks to get there. I did not anticipate a problem with this lead time because a parcel has always arrived within three to four DAYS!  Well two weeks came and went. No letter arrived. So disappointing for the birthday girl!  The following Monday I put a box together and put it in the mail.  The parcel arrived on Thursday afternoon! Hooray!  She got her birthday card (and a few other things of course- cookies, dominos, socks and swim goggles) and all was well, We just assumed the card had gotten lost in the mail! WRONG!! It arrived today- Saturday- exactly three weeks after I mailed it! Where it has been all this time is a mystery and will forever remain so!

  Tutti-frutti cake! One from a mix and one from scratch!  Easy enough, right?  Mom was insistent on butter cream! Easy enough!  Decorating?? Definitely a challenge! The cake was good. The filling was delicious but there was not enough of it! The buttercream was the best I’ve ever had! (Molly Yeh recipe). I tried to make fondant but that was a disaster so I headed to the store. The store bought fondant was fairly easy to work with and  tasted okay. The fondant looked great but I made the decorations too large and had some re-dos! A difficult experience but it was fun and I learned a lot! The rectangular cake is gone...it was the one made from a box! It was well appreciated by all. The birthday boy wanted the magic yellow box so that’s what he got! Why would you want a corner piece so it could be cut neatly! I need to learn how to cut through fondant! For the filling search for the Costco  cake filling hack! Mix a vanilla pudding package with 1/2 cup of...

 It’s August and the garden is pretty much full grown! This when I make plans-to cut back, move, get rid of , add color etc. but it’s also the time I run out of steam. So I usually make notes, take pictures etc and just enjoy what there is because soon enough the winter frost will come and I can do some or all of that in the spring... at least that is what I tell myself! Last Saturday the granddaughter came to help and we dug out a bed of lamium and put in some of the Hostas that needed to be cut back.  We also cleaned the area on the west side of the shed. (The back is still on the wish list)  Today, I hired a neighbor boy and we moved some plants, cut back the huge crocosmia, pulled the grass at the bottom of the deer fence and best of all moved some large square pavers into semblance of a path. Then we got all of the junk into my car so I could take it to the dump.  2 and a half hours later we stopped...after we had worked ourselves up into a good, hot, sticky, sw...

While   Michigan has much farmland, it also has superb orchards! The ones I like are apples, sour cherries and blueberries! I really love blueberries! My friend and I went to find a u-pick farm last week... getting there was an adventure! The day was so beautiful- sunny, breezy and not too warm. We picked for just over an hour and I came home with 9 lbs.  I put most of them on cookie sheets and into the freezer so I could bag them. Eleven pounds of berries in buckets doesn’t look like a lot  but on cookie sheets it looks like a good haul! We ate plenty as well!   After eating all the fresh berries and then bagging up the frozen ones, I’ve decided that I need to go and pick some more.  So delicious!!  

While the  garden has produced an amazing abundance of blooms this July, August has its own charm.    The latest blooms are phlox and rudbeckia (black eye susans) .  Both are such large groupings that I need to cut them back a lot. Also the Shasta daisies are big and beautiful.    Last year I let the cleome go to seed and spread those seeds randomly around the yard.  There are lots of bright pink blossoms everywhere.  They smell a bit like weed and have the same leaf but the experts say they are not related! I hope they are right because it does look like I’m growing!! I do enjoy seeing those pink blooms around the yard but this is a bit too much.  I'll need to be more judicious this year. The joe pie weed is blooming too but it’s pretty muted.  The bees like it.