Allergies, Be Damned!

The smell of lilacs is like the nectar of the gods. The sad thing is, it only lasts about a week. So, what is one to do?

Well, in my case, I take a trip to Madison's Arboretum and stick my face in blooming lilacs for about an hour and a half. By the time I'm done, I've gotten my lilac fix (and I've sneezed my head off) and don't feel quite as bad when the blooms start to brown and drop.

So, let's start with the Arboretum (lovingly referred to as The Arb). The University of Wisconsin Arboretum is actually a research facility - acres and acres of land - gardens and prairies - that's used for environmental and ecological study. Their mission is to conserve and restore Arboretum lands, advance restoration ecology, and foster the land ethic." And, to the delight of thousands of people, it's open to the public for all manner of fun. The history of the Arb is fascinating and it's wonderful to know that all this gorgeous land (and water!) in the middle of our city will be preserved for the foreseeable future.

My all-time favorite part of the Arb is the lilac grove. There are, quite literally, hundreds of varieties of lilacs. Large flowered, small flowered, double-flowered, trees, bushes, sweet smelling, spicy smelling, and even one that smells slightly of feet. Adjacent to the lilac grove is the cherry and apple grove so it's easy enough to wander from the heady scent of lilac over to the blooming trees for a bit of a palate cleanser. I love that the cherry and apple trees bloom concurrent with the lilacs. It makes the trip doubly fun. 

Here, in pictures, is a summary of my trip to the Arb last Friday. We had a stunningly gorgeous late afternoon promenade and stuck our faces in every single lilac bloom. Halfway through I started sneezing but, as the title suggests, allergies be damned - I was going to get my fill!

Enjoy!

My friend didn't sneeze as much as me.

Blue skies and sun!

These are the tags on the trees - in case you want to identify the variety.

Look at the crazy curl on these flower petals!

Entering the apple & cherry tree grove.

Then we wandered into the maple grove.

This Norway Maple was one of the biggest trees I've ever seen.

Wildflowers by the visitor's center.

Bounce (but only if you're 21+)

Wisconsin has a lot of proud traditions - most surrounding food and drink (and sports). Some are
obvious, like the Green Bay Packers. Some are lesser known outside of the Midwest, like Friday Fish Fry and brandy Old Fashioneds  sweet. Some are nearly unknown, unless you live in Wisconsin, like Cherry Bounce.




Wikipedia has a tiny entry on Cherry Bounce, which doesn't allude to the Midwestern custom at all.

Cherry Bounce is a liqueur made by infusing brandy with cherries and sugar. Some recipes will use rum, whiskey or vodka instead of brandy.

The English hamlet of Frithsden claims to have originated the Cherry Bounce.

A lane leading off the Old High Street in nearby Hemel Hempstead is named Cherry Bounce and is shown having had this name in maps dating back to the early 19th century.

That's the whole thing...

On this side of the pond, Martha Washington actually had a recipe for Cherry Bounce (which can be found online) and legend has it that George packed a canteen of it for a trip west across the Allegheny Mountains in September 1784.

With the trend in craft cocktails and the resurrection of old, classic drink recipes, Cherry Bounce is making a national comeback of sorts. A Google search yields a lot of recipes from popular and trusted sources like The Beekman Boys, Epicurious, Imbibe Magazine, Cooks.com and more. However, these recipes are a lot fancier than a traditional Wisconsin Bounce. They call for spicing the cherries with things like cinnamon, nutmeg, and clove. They also add a step that Wisconsin recipes don't bother with - macerating the cherries for a period of time before adding the alcohol.

The Wisconsin recipe is simple and calls for a total of four ingredients: tart cherries, sugar, alcohol, and time.

Tart cherries. In our state, there's yet another thing we're mighty proud of - Door County cherries (tm). Yeah... they're probably not REALLY trademarked but they should be. For truly traditional Wisconsin Bounce, Door County Montmorency pie cherries are the ones you want. Fortunately, my backyard cherry tree has Montmorencys on it and it was VERY prolific this year.

Sugar. Get a lot. Cherry Bounce is a liqueur - very thick and syrupy.

Alcohol. Like all Wisconsin cocktails, brandy is the preferred and traditional alcohol for Bounce. I'm not sure what the Wisconsin fascination is with brandy... it's too sweet for me. This is one place where the east-coaster in me takes over and I make my Bounce with bourbon. I've also seen it made with rum.

Time. So, the rule is that you put up your Cherry Bounce in early July when the Door County cherries come ripe and you let it sit until Christmas. If you're smart, you save some cherries in the freezer and put up a new batch of Bounce just before Christmas so that you have some in the early summer just before the Door County harvest happens.

Now, how you put your Bounce together is up for debate. Ask 10 Wisconsinites and you'll get 10 variations (within a small range of variables). Last year, I put up Bounce using unpitted sweet cherries because that's what I had too many of. I used bourbon and I cut the sugar back a bit. The resulting Bounce was good but not great. It wasn't enough of a liqueur (not enough sugar) and the cherry flavor was okay but not great. This year, I followed the more traditional recipe and I have great hopes for a truly excellent Christmas.

Traditional Wisconsin Cherry Bounce
makes one quart

• Fill a 1 qt Mason jar half full with pitted, tart (pie) cherries (Montmorency)
• Cover the cherries with 2 C white cane sugar*. Screw on the lid and shake vigorously until the cherries are coated.
• Add 1/2 qt of brandy (or bourbon, or rum, or even vodka) to fill the jar.
• Screw on lid tightly and shake to mix well. 
• For the next day or so, shake the Mason jar occasionally to finish dissolving the sugar.
• The cherries may settle a bit and it's worth opening the jar back up and adding enough pitted cherries to fill the entire jar.

 Put the jar in a cool, dark place and let it sit until Christmas.  Open and enjoy as a shot, mixed with club soda, or with hot water for a cherry toddy.

*I used a cup and a half of sugar. I simply couldn't bring myself to add that much sugar to the jar. We'll see how it turns out.

Last week, we got blueberries in our fruit CSA and my friend Kristine got really creative and made Blueberry Bounce with them. She used vodka as her liquor (which I think was a good choice for blueberries). There may soon be some jars of blue nectar curing in my closet with the red ones.

- Alex

Ladybug: Aphid Killer

Ladybugs are cute - all red and polka-dotted. In childhood books they're portrayed as sweet and adorable.

In realilty, ladybugs and their more aggressive cousins, the Asisan beetle, are stone cold killers.

As I have mentioned (probably ad nauseum), I have a severe infestation of black cherry aphids on my lovely, beloved cherry tree. I've tried a lot of things to eradicate them. The first year, I got so frustrated, I actually used a nasty chemical - against my better judgement. It didn't work. So, for the last couple of years, my tactic as been to manually remove the infested leaves and treat the entire tree with organic insecticidal soap. Yeah... not so much.

At the end of last summer, I did serious research on how to get rid of the little buggers. However, I missed a critical piece of information - the one that said "do all this in the fall". I waited until spring and, of course, by then it was too late to do the preventative stuff. So, I was back to picking off leaves and spraying soap in hopes of keeping them under control. My last ditch effort was the one that I had the least faith in - buying live predators and realeasing them on the tree to kill the aphids.

I read too much online to have any faith in buying ladybugs to eat the aphids. Most of the reviewers complained of releasing $40 worth of ladybugs only to see them fly off into the sunset (or to the neighbor's yard). Short of putting a net up to keep them on the tree, I couldn't imagine that this tactic would work at all.

But... desperate times call for desperate measures. I ordered 3,000 ladybugs - two packages of 1,500 from two different suppliers (just in case one was a dud). I also ordered some ladybug "lure" which is supposed to make the tree irrisistable.

Here, in photos, was my experience:

Box #1 - Nicely packaged. Good air holes. Well branded box.

Box #2 - hand-made airholes. No branding on box. Giant "live ladybug" sticker on top.

In box #1 - a vial of nectar concentrate. Enough to make 1 qt of nectar to feed the bugs.

Box #2 - a bag of nectar powder. Enough to make about 1 at of nectar.

Both sets of bugs came in this type of plastic mesh bag.

At this point, I'd like to point out some differences between my two shipments. Box #1 included a lot of stuff that box #2 didn't (or didn't do as well.) Box #1 had lovely, 4-color inserts with information on the lifecycle of the bugs and how to release them, cross-sell on a bunch of other cool ladybug stuff (including kits for kids), and a coupon for 10% off my next purchase. Box #2 had two sheets of typed information that explained about ladybugs and how to release them. They were copied on green paper.

The biggest difference between the two was the health of the bugs. Box #2 had about 1/2 inch of dead ladybugs in the bottom of the bag. Now... I'm still sure I got my 1,500. There were TONS of live bugs in there. But they were rather weak which, when it was all said and done, worked in my favor. Box #1 had a total of 7 dead bugs in the bag. Seven. Seriously. And all the bugs were super-active and seemed very healthy. This could have been attributed to the fact that box #1's bag had a small piece of "feeding cotton" in it. I'm sure it was soaked with nectar. So, why were the weaker bugs better?? Because they immediately sought out food (the aphids) and they didn't disappear as quickly. The healthy bugs in box #1 ate some, but were perfectly content to fly off.

Check this out:

After releasing the ladybugs, a lot of them stayed around and feasted on aphids. If the information in box #1 is to be believed, they will have laid some eggs and will hatch larvae that will continue to eat the aphids - thus controlling the pests completely. Who knows. Out of 3,000 bugs, there were probably a few hundreds left on the tree after a day. Maybe that's all it takes...

Regardless, the process was fun and it was great to see the bugs do what they were meant to do. Fingers crossed!

- Alex

Save the Cherries

About a month or so ago, my friend SSAF had an epiphany regarding my backyard cherry tree and how to keep the birds away. This is how craft projects happen, isn't it? One day, you look at some thing - like the lid from a frozen orange juice container - and you realize that it shouldn't go in the trash but that it needs to have a new life as a bird deterrent on a fruit tree.

I use wind chimes in my tree but I love this idea. The lids are not super-shiny but they're "metal" enough to reflect some light and they're so easy to make that you can have tons of them decorating anything you want to keep the birds away from.

So, SSAF started saving juice can lids and she also started obsessively cutting out little paper things to decorate them with. She claims this is theraputic... All I can see is shoulder pain and strained eyes. :)  Thank goodness she enjoyed this part because we had SO much fun stuff to work with when we sat down to craft last weekend. Take a look at the itty-bitty bits we got to play with!!

Kitschy and cute.

SSAF knows I love ephemera.

So, how to make Bird (and, hopefully, Squirrel) Deterrent Tree Hangers:

Step one is to make a hole in the lid to run your hanger through. We used a hammer, screwdriver, and a block of wood. This did leave a bit of a sharp piece on the back that I mashed down with some pliers. If you have a metal punch, that would work well too. You may also punch some holes in the bottom so you can hang things (bells, beads, whatever) from the bottom of the piece.

Step two is to pick your decorations and do a "dry" layout. Once you're happy with how it's going to look, you move to...

Step three - Mod Podge! 

If you've never used this wonder stuff, get thee to a craft store. Made by Plaid, Mod Podge is an adhesive and a sealant and dries wonderfully clear and a little bit shiny. I hadn't worked with it in years and had forgotten how glorious it is.



Awesome stuff.

 

Paint some on the lid as glue



Place your pictures & cover with a good coat of Mod Podge

Step four - Tie & Dry. I used hemp twine, thinking that it might hold up well in the weather. We considered a number of different options but the twine was handy, easy to work with, and (we assume) sturdy.  :)

Then just hang them up or lay them flat to dry. C'est tout! The Mod Podge dries very clear as you can see from the pictures below. I can't wait for spring to sprung so I can hang these beauties on my tree!

The cutting of the fun paper bits was probably the most time-consuming part of this project. Of course, I was the delighted recipient of SSAF's efforts. You certainly don't have to have to make collages - you could cover them with nice wrapping paper or individual images cut from magazines. The beauty is, these can be as simple or as complicated as you want to make them.

I'll let you know how well they work after I put them on the tree this year!

- Alex