{"id":2294,"date":"2007-09-23T01:53:10","date_gmt":"2007-09-23T07:53:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/gardenlog\/?p=2294"},"modified":"2017-07-19T19:09:57","modified_gmt":"2017-07-20T00:09:57","slug":"paradise-regained","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/garden-design\/paradise-regained\/","title":{"rendered":"Paradise Regained"},"content":{"rendered":"

Commenting on the September Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day post, Yolanda Elizabet of Bliss<\/a> said, “I’ve noticed that a little bit of rain makes all the difference in Austin, TX.” How right she is! Maybe some of you, especially those of you suffering from drought this year, are tired of hearing me exult in Austin’s rain this summer. Longtime readers of Zanthan Gardens might remember that a year ago, when Austin was in the middle of a devastating drought I posted a video<\/a> of what was left of my garden. My garden was fried. Half my roses died. The fall rains had not come. Even my oxblood lilies were holding out for better times.<\/p>\n

I look at that video now and want to cry all over again. I can’t believe I was able to go on, to walk back out in the garden and keep weeding and watering and tending and hoping.<\/p>\n

Then in March 2007 it began raining and continued raining for the following six months. Austin’s lakes are overflowing. In the first six months of the year we had almost doubled the amount of rain we normally get. The 100 degree day was a rarity in the summer of 2007. This was the best summer in my memory of 30 summers spent in Austin.<\/p>\n

Several people have encouraged me to make another video to show the rejuvenation of the garden and here it is. Pictures from September 2006 are followed by the same shot in September 2007. In both years the photos were taken in the second week of September.<\/p>\n

Some notes. (Sorry no audio.)
\n1) I have not watered my lawn this year, nor do I feed it any commercial fertilizers. I give it coffee grounds from Starbucks and fill in any patchy places with Texas Native hardwood mulch.
\n2) I probably spent less than $50 on new plants in 2007. I bought 100 daffodil bulbs, a 4-inch pot of Lindheimer senna, a 4-inch rudbeckia, 3 4-inch pots of Mexican wire grass, a packet of orange cosmos, two packets of sunflowers and sweet peas, and 4 4-inch pots of summer vegetables. Since May my garden has been torn up in the construction of the failed garden house<\/a> and so I’ve had neither time nor money to invest in new plants. I hope to do my main planting this fall which is the best time in to plant in Austin anyway. Thus, the growth you see is mostly from plants that survived the 2006 drought.
\n3) Not all plants liked the rain. Half the lavender died out and most of the bearded iris rotted away. I garden on the side of Austin that is over rich black clay. Xeriscape plants generally require very good drainage. Even without actual rain, many Mediterranean plants dislike Austin’s high humidity: they will wilt, mildew, and succumb to rot and bugs.
\n4) I need to do some serious weeding and pruning now, don’t I?<\/p>\n

What will 2008 bring? The forecast for the last week of September in Austin’s predict that highs will remain in the low 90s and there will be no rain. For us that’s a typical beginning of fall.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a year of drought across the United States, Austin has received an unusual amount of rain. Zanthan Gardens has come back to life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2294"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2294"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2294\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5515,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2294\/revisions\/5515"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}