Living Small in Austin TX

Murderer!

I have 12 yards of mulch to distribute about the place, so naturally, I'm drawn to the glow of my computer.

I killed so many ants yesterday.  Remember this post where I waxed rhapsodic about the leafcutter ants - oh, they're so fascinating, I could watch them for hours, blah, blah, blah...?  Yeah, well, fuck that noise.

This is my healthy pomegranate tree:

This is my other pomegranate tree, the one that is getting eaten to bits by leafcutter ants:

In anticipation of my mulch delivery, I was weeding around the fruit trees and suddenly noticed a trillion little leaf snippets strewn about.  I am not so content to just observe their ant-like behavior when it's my fruit trees they are going after!  Whassamatter, ants?  You no like crepe myrtles no more?!?!?  I stamped on a couple of hundred (neighbors think I'm cray-cray!) and boiled a kettle of water.  Lots of ants are dead now.  My tree remains un-molested this morning, but they are regrouping.  I know they are.  I will be ready with lots and lots and lots of boiling water.  I will tire you out, ants.  I will force you to relocate.

I will make this scientific observation though.  This pomegranate tree was not looking so great, even before the ants.  Like lions, predators in the garden go after the weak.  I need to baby this tree.

Speaking of babying plants, work on my greenhouse is momentarily stalled (again), so I've been moving flats of seedlings about my bedroom all day, chasing the sun.  

I suspect someone who does not like brussel sprouts that much has been saying mean words to the babies, because it's the only row where only one cell has seedlings.  

 

Chicken Coop 2.0

See the ugly shed to the right of the coop in the photo just above this one?  It's going to be our chicken coop/green house, but it needs a lot of work. 

Not only is it ugly, but whatever the exterior is sheathed in, it's crumbling.  And a big tree fell on the back side of the roof and sort of busted the rafters.  And there's a big pile of crap inside.  Some of it will get reused in the coop/greenhouse, and some will get donated to Habitat Restore, and there are piles and piles of metal I'm going to recycle or sell (hey, there's a bunch of copper in there!).

First things first, we stripped off the exterior.  At which point I noticed some significant termite damage along the sill plate (that's the beam along the bottom of the framing that rests on the concrete foundation).  I looked up directions on replacing this and it involved the rental of jacks and more arms than we have between us and would undoubtedly take the better part of a weekend, so I called my awesome contractor, Steve, and uh..he sent over one man and no jacks and was finished in about an hour and twenty minutes.

Look!  That's the farm, right there behind our back fence!  And yet we are 2 miles east of the capitol building and downtown Austin.  Love it;)

Here are the "bones" of the coop.  We framed out a space to hold a sturdy floor, up high to get good airflow in the summer and to allow for storage space underneath.  The little shelf is for the nesting boxes to rest on.  Everything is at a nice height, ergonomcially speaking, for gathering eggs and cleaning out the coop floor.  I can roll a wheelbarrow right up to the bottom hatch and rake all the used bedding into it.  Less mess!  More time for play!

Speaking of nesting boxes, remember how dirty the other ones got?  I looked into getting old fashioned metal ones and they were not cheap!  Or available locally.  So I decided to get some 5 gallon buckets and cut the bottoms off them.  When they dirty, I can just host them down!  Cutting the bottoms off with a hacksaw was easier said than done.  I looked sort of tough though...

There's a hardware cloth covered top, that I suppose we could use for light storage - haybales and such...but mostly, I just want it to be well ventilated and not have to worry about making the entire shed predator proof, because that's probably impossible, especially given the greenhouse component.  This little "box" will be completely enclosed in hardware cloth and those possums would have to be ninjas to get into my chickens at night!

I'm reusing the roosting bars from the old coop and secured them to the shelf under the nesting boxes with those little brackets you use to hold plumbing?  I don't know what they're called.  This size you actually get in the electrical department at the hardware store.

This a better photo...sort of...

There will be three nesting boxes total, which should be plenty for 8 chickens, and I'll be back with another post soon detailing the finished coop!


 

 

Burclover and my "un"compost pile

Burclover.  Does it have any redeeming qualities?  My chickens won't eat it.

I know what I don't like about burclover.  You ever step on one of the burs?  It stays stuck in you and if you try to pull it out, it pulls your skin up into a little baby mountain.  You have to just wince and keep pulling until it finally wrenches free.  It goes right through bike tires...I had to replace the inner tube on my jogging stroller twice last summer, and I hardly ever use the darn thing!

Have I mentioned my little boy doesn't like to wear shoes?

I have spent most of the spring planting season on gardening infrastructure as opposed to actually gardening (I know, I know...) and so the burclover sort of ate our vegetable garden.  I noticed the other day that I was almost out of salads and the thought of actually having to buy lettuce at the grocery store, or even the farmer's market pains me. Time to clear things out in the hopes that I'll have something other than chard and carrots to harvest.

So, aside from scattering about a zillion little burs all over the darn place, thus ensuring I have an even more abundant bounty of burclover next year, what did I notice?  The burclover kept the ground underneath moist and soft - huzzah for living muclches!  There wasn't really anything else growing under it - let's go weed suppression! Big, stubborn, deep roots - aerating the soil!  Lots of critters - spideys, snails, grubs, caterpillars, ladybugs, ants...I know some of them eat my food, and some of them sting the heck out of me (why, ants??!?! why?!?!) but it's always a good thing when the microherd is movin' and groovin'.

That's my "un"compost pile to the left.  It's just a cylinder of wire fencing.  I put yard waste in there that I don't want mixed in with my compost - bermuda grass, weeds that have gone to seed, the big spiky "leaves" of the palm out front - anything that would overwhelm the compost bin, or deposit unwanted seeds.  There's all the burclover I pulled sitting on top.  I'm not sure what else to do with that stuff.  It will break down eventually.  I never seem to run out of room in the "un"compost pile, so something's happening down below;)

Here's what the interwebz had to say about burclover, or Black Medic...it fixes nitrogen in the soil, prevents erosion, builds quality soil, and mines minerals from the subsoil.  A significant percentage of the seeds are "hard seeds" meaning they can take 2 or more years to germinate.

I think I like burclover.  I think I like the name Black Medic even more.  A lot of what I found online related to the lengths people will go to eradicate it from their lawns.  One woman actually suggested using a shop vac to suck up the seeds to prevent them spreading in the yard!  And of course the usual suspects suggested broadleaf herbicides.  Crazytown and Twitsville.

I'm not going to let it take quite so many liberties with the vegetable garden in the future (famous last words) but a shop vac??  I'm going to let it be.  Suggest the boy wear shoes.  Stop taking shortcuts across the grass with my jogging stroller - maybe if I actually jogged with it, there'd be no need for shortcuts.

Combat Peak Soil with weeds!!!

 

Getting naked.

Not me, the trees.  To be more specific, my crepe myrtles are being denuded by an extremely diligent colony of leafcutter ants.

I didn't even know we had leafcutter ants!  I thought leafcutter ants lived in...I don't know...Borneo, or somewhere equally remote and/or exotic.

See that green trail all along the fence?  It isn't grass; it's a very long trail of partially cut leaves.  

See?

It starts at the base of the crepe myrtle on the north side of our house, runs along the length of the house, curves around the back of the house, crosses a cement walkway, crosses an expanse of grass, goes underneath the fence along the south side of the house, and stops at the street.  I'm assuming the trail originally crossed the street and the leaves have since been blown away.

The ants are fascinating to watch and their industry is staggering.  They harvest the leaves to feed to a fungus they farm down in the colony.  The fungus helps compost the leaves and provide food for the ants.  They carry the leaves an astonishing distance.  A couple of weeks ago they were working on a different crepe myrtle on the south side of the house and carrying those leaves quite a distance around the driveway, as opposed to a much more direct route across it.  I don't think it's the heat of the cement they are avoiding either, because they walk on the driveway, just all the way up to the top, cross it there, and then all the way back down!  

I'm hoping they don't completely decimate my garden and am only slightly heartened by the fact that when they were actively harvesting leaves off the other tree last week, they seemed to reach some agreed upon stopping point that left a fair amount of leaves on the tree.  

Bill Mollison, the bewhiskered grandpappy of permaculture, when describing a garden beset upon by slugs, declared there was no slug problem, but rather a duck deficiency.

So, channeling Bill, I now have to determine the deficiency and shift the balance, but soon, because before you know it will be fall and I have trees to plant!

 

 

Got to start somewhere...

I took a bunch of "before" photos the other day.  At 107 degrees, it's really too hot to get started on the "afters".  

Actually, that didn't stop Nate from planting a few beans.  They were doing alright, until he left for a business trip the day after transplanting them into a freshly prepared bed.  By noon that first day, the leaves were all shriveled up!  Was he really going to come home to find I'd killed his happly little seedlings?

Not if I could help it.  I moved aside the mulch to feel the soil and was surprised to find it moist and relatively cool.  Clearly the sun was just too strong for these babies.

Next year, I'll know better.  Next year, I'll let something tallish and spindly grow along the outside of the fence - a nursemaid, if you will.  Amaranth?  Milo?  Maybe just some pretty flowers to attract beneficials to the garden?

This year?  Old threadbare sheet, some chicken wire and a couple of clothespins to the rescue!  It's really not pretty, but those little seedlings are H-A-P-P-Y.

Dustin' off the virtual cobwebs...and building a potting table

Blogging took a bit of a backseat to moving.  The dust still hasn't quite settled here - full boxes sit untouched, artwork stacked against walls instead of hanging on them, daily chores abandoned in favor of unpacking, moving furniture about until it feels like it's in the right place, but it is definitely starting to feel like home.

Soooo, let the DIY-themed posts commence!

Every gardener needs an outdoor work bench or potting table, but I've...sob...never actually had one.  There was this gorgeous old paneled door leaning against the shed in the garden.  Look at that patina!  It was just begging to be incorporated into our outdoor decor.

Then, when I investigated further...

Pink!  

Now I was really torn - the other side was arguably more weathered, but then again...Pink!  And I love this little spot where the door handle once was - look at the shape of it!  I'd love to get hold of some of those original plates and restore the few remaining original doors inside my house - all but three of them have been replaced.  Judging from the state of this one, I suppose they needed to be.

Here's the final product.  

Nate is experimenting with egg cartons as seedling trays - he left eggshell halves in a few of them to see if that helps make transplanting any easier.  The legs are a couple of adjustable height pine sawhorses I purchased at IKEA a couple of years ago. Underneath there is plenty of room for...uh, my gallon jar collection.  We really could stand to drink less apple juice (blame it all on summer and the boy).  I'm determined to find a way to creatively re-use those jars.  Right now, I use them to transport hibiscus mint tea to potlucks.  The twice it's rained this summer, we've put our a variety of buckets and containers and then funneled the rainwater into these closeable (mosquito proof!) jars to use in the garden.  What I really want is a glass jar and bottle cutter, so I can turn the tops into cloches and the bottoms into...terrariums?  Glass stepping stones?  DIY gifties for everyone?!?!

And now, I am off to sample some local flavor at Live Oak Barbeque!

Gardens grow more than just food...

Our lease is up at the end of the summer, so the beginning of May seems like a good time to start house hunting in earnest.  While we've gone back and forth on many characteristics we'd like in our home of our own, a very large and sunny yard has remained a constant.  I've dismissed more than a few beautiful, resonably priced homes in walkable neighborhoods because the lot wasn't quite big enough or there were too many trees.  Kind of crazy, especially considering how important shade is to one's comfort level through our long, hot Texas summers.  

Last night I went to a community meeting, and had a mini-epiphany.  Yes, a big sunny yard would be awesome, but why not grow food and community in a shared garden in my neighborhood?

Yesterday was  Austin's Second Annual Community Gardens Tour.  I didn't actually go on the tour (poseur alert!) because I was still feeling sort of delicate after a debilitating migraine swept me off my feet on Saturday, but by 6 PM Sunday evening, I was thinking I could handle sitting in on a panel discussion. 

The Sustainable Food Center, The Coalition of Austin Community Gardens, and the Congress for the New Urbanism presented the tour, a local foods potluck and the panel discussion and I'm so glad I went.  

There are approximately 30 community gardens here in Austin, but there could definitely stand to be more in a city of this size.  Also, some of those gardens are on private land or state owned land, which can have their drawbacks.  Festival Gardens in East Austin had to move this year, due to its land being sold and the South Austin Community Garden's situation seems a little tenous at the moment. To that end, the city just passed a couple of resolutions to make it even easier to start a garden in your neighborhood on city owned property or designated park land.  

There's a pamphlet available through the city's website that will take you step by step through the process and the city has just hired a staff person to specifically work with community members on sustainable urban agriculture.  There are now waivers available for water tap fees, including the waiving of waste water fees.  This is huge!  I know the waste water charges on my residential water bill are probably about half of my monthly fee, and it makes no sense to charge these fees for gardeners who are promoting the insoak of water back into Austin's water table.

Best News of the Night?  One of the requirements of a city supported community garden is the incorporation of water conservation, composting and integrated pest management practices!  The city's not just promoting urban agriculture, it's effectively requiring urban agriculture be organic!  

If you're interested, the Sustainable Food Center is offering a Community Garden Leadership Training workshop on June 11th.  You can bet I'll be there!  Join me?

 

 

Underfoot

My mission this week is to determine what exactly is growing out there on our back "lawn".

I love the idea of no lawn whatsoever, but with small children and pets, a green recreational space is really a neccessity.  At our house in Southern California, we laid down a very thick layer of mulch in our playspace.  This was the least expensive, short-term,and (the most important consideration in a coastal desert) water-wise solution to our problem of the kids needing a place to play.

Of course, we're just renting for the moment, but as soon as I do get my grubby little gardening hands on my very own patch of dirt, I want to cultivate a green play area.  Mulch has its place, but given how very warm it gets here in the summer, I want green leafies to help keep the yard cool.  Plus, while mulch is a fantastic insulator and keeps water from evaporating, what would really benefit all of us the most, would be to encourage "invisible breathing" and transpiration of water on a microscale.  I only recently learned about this concept and it's pretty exciting (to an earth nerd such as myself). 

What else do I hope to accomplish by replacing a monoculture with a biologically diverse green space?

Well, the more diversity I can encourage in our green, the more I'm healing the soil. 

A variety of plants will support and attract a variety of pollenators. Honey bees aren't the only ones out there, but with colony collapse decreasing their numbers so dramatically, I want to encourage as many different pollenators as we can.

Pollenators attract predators.  Predators poop.  Poop fertilizes my soil, and it also guarantees I get free seed flown in from elsewhere!  Bonus! 

A biodiverse lawn is going to do something else.  It's going to grow me some more soil - good soil!  Healthy soil!  Soil especially suited for this particular plant community.  Some plants will fix nitrogen, while others will draw potassium or phosphorus up into the top soil to share with their neighbors, who are doing their own good turn, whether it's something we've documented or understand or not.

People seem to go to great lengths to keep their lawns presentable.  I don't want to go to great lengths.  I want to picnic on a soft quilt in the cool dappled shade and listen to birdsong, and nibble on the sweet fushia trumpets of henbit, and watch bees drowsily collect pollen.  I want to listen to my girl make up fantastical stories and build fairy houses.  I want to kick a ball with my little boy and take afternoon naps in a hammock with my man. One of the best ways to accomplish this is to do a little legwork and identify what really wants to grow here, what will grow in my unkempt backyard that's been trampled by dogs and watered by the occasional rainfall. 

Horseherb will.  It's evergreen, and it doesn't seem to really mind if we step on it, and it has pretty little yellow flowers.  I have no idea who else likes those little flowers, but nature's pretty economical.  Those flowers ain't just for show.

So that's my project.  Keep my eyes on the ground.  Watch who's visiting what.  Pay attention to what grows where, and next to who.  And next winter, when the lawn dies back, nurture the weeds - the henbit that cuts our rabbit pellet bill in half, the horseherb that will never need mowing, the white clover that's the perfect living mulch for my vegetable garden.

 

A hard frost (will probably bore the pants off you if you've nothing at stake in my gardening endeavour)

It got mighty cold here in Austin this past week.  Yes, that's snow in my backyard!

Kind of funny, given all the green leafies in the background!

When I wasn't fretting about my children, who were suffering from a most horrible cold, I was fretting about my little baby plants, suffering night time lows in the teens.

I have a chicken wire critter cage protecting my raised bed out back, so it was easy enough to throw a light blanket over it.  There it is, just to the left of the abominable snow-dad chasing my daughter up there.  Whatever critter I've been protecting my plants from (raccoon?  cat?  something biggish!) jumped right on top of my cage and stove the top in, but luckily nothing is growing in the middle.  Anyway, I was kind of surprised to see my big badass broccoli looking so sad and wilted!  I assumed all I needed to do was cover it.

It's sort of wrinkly and shrunken.  I have a lot to learn and am extremely grateful I'm not reliant on my gardening skills for our food.  Next time it gets chilly, I may try leaving incandescents burning.  I've also heard it can help to leave buckets of water under the tent, but the other night a bucket of water would have frozen, and then wouldn't a giant ice cube cool things down even more?  Or is an ice-cube warmer than the ambient air temps when it gets down to 16 degrees?  

What did surprise me was that my lettuce seedlings, in the same bed as the broccoli, look just fine?   Perhaps I underestimated the wind?  I don't think my backyard is particularly windy, given the bamboo thicket just south of us and the crowded lots in our very urban neighborhood.  That said, the top completely snapped off one of the few healthy looking trees at the bottom of the garden, so maybe I'm not the best judge of windspeed back there!

I have to admit to totally neglecting the herb pots on my front porch.  That front southwest corner of our house was so cold (lots of single pane windows, completely uninsulated pier and beam foundation) that in an effort to get our living room warm enough to spend any time in whatsoever, I resorted to the high tech solution of taping a fleece blanket over the so-drafty-it-might-as-well-be-open front door (with UGLY packaging tape).  I also kept the curtains (hideous red polyester drapes my landlord abandoned) tightly closed.  Out of sight, out of mind and by the time this morning, and warmer temps, rolled around I was sure I'd killed everything out front.  Well, everything except the rosemary, right?

Actually, the tips of the rosemary were still nice and green, but otherwise, it was a horrible greyish black.  My thyme looks happy as can be, and the extra onion sets I stuck in a window box?  Well, to be honest, only time will tell.  They look exactly the same as when I planted them two weeks ago, whereas the ones in my raised bed out back are clearly swelling up under the soil.

I miss sunsets over the ocean.  Some evenings it was just achingly beautiful, and I never lost my appreciation for the view as one crested that last bluff on our drive home.  We could see Oceanside's pier to the north of us, down to where La Jolla jutted out into the ocean and it was gorgeous.  It's very flat where I live right now and our view of sky seems obstructed by the trees and buildings in my neighborhood.  Yesterday afternoon I watched these trees as the color on them shifted to golden.  Nothing can quite match sunset over the water, but I felt quite peaceful watching my golden trees sway ever so slightly in the late afternoon...well, except when my glance shifted over the right where there the branches have caught someone's cast off plastic bag.  Gives me a sad.

 

I can't help but smile whenever I pass this!

Lately, I've been feeling out of sorts - missing old friends, feeling a bit impatient about how long it seems to be taking to make new ones here in Austin, and reading/listening/watching way too much depressing information about peak oil and climate change.  Ugh.  Some mornings it felt like I'd slept under a lead blanket, and never managed to shrug it off once I crawled out of bed!

I may have turned a corner this weekend.  On Saturday, I started my long awaited Permaculture Design Course!  There are 30 of us in the class, and despite all the coursework packed into the long day, plenty of time to get to know each other.  I tried to talk to as many people as I could, during breaks and other opportunities, because once everyone had introduced themselves, it seemed everyone had something I wanted to talk to them more about!  Whether it was edible landscaping for the public commons, or seed saving, or creative ways to re-localize our economy...well, I could go on and on, and certainly could have kept on talking to my fellow classmates all night!  And I'm an introvert.  Generally, a couple hours and I really start to need some time to myself, but every once in a great while, I can get caught up in the creative synergy of a group that works particularly well together and really surprise myself.

So between the excitement of the course itself, a full day off from my regular duties, the potential for new friendships, the perfect weather for biking over there, and just the collective sense of...ooh, dare I say...hope?  Yeah, I'll say hope!  I've been giddy all weekend!

Okay - little random facts to remember from class on Saturday - Redbuds are nitrogen fixing trees, a hammock is indispensable to the design process, there is a right and a wrong way to approach a berry bush (downwind!), Henbit is edible, there's an organization here in town called TreeFolks and they give away saplings, the universe is still speeding up, and a tree divides into branches 6 to 8 times.  I also found a HUGE owl pellet out in the field.  It had very large rat teeth in it, among other things...

***

NO POO UPDATE!

My hair is soft.  My hair is shiny.  I have not felt the need to wear a hat.  There is really nothing not to like about No Poo!  Well, except me liking everything in its place, and so needing to find suitable containers for my baking soda and apple cider vinegar in the bathroom.  Bumbling around the kitchen, emptying tablespoons of each of them into whatever little non-breakable container happens to be empty, clean, and at my disposal is, while a minor inconvenience, an inconvenience nonetheless.

***

ONE LAST THING BEFORE I GO TO BED

I hope one day I will look back on this afternoon and laugh.  My big strong farmer shoulders will shake as I recall how urban and soft I was.  How I let that roll of chicken wire beast me!  How long it took us to construct a simple little cage attached to a frame to keep the critters out of my piddly little raised bed!