April 8th, 2013 by Marc Opperman

It’s getting hard to avoid Monsanto (and other franken-foods) in the grocery store. But apparently even if you grow your own vegetables in your own yard, you’re still not out of the woods. Monsanto owns 40% of the packaged seed producers, too.

Fortunately, people with a lot more research time than me have figured out which seeds to buy… which companies haven’t been overtaken by Monsanto.

See here:
http://www.thehealthyhomeeconomist.com/the-four-steps-required-to-keep-monsanto-out-of-your-garden/

February 26th, 2013 by Marc Opperman

It’s been a while since I’ve done anything with this space. Mainly I’ve stopped gardening now that I’ve moved to a rental duplex. While that normally wouldn’t stop me, the yard I have is completely shaded by elm trees, and mostly devoid of anything other than what most people would consider weeds. The trees are nice, but not much good for sun-loving vegetables.

I’ve poured a lot of energy into a few other outlets. Mainly, Capital Area Master Naturalist volunteer work, and raising Lukas – he’s almost three! – with a sense of wonder about the outdoors and nature.

I’ve been teaching him various specific Central Texas plants and birds. He can identify evergreen sumac, ashe juniper, twist-leaf yucca, prickly-pear cactus and oaks by sight. And he remembers the names without prompting! Pretty good for three years old!

I’ve taught him a few birds. He recognizes red-shouldered hawks, American crows and bewick’s wrens by sound, and turkey vultures by sight. The wrens have been easy – we have a few in the elms around the house, and they are singing a lot right now. Also, they fearlessly poke around the porch and eaves of the house looking for bugs and nesting spots. So today, we made a wren house out of a gourd I’ve had for a few years. It was thoroughly dried from hanging in a garage. I’m sure I got it from my parents, but I don’t know anything about what kind it is.

But I’ll let photos tell the story of how we made our birdhouse.

It wasn’t even finished – the urethane was still drying – when a wren sat on top of it and poked its head inside. Such curious birds.

bewick's wren, bird house, gourd, make, wren

August 5th, 2012 by Marc Opperman

Yesterday I removed a few mostly-dead tomato plants, cleared some withering cantaloupe vines, and whacked back some of the growth that came after our amazing July rains. But now it’s on to the very oven-esque part of a typical Texas summer.

I had a really good cantaloupe yield this season. I harvested eight fully-developed melons. While none of them quite blew me away with their taste, a few were quite serviceable. And since I know how they were grown, I will automatically state they were better than store-bought melons. They were the last food crop I was awaiting in the yard from the Summer garden.

A couple developed strangely – oblong like watermelon. But they were clearly like the more traditional cantaloupe on the inside. Still another couple did odd things shortly after they were picked – they fermented. One even went so far as to start “peeing” liquid through a pinprick-sized hole. Luckily I caught it doing this. It would have been a mess otherwise. I assume the melon started decomposing a bit and internal pressure needed to equalize. It went straight to the compost pile, a meal for the raccoon family.

Speaking of the raccoon family, they completely destroyed my small fountain attempting to get at the lower reservoir. Poor things were so desperate for water, they ripped out and broke a lot of metal screen and dumped glass beads everywhere. I decided to leave it apart for the rest of the summer, pending whatever I do with regard to staying in this house.

For the same reason – my future here is highly uncertain – I am not planting a Fall garden. And that makes me really sad. In fact, I’ve largely stopped viewing the garden as an asset and place of tranquility, and more of a liability… something that needs far more work than I am able or willing to give it. Hard to invest in it now that I am merely a renter in this space. I long ago made the resolution that I would not improve rented spaces beyond what I could do for free and with little effort. Landlords have always proven too mercurial in what they’ll accept for me to do much more.

And that puts the future of this blog in flux, too. I’ll either shut it down when I leave this garden space, or convert it to express my environmentally-based volunteer work and Master Naturalist experience. I suspect the latter, though it would probably make more sense to start a new site for that. We’ll see.

But to end on a positive note for now, I have now seen two zebra longwing butterflies (Heliconius charithonia) in the yard. I’ve never seen them here before. Though, it makes sense. They consider passiflora incarnata a host plant, and mine is doing better than it ever has.

Since I count in large part the success of my gardening efforts by what new species of animals I see here, I’ll take this as a small win.

July 15th, 2012 by Marc Opperman

Last year I completed a series of interpretive signs for the school garden where my parents spend a lot of volunteer time. My mom wrote or compiled the text, and provided many of the materials. I supplied the graphic artistry and a lot of my own photos. (I wrote a project summary here.)

Fast-forward six months or so, and I struck up a conversation with Bonnie Martin, a Master Gardener and volunteer at River Place Elementary‘s Titan Gardens. She expressed some interest in having some similar signs done for her project.

If you’re not familiar with the gardens there, they are divided into three distinct areas: native/adapted plants, herb gardens and vegetable gardens. In addition, they have a compost area, rainwater harvesting, a fantastic garden shed with a covered teaching area, and solar panels on the roof. Bonnie has been instrumental in the design and ongoing maintenance of the area.

A couple months ago, we began work on the text of the signs. We agreed that a number of the concepts expressed in text could be handled with graphic treatments – the production of electricity from solar panels, the recipe for making compost, etc. After we had the text in usable form, I got to work on the graphics and much of the photography. Once we had that in a respectable form, we passed the drafts off to our county extension agents, Daphne Richards (horticulturalist) and Wizzie Brown (entomologist) for factual blessing. A few tweaks later, and we were done.

I handed off the finished diabond-printed signs yesterday, to be installed by Bonnie’s husband.

We’re all pretty excited about how they came out. Once they are installed, I’ll take photos and post the finished product.

And now, apropos of absolutely nothing, a spider I found while mowing today:

She was big! (And confirmed safe from the mowing.)

interpretive, river place elementary, school, signs, titan gardens

June 24th, 2012 by Marc Opperman

I’ve largely let my garden space go to seed, literally. I have more wildflower seed heads drying in the relentless sun than I think I’ve ever had before, and in parts of the yard that never before had wildflowers. I blame the good rains we had in Spring and my lack of mowing thereafter.

One of the neater volunteers in the spaces that weren’t mowed was a standing winecup (Callirhoe digitata.) Ive had this in my yard in the past, but in a completely different location, and not for the last 3 years. Another factor that may have helped was that my neighbor cut down two-thirds of an overhanging mulberry tree, and now I get a lot more sun in part of the back yard.

This weekend I finally dug the last of my potatoes – kennebecs, red pontiacs and Russian fingerlings. (All the seed potatoes came from The Natural Gardener.)

I got ten pounds of potatoes. My yield of the two big varieties was a little disappointing, as it was last year. Not sure if I could have done something to increase the size and quantity of them. Also, I may have waited too long – some of the larger specimens came up slightly rotten. In addition, a lot of the kennebecs and red pontiacs developed a lot of odd nodules, looking more like toads than potatoes. They seem edible, however. While I don’t know, I suspect this condition is related to the soil being too wet at times, causing swollen lenticles (described on this page.)

Still, I didn’t have any of the potato scab from last year. I had worked in a lot of compost to the potato beds this year. The change in pH (more acidic) from the added compost is supposed to inhibit the bacteria that causes scab.

Scab last year:

The Russian fingerlings, however, performed very well for the small space they grew in, and all of them seemed healthy. I will be growing more of these in the future since they yield small tubers that would be good for a variety of purposes – sautéed, roasted, grilled, etc.

This weekend the boy and I have been eating a lot of “taterpas” – lightly-sauteed coins of potato. I add a little garlic powder and coarse sea salt. Yum!

Coming soon, too, are my melons. I have five or six cantaloupes nearing the ripening phase, as well as a couple oblong melon that were SUPPOSED to be cantaloupe but look more like watermelon. I would have had one more cantaloupe nearing readiness, but I sacrificed it to science and cut it open. It was utterly green and NOT sweet.

The melon patch earlier this year… a view I really like (the house is nearly hidden!)

If that is a watermelon, I might have to donate it to someone. I’ve never been a fan. Though, maybe growing one of my own will convert me, much like when I started loving onions after growing them successfully.

May 29th, 2012 by Marc Opperman

I know this has zip to do with gardening, but I wanted to post it so I remembered it.

Besides, I gotta write about something even though I’m leaving my garden soon.

This one is good, mainly because the site is pretty.
http://smallnotebook.org/2009/07/10/homemade-chocolate-syrup/

But I’ve followed this one a couple times, and I like the results a little better:
http://allrecipes.com/recipe/chocolate-syrup/

Maybe because it s a darker sauce, more like Ghiradelli?

April 29th, 2012 by Marc Opperman

This weekend I accomplished a number of things that have been long-standing to-do items in the realm of GardenAustin. Most notably, I made margaritas flavored with agarita berries. I’ve been wanting to do that for some time. I jumped in and did it this year, but it wasn’t easy.

As anyone who knows agarita will tell you, the leaves that protect this native shrub are the vegetal equivalent of a polearm. The berries are small and seedy, and well-protected. Picking them is a labor akin to willfully sticking your hands into a porcupine.

Old-timers will tell you to stick a sheet under the shrub and beat the branches with a stick to collect the berries, but this didn’t work for me. My particular plant is too dense to achieve such a thing. So I hand-picked about a cup and a half of the berries.

Juicing them was no easy task, either. Perhaps there is some form of juice-extracting wizardry out there, but I don’t have that. Instead, I used my garlic press.

Yup. Garlic press. The openings in it are small enough to exclude the seeds and trap the pulp, yet still extract the juices. It took about 30 minutes, but a cup-and-a-half of berries yielded about two ounces of juice.

Since agarita berries are tart like limes with a vaguely strawberry-like taste, I’d always wanted to use the berries instead of lime juice. That just wasn’t practical, though, with only two ounces of berry juice. So, the berry juice became an additive. A flavor.

The results were very good. Well worth the making of a Spring tradition.

My recipe was this:

… over ice.

Read the rest of this entry »

March 18th, 2012 by Marc Opperman

Today I planted two serrano pepper plants, two viva italia plants, and one roma tomato plant. I might have purchased more at The Natural Gardener today if it hadn’t been too close to the boy’s nap time and he hadn’t been melting down. At least he posed for a few cute candids before the melting began:

I’ve been harvesting three types of kale, swiss chard, and broccoli recently. I had a delicious meal of these with my friend Susan on Friday night. We sautéed the greens with garlic and olive oil, and then added garbanzo beans and a few other seasonings. I think we were both high on all the vitamins.

Also did some work on some structural stuff… added some brick to the walkways and removed more grass. I also created a small bed edging with beer bottles. I experimented with this a while back, but hadn’t used it anywhere until now.

Overall a pretty productive day, though it always seems there’s more to do.

This was an off weekend for CAMN classes, so I led a small group out on JJ&T for some fence monitoring. We logged 6.25 hours and repaired one intentionally-cut hole in the fence. Along the way, we heard a male golden cheeked warbler, saw a red and yellow striped snake hanging out underwater, watched two dung beetles rolling their prize, and saw numerous interesting plants. I’m really enjoying getting to know my fellow master naturalists, and enjoyed hiking with inquisitive, intelligent people.

And it was nice to see this after so many months of punishing drought:

Unnamed Creek

March 10th, 2012 by Marc Opperman

My rain barrels are full again! Not too surprising, really, but I had emptied them in preparation for this rain event. I made 10 gallons of compost tea with some of my stored water. Two 5-gallon buckets with a few ounces blackstrap molasses each, a shovel of freshly-dug compost each, and daily stirring. Hopefully, the vegetables enjoyed the foliar feeding they got just before the rain.

Oh, and I added a couple teaspoons each of bacillus thuringiensis v. kurstaki for the rampant worms that have been devouring my plants nightly. As early as the last week of February, I was seeing nasty cutworms. The last couple years, these have caused a lot of damage to my vegetable crops, and seem indiscriminate as to what they’ll eat… onion greens, broccoli, carrot greens, potato shoots, strawberry leaves. This year they seem even more numerous. And I’m seeing them as nocturnal pests, with two different behaviors: some cut the stems of plants, and leave the fallen plant. Others climb into the foliage and eat leaves. I can usually pick off the leaf-eaters, but the stem-cutters are harder to find. Sometimes I can poke around the base of cut plants and find a cutworm. Helps to have a good headlamp.

So, I’m trying the kurstaki. I read the caterpillars eat the microbe, which then releases crystallin toxins as the microbes multiply in the caterpillar’s gut. Sounds nasty. And fitting.

I finally finished removing the fire pit and replaced it with a sizable full-sun raised bed. I used spare cedar lumber, a few logs of cut juniper, and a block of sandstone to make it. My brand of economy leads to such eclecticism.

I had good help:

I filled the bottom with freshly-dug compost, and covered that with Natural Gardener Lady Bug soil. In one end, I planted three tomato transplants from my parents, Heinz, Ace and a large cherry. The other half will get cantaloupes, I think. I still want to plant a few more tomatoes, mainly indeterminate Romas or the Viva Italias I had last year.

Probably not much gardening this weekend… rain, and CAMN training. Tomorrow is spiders, insects and birds. Taught at Hornsby Bend. I’ve never been there, but I hear good things.

February 21st, 2012 by Marc Opperman

Finally got out into the yard this Sunday to do a lot of clean up and preparation work. Such glorious weather! I had the capable help of the boy almost all day. He helped move rocks around (mostly on the scale of pebbles), dig arbitrary holes, and occasionally pull a random weed or kale plant. There were more than a few lessons on what NOT to pull or stomp on, but I think they were mainly ignored or lost. Can’t tell which.

I did manage to transplant some little bluestem and prune back a lot of dead growth. Even ground up the pile while the boy was napping and made some really good material for the compost heap.

My project to remove the circular fire pit hasn’t really progressed. I started a few weeks ago and got as far as pulling out the bricks and shoveling up the gravel into my two wheelbarrows. They’ve sat in the same place, more or less, since then… twin mired messes of gravel and mud from all the rain. My wheelbarrows are likely to fall to rust before I get time again to put the gravel someplace useful.

I’m moving the fire pit because it sits in some of the best sunny space I have in the back yard. I think this will be my new tomato bed since every other place I grew them last year now has onions or potatoes in it.

Tonight I picked up Lukas and zipped over to The Natural Gardener to buy a few more seed potatoes. I had a few (potatoes I grew last season) but I think they had dried too much and maybe were no longer viable. Natural Gardener had all seed potatoes on clearance – this makes me think I’m late in planting. But I know I was abnormally early last year. I used a headlamp and did some gardening at night to plant them. I planted kennebec, red pontiac (both of which I had last year), and la ratte fingerlings. I’m only a day after President’s Day, so I think that counts as “between the Presidents’ birthdays.”

This weekend – more CAMN training. This week’s topic is mammology. Not to be confused with mammography.