Zanthan Gardens
Weblog of a Central Austin Garden

Whoo, boy! Austin needs rain. But I wish we didn’t get the entire year’s supply in one 4-hour deluge. It began pouring rain about 5:45 AM and got worse between 8 and 9. It’s just slacking off a bit now at 9:45. I’m guessing we got about four inches, so far. The rain pounded down and ran off instead of soaking in, like good rain.

2007-01-13. Austin, TX. Although the meadow has one of the gentlest slopes in the yard, it can wash out. Look at my new path!

I garden on a hill. I started terracing it when I began. I build planter boxes, too. But this rain overflowed my boxes and rock walls and paths and berms. It overflowed the retaining walls and flowed up against the garage and left three inches on my covered, concrete patio.

2007-01-13. Austin, TX. Looking at this photo it’s difficult to believe I’ve dug a drainage ditch here and filled it with gravel. The water is at least six inches deep and seeping into the garage.

How much cleanup time will I have before the big freeze tomorrow night? Currently the forecast shows 100% chance of rain the rest of today, 70% tomorrow, and 80% Monday–when the rain turns to ice pellets. I’m crossing my fingers the rain will slackk off a bit and give what’s fallen a chance to soak in.

Damn. Sounds like it’s starting up again.

PS. Bill, did you get hit with the ice storm yesterday? How are you faring up north?

“Just one more trip,” I kept telling myself. How can I turn away from a huge pile of free mulch? I can’t! I figure each lawn and leaf bag hold about the same as one bag of mulch from a big box store. So 32 x 2 x $3 = $192. If a penny saved is a penny earned, then I made $12 an hour–and didn’t have to pay taxes. Of course, if I bought mulch by the yard it would be cheaper but because I don’t have a truck, I’d have to pay a delivery charge.

I also bagged 58 paper grocery sacks of ground pine needles that I’ll compost with the oak leaves I’m still raking up.

At any rate, even when we had a truck, I never had enough mulch to cover all the paths in the meadow evenly. This is a first. And it looks so nice. I’m always pleased with how the garden looks when the paths are tidied.

An ice storm is headed our way. If we’re lucky it will rain first. Bearing this in mind I kept at it. In a couple of days, I’ll be huddling indoors enjoying our week of winter and wondering how the rose bushes, which are beginning to bud, and the vegetable garden will do. I picked enough lettuce for a big salad and three cherry tomatoes today. I don’t think I’ll be able to coddle the tomato through this storm.

If the forecast is correct, my next photo may be of the garden covered in snow.

Carol at May Dreams Gardens asks What kind of a seed buyer are you? Actually she posted a long questionaire.

Q: Do you carefully read all of the seed catalogs sent to you and then browse the Internet to compare and contrast all the options, then decide which seeds to buy?
A: I love reading descriptions in seed catalogs and I carefully compare the descriptions with any information I can find in books and, now, on the internet.

Q: Do you buy seeds from ‘bricks and mortar’ stores and get whatever appeals to you as you are browsing?
A: I typically buy my seeds from ‘bricks and mortar’ stores; companies I like such as Renee’s Gardens, Seeds of Change, and Botanical Interests are easy to find at our local nurseries and even at supermarkets like Central Market. I do my research by reading the catalogs and then go to the stores to buy. If I wait to send in an order, the seeds often arrive too late for our climate.

Q: Do you buy vegetable seeds in bulk where they scoop them out of seed bins, weigh them and put them in hand-marked envelopes?
A: The only seeds I’ve seen sold this way are seeds for winter groundcovers at The Natural Gardener.

Q: Do you buy seeds for just vegetables, or just annual flowers? Do you buy seeds for perennial flowers?
A: I buy seeds primarily for annuals and some vegetables. However, I’ll buy any type of seed if I’m interested in growing the plant. I like to experiment.

Q: Do you know what stratification and scarification are? Have you done either or both with seeds?
A: Yes. Yes. The advice for growing bluebonnets often suggest scarification because it has a tough seedcoat so that not all the seed sprouts at once. That way if conditions prove unfavorable (typical in Central Texas) some seeds are left to sprout when conditions improve. I find, however, that fresh seed (my own) sprout readily. I have the most success with soaking tough seeds overnight–or until they swell up.

Q: Do you order seeds from more than one seed company to save on shipping or buy from whoever has the seeds you want, even if it means paying nearly the same for shipping as you do for the actual seeds?
A: I typically get seed from one source; whoever has the most thing I want to buy. I haven’t ordered from a catalog in several years because we have such a good selection in our many local “brick and mortar” stores.

Q: Do you buy more seeds than you could ever sow in one season?
A: Of course! I’ve stopped buying tomato seeds, though, because I always end up with far more plants than I have room for.

Q: Do you only buy seeds to direct sow into the garden or do you end up with flats of seedlings in any window of the house with decent light?
A: When I worked in an office I sprouted seedlings on top of my computer monitor. Great bottom heat. Now I sow in a seed bed and transplant. Many of the plants I originally started from seeds are rampant self-sowers so I don’t have to start them anymore…just transplant them from wherever they sprout.

Q: Do you save your own seeds from year to year and exchange them with other seed savers?
Yes. And I’ve given away seeds, too, via this blog. But I’ve stopped doing that because I discovered that too many people were demanding and unappreciative.

Q: Do you even buy seeds?
A: Yep. There’s a stack of seed packets right here at my elbow making me feel guilty.

Q: Do you have a fear of seeds? Some gardeners don’t try seeds, why not?
A: Obviously not. I started with bulbs and then moved to seeds because I didn’t have the money to spend on large plants. Because I wanted year around flowers I did then move on to perennials…thinking that in the long run that they’d be more cost-effective. This year, though, after losing many perennials to drought, I’ve decided to go back to seeds and have a spectacular spring and then take a rest through summer. I also propagate plants (such as lavender) from cuttings.

Q: Do you understand seeds? I once bought seeds at a Walmart in January (Burpee Seeds) and the cashier asked me, “Do these really work? Yes, they do. “Isn’t it too cold to plant them now?” Well, yes, if you are planning to plant them outside. I don’t think this cashier grew up around anyone who gardened.
A: Yes. Well some of them. A lot of information about seeds is written for gardeners in a different climate than Austin’s. Sometimes it’s difficult to know when to plant them. I’ve decided to do more trials on my own to see what’s appropriate for Austin.

Q: Do you list all your seeds on a spreadsheet, so you can sort the list by when you should sow them so you have a master seed plan of sorts?
A: I don’t use a spreadsheet for my seeds but I do make other kinds of lists. One of my resolutions for 2007 is to consolidate all the data I’ve collected so far and figure out what I’ve done. I do have a spreadsheet for my oxblood lilies and for my irises.

Q: Do you keep all the old seeds and seed packets from year to year, scattered about in various drawers, boxes, and baskets?
A: Every once in awhile I throw them out and then regret it and begin hoarding them again. Maybe someday I’ll make a huge collage of seed packets on the side of the garden shed.

Q: Do you determine germination percentage for old seed?
A: Nope. At some point I just throw them all into the seed beds to see if anything will come up.

The New Year dawned cold but sunny. I discover that I do like the sun! but only when the temperatures are below 70F. Reading over my garden journal I see how every fall and winter I plan and plant anew. The amount of plants I’ve killed over the years is sobering. And reading about my excitement and hopes and how my many plans came to nothing puts a damper on plans for this new year. For the first time I see the downside of keeping a journal.

Yet it’s difficult not to throw oneself into gardening when the days are so fine. Add the fact that we had a bit of our usual December rain and you’ll understand why it’s said that hope springs eternal. The success of my first winter vegetable garden encourages me to make new plans.

I spend a lot of time writing about the reversal of seasons down south. Lately I’ve been thinking that if summer is really our dead season, why shouldn’t I treat it as such. Why not help the garden go completely dormant, cover it up with mulch, and wait out the worst of summer. As long as this drought continues (the one in the 1950s lasted seven years), our summers are getting hotter and we have more and more days over 100F degrees.

Kathy Purdy at Cold Climate Gardening posted recently about the USDA hardiness zone maps and I replied that in Austin I’m more concerned with the data in the relatively new AHS Heat Zone Map. Some plants suffer heat damage in temperatures as low as 86F degrees. In Austin, temperatures top 86F degrees 50 to 65 percent of the days in the year. Finding the right heat-loving plants is part of the fun of gardening, a challenge tempered with failure. We plant native plants but I, for one, want something more than plants that merely survive. If we try Mediterranean or desert plants in our dry years, we risk losing them to humidity in our wet years. If we plant tropicals, we worry about that one hard freeze a year wiping them out.

The number of days in a row where temperatures are above freezing but below 86F is hard to calculate but generally speaking Austin has two short prime growing seasons from mid-September to mid-November and mid-February to mid-May. Here at Zanthan Gardens plants receive more sunlight in December after the leaves of our large deciduous trees have fallen than in July. And, on the average, more rain.

As I spend my days tending my cool-weather vegetables and planting out my cottage annuals (which don’t require a struggle to dig deep holes in the clay and endless roots of bindweed), I wonder why not just stop here? Enjoy the spring flush of flowers and pack it in for the summer. Forget the short-lived perennials and roses which never receive enough light in the summer and yet demand water, feeding, and attention. Sling a hammock in the deep shade and forget about gardening in summer. Become a cold season gardener.

Is it possible?

Dateline: 2007
This week is clear, dry, cold and windy. As sunny as the days are, the garden is not very inviting. My garden chores this time of year are focused on transplanting self-sown seeds and these are the worst conditions for doing so. I’m busy enjoying the domestic comforts of the Christmas season so I don’t mind being indoors.

I did call in TreeMasters to take out the chinaberry along the west fence on Thursday (12/27). So the second day of Christmas, my true love gave to me another pile of wood chip mulch and a pile of firewood from the cedar elm branch which was overhanging the garden house. I waited until all the leaves had dropped so this pile of mulch is clean and white wood chips for the paths.

On Saturday (12/29), I climb up on the roof to do battle with the fig ivy which is smothering the chimney. It’s going to be in the 20s next week and I want to be able to build a fire. I noticed that the fig ivy near the top of the chimney was turning brown from the heat. I feel lucky that we haven’t had a very hot fire or it might have caught fire and we wouldn’t have known it until it had spread and caught the house on fire.

On New Year’s Eve, I watch the fireworks on Auditorium Shores from the backyard. Now that the chinaberry and hackberry trees are gone from the north border, we have a perfect view of the fireworks.

No new flowers this week. The lawns have not frozen, yet, and are still green and much neater this year now that I have a mulching mower again.
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I can’t match the incredible tomato reviews that Hanna writes but I do want to share our first and only vine-ripened tomatoes of 2006. Two! We also ate half a dozen others that I picked three weeks ago before our first freeze and ripened in a paper bag. These are from the “Husky Cherry Red” tomato plant from Home Depot that I planted on September 22, 2006 when it was 99F degrees. These cherry tomatoes have a nice tang to them which both of us like. ‘Husky Cherry Red’ is classified as a dwarf indeterminate and marketed for people with small gardens or who want to grow tomatoes in a container.

The lettuce is producing wonderfully now, almost 8 inches tall–enough to make two modest salads a night. The weather forecasters are teasing us with predictions of snow flurries for Christmas Eve but the temperatures look to stay just at freezing, so I’ll cover everything up and try to pull it through. After the front blows through this weekend it will be sunny and in the 60s again.

Dateline: 2007
First flower: Lupinus texensis (12/15).

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Time Magazine has named You the 2006 Person of the Year: you who blogs, you who has a MySpace account, you who posts video to YouTube. That’s me and you, baby. We’re changing the world. And we’re doing it for free.

“There are lots of people in my line of work who believe that this phenomenon is dangerous because it undermines the traditional authority of media institutions like TIME. Some have called it an “amateur hour.” And it often is. But America was founded by amateurs. The framers were professional lawyers and military men and bankers, but they were amateur politicians, and that’s the way they thought it should be. Thomas Paine was in effect the first blogger, and Ben Franklin was essentially loading his persona into the MySpace of the 18th century, Poor Richard’s Almanack. The new media age of Web 2.0 is threatening only if you believe that an excess of democracy is the road to anarchy. I don’t.” — Richard Stengel, managing editor Time Magazine

“On page 123 there was a cross-section drawing of how to prepare a rose bed. Instruction: excavate the entire bed to a depth of two feet. I shall pause here to allow time for reeling around and protesting.” –Midge Ellis Keeble, “Tottering in My Garden”

“Unless one is willing to take the trouble properly to prepare the ground, there is no use in expecting success in gardening. I have but on rule: stake out the bed, and then dig out the entire space two feet in depth. Often stones will be found requiring the strength and labor of several men, with crowbars and levers, to remove them; often there will be rocks that require blasting.” — Helena Rutherfurd Ely, “A Woman’s Hardy Garden”

With the weather back up in the 70s this week, I’m trying to get all my December gardening chores done, especially transplanting the three ‘New Dawn’ roses that I grew from cuttings.

I find digging a hole of any depth in my heavy clay difficult. Lacking a cadre of men with pick-axes and blasting equipment, I’ve developed a compromise plan: I dig down one foot and build up one foot. For these roses, I had AJM construct three additional 4×4 foot planter boxes.

I’m planting two of the roses in the, optimistically named, north border. The north of my back yard is fenced with a short chain-link fence and looks directly into the shared yard of a rental duplex. Given these intimate conditions, I prefer neighbors who aren’t much interested in yard work because they spend all their time indoors. The latest renter, however, likes to sit on his back patio and talk all afternoon into his cell phone. His presence (and the fact that he and his girlfriend share afternoon delight with the windows open–he’s apparently very good) has kept me from spending much time in the back lately but this week I decided I had to get this job done. My presence right at the fence line drove him indoors.

To provide a bit of privacy I’ve let the nandina grow wildly out of hand. My idea, inspired by English hedgerows, was to create a mixed hedge by planting other plants among the nandina and then as the new plants grew bigger cutting back more and more of the nandina. Unfortunately, almost everything I’ve planted has died mostly because I never water the nandina and so I forget to water anything else on that side of the yard. Even the Podranea ricasoliana which has eaten the north side of my garage, failed to cascade gracefully over the chain link fence where I wanted it to do. To block some of the holes in the view, I built a woven wood fence out of pieces of the rotting fence that we took down. I attached it to the chain link fence with cable ties. I’m pleased to report that it’s still holding up well.

Before I could dig, I had to prune back the nandina. I know that it looks better when it’s trimmed viciously but some of it was six feet tall and did a pretty good job of blocking the duplex from sight. I hated opening up holes in the border that will take years to fill in. But it had to be done. The north border is also ridden with bindweed, thorny smilax (I think), and some poison ivy. I’ve spent the better part of three afternoons hacking at roots and digging out a bit of soil and hacking at more roots.

One encouraging note is that there is about 3 inches of leaf mold mulching the nandina. I dump whatever leaves I don’t have room for in the compost here and it’s built up nicely. I read once that the earthworms would mix the top dressing in but I see no evidence of that. The layers of dirt here are clearly stratified. The next 8 inches are pretty good soil: not too many rocks and not many lumps of clay. I can tell I’ve dug here before, twice. Below the friable dir. is black clay.

Another book I read suggested using landscape fabric to line the holes in order to keep tree roots from overrunning bulbs and annuals. When I read this ten years ago, I thought it was ridiculously unnatural. I’ve been humbled. I cannot spend every year redigging every bed. The tree roots suck all the moisture and nutrients out of the soil. Beds where I’ve generously mixed in copious amounts of sifted compost or aged horse manure look like they’ve never been cultivated. Implementing this advice was more difficult than I imagined. Did I dig down deeply enough? Won’t the roots just come in from the side. And should I cut a hole for the rose’s roots–will it ever get that big? will a hole allow the noxious roots to invade?

After I filled in the planter with dirt, sifted compost and Dillo Dirt (aka people poop), I transplanted one of the little roses. It didn’t have much of a root system…or perhaps I ripped out all the roots when I dug it out. Well, it grew originally with no roots at all from a cutting. Maybe it will take. I don’t really understand how Susan Harris can dig up established plants and move them around on whim. I bow before her in awe. In my yard, if something takes to a place, it’s pretty much stuck there forever.

“For me the gardening year begins in October…Number one on my late-October agenda is to clear out the two twenty-foot-long borders of all the summer flowers, most of which are still giving us a fine show. The minute I look the situation over, I begin to feel guilty and wasteful. They look so lovely, but I have allotted this morning to this project, and my gardener, Junior Robinson, is by my side. We both know that in a day or two frost will descend and have these lush beauties looking unhappy and faded. So I firm up my resolve, turn toward Junior, who’s looking undecided, and tell him that we are going forward with this project now. I ask him if he wants a Classic Coke to strengthen him and he says, “Yes, I’m going to need it.” –Emily Whaley “Mrs. Whaley and Her Charleston Garden”

Temperatures have been hovering over the freeze line, some nights dipping just below, just enough to damage the more tender plants and yet not enough to do them in. The ones that are not entirely done in–some cosmos, some bananas, and some four o’clocks just look sickly and sad.

On Wednesday, it warms up to 73F and I spend all day in the garden. First I have to move all the potted plants outside for some water and sun. Then I have to uncover all the plants I’ve covered so that they don’t swelter in this one day of heat. I give them a good watering which should help to keep temperatures a bit more stable. I spend most of the day raking leaves which fell all at once last week. Now for two months, maybe three, my yard is in full sun. One rose, ‘Blush Noisette’, is taking advantage of it and all the others that managed to survive the summer are looking healthy even if they aren’t blooming. As I rake, I also cut back the four o’clocks. Just like Mrs. Whaley, I feel relief to be done with them, to clear the garden down to the bones. Still I don’t manage her firm resolve, nor does my garden have strong bones. Right now, covered in pecan leaves scavenged from the neighbors raking their lawns, the bones of the garden are more difficult than ever to see. Nope, I’m not quite able to follow through–against Mrs. Whaley’s advice I still “waver and quaver” over each decision. Maybe when I turn 85, I’ll attain her admirable ruthlessnes.

We have one day of warmth before the cold funnels down from the north again. Potted plants back inside. Tender perennials covered up. And now that the pecan leaves are raked up, the oak leaves have started falling. I see buds on the narcissus. Spring will begin before fall is even finished. Winter just interjects itself in short, icy spurts.