February 6th, 2011 by Marc Opperman

So, the first wave of really cold weather is over, and this weekend has been completely glorious… the sort of Winter weather most of us signed up for with our Austin citizenship cards.

Saturday for me was the big unveiling of all the heavily-covered food crops. Lots of towels, bedsheets, blankets, tarps, drop cloths and a roll of carpet to pull back, air out and put away. Not to mention a number of extension cords, strings of lights, and jugs of water.

The happy news is that nothing at all got nipped by the cold other than a few onion leaf tips that refused to stay inside the raised bed walls. I even noticed that a few plants thrived under the blankets, most notably the strawberries. They seem eager to get some growing done, as several of the plants developed new growth in the three days they were under wraps.

I spent the latter half of Saturday planting bricks in the ground, completing the walkway entrance to my new garden areas. Part of the equation was to knock out more grass and extend a native plant bed.

The brick is all reclaimed, most of it begged-for and received on Freecycle. The bricks are held together (or perhaps locked in place is a more apt description) with pea gravel brushed into all the cracks and crevices. All of the stone and brick walkways I’ve made have been put together this way. Some of the installations are 4-5 years old, and seem as durable as mortared brick.

Now, let’s hope all that newly-planted brick doesn’t freeze this coming week when the temps drop into the 20s again.

February 1st, 2011 by Marc Opperman

ZZ Top wasn’t singing about compost? Hmm. Well, having schlepped a half-cubic yard home from the Natural Gardener, and then wheel-barrowing it all over the yard, I’m sure I subconsciously re-worded the song to honor all the new turkey compost. Mainly I wanted it to work into the new potato bed, hopefully to lower the alkalinity of our native Central Texas soil. (Potatoes dislike high alkalinity. Gives them something called scab, apparently.) If the 18-degree freeze doesn’t somehow do them in (they haven’t sprouted – just planted them Sunday), the seed potatoes ought to be ready for some mounding in 3-4 weeks.

I had lots of leftover compost, so I top-dressed several beds. Hopefully this will result in better-tasting tomatoes and peppers come time for their season. (My tomatoes last year were disappointingly bland. Sort of like store-bought tomatoes.)

I’ve been reworking my entire back yard in an effort to bring more vegetable beds online. Part of this has meant refiguring how to access some of the areas that haven’t had grass in them for a long time. I want to keep removing grass, and I have a lot of various brick around. I’ve been moving rock around, and have begun creating another broken-brick path to keep some of the garden area from being a mud- and/or weed-pit. I like the progress so far:

brick, compost, natural gardener, potatoes, rock, turkey compost

January 26th, 2011 by Marc Opperman

This past weekend was somewhat productive in garden-land. I finished up my 30-minute compost pile. Why “30-minute?” Because I tossed most of it together in about 30 minutes last Thursday evening after work, that’s why. In the immortal words of Han Solo, “She may not look like much, kid, but she’s got it where it counts.”

See what I mean? Ghetto. (As is my photography). But it will do the job. And for those of you following along at home, that’s two wooden shipping palettes ganked from work with a liner of metal window screen I had left over from a failed window-rescreening job. All of it is lovingly and skillfully nailed to the side of my existing compost bins. (Snort!)

In other doings, I got myself to the Natural Gardener for seed potatoes (Kennebec and Red Pontiac), three bare-root Brazos raspberry bushes, and dirt… a few dig-yer-own bags of Hill Country mix. The dirt went in my third raised bed, and the raspberries went behind the bed along our fence. Should be a good place, as they’ll get some run-off water from the sprinkler system, as well as a decent amount of sun. Might also, however, be a little too close to the squirrel highway (the fence.)

The potatoes will go in the ground. I cut them and dusted them with sulphur as suggested by the Natural Gardener potato fact sheet, and they are presently curing in the garage. Hopefully I’ll get to plant them this weekend, but I think I need to work in some compost first. Probably an entire pickup load from Natural Gardener (yet to be procured.)

Also yanked some miscellaneous plants, mainly helianthus maximilliani and pavonia braziliensis that, together, had taken over a very large portion of the back. They, in turn, shielded from destruction a great amount of bermuda grass, St. Augustine and the other major scourge of my yard, straggler daisy (Calyptocarpus vialis – should be called strangler daisy). I did a LOT of digging and composting, but I did consign the bermuda grass rhizomes and stolons to the fire pit. I’m not letting that stuff near anything resembling soil if I can help it.

bermuda grass, compost, natural gardener, potatoes, straggler daisy

January 12th, 2011 by Marc Opperman

I’ve been casting about for a shift in how I see my life. Mainly, I’m looking for a way that work doesn’t rule everything I do or my definition of myself. I’d like to see art and creativity take over that role. I have a fair amount of frequently untapped talent for making things in a somewhat improvised but lasting manner. I’ve crafted a bench out of two pieces of limestone and a plank of wood, fountains from flower pots and scrap copper pipe, and innovative landscape features with nothing but piles of stone, a shovel and sweat. Most landscaping or garden construction techniques I have attempted I can master, adding a personal flair to them as I go. Much of what I do uses materials and tools I have at hand. Sometimes, however, I treat my lack of ability to buy materials as a handicap as opposed to the opportunity for craftiness it really is. I have to, at the very least, suppress that message of “lack” if I want to nurture my creativity.

Enter Berthold Haas. (Or in my case, hopefully re-enter.) I haven’t kept up my friendship with him in the years since I got married, but now seems like a good time to get in touch with him. I was indelibly inspired by his use of limestone in making everything, but particularly landscape features like fountains. I used to live next door to him as he transformed his rented house into a garden oasis of fountains, walls and a limestone grotto.

His particular rough-hewn, but classically-inspired forms are perfectly in line with my aesthetic given that mine is informed by Texas Hill Country landforms (lots of limestone and “cedar”, or ashe juniper) and an earlier life as a hobbyist caver (more limestone). And while I could never even begin to copy him adequately, there’s not a time I work with karst limestone (that swiss-cheese limestone named for cave-bearing landforms) that I don’t think of him.

It might be time for me to try my hand at more fountains and benches, stuff that’s a little bigger and better than I’ve already done. I’d love to try a fountain somewhat like Berthold’s – hulking slab of uncut, natural limestone with a perfect well and channel cut into it, water entering from a hidden source over a hand-hewn race or nozzle. I might not be able to match that scale – he works with pieces that weigh tons, and has the studio and employees to help deal with these thing – but I know I can at least create forms that are pleasing.

bench, berthold haas, creativity, fountain, garden, inspiration, karst, landscape, limestone, sculpt, stone, structure

January 7th, 2011 by Marc Opperman

It’s technically Winter here in Austin, just as it is elsewhere in the Northern Hemisphere. But as is usual for Central Texas, you wouldn’t really know it. Especially if you grew up somewhere more northerly, like I did.

Well, it’s about to get a LOT more winterly in a few days – with sustained lows in the city hovering in the mid-20s. That means I’ll be scrambling to protect some early Winter crops – onions, carrots, newly-planted lettuce and radishes. Since my budget for gardening has been hovering pretty close to $0, I have no fancy row cover or hoop structures for covering things, and must instead rely on a mish-mash of old sheets and towels. It’s more work and sometimes tougher in windy weather, but it usually gets the job done. That said, it is going to be in the 20s… will my things actually survive that, covered or not?

Well, I snapped a few pictures with the iPhone… a couple reminders of what my Winter garden looks like. Might look radically different in a few days.

December 6th, 2010 by Marc Opperman

It’s that time of year in Central Texas… leaf season. Twelve metric tons of leaves fall from my one ash tree or blow in from the neighbors’ yards and generally bury everything in the yard. And every year I agonize – mulch the leaves in place in the yard or rake, suck up with mulching mower, and put them somewhere useful? Rake leaves out of the beds? Or leave them there to compost?

Yesterday I opted to do more raking off the grass and out of the beds so that I could suck the leaves up with the mower and mulch elsewhere. In the process I threw in a lot of still-green clippings from other plants to give the “brown stuff” of the leaves a little “green-stuff” fuel for composting.

But given that our rainfall has, well, fallen behind again, composting in Central Texas can be a real challenge. Keeping leaf piles and compost heaps moist is difficult. Without the moisture, leaves and other “brown” materials just sit… for a couple years in some cases. Using city water to artificially water the pile poses some challenge, too, as the chlorine and other minerals in tap water change the balance of beneficial microbes in the compost and soil. A rainwater collection system feed to water the compost pile would be ideal, but could be hard to rig. Yesterday, I dragged out my hose-end chlorine filter and let a small sprinkler water the compost for about 45 minutes after mixing in some of my leaves and some pine needles imported by my parents from Houston. Hopefully that’ll help jump-start the compost again.

While turning the pile, I did find some dynastes beetle grubs, so I know the pile is not dead.

I also managed to plant some oxblood lily bulbs my mom gave me. I panted them in a row along the edge of a path in my back yard, so hopefully, come next Fall (usually on my birthday), I’ll have a red-lined walk.

November 29th, 2010 by Marc Opperman

Despite reports of frozen vegetation everywhere around me, and of temperatures that hovered around 20 degrees for too long, nothing in my yard was nipped last Friday. Strangely, gardeners I know who were just a couple miles south of me had frozen veggies, mainly tomatoes, peppers and other more sensitive things. I was in Houston for the holiday, and couldn’t have done anything about my plants, so when things froze there, I figured my yard was a goner. I was worried about the 50-plus onions I’d planted, specifically. But no harm came.

Not that freezing is such a bad thing. I actually look forward to it every year. It’s a chance to reset, and to remove the plants that just don’t work. I like to think that if I can plant a specific plant, and that it will survive the psychotic winters of the Texas Hill Country, then it was meant to be in my yard.

Another reason I look forward to a good, hard freeze is the art wrought by the frostweed (verbesina virginica). Magical.

cold, freeze, frost, frostweed

October 22nd, 2010 by Marc Opperman

These blackfoot daisies (Melampodium leucanthum), growing next to my driveway, are the best I’ve seen them in my yard. Typically very drought tolerant, they also have a very long blooming season, March to November. The rains in August set them off, and they’ve been glorious since.

I did some work on the bed they’re in to remove some very overgrown agave and grasses that had died. I replaced those with little bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium) and evening primrose I transplanted from other parts of the yard.

I learned something the hard way about agave (mine was Agave americana americana). Besides the nasty spikes and recurved thorns the plant uses to defend itself, it has a third defense mechanism that’s not apparent to the eye. In fact, it’s microscopic. The juice of the plant contains calcium oxalate raphides – microscopic needles – that cause acute contact dermatitis. In my case, the pulpy “leaves” of agave I was chopping slapped up against the insides of my knees. Within a minute or so my skin was on fire and itching simultaneously. I knew I’d come in contact with something, but not specifically what. I dropped everything and ran to the shower. It was too late, however. Benedryl cream and topical fluocininide (strong steroidal cream) didn’t do a whole lot, but the burning eventually subsided. The following day I had a rash that looked and felt a little like poison ivy. A week later it has not faded a bit. In fact, I read one source that said the rash can last a year.

I love learning new things about plants, but not in such a tactile, first-hand way. My friend Grog and I once joked we should start a TV show called The Tactile Botanist, with a Brit-accented buffoon of a host bumbling his way through a range of plant identifications based on their thorns, spines, brambles, tripping vines and rash-producing juices, and the severity of his injuries. Needless to say, the agave is now my main vote for the pilot episode.

I continued my work the next day in jeans and a long sleeve shirt. Lesson learned.

agave americana, blackfoot daisy, calcium oxalate, little bluestem, Melampodium leucanthum, raphides, Schizachyrium scoparium

September 29th, 2010 by Marc Opperman

Back a few months ago I lashed together some bamboo posts to form a trellis for a passion vine at the end of my porch. (My older entry is here). The idea was to create a privacy barrier on that end of the house to shield us from the neighbors. Our porch sits almost higher than their fence, so it always felt a little open back there.

Well, no more:

…at least until it freezes. And then I get to grow my barrier all over again next Spring.

bamboo, passion vine, trellis

September 28th, 2010 by Marc Opperman

I emailed the makers of the Leonard Soil Knife, and two of their employees emailed me back Monday morning with many apologies. Apparently the tool I got was part of a bad batch involving poorly-tempered steel (and a lot of broken blades). They have since solved the production issue, and upgraded the tool with a few extra features. Having a job based in production, I know these things can and do happen.

They have mailed me a new one. All they wanted in return was a picture of the broken one. As a bonus, it’s the upgraded model!

I’m happy I’ll have one of these. I think in Texas soil it’ll be an indispensable wrangler of roots, rocks and rowdy weeds.

a. m. leonard, customer service, leonard, soil knife, tool