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 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

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.

July 13th, 2011 by Marc Opperman

It’s been a bunch of weeks since I last posted. Life has tossed me some loops, and it’s been a rough ride. My main concern as far as this space is concerned was that I thought I would no longer have this house and would be returning to the land of rental hell. I had stopped doing anything in the yard besides collecting tomatoes and mowing. It was part of my process of letting go. Somewhere in the midst of feeling like I was needing to let go, I realized my garden is my biggest, most significant place of sanctuary in my life. It’s also one of the bigger ways in which I express my creativity.

Leaving the house appears like it will no longer be the case. I won’t go into those details much, but me keeping the house involves a lot of outside help, for which I’m very grateful. Getting a decent full-time job after my 3 months of unemployment also helps.

This means I feel much better re-engageing with my ‘blog and the greater gardener community on the whole. While I missed the opportunity to apply for Travis County Master Gardener training (just too much uncertainty at the time to go through with it), I still hope to build my friendships with that community, too, as well as the other wonderful people I’ve met through the Austin Garden Bloggers page on Facebook.

I have some topics for posts in mind, so I hope you’ll join me as I re-energize this space!

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

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

May 7th, 2011 by Marc Opperman

I won a pair of passes to the Wildflower Center’s Gardens on Tour this weekend (courtesy of the Statesman’s Renee Studebaker at Renee’s Roots, so we’ll be loading up the child and hoping he doesn’t want to stay for 14 hours at each place we visit.

All of the gardens appear to be professionally designed and installed, and I sometimes feel these don’t necessarily incorporate the soul of an inspired homeowner/gardener. But they WILL be pretty, and a testament to what you can do with a lot of resources. And hopefully a showcase for native plants, always a plus.

From the official description:

Last year’s drought and hard freezes put plants to the test. These gardens demonstrate how our natives can beautify a space, no matter the rigors of the region. Moreover, wildflower gardens are highly sustainable. They are conservative in water use, don’t need excessive chemicals to make them thrive and are easy to maintain.

April 11th, 2011 by Marc Opperman

Little Mr. is positively addicted to the outdoors. Never fussy out there, and positively flips out when we bring him indoors.

So here he is in his element this evening:

lukas

March 29th, 2011 by Marc Opperman

Well, things seem to be humming along outside. I have strawberries, blackberries, Viva Italia tomatoes and broccoli all setting fruit (though, broccoli isn’t technically a fruit… a head or a crown instead.) The blackberries are unexpected because I was under the impression the fruit would develop on this year’s growth but next year. In other words, on old growth. The canes I planted this year, however must be considered last year’s growth, so maybe that explains it.

Sunday I took the boy outside. He loves it. He’s a brave little explorer, and seemingly pretty tough, too. It’s not uncommon to find him bouldering over the various landscape features, carefully picking his way with huff-puffs of determination, and gingerly brushing the plants aside or avoiding them. So far he has not ripped any up. Most of the time, he dabbles in whatever dirt he can find, or waves sticks around. Sometimes he wanders, but he hasn’t gone too far yet. It helps that the back yard is enclosed.

While he explored, I modified my sprinkler system. I replaced one of the high-volume reciprocating heads with a drip irrigation tap and half-inch tubing. I also ran several eighth-inch tubes and spray heads to cover much of the former area of the higher-pressure head. One immediate and obvious benefit is decreased water consumption, and better-targeted watering. However, the nicest benefit so far is that the “chik-chik-chik” sound of the old head has been replaced by a gentle hiss. Watering just got a lot quieter.

My cutworm problems are in remission, and the green worms that were eating the lettuce are completely gone, too. Perhaps this was the application of Bacillus thuringiensis kurstaki last week, the cooler weather, or the worms are just in natural decline having passed whatever their season is. This seems like a nice reprieve, though I know other pests will soon be along to fill the voids.

In non-food news…
I met with a group of Austin garden bloggers for the first time this weekend at the home and gardens of one of the group’s members. It was wonderful to meet all these dedicated gardeners and plant aficionados. Part of the fun was a plant swap. And although I was remiss in taking anything, I brought back several nice natives that I installed around my yard. Among the haul: Mexican buckeye, Hill Country penstemon, Gregg’s mistflower, and a tradescantia gigantea. I’m excited about all these plants, and hope they do well.