I hope you all are enjoying a great and blessed Easter season. Clayton and I decorated our house with some paper decorations, but our walls don't like tape, so that was short lived. I know a lot of you just gasped when you heard "walls" and "tape" in the same sentence. Our walls like it so little, the tape didn't even take paint away. It just fell down. Fortunately for me, my flower arrangement didn't require tape, and the flowers I chose at the grocery store are blooming and bringing color to my kitchen.
Yesterday, we got up and I made blueberry muffins while we looked for the Easter baskets we hid for each other. Next, we made garlic-cheddar biscuits, potato pancakes, chicken wing dip, and rice crispy treats in plastic eggs. Then we went to our friends' house with all this food and added to their feast of ham, sweet potatoes, corn casserole, and lemon bars. That was just an all together pleasant, delicious afternoon.
While finding my kitchen underneath all the dishes yesterday's festivities produced, the doorbell rang. When I answered it, I found a package sent by Clayton's mother. It was a box full of Easter blessings and goodies! The bundle with my name on it contained some awesome gardening tools from Fiskar, as well as several packets of Zinnias. This reminded me to look up something I've been wondering about for about a week now: Does rhubarb grow in North Carolina? Every book on Southern cooking I've ever read has never said anything about rhubarb, and it made me concerned. The news has been saying strawberries should be ready very soon now, and I want to make strawberry rhubarb pie! Clayton says pie should be strawberry or rhubarb, but not both. However, he is wrong.
So after a few minutes of Googling and reading, here is what I found. Anecdotal evidence that rhubarb hates heat and only works as an annual, and a five year old newsletter from the North Carolina Cooperative Extension, explaining how to carefully cultivate rhubarb as a perennial, but even they say that it can be harvested for about "six weeks in the spring," which is over before strawberries are typically ready. According to the aforementioned anecdotal evidence, even this small window is only possible to achieve in the mountains of western North Carolina, where the climate is cooler and less humid than here on the coast. Oh well, I suppose I shall have to find other plants to grow in our gardens. If anyone has any suggestions for plants that thrive in this climate, I would love to hear them.
Thanks for dropping in. Check back soon for pictures from Easter.
Yesterday, we got up and I made blueberry muffins while we looked for the Easter baskets we hid for each other. Next, we made garlic-cheddar biscuits, potato pancakes, chicken wing dip, and rice crispy treats in plastic eggs. Then we went to our friends' house with all this food and added to their feast of ham, sweet potatoes, corn casserole, and lemon bars. That was just an all together pleasant, delicious afternoon.
While finding my kitchen underneath all the dishes yesterday's festivities produced, the doorbell rang. When I answered it, I found a package sent by Clayton's mother. It was a box full of Easter blessings and goodies! The bundle with my name on it contained some awesome gardening tools from Fiskar, as well as several packets of Zinnias. This reminded me to look up something I've been wondering about for about a week now: Does rhubarb grow in North Carolina? Every book on Southern cooking I've ever read has never said anything about rhubarb, and it made me concerned. The news has been saying strawberries should be ready very soon now, and I want to make strawberry rhubarb pie! Clayton says pie should be strawberry or rhubarb, but not both. However, he is wrong.
So after a few minutes of Googling and reading, here is what I found. Anecdotal evidence that rhubarb hates heat and only works as an annual, and a five year old newsletter from the North Carolina Cooperative Extension, explaining how to carefully cultivate rhubarb as a perennial, but even they say that it can be harvested for about "six weeks in the spring," which is over before strawberries are typically ready. According to the aforementioned anecdotal evidence, even this small window is only possible to achieve in the mountains of western North Carolina, where the climate is cooler and less humid than here on the coast. Oh well, I suppose I shall have to find other plants to grow in our gardens. If anyone has any suggestions for plants that thrive in this climate, I would love to hear them.
Thanks for dropping in. Check back soon for pictures from Easter.