Another rain, Another Round of Lilies!

Rain Lilies and Chives

All the Rainlilies in the previous posts have shrivelled up and died. I was going to post a picture of shrivelled-up rain lilies, but it was TOO DEPRESSING. But then, we had ANOTHER good rain (not 3 inches, but some) and we got a few stragglers.  It is so unusual; in August the THOUSAND YEAR DROUGHT was so bad, the ground was a dead gray, with no vegetation, as you know from my previous posts, it LOOKED like  the world after several frosts, but it was 106˚ out!

Rain Lily and....I think WEEDS

Now, everywhere, because of the rain, flowers are blooming and “grass” (native weeds) are growing, and it is a reasonable temperature (70˚-90˚), so it feels for all the world like Spring! P*L*U*S, everyone is planting their garden!

Honestly, Texas is another planet. Seriously, Ya’ll.

SEEDLINGS!

Perky young lettuce with sinister frond of Bermuda grass sneaking up on it

I actually had to WRITE actual COPY for publication this weekend, causing me to be a useless space case for three days while I attempted to FOCUS my MIND (which still doesn’t tend to happen naturally until the 8 hours before deadline.) During the time that I was sweating on the creative throne to give birth to my brain-children, I grew oblivious to the outer world, causing me to rush outside on Sunday afternoon and realize that not only had my seeds SPROUTED, but they had started to DIE of thirst and neglect as well.

Snow Peas sprout in the back, and arugula sprouts in the front

I frantically watered all my beds (Sunday was HOT) and all is well, no one died and all the wee seedlings recovered. Phew!

REMEMBER TO KEEP THOSE SEED BEDS DAMP!

SEE how the evil carrot seedlings group together?

Beets: The Plantening!

Beet Greens and Swiss Chard

Time for that BEETS post I promised you! Unfortunately, I don’t have as many gorgeous pictures of BEETS from my GARDEN as I have of Carrots to spice this up with.

Beets, like carrots, do well in Austin in the Winter Garden.

(There was once a place in New York City called the Wintergarden, in the early 20th and late 19th century, and it was a very popular theater and I think they served cocktails there and also had dancing and bands.)

The Winter Garden in New York City.

Anyway: My best experience with beets has been planting them directly into homemade, screened compost. Which brings us to Compost. You may have noticed that most gardeners, both of this century and the 19th and 20th, are fanatical about compost, and I am no exception. I don’t know WHAT IT IS about compost, but it is ADDICTIVE! Once you start making compost YOU CANNOT STOP, even if you DON’T HAVE A GARDEN!

What is compost? Essentially, it is homemade fertilizer made out of dead plants, kitchen waste, fallen leaves, and if you are lucky like me, sawdust. Oh, and coffee grounds and used tea leaves usually are included. There are a million (ok, hundreds) of books out there and website information about the B*E*S*T ways to make compost, but essentially compost is just throwing garbage in a pile on the ground and letting it break down into soil again. (Biodegradable garbage, that is.)

Compost can be made two ways: hot or cold. Making “hot” compost is much faster, and “cold” compost has more nutrients, but they are both fine compost. To make HOT compost, you make or buy some sort of BIN, and you put your leaves and coffee grounds and carrot peelings and dead tomato plants in it, and a little water, and you turn the bin to let oxygen in, and the process of breaking down creates HEAT. If you pay close attention to the ratio of dry, brown ingredients (called “browns” : dry leaves, sawdust. etc) and damp “Green” ingredients (called “greens” but includes cofffee grounds, grass clippings, and vegetable kitchen wastes) you can make a batch of finished “hot” compost in a relatively short time. Compost is done cooking when it smells heavenly like a forest floor.

Gigantic BEETS!

“Cold” composting takes longer, but is more suited to my laziness and busy schedule. For “cold” compost, you create an open-air bin out of old pallets, or bales of hay, or whatever is handy. Them you just throw your compost ingredients into it willy-nilly, being careful, however, to cover up delicious kitchen scraps with dirt, to discourage “wildlife”. Once your bin is full, you “turn” it by pitching it into another nearby open-air bin, and after a while you pitch it back into the original bin. It is done when it looks like dirt and smells heavenly like a forest floor.

(What is the addictive part of composting? It is saving things to compost. Once you have gotten used to setting all your compostable kitchen waste aside, you can never stop. It just seems like such a WASTE to throw things into the landfill, that could so easily be composted! To create fantastic topsoil! While all around us agribusiness is sending millions of tons of topsoil into the gulf of Mexico, guaranteeing that our grandchildren will die of starvation due to lack of sufficient topsoil in which to grow food! The impulse to compost the compostable becomes irresistable, to the extent that one starts saving orange peels in one’s pockets when away from home, and asking restaurants if you can have their coffee grounds.)

Back to BEETS: THE PLANTENING! So, prepare a wheelbarrow-loadful of screened compost (to make screened compost you force compost through a screen made of hardware cloth) and dump it on your weeded, prepared bed. Smooth out the compost and make it as level as you can without kneeling or stepping on the bed.

Then, take the beet seeds, which are GREAT seeds, very easy to see and work with, and plant them about three inches apart in rows in the soil. Plant them about a half an inch to an inch deep, and when you are done press all the dirt down and water it. Keep the bed moist with daily watering until it is full of wee seedlings.

Here is the thing about beet seeds (and swiss chard seeds too, which are practically the same thing): each seeds has FIVE seeds on it. So under perfect conditions, each seed will make five seedlings. Can you let them all live? NO. You must only allow ONE seedling to live. That’s right, MORE THINNING!!

Fresh Beets make your dinner COLORFUL

Thinning beets is MUCH easier, psychologically, than thinning carrots, however. Because you can EAT the thinned seedlings, which is 1)delicious and 2) at least they are not being killed in vain. The wee Beet seedlings are great mixed into a salad, which is what I usually do; a whole bedful of beet seedlings only makes like one salad. Or, you can cook them and eat them, they are good that way too! Lots of fancy restaurants only use the beet seedlings, they are so GOURMET.

Another great thing about beets is: beet greens. When you harvest a beet, you harvest the greens at the same time, and they are ALSO edible. I would say that they fall in the Deliciousness Spectrum in between SPINACH (the most delicious green) and Swiss Chard; they taste like swiss chard, but have the soft texture of spinach. When you harvest your beets, you can bake the beets in the oven, tossed in olive oil and salt, and quickly sautee the beet greens to be served as your second vegetable. They can be used in any recipe that calls for cooked spinach with good effect. ANd they are totally EXTRA and FREE!

More Neighborhood Rain Lilies

Lilies from my neighbor M.J.'s garden (Yes, I think she IS that M.J.)

Yeah, yeah, I know this is a whole lot of pictures and not much writing! But LOOK at the Shiny Things!!

In Motorcycle guy's Front Treelawn

This shot captures the feel of them better

Rain Lilies contrasting nicely with Candlestick Plant

My Breakfast

A Texas French Bread Bagel, with jalapeno cream cheese, cippolina onions, cucumber, and smoked salmon remnants. "Way to stretch out the Lox, Dude!"

Certain Rain Actually Occurs

Behold the wheelbarrow full of rain water!

How about some nice RAIN PICTURES? Because it DID rain!

Remember how I said that I might awaken to the sound of rain and thunder? It actually happened just like that! It rained pretty near three inches before I even got up the next morning. Rain has actually CONTINUED, off and on, for two days now. It has been a light, gentle rain for the most part, so my seeds and soil have not washed away.

Watch the Broccoli plants double in size before your very eyes!

Very Happy Basil Plants

Remember those relocated Artichokes? hey lived and are now putting out teeny tiny leaves

OMG Kathy! Did You Get Your Tiny Cabbages Planted before The Almost Certain Rain Tomorrow?!?!?!?

Enormous Grub Poops in my Hand.

Of course I did. But first, a gratuitous photo of a gigantic Grub crapping in my hand!

Then, let us join hands in prayerful expectation of RAIN, which there is an 80% chance of tomorrow, and even as I TYPE THIS, my radar shows a line of violent thunderstorms drifting in an Austinly direction! I may be wakening to the sound of thunder at 4 AM.

After a day like today, where I did a million things IN ADDITION to a Herculean Gardening Chore, I feel too tired to do much ‘splaining. Let us proceed DIRECTLY to the DOCUMENTATION:

Where is the Bed? I can't see it for all the weeds....oh, THERE it is, inside the barely visible brick outline

For Contrast, here you see on the left, a FINISHED BED, next to THE WEEDY BED that we will be working on today

Now, a photo of the bed, weeded:

I Have Weeded It

I found a few surviving beets and onions, that lived through the merciless heat and drought in the shade of the native weed-cover.

What a Fine White Onion, a SURVIVOR!

What a fine onion! I left him there to delight in the cooler temperatures and rain of Autumn

Now, a photo of the bed with three piles of screened compost:

This is just about the L*A*S*T of my homemade compost! Things are not breaking down very quickly in the DROUGHT

PLANTED!

All Planted! THis bed's new name shall be THE CABBAGE BED

Cauliflower in the back, then cabbages, then a row of “recovered” onions that I found, still alive, under the shade of the weeds, then Beets. Tomorrow, I will do a little post on BEETS, like my CARROTS: THE PLANTING post.

Carrots: THE PLANTING.

Your Host, with some pretty nice size carrots freshly pulled from nature's bosom. Photo by Todd Wolfson.

I am VERY enthusiastic about planting carrots here in Austin; I have never had a terrible harvest, no matter how dreadful the soil I have planted them in. I have planted carrots in gravel, in clay, and in reasonable “good” soil, and they have done well in every type of soil (although of course they did BEST in the fairly good soil!) In fact, I have read that it doesn’t DO to fertilize them much, as this makes them grow huge carrot-tops and tiny carrots. They do better in rather poor soil. (I have plenty of that!)

“But why do you bother to plant carrots in the cruddy soil?” you may be asking, gripping your computer with white-knuckled fingers. This is a good time to bring up Crop Rotation. Unfortunately, crop rotation isn’t just for Serious Farmers with Big Farms. It’s like this: when you grow a vegetable, let’s call it Vegetable X,  in the soil, diseases and microbes and viruses and other things I forget the names of (Nematodes! that’s it!) are attracted to Vegetable X and migrate there to feast upon it and prey upon it. By the time you harvest vegetable X,  its Enemies are well-established and hoping to get an easy living by absolutely DECIMATING the next year’s batch.

If you plant the same thing in the same place the next year, it usually does very poorly. VERY. One year, before I learned about CROP ROTATION, I planted Okra in what seemed like an awesome spot for Okra: HOT HOT HOT, full sun, southern exposure. I harvested gigantic bags full of Okra, a bumper crop, I didn’t know what to DO with it all. The next year, I planted them in the OKRA SPOT again, and I GOT NOT A SINGLE POD. NOT ONE!! That is how important it is to rotate your crops.

Huge bucket FUll of Carrots. See how tiny some of them are? THAT"S BECAUSE I DIDN"T THIN THEM ENOUGH!

So, you have to pull the ol’ switcheroo on the nematodes, diseases, etc. There they are, lurking in the soil, waiting to attack….and you plant SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT! (It is not advised to plant something only slightly different. For instance, Broccoli and Cabbage are both in the Brassica family, and aren’t different ENOUGH. Most gardening books will tell you what vegetables are in the same family so you can avoid doing a poor rotation.)

So, you have to move everything around every single year. I have a few beds in my garden that are actually sort of GOOD (I think they are where older settlers might have had the henhouse, or the privy) and then I have some rather bad beds, that are very gravelly or stony or heavy clay.)

As you know from YESTERDAY’S post, I am ALWAYS amending my soil with fertilizer and compost, which helps a lot, but I think it all just washes away over time or something. The bad beds are still full of gravel and stones and clay. SOMEDAY (cue music) I will be able to build Bermuda-grass-root resistant masonry beds, filled with perfect stone-free soil and worms, 2 feet deep!. My compost and soil will be trapped and will never wash away again! (This is part of my “Lottery Fantasy”, which is kind of silly because it really wouldn’t cost THAT much! All I would need is a shovel and cement and TIME!)

Making Carrot and Fennel Stock for Vegetarian Soups

Where was I? Oh yes. Carrots do quite well, and also you almost never actually have to cover them in freezes, because the GROUND never freezes here, ever. The carrot tops never seem to freeze either, but even if they did, it wouldn’t affect the actual CARROTS.

To plant your carrots, I recommend loosening your soil and adding compost on top, as deep as seems practical. Then scatter a huge amount of carrot seeds over the top, and water them into the soil. Carrot seeds can take as long as A MONTH (!) to germinate (compared to most seeds only taking a few days) so if they don’t germinate in a normal amount of time, don’t panic. Usually in September they germinate fairly quickly, but if it is chilly out, they take their time.

IMPORTANT: DO NOT plant ANYTHING into Turkey or other bird poop compost! Nothing will germinate in Turkey Compost, I think it is too acidic or something. Use homemade or Revitalizer.

Then, after they germinate, you must THIN them, That means, pull up and kill the innocent little carrot plants so that the remaining carrots are not at all crowded and have room, like one carrot every three inches. Carrots are usually non-compliant and won’t even sprout unless they are in clumps, so you have a bunch a dirt with NO carrots and then fifty carrots all in one inch. Bastards! But you must grit your teeth and pull up nearly all of them so that they are well-thinned.

I had to learn all this THE HARD WAY because, NO, I couldn’t just BELIEVE what the seed packet SAID, I had to experiment for myself with 1) not thinning 2) not using very much seed; what do you know, the old-timers who have actually been growing carrots for generations were right: plant thickly, then thin.

"I remember how it used to rain." She reminisced, next to a huge juicy hollyhock, the kind that only grows when it actually rains. Photo by Todd Wolfson

Interesting Carrot Fact: Carrots used to be considered an EXOTIC vegetable that no one knew about. The vegetable that was MUCH more POPULAR is the one that looks like a WHITE carrot, the PARSNIP. Parsnips can be left in the field during a hard freeze and they don’t freeze and get ruined, and the cold makes them taste sweet (Cold makes all vegetables taste sweet, including carrots, which is why the best tasting vegetables come from cold places like New York State, in the summer I mean.) So naturally everyone liked parsnips better, because they were less work and sweeter. BUT WHERE ARE YOU NOW, PARSNIPS? NO ONE EATS YOU ANYMORE!

(Hey, maybe I should plant some! I would eat them! Daikon radishes grow really really well here, and they LOOK like parsnips.)

The other grand thing about CARROTS, for the home gardener, is that they are one of those awesome vegetables that, anytime from when they are tiny to when they are huge, you can just go pick one when you need one. It’s not like they all come ripe at once and demand use immediately, no matter HOW inconvenient this is for YOU. Instead, like green peppers and onions, you can go get one when you need one and just leave the rest to keep growing larger.

Gratuitous picture of cats playing with catnip

OOPS! Time to Get A-Plantin’ Heh Heh

Red Wheelbarrow full of screened compost and bag of LADYBUG Fertilizer

You remember how I said that we were supposed to get MORE RAIN? Well, it hasn’t happened; even though that storm system circled back on us, and we have has 20% and 30% rain predictions every day for days and days. HARRUMPH.

Where was I?

Anyway, I sat on my front porch in my underwear, and it WASN’T HOT! It was only like 85˚. Really comfortable. And I made a list of what I want to plant this Fall:

Snow Peas

My collection of OLD SEEDS

Carrots

Broccoli

Cauliflower

Lettuces

Arugula

Spinach

Cabbages

Cilantro

Oregano

Dill

Italian Pasley

My Seedling Purchases from THE NATURAL GARDENER

Fennel

Beets

Catnip

Mint

Swiss Chard

Artichokes

THEN, the next day, I got my old seeds out of the icebox (I keep them in a Ziploc Bag in the potato drawer) and figured out that I HAD most everything  SEED NEED-WISE.  I only needed to buy 2 packages of carrot seeds and a package of cilantro seeds. But I still needed to buy all the transplants (cabbages, broccolis, cauliflowers, herbs). Also I want to buy a few potted geraniums to keep in the kitchen windowsill.

So I took a trip out to JOHN DROMGOOLE’S NATURAL GARDENER (Out in BFE!) (That means “Bum-Fuck Egypt“) to buy the three packages of seeds, and to see if they had their transplants in yet. AND THEY DID! I was quite surprised, because it seemed to me to be a little early. But WHATEVER, amirite? So I bought everything I needed that they HAD (they did not have Geraniums, or “Melody” spinach plants, or Russian Kale which I forgot to mention. Mmmm…Kale).

Then, all of a sudden, instead of feeling like “I am ahead of weeding schedule!” I am all like, “DOOD, I had better get planting, all of a sudden I am BEHINDHAND!”

(Heh heh. I said BEHIND HAND!!)

So now I am going to intersperse this post with PICTURES so I can SHOW all the PLANTING I did today! Here Goes! (Oh, and it suddenly occurs to me that this post isn’t very informative; forgive me, I am really tired! I will elucidate of planting all the various vegetables tomorrow….after I weed a bed and finish planting.)

The New Carrot Bed pictured with two loads of screened compost dumped on it

Three packages of carrot seeds: carrots must be planted thickly and then thinned drastically. Why not just plant fewer? Because they don't like to germinate unless they are in a crowd.

Compost all smoothed out, and carrot seeds scattered and watered in

Snow Peas planted along the fence in bottomless cups, arugula planted in the front. Of course you just have to take my word for it!

Broccoli plants and smoothing rake. If you ever tried to rake leaves with this kind of rake, it is not for that. It is for smoothing soil in garden beds.

Broccoli Bed with mounds of screened compost prior to smoothing

Broccoli plants all planted up!

Catnip and Oregano (Greek and Italian) planted in pots

Lettuce, both seeds and plants, all nicely planted

Cilantro seeds all planted in the (former) Chard Bed

Fennel and lettuce planted in cups for later, pictured with the cauliflower and cabbage seedlings that are going to have to wait for me to WEED a BED to put them in.

We Demand MORE Weeding Photos! Sez Rabble of Excited Fans

Primary Colors in the Garden

First, enjoy this lovely photo of the primary colors of the Oxblood Rain Lilies, Bronze Chrysanthemums, and Plumbago.

Now, these next beds promised to be a breeze, because the weeds weren’t too thick….until I remembered that in order to dig out the Bermuda Grass Roots, I would have to scrape off and RESERVE all the MULCH. Oy. So it became a multi-step process: 1) pull up dead plants 2) scrape off mulch 3) dig up weeds 4) turn over soil 5) fertilize 6) screen compost 7) spread compost. Are you sweating yet?

The "Carrot" Bed (I am naming these beds after what I planted in them last year)

The Carrot Bed" AFTER!!!!

In this bed, the Artichoke Bed, as I proceeded to pull up the very dead artichokes, guess what? THEY WEREN’T ALL DEAD! So I relocated them to a more congenial spot (this is a VERY hot bed in the summer, with the sun reflecting off the asbestos tile)

The Artichoke Bed: BEFORE!

The Artichoke Bed: AFTER!!!

I ran out of fertilizer, so I had to stop and go to the Garden Store. I go to The Natural Gardener, which is about 20 fucking miles away, damn them, but they are the BEST! It is a HUGE TRIP though, and in order to Personally Save the Earth I go as seldom as I can.

tiny artichoke leaves protrude from UNDEAD ROOT BALL!!

More Evidence of Life!