WHAT’S KEEPING ME FROM WRITING? (And Winner of the Draw)

Fall is clearly approaching, with loads of ripe figs and spiders all over the place. I feel like I haven’t posted anything here in ages, and as usual am having a hard time getting back into the habit. A combination of factors have conspired to keep me away from the blog and away from other things that are not at the very top of my crisis mode to-do list.

First there was urgent family business to take care of. Then, I suddenly got a small window of time in which to do orchid care that had been deferred for too many years. There’s still a long way to go on that, but at least I’ve made a start on repotting big plants and potting out small ones individually. I wrote a short, one-act play to submit for our fall show, the deadline for which is fast approaching.

At the same time, I was scrambling to get pre-production samples of the new bottles ready to go to Elements. If anyone is in New York and going there, you can see Olympic Orchids’ new look at the Blackbird display and get to meet Nicole, Liz, and/or Aaron, all wonderful people. I have filled all but one bottle of my set, and will be photographing them within the next few days.

I’ve also been preparing for my class that starts a week from Tuesday. It’s a spinoff of the old one that I’ve been teaching, but is a completely new reincarnation with less “arts” and more “science”, which seems to be what students want these days. They apparently are all suffering from the illusion that “hard science”, math, and engineering courses will get them into high-paying jobs or high-paying professions, and that they can’t afford to waste time on frivolous things like the arts. I’m not so sure about that.

This weekend is full of events as well, including a training class for lavender judges. It happens tomorrow morning so I’ll probably write about it here once I experience it. Who knew that there was such a thing as lavender judging?

Last, but not least, I just realized that in all the chaos I forgot to do the drawing for those who responded to my questionnaire about gift boxes. The little scrap of paper tells me that the winner is GAIL, who gets to choose a 15 ml bottle of perfume. 

PADRON PEPPERS AND POSTING PRACTICES

This year we’re growing a type of small peppers called pimientos de Padron. They are popular in Spain, where they’re fried in olive oil and seasoned with coarse sea salt, making a truly delicious dish that’s often served as tapas. They’re usually used while they’re still green, but if left to their own devices they eventually turn red and dry out. The thing that’s truly special about Padron peppers is that one or two out of every twenty are hot, and the rest range from mild to sweet. Eating these peppers is like playing a gambling game – will you win the lottery and get the hot treat?

The ones we’re growing in the garden seem to be a super hot variety, especially when they’re ripe and red. In fact, the dried-out red one that I ate neat off the vine was probably the hottest pepper I’ve ever tasted, and I’ve tasted some blisteringly hot ones in India and Mexico. Actually I only ate half of it at the first sitting, and I have a higher tolerance for hot stuff than just about anyone I know.  The plant is now making a new crop of small green peppers. I think they’re just about ready to fry!

So what do Padron peppers have to do with posting on my blog? If you’ve been reading for any length of time you may have discovered that most of my posts are sweet and innocuous perfume reviews, discussions about making and marketing perfume, photos of my garden and orchids, or musings about wearing perfume. However, about one or two out of every twenty posts are rants about something cultural, social, political, philosophical, environmental, etc, and I sense that some people are turned off by social commentary, just as other people are unable to tolerate the taste of capsaicin-filled chili peppers. When you tune in to my blog you’re gambling that you’ll get whatever payoff it is you’re looking for, the sweet and palatable or the hot and spicy.

Today’s rant is on the egregious lies that big industry and government are able to get away with, and the fact that so many people accept them at face value until presented with overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The prompt for this was an article that I stumbled upon a week or two ago in the more obscure “Asian” section of our local online newspaper, in which it was revealed that Tokyo Electric Power Company (aka TEPCO) had been saying that everything was fine and dandy in their Fukushima facility, denying that the tsunami disaster had created any ongoing problems even though about 300 metric tons of highly radioactive water have been leaking into the Pacific Ocean every day for the past two years since the meltdown happened. Obviously the folks at TEPCO and the Japanese government, which was bailing them out, knew this, because it turns out they were experimenting with various methods to try to contain the contaminated water.

According to the articles I’ve read (here's one) the ongoing leaks occurred through or around a barrier that TEPCO had attempted to build in the soil around the damaged reactors. The latest news is that the water has not only been leaking through the barrier, but has now spilled over the top of the barrier and is flowing directly into the Pacific unimpeded. Now they’re talking about a plan to run cooling pipes in the ground and freeze the soil. What if the power goes off again and everything thaws? In any case, don’t they still have the problem of the water accumulating and the question of what to do with it? You don’t have to be an engineer or physicist to know that if tons of contaminated water are being generated every day, it makes very little sense to try to contain it or store it, because it would need an ever-larger container. And what would they do with it all, anyway? Some of the isotopes are rapidly-decaying, but the half-life of cesium 137 is 30 years, and that of cesium 135 is over 2 million years. That’s a long time to keep the ground frozen.

The situation itself is bad enough, but the most disturbing aspect of the whole incident is the lack of any sort of public criticism of TEPCO’s failure to acknowledge the problem for two years. Everyone apparently prefers to keep their head in the sand, praise TEPCO for “trying”, as if they were a klutzy kindergarten student, and not look for actual solutions to the problems.

TEPCO’s failure to disclose and seek solutions for its radioactive waste problem probably just represents the tip of the iceberg. How many other large, wealthy industries and governments engage in similar deceptive practices to hide their own egregious mistakes or intentional wrongdoing, while individuals are harassed and fined for trivial issues like a homeowner letting the vegetation grow too high in their yard or children operating a lemonade stand without a city license?

I suppose the tactic employed by big corporations is to keep most people so occupied with bread and circuses that they don’t have time to think about the fact that the ocean is full of all sorts of waste that is slowly or quickly killing marine life and getting into their own food. When you have to work two or three minimum-wage jobs just to pay the rent and eat, it’s probably hard to do more at the end of the day than sit down in front of a stupid TV show, drink a cheap beer, and fall asleep. However, even the more affluent and educated people of the world seem remarkably apathetic and passive when it comes to protesting blatant corporate deception. At least I can write about it and grow Padron peppers to eat with my radioactive salmon. 

[Photo of cooked peppers adapted from Wikimedia; Fukushima photos from various news media] 

THINKING AHEAD TO WINTER

It seems strange to be thinking about the winter holiday season in the middle of summer, but if I’ve learned anything in this business it is that everything requires far more lead time than I’d like, or than I can even imagine. Right now the lovely red-and-green fuschias in the garden remind me that I should be thinking about what I’d like to do for this year’s December holiday gift box, if I do one. Last year’s was pretty much a spur-of-the-moment, simple collection of a spray perfume, soap, all-purpose body/hair/bath oil, and a music CD in a generic, colorful cardboard box packed with tissue paper. Anything more requires advance planning.

I have some ideas, but would also like to throw out some questions for you, the perfume-loving public. If you answer all of the questions, you will be entered in a drawing to win a 15 ml bottle of the Olympic Orchids fragrance of your choice, so it’s worth your while! Here goes:

1. Do you like holiday gift sets of any kind, to keep, give, or receive? Generic gift sets?  Frankly, I’m not big on any of them myself, but everyone is different.

2. Would you buy a gift set for yourself or someone else? (The perfume community is one place where we all know that it’s OK to buy gifts for ourselves!)

3. What items (and sizes) would you like to see in a gift set?

4. Would you like a fancy box with a custom-made insert to fit the items, or a simple cardboard box with tissue paper wrapping? Or do you prefer some other type of packaging?

5. Do you like a single theme with one fragrance in different products (e.g., perfume, oil, soap) multiple fragrances in the same type of product (e.g., several perfumes), or a random mix of all-different fragrances and products? 

6. Do you like for gift sets to include any non-fragrance items and/or a coupon for a $ amount or percentage off of an order?

7. What price range would you be willing to pay for the type of gift set that you describe?

8. Any other comments about gift sets?

I’ll be really interested to see your answers to these questions and any other observations that you care to contribute. The drawing will take place on Thursday, August 15. 

[food (or drink?) gift set photos taken from manufacturers' postings] 

VOLUNTEER ORCHIDS AND MIRABELLES

It’s always a treat to find useful or beautiful plants that I didn’t plant growing in the garden. Everywhere else I’ve lived and done anything resembling gardening, my rule of thumb was that I needed to plant 10 things to get one that survived. Here in the Pacific Northwest, I plant 10 things and end up with a hundred like the one I planted, and other, different ones that seem to come out of nowhere by spontaneous generation.

This summer there have been several surprises, but two of them are really special. The first is the volunteer orchid, Sipranthes romanzoffiana, also called hooded lady's tresses, a native terrestrial orchid that must have blown in from somewhere last winter. Back in the spring I saw a small rosette of thin green leaves that looked a little like a hyacinth plant. I assumed that’s what it was, because the squirrels have a habit of transplanting bulbs, digging them up to nibble on, then burying what’s left for another meal.  A few weeks ago the leaves started dying down, but a flower spike started coming up. It’s now about 45 cm (18 inches) tall, with loosely spiraling rows of white flowers, most of which are open. And the flowers are fragrant! They have a sweet, airy, vanilla-floral scent that seems to attract bumblebees. Orchids are always welcome in my garden even if, technically, they’re weeds.

The second big surprise was a shoot that came up from the roots of a purple-leaf ornamental plum that we planted several years ago. Apparently the ornamental plum had been grafted onto a rootstock of another variety, and the rootstock decided to grow on its own. This year, when I was clearing blackberries away from the base of the tree, I was amazed to see little fruits all over the branches of the renegade tree. They looked like mirabelles, a blush red variety. A few had dropped on the ground, and when I tasted them they were indeed mirabelles. What a bonus! We now have a beautiful pink-flowered ornamental tree that blooms spectacularly in spring, and next to it, like a siamese twin, a highly productive white-flowered mirabelle plum tree. I harvested a few today by shaking the tree. These tree-ripened fruits are tasty and sweet, with a flowery, concentrated plum flavor, much better than the big, sour plums they sell in the supermarket. I love volunteer plants!

DISTILLING LAVENDER WITH MESHA MUNYAN

On a gloriously sunny day earlier this week, Michael and I joined our friends Gail and Brad and perfumer David Falsberg for a day of lavender distilling at Mesha Munyan’s farm out on the Olympic Peninsula. Mesha has been growing and distilling lavender for many years and has recently established a natural perfume company, Meshaz. She won numerous gold medals at the Seattle Artisan Perfume Salon earlier this summer.

The lavender bloomed early this year, so we were lucky to get in on the tail end of distilling season. Mesha grows many different varieties of lavender and when we arrived we found the one she was going to distill that day drying on cloth sheets on the porch, next to where the still is set up.

We got to participate in the entire process, from start to finish. To begin with, we went out in the fields to smell the different varieties of lavender plants and learn how to harvest it with a curved, serrated knife. We gathered one type that was currently in bloom into bunches that would be hung to dry once we were back in the house. For distillation, it would just be spread out in mass on a cloth to dry.

Mesha uses a simple alembic-type still, fired by a propane gas burner. As the water heated, we took turns stuffing the dried lavender into the still until it was full. She then put the onion-shaped top on and sealed the neck to the condenser component, basically a metal coil submerged in a bucket of circulating water.

We all waited in anticipation, and it wasn’t long until the first drops of liquid began to appear, followed by a thin stream that was caught in a tall container that slowly released the heavier, aqueous phase into a bucket below while allowing the lighter oil phase to collect on top. We all took turns smelling the oil as it came out of the still. Delicious!

Once all of the oil was collected, it was put in a separatory funnel to finish removing the aqueous phase and the small layer of dark colored stuff at the interface between the oil and water. The oil was then bottled and put aside to age. At this point the spent lavender had to be extracted from the still and collected in a wheelbarrow to use as mulch on the lavender plants.

The whole process was not only fun, but an amazing learning experience. The distillation process is fairly easy in theory, but there are so many variables that it takes a great deal of knowledge and experience to do it right. Mesha is a master at it! The little samples of lavender oil that we all got to take home attest to that.