March 29th, 2011 by Marc Opperman

Well, things seem to be humming along outside. I have strawberries, blackberries, Viva Italia tomatoes and broccoli all setting fruit (though, broccoli isn’t technically a fruit… a head or a crown instead.) The blackberries are unexpected because I was under the impression the fruit would develop on this year’s growth but next year. In other words, on old growth. The canes I planted this year, however must be considered last year’s growth, so maybe that explains it.

Sunday I took the boy outside. He loves it. He’s a brave little explorer, and seemingly pretty tough, too. It’s not uncommon to find him bouldering over the various landscape features, carefully picking his way with huff-puffs of determination, and gingerly brushing the plants aside or avoiding them. So far he has not ripped any up. Most of the time, he dabbles in whatever dirt he can find, or waves sticks around. Sometimes he wanders, but he hasn’t gone too far yet. It helps that the back yard is enclosed.

While he explored, I modified my sprinkler system. I replaced one of the high-volume reciprocating heads with a drip irrigation tap and half-inch tubing. I also ran several eighth-inch tubes and spray heads to cover much of the former area of the higher-pressure head. One immediate and obvious benefit is decreased water consumption, and better-targeted watering. However, the nicest benefit so far is that the “chik-chik-chik” sound of the old head has been replaced by a gentle hiss. Watering just got a lot quieter.

My cutworm problems are in remission, and the green worms that were eating the lettuce are completely gone, too. Perhaps this was the application of Bacillus thuringiensis kurstaki last week, the cooler weather, or the worms are just in natural decline having passed whatever their season is. This seems like a nice reprieve, though I know other pests will soon be along to fill the voids.

In non-food news…
I met with a group of Austin garden bloggers for the first time this weekend at the home and gardens of one of the group’s members. It was wonderful to meet all these dedicated gardeners and plant aficionados. Part of the fun was a plant swap. And although I was remiss in taking anything, I brought back several nice natives that I installed around my yard. Among the haul: Mexican buckeye, Hill Country penstemon, Gregg’s mistflower, and a tradescantia gigantea. I’m excited about all these plants, and hope they do well.

March 25th, 2011 by Marc Opperman

I get to this time of year and I want to build things: structures, landscape forms, garden beds, walkways. It never fails. But so much of the work is seat-of-my-pants with materials I have on-hand. Which, usually, is fine by me. I like improvising and coming up with something innovative with what’s on hand.

But there is one project I just don’t think I’ll be able to be that… haphazard with: a chicken coop. I’m certain I will have to draw out some plans and be very intentional about materials and form.

To that end I actually sat down and sketched, to the best of my ability, a plan for a simple trellis structure to help give our yard some privacy on the south side. That side has our Miami Beach wannabe neighbor, and I just don’t want his pimp-daddy self to have visual access to our yard. Especially since he’s a little hostile and pretty much anathema to everything about organic, sustainable gardening.

So, the drawing is to scale, and does a pretty good job of letting me know what my bill of materials and costs would be. It would be rough-hewn cedar, hardware cloth, and coral honeysuckle. It would replace my ghetto bamboo trellis. And I drew all of it with a dull pencil, a ruler and scrap paper (‘cept the part I fixed in Photoshop after I scanned it).

I have rarely engaged my mechanical drawing skills since high school, but a lot of it came back naturally. Maybe I have a fighting chance with a chicken coop.

March 23rd, 2011 by Marc Opperman

March 22nd, 2011 by Marc Opperman

Pretty sure Michael Stipe of REM mumbled all of the words to his song, so I have no real idea why HE would be gardening at night. But for me, tonight, it was to go find the bastard cutworm(s) doing in my potatoes. I’ve now had two plants in 2 contiguous nights all but decimated. I only have 15 plants, so they just can’t have any more of them!

Armed with Petzl LED headlamp and trowel, I carefully dug around the cut stems of the plants. Around the most badly-damaged plant, I found nothing. But shortly after starting to search, a stem on a plant next to it fell! I had the bastard. Sure enough, curled in the soil near the scene of its misdeeds, was the worm. Possibly a black cutworm based on how it looked and its habit of eating the stem below the surface. I don’t really know how to tell, though. Nor do I even know if it matters much… they all can devastate young plants, and controlling any of them seems to require the same methods.

I spread diatomaceous earth around most of the plants afterward (you can see it in the photo) but I’m not convinced that will affect the usually-subterranian cutworms. I’ve read that collars of tinfoil or paper tubes can help, but my potato plants might be too large for that already. So far, searching for them near the affected plant just below the soil surface has been most effective. Manually picking them off by hand and applying traumatic compression is no longer a thing to make me squeamish. Just glad to get even.

Just by chance as I was going back inside, I looked for any bolted onions I might have missed. Sure enough, a similar looking worm was at the top of an onion leaf. Because it was climbing, it makes me doubt what kind of cutworms I’m dealing with, whether there are more than one type at play here, or whether this was something different altogether. I have been seeing caterpillar damage of some sort on onions in the side bed, but that could be anything, perhaps even the same green worms that are eating my lettuce. Or who knows… onions probably have their own caterpillar pest, while the lettuce worms are perhaps unique to it. The whole freaking insect world seems to be coming for my garden all at once.

But I’m going to defend it!

cutworm, insect, integrated pest management, IPM, potato

March 21st, 2011 by Marc Opperman

The people behind the Austin Funky Chicken Coop Tour sent me a note as a comment to a previous entry. Thought I’d repost, as I’m excited about this tour and hope other people will be, too.

Thank you for writing about the upcoming Austin Funky Chicken Coop Tour. We thought you and your readers might want to hear more about this year’s tour, which we think will be better than ever. We are one of the first and (we think) most fun urban chicken coop tours in the country. As with last year’s tour, we are a nonprofit organization, staffed entirely by volunteers, that organizes a self-guided chicken coop tour every Spring in the city of Austin, Texas. The purpose of this tour is to encourage city residents to raise chickens at home by demonstrating the many ways that chicken (and other poultry) housing can be incorporated into a city residence without violating city ordinances or creating a nuisance. Many of the homes on the tour have featured various alternative energy sources, such as solar panels, along with other environmentally sound practices such as rainwater harvesting and xeriscaping. We think this year’s tour will be especially interesting: a lot of the coops on the tour also unusual features; for example, one of our tour hosts on this year’s tour keeps dairy goats along with chickens and another has a chandelier inside the coop!

We also like to show Austin residents that chickens and their manure are readily incorporated into a household gardening and composting regimen that results in inexpensive, healthy and sustainable food, even in relatively small spaces. Encouraging people of all income levels to produce their own food is, in our opinion, a means of advancing “social and community welfare.” Since this local production of foodstuffs (and nothing is more “local” than one’s own backyard!) replaces food produced on commercial farms and trucked into supermarkets, we also believe that our organization promotes the “advancement of the natural environment.” Another benefit of our tour is to raise awareness of heritage breeds of poultry, many of which have been in danger of disappearing as factory poultry farming has come to dominate most commercial production; local chicken enthusiasts have been responsible for the resurgence in interest in various poultry breeds, some of which are better adapted to Austin’s hot climate and which represent an important part of historic American farming culture.

If you would like to know more about us, please visit our website www.austincooptour.org and visit our Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Austin-Funky-Chicken-Coop-Tour/148228950019.

Our organization, Austin Funky Chicken Coop Tour, operates in association with another local organization, The Sustainable Food Center, http://www.sustainablefoodcenter.org .The tour will be a fundraiser for the first time this year, with all proceeds (after expenses) to be donated to the SFC.

We would like to invite both you and your readers to join us on April 23, 2011, and please let us know if you write about us so we can mention you on our Facebook and Webpage.

austin funky chicken coop tour, chickens

March 20th, 2011 by Marc Opperman

Sometimes it’s not all showy new plants or fabulous creations in the garden on a Spring weekend… and that’s okay. This was a good, productive weekend devoted to garden maintenance tasks. No building, no new paths or beds, no trellis structures… just solid, satisfying upkeep.

Potato Mounding:
The potato crop has been growing like weeds, so it was time to do their second mounding. I did the first mounding about three weeks ago, and my furrows were mostly filled. So I had to come up with a source of soil to do this work. I had a good half-wheelbarrow of compost from my pile to dig out, some bags of Houston soil, and a half-wheelbarrow of Hill Country blend. So I loaded up my wheelbarrows and did some mixing. What I produced probably turned out to be some of the best soil I’ve ever worked with. (I’m beginning to dislike straight Hill Country blend for planting. It dries out far too quickly and crusts over.) The potato rows are now mounded, about halfway up their stems… left plenty of the leaves showing to allow the plant to remain vigorous but protect the tubers from sunlight… Eek! Solanine!

Over the past couple nights, I’ve lost stems of potato plants to a cutworm… or at least that was my theory. Today, I did a little probing around with my soil knife at the base of the cut plant, and I found the vile bastard! Dispatched. Hopefully there aren’t more. But now I know how to find them.

Native Grass Bed:
This is the last major ornamental bed I created since beginning a focus on food crops. I made it in Spring, 2009 to contain grasses native to Central Texas. I have bushy bluestem, little bluestem, sideoats grama and seep muhly. A few other acceptable things have crept in: columbine and prairie verbena. But one other plant, a baccharis, which piggybacked with one of the little bluestems from the Wildflower Center plant sale, had gotten very large and unruly. And unwanted. (Though, to be fair, if I had open ground in the sun, I’d have moved it or kept it. They can be rather pretty, even if they do have properties that give some people intense allergic reactions). So, I dug it out. In the process I had to move some bluestems to other parts of the yard. While I was at it, I trimmed back the thickest old growth, leaving just enough to retain interest. I moved a few rhizomes of the sideoats to other parts, too, and shored up the bed’s karst limestone edges. I gave the bed a side-dressing of my compost mix, too. But I didn’t want to add too much. Most of these grasses do well in dry, alkaline soils devoid of too much organic matter.

Native Sprout Rescue:
Every year a few plants I really like decide life is better outside the established borders and die back within the beds after establishing sprouts in my brick or gravel paths. And since I’m a real sucker for a few of them, I will pry up bricks and dig up gravel to move them to more suitable places. I did some of that to clear a brick walkway and re-establish some borders that had come apart. After siting some karst limestone chunks at the edge of my large semi-circular bed, I moved a prairie verbena into one of the holes in the limestone. I also moved a Texas primrose to the edge of another bed.

All of the prairie verbena I have came from a single one-inch sprig I imported with some reclaimed karst limestone. I broke that sprig out of its rock with a chisel and replanted it. So I know this stuff is tough, can be moved easily, and will grow under strange conditions.

Compost Swap:
Since I had dug out the remnants of one compost pile and had emptied the bin, I decided to swap and invert the contents of another pile into it. And this is the work I’m feeling now, mainly in my lower back and arms. But to my delight, I found that most of the material in pile I was moving is half- to three-quarters finished. As a bonus, there is a solid two wheelbarrows of finished compost from the bottom. I didn’t have a lot of “green” material to layer in with the stuff I was moving, so I added a couple layers of dry Natural Gardener fertilizer to add nitrogen to jumpstart the compost microbes. I watered both layers to give the pile some moisture. I’m curious to see if I actually get heat out of this pile. I usually don’t get too much heat unless I mix in a lot of cut grass. Overall, I’m hoping to master some of the nuances of composting this year.

Miscellaneous:
Hmm… what comes to mind?

• picked more radishes and carrots. And a few bolted onions, too. I sure hope they don’t all bolt. However, the weather was right for onions to think they should flower, so we’ll see.
• pulled 986,760 weeds
• found and dispatched a lot of green caterpillars that were eating my lettuce. Jenna found the first one, and got after them with a vengeance. It’s a good sign that she’s getting protective of our veggies!
• freaked out about all the pillbugs eating everything from the tops of my radishes to the bottoms of my potato plants, as well as my strawberry plants and onion leaves. Spread lots of diatomaceous earth and vowed to water only in the mornings.
• added glauconite to several beds hoping to improve the quality of those soils and the taste of vegetables grown in them
• improved my former-tallow-tree bed with more pine straw and some of the grasses I moved. I’m starting to consider this my “native woodlands” bed… partly shady near the center but dry.
• noted, in general, pests are back. caterpillars/worms, mainly. But so, too, are their main predators… wasps!
• had an inspiring visit to the Wildflower Center… but that’s another post.

compost, cutworm, diatomaceous earth, glauconite, grasses, little bluestem, prairie verbena, soil

March 18th, 2011 by Marc Opperman

First confirmed kill.

Game over. Paradise lost. Aedes albopictus is back for many long months.

So, here’s the yearly roundup (minus a few lapses):
2005: April 9.
2007: March 25.
2009: March 9.
2010: March 24.

Mind you, this is so unscientific, it’s ridiculous. But it has become tradition for me.

Aedes albopictus, mosquito

March 14th, 2011 by Marc Opperman

It seems to me having that first salad completely consisting of vegetables from one’s own garden is some form of landmark. Today, for lunch, was that landmark moment for me. Radishes (cherry belle and French breakfast), carrots (scarlet nantes) and lettuce (red sails)… simple, but completely grown by me, and all of it picked this weekend.

I did add a simple dressing – mostly white balsamic vinegar, dijon mustard, herbs and spices – to top it off, but even many of the herbs came from the garden, too.

I look forward to more.

carrot, lettuce, radish, salad

March 11th, 2011 by Marc Opperman

Just wanting to preserve this link from Field and Feast. A lot of great ideas about growing tomatoes in Central Texas – solving pest and disease problems, as well as general growing tips. I like the “Texas Pot” method, and am going to do that myself.

field and feast, tomatoes

March 10th, 2011 by Marc Opperman

I really like radishes. And the more peppery they are, the better. Store-bought radishes – even organically-produced ones – generally fail to have any “heat” and usually don’t interest me, falling in the category of ornamental filler for salads as far as I’m concerned.

But I am sort of wondering if I didn’t go overboard with planting radishes. Between yesterday and this morning I harvested over 55 radishes, most of them the cherubic cherry belle variety, with a dozen or so French breakfast for diversity. The cherry belles are a little sweet, but full of pepperiness, while the French breakfasts are more mild-tasting.

Cherry belle:

Since I’m the pretty much the household’s only consumer of radishes in quantity, I’m going to have to find some lucky outsiders with whom to share the wealth.

As a side note, about 10% of the cherry belles I picked had split right at the root at the base of the bulb, exposing the white innards. In most cases this didn’t affect the edibility or taste at all… just cosmetic. In a few cases it appears this promoted a little rot. This was easy to scrape or cut away, and the remainder was still tasty. I’ve read there are possibly two causes for this: waiting too long to harvest the radish, or watering too much after a drier period. The bulb attempts to store too much water and splits as a result. Consistent, even watering is supposed to help this.

cherry belle, french breakfast, radish, radishes