Garbage Apples, Jam Trauma, and the Beige Poppy Crisis

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This week I summer-pruned a tree, made strawberry jam I’m not ready to talk about, and made my favourite food group; garlic scape pesto. Among other things, like Poppypalooza.

Table of Contents

🎯 I’m Officially Qualified to Prune a Stranger’s Tree. (But I won’t.)

After a decade of shaping this thing, I can finally say I understand it. I get the structure. I can see it. If you asked me to come help prune your apple tree, I could. I won’t. But I could.

For about two hours post-prune, the trees look like something from a historical French orchard. Very elegant. Then the cloches go on the apples and it immediately veers into a suburban art installation inspired by a garbage strike.

The tree has apple rust. I’ve never had to deal with it before, and I’m mostly ignoring it, which is a classic first step in all effective pest management strategies. I assume it's punishment for becoming too confident.

🌿 The Pesto That Launched a Thousand Dinners

This week I harvested my garlic scapes and made three batches of pesto. I use it all year on pasta, on pizza, or eaten straight off a spoon while standing in front of the fridge like a raccoon.

I have a recipe for pesto pasta and one for pesto pizza if you want to see what happens when a green sauce becomes the answer to dinner 62 times a year.

🍓 Strawberry Jam (and a Story I’m Emotionally Unready to Tell)

Also this week: strawberry jam. A tiny batch. A half batch of my strawberry jam recipe which ended up being 4 jam jars. The story behind the jam is too long to tell here, but it involves a situation and someone laugh-gagging behind a compost pile. Which later became crying in a parking lot. I’ll get into it later, once I’ve emotionally recovered.

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Until then, I’m eating the jam the only way I really ever do — in mini jam jars with Greek yogurt and something crunchy on top. One tub of yogurt + ½ jar of jam = ten snacks or desserts.

My other dessert of choice is a spray can of whipped cream dispensed directly into my mouth.

The Poppy Incident

I transplanted three from the community garden a month ago, which is dumb because poppies hate moving. But I did it anyway, and two of them faked their own deaths for a few days, then revived. Like tiny botanical soap opera stars.

They’re blooming now, which is a shocker, but they're white flowers. White is a dominant gene in these poppies so if they cross pollinate (and they do) you end up with mostly white poppies. :/ A garden bed full of beige slacks.

But out at the community garden, two poppies bloomed in colours that made me stop and swear. One was coral. The other was mauve, almost brown. These are the unicorns. I’ve been trying to hand-pollinate them, hoping to collect seeds that might actually produce something other than more beige slacks.