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

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 23rd, 2011 by Marc Opperman

July 3rd, 2010 by Marc Opperman

We’re off to get peaches at Burg’s Corner in Stonewall with friends, but I thought I’d post this photo of sex on the vines.

May 5th, 2010 by Marc Opperman

Chris of Libra Fitness asked me the other day whether I had any thoughts on backyard gardening and its implications for the health of otherwise declining honeybee populations, and our ability as a society to continue raising crops that require honeybees as pollinators.

I have to admit, I haven’t really kept up with research relating to Colony Collapse Disorder or honeybee declines in general, or with what sometimes comes across as the apocalyptic nature of predictions that our food supply is about to collapse since bees are a critical component of that infrastructure. The Wikipedia entry (linked above) is a good summary of all the specific factors that may be playing a role in honeybee die-offs – specifically, insecticides; viral, bacterial and fungal pathogens; the stresses of transporting hives cross-coutry to pollinate crops year-round; hive malnutrition (as commercial hives are often supplemented with high-fructose corn syrup); and even radio-frequency interference and genetically-modified crops have all been accused or implicated. But the truth is, no one seems to know why the large-scale disappearances are occurring… least of all me.

When I wander around my yard, I see plenty of honeybees. I see enough that you couldn’t convince me there was a problem with honeybee populations based solely on my observations. They are a significant portion of the pollinator population in my yard.

But they aren’t the only pollinators I see. Butterflies, beetles, wasps, flies, moths, solitary bees, and ants all play their part. When you factor in all the other species of insects doing their work, honeybees become perhaps a rough 15% portion of the pollinating insect population I see.

So, were honeybees to disappear entirely, the varied plants in my yard would probably keep getting the pollination support they need. I won’t rule out that perhaps a few species of plants might collapse – specialists with a direct tie to honeybees – but from the perspective of moving bits of pollen around from plant to plant, honeybees are but a small factor.

In industrialized agriculture, where honeybees often have to be imported from other states (bringing with them the diseases and fungi of other ecosystems to remnants of any native bee populations), quite often much of the native insect population (bees and otherwise) has been wiped out by broadcast spraying of insecticides to control one or two pests specific to that crop. Imported honeybees become, then, the only insect pollinator of those crops.

So, again, as in my rant about Monsanto, the antidote to bee die-offs is probably a return to small-scale organic farming, stuff that doesn’t foster a monoculture, either in crops or in their pollinators. Back-yard farmers are an important piece of that, both ecologically and ideologically.

bees, crops, gardening, insects, organic, pollinators

April 23rd, 2010 by Marc Opperman

My mom and I were talking last night a little about how monarch butterflies, being a migratory butterfly that winters in Mexico and Central America, suffered incredible losses last Winter, with harsh freezes killing large percentages of their numbers. She was wondering if I had seen any monarchs yet. I hadn’t. Worse, all my asclepias (butterfly weed) froze over the winter, so any monarchs visiting my yard right now won’t have any food for their larva anyway.

Mom and I also talked about how Houston Public Schools now have a mandate to create butterfly gardens on their campuses, and yet no money or expertise provided to do so. I applaud the goal – habitat and learning opportunities – but the execution appears sloppy.

Today I saw this. It offers a way for schools to get a small grant to foster monarch habitat suitable for their migration.
Grants Available to Create Monarch Waystations.

I wonder if Tigerlily Preschool would be interested.