Fresh Flower Arrangement & Baking a Strawberry Pie! 🍓💐🥰 // Garden Answer

hey guys how's it going it's 108 degrees out today you can probably tell that i'm already breaking a sweat just standing here i did get my necessary watering done for this time of the day typically with things in the greenhouse or you know a few potted things that we have sitting aside for projects later on we have to water early in the day and then we have to go back through in the evening and just double check everything and make sure nothing needs a little bit of extra help in this kind of heat it's been 107.89 it said one of the days was supposed to get to 110 i'm not sure it got there i think 109 does it really matter 109 110 it's too hot and you can only take uh so much of that before you're just kind of done and i think today i'm done with it and i don't want to do any garden projects out here except for we are going to head out to the cut flower garden i am gonna pick some strawberries we're gonna make a strawberry pie and i also want to pick some flowers it's totally the wrong time of day for like late morning right now you should cut flowers like first thing in the morning before the sun really ideally before the sun comes up or as it's coming up when it's cooler but we're just going to go with it i kind of want to take my mom a bouquet of sunflowers just something simple but i want to go pick the strawberries i don't know if i'll have enough for an entire pie but i've been freezing batches of them all along and i know i have enough frozen in there so either way we're gonna we're gonna do that today there's cheddar how you doing buddy i've got my berry picking baskets and then a few vases i need to return to the cut flower shed oh look at it out there just looks hot i do think this is our last day of it though the weather it's supposed to cool off by tomorrow like 15 14 or 15 degrees which means we're probably going to get a crazy amount of wind this evening but it said there's a possibility a small possibility of some moisture that would be awesome the poor potato vines they have drip run to them they're just so hot they welt and then they pick back up this however is looking awesome look at that i swear things have grown just in the day or two since i walked you through this area it's amazing our strawberries are right here you know if you take a look in here you can see a whole bunch that are ready to be picked so we're just gonna work our way down the row and see what we can what we can glean you know everything out here is pretty much holding up to the weather except for the tomatoes they are they look a little bit a little bit sad they are producing tomatoes and i expect once we have a cool down they'll probably perk back up and look a little bit better but they're looking a little stressed they're kind of folding under the pressure of all the heat they do this in order to minimize moisture loss but you know they are producing they're producing tomatoes all over fact this sad looking bonnie best right here i think there's a few in here so this first batch of strawberries are seascape which this is the first time i've ever grown this variety and i've been really pleased with what they've produced i mean for first year plants it's pretty incredible like the size of the berries they are really sweet really tasty so that's been fun because i'm not sure i would have actually ordered these you guys might remember these strawberries showed up as a surprise on one of my plant loads um there was five flats and there's eighteen it's at the right math 18 four inch strawberry plants per flat and i wasn't really set up to plant the strawberries i was going to build a raised bed to do that and but i just decided well they showed up so we're going to plant them and it was five different varieties only one of which i was familiar with so anyway it's been really fun to just kind of you know have these things show up have somebody else pick out the varieties for me and then i get some experience with them look at that berry that's amazing there's some little guys too they're not all huge you can see we've got a crop of carrots right up above us there these i planted last july and i'm letting them go to seed they're danvers they're almost ready some of the flower discs are almost dry enough to to harvest oh that's weird it's like a twin there's no bugs in there there's an artichoke from last year how funny so there's today's haul we've been picking at least this many if not more every other day between this row raspberries and the buried treasure strawberries that we have in those tubs but i just picked those last night and froze those so not quite enough for the whole pie once the tops are all removed so we'll just pull the frozen ones out that i've been freezing all along i did notice the jade beans are starting to produce pretty heavily those are right next door to the strawberries there yeah i need to get out here when it's cooler my goodness there's a whole bunch of things to pick just a whole bunch and we are also going to be focusing on potato harvest here pretty quick as well the plants are starting to die back more in some spots than others so i might give them just a little bit more time typically you want them all to look kind of like this like flopping over kind of like browning and yellowing leaves but some of the plants still look pretty darn fresh so anyway it's pretty we're getting closer okay let's get a bucket of water get some sunflowers and get back inside [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] all right guys we're back inside where it's air conditioned we're in the butler's pantry so technically it's the kitchen on the old side of our house so the side that was built in 1919 so the room we're standing in right now is over 100 years old which is kind of cool there's some really fun built-ins i've showed you with this room before tad echoey in here i suppose i could have taken all of this out to the studio i just kind of felt like being in the house today i do have some things going in the crock pot and i've got laundry going so i'm kind of wanting to stay on top of all those chores today as well so just a quick pan around the room it's not super duper clean i've got a couple of things i need to take out to the cut flower shed but you can see the sink in here my food dehydrator it works really well up here in here because when you're drying stuff it does have a scent and i don't really care for the scent very much so i like to dehydrate stuff up here uh panning this way you can see the laundry room there and then the built-ins so we've got our cocktails dash right here and down here and then just decorative things so there's lots of vases in here i've got lots of different candles and such um yeah that sort of thing uh and then over here this is pretty cool look at this little cubby in here just like a little place to sit it looks out at the weird tree face and then in this spot i've got the kids easel i've got this table which i bought for samantha and it was like a little tiny bit too advanced so it's staying up here she actually comes up here and plays with it though at this point i should probably pull it down um anyway so that's there and then this is our giveaway tub when we have things like kids clothes and and i've got some cheats and stuff that are brand new and that sort of thing that's our donation pile and the door leads us right back to the shade porch where we have the cute bistro so we've got a menagerie of really beautiful things i was just gonna do sunflowers and then i just kind of got carried away you guys so there's a mix there's some sunflowers there's some beautiful blue sweet peas there's some dahlias in here some really cool zinnias we've got some blue status some blue delphinium look at these these zinnias are just so striking they're a redmond redmond super cactus that some of them are really double like fully double and really like mop head and some of them come out like this and i actually prefer these right here look at that that's so cool i love it this is the vase we're using it's actually an old candle holder that i cleaned out so anyway let's put some together okay so typically when i'm starting a flower arrangement i use some kind of a frog which typically i'll use a piece of chicken wire you know you cut it like a square of it and then kind of wad it up in the sort of a ball and pop it down in your vase and it allows you to pop stems in uh you know in the little holes and it keeps things in place or i'll use some willow branches or some kind of flexible branches where you take all the leaves off of them and you kind of just weave them into a sphere and pop them down in the vase you want to make sure to remove all the leaves though of course but in this case i've got so much stuff i don't think i'm going to need a traditional frog i'm just going to start with some of my bigger items some of this stuff that's real branchy and this will kind of create a network of whatever a network of what's the word a network of branches i guess i don't know it'll create structure down inside the base without having to use any kind of frog see how already just with those two branches there's places for branches to slide down in and they'll stay put and i'll add a few more of those types of things in plus i did cut a couple of dahlias that are multi-branch which will do the same thing okay so i'm just going to keep working on building this i am going to try to make it look good from all sides since this is going out to my parents house the arrangements i take out there typically are put right on the end of their kitchen counter where you see it from all different angles so a lot of the ones that i do for our own house i can design them from the back and not really worry about what the back looks like because it's always up against a wall typically so it just needs to look good from you know front and sides so anyway i'll just be spinning this thing around and working with all these blooms i should have enough to create something really pretty i think [Music] well that turned out super fun and full of color and variety oh my goodness just kind of a wild bunch lots of sunflowers xenias dahlias now the xenia is this this one too so this is a cinderella lilac isn't that a pretty color some come out full mop head like that and some come out more single with a really prominent center and then i love the addition of the blue delphinium the blue status the blue sweet peas and then the sunflowers are just all different colors so really deep color there's some kind of classic yellow some pale yellow and as we flip it around you can see i actually used every last stem except for one of the delphinium stems because it was a little bit old the flowers were starting to fall off of it and so i'll probably grab a couple more zinnias on our way out like right here and then i want something else right here before we leave it's crazy how many flowers you can use in such a small vessel crazy that's beautiful look at that i think my mom will enjoy looking at this bright bouquet for the next week or so most of these flowers will last at least five to seven days the dahlias and sunflowers are the shortest lasting of all of them so five to seven days tops the rest of them zinnias will last a long time so long as you you know keep the water topped up and all of that and then of course the status will dry and look exactly like that for the rest of its life it'll look just like every bit as blue and beautiful as it is today okay we're gonna head down to the kitchen and start the strawberry pie i already made the crust for this pie because i knew it needed to chill in the refrigerator for a couple of hours before we were ready to use it you can see the beautiful sunflowers on the island here aren't those gorgeous these are the pro cut lemons so they're a single stem sunflower that's the only bummer part about them is that you get one flower and then it's done but they are pollen free which means they aren't going to make a mess wherever you put them when you cut and bring them inside when you have traditional sunflowers they'll drop pollen all over underneath where they're at and sometimes like on a kitchen island you don't really want your flowers dropping stuff all over the place so i just have been enjoying these so much benjamin and i cut these last night and then i've got some beef stroganoff going in the crock pot right now for dinner tonight and here is our recipe right here i make the pie crust in my food processor which i didn't even own one until last year i finally bought one and i've only used it for pie crust i haven't used it for anything else up to this point i'm not sure that that makes it worth the cupboard space but it sure is handy it mixes together pie crust like really well so i add in two and a half cups of flour first i spoon it into my measuring cups and then i level it off with a knife so it's not like packed in there after that i do two teaspoons of sugar is what the recipe calls for but i do two mounding teaspoons plus a dash more because it's a dessert and i want it to be sweet and then one teaspoon of salt once all of those dry ingredients are in the hopper i pulse just a few times just to make sure they're blended then i grab my butter out of the refrigerator i like to make sure it's just super cold i do cut it into smaller pieces before putting in the dry ingredients one because it mixes easier and better and two i can't get a whole bunch of butter down the little hole on top of the um processor thing the lid once it's all in there i pulse just enough times until the mixture resembles peas it's kind of like the butter has been crunched up into tiny little pieces and it's just coated in flour and then i make my ice water mixture so you put a half a cup of water in a measuring cup and then put your ice cubes in stir it around and it will melt that ice so then you take the ice out and pour out water until it's back down to a half cup of ice water and then i pour it in kind of like a tablespoon or two at a time it typically takes the full half cup and that's about it you can add a tiny bit more if you need to the mixture still won't come together in the food processor what i do after that after the water is mixed in i put a little bit of flour on the counter pour out to the whole mixture and then just kind of gently put it together into a disk or a ball and it typically comes together really easily there's not a whole lot falling off of it then i take a knife and cut it in half so that i've got my top of my bottom piece i put them in saran wrap put them in the fridge so that's where i'm at at this point then for our filling what we're gonna do is we're gonna put one and a half teaspoons of lemon juice and six cups of frozen strawberries in a saucepan then in a separate bowl we are going to mix a half cup of cornstarch and one cup of sugar together and then we'll pour the dry ingredients over the strawberries and just mix them all together in that saucepan then we'll cook them over about medium heat medium-high-ish heat for about 15 minutes until the berries start to soften then we'll kick the heat up to high let them boil for five minutes bubble and simmer for five minutes then we will remove them from the heat let them start to cool while we prepare our crust so let's get our filling done real quick [Music] [Applause] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] okay we've removed it from the heat it looks perfect look at that it thickened up beautifully we're gonna let it set over here for just a few minutes while we prepare our pie crust and it can cool off just a little bit this part is pretty easy we're going to roll out our bottom pie crust put it in our pie dish put the filling in and then we'll create a lattice top on top of the filling i already have the oven preheated to 350 degrees we will bake it for about 35 to 40 minutes rotating it halfway through so it's like the back right of our oven bakes faster and so it's a good thing whenever instructions tell me to rotate things it just reminds me that it's an especially good idea for me to rotate things because our oven is just i can't wait to get a new oven one day all right let's get this done [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] so [Music] bye oh my goodness you guys it's so pretty look at that i did have to bake it a little bit longer than normal so i put a crust guard thing over the edge so that the outer part didn't get too brown and these are done they didn't put on a lot of color though i just didn't want to overcook it but it looks beautiful now that the pie is done and the flowers are done i'm going to let the pie cool for a little bit while i make dinner and then we are going to head out and make our delivery how's it going hello oh your dinner smells good come on look at that that sunflower looks like it's missing some teats in comparison to what i've been doing look at you dude charles atwood if you remember that man next week i'll probably put uh next week [Music] okay here we go that's good and that is going to do it for our video right now guys i'm really happy with everything today and it was a really nice change of pace to be outside for just a short amount of time picking flowers and fruit and then coming inside and enjoying the rest of the day in the air conditioning so anyway thank you guys so much for watching this video i hope you enjoyed it and we will see you in the next one bye

Channel: Garden Answer

Views: 160,773

Keywords: Garden, Answer, Laura, Flower, gardening, gardener, beautiful, succulents, diy, grow, green, Proven, Winners, Fall, Winter, summer, spring, plant, planting, growing, plants, succulent, shrubs, shrub, bush, soil, dirt, earth

Id: R8m99bmnyE0

Length: 22min 36sec (1356 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 09 2022