Cold weather prompts return to the indoors:-)

Much has occurred in the ol' yard this past year. Vegetable, animal, and mineral. Not all of it good. I'll be popping out narrow topic posts over the next few weeks to backfill my dearth of 2014 blogging activity.

I'm also working with a Google+ page that might end up replacing this blog. I'm not really sure what advantages one has over the other. Believe me when I say that what I blog about has more value to me than the actual blog. So the less computer work the better!

Smedley's Domain

As mentioned previously, there is a big rock in my front yard named Smedley. His purpose is to anchor the new landscaping that is the replacement for a grass lawn. After the 2011 drought the St. Augustine grass was decimated. Mother Nature was trying to make a point and I'm trying to pay attention. We have also been in Stage 2 Water Restriction since that time.

This part of central Texas is pretty rocky in general and Smedley has a lot of local relatives available to hang with him. Along with Smedley and gang there are an assortment of annuals and perennials scattered about the front yard. Right now there is culinary sage, yellow puccoon, purple sage, orange bulbine, lantanas, daylilies, Pride of Barbados, dwarf fountain grass, purslane, blue daze, rosemary, lavender, tick seed, verbena, dianthus, nandina, dwarf Burford holly, yaupon holly, ligustrum, blue plumbago, crepe myrtle, desert willow, live oak and a Europena rose bush.

This is Smedley surrounded by assorted perennials. The line of wine colored daylilies on the backside started blooming in early May and still has a bit to go now at the end of June. The maximum number of blooms at a single time was twenty-six. I think there was a 2 week period that had at least 20 blossoms each day. A sweet bonus was that I bought these in the fall of 2011 marked down to $2 each and let them languish in 4" pots for 8 months before planting. More luck than I deserve.

The above photo is from June 28. This side of my front yard is a wedge shape due to its position on the outside of a sharp curve. The lighter concrete strip was recently added to the side of the driveway to overcome the inconvenience of stepping onto the mud/dirt/grass/etc. when exiting the car. Those white limestone blocks are 4" thick and 8" tall (sunk halfway into the ground).

The shrubs on the left and rear of the photo have been around for several years but the central plantings are from the spring/summer of 2012. The culinary sage (left, front) was a 4" plant a year ago but is now overgrowing the limestone blocks. The orange flowering Pride of Barbados towards the right rear is also in danger of hanging over the concrete walkway. I swear the hardest thing is to anticipate the proper spacing and placement of plants. This blog will soon feature a section on "oops" moments that will include errors in plant placement.

One oops I worked hard to avoid in the front yard is sun exposure errors. The image above is around noon. The sun comes up behind the house (top right). These plants in the foreground all have full sun requirements and they get it. The area between the live oak and house is shaded until late morning then gets varying shade for most of the remainder of the day. Sunset shoots right into the windows on the front of the house.

The driveway slopes a bit down toward the house and rain runoff flows from right to left about where those white limestone blocks curve to the left. The current plan is to put in a faux-creek across the front of the house that will actually route water when it rains.

Raised Bed Evolution

Living a few miles west of Austin, Tx means the soil around here merely exists to keep the limestone rocks from bumping into each other. The soil itself is sticky clay when wet and kiln fired ceramic when dry. Gardeners have few choices - gardening in pots, hydroponics, raised beds, heavy amendment of the existing soil or just faking it and going to the farmer's market every weekend. I have tried all but the hydroponics for my fresh vegetables and am currently using the raised bed and farmer's market options.

My first design decision for raised beds was what materials to use. Many online raised bed resources seemed to be from areas where you could run down to the local sawmill and pick up 1" X 12" planks of rot resistant lumber for cheap since you could sort through the "seconds" pile. Then you would need to buy $15-$25 corner brackets from their convenient website.

Of course railroad ties and treated lumber were out unless you wanted to risk growing a third eye or develop a horrible debilitating disease from the chemicals that were supposed to leach out of the wood into your soil. Since those health issues are not without scientific basis I wanted a more benign material to hold up my dirt.

Concrete blocks are also suggested as raised bed materials.The soil around here is pretty alkaline already and I wonder if that would make pH control more difficult. Anyone have some related information? To be self supporting the blocks would likely need to be the 8 x 8 x 16 blocks in a double high row. An advantage would be they could be easily rearranged for different garden bed needs.

In my case I had about an 16' x 24' garden space. The goal was to have 5 bed rows of three foot widths across the 24' direction due to sun position. A wheelbarrow needed to fit between the beds. Using the blocks each 3 foot bed was going to need 70 inches of width! Since this was not a government project I didn't want to waste almost 50% of the available space. The concrete blocks would eat an entire row, leaving me with just 4 rows.

Being a cheap frugal manufacturing engineer I had a eureka moment as I was buying some replacement pickets for my cedar privacy fence. The cedar pickets come in handy 6" widths and 6' or 8' lengths and go for around $2.20 or $3.20 respectively. My ultimate bed turned out to be a 3' x 3' square that is 12" tall. Four pickets cut in half and 4 corner pieces made of 2"x 2" rough cedar held together with coated deck screws made a very light and sturdy bed frame.

I tried bigger frames ( 3' x 8' ) the 1st year but they required reinforcement to keep the dirt from pushing them out in the middle and were much more awkward to build. I also realized that the height meant you couldn't step over them and you had to go all the way around the row to get to the other side. The 3' squares now have a stepping space in between them so access is very easy. Maintenance will also be pretty simple since I can just unscrew any damaged board on any side and replace it in situ. The oldest 3' x3' frame is on its third year with no board damage yet. The ends of the bigger frames that were butted together had noticeable damage since they stayed damp for a long time.

The photo above shows 3 iterations of the design. The top left row shows the 3' x 8' frames butted up end to end. The bottom right row shows some 3' x 4' frames. The middle row is the final 3' x 3' design. It turned out that anything over 3' would flex and require additional support. The economics of only using 6' pickets was also a factor.

The photo above is one of the 3' x 3' frames. They only weighed a few pounds made out of the cedar. The boards were hand picked from Home Depot's pallet in order to get straight pickets with few knots and splits. The material cost was $10-$11 including screws.

I'd be interested in hearing about other frame designs that folks have used for their raised beds.

WTF Fish Fertilizer Marketing Method

As you can tell by the title I have stumbled across a special bit of information regarding a recent purchase of fish emulsion fertilizer that is BASED on fish emulsion. Note that it is Natural Organic Based* but the asterisk indicates Not for use in organic food and crop production.

Elsewhere on the label it says to go to a website to check out info about the metals content of this fauxtilizer. It turned out to be some industry organization relating to fertilizer ingredients and provided only convoluted info that wasn't helpful at all. I then called the manufacturer, www.LillyMiller.com, to find out why this natural and organic based fertilizer couldn't be used for organic crops but got tired of waiting on hold. After hanging up we went and saw The Hunger Games and 15 minutes into the movie it became clear what the fertilizer issue was about. If you are familiar with future fiction that describes the general population as serfs that bow to the whims of an upper elite you know what I mean.

This fishy stuff was Home Depot's single feeble attempt at organic fertilizer. It's going back tomorrow.

2011 Lifeless Landscape Returns As 2012 Weed World

The Texas drought of 2011 left a tortured, burnt landscape here in Central Texas. The huge fires east of here in Bastrop decimated about 1500 homes. Unlike those hills in California that seem to burn every year this area hadn't seen a major fire for a hundred years. As the drought continued it gave the impression the only plant life that would be viable in the future was cacti and other dryland adapted growth.

This is a shot of Lake Travis. Note where the water line usually lies.

Soon after the picture above was taken we started getting some periodic rain. About 2 inches in November, almost 5 inches in December and as much as 10 inches in 2012 up to mid-February. Coupled with the very mild winter, the weeds are loving it. All the seed that never germinated throughout 2011 has made up for lost time. Since many suburban yards lost their turf cover the weeds have ample places to spring to life. There are a couple of yards nearby that have 12 inch henbit weed completely covering all soil areas. Since it has a little purple flower it almost looks decorative - almost. The bad ones are where the predominant weed seed was barnyard grass and thistle types. Besides looking unkempt in the extreme they are also producing new seed to spread around the neighborhood. Many folks have already mowed this year - but it is just weeds and more weeds.

All weeds, all the time.

I've decided that my small front yard is going to a no-grass condition and have started working on a rock/perennial/mulch/paver/etc. landscape design. No mowing and reduced watering - yippee!

The point of interest is going to be this 1800lb. chunk of limestone. It has some calcite layered in it that gives it some character and a bit of bling. Since I'm attracted to shiny objects it's a perfect fit.

At certain angles the calcite layer kind of looks like eyes. My wife named it Smedley.

 More on the front yard conversion as it develops.

Harvesting some potatoes that have pimples!

My neighbor plucked a few spuds today so I followed suit in order to see if mine were bigger ;-)

Size was not the problem. They had zits! Three of the five tubers had little white bumps on them. They did not seem like a rotting type of feature but were not very pleasing to look at due to some old teenage angst I never really put behind me.

After cruising the web for a bit I found the probable cause. Too much watering that caused their lenticels to swell.  Swollen and protruding lenticels may sound like something you would make a reality show about but it turns out they are just the pores on the skin of the potato. When they stay in too moist of soil they swell up. I found the info in a couple of places. This link has a bunch of other useful potato growing tips.

http://www.ag.ndsu.edu/pubs/plantsci/hortcrop/pp756w.htm

Here's an image of my swollen lenticels.........get your mind out of the gutter. Note that not all the spuds had the same amount of problem. The deeper buried ones were in the soil that stayed wet and had the most zits.

I have the potatoes planted in 3 foot diameter cages with compost heaped up over a foot above the ground level. The compost dried out much faster than the base garden soil so I let myself be fooled into thinking they needed water. I'm digging into the other two cages this week to see how the other varieties fared. It looks like better watering practices are needed by yours truly.

As a side note I keep running into two irritating things regarding plant problems on the web. Number one is poor or no images of the problems people were reporting along with crappy imagery on websites that were trying to show what the issue looked like. Let me know how this image works for you. I'm serious - let me know.

The other thing was all the gardening gods making prophetic announcements that they knew exactly what the root cause of a problem was with little information to go on. Many times the original poster would come back with a "you were wrong" reply after they got some real help. In the case I am presenting regarding the swollen lenticels I saw most of the gardening gods claiming that it was nematodes with all the associated pain in the neck actions needed by the victim gardener. Glad I kept looking.

Firsties!

I've been gardening for quite a long time. There were no string trimmers when I started and DDT was still in use by agricultural groups. It took most of the intervening years to realize that nature had its own agenda regarding how plants thrive. Let's just say when I finally gave up trying to grow bermuda grass in the shade under a live oak it was a turning point in all my dealings with terrestrial flora.

So I hope to be able to provide my experiences to help other gardeners get the most out of their efforts and maybe they can reciprocate by teaching this old dog some new tricks.