Our Domestic Deer Drama

There's almost always some drama going on in the backyard.  This afternoon it was this little family scene.

Mama grazes while the babies snooze.

Then they hear a sound--your patient photographer?

Is it real danger?  Or a false alarm?

It's definitely time to look for safer pastures.

This drama is over for today.  What will tomorrow bring?

Harvesting Shallots

This year with some trepidation I decided to try growing shallots--the aristocrats of the onion family.  This was my first attempt at any kind of onions--and my first garden in the Hill Country--so I was not sure if there would be a harvest or not.  Well, I am happy to say that the shallot harvest is now in progress.

I set aside one bed in the new garden for blackberries, but knowing that the bushes would take a season or two to grow and spread in the bed, I thought, why not fill up that space around the perimeter of the bed with shallots!  Hence the great shallot experiment.

I wish I could remember the date for planting the little shallot bulblets, but it was probably some time in March or April.  What I read about harvesting shallots seemed to indicate that one would know when the shallots were ready to harvest, as the bulbs would push out of the ground and the tops would begin to turn brown.  Sure enough, over the past two weeks, that is exactly what is happening to the plants around the blackberries.

The bulbs when dug need to be set aside to dry--but not in the sun!

Here is a basket of shallots just dug from the ground--placed in the grass for purposes of the picture, but residing at present in the warm, dry garage, out of the sun.

Here they are drying with air circulating around them.

These shallots look ready to eat, but the conventional wisdom is to allow the bulbs to continue to rest for a month or so after harvest to avoid a bitter taste,

From what I can tell, shallots are often planted in the fall, so my plan is to save several of the choice bulbs as planting stock for October.  The rest will be consumed!

Floods are powerful--and deadly

Today I found out that "church"  is an active verb.

Yesterday morning, snug in my bed, I could tell this was no ordinary storm.  Usually, thunderstorms come quickly and pass over just as quickly.  You can hear the thunder in the distance, count the lag between the flash of lightning and the clap of thunder, and tell how far off the thunder is.  As the lag becomes shorter and shorter, the low pressure area is coming closer; the thunder clap and the lightning are almost simultaneous--and then the lag gets longer again as the storm passes on.

This storm was different.  The lightning and the thunder were almost simultaneous, again and again.  The rain came in torrents, and the storm stalled over New Braunfels.  We had 11 to 13 inches of rain in the course of about three hours.  San Marcos, a few miles to the north had one half inch; Canyon Lake a few miles to the west, a half inch.

Our friends Cathi and Craig--who live on the banks of the Guadalupe River--experienced a flood of epic proportions in their neighborhood.  As the waters raged behind their house (and then suddenly in their house) they heard the cries of a child coming from the river and Craig went into the turgid waters, already polluted from a sewage treatment plant that had been inundated, and rescued the 11 year old girl who had been camping in an area campground with her parents.  Later in the day she was reunited with her parents who had been swept downstream--her mother 5 miles away.

Craig and Cathi's house was basically destroyed, and today church members gathered at the house to begin the salvage operation.  All day long people slopped through the viscous, polluted mud in the house to rescue the items that had been perched above the high water line, to clean those pieces which could be salvaged, and to begin the monumental disposal operation.  I have rarely witnessed such acts of love--and hard work in the blazin sun on a hot and humid day.  

I watched a trash truck driver stop his route to allow us time to cram as much of the debris as possible into the truck.  I saw a stranger stop by to say that in the first recovery efforts yesterday afternoon, she had taken some of the goods to dry ground in her truck.  There was a bag of clothes in the materials; today she returned the clothes, all washed and clean.

Cathi sobbed in my arms as the tow truck came to take her ruined, flooded car away, and I found it hard to say anything because of the lump in my throat.

At noon a carload of Subway sandwiches arrived unexpectedly; bottles of cold (pure) water appeared throughout the day.

All day long, the mantra that went through my head were the words of the medieval St. Julian of Norwich:  "all will be well."  I know that all will be well, but in the midst of that kind of devastation it is almost hard to believe that things will work out.

In the meantime, however, watching the uncomplaining workers sloshing through the filth and destruction, I saw church in action.  Indeed, "church"  is an active verb.

If Butterflies are the Cinderellas of the Garden

Then moths must be the ugly stepsisters.

Butterflies start out as caterpillars, and sometimes they resemble Cinderella before her fairy godmother transformed her into a princess for the ball.  As, for example, this fellow:

This homely little fellow (or gal) appears at the ball in a few weeks dressed to the nines:

Consider the lowly moth.  Drawn to a candle flame, where it self immolates.  Destroyer of woolen sweaters unprotected by moth balls.  Moths don't have a very good press, do they?

Imagine my delight at stumbling on this little creature (maybe 7/8ths of a inch if it has just taken a deep breath) who appeared one day recently on a blue salvia plant:

So obliging, that he actually waited until I could run into the house, grab the camera, and snap on the macro lens, to allow two more pictures:

With the help of the internet (and a moth expert) I was able to identify the visitor as Pyrausta inornatalis, a species that favors--salvia!

This ugly stepsister does not have to hang her head in shame alongside Cinderella.

The Garden, part 2

First of all, the garden is still a work in progress.  Truth to tell, it probably always will be a work in progress.  Consider this posting, then, a progress update.

As you can tell from the "before"  shots, the task of carving out a garden was formidable, so I am happy with what we have been able to accomplish in the past nine months.  Here is how the garden looked a week ago when I took camera in hand out back.

First of all, the path to the garden.  The purpose of this little preliminary garden was to block the view of the septic system from our casita in back of the house, where we frequently sit in the evenings and entertain friends.  From this angle, you can see the exposed parts of the septic system, but it is obscured from view from the house by the plantings and the rock walls.  The oleanders are still small, as they were grown from seed that I gathered in January, 2009, soon after we arrived.  I planted 24 seeds and now have 20 oleander "yearlings"!

A delivery truck deposited four yards of crushed granite at the end of the driveway, which was then conveyed, one wheelbarrow at a time, to create the path down to the garden.

The plan is eventually to have the area around the path (outside the fence) planted with native plants and grasses that deer do not find palatable.  So far, they have not nibbled on any of these plantings.  I see the telltale cloven hoof footprints around these plants often in the mornings, but have not noticed that any of the plants were bothered.

I guess it was not really necessary to have a sign that says "Garden"  at the entrance, but I couldn't resist the metal sign when I spotted it in a local store.

This is the first raised bed I constructed, the one you can see in the bleak "before"  picture in the previous post.  The prolific plant in the foreground is anise hyssop, something we particularly enjoyed in Connecticut.  We'll see if it can survive a Hill Country summer!  This bed had lettuce, spinach, arugula, and beets all winter--which we enjoyed until the weather turned warm and these cool-weather plants all bolted.  It also has oregano, marjoram, dill, basil, and tarragon.  The tree to the back is a peach.

The mint is planted outside the raised beds so that it does not take over the garden.  These are the plants that provided the crucial ingredient for our Kentucky Derby party.

On the far side of the garden is a bed for blackberries.  Since the blackberry plants came from a mail order nursery, they were small and looked rather lost in this bed, so I decided in this first year to make the bed into a blackberry-shallot bed.  I have never before raised shallots, and I had no idea how they would fare.  As you can see, we will have in a short while a bountiful harvest of shallots!  The tree in the foreground is a nectarine, also from a mail order nursery, planted bare root in February.  The tree in the rear is an apricot.

This is a picture of the same bed from the other direction.  We love hibiscus, but so do the deer!  These hibiscus plants are safe, and the deer can only look and salivate.

This is a shot of the front of the garden.  Noreen wanted to have flowers as well as vegetables, so this raised bed is given over to two climbing roses, an autumn-blooming clematis (clematis paniculata), and assorted other flowers.

This is the bed with peppers, tomatoes, purple basil, and green beans.

I was lucky enough to find a peach tree locally last fall just after the fence was erected, so the peach was planted in October.  There are far too many peaches for a tree of this size, so to protect the slender branches, I have culled several peaches, much as it hurt me to do so.

This little sign--a gift from Brian and his family--is displayed prominently at the entrance to the garden.  A reminder, indeed, that "gardening tills the soul."

The Garden, part 1

I often write about the garden, and I have had several requests from occasional readers of the blog to show some pictures.  Well, I will do so, but I think in all fairness I will have to show some "before and after"  pictures.  So this part one will consist of the "before" pictures.  "After"  pictures will follow.

We moved into this little corner of the Texas Hill Country in November, 2008.  The one acre plot did have some grass and plantings around the house, but most of the lot consisted of rocks--thousands (millions?) of the native limestone.  Some small rocks, but a lot of boulders.

And, of course, prickly pear cactus!  What you cannot tell from these pictures is that most of the rocks rest comfortably below the surface of the soil.  Stick a fork in the soil, and you hit a rock!

On average, there is about four inches of limey (alkaline) topsoil in the landscape.  Below that topsoil are rocks.

I spent the spring and summer of 2009 trying to figure out what the deer would not eat.  The problem was that this area was in the midst of a drought and the deer population was very stressed.  The result was, they seemed to eat everything--discouraging, to say the least.

The challenges were, then, first, to work around the rocks; second, to secure enough real soil that plants could grow; and third, to keep Bambi and his extended family OUT.

The solution was to dig out as many rocks as possible--slowly, one rock at a time; and then to construct raised beds.  The project began in earnest in September, 2009--after the blistering heat of summer had dissipated.

This is the first raised bed, looking very lonely in the midst of weeds and rocks--a shot taken after the long, hot summer of 2009 was coming to an end.

This is not to say that nothing ever grew in this barren soil.  During the summer, even in the middle of a drought, this area was absolutely filled with thistles.

How many thistle seeds (which look like dandelion seeds) do you figure were lying in the thin soil waiting to spring forth in the spring of 2010?

Emboldened by that one modest raised bed, more were undertaken.  And, of course, the area was enclosed by a deer-proof fence (which has proved reliable in its first year of use--excepting the fawn which managed to sneak through.)

As rocks came out of the ground, the natural thing to do was to use them in constructing walls and a path to the garden.  Did you ever wonder why New England has so many picturesque rock walls?  What else were farmers to do with the rocks they dug out of the soil in their attempt to cultivate fields to be productive?

So that's how the garden began through the winter of 2009 and the beginning of 2010.  In my next post, I will display some "after"  pictures.  Not that the project is completed: a garden is always a work in progress!