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 »

September 28th, 2011 by Marc Opperman

I haven’t been all that motivated to write considering I’ve spent less than a couple hours in the yard in the past month, and that was mainly just to haul brush to the curb for the City of Austin collection day in our area. The cooler weather has been was nice, but with zero rain during the past few days of scattered thunderstorms, my yard is still a desiccated wasteland, and somewhat depressing to behold.

I did remove a native (and dead) inland sea oats grass from a large pot and move a stray little bluestem grass to the pot. I tried something that I hope will help foster deep roots and some moisture retention in the pot, as well as help some of my potted plants survive drought. And the seeds of the idea came from a project I’d been a part of.

A couple years ago I volunteered on a City of Austin Wildland Conservation Division work project to plant little bluestem in an arroyo on a preserve to mitigate erosion. We used a donated (but otherwise expensive) product called DriWater to help establish the transplants in the absence of continued watering.

The idea behind the product is that a non-toxic, degradable cellulose matrix bearing water within a carton would slowly release the water to the plants over an extended period as soil microbes helped the cellulose matrix decay – ideal for a preserve where watering wouldn’t be available. I heard anecdotally that the product helped and that some of the grasses got established.

Fast-forward to the past year. I have a toddler bumbling around, and one thing we certainly have is a supply of diapers. Occasionally one tears or fails in some way while still clean. It occurred to me at one point diapers probably use the same technology as the Dri-Water does, even if they don’t come pre-loaded with a water supply. (You need a toddler for that.)

I’d collected a few “bad” diapers, eventually to support my experiment. I tore the elastic and extraneous junk off a diaper and, while planting the little bluestem in a pot, buried the diaper pieces in the soil.

Diapers seem to hold buckets of… liquid. I’m curious to see if this helps the transplant grass weather our drought. I might try a planting in a raised bed with some diaper pieces at some point near transplants, or adjust potted plants to have more than one diaper in them. It’s been a week, and so far my transplanted bluestem looks good despite minimal watering.

drought, little bluestem, water

May 12th, 2011 by Marc Opperman

This week I got the chance to attend a private tour of the properties that comprise the 2011 Travis County Master Gardener’s Association Inside Austin Gardens tour. Given that I’m unemployed, the weekday-date of this preview tour wasn’t as daunting to me. All in the name of professional development, networking and inspiration, right?

Jenna and I went on this tour in 2009, and I still borrow ideas from the gardens from that year (Cheryl Goveia’s garden of art and whimsy being the stand-out property for me). So, I wasn’t going to attend this year’s tour on the actual date (Saturday, May 14), but the private tour afforded me a chance to experience the tour without toting the tot (who, recently, has made this type of hopscotch travel difficult.)

The theme of the tour is water-wise gardening: increasing rainwater infiltration, rainwater catchment, xeric plantings, etc. I can say some wonderful things about all of the properties with relation to that and other aspects of gardening. Each had significant strengths, and a wealth of stealable-ideas. I loved Rebecca’s tenacity at transforming her yard one small bed at a time to the point she no longer has grass. I appreciated the sheer lushness of Sue’s garden, and the tip about “cemetery rock”. And Sheryl’s garden was an oasis of low-water ideas, even with its lush vegetable production areas. Oh, and did I mention her enviable water collection systems? Yeah.

But I definitely wanted to focus this entry on Link Davidson‘s creations. (Oh, and if you missed this energetic self-described ox of a designer, catch him on CTG from this past week. (And if you watch his interview, stay a little longer in the program for a few photos of mine CTG used.)

Technically, the property on the tour is Wendy’s, and was created with her interests and aesthetics in mind. It sits next door to Link’s property, and he has fused the two landscapes into one by continuing certain elements between the two. A dry creek bed reminiscent of Wendy’s love of the Barton Creek Greenbelt, for example. This feature rolls gently downhill from Link’s property before heading south through Wendy’s. Naturally it ties the two together visually, but serves as a channel for run-off and rainwater infiltration for the surrounding plantings.

Another feature, a cut concrete path, conjures up Wendy’s desire that as much material be reclaimed and reused as possible. To that end, Link cut the formerly-straight sidewalk into rectangles and squares using a concrete saw, and then moved the pieces into a curvy stepping-stone arrangement with generous space between for granite gravel. Additional pieces he tipped on their sides and used for varying vertical interest.

Steel compressor tanks and rusted, bent metal edging have been used to add other sculptural elements to the space. Many of these things were scavenged on Austin’s bulky trash day, and turned into pure art. As Link said, if he can’t get it out of the trash, it had better be on clearance at Target or Home Depot.

And while it’s probably not kosher of me to say too much about HIS yard, which we also toured, I’ll post a few photos of his space on my Flickr account to give you an idea of the depth of this man’s creativity. Needless to say, I was blown away at the artistry and resourcefulness at creating highly-inspiring spaces on a budget. I’m sure in some weak-kneed moment I heard myself tell him we were kindred spirits.

The What, When and Where:
Inside Austin Gardens Tour
Water-Wise Gardening
Saturday, May 14, 2011
9am – 4pm
www.tcmastergardeners.org/what/gardentour.html
$5 per garden, or $10 for all

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 10th, 2011 by Marc Opperman

I meant to post sooner this past week, but life shot me a sneaky-fast curveball and I lost my job Tuesday. Does this work for me financially? In the short-term, not exactly. Too much uncertainty. Is it the best thing for me in a thousand other ways? Totally.

But maybe I’ll talk about that in another post.

I took a lot of photos on one of my new days “off” because it was overcast and the light was diffuse. They document my garden’s progress pretty well. I had another ulterior motive for these photos, but… again. Another post.

Onions:
Nearly all of my onions are out of the ground, only a handful are still in place. The stalks haven’t fallen, and the bulbs aren’t very big, so I’m optimistic they’ll still mature a little more.

Strawberries:
I get 1 – 2 berries a day, and they are delicious. But the quantity isn’t very useful. I had five plants this year, two of which aren’t producing because the pill bugs attacked them too strongly in the beginning, and they are now just recovering. Next year I want to plant about 15 plants and dedicate one whole bed to berries.

Broccoli:
So far, one head out of two plants. Both plants were the same size, but only one produced anything. I’m not sure why. I am trying to figure this out, and whether I should whack the non-productive plant or wait. The good head went in an all-garden stir-fry tonight (along with onions, green beans, carrots and snow peas), and it was all delicious.

Lettuce:
Next year, less lettuce. More butterhead. The red sails… gets too flobby in the heat, and develops nasty spines? hairs? along the leaf axis. But it sure is pretty.

Potatoes:
The potato patch looks amazing. I catch a leaf-footed bug occasionally out there, but otherwise the plants look lush and healthy. I certainly hope there are lush things happening below ground, too.

Flowering things:
Gulf Coast penstemon

Texas primrose

Other Things:
My friend Phoebe gave me some of the pink evening primrose I have been seeking. I’m hoping I didn’t wait too long to get it in the ground, and that it snaps back. Otherwise, it looks pretty pitiful. Hmm.

Been seeing Texas spiny lizards multiple times a day in the yard. I love these critters. I’m not sure why. I have yet to get a good current photo of one, but here’s me harassing one somewhere I shouldn’t have been harassing one. (Though I will assure any of my City of Austin Wildland friends who might be reading, this was NOT one of their lizards!)

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 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 9th, 2011 by Marc Opperman

I’ve made some remarkable leaps in growing food in the year I’ve been at it. As I enter my second growing season, I am happy with the both the diversity of food crops I’m growing and some of the methods I’m using. I started to mentally draw out a list of all the vegetables and fruits I’m growing, and it was pretty satisfying:

• Tomatoes: 10 Ace, Cherokee, Roma, Italia and a cherry. Transplants both from The Natural Gardener and my parents
• Onions: Yellow Granex, 1015y Texas Super-Sweet (white), Southern Belle (red) from Dixondale Farms
• Carrots: 3 varieties, 2 of whose names escape me. Some of the seed was from Home Depot, and 1 variety (Danvers) was from Botanical Interests
• Radishes: French breakfast and Cherry Belle (seeds from Botanical Interests)
• Blackberries: Brazos, from The Natural Gardener.
• Lettuce: Red Sails, Butterhead, Oak-Leaf. Seed from Botanical Interests
• Cantaloupe: unknown variety, seed saved from volunteer plant from last year
• Potatoes: Red Pontiac, Kennebec, seed potatoes from The Natural Gardener
• Strawberries: Chandler and Sea Spray(?), both from The Natural Gardener
• Broccoli… transplants from my parents
• Snow Peas. Seed from Botanical Interests
• Bush cucumbers from Botanical Interests seed.
• Assorted herbs, including italian oregano, rosemary (3 varieties, including Tuscan Blue), lavender, flat-leaf parsley, chocolate mint.

Last year, I managed 3 varieties of tomato and wasn’t very happy with them (grocery-store bland taste). I had two types of pepper, poblano and jalapeño, neither of which had any heat. I was moderately successful with bush green beans, though the yield wasn’t as high as I thought it’d be. I had basil and the other herbs. So this year is a huge jump up.

As far as methods go, I have added more raised beds, bringing my total to seven and approximately 105 sq. ft. of growing area. In addition, I am trying the cucumbers in pots, and potatoes in both the ground and a cage. I have paid a LOT more attention to the quality of my soil, and have done the most I’ve ever done to make sure specific crops get the right soil. Especially the potatoes, for which I imported a half-cubic yard of Natural Gardener turkey compost. Other raised beds have gotten a mixture of compost from my own piles, Hill Country Blend soil from Natural Gardener, and a sandy soil from the Houston area brought in by my parents.

I’ve built a trellis for the peas out of a section of iron fence, extended my micro-irrigation in ways I hadn’t anticipated to make it efficient for the plants it serves, and reconfigured whole swathes of the back yard to take advantage of Winter sun. And I’ve even considered another way I can re-arrange some features to take advantage of even more of that precious sunny space, while eliminating even more “grass area”: relocate the fire pit to a truly shady area and expand the growing space to where it currently sits.

And I’ve even been happy that I managed to get a lot of this done at the proper time of the early growing season here. Much of the winter garden was planted in early November (onions, carrots) with some following in January (potatoes, radishes, lettuce). The double freeze was rather harrowing, but I pulled all my seedlings through. Tomatoes are in the ground, though I did start seed for peppers and tomatoes too late for transplanting. However, I am happy with the backup plan – purchased transplants.

And all of this, I realize, is still a big experiment for me, with this blog serving as my logbook into successes and failures. It’ll be interesting to look back on this next year and see whether I judge this year as being unambitious (hopefully!) or successful in all the right ways.

March 4th, 2011 by Marc Opperman

Some other notable things I accomplished (with MUCH help from my parents) last weekend:

• Made it to the Natural Gardener, where we purchased another half-yard of Hill Country Blend soil for the new raised beds.
• Brought back several tomato transplants from Natural Gardener, too. Two romas and three heirloom varieties, including Chreokees.
• Cleaned up the rest of the junk in the side bed and made it halfway respectable. Recently I’ve planted guara, oxblood lilies, and flame acanthus in that bed. Considering moving a damianita (chrysactinia mexicana) and some other hardy natives there. I first encountered damianita leading hikes on the formerly disturbed, over-grazed portion of a City Water Quality Protection Land preserve. It has an interesting licorice-like scent, and is evergreen.
• Drilled out part of the stump of the Chinese tallow and planted prickly pear in the cavity.
• Extended the micro-sprinkler system to cover the potato beds and cage.
• Emptied the Hill Country soil into the beds and transplanted some thinned red sails lettuce to the side bed. It’s not looking too well, though, but might sprout back from the roots.
• planted some broccoli and oak leaf lettuce from my parents

This weekend, I’m hitting the Sunshine Gardens plant sale with friends and then helping them build and plant some raised beds. Assuming we don’t get rained out.

Potato Progress:

Radishes are close: