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.

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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.