The root on my swiss chard is twice the size of my largest carrot!
Category Archives: Breaking ground
I’m not sure who ordered all of last summer’s rain at once, but…thank you?
I only had my phone camera, so the quality leaves much to be desired, but I simply had to capture this moment. This piece, I call: “Car? What car? There’s not a car in the next lane…” 
The second installment in this piece is entitled: “Field? There’s a soccer field? Where?”
Alternate title: The Sidewalk River
And finally, the piece fretfully called: “Hang in there, bridge!”
This beast of a washed out gully is usually dry, and occasionally a trickle any small child could hop across, or adult could take in stride. By morning the water had all drained away, filling our aquifer, engorging the Colorado, making its way to the Gulf. No one here complains about the rain. Not after last year. Instead, children run barefoot from their homes once the danger of being swept into storm drains has passed. People gather on concrete bridges to watch the water rush underfoot. Everyone is grinning, ear to ear, cameras in hand. Why? Because this year, those thunderheads are unzipping their buckets of sky water. This year, the trees are going to survive. This year, the fires don’t have a chance. This year, the farmer’s do. Before last year, the record of days in a row over 100 degrees was 21 days, last year was 27 days in a row over 100 degrees. Total days over 100 degrees? That record was 69 days (set in 1925 and tied 2009, I believe.) Last year? 85. Three months worth of triple digit days. We also tied our hottest day ever at 112. The heat may not have been so bad had it not been for the complete lack of rain. It rained for four days in January, 2011. It didn’t rain again, not a single drop, until the first week of June. When it rained perhaps 20 drops. (The sidewalk had spots about 18″ apart, that dried within a minute.) It didn’t rain again until September, when it rained, so much so that I took pictures! 
(yes, those dark spots are all of the rain we got.) Nothing again until November. The drought last year was the worst drought on record. Not by a little bit, or even a medium bit, but worse than the 2nd worst draught by more than double. Even with our rain this year (plentiful and glorious as it is!) we have yet to recover. They predict it will take years to recover. Nevermind the loss of trees, wildlife, and those who lost land, homes, and lives in the fires. The evacuations reached within 4 miles of our home, but luckily the winds shifted.
So we’ll take the rain. Every single nourishing drop. And this year, the complaints about the heat have ceased already. August will be a scorcher, but that’s ok. August is supposed to be a scorcher. Today is the first triple digit day in weeks and with the perspective of last year still fresh in our minds, we are each grateful for the last few weeks of 90s and thunderstorms.
It’s hot around the yard these days.
I thought I’d picked some sun-loving, drought-tolerant, and generally tough-skinned plants for the new front bed.
They’re looking a little wimpy, but so far only one has died and it was dying before it ever made it in the ground. It is so nice to have this bed done! Even if it will be a battle, that I may only win with agave varieties, it’s nice to have the dead grass and unruly invasive weeds looking a little more friendly.
Things I learned on this project:
- Sun-loving, drought-tolerant still doesn’t mean put the baby plant in direct sun and water every other day until established. It means see if you can find the plant in October and put it out about Halloween to get established before it needs to be sun-loving and drought tolerant, you’ll have a better shot.
- When buying rock, don’t shop at the big box stores. We found Whittlesey’s, and there’s likely a similar landscape supply company near you where instead of $4 per rock, the same rocks or nicer are $0.07 per pound.
- If the rocks are too big, and of the right make-up, leaning them against a stump and tapping with a hammer will break them into smaller lengths (much easier for small circles!)
Another rock project? The new pomegranate for DH. Our grass is made of at least three varieties – all of which like to invade any place they aren’t already growing.
That impossible to miss, super tall and lush grass behind it? I have a soft spot for that grass. When DH mows, it gets hacked to the ground. By the time the rest of the lawn is ready for me to mow it, this stuff is back up to Bug Jungle Size. Same amount of light, water, and soil as the other grasses around it and it just throws caution to the wind and shoots for the sky. As much as I can’t bring myself to mow over it, I’m glad DH does so it doesn’t take over the entire yard.
The seeds are just about ready to save, though, and I’ll be stowing some away for a rainy day when we’ve moved someplace without it and I find myself in need of a resilience reminder.
Flower beds and herb attempts.
This bed has had me in a pickle. It gets sun from mid-morning to late afternoon, stays moist in the back corner nearly constantly due to the AC drip, receives the brunt of the roof run off in a down pour, but dries out quickly…and is maybe a total twelve inches deep. I sowed a red clover over the winter to drown out the weeds and enliven the soil. I turned it under just two weeks ago and the soil is so much happier! DH wanted to go in search of some more pepper plants now that the backyard bed is mostly done. I thought we may have some slim pickings, seeing as it’s already into June, but I don’t say no when he’s the one asking to go plant shopping! So off we went to Green and Growing, and while the ” slim pickings” worry turned out to be too optimistic (they were done with veggie transplants all together for the summer) we did pick up some flowers and herbs. In the bed above, I’m trying a Bat-faced Cuphea, two Cinderella purslane, and three little color splash purslanes only named ”scarlet” and ”fuchsia.” Immediately to the right of this square is a small strip that lays below the guest room/office window. DH thought if they were out of edibles he would still get peppers and selected these playful ”chilly chili” ornamental peppers. They have to share space with the not-flowering-in-this-heat violas and zinnias to the right, but hopefully won’t mind.
The front bed by the street has more space than I wanted to leave as a blank mulch canvas, and I’ve seen these growing wild along the highways so can trust that they’re low maintenance and drought tolerant. Plus, they’re so cheerful looking!
DH’s mother has been having a blessed Basil year and after we tasted some of her homemade pesto, he has been missing having fresh basil out the backdoor. He picked up the two sweet basil below, and because the overwintered Thai basil isn’t producing enough to eat any, he picked up two of those as well.
And to dip my toes back in the seed starting waters, I thought to try once again to grow herbs from seed (I’m not very good at it yet.)
Operation: Wild Bed
Over the last six months or so, I’ve been slowly chipping away at a small plot of grass at the front of our lawn.
Tangent: If this wasn’t a rental, that wouldn’t someday in the not-so-distant-future have tenants living in it, all of the lawn would be gone. All of it. But. It is what it is. And. The front lawn specifically is mostly ours, and partially the neighbors. By ripping out all of ours, I would be directly (negatively) affecting the property value of our neighbors by diminishing most of their front lawn to about…four feet wide. Basically – that’s just rude. Ultimately, if their property value is reduced, so is ours. Someday, I will not live surrounded by lawn. Today is not that day. /end tangent
I’ll make due with a patch though! This spot will be a wild bed. A bed for the bees, the butterflies, and maybe even the birds made with drought tolerant plants and natives. I started with some plants gifted to me by my folks, via Landscape Mafia. A few holes in the lawn, a few scoops of manure, some beneficial fungus, and in they went. Months passed as I worked on the new 400 sq feet over in the community gardens, worked more than I’d expected, and trained for the mini-tri in the evenings. What I didn’t realize, was that what was, to me, very clearly a garden bed…wasn’t so clear to other human creatures. DH was kind enough to mow around the plants…and apologized for accidentally over one that was completely hidden under the grass. The folks that pick up the recycling at the curb thought it appropriate to put the recycle bin (the big kind, on wheels) back down in the bed instead of the street. That was the end of another plant. Thankfully, the two lost plants were of the kind that I had three so no single variety was gone.
DH, in his wisdom, suggested I communicate the existence of the bed more clearly to other human creatures.
We headed over to Whittlesey’s again, this time for rocks! We meant to get enough for this bed, the White Oak, and the new pomegranate in the back yard. We thought we got extra. Usually, that’s true. Never having purchased rock before…
We were a little short. The front bed got its boarder, and the White Oak has a C. The pomegranate is still without stone.
Over the last two weeks, I’ve been able to spend a little time every few days removing the sod and weeds from the front bed. When I started, we were still only in the high 80s, and I got a good space done in an afternoon. Now we’re always in the low 90s, and the spot gets sun all day. I can sneak in about an hour before the sun sets where the light is dying and it’s not sweltering. I’m getting there though!
Want to see what else is joining the Fragrant Mimosa, the Verbena, the Mexican bush sage, and the lone survivor of the Recycle Bin Lawn Mower Incidents?
We’ll see how they do. I may end up moving the Day Lily and the Lobelia due to too much sunlight.
As much as I enjoy growing food from seed (and saving seed from food) I haven’t ventured into non-food seed sowing other than simple flowers (wild flowers, zinnias, violas, nasturtiums, etc.) Last year was the first year I’d ventured out of veggies into flowers, maybe next year I’ll venture more into the seed sowing aspect of non-food. Maybe not til the year after.
Right Bed, say hello to your new inhabitants.
As I’m sure many of you do, I have a particular way I like to do things. Oddly enough, I think that defaults into a particular way things should be done.
Years ago, I encountered someone who had decided in their marriage, that “should” was a dirty word. I rolled this thought around in my brainpan for awhile, and over the years, have done my best to remove “should” from as many aspects of my life as possible.
Enter gardening. Gardening, in our household, is my realm. It’s what I love. It’s what I read about. It’s what I decide. It’s what I do. But the more gardening has grown for me, the more space, and the more work, the more I’ve needed to ask for help. DH is happy to help. DH is not happy to necessarily do things “my way.” Oh, right. Sharing.
I remember just over nine years ago, talking with DH, and worried that with how much we talked about every little thing, that someday we would run out of things to talk about. DH assured me that day wouldn’t come.
So here we are, still finding new conversations to navigate. We made it through, like we always do, by donning our work boots, and wading through the muck together. Amusingly, with gardening, that’s as literal as it is metaphorical.
And look what we accomplished!
All of the henbit, all of the dandelions, all of the thistle, and all of the creeping, crawling, t-bar-rooting grass dug, discovered, and carried to the rubbish bin.
A quick dusting of sulfur, and we called it a day.
Then, on Sunday, I headed out late in the afternoon to finally let my tomatoes loose from their Sonic cups, and into the soil.
And then two days later, we had the biggest thunderstorm I’ve ever witnessed. The sky glowed lavender in the middle of the night. Thunder that lasted for nearly a minute at a time. Water literally pouring from the sky in solid sheets. The flash flood warnings had been up all day. The next day, the creeks raced one another to the sea. It’s amazing what a terrible drought will do to your perspective. I don’t mind the rainy days this spring. I revel in them. I still don’t do well with two cloudy days in a row, and miss my sunshine when it happens, but will take every drop of water the sky wishes to give us, but look how happy the pond is these days…
So what happens when it dumps buckets on the freshly turned soil?
Beaten down baby tom-toms, and a cracked surface.
Thankfully, the community garden gods that be, delivered a new truckload of mulch sometime in the past three days!
That catches us up to…Wednesday.
Saturday, it was time to prep more of the bed to get ready for peppers. DH was responsibly studying at home, so it was up to me to get as much done as I could. In the three or so hours I was there, I managed to not get sunburned, water the squash, the melons, the beans, and the tomatoes again – and dig another 60 sq ft or so. My hamstrings (go figure) are still sore. But! The weeds are out, the earth is crumbly, and the worms were found. (Not that they were lost.)
That was it for Saturday, so when my borrowed shovel returned to me, I packed up the dog, my dusty self, and headed home.
Sunday was much less labor intensive, but I must say the heat is already pushing me to restructure my day to avoid the late afternoon. Sunday was transplanting my pepper starts from their Sonic cups (happy hour at Sonic, if you don’t have a Sonic near you, is dangerous) into most of the rest of the Right Bed.
DH and I had stopped by Green and Growing for some diatomaceous earth and mycorrhiza. The mycorrhiza made an appearance in each hole before laying the pepper roots in the ground. I just learned about mycorrhiza on an episode of Central Texas Gardener – apparently it is a beneficial fungus that creates a happy relationship with the roots of most plants. It enjoys the carbs the plant roots offer, and in exchange delivers minerals and other nutrients to the roots of the plant. It also is purported to help with water absorption which is always appreciated in this area.
The diatomaceous earth was purchased for a few reasons:
- Fire ants have invaded the crack between the sidewalk and the lawn, and also like to travel on the Right Bed’s border board. I’m allergic and have yet to boil enough water to kill them off or make them relocate.
- Supposedly it can help with other pests (caterpillars, I’m eyeing my chard since I can’t find you myself) so I thought I’d give it a try for that.
- And since I did remember to get some, and forgot to pick up more rock salt or bring a beer to the gardens, my nearly-demolished Soleil beans (and their neighbors) got a border sprinkle.
And so, the bugs were battled and the peppers were planted.
In planting the peppers and accounting for how many of each variety had survived my neglectful sowing process this year, I realized that in twelve pepper plants, I had zero bell peppers. Did I mention that I don’t eat tomatoes? Or hot peppers? So so far, the Right Bed is all for DH. I’m ok with that. It’s just kind of funny that I didn’t realize it until now.
Pepper Plants Planted
- Anaheim (two)
- Cayenne (two)
- Chinese Five
- Czechoslovakian Black (sadly, only one)
- Fish
- Jalapeno (three)
- Poblano (two)
With twelve in the ground, I have room for at least three more in that area, and have yet to decide what’s going in to the bean spots when they’re finished, so perhaps that means I do get to go plant shopping after all!
And while I’m on the topic of seedlings I’ve killed so far this year, I’m fairly certain all of my ground cherry sprouts kicked the bucket in their secondary pots. If the tomatoes were happy, and the peppers were mostly happy, I’m not sure what went wrong, but shall try and try again.
Digging in the dirt!
Digging in the dirt doesn’t make for the most exciting of posts, or the prettiest of pictures.
I spent a few hours in our afternoon sunshine working on the Right Bed.
I started the initial double-digging of this fallow bed today. The intense web of grass roots made this slow going.
Slide the spade into the earth.
Pry.
Turn.
Squat.
Sift.
Pick.
Bucket.
Repeat.
Thankfully, the soil in this bed feels lively! It’s loose, crumbly, a little sandy, and full of some healthy earthworms! I haven’t met soil like this before in Texas. It’s exciting to not have to start from scratch with the cloying, airless clay that is all so common in this area. During my digging, I unearthed an old 4″x4″. Pocked and soft with decay, I thought to give it one more task before the earth reclaimed it. The builders of the garden beds used some really nice cedar planks around the edges of the beds. Unfortunately, they left them floating just above the surface. This means that no matter how diligently I remove weed roots now, or weed later, the weeds will wriggle right under the walls and invade the garden. In an attempt to block (or at least dissuade) their wiley ways, I nestled the found board under the edging plank (you can just see it in the picture above.) Hopefully that works at least until next year.
So, what else is going on in this lovely weather?
The Borage has blossomed! If you’ve never grown Borage, I find it pretty, but it’s also pokey, and tends to spread, so be careful. Borage flowers taste a little like cucumber and can add a dollop of periwinkle to your salad, or I hear you can even make a medicinal tea.
My volunteer fern is also throwing out some food for the bees.
Isn’t that delicate and lovely? Last year was my first fern attempt (Ferns, in Texas? Yep. I’m a rebel.) I sowed them about this time last year, and not many of them came up. Then, early November, with the rain came the flower sprouts. I rather like having a little experimental bed for the flowers to reseed and see what does what. I’m doing just that with the little strip of earth in the back yard between the sidewalk to the patio and the back door. The builders thought to leave 12″ of green space between the foundation and the sidewalk. It’s also only about 4″-8″ deep, depending on where you dig.
There are many fun things (for me) about gardening, and one of them is to push myself to try new foods – or to have them available to me for the first time. Most recently, I’d only had peas in their frozen or canned form. I managed to right that wrong just yesterday. My first garden peas! (First for me as a gardener, and for eating.)
I thought they tasted great – like if peas and freshly cut grass popped in your mouth. These were simply labeled “English Peas” on their seed packet.
The weather outside is weather…
It was 88 degrees on Thursday. Today was a high of 63. It’s supposed to be 40 tonight.
Seasonal changes where I grew up in the Pacific Northwest of the United States were gradual. Days slowly got drier and warmer as they got longer in the spring. In the fall, they slowly lost daylight hours to night hours as the temperatures mosied down the thermometer until winter. Texas is different. Central Texas is a fan of a 40 degree temperature drop in a matter of hours. A cold front comes in and that’s that. The humidity is pushed out, the sky clears, and the temperatures plummet.
Thursday, I took my tomato and pepper sprouts outside for the first time and worked in shorts and a tank top and was warm. Today, I was in jeans and a tanktop while shoveling a cubic yard with DH. Tonight, I’ll be bundled in pants, long sleeves, a jacket, hat, scarf, and gloves. Oh, how the winds change things.
Each year so far I’ve forgotten how the peppers stay small for so much longer than the tomatoes do. These tomatoes were the usual little leggy sprouts in a tray, that got planted up to their necks about a month ago. Here they are, ready to be buried once again.
What else is the weather doing? It’s bringing things to life. This is June. (We name things in our household. Not all things, but more things than I think most households name.) June is a grafted plum tree. She houses four varieties on her delicate limbs. She came from Raintree Nursery late last spring.
June thinks it’s time to bud, and it very well may be.
Speaking of things that it’s time for…
Each year for the last few years DH and I have gone camping for our anniversary. It gives us a chance to be out in the quiet wild of the world, spend time with each other away from the laundry (but not the dishes), away from the world of now-now-now, away from cell phones, laptops, work, and people, and just be. We had planned to go this weekend, and oddly both of us, as we were set to start packing the car, looked at one another.
I didn’t really want to go. He spoke up. “Do you really want to go? You don’t seem that excited.” I wasn’t. It turns out he wasn’t either. So instead we’re doing some homesteading/nesting for our anniversary weekend. Part of that is putting in some serious labor on the new garden plots.
Yesterday, DH spent a couple of hours turning the rest of the Left Bed to aerate the beaten down, lifeless soil. I followed behind on a beam of wood that distributed my weight evenly so as to not re-compress the soil, pulling out bucketful after bucketful of weeds. We even found a potato and a beet the previous gardener had left behind! For some reason, our dog, T, thought that potato was the most fun that could be had at that moment and spent the next twenty minutes tossing it into the air to himself, chasing it down, and tossing it again.
Today, DH drove us in his little truck to Whittlesey’s for a cubic yard of soil. We ended up getting their Austin Soil Amendment. 66% organic compost, sand, and other nutrients to help feed the earth and break apart our dense clay. The mix sparkles ever so slightly in the sunlight. We spent the afternoon with two shovels, a wheelbarrow, and a lot of back muscles. With a little final work with a hoe and a rake, the mix was spread evenly across the 200 square feet.
Tomorrow will be a trip to the lumber yard for enough 2″x6″ beams to make two foot-wide paths twenty feet long. When those are in place, I’ll turn the amendment into the soil, sow a couple hundred drying beans, water, and move on.
Move on? Well, yes. There’s a-whole-nother 200 square feet that needs to be weeded, turned, amended, and structured. That bed needs to be finished next weekend so the tomato and pepper plants can settle into it before the heat really comes to stay for good.
Saturday, it rained.
2011 marked the worst drought on record, by more than double the 2nd worst drought on record.
As such, I will not complain about rain. No matter the amount, the frequency, the clouds, or the cold. We need it. I’m grateful for it. I can almost hear the trees sigh in pleasure from it.
It did, however, put a damper on my Saturday plans. I had planned to spend most of the day on Saturday out in my new community garden plots. Turning the earth. Aerating. Amending with manure. Enjoying the air. Acquainting myself with the soil. Instead, I spent the morning at breakfast with DH and his mother before trekking to the Farmer’s Market to pick up some more red carrots, beets, kale, and mushrooms, among other goodies.
Upon arriving home, I promptly fell asleep for an impromptu nap. Awoken just in time for some dinner before a movie date, and that was the day.
Sunday, however! Sunday broke to clear skies, warming air, and a soft and cheerful breeze. I downed my breakfast of market finds sauteed in bacon grease (complete with duck egg, a first for me!) and started loading.
I still had maybe a 1/3 of a cubic yard of farm manure left over, and began shoveling it into the wheelbarrow, wheeling it to the truck, up a ramp, and dumping it onto some weed cloth. When most of it was in the truck, I loaded up my tools, my water bottle, and my gloves, and took a short drive to the gardens.
Those, dear readers, are my two new garden plots. 10’x20′ each. On days where I don’t need to haul manure, I can walk to these gardens from my home. They’ve allowed me to quintuple (quintuple!) my garden space for 2012! I can’t stop smiling when I think about what that means.
The one in the foreground had a gardener last year. According to the gardener of the neighboring plot (not pictured) my predecessor was a bit angry of a lady. The soil appears to have taken the brunt of her anger. It is compacted. It is lifeless (I found one little earthworm, a mere two inches long, in 30 sq ft of digging.) And while the bed may look mostly cleared out in the photo, do not be fooled. (I was fooled.) It is not a weed-free bed. It is a weed-full bed…covered in mulch.
The bed in the background, according to the same neighboring gardener, was weeds all last year. I was worried when I heard this. However, upon first touch, the soil is lovely. It’s loose, crumbly, and soft. That has never happened for me in a new-to-me garden bed in Texas.
With those as my starts, I started in on the harder undertaking. It was time to show the soil in the foreground some love. It was time to see if I couldn’t breathe some life back into it. And with that in mind, I got to work.
Apologies for the phone-photo-quality.
I believe these are tomato roots? I can’t say for certain. Since I can’t say for certain, they must come out. Nevermind that it will take me six times as long to do. People usually don’t believe me when I tell them I only weed my gardens a couple times a year. This is the work that must be done to get to that stage. My dad used to say that things worth doing are worth doing well. If it’s not worth doing well, it’s not worth doing.
The more work I do now, the less I’ll have to do in the future. The future is a lot longer than the now.
And so, after three hours of re-shoveling manure into a wheelbarrow, down the ramp, and into the beds, followed by 30 sq ft of earth turning, root sifting, and deep root pulling, I was hungry and it was time to head home.
I’ll make it out again tomorrow evening (tonight is Mini Tri Training) and hopefully again Friday morning. This weekend we go camping for our anniversary, so Saturday will once again be full of other things (like campfires and swimming!) Sunday, however, should have a few more solid hours of root-pulling in store.
I think tomorrow evening, I’ll be planting beans in my home-plot. Three weeks early, yes, but with a high of 81 on Thursday and the lowest night temperatures only hitting 42 for the next ten days…I’m feeling like taking a risk.
Purple Weeds of the Unknown Kind.
I got off to a delayed start today. The animals conspired to awaken us earlier than we’d appreciated. We cooked our breakfasts side by side, and it was nearly time for some forced errands (work) followed by some elective ones (Pho Hoang and Home Depot.) By the time we’d returned and walked the dog, it was past two o’clock.
As much as the weather begged for an attempted hammock hanging and a good book, I’d told myself last night I would finish the front anchor plants today. So I donned my leather gloves, snatched up my shovel, and attempted to make quick yet thorough work of it.
I’m not positive the mulch gathering folk in our neighborhood will want sod, clover, and other assorted greenery mixed with earth, but perhaps they do?
In the fading light, I thought to check in on my front flower bed. A year ago, there was a grass patch between our walkway and the garage wall. In a January drizzle, my mother and I ripped up a patch of sod from its roots and planted some nasturtiums. They bloomed awhile later and were joined by some borage, bachelor’s buttons, blanketflower, and others. The bed has had a few zealous varieties reseed many times already, others reseeded once and those seeds have been dormant, until now.
The monster in the middle is a re-seeded Borage. It will be awhile yet, but someday it will send up a stalk that will put out little bluish purple star-shaped blossoms. Borage has been used medicinally for a good long while, and the flowers can be added to salads or eaten straight from the stalk. I think they kind of taste like cucumbers.
There’s a nasturtium glowing in the sun’s rays, and a whole lot of other bits of life vying for space. I say bits of life, because I don’t always (or even often, as the case may be) know what it is that has sprouted in my garden. As a fortune cookie once told me (and now the slip of paper magneted to my fridge reminds me) “Much more grows in a garden than that which is planted there.” So how to tell friend from foe? Beneficial from invasive?
Once again, for me, was a good bit of Trial and Error, this time combined with some observation and some online image searching. For instance, in the image above, I can see a weed. You may be able to spot many weeds, since there are also at least two plants I don’t recognize. The one I see? I still don’t know the name of. If you look at where the concrete makes a line with the Borage leaf, and let your eye travel straight down, there’s a little thing that doesn’t belong there.
That little thing will grow into this:
Anyone know what it’s called?
I actually find these “weeds” kind of pretty. Delicate purple and white blossoms on long stems with tiered leaves…but it must go. If it stays, my flower bed will look more like this:
And that’s not what I’m shooting for. It would make a lovely ground cover for more wild landscape. Someplace where a meadow could turn dark green with purple flecks for the bees to feast upon. Until I have such a meadow, it must come up at the roots and go into the garbage bin.
plumdirt 