2017- DECEMBER HOLIDIVA DAY

This post, 2017 – December Holidiva Day -  was written by Diva Glinda/AKA Annie in Austin for the Divas of the Dirt blog.

We Divas of the Dirt sneaked that last garden day into the 2017 schedule in the nick of time. Just a few days later the pleasant gardening weather was gone and the arrival of a cold front, some rain, a touch of frost and a dusting of snow let us know that it really was December. We were all in the mood to go to Buffy’s house for the annual Holidiva Day lunch and the gift-stealing game.

When I arrived hostess Buffy was cooking and Sophia was constructing an enormous salad. Annie, Buffy and Mindy went into the dining room to set the table – Mindy showed off her origami skills by making the napkins into Birds-of-Paradise. Fun!

 The early afternoon sun cast shadows over the room, adding a bit of magic.

We love the traditional Poinsettia cocktails – another Mindy speciality. (Yes, I said speciality instead of specialty… have I watched too much Brit TV of late?)

 Along with Poinsettias Buffy had eggnog and wine. Diva Annie and hostess Buffy raised a toast to friendship. They’ve been part of this group for almost 20 years.

The appetizers this year were brought by me, Glinda. I made a cold crab dip and a hot spinach-artichoke dip with assorted crackers.

We had our favorite cocktails, stuff to munch, and good friends to share them with – Karla, Glinda and Annie are happy to be here. [photo by Diva Mattie]

 Mindy shared hugs with visiting pup Barbie. [photo by Diva Mattie]

 Buffy, Mindy, Annie, Karla, Mattie, Sophia, Glinda and Sugar were all present and ready for lunch. What was on the menu for 2017?

 Sophia likes salads that surprise – in addition to expected salad ingredients like small tomatoes, red onions, croutons and lovely greens this huge bowl had olives, hearts of palm and Ciliegine – those perfect little cherry-sized balls of fresh mozzarella.

 Buffy’s elegant choice of entrée was greeted with delight – Prime Rib Roast. I didn’t write it down, but am pretty sure there was horseradish sauce.

Buffy decided the way to add puffy goodness to Prime Rib would be individual Yorkshire Puddings.

Mattie found a long, slow recipe from Ree Drummond of the Pioneer Woman. Look at these Burgundy Mushrooms, with red wine and dill seed. They cooked for more than nine hours.

Mindy loves roasted vegetables – she made Special Roasted Brussels Sprouts with Balsamic vinegar. 

Annie also used a recipe from Ree Drummond of the Pioneer Woman – yummy Hasselback potatoes.

Karla turned to a recipe from Juniper Hills Farm in Dripping Springs to make Honey Roasted Carrots with walnuts, raisins and mint. 

After lunch, Buffy’s son snapped this photo of the Divas of the Dirt. Thank you!

Mattie knew that pups like special lunches, too. She shared little bits of the prime rib with her dog Barbie, Buffy’s Fredric and the chihuahua sisters Lynda & Luci.

 Watching the dogs cavort with Mattie was great post-lunch entertainment!

 The gifts under the tree were ready for the stealing game.

But first things first – we’d been looking at that sparkly winter-scene cake for a loooong time! Sugar had put together layers of gingerbread cake and cream cheese frosting, topped it with a small gingerbread house and then arranged trees made of inverted rosemary, all presented on a base that looked like a slice of tree trunk… very special.

Look at those layers of gingerbready goodness.

We drew numbers from a bowl and Mattie had first choice. She unwrapped a heavy cast metal figure of a Painted Bunting brought by Buffy.

Mindy chose a burlap bag brought by Mattie and found another bird-themed gift… a metal hummingbird sculpture. (Sorry it’s so hard to see against the dark tree.)

Sophia unveiled an artistic gift brought by Annie – a metal peacock and plant peg. A third metal bird? Is this a theme?

Mattie liked the bunting statue but she didn’t get to keep it… Glinda’s turn was next and she stole the bird.

Since her original choice had been swiped, Mattie went for a new choice – it turned out to be a Blue Butterfly coir mat brought by Glinda.

See that bag Annie is holding in the photo? She thought the hummingbird sculpture was just her style and on the next turn she swiped the hummingbird from Mindy.

With the hummingbird gone, Mindy got a new turn – she unwrapped a set of extremely decorative but rather bossy letters on sticks from Sugar.

Annie didn’t hold onto the swag-bag for too long. Sugar’s turn was next so she restole the hummingbird and with the rules in her favor, got to keep it.

On her next try Annie unwrapped a beautiful ceramic basket brought by Mindy. It also looks like Annie’s style, doesn’t it?

Karla opened a gift from Sophia – a beautiful glass globe. Don’t you love the way the light in the room makes Karla look like a fortune teller looking into a crystal ball?

Finally our hostess Buffy had her turn. (Whenever Buffy sits down she immediately has a lapful of chihuahuas.) She unwrapped a very cool metal hoop-shaped mobile from Karla.

The year ahead would be challenging but our Holidiva Day was pretty perfect. As our musician friend Bob says – Peace and Love, everyone!

This post, 2017 – December Holidiva Day -  was written by Diva Glinda/AKA Annie in Austin for the Divas of the Dirt blog.

2017 – MAY and JUNE, SOPHIA and GLINDA

This post, 2017 – May and June, Sophia and Glinda, was written by Annie in Austin for the Divas of the Dirt blog.

2017 was fixing to be a very unpredictable year. 

SOPHIA

May was another rain-out. Sophia thought 80% chances were so high that she cancelled her planned day. We were not happy – partly because we really wanted to help Sophia with her garden and partly because she serves such wonderful lunches and desserts!

The rain did materialize and boy, did we need it.

At least there was a new rescue kitten at Sophia’s house to console her for the lost meeting.

Mindy scored some rescue plants that had been torn out for new landscaping. This beauty is a RickRack orchid.

GLINDA

Back in January the Divas set mid-June as the date for Glinda’s day. Luckily for Glinda the weather was warm but dry. The back garden inside the fence looked pretty good.

The beds were tended and it was full of birds and flowers...

..but the front yard really needed help. There aren’t any Before photos of the project because Glinda didn’t like working up there. The trees were okay and the lawn was mown but the beds were a mess! The mutabilis rose had frozen back hard but Glinda wanted to clean it up and give it a chance. The hummingbird acanthus and salvia in the parkway were good for the birds but the weeds made it an eyesore for humans. The woodland area had flowers but you could hardly see them.

DivaAnnie arrived first, then Sophia, Karla and Mattie (with tail-wagging Barbie) and Buffy a little later. The Divas of the Dirt set to work and made everything better – the lawn bags were filling up!

Buffy set to work with the hedge clippers, taming the boxwoods.

The aging Arizona Ash provided dappled shade for the workers. No one knew this would be the tree’s last summer. A couple of months later Hurricane Harvey cracked off many limbs, revealing rot. The tree had became too dangerous to keep.

The front bed looked a lot better – what was left of the rose would have to decide whether to live or die. Mulching would come later.

The woodland area was pretty once more, with dead sticks and sapling trees gone and Malvaviscus/Wax mallow blooming for the hummingbirds.

 

Time for lunch! Glinda used her meeting as a chance to try out La Fleur flower shop where she found gorgeous Hydrangeas. But Glinda’s menu had nothing fancy – it was an indoor picnic. Chips and Guacamole, Cranberry Chicken salad, cheeses and Black Forest ham on crossants and Gluten-free bread, Sweet Kale salad with lemon poppyseed dressing, tomatoes, Hibiscus-Mint tea and coffee.

For dessert there were raspberry/chocolate cookies and blueberry shortcake on gluten-free sponge cake with whipped cream.

The mulched front border looked good and so did the parkway.

the Boxwood hedge looked not only good – it looked respectable.

Just one pair of left-behind garden shoes gave a clue who had worked the magic.

The next day Karla sent a photo of her butterfly border – Happy Summer! 

This post, 2017 – May and June, Sophia and Glinda, was written by Annie in Austin for the Divas of the Dirt blog. 

2016, May 14 - Sophia’s Garden Day

2016, May 14 - Sophia’s Garden Day was written by Annie in Austin/Diva Glinda for the Divas of the Dirt Blog

With the ground softened by rain a few days earlier, six Divas of the Dirt met at Sophia’s house, hoping to get some weeding, clipping and planting done for our friend. Sugar and Mattie were both out of town with family.

Assorted health issues meant our group was kind of wobbly (Buffy was using a cane after leg surgery) but we’d do our best.

 

Sophia’s table was festive but not fussy… ready for a wonderful meal. Since this was Sophia – even breakfast had an appetizer. Apple strudel appeared while she worked on the main breakfast recipe.

The recipe was “Nonna’s Eggs”, a special dish that had been handed down from Sophia’s grandmother. Eggs were separated and the egg whites beaten into peaks. The whites were piled onto toast arranged on a baking sheet, then a little hollow was made in the center so a yolk could be slipped in. After a sprinkle of salt and pepper, they were baked in the oven.

Simple ingredients somehow combined into unexpected textures with great flavor.

Strawberries, blueberries, grapes and bananas made a delicious salad.

Here is the fruit salad, fried potatoes and Nonna’s Eggs – oops – didn’t get a photo of the chicken breakfast sausage.

 Out in the front garden we noticed the native Inland Sea Oats were doing extremely well. Sophia’s Shell Ginger/Alpinia zerumbet 'Variegata' looked bouncy, too. Obviously she had remembered to bring it into shelter last winter.

Eight months previously the Divas had helped Sophia and Roger with a sod-laying project. The replaced lawn looks as if it has settled in well.

Under the large Cedar Elms the Cast Iron Plant reigns. In some years it needs a lot of snipping by Divas, but it looked pretty good today.

The parkway did need Diva help – it was full of grassy weeds and cedar elm seedlings, and some plants had bailed from too much rain.

We Divas of the Dirt like to share so Annie brought Salvia ‘Black & Blue’, Obedient plant/ Physostegia virgiania and some fall aster AKA Symphyotrichum oblongifolium. I brought the yellow-flowering Salvia madrensis. Karla decided that we could use more of that useful fall aster and zipped over to her house to dig more. 

Things moved along pretty well – that’s fall aster wrapped in newspaper, ready to plant. We got everything going pretty well.

The bed along the driveway need some weeding too –but who even sees weeds when a beautiful small native tree like Golden Leadball Tree is in bloom? ( Call it Leucaena retusa if you want to be precise.) 

Drizzle started up and we ignored it at first, but a crack of thunder with lightning sent us inside for a while.

Not long after we went back out there was a surprise. As if hosting a garden day was not exciting enough,  that afternoon was also New Pre-Owned Car day for Roger & Sophia –  this gleaming auto arrived like a kiss of sunshine. Wow! It was gorgeous.

The rain held off long enough for us to weed and clip the front groundcovers area but we didn’t get to finish the job. Heavy rain drove us back into the house in mid-afternoon. (Total rain for this weekend “event” was about 4 inches.)

Before quitting, Mindy insisted on making sure the parkway and front edge of the main yard got mulched.

Sophia served a feast for our late lunch: Salad of mini kale, spinach and chard with Feta cheese, grape tomatoes and artichoke hearts, Greek olives and ginger dressing.

Sophia let Costco make the Chicken Alfredo  -  I don’t want to sound like an ad, but it was really good! 

The dessert was also a Costco treat – have you ever seen such an enormous Cherry Pie?

We hadn’t really done enough garden work to deserve those lovely meals, but that is the chance we take in Central Texas. Unpredictable weather is always lurking, ready to sneak in and spoil the most well-made plans.

2016, May 14 - Sophia’s Garden Day was written by Annie in Austin/Diva Glinda for the Divas of the Dirt Blog