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.

In other news, I finished the transition of the former fire pit area today with a mixture of brick-laying and gravel pathway magic. Both the bricks and the granite gravel were reused materials, and the area they cover removed yet more lawn from the southwest corner of my yard. I used perforated brick with the homes that it would serve as a rain infiltration point. I purposely dug the area between the two garden beds to be a little lower so that rainwater would collect on the path and infiltrate. We’ll see how that goes.

Cantaloupe are planted, as well as one mystery tomato volunteer I found this weekend. I transplanted it to a more useful spot that wasn’t in the path of, well, path construction.

Lukas was a big help today. Mainly he was fascinated by caterpillars. He let one (a gulf fritillary) crawl all over him, and decided to carry another around as a temporary pet for about an hour. As that second one was some form of army worm, I had no objections. Especially when he eventually squished it with his Matchbox car. I love seeing him so fearless about bugs.

Oh, and did I mention he ate several carpenter ants yesterday?

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

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.

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.

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.

My old makeshift rain barrel platform (constructed of pieces of old pressure-treated lumber) was sinking into the ground, and my rain barrel was listing. So I got a few concrete blocks, some spare brick, and a couple 24″ pavers and constructed a new one:

It is very sturdy, level and ultimately reusable. Nothing is mortared together – just heavy enough to stay in place, even if the barrel is empty of the 440 pounds of water it could hold.

I arranged the blocks in such a way that toads and other small critters have an opening to the interior and can access the inside and hide out in little “rooms” formed by the different blocks.

I want to go back to the homebrew store and buy another barrel. I’m eager to double my capacity.

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.

But there are probably still a few costs associated with starting up a flock – hardware cloth for the coop, miscellaneous construction supplies, watering accessories, feed, and, well, birds.

So, I submitted a Kickstarter project:

Hopefully it’ll get approved. I would like to get a coop built this Winter in time for the Funky Coop Tour in Spring.

I’ve poked around for coop plans, and have a few saved. I also have sketched my own basic plans that would incorporate some of the materials I’ve saved.

I’ve brainstormed… wrote some notes in my moleskin at the time I drew the plans:

I want to build a coop, mostly out of reclaimed materials. (I’m okay buying some framing lumber if I can’t get it for free.) I’ve been sitting here with graph paper, and beyond basic dimensions, can’t seem to draw anything useful. Still working on it, though.

I have four 6-foot raw cedar tree posts to use for the corners.
I have a couple more that could be used decoratively, or across top of framing in front. Or for legs to the inside nest box.
I want it to be roughly 8 feet wide, Six feet tall in front, 5 feet tall in back, and 6 feet deep. (Slanted roof).
I have enough corrugated tin roofing material for the top.
It could look roughly like this:
http://www.prlog.org/11412887-backyard-chicken-coop-plans.jpg
I do not have a screen door, plywood, or hardware cloth, but can possibly scrounge some stuff up.
I do not mind using treated wood, as I hear it doesn’t pose problems. If not using treated wood, I have enough bricks to keep the wood off the ground.
The inside of that inner area has a few nest boxes (usually 3) that the chickens lay the eggs in. Seems they will use a wide variety of box sizes, but they need to be divided a little, and be big enough to hold straw. I saw one coop that used milk crates as nest boxes.
The nest boxes need easy access via a hatch-style door on he outside so you can grab the eggs.
The chickens use a ramp to get into the nest box area.
Some sort of ventilation at the top of the nest box area would be great.
In general it has to be predator proof… snakes, possums, raccoons, cats, dogs… etc. So hardware cloth that’s strong and has smaller holes.

More what I need is a 24″ screen door that can be cut down to roughly 5.5 feet, or any rolls of hardware cloth that can be reclaimed.

So, we’ll see. If I can’t raise some funds in the next month, maybe I’ll just try to put something together anyway.

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.

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.

I’m nothing if not a do-it-yourselfer. I love the challenge of taking stuff I already have and finding the best way to make something useful out of it. Part of this comes genetically – my grandfather was, and my father is, crafty this way. And like them, I keep a lot of salvaged stuff around so that I have options when it comes time to make something.

But one project eluded me – a rainbarrel. It’s been hard for me to locate a source of barrels suitable for tinkering. Most sellers know a finished rainbarrel sells for between $100 and $200, so they tend to price empty food-grade barrels accordingly.

Back when I wanted to make fresh mozzarella, I stopped by Austin Homebrew Supply since they are apparently the only place in town supplying the ingredients for cheese-making. However, they sell empty 55-gallon barrels very cheaply, as well. They have a supply of them because they sell beer-brewing malt syrup in bulk. These barrels are a very sturdy blue plastic with a metal ring and rubber gaskets to seal the top. I bought one on the spot the last time I was there.

It didn’t take too much tinkering to create a functional rainbarrel.

First, I had to clean the leftover malt out of the barrel. Because malt is basically a sugary syrup, this was a pretty pleasant-smelling – if sticky – task. I didn’t use any soap, and all of the leftover water, I poured directly on parts of my garden.

I drilled a half-inch hole near the base of the barrel to accommodate a spigot. I had a cool, weathered brass spigot leftover from who-knows-where.

I also had an appropriate gasket and half-inch nut for the inside to secure the spigot.

Next I cut a hole in the lid of the barrel. The lid already had two threaded 3-inch holes in it, but I needed something bigger to be able to use a proper downspout diverter ($8 at Home Depot). I used my Skil saw to cut a hole in the lid that matched the diameter of the downspout diverter. I had marked this with a Sharpie.

Inside the lid, I fashioned some metal window screen as a catch-basket for debris and mosquito larvae pouring in from my downspouting. Currently, zip ties hold it in place, but I may use a stainless-steel hose clamp in the future. Cleaning the trap is done by removing (and inverting) the barrel lid steel hoop and the diverter assembly.

I built a stand for the barrel using some pieces of 2×6 lumber and cedar fence slats. It’s not gorgeous, but it does the trick of elevating the barrel 18 inches to give me head pressure for watering parts of the yard. The wooden part of the stand rests on some concrete pavers to help reduce the chance the wood rots.

So far I’ve spent a total of $28 to make it. It’s not perfect, though. What this barrel is lacking is any form of overflow arrangement, or way to connect it to a second barrel. Adding a second barrel would be nice since 55 gallons doesn’t go far. I want to figure out a better way to connect the spigot (it leaks a tiny bit). Also, I didn’t remove the St. Augustine grass from below the stand. A gravel base beneath it might be tidier. In April I made a concrete block stand for a friend, and I might try that model in the future. Concrete blocks are cheap.

Still, we’ve had a couple brief downpours since I built this barrel, and even a few minutes of rain fill it completely to the point of overflowing. Now if we’d only have a few more.