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.

January 8th, 2012 by Marc Opperman

We’re supposed to get a new deluge of rain tonight, but I’m a little reticent to revel in that. I could jinx our chances.

That said, I got all the leaves mulched into fine particles suitable for direct mulching or the compost bins. I made perhaps 6 wheelbarrows of fine leaf litter, some of which went around the raspberry and blackberry canes. Much of the rest went into the compost bins, where I turned it in to be amongst the happy microorganisms that are already burning overtime to create some rich soil.

I finished my rain barrels last week in time for anything that might happen tonight. I’m really happy with the setup. Two barrels, a small length of garden hose between them, and some swank brass spigots. They are happily leak-proof after the application of both silicon and construction adhesive. The best part is that the pair of them cost about $70. And that includes the concrete block-and-brick bases.

I have radishes, lettuce, onions and carrots in progress right now, as well as some baby kale, cauliflower and broccoli. I probably could have planted these earlier, but they seem happy for now, and the radishes, for one, appear nearly ready for harvest.

November 23rd, 2011 by Marc Opperman

I have mentioned more than once I want to incorporate chickens into my garden work. I’ve collected materials for the coop construction – cedar posts, scrap tin roof material, etc. – in an effort to use as little new material as possible. After all, one aim in doing this is to be as resourceful as possible in reusing materials. And to keep costs down.
Read the rest of this entry »

August 20th, 2011 by Marc Opperman

Since Austin is hurtling toward heavier restrictions on outdoor watering (Sept. 6 if our rainfall doesn’t improve), I’m considering a rather drastic experiment – no supplemental watering of anything in my yard.

This more or less means no Fall vegetable garden. But it will be an opportunity to see how tough my various natives are. And if I lose some St. Augustine grass in the deal, so much the better.

I was rather spooked by an article in the New York Times yesterday on the possibility that Texas could see another decade-long drought – it has seen droughts lasting as long as 50 years in the past – and that what we’ve endured so far this Summer could appear mild by comparison.

I’m trying to convince my family to accelerate our plans to move to Portland. So far no success.

drought, natives, water

May 7th, 2011 by Marc Opperman

It may be a little late for such things, so we’ll see. Planted okra and jalapeño transplants this week, as well as bush and vine green bean seeds, sweet corn seed, and summer squash seed. The bush beans are already past seed-leaf stage, while the other stuff seems to be biding its time. In a year with actual rainfall, the lateness might not matter much. But I think the drought may impact my success. We’ll see.

However, to help with all this, I am still letting tap water outgas its chlorine, and I have used parts of a bag of Revitalizer Compost from The Natural Gardener to make two 5-gallon buckets of compost tea. I was inspired to do this because I had potted a passionvine cutting directly in Revitalizer. Every time I went to water the sprout, the water in the saucer below was a rich dark-chocolate color. I could hear my other plants begging for it.

Today I need to strain that into storage jugs so it doesn’t become a haven for the blood squad. Though, a b. thuringiensis dunk would probably help that, and not hurt the compost tea.

A limitation I ran into this year is not having enough open planting space to plant certain crops on time. Basically, I’d love to have the corn where the potatoes are, but the potatoes have yet to vacate the space (but they are seeming close to digging time). The strawberry bed would make a good spot for squash, but they still seem happy…even if my total berry output this year could be measured in the single ounces column.

Notable Arrivals
I’m reading reports of ripe tomatoes all over the Central Texas blogosphere, and my garden is not one to be out-performed in this regard. So far I’ve picked several handfuls of a small cherry tomato (don’t know the variety, but they are about the size of small marbles and VERY sweet.) I’ve also plucked the first two Viva Italias. Basically very much like Romas, these are a paste tomato that should be good for sauces and cooking. Verdict on taste is not in (I had a lot of tasteless tomatoes last year), but they are gorgeous, unblemished and heavy.

Also, we had one blackberry. Jenna reported it to be delicious. She got it since she requested the blackberry brambles back in January. We may get one more ripe berry. This is only notable since one shouldn’t actually get berries on first-year brambles. Berries develop on last-year’s canes.

What Else?
I was supposed to be going to the Wildflower Center’s Gardens on Tour today, but the boy is still sick, and would probably be pretty fussy. Momma and boy are sleeping right now, so plans are up in the air.

beans, compost tea, corn, okra, squash, vegetables

April 25th, 2011 by Marc Opperman

Great ideas for a raised bed that costs $10 in wood. Cedar, to be precise.

Not sure I’d bother with the glue, though.

Raised cedar beds

April 19th, 2011 by Marc Opperman

I robbed a couple potatoes from my still-growing forest of potato plants. I hand-dug below a red pontiac plant and a kennebec plant, and came up with a pair of pretty tubers. Both of these would be considered “new potatoes” since they are the earliest from the crop.

The small one was from a smaller plant I pulled a few days ago. The larger red pontiac’s skin is torn from me trying to wrest it from the ground. Maybe I need to cut my fingernails.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that the red pontiac had a couple sizable scab lesions.

Potato scab is lesions on potatoes caused by the presence of a bacterium in the soil, Streptomyces scabies. It causes various forms of lesion, either pits or raised welts, seemingly dependent on the growing conditions and variety of potato. It isn’t harmful to humans, but it does render the otherwise pretty potato unsightly. In extreme cases the lesions take on a corky, pithy form that is unappealing to eat.

I knew my soil conditions might be right for scab when I planted the seed potato slips, but I had done some work to try and condition my alkaline soil to help ward off the pathogen. The bacteria doesn’t do well in soils with a pH below 5.2, so boosting the acidity of the soil with compost is something growers often do. (Compost can raise soil acidity). However, I’ve seen warnings that using manure-based composts might aggravate the condition. I used Natural Gardener turkey compost to help acidify my soil some.

For next year I may have my soil tested professionally and amend it accordingly with something more like coffee grounds or another acidic agent that doesn’t contain manure compost. Another factor seems to be to maintain consistently-high soil moisture. This allows other non-harmful soil bacteria to out-compete s. scabies.

Whatever the case, my two potatoes will be breakfast tomorrow. The scab on the red pontiac is easily cut off. I plan to enjoy thinly-sliced potatoes sautéed in olive oil with minced garlic and maybe a bit of chopped garden onion.

bacteria, kennebec, pathogen, potaotes, red pontiac, scab, Streptomyces scabies