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

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 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.

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 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

September 22nd, 2010 by Marc Opperman

I’m really happy the weather has seemingly made a turn. With it, my willingness to claim I even have a yard/garden has returned, and the urge to hibernate has receded.

This weekend I had a very productive time of it in the yard. The usual mowing, weeding, trimming, etc. But some of my effort was motivated by the city’s bulky brush collection day in our neighborhood. I wanted to get the dead chinese tallow out of the yard for good.

Another small project involved a few pieces of 50s-era pine I got from my friend Grog. He’s been remodeling his own kitchen (yes, he did most of his own work), and he tore out some old cabinets. Those had some very serviceable 1×12 pine boards that immediately looked to me like good material for a raised planter box:

Here’s what the box looked like after it was put in place. The box is in the middle of the photo, and on the lower portion, I attached a 12″-piece I built out of some old shipping palettes. I piled a bunch of shredded grass/oak leaves I had saved in them so they could compost down.

It was nice to have a couple cuties visit, too! And, in the background, you can see the box with my bush beans. I’ve not gotten tons of green beans yet, but as of tonight I’ve had two solid handfuls in the past half-week… enough for two people to have them as a side at dinner. And many more are on the way!

I don’t see a lot of mantises in the yard (though I have at least seen them consistently), so was a little thrilled to see this mama staking out my compost pitchfork:

Lots of other good visitors, blooming things and volunteers – the rain has been a huge blessing. But more on that later.

June 27th, 2010 by Marc Opperman

Nothing particularly coherent to write about, but there were a few things I wanted to note for posterity.

Yesterday I planted green beans in the south-side bed. Originally I had saved that space for my wife to use. She wanted to get more involved in gardening, and we had researched the best things to plant given the late month. I was excited by that when she decided – it would have been a nice way to connect. But May stretched into June, and she hadn’t done anything with it. A week ago she finally admitted she wasn’t going to do anything with it. Disappointing.

So without a whole lot to lose, I planted green beans there… two rows of 3 seeds per mound… about 10 mounds. Already today they are sprouting. Beans are FAST! Now, it being almost July in Texas, it remains to be seen if anything comes of them. A long shot… but again, what’s to lose? I already had spare seeds.

Which reminds me, I need to hook up a water line to supply that bed from the sprinkler system. I have a micro-sprinkler tap nearby, but I need a few small parts to make it a go. Currently I have a hose-end sprinkler and chlorine filter supplying that bed, but with my 40+ year old brain, I’m likely to forget and leave that running all night.

And speaking of water, I have a PVC pipe over on the north-ish side of the house that captures the water from the A/C condenser. I had disconnected it over the winter – not a lot of A/C use until about February or so. I reconnected it today to water a small bed over there that contains a small thorny shrub whose name escapes me now. Damned 40-year-old brain. But it occurs to me that would make a good spot for the Gulf Coast penstemon, too… moisture and shade. I have had that plant for months, and I have yet to plant it. Poor thing. A wonder it’s still alive.

Lastly, since it has been Bug Week around here, I have to leave this post with yet another striking visitor to the yard:

June 27th, 2010 by Marc Opperman

The love-song of the male cicada is certainly one of the quintessential sounds of summer, and one I can remember from as far back as I can remember things – from summer days on my grandparent’s farm in New Bremen, to mountain biking in the woods in Northern Virginia, to just about any memory I have of summer outings in Texas.

Yesterday morning, I was standing on the front porch, when a bit of movement caught my eye. A cicada nymph was kicking around on its back. It had just fallen off the post it had climbed in order to molt.

I helped it onto a small twig and planted that in the dirt nearby. Close by, there was a hole in the ground the diameter of a wooden pencil. It was then I connected the dots to something I’d been seeing… those small holes in the yard were everywhere… they had to be the place cicada nymphs were emerging.

Within the hour, my cicada friend had emerged from its shell, looking like something from a cheezy vampire flick, wings shriveled and useless. Another hour, and it had shimmering, sleek wings ready for lift-off. Soon after, it was gone, off to join the summer chorus.

June 24th, 2010 by Marc Opperman

More shots of the unknown wonderland larvae: