Studio day and bamboo planting on the agenda

I got a pretty full studio day yesterday and just have one large bowl to slip and decorate, then I'll throw a few more small pots with a white stoneware which I had to wet down a bit yesterday. All the Phoenix pots are slipped with Randy's flashing slip and these white stoneware pots will be for Lindas Yellow, which is nice and bright on this body; but a bit mudddy on the Phoenix.

At some point today, if there's a bit of clearing of the weather, I need to plant a bamboo (maybe two if the other one arrives). Most bamboos don't like clay soil, which is mainly what I've found almost every time I've put a shovel in the ground; but I have found two spots with what some locals call sugary soil, and one of them is in a fairly steep slope adjacent to some of my terraced vegetable beds. In this climate, the bamboo won't be as tall as it would be in a much warmer zone; and at the ten foot height, which is what it's advertised to be in this zone, I don't expect it to interfere with my vegetable growing.

Dinner is leftovers so I'll have plenty of time for studio with a short break to plant the bamboo. It feels good to be over this flu bug and back to work!

Mushroom Gougere

Here's the Mushroom gougere I made for dinner last night. It's basically a choux pastry with gruyere forming an outside ring, with sauteed mushrooms, onion, shredded carrot, etc. in a curried cream sauce, topped with almond slices, in the center - a rich and delicious, vegetarian dish.

Yesterday morning, Ron Slagle came over and he and Jim worked very hard to plant my new bamboo. I felt bad that it took so long, since I assumed it would be an easy dig because we were planting it where another tree young, small, tree had died; but that clay soil made for hard digging even after all the rain. I was able to cut off one of the new shoots for Ron to add to his bamboo collection. There were two tired men after that job. I definitely owe Ron a nice dinner for that!

Ron said it looked like the persimmon we dug out might still have some life in the roots, so I quickly got that potted in a large bucket. It did well for two years and I have no idea what happened over the winter; but it would sure be nice to have it come back to life next spring.

Instead of going to the studio, I tagged along with Jim for lunch at the golf course, followed by a Walmart run. On the way back I stopped at a friends house to pick up embroidery backing fabric that I'm going to use to create diffusion panels to help with my photography setup. She has a lot of bamboo she wants to get rid of and when I arrived she had two workers there cutting it down. They assured me that I could just take some of the cut pieces, stick them in the ground, keep them well watered, they would root. So when we got home I got the pieces trimmed and pushed them into a pile of leftover sandy top soil and got it well watered. This worked in Florida for one of my neighbors, so I hope these will root here, although I have no idea how long it will take.

By the time all this planting was done, I was hurting a lot and still had dinner to cook; and the hurting continues this morning, so I'm going to take it real easy till after lunch and if I feel up to it, I'll get an hour or two in the studio doing non muscle straining chores. Otherwise I'll just work on one of my other projects till our Friday porch sitting with our friends Laura and Jim at their place.