Zanthan Gardens
Weblog of a Central Austin Garden

Annie in Austin asked me, “With a chance to redo beds and plan anew, are there parts of the garden that you were unhappy with anyway?”

I guess my initial reaction is to think that I hadn’t really finished implementing my plans for the garden. So I haven’t had a chance to get tired of it yet or long for a change. The garden was still growing into my vision for it. Not that I have any grand design. I’m not a good designer. More specifically, I don’t implement well from a design. I have a tactile approach to gardening.

Although I imagine I’d love one of the fab designs from Floribunda (Aren’t they the coolest!?! Most of these are in my neighborhood. I’ve been intrigued by them and was happy to discover they were all done by Floribunda.) or a lovely cottage garden like Pam’s at Digging, the reality is I’m a plant person. (I’m not saying you can’t be both, just that I don’t have the talent for pulling a design together–and not just in gardening. I’ve never owned a matching purse and shoes in my life, or even matching bras and panties.) I’m a hodgepodge and so is my house and so is my garden. And it shows!

Due to constraints of both time and money, I rarely buy more than one plant at a time. I was full of wonder and envy when some friends of mine recently had their garden designed by a professional. The cost of the plants alone was $1,000. The only plants I’ve bought this year were the three Duranta erecta that I bought on sale for $4.99 each (Still alive!) and an anemic basil which I’ve had in a pot for summer pesto but will be planting in the fall garden soon. Dirt gardener describes me pretty well.

Despite the dreary drought photos, there are only two beds that I feel that I need to tear out and completely replant: the two 12×12 beds on the south side of the house that I started as a winter garden. However, I don’t really know what to do with a blank slate. My usual habit is to watch how parts of the garden grow and change and then nestle in a new plant here and there.

I’ve tried designing on paper but it doesn’t work for me. I design in four dimensions (time is very important and frequently ignored in garden design I think). My approach to design, if what I do can even be called design, requires a lot of walking around and looking at the garden from various angles.

I was working in the garden all day today (not a fingernail left unbroken) clearing out dead plants. When I was finished and saw that newly turned dirt in one of the front beds, I thought, “If I’m going to have tomatoes this fall, this is probably the best place to plant them…it’s the only spot getting sun this time of year.” It’s precisely this kind of thinking that results in the odd combinations in my garden. I look primarily for conditions where I think a plant will survive and don’t worry much about the effect of my plant combinations.

Has this summer taught me anything? Have I learned my lessons? Will I reform? Or will I be at Gardens tomorrow checking whether they have their fall tomatoes in? Stay tuned…

Fall has fallen. I woke up this morning and the entire front yard (and my car) were covered in the buttery yellow leaves of the cedar elms. A light rain was almost falling–just enough rain to drip off the roof but not enough to get me or the ground wet as I spent all day playing in the dirt. (Camp Mabry measured almost 1/2 an inch but we were closer to ABIA’s 1/10th of an inch.) And the temperature, wow! On September 5, 2000 Austin hit it’s all time high of 112 degrees. Today the high was 81. 81! Eighty-one.

Pam/Digging and Annie of Austin have asked me some thoughtful questions. Credit the cooler weather but my mind has been going 100 miles a minute analyzing and theorizing. I began writing a response but it grew so long, I’ve decided to break it up into more digestible pieces.

I think the best way to figure out where to go from here is to determine where I’ve been. Pam gardens nearby and although her garden suffered in Austin’s drought, it does not appear to be as devastated as mine. So where did I go wrong?

1. I Bit Off More Than I Could Chew
My yard is pretty large for its location. The house was built on two lots totalling 15,000 square feet. Almost 90% of that is yard. In 1993, when I moved in, the landscape was well-established; it was already 50 years old. I’ve never really started a garden from scratch–I simply carve out a space or a place for a plant that I’ve fallen in love with.

Although I try to put plants with like requirements together, that doesn’t always happen. So plants requiring special care are scattered all over the yard. And though I began the garden with native and drought-tolerant plants, over the years I’ve expanded my interests. My idea, which has worked for many years, is that the natives take care of themselves leaving me time to take care of the special needs plants.

I do all the work myself but, in the garden, I’m not a very focused worker. (This is leisure, dammit!) Nope. I’m one of those gardeners that’s easily distracted by tasks as I walk from a bed I’m weeding to the mulch pile. Sometimes I spend an inordinate amount of time just smelling the dirt or watching clouds drift by or taking photographs. I can spend all weekend in the garden without anyone being able to see what exactly it was I accomplished.

And over the years I gave up three of my most useful tools. 1. A chipper/grinder. 2. My mulching mower. 3. AJM’s pickup truck. I miss the truck the most. Every birthday and holiday I used to get a cubic yard or two of mulch (AJM does know the secret workings of my heart). Do you know how many bags of mulch you can fit into a Miata? (Three.)

The bottom line is that over the years I’ve expanded the number of beds, the realm of the garden, with the expectation that the established beds would require less attention. That expectation has been disappointed.

2. I Forgot That Trees Grow
I always hate comparing garden design to interior design. Can you imagine a finding the perfect coffee table to complement your sofa only to have it grow disproportionately large and crowd out the sofa so that one side turns brown and withers? I’ve always thought it ridiculous to treat a landscape as something that can be installed as if it were furniture. Furniture is static. Plants change. Being aware of this, I’m rather surprised that the trees were able to sneak up on me.

When I moved here in 1993, my lot was covered in large trees: cedar elms, a couple of pecans, two weedy chinaberries and a sickly young live oak. That June the largest cedar elm split in half. On September 7 1995 Austin experienced 70 mile an hour winds and every tree in my yard lost major limbs. And I was one of the lucky ones. My neighbor had a huge live oak completely uprooted. Another neighbor’s tree had the top sheared off.

I was just beginning to garden then, and the tree disaster had a silver lining. For the first time there was sunlight in my garden. We could see the sky. I planted crepe myrtles, esperanza, salvias, and plumbago. Over the years, the shade has crept back in, slowly taking over beds planned for full sun.

My real problem, however, is with tree roots. I try as much as possible to make raised beds. Even when I can’t, I conscientiously amend the soil with compost before planting. However, when I later dig up plants to divide them, the tree roots have invaded. If I don’t redo a bed every couple of years or so, the tree roots suck all the moisture and tilth from the soil. When I look at the garden I think the hardest hit spots are beds that I haven’t dug up in more than three years.

I’d hoped that once I got those beds established I’d be able to move on to new beds. I don’t have the time, energy, or money to rework every bed every couple of years. I’m thinking of using horticultural cloth to keep out the tree roots but I don’t think it will work with the kind of planting I do. Which is more labor intensive? Which is more expensive?

3. I Was Complacent
I moved to Austin over 30 years ago. Austinites expect summer to be miserable and are happily surprised the few years it isn’t. Grousing about the heat is a city-wide sport. Every summer around the fourth of July I brace myself for two months of misery.

This was just another summer right? Wrong. Although the daily high temperatures were not as high as in other summers, they were consistently high for almost seven weeks. The real problem was that my plants were already stressed going into summer; the ground already parched.

Ever since last September when Hurricane Rita swerved east of Austin, we’ve had unusually dry conditions. Last fall, noticeably few self-sown overwintering annuals sprouted. Some, like love-in-a-mist, didn’t come up at all–for the first time in all the years I’ve had it.

I spent some time every weekend providing supplemental water but last spring I was in school and beginning the kitchen remodel so I put the garden on the back burner. (And you know what happens when you forget a saucepan of milk on the stove.)

4. I Ignored Early Warning Signs
Several bulbs (gladiolus, daylilies, sprekelia, irises) began withering and going dormant much earlier in the summer than usual. I should have dug them up right away but I just didn’t feel like being in the garden during our 100 degree days. I put in my couple of hours in the early morning watering but that was it.

Plants that rarely have problems with a dry spell turned brown (nandina, yaupon holly, English ivy, monkey grass). Except for the yaupon holly, I consider these plants friendly weeds; that is, I let them grow and fill in the gaps without any care from me until I can get around to planting that section of the yard.

Summary
I guess my biggest mistake was thinking that this summer was like other summers–that established drought-resistant native plants would pull through on their own. I believed that because the history of my garden told me so. And as we all know from watching politics, belief often clouds our eyes to the evidence in front of us.

The last question on Kathy Purdy’s panel discussion on garden blogging asks us what we see for the future of gardeners on the internet. Well, I’m addicted to YouTube, so I see vlogging in our future.

A vlog, or video log is just that…a blog entry via video. The best vlogs have people talking to you right into the camera. It’s incredibly intimate. You feel like their secret confidant. As some of you have inferred, I’m a rather private person. This site’s not about me, but my garden. So in this video (not strictly an example of a vlog) I keep behind the camera and let the garden speak for itself.

Oh, yes. Most videos have sound and this one doesn’t. I’m pretty new to making videos and this already took far more time than I wanted to invest in it.

Just as gardeners who I read about in books anxiously look for spring in the first buds of crocuses pushing through the snow, we Austin gardeners look for the first sign of fall in the buds of the oxblood lily (Rhodophiala bifida). Last Sunday (8/27) I noticed some buds in a bed I was watering and thought, “Summer can’t last much longer now.”

And then Tuesday morning (8/29) a front pushed through and it rained. The rain wasn’t much; it barely soaked in a 1/32 of an inch. But when you haven’t had rain in almost two months every drop is glorious. And the temperatures! The high was only in the 80s. The low dropped into the 60s. Oh it really did feel like fall, for a day.

Wednesday morning I looked out my bedroom window and saw the first oxblood lilies in bloom. I jumped up and ran out to look at them. It wasn’t the rain that caused them to flower; it was because they were near some lavender I was watering. (As usual, they flowered for Rantor first, who reported first flower on 8/23–and also that the Spanish name is azucenita roja.)

Never mind that on Thursday Austin was back to 102, Friday 100. This weekend rain is in the forecast. And next week our highs will only be in the 90s. Yep. Fall is here. An oxblood lily told me.

An old gardening proverb tells us to plant beans when you can sit on the ground with your bare bum. The idea was that if the ground was too cold and damp to sit on comfortably, then it was still too cold and damp to plant beans. They’d rot.

Is there some corollary for planting fall gardens in 100 degree weather? After all the Navajo and Hopi of the American southwest grew beans and corn in drier, hotter climes than Austin.

Reading Dirt posted a great entry, Superfoods! Article 2: Beans last week which reminded me that I had some cannellini beans left from a failed spring planting. AJM makes exquisite refried white beans which we put in breakfast tacos. Every spring I’ve tried to grow cannellini beans I end up with less beans than I planted.

The instructions say, “For uniform, rapid emergence been seed should be planted in warm soils.” Unfortunately (now I read this) it continues “…above 95F germination is very poor.” Luckily, I still have seed left. If this batch fails, I’ll try again in another month. If we don’t have an early freeze, that might give me the 85 days I need for them to mature.

I guess I’ll reread Elizabeth Berry’s Great Bean Book and dream of beans.

Technorati: bean cannellini gardening
Read the rest of this entry »

Kathy, of Cold Climate Gardening begins a series today, an online panel discussion of eight other garden bloggers who have been blogging for four or more years. I’m thrilled to be included. Kathy is putting up one topic a day over the next week or so. Here are the questions she asked with links to the answers. I’ll update the list as she does.

Part 1. According to their respective websites, Blogger was founded in 1999 and Movable Type in 2001. But as I remember, even when I started my garden blog in 2002, most people didn’t know what a blog was, or see the point of it, really. So what in your background or relationships made you aware of and comfortable with the technology? What led you to become an “early adopter”? Link to discussion.

Part 2. Of all the things you could use this technology for, why gardening? How did you see a blog working for you better than more traditional means of garden communication, such as a chat over the fence, a garden club membership, a plant society membership, or a magazine subscription? What problem were you hoping to solve, or what need did you want to fill? Link to discussion.

Part 3. Did your garden blog accomplish what you were hoping for? Any unexpected benefits? Any disappointments? Link to discussion.

Part 4. What do you think has caused the proliferation of garden blogs in the last year? Link to discussion.

Part 5. Thinking over all of the garden blogging you’ve done and the garden blogs you’ve read since you first started, what has changed for the better? What negatives, if any, have arisen? Do you miss anything from the “good ol’ days” of blogging? Link to discussion.

Part 6. Do you think gardeners comment less than other bloggers? Link to discussion.

Part 7. Does it seem to you that gardeners, as a whole, are late adopters of technology? I mean, look at the categories for the Weblog Awards. There’s a category for best craft blog, best food blog, best entertainment blog, best politics blog, best web development blog, etc. The closest gardeners get is best topical blog, which is basically an “everything else” category. Why do you think this is so? (Or make a case for the oppositeÅ|that they’re not late adopters.) Link to discussion.

Part 8. What advice would you give a gardener starting a blog today? Link to discussion.

Part 9. What’s next for gardeners interested in internet communication? Today, blogging. Tomorrow? Link to discussion.
Read the rest of this entry »

This week I’m still working on turning over my mulch pile. I have to take it slow because even at dusk the temperatures are hovering at 100. Tonight I noticed the large lizard that I’ve seen before hanging out around the mulch. When I exposed a rather dried out section of the pile scores of beetles and roaches ran for shelter. That lizard was on them like a duck on june bug.

We were both smiling after his meal. (Anything that will eat cockroaches has my seal of approval.)

I think the lizard’s a Texas Spiny Lizard (Sceloporus olivaceus). He’s too fast for me to get a photo or even a good look. But he does race up a tree if he thinks I’m threatening him and he blends well against the color of the tree trunks. And he’s quite big–easily 6 to 8 inches long.

On an August day in Texas when the sun keeps us indoors from 8 in the morning until 8 at night, Living with Sheep is not much on our minds. The thought of one wooly lamb causes prickles of heat rash; a flock, a swoon of claustrophobia.

“Who would want to read about sheep in Austin?” I thought as I pulled the book from the library shelf. On the other hand, my urban neighborhood is already populated with chickens, a goat, and a pig. Maybe sheep?

The answer is no. Sheep would be even more miserable in an Austin summer than the rest of us. The fact that I was compelled to read Living with Sheep from cover to cover is a credit to the writing–direct, elegant, informative, and humorous.

Living with Sheep is targeted toward the beginner shepherd, one who has no previous experience raising livestock. It’s one of those books that was written to fill a gap in the author’s collection when all he could find were highly technical books on sheep diseases. As such it sets out to answer “the big picture questions, the general cases, the wide range of options.”

Wooster approaches his efforts to understand sheep with the same curiousity and delight that mark the best travel writers. He became a shepherd without really planning to: some friends were looking to sell and he’d just moved to a farm. “Before I knew what was going on, I was in over my head and encountering adventure and intrigue around every corner.”

The nice thing about his tale is that he doesn’t assume that everyone has his same “Go for it” personality. So after introducing a concept with a personal anecdote he steps back and provides the big picture view of options–from deciding how involved a shepherd you want to be, to approaches toward butchering.

And, yes, after nine laugh-out-loud chapters filled with gorgeous photos of cute sheep, of advice for choosing among breeds, how to fence and shelter them, what to feed them, shearing, breeding and birthing, we face the inevitable “Chapter Ten: Slaughter and Butchering”.

“There is no point trying to sugarcoat it: killing animals is an intense and disturbing business. This is doubly true when the animals in question are ones you’ve fed and housed and raised from birth. All year long you’ve nurtured and cared for an animal and done your best to make it happy and healthy. Then you wake up one morning, pick up the proverbial knife, and do it in.”

So begins a thoughtful and beautifully written essay on taking responsibility for the food we eat. For us omnivores that means dealing with death. For the shepherd it means being the agent of death. The photo of a sheepskin hanging over the fence caught my attention. The caption said it was MolÉ–and I recognized the name as the lamb he had talked about earlier, the first one ever born on the farm, a singleton abandoned by his ewe that Wooster had to bottle feed.

Some final notes wrap up the book including a controversy that’s been brewing more and more lately in backlash to the success of Whole Foods Market. Which is better: local or organic? “My neighboring farmer’s hay, although rich and wonderful and harvested from fields that have been well cared for by his family for more than a century, is not certified organic…If and when I decide to raise my sheep organically, I will be doing so at the expense of my neighborhood farming economy, which I am reluctant to do.”

If you are considering getting sheep, this is a must read book for you. If you’re not, this is still a pretty good read. I hope Chuck Wooster writes more books because, whatever the subject, he makes it interesting.

Living with Sheep: The Website!

technorati: animalhusbandry farming livestock food books Chuck Wooster

Dateline: 2006
When I was a kid, by the time August rolled around I was just tired of summer. Most of my early life I lived in the desert southwest so trees and hammocks and back porches and playing ball on a green lawn were images out what might as well have been fairy tale books so little did they correspond with my experience of summer. My summer days were filled with reading, helping my mom do the laundry while we watched soaps together, and working on projects around the kitchen with my brothers and sisters. One year we were quite into stamp collecting which is why I know that the state flower of Kansas is a sunflower. After two months, even my mom had run out of ideas for entertaining 8 kids indoors (too hot to play outside, remember) and I’d read all my books several times. You never saw any kid so anxious for summer to be over.

I longed for school to start, for the rains to come, and the air to smell fresh again. Other people associate spring with beginnings and renewal. But that’s how I feel about fall. I always fall in love in fall. I don’t think I look forward to fall in the same way you cold climate gardeners anticipate spring. There are no early signs like crocuses or buds swelling to make my blood quicken.

I’m finally at the point in summer this year where I’m resigned to it. In July I still tend to be fighting–out in the garden watering, mulching, and fussing over plants. By August, I just sit indoors and wonder what will pull through this year. Will the rains come the last week of August like they did the very first fall I lived in Austin? Or will we have another extended summer like last year when it was still hot in October?

I do my part to bring the rain. Wash the wool carpet and leave it in the grass to dry. Wash the cars. Leave the car windows open a crack. We did get 10 seconds of rain last Sunday after a strong gusts of wind hinted at a storm approaching. Monday we got almost three minutes of rain.

Another rose, ‘Madame Joseph Schwartz’, has succumbed to rose dieback. I’ve started turning the spring compost pile. At least the hot weather helps break down everything quickly as long as the pile is kept moist. I found the biggest grubs I’ve ever seen in the middle of the pile. Usually they’re small enough I don’t mind squishing them with my bare hand (just imagine it’s a grape) but these were bigger than my longest finger. It took a good stomp with my boot. I’ve also seen two or three hummingbirds this week which is unusual in my yard. They must be after the turk’s cap which is one of the few things left flowering. I haven’t had to mow all month since the grass is lying flaccid and scorched. The leaves are beginning to fall from the cedar elms and the chinaberry trees. On the Japanese persimmon almost 1/3 of its leaves have turned yellow. I’m hoping the fruit won’t drop as there are less than half a dozen persimmons this year.

Wake me when it’s September.
Read the rest of this entry »

Dateline: 2006
The toad finally let me get close enough to snap his portrait. He jumps into the potted plants after I water them in the morning. I frequently disturb him when I’m fiddling with the plants, only seeing him when he hops off in a puff. Today I was sitting panting on the step when I noticed him panting in the saucer. I snapped a score of pictures inching closer and closer until I got this one. He was too lethargic to care. I feel the same way.

August in Austin is filled with lots of shoulds. I should be watering more. I should be clearing out the many plants that have died. I should be getting my beds ready for a fall garden. I should be starting seeds for fall tomatoes and wildflowers. (I always wonder how the seeds sprout in these temperatures. Doesn’t it need to be 65 or something? Our overnight lows are in the mid-70s and it’s never cooler than 80 in the house.) I should be digging holes for planting shrubs and trees.

But every time I step into the searing sunlight I suspect that I’m part vampire. I saw a T-shirt I want to buy: The Sun Is Trying to Kill Me.

The garden this week? Scorched. That’s normal for us Texans. Sorry that the rest of you guys got stuck with Texas weather or worse this week. We didn’t plan to export the worst aspects of Texas to the rest of the country. You’ve probably had enough of that already.