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.

May 5th, 2011 by Marc Opperman

For some time I’ve lamented that I never manage that seemingly perfect mix of compost heap ingredients that yields a little backyard furnace of thermophilic microorganisms, the one that keeps me from spreading weed seeds all over the yard (I’m damn tired of Arizona ash, sunflower and frostweed sprouts everywhere). I vowed to do better with composting this year, but wasn’t really doing anything systematically better to get there.

A week ago, however, I went to bury some kitchen scraps in the pile and flipped over a layer of organic detritus and discovered… heat!

The temperature needs to be a little higher… 135-160 degrees is the optimal temperature to destroy seeds and pathogens (not that I suspect THOSE are a problem… yet). Could be I need to get more air or moisture – or less – into the mixture.

But I think I stumbled into the right mixture of “green” to “brown” materials for the compost heap quite on accident. And a way to reproduce it in a somewhat reliable way. Last week when I mowed the grass for the first time this season, I had a bag of scavenged mixed oak leaves and grass from another yard I was mowing near. The bottom of the bag had rotted out, and when I went to move it, the leaf mixture spewed forth. Did I bother to rake it up? No. I had my gas-powered vacuum cleaner already running, so I kicked the leaves around and mowed them up. Since it’s a mulching mower and I bag the clippings, I had inadvertently created a really good mixture for the compost heap, probably achieving close to the 30:1 ratio of carboniferous to nitrogenous materials.

But it has been exceptionally dry here, too.

So, to help with that, I’ve been allowing tap water to sit in white plastic jugs. This allows the city-provided chlorine to outgas and prevents it from damaging the microbial community in the compost heap. Every week I dump a 5-gallon jug into the heap to help keep it moist. I generally turn it (or at least give it a good prodding) on the same rough schedule so it maintains some oxygen.

Last night I checked the temperature again, and it had fallen to around 110?. I suspect a lot of the nitrogen-bearing grass has been used up. It’s getting close to time to mow again, so I’m definitely going to toss in more leaves as I do.

And if that doesn’t work, I might resort to peeing in my compost pile.

carbon, compost, nitrogen

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

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

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!)

April 5th, 2011 by Marc Opperman

I took a weekend off from garden projects and maintenance, and went camping at Pedernales Falls State Park instead. The weather was perfect, and the river cold. There were lots of wildflowers to marvel at, and I have a few pictures of some I have yet to identify for myself. It’s Tuesday, and my legs are still sore from backpacking with a 70 pound pack, and my chigger bites still itch. But I enjoyed myself anyway.

A few pictures from Pedernales:

Sunset:

As I mentioned, no real gardening this past weekend to speak of. But I have a morning ritual, and it tends to involve making coffee and eating breakfast until it gets light, and then wandering out in the garden for ten minutes before getting ready for work. I check for bug or critter damage, pull a lot of weeds, and harvest any produce that’s ready. In the past few days that has meant strawberries!

Today or tomorrow, too, I’ll be harvesting a head of broccoli. There’s tons of lettuce ready, and onions falling over daily.

Otherwise, I’m pretty much just waiting for things to get ripe, finish growing, or whatever it is they do.

Snow peas:

Potatoes are flowering, so presumably they are growing some tubers, too. Tomatoes vines are all setting fruit, most of my cantaloupe are past the seed-leaf stage and developing a few real leaves. Everything is doing what it’s supposed to be doing, just slowly. Well, “slowly” for a human.

This is the part of gardening that teaches me patience.

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.

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 23rd, 2011 by Marc Opperman