Harvest Haiku

This post, "Harvest Haiku" was written for my blogspot blog "The Transplantable Rose" by Annie in Austin.

Pleasure in Autumn
Stealing nuts from the squirrel
He rages; I smile

Oval wooden box
Fallen from the pecan tree
Valued when broken

Where are the loquats?
Hidden in next year's flower
Praying for no ice

Peppers were captured
Vinegar and glass hold them
Heat awaits the tongue

It was fun playing with these sort-of Haiku for the November edition of Garden Blogger's Muse Day . Unlike our friends in colder places, we feel no slowing down this month - there's too much to do! With more moderate day temperatures and the blessing of cooler nights we're happy to be digging, planting and transplanting. I'm deciding where to plant daffodil bulbs once the ground has cooled off a few more degrees. For the Austin gardeners this month isn't NOvember ... it's NOWvember!

This post, "Harvest Haiku" was written for my blogspot blog "The Transplantable Rose" by Annie in Austin.

Our Nutty Weekend

A few weeks ago I showed a handful of pecan kernels under the smart-alec caption Ha-Ha Harvest... now I must eat my words - and they are delicious! This is the best pecan year in 3 decades according to Austin, Texas newspaper articles. I don't know who planted ours, but pecan trees may not have been the best choice for a quarter-acre lot. They grow too large and drop something in every season... husks, leaves, pollen flowers, limbs and tent caterpillar debris. The trees were already here when we came, giving shade and once in a long while - bestowing a harvest.

Some of you live where pecans grow so you may have seen the green husks emerging in spring near the long yellowish pollen flowers. Maybe you've also watched the nuts develop as the husks swell all summer long. We had no experience with pecan trees until we saw husks form during our three summers at this house.
If you're a Texan or a Southerner you probably knew what the nuts should look like at harvest time - we had no clue. No edible nuts made it to harvest time here in 2004... or 2005... or 2006. We'd been in a period of drought so the husks were taken unripe by squirrels and only the 'empties' were left behind to fall off - no wonder the online articles didn't tell us how to get the nuts out of those thick green husks - Nature is supposed to do it! This year we finally saw how things are supposed to happen: the husks gradually open and dry up, with the points curling back, revealing the beautiful tawny nut inside. Instead of waiting for them to drop, we got on ladders and took any that looked close to ready before the squirrels got them. They were still hard to open and there were many empties or bad kernels. A post by Susan Albert clued us in that the nuts needed to be dried first. That made a big difference.We had to crack a lot of nuts to get good kernels but when the wonderful Divas of the Dirt showed up on Saturday the table had this arrangement of Texas-grown sunflowers from Whole Foods, and we had nut bread for breakfast - made with our own pecans.
[Thank you, Entangled for making that suggestion in a comment! ]

As a member of the Divas I get one turn a year to be hostess, serving breakfast and lunch to my friends. It's fun to cook for them, and we need fuel to work on whatever garden project the hostess has set up. My last turn was in February of 2006 when the Divas helped me transplant three spiraeas to start the bat-shaped bed. They also moved some large container plants from weather shattered clay pots to unbreakable containers. That day we had off/on rain and barely got to 50º.
This time the weather was sunny with a high of 90º. I asked my friends to get rid of some more lawn grass and enlarge the 28-foot long border along the fence where the Acoma crepe myrtles grow. The bed was too narrow, the edge was uneven and it had become shadier since the crepe myrtles finally 'took'. Adding a foot-and-a-half along the front edge would make space to move sun plants languishing in shadow.

I won't tell the whole story of what happened on Saturday - that only happens once a year at the end of January on the Diva website - but here's how the long border looked today, after wind, rain and an overnight drop in temperature.

Something else dropped last night - the wind blew down the pecans from the top of the tree where our ladders couldn't reach. We picked up all that we could find, washed them and they're drying on racks in the garage.I hope the proportion of good nuts is high enough for more nut bread - or maybe a traditional Thanksgiving pecan pie.
Some other Austin gardeners have pecan trees, too - and have not had much of a harvest in previous years. Maybe MSS from Zanthan Gardens and Lee from The Grackle were lucky in 2007, too - is anyone else out there enjoying this bumper crop?

Edited October 24: The percentage of good nuts is pretty high - and my scientist husband notes that it's taking about 100 of them to make one pound of shelled pecans. Susan Albert sent a link to LSU's Ag Center with advice on how to store pecans. Thank you, Susan!

My Gardens ~ My Environment

Carol of May Dreams Garden invites us to share buds and blossoms on the fifteenth of each month, calling it Garden Bloggers Bloom Day. October 15th of this year has been named Blog Action Day with bloggers invited to post on the environment. I thought about both of these concepts as I wandered around with the camera, then flipped through old photo albums.

Philo & I enjoyed our first vacation as a family in 1970, driving from our small apartment in a Chicago suburb to a cottage in Wisconsin. We liked the lake, the trees and the hikes through the hills, and our toddlers had fun with their Tonka trucks, making roads in the soil around the porch, studding the ground with rocks and sticks. We were saving money to buy a house, one with soil for tomatoes and flowers, with shrubs and trees around it. It would be our own chunk of the greater environment...what Webster defines as the "air, water, minerals, organisms, and all other external factors surrounding and affecting a given organism at any time".

1970 was a year filled with war, destruction, monsoons, Kent State, space exploration, strikes, explosions and the break-up of the Beatles, but in ecology and the environment there were signs of hope: Mother Earth News was first published in 1970, Earth Day was declared for Sunday, April 22, 1970 and in December the Environmental Protection Agency was founded. The focus on insecticides and weedkillers intensified and by the time we had the down payment for that house the weedkiller DDT had been banned. The US government stopped using Agent Orange in Vietnam, and the connection to lawn weedkillers like 2 4-D became public. Robert Rodale spread the word on organic gardening in press and on television.

By the time we moved into our first house in 1973, it seemed logical to avoid pesticides and weedkillers on the land where our children would play, to use compost, to grow vegetables and fruit and to plant lots of trees, shrubs and flowers. It still seems logical 35 years later.

I like to read about everyone's gardens and it usually doesn't matter that we don't grow the same things, or live in the same zone or dig in similar soil. We can share a love of gardening without needing much in common.

But when it comes to advice about how to garden responsibly in a specific garden, something positive is needed - advice based in personal experience focusing on local information. Clipped and pasted pronouncements intended for general distribution may work in one place, and be useless somewhere else.

Allen Lacy told us, "It is impossible to write a book on gardening that is universal. Everyone gardens in the highly particular, on one spot of home ground at the intersection of this degree of latitude and that degree of longitude."

I miss those highway signs in Texas that encouraged us to 'Drive Friendly'. They seemed positive rather than negative, implying that people knew what was right if they followed their best instincts and were flexible about who got to the stopsign first. So I won't give you orders on what you should do in your garden, but let's look at some flowers as I share my attempts to 'Plant Friendly' on my little spot of home ground here in the NW part of Austin, Texas.

To have beauty without spraying I can choose plants with some built-in disease resistence - like the 'Julia Child' rose, with a bloom or bud in evidence every day since April.

It's not in my power to remove and replace every plant on the City of Austin's invasive list, but I can cut the flowers off nandina to prevent seed development and clip any berries I can reach from the ligustrum where it hangs over the fence from my neighbors' yard. I do this so the birds won't eat them and spread seeds in natural areas. I think a certain amount of flat green grass is necessary for comfort, as a design element, and for my sanity, so I won't dig up all of my casual, seldom watered, but acceptable-to-me lawn. [And like Carol of May Dreams, I actually like to mow.]

But I can and will shrink the lawn - we've already replaced some of it with plants for people, birds, bees and butterflies. Here's a garden for birds and butterflies, planted in the footprint where the Arizona Ash used to grow. Another thing I can do is to try out environmental ideas that take effort rather than money - like my in-progress seep garden to slow down storm runoff. Native plants Rivina humilis/pigeon-berry and White mistflower/Ageratina havanensis are young and still getting established.

I can learn to be flexible and take advantage of the unexpected in the garden - when a huge limb fell off the pecan last month all the shade plants were suddenly in sunlight.
The impatiens found space in shade near the Cast Iron plants and now the native Barbados Cherry/Malpighia glabra has enough sun to make buds.

I can try to water with care and attention and respect, appreciating the labor of those who came before us to this land of violent floods and killing drought to build the dams and reservoirs which make it possible for our city to thrive.

I'm willing to handwater my tropicals and other beautiful plants - like the clematis - this is a small garden and I think beauty is worth the trouble. But when choosing permanent landscape plants for the harsher western exposures, I'll look for tougher plants - native and adapted ones that need less supplemental water. That's what we did in a triangular area where the lawn turned brown too easily - the flowers in the pink entrance garden are doing well and are more fun.

When I talk to my neighbors I can tell them the reasons we won't use things like weed and feed while sharing divisions of plants from my borders. My neighbors may never be reconciled to the way I keep the lawn, but they may not be able to resist flowers, butterflies and hummingbirds.

Blooming off camera:
Lantanas
Pentas
Moon Vine
Buddlejas
Angel's Trumpet
Plumbago
Salvias greggii, leucantha and 'Nuevo Leon',
Cupheas
White ginger
Oxalis
Evolvolus
Rock rose/ Pavonia
Portulaca
Dianthus
Plumerias

Edited October 23 - Mr Brown Thumb has gathered links to other garden blogs with posts for Blog Action Day.

Ha-Ha-Harvest

Garden Blogger Bloom Day and Blog Action Day are rapidly approaching. While I struggle with those large concepts, here's a small post - and small is the appropriate size since what passes for a harvest here is paltry, in spite of 3 years of amending and working the soil, buying good quality plant starts and an abundance of water this summer.


Some plants grew well, but made little fruit - look at that pitiful Bell pepper. The fig tree finally started to grow - these four figs at once are a bonanza! We can't make sauces when one small tomato per week, pre-punctured by some critter, is the norm. This is the first year ever for an edible pecan - and it took nearly 40 inches of rain to get them. I cracked a bucketful to get the nuts on that plate - the rest were empty, not developed, or moldy. If you want to flavor food, we can offer rosemary, English mint, lemon thyme, basil, culinary sage, Mexican oregano, chives, Pineapple sage, parsley and Mexican mint marigold, AKA Texas tarragon, pictured above.
Instead of Bell peppers we can pick fiery Indian peppers or hot-as-blazes Mariachi peppers. Our garden could not sustain us for long - it's not a root cellar - it's more like a refrigerator containing nothing but condiments.