The Accidental Huswife

Winter Sewn Garden, Dried Tomatoes, Soap Paste. Now with Tutus!

2012-01-25T14:14:00.000-06:00

So I know there are all these people out there who have six children and are pregnant with twins and still find time to make cheese and card wool. I know it because they also seem to find time to blog about it and post adorable pictures of their kids in hand-smocked blouses. Me, with two kids? All I can seem to do is keep the kids from maiming each other (mostly) and the house from burning down.

In between administering first aid and putting out fires, I've managed to fit a few projects that I feel inordinately proud about:

-- Winter sowing lettuces, herbs and garlic has got to be the most rewarding gardening for the least effort in Central Texas. Because we get erratic freezes and our garden well does not have any of the infrastructure to for a freeze, I have to drain the well (it's a tiny little tank, but still) and the hoses after just about each use. So instead I've just not watered the garden. Not even once. Which in these parts is usually just a guarantee that lots of insects will feast on toasty, dry, unsprouted seeds. But we've had enough rain that everything germinated and took off. Plus, two of my friends brought three different varieties of garlic out and we drank wine while we planted it. (Or maybe that last part was just me.)

-- I've been experimenting with some awesome soap paste, made out of my homemade bar soap, essential oils, and glycerin. I use it to wash dishes and it makes suds, cuts grease, and rinses cleaner than regular homemade soap. I continue the experiment and shall post about it when I feel it's good enough to share.

-- Making lots of quick sauces from last summer's dehydrated tomatoes. Seriously, why did I ever bother to can tomatoes? You can do just about anything with dried.

-- Planted a hillside with Winter Rye for my kids to roll down. Just for the fun of the technicolor green in the middle of dull green and brown winter landscape. That stuff does not even look real.

That's what comes to mind right now. I'll leave you with this parting image. It's two o'clock Central Standard Time and we are inside because it's raining. My son and daughter are wearing tutus and diapers. I am wearing flannel pajamas.

They were wearing pajamas as well until my three year old daughter stripped hers off to put on a bright green and blue tutu. Then my two year old son tackled her and said, "Want! Want!"

I said, "Hey, don't fight. There are tutus for everybody."

And I went and found him a pink and purple tutu.

Then my daughter said, "No, pink is for girls!"

So they switched tutus and now my son is wearing a blue tutu and my daughter is wearing a pink one. Seriously, where do they pick up this sexist stuff?

Occupy Wallstreet and Food Gardens

2011-12-01T09:28:00.000-06:00

Awesome post that includes reflection on the meaning(s) of Occupy Wallstreet and gardening. Plus, social theory!

A Million Gardens

Vertical Food Garden for Small Spaces

2011-11-03T11:02:00.000-05:00

Vertical Food Garden

With all the talk about vertical gardens, I just had to share this link. Most of the vertical gardens I've seen are ornamental, complicated expensive to install, and labor-intensive to maintain. There's a multi-story garden at the Whole Foods on 5th in Austin, for example, that is stunning, and that I always stop to admire, but often has half-dead plants.

This garden, however, seems practical and productive. It's just three rows of rain gutter nailed to a sunny wall, filled with soil, and planted with salad greens and radishes. One of the commenters suggests adding a drip irrigation system as well, which would probably be useful in our hot climate because such a small bit of soil would dry out so quickly. I do wonder about her siding though, and the problem of rot from regular watering and contact with the soil-filled gutters.

In any case, I love this woman's garden and just wish I'd thought of doing something similar when I lived in central Austin, with our tiny, shaded yard. One sunny wall could enough yield salads and greens to feed our family.

Tiny Rain, Big Runoff

2011-10-27T06:00:00.002-05:00

This photo is from a few weeks ago, right after a quick intense rain that gave our area a mere inch of rain, but that I am immensely happy to have received nevertheless.

Last summer our neighbor began clear cutting several large fields, probably about twenty acres worth. His plan was to plant Coastal Bermuda and graze Longhorns on it. Now I don't know anything about Coastal Bermuda, and whether he could really have grown it here so far from the coast, on our stony land, without irrigation, and I guess I won't find out anytime soon. Our neighbor abandoned the project and is left with acres of parched, bare ground. That's his soil you see washed all over our road, and also into our field which sits below his. So I guess we gained some soil but I don't feel like celebrating.

Our field is parched too, but the tough native grasses send roots down two, three, or more feet and hold tight to the soil in even the biggest gullywashers.

Cow Rampage

2011-10-23T20:52:00.002-05:00

Maybe you've heard that Central Texas is having the worst drought in recorded history. The 110 degree days seem to be behind us, and we've had a couple of tiny rain storms, but the landscape is still parched. The cove we live on is completely dry. The other morning we awoke to discover that the cows that normally graze across the cove had crossed over the now dry basin, somehow climbed up the cliff to our front yard, and mowed down a twelve by ten or so hedge of thornless cactus. I don't blame them. That cactus looked seriously juicy and is probably the greenest thing for miles. When I was growing up farmers used to take a blow torch to the very thorny native cactus during the driest part of the summer, singe off the thorns and let the cows have at it.

The photo is post-cactus binge. That almost bare ground is where the cactus used to stand. The green you see is some Turk's Cap I planted alongside the cactus and which seems to need less water than just about anything else around here. Miraculously, cows do not seem to find it tasty.

Advantages of Dehydrating Foods for Short or Long Term Storage, with Instructions

2011-06-23T11:32:00.000-05:00

This is the time of the season when fruits and vegetables are really ramping up production and we have more than we can eat but not enough to justify getting out all the canning apparatus. You know, ten tomatoes a day, a quart or two of figs, six or seven cucumbers, an armful of basil, a half bushel of squash.

In past years I’ve tried freezing these small bits and although it's quick and easy, it degrades the flavor of some things, like tomatoes. Freezing also requires a lot of apparatus: freezer bags are usually single use; plastic containers are, well, plastic, and jars take a lot of space. Obviously, you'll need a freezer big enough to hold what you freeze and electricity to keep it going. Sad and busy is the day when electricity goes out for more than a short while (as it does occaisonally in our neck of the woods) because then you've got to try to find ways to use or alternatively preserve all that hard won garden produce.

Canning requires a lot of apparatus and time. Jars need to be sterilized, water boiled, syrups made, processing tended. Especially if you have small children running around underfoot, it can be hard to carve out a chunk of time when everyone will be safe from boiling liquids.

Dehydration has a number of advantages as compared to freezing and canning:

1. Dehydration can be done in absentia. Just wash, slice, pop in the dehydtor and go about other business.
2. Dehydration often improves the flavors of foods. Tomatoes become richer and more intense.
3. Dehydrated foods store compactly. A bushel of dehydrated tomatoes can be stored in a couple of canning jars.
4. Dehydrated foods are easy to use. Ever tried to make tomato paste from canned tomatoes? Prepare to be at the stove all day as they cook down. Ever tried to make tomato paste from dehydrated tomatoes? Soak in water, then blend. That's all.

By the way, the instruction part of the title of this post is a little joke. There’s really nothing to know, no real instructions needed to dehydrate fruits or veggies. Just wash and cut produce in more or less even pieces and then dry until you’re satisfied. The drier the food, the longer it lasts. But don’t overdry herbs.

Planting Potatoes in Central Texas

2011-05-16T15:39:00.000-05:00

Yellow wax, french fingerling, purple Peruvian, and red potatoes

We have two great challenges to growing potatoes in central Texas. First, potatoes like deep, rich, loose, slightly acid soil and ours tends to be shallow, poor, highly alkaline, and sticky. Potatoes also give small yields if exposed to high temperatures or really wet conditions too early. And we have short, wet (if we're lucky) winters and springs. So many gardeners in this area grow potatoes in chicken wire towers or boxes from pallets.

My dad and the old German farmer down the road from us grew potatoes old school, straight in the ground, and had a good amount of success, so I tend to do the same thing. Dad and our neighbor both had the strange good fortune to possess some small pockets of deep, black soil among the rocky hills that make up most of this area. Plus, they were both incredibly stubborn.

We too have a pocket of fairly good soil, although it's a little heavy and sticky. Still, with lots of organic amendment, I can grow potatoes right in the ground with reasonable success. And I even take a few liberties with conventional wisdom about growing potatoes.

Here's what I know of conventional wisdom and where I've diverged:

Using grocery store potatoes versus seed potatoes
The word is, you should never plant grocery store potatoes because they may have been treated with a growth inhibitor. I guess that may be true since everyone says it, but it's an hour drive to the nearest place that sells seed potatoes and I've yet to try and save my own seed. So I've planted grocery store potatoes from time to time. They do sprout quite readily. Hasn't everyone accidentally sprouted potatoes in their kitchen?

Pre-sprouting versus not prespouting
I think the idea behind pre-sprouting is that it shaves a week or so off time between planting and maturity. It also easily lets you see where to cut the potatoes so that you have at least one growing eye in each piece.

Our neighbor never presprouted. He had a huge field he planted every year, and he said he had to move too fast to worry about knocking off the fragile sprout tips. He grew more potatoes than anyone I've ever known. My dad always pre-sprouted so I always did too, until this year when my mother-in-law gave me a bunch of very tiny seed potatoes from her nursery. They were small enough that I knew I couldn't cut them and also, for some reason, they never sprouted above ground. So I planted them anyway and have had a pretty good harvest. It's hard to tell if it took a lot longer for the potatoes planted without pre-sprouting to mature because we had a crazy early heat spell that caused the plants to jump ahead by about a month. So we harvested in early May.

How to Pre-sprout (also called chitting)
Lay potatoes in a single layer on a shallow box or tray. Do not let them touch. If your potatoes are small enough, an egg carton is a great way to keep them sorted properly. They should ideally remain at around 60-70 degrees. But that's a temperature range that's hard to come by around here. Outside, in the house, on the porch, in the garage, it's usually either hotter or colder than that. I think as long as it's well above freezing and below wiltingly hot, those potatoes will sprout. Also, try to keep them dry. Try to plant before the sprouts get too long or they will tend to break as you drop them in the ground.

Cutting potatoes versus planting whole
A large sprouted potato can often be cut into three or four pieces, so cutting is definitely the frugal choice. If you do cut, no peice should be smaller than a golf ball.

Curing seed potatoes with sulfur versus wood ash versus nothing
The purpose of curing cut potatoes with sulfur is to prevent rotting in the ground. My dad always used wood ash instead of sulfur and he had enormous yields. I confess that I have several times skipped this step entirely and have yet to suffer adversely. I wonder if it is in wetter climates that curing really matters?

How to cure seed potatoes with sulfur or wood ash
After cutting potatoes, let them dry until a skin forms on cut surfaces. Dust with sulfur or wood ash and let potatoes dry another day before planting.

How to plant potatoes
Dig a furrow 6-8 inches wide and 6-8 inches deep. Most sources say to space seeds about 10” apart, but if there's room, space even more widely. I like about 14 inched so they have plenty of room to spread their toes. I also think it keeps disease down. Cover potatoes with soil. After plants are about 3-4” tall, add more soil.

When to harvest potatoes
Once the plants are flowering, wait a week or so, then carefully dig around the plants for new potatoes. Between 90 – 120 days, the plants suddenly turn yellow and start looking like they're dying. Now it's time for the big harvest. This year, the potato gods went crazy and I started havested in about 70 or 80 days. This means I'll have a smaller crop, but it's still a good one. I think it got hot so early it sent the potatoes into hyperdrive.

What varieties grow best in Texas? Well, I've tried a number of red, white, yellow, and purple. Sadly, so far I've had very limited success with purple. I say sadly because those are my favorites and they are also the most nutricious. Here in our alkaline soils, it seems the yellow, waxy varieties grow best.

For red potato, Red La Soda and Pontiac are proven favorites; for white, Kennebec or Irish Cobbler varieties are the choices. Russets do not grow well in our area.

Are Oak Leaves Safe for Garden Mulch?

2011-05-10T08:01:00.002-05:00

Everyone knows that walnut trees produce a potent growth inhibitor as a way of protecting their territory. Juniper trees are rumored to do so as well. But what about oak trees? Live oak trees, which are our most plentiful hardwood, make small, very fibrous leaves that take forever to decompose. For that reason, as I explained here, I've been tending to use them as mulch rather than adding more than a small percentage to my compost pile. And because I'd heard they might contain a plant growth inhibitor, I only used them on the walkways, never near the vegetables I was growing.

But now as weeds invade my beds and rows of tomatoes, squash, greens, onions, herbs, beans, garlic, peppers, cucumbers, potatoes, and other lovely deliciousness, I wonder if I can use oak leaves as mulch near the plants themselves. Oak leaves are certainly something we have plenty of.

It turns out the question of oak leaves containing growth inhibitors is fairly debatable. Definitely they contain lots of tannins. That's why if oak leaves fall in a container of water, the water will turn brown like tea. As far as I can tell, tannins do play some role in plant growth regulation, in the plants that produce them. It might be reasonable to expect them to affect plants growing in the same soil in which tannins from other plants are being released. But whether that means tannins from oak leaves would inhibit vegetable seed germination and growth, I don't know. One benefit would be that many animals find the taste of tannins unpleasant, so perhaps oak leaves would repel unwanted pests.

More definitively, oak leaves release phenols in their first month or so of decomposition, which do inhibit seed germination and growth. So I'd conclude that only leaves that have rotted for a month or more should be added to the beds itself, but that fresh leaves are fantastic for walkways. In fact, this is the perfect way to work with nature instead of against it.

Oak Leaf Mulch

2011-05-08T16:57:00.000-05:00

Here in Central Texas, oaks are the most common deciduous tree. So we have lots of leaves and they take forever to decompose. I've taken to using them less for compost and more for mulch for this reason. I understand that most people shed them with a mower first but I think that step is unnecessary. They compact pretty quickly and in the meanwhile, I'm prepared to slide around a bit. It may be that they contain some kind of plant growth inhibitor, as juniper is rumored to contain. Just in case, I've not ever tried oak leaf mulch around the plants themselves. I do know that I won't have any weeds between rows this season.

Easy Homemade Laundry Soap

2011-05-03T13:00:00.000-05:00

The simplest, most effective, least costly soap I know of. It takes a minute or two to make, works in any type of washer, is safe for all washable clothes, is non-toxic, and stores indefinitely.

Chopping the bar soap before adding it to the food processor

Ingredients

You’ll need some kind of bar soap. I prefer my own homemade soap, but just about any kind will work. Fels Naptha and Zote are especially nice because they were designed for laundry (Zote is also hot pink and makes a very pretty laundry detergent J), but I’ve also used Ivory, and once in a pinch, I used a handful of tiny hotel soaps.

You’ll also need washing soda and either borax or baking soda. I prefer baking soda because it’s non-toxic and does a nice job deodorizing.

A note about the ingredients:

Washing soda or sodium carbonate: It removes dirt and deodorizes. I’ve found it in the laundry isle of my grocery store and also at Ace Hardware.

Baking soda or sodium bicarbonate: It also removes odors.

Borax: Also a deodorizer but a whitener as well. It’s a great ingredient but I don’t use it anymore since I had kids. It’s a little more toxic than I like to have around my kids.

Finished Laundry Soap

The Recipe

Actually, it’s so simple it can hardly be called a recipe. First grate the soap. (I chop it roughly first and then finish the grating in a food processor. You can also use a cheese grater.) Then mix one part soap, one part washing soda, and one part baking soda (or borax). Store in a container with a lid and it lasts indefinitely. Use about 1-2 teaspoons per load of laundry. Yes, that’s right: 1-2 teaspoons. This soap has no fillers or liquids and you don’t need very much.

Why go to the trouble of making your own soap?

1) So, so much cheaper. By my rough calculations, this recipe comes out to about a penny a load. Seriously, a penny. Even the cheapest commercial soap costs far far more.

2) Less waste: no enormous plastic containers to end up in landfill. No filler ingredients had to be manufactured either.

3) Easier. Takes about a minute to make enough to last a month or more. No toting heavy containers from the store.

4) Non-toxic ingredients. I feel better about using it for my own laundry, my children’s laundry, and my pets’ bedding. I’m not worried about the fumes created when it is dissolved in hot water, nor about storing it in my household.

The most common questions about this recipe are: Is it safe for HE or front loading washers? And, does it work? Well, I’ve been using it in my own HE washer for over five years with no problems. And I have two kids, two dogs, and a messy, messy life. It works as well as any other laundry soap or detergent I've ever used.

A Central Texas Plant Heritage

2011-04-14T10:29:00.001-05:00

This bearded iris is planted near an oak tree at the entrance to our driveway. We never water or pay much attention to it, but it gives us flowers anyway. Irises are one of those plants that get divided and passed down between friends and family. This one came from a patch near the front door of my current house. I planted that patch from some divisions I took when we moved from our last house. And that patch came from some divisions from my good friend Lori's yard.

Next weekend I plan to go out to my dad's farm and while I'm there I'll dig up some rhizomes from a patch of white irises, the kind I've heard called German Settler, and take them back to my house to plant. I don't know who planted those white irises. They were there when my parents bought the land more than sixty years ago. Dad speculates that there was another house, in another site, that had long since burned down or tumbled to dust. The previous owners didn't know, and there are no records to show another house was ever there. But near my parents' house is a fine spot for a house, with a pretty view and a patch of irises, and another patch of horehound. We do know that the early settlers to the area tended to plant both irises and horehound.

It would have been a woman who made these plantings, from divisions, given to to her by a friend or a sister or a mother. She would have been looking to take care of her family, to provide medicine, in the form of horehound, and beauty, in the form of irises.

Everyday Emergencies

2011-01-23T01:11:00.000-06:00

For the last week my husband and children have had a stomach flu and all I’ve been doing is wiping whatnots and cleaning up unspeakables. And just when my husband and daughter are able to mostly control their bodily functions, it has somehow transmogrified into a respiratory infection. My poor little boy gets both problems at once.

This is our first round of simultaneous illnesses with the kids and we’re lucky that I didn’t get sick too. Yet. So I’ve been learning what everyone who has small children knows: at a time like this there are two many temperatures to take, tummies to tend, brows to cool, cries to comfort, and messes to clean up, for anything like normal life to carry on. That means laundry doesn’t get done, bread doesn’t get baked, yogurt doesn’t get fermented, gardens don’t get weeded, jam doesn’t get made, and so on. Certainly errands and appointments have to wait. These are the kinds of ordinary, everyday code reds that I realize now I was unprepared for.

I somehow managed to run out of yogurt and the small jar I usually set aside to start the next batch turned out to be a jar of home-rendered lard my sister had given me at Christmas. Where did my starter jar end up? I don’t know but I assume we ate it at some point. And yogurt was the only thing my daughter wanted or could keep down.

We had no juice on hand, since we ordinarily don’t drink it, and my daughter was refusing regular water. We had nothing like Pedialite or Gatorade either. No soup ready-made. No crackers. A cold front came in and tore through some tender just-sprouting greens before I could get a chance to cover them. Laundry is piled in mountains.

By a cruel twist of fate, for the last few months I’ve been trying to use up last years home-canned, frozen, and dehydrated foods, the bulk-purchased flours and grains, honey, beef, chicken, and pork, all to make way for the next season. So we were low on everything. We didn’t actually run out of any of those things, but if we’d needed to go much longer without a trip to the store, we would have.

The kind of preparedness I’d been working on, the stockpiles I’ve built, the skills I’ve developed, are useful for many things, but not necessarily for the intensity of a bunch of sick people in the house. So now I’m thinking through how to develop preparedness for the everyday emergencies of life.

1. Have a week of easy meals at hand, canned or in the freezer. There are times when scratch cooking just isn’t possible or practical. I can’t tell you how much I would have appreciated some homemade chicken soup last week, but I could never find the time to make it. I actually did something like this when my family came to stay for Christmas. I had many gallons of soup, stew, and beans along with a dozen loaves of bread waiting in the freezer. It meant we had plenty of time to just enjoy each other.

2. As much as I despise the stuff, I’m going to start keeping Pedialite, Gatorade, and frozen juice stocked in the house. Depending on the day and the mood, the kids would refuse or prefer Pedialite, Gatorade, water, my homemade electrolyte solution, or juice. And some days, even the time to mix up the electrolyte solution was too much.

3. I also need to plan a method for rotating stockpiles that doesn’t involve letting so many things run out at once. I’ll be thinking this through more over the next few weeks.

I don’t want to make this sound more dire than it was. It wasn’t dire at all, in fact. Just inconvenient. I could have run to the store or sent my retching husband. At any point, I could have called a friend to fetch me some things. We still had plenty of everything, including some stores of food designed to last thirty years or more, sent to us by my sweet in-laws. But how nice some homemade chicken soup would have been, waiting in the freezer.

On Not Trying New Things

2011-01-06T15:51:00.000-06:00

I started making this bread about twenty years ago, from a community cookbook that had been my mothers, and that she gave me when I left home. It's just a simple sandwich bread, made from white flour, although over the years I started making it from mostly wheat.

Then, after a trip to France, I fell in love with baguette style loaves, and because at that time we lived within walking distance of two very fine bakeries, I stopped baking althogether. When we moved out to this rural area, I started trying to duplicate French style baguettes, with moderate success, using the no-knead bread recipes the New York Times went crazy over.

Which us all well and good. It's fun to experiment and learn new things. But my husband really prefers sandwich bread so we ended up buying bread half the time and my trusty old recipe got mostly forgotten. When my large family came to stay for Christmas, I pulled my old recipe out again, and discovered I was a pretty rusty sanndwich bread maker. I wanted to have enough loaves baked and frozen so that everyone could help themselves to sandwiches for lunch. That means I needed about a dozen loaves to get through the holidays, minimum. The first few loaves came out kind of wonky. I could no longer double and triple the recipe with ease. I'd forgotten how much whole wheat I used to substitute for white, that I'd started using less yeast and letting it rise longer. That sort of thing. The sort of thing a cook knows how to do from years of practice or learns in the kitchen of another experienced cook.

I guess what I'm talking about is tradition. I'm talking about the ordinary, every day traditions that we lose all too easily in a generation or so, if we're not careful. My mother talked about my paternal grandmother's yeast biscuits, which to hear her tell it, were as big as a loaf of bread and as light as a wisp of smoke. Maybe they were really that special or maybe they only became so in her memory but we'll never know because that recipe was lost when Grandmother left her mortal coil. Now that my own mother is gone too, I find myself reaching for the phone sometimes still, to ask her how she made her oatmeal, and why mine never tastes the same. My younger sister does the same thing and we both pine for that oatmeal, but too bad for us. We waited too long to get her technique.

Too bad for the world too. It's all too easy to lose touch with skills that were common just a generation or so ago: gardening, sewing, home repairs, animal husbandry, and so on. In the world I grew up in, cheap oil and the notion of an ever-expanding economy allowed us to believe we could, even should, let go of those traditional skills. And we can't reclaim them overnight either. It takes time to learn how to garden well, for example. It takes season after season to learn about a particular climate and microclimate, to even begin to get a glimmer of understanding about how seasons work, how seeds like to sprout, what makes a tender plant thrive and what consigns it to failure. It takes time to develop any skill and it's always best to learn from an experienced teacher, although books are a great source too.

So what I'm circling around to in this rambling post is that it's fun and instructive to try new things, like French style baguettes, but having a practiced, make-it-in-your-sleep skill, like I once had for sandwich bread as part of our every day repertoire cannot be neglected.

The Huswife's Home Pharmacopea: Mullein

2010-11-29T13:04:00.000-06:00

A few years ago I had the worst cold I’ve ever had in my life. It might have been pnumonia but I was at a conference at an isolated resort and I never went to the doctor to find out. My airways were severely constricted and when I coughed I wheezed like a newly landed fish.

Fortunately, the resort spa sold tincture of mullein and it got me through the conference. My airways opened up, coughing diminished, and all without that weird spacey feeling from commercial decongestants. By the time I went home I was on the mend and comnpletely sold on mullein. Since then I’ve kept it stocked in my medicine cabinet.

A few years ago I was in Colorado and noticed it growing along the sides of the road. I stopped and took a few stalks of seeds home and scattered them in a field, hoping to grow my own. No luck. Then I saw it in my brother-in-law’s yard in West Texas, took some seed home, and tried again. Still no luck. Fast forward six months: I spot mullein growing along a road near my dad’s farm. I took some seed home, scratched the earth, planted, watered, and watched. No go. I seemed cursed to buy tincture of mullein forever. Six more months pass and what do I find growing along a small road near my house? Right. Mullein. And lots of it. It seems I can't make it grow where I will but it will grow where it wills. It just doesn't like the field where I was trying to grow it. Around here, it prefers semi-shady, semi-cool, bottom land and thin, chalky soil, I think.

So for now, I'll gather from the wild with a light hand and also try to find a spot on my land that's low and cool and chalky to scatter a little seed. Because I definitely always, always want to have some on hand. And I think you should too.

Uses: Excellent for colds, coughs and any respiratory illness. Honest, mullein is far superior to any over- the-counter or prescription cold medicine I've ever tried. It is reputed to be good for skin rashes although I've no experience with this use.

Harvesting: Leaves are the most practical part of the plant to harvest. The flowers are useful as well, but they are tiny and must be harvested as they open. Some folks also harvest the long taproot, but I never have.

To use: Easiest is to make a tea from the leaves, either fresh or dried. Be sure and strain the tea. The leaves have little hairs that can tickle the throat if you ingest. You can also make an alcohol-based tincture.

If, like me, you don't have an immediate source for the plant, you can buy the prepared tincture from most health food stores and Whole Foods. I've also bought the dried leaves at our local farmer's market.

Lost and Found

2010-11-02T15:05:00.000-05:00

Discovered in the process of mowing my overgrown field: favorite hat and gardening gloves.

My Garden Wants to Kill Me

2010-11-01T13:14:00.000-05:00

The biggest problem in the garden? The garden is a patch of about half an acre in the middle of a fenced acre of thick native thatch populated by the most hostile, pain-inducing stickers. The stickers are broken up by occasional cacti, fire ant mounds and needle-thorned mesquite. Even when I was working on it regularly, stickers were a constant battle. I had to wear heavy boots, gloves, and layers of denim. I did my best to mow around the cultivated patch and create a kind of demilitarized zone, but the incursions from hostile plant life were frequent and unrelenting.

Now after six months of neglect, the garden has returned to its natural state of hostility to human flesh. My puny little mower stalls out every few feet. And with the children now, I don't have long stretches of time to devote to two-feet-at-a-time mowing. What's more, I can't take the kids with me to the garden because there are two many things out there that want to pierce tender young hides.

So what to do? Do I buy a more powerful mower? Hire someone with a tractor to plow the whole acre under and plant more flesh-friendly ground cover? Give the project up as a folly? I'm open to ideas.

Volunteer Squash

2010-06-14T00:12:00.001-05:00

About fifteen volunteer squash, of unknown provenance, have sprung up in last year's compost pile. They look like watermelon and spaghetti squash plants, and may well be some Frankensteinian cross. Squash are notorious for cross-pollinating with gourds, which is why I've yet to plant gourds. Time will tell if the fruits of these plants are any good to eat.

Drought Tolerant Vegetable Garden

2010-06-12T12:24:00.001-05:00

I've learned a little bit about drought tolerant gardening in the last few years. We had a record two year drought and we also lost access to a well for a brief period of time. This year, I planted an area of the garden for which I've not yet built a drip system, so I have to water with a garden hose, by hand. Pretty time consuming, so I planted some really drought tolerant veggies: hot peppers, calabacita, tomatillos, and zucchini. I drip the garden hose on one plant at a time, near the base, while I go about other garden chores. This means that each plant gets a deep watering about every 7-10 days. So far, we've had enough rains that this has been enough. As the season progresses, I hope to find time to add a drip system. But in the meanwhile, the plants are doing great, and producing like mad. Besides choosing drought tolerant varieties, there are a few other things to do to grow plants with less water:

1. add berms to the garden, to catch and hold rainwater run-off.

2. study the topography of your garden so that you can lay out beds in a more or less perpendicular manner to run-off patterns.

3. amend soil with lots of rich organic matter. I used home made compost and purchased composted turkey manure.

4. space plants widely, more widely than seems sensible, so that they can really stretch out their toes and have access to lots of water and nutrients.

5. mulch heavily. I meant to mulch, and I really should have, but I haven't had a chance. Poor plants are probably struggling more than they have to as a result.

6. Take advantage of natural clay soils, if you have them. Our garden has a large patch of heavy clay gumbo soil, and this is where I have my drought tolerant veggies. Everyone says you can't grow veggies in gumbo soil, but I've found that if I amend with organic matter, it works beautifully.

Something's Lurking Among the Tomatoes

2010-06-09T23:40:00.000-05:00

About a week ago these creatures starting showing up on my tomato plants. They're just sitting on the leaves and there are perhaps five or six per plants. They look like some kind of multi-lobed egg sac or larvae, about the size of a thumbnail.

Normally, I don't do much about insect invasions -- I just wait them out and nature usually rebalances everything in a reasonable period of time. Sometimes crops do take a beating but generally, nature just takes her ten percent tithe.

But there's something kind of ominous-looking about these things. I've never seen them before and suddenly they appear in startling numbers. So I've been peering at them and trying to decide if I should try to remove them. Who are you, creature? Friend or foe?

Everything I Know about Planting Onions

2010-06-09T10:08:00.000-05:00

I don't really understand onions and their life cycle. I really don't. I only know five things:

1) plant when it's cool, well before the heat of summer takes over. I planted these last February.

2) plant shallow. In fact, I usually plant so shallowly that I have to really pinch the dirt up around the seedlings to get them to stay up. This seems like the main thing to get big, healthy onions.

3) harvest when the bulbs push their shoulders up out of the dirt.

4) cure the onions for a good while in the sun. I'll cure these for about a week.

5) store in a cool, dry place with good air flow. I break this rule a bit because I don't have such a place to store them. I put them in a basket in my pantry, which is cool and dry but without much airflow. But we eat them so quickly, and we have two growing seasons, so we've not had any spoil yet.

A Day's Harvest from a Neglected Garden

2010-06-07T23:52:00.000-05:00

Sometimes nature is generous. This summer so far, more rain than usual, no freak hail storms, tornadoes, or sirocco-like hot winds. So, this poor neglected garden carries on, and sends veggies our way.

Squash versus the Squash Vine Borer

2010-05-31T23:12:00.000-05:00

In our neck of the woods, the squash vine borer is endemic, fast, and lethal. No method, whether natural or napalm, can withstand the borer if he wants your squash. Many experienced gardeners have given up on certain varieties of squash altogether.

For some reason, the borer hasn't found my garden yet so I'm growing squash like mad while I can. What kind of squash is in the garden this year? Butternut, yellow, calabacita, and yellow zucchini, spaghetti, in that order.

Perennial Artichokes

2010-05-30T08:31:00.000-05:00

Pity my severely neglected garden. Between Dad's illness and two new kids, I've barely paid it any attention. I planted about half of the things I intended to plant; everything has been planted a little bit late; weeds have taken over most of the beds; watering has been sporadic.

Fortunately, the weather has been just a about perfect this spring and summer -- lots of rain, sunny, no cruel heat waves just yet. And our soil is in great shape from several years of turkey manure amendments and mountains of compost. Best of all, the permaculture beds are pretty much taking care of themselves. So far, I've found a few plants that are either more or less perennial or reliably reseed themselves in our climate: cilantro, basil, kale, leeks, chard, and several lettuces. It doesn't sound like much but add a few easy-to-grow varieties of squash, tomatoes, peppers, and such, and we've had a more than adequate harvest this summer, with hardly any attention to the garden.

It's only recently that I realized artichokes would love our climate. And they do love it! We had a couple of hard freezes last year that I thought had killed them off. But the original two plants came right back, more vigorous than ever. And those that I let go to seed sent their babies to the original bed and all over the surrounding field. Where once we two artichokes are now about fifteen healthy plants.

Life versus Blogging

2010-05-14T00:27:00.000-05:00

Life has been richly complicated since I last posted anything at all. My dad got sick and had to come live with us for a while. It was serious; he was tough and determined to get better; he got a lot better and went to live with my brother and sister-in-law.

And then....

We adopted two children.

So life is richly, richly complicated and I haven't made time to blog.

In the meanwhile, the wildflowers decided to have their best season in years. We had a Bluebonnet explosion to welcome the children.

Welcome to central Texas, babies! We hope you like it here.

Two Kinds of Texas Winter

2010-02-12T00:37:00.004-06:00

These photos are from Christmas, which we spent with family in West Texas. It was beautiful in its own rugged, spare way.

And this is what we came home to, in Central Texas. It was cold. In the forties and fifties. But we still had not had our first really hard freeze. We've had several hard freezes since then and the grass has gone brown. In fact, we've had some record freezes and lost plants and trees that had been surviving our winters for a some five years or more with no problems. It's just part of the cyclical nature of our weather here. This summer I'll chance it again, probably, and plant some marginal things -- subtropicals that will grow for five or ten years, or longer if I baby them, and if luck and nature don't take me by surprise.

Making Sauce From Frozen Tomatoes

2010-02-11T01:16:00.003-06:00

Last summer I just plain could not keep up with the tomato canning and ended up doing something that frankly, made me shudder. I froze some tomatoes. I'd read that a lot of people do that when they run out of time. I never really trusted that frozen tomatoes would be any good, and so ended up buying some store bought tomatoes when my own canned ran out two months ago. Of course store bought tomatoes in winter are pretty sad things as well.

So here I am in February, finally using those frozen tomatoes. It turns out they're just fine. They work almost as well as home canned and are about a thousand times better than anything that can be bought out of season. I did fire roast about half of the tomatoes before I froze them and those are actually quite excellent. The other were frozen whole or quartered, without roasting or even blanching. Now I'm glad I didn't bother with blanching. Freezing serves the same purpose, which is to allow the skins to slip off.

I did remove the skins for the first few batches of sauce. Then I thought, why be so picky? You ate store bought tomatoes and didn't die. Surely you can eat the skins from your own homegrown, albeit previously frozen tomatoes. A Vitamix, or some other high speed blender, is key, I suspect, to the success of this venture. You can even blend the tomatoes without defrosting them first. You'll end up with a thick, chilly, bright pink tomato puree that can be cooked into any sauce at all, and those skins don't have to end up in the compost pile. Plus, you save the entire five seconds it would have taken to remove the skins from the tomatoes.

Wordless Wednesday: From the Pantry and Freezer

2010-02-10T13:26:00.007-06:00

Planning the Tomato Crop

2010-02-09T01:39:00.002-06:00

I can't think of any crop that's more important for happiness than home-grown tomatoes. They are one of the veggies that, in my opinion, money can't buy.

Last year I planted tomatoes three times. The first batch was killed by a surprise hail storm, the second by a series of late season freezes that even a couple of makeshift hoop houses couldn't withstand. The last batch made it through most of the season until we lost our agricultural water in July. Still, we ended up with enough tomatoes to supply our household for about 3/4 of the year. I say 3/4 but that's a guess. I still have some tomatoes in the freezer, and one jar in the cupboard as well, because I was so stingy with them throughout the year. Also, I bought fresh tomatoes from the store from time to time.

This year I want to go all the way. I want to grow enough to keep us up to our necks in preserved tomatoes for the entire year. And have enough to share. And enough green ones at the end of the season to store and use as they ripen. I'm not sure exactly how to calculate this amount except to well, just guess, and double the number of plants. I do know one thing. I'm going to keep better records this year, and actually measure output by variety if I can.

I'd love to hear how others plan their tomato crops.

Toad For Breakfast

2010-02-08T10:00:00.000-06:00

Here's a happy collection: A few slices of leftover no-knead homemade bread; some fresh eggs from a friend's backyard chickens; butter I made several months ago, from local raw cream, and that had been hiding in a corner of the freezer. Quite naturally on a Sunday morning, my thoughts turned to toad-in-a-hole. Making it is simple. Use a biscuit or cookie cutter to make a hole in the middle of a piece of bread. Melt butter in a frying pan. Add eggs, cook, flip, cook some more. The best part is the little rim where the eggs meet the bread. And in my neck of the woods we eat this homemade salsa.

Using It Up

2010-02-07T00:09:00.002-06:00

One of the prompts for Frugal February was a post I read somewhere, sometime, about the huge waste that is most people's experience with buying a chest freezer. That is, most folks fill it up, thinking they're being careful and frugal and all in all good planetary citizens. Then they lose track of what's the deep recesses of said freezer until too late -- all this fine food gets tossed away.

Last summer I canned and dehydrated and froze fruits and veggies from my garden. I purchased a quarter of beef from the finest grass feeding ranchers in the state, not to mention some similarly fine pork. I bought bulk grains, oils, and spices through my native nutrition community buying group. It was all in service of creating a functioning home economia, and the hope was that we would have the best foods, as local as possible, as organic as possible, bought and preserved or used in season. And I would get it all at the best price. Moreover, I hoped we would be less subject to the vagaries of a crazy economy and possible disruptions in food supply (whether from natural disaster, ordinary weather patterns, zombie invasion, or whatever).

But somewhere along the way I did a poor job of measuring. I think I simply stockpiled too much. I did not quite realize how much could be grown on a fraction of an acre in my climate, given good soil and lots of labor on my part. So I still have quarts and gallons and more quarts of frozen and canned fruits and veggies in store. Too much jam and jelly. Excessive amounts of beef. And there are other things that I've run out of all year long, things I've had to buy lower quality versions of because I didn't produce enough. So in the month of February, as I go through our cupboards and freezers, I hope to measure, plan, and reevaluate for the coming year.

Frugal February

2010-02-05T23:46:00.008-06:00

I really should have made this post on February 1 but what's new about me running behind on every single thing in my life? February has always been a funny month for me, and for central Texas also. It's really the end of our short winter and I think it catches a lot of folks by surprise. We're worn out from Christmas, January just flew by. It's cold and gray; it's wet; it's icy; from time to time it's cold, wet, grey, and icy all at the same time. Just the perfect time to let myself slip into a funk of guilt and self-recrimination. Why did I spend so much at Christmas? How could I have eaten all that? Why is the house so cluttered? More generally it's also a time when central Texans actually start complaining about things like rain and cool weather. I mean, really, these are things we cry and gasp for in the dog days of summer and now we complain about them. Such ungrateful behavior and yet another reason to slip into a pattern of guilt and self-recrimination.

Last February I managed these gray days by declaring Frugal February and I'm doing it again this year. It seems like a good month to use up the stores I have on hand, to boycott shopping, to reset my spending patterns -- kind of like the way Ayurveda has you go on a fast to reset your taste buds to purer foods and rest the digestive system. Only I can promise, I shall not be going on a fast. Here are the contours of Frugal February: no shopping at all for the entire month. That's it.

OK, that's not quite it. An exception has been made, and I won't say who in my household has made this exception, except to say it wasn't me. Bananas will continue to be purchased during Frugal February.

But other than that exception, no shopping. Believe me, this will not be onerous. I keep such a huge store of emergency foods here that I suspect we could go six months without buying groceries. And as for non-food shopping like clothes, we could go far longer yet. What I hope to accomplish is to just rest my system, enjoy the freedom of bowing out of the spend/consume cycles for a while, and take stock of what we have. I hope to discover how well we're planned out little home oeconomia here. We'll see how well the winter greens and herbs from the garden hold out, and use up the last of my canned, frozen, and dehydrated garden foods from last summer. We'll see if monotony sets in. As I recall from last year, I came away feeling very refreshed and ready for the fine, fine spring ahead.

The Jig's Up, Spaghetti Squash

2010-02-02T12:24:00.004-06:00

I first encountered spaghetti squash when a friend of mine was doing Weight Watchers, in the 90's, when the low fat craze was in full swing. She cut the poor squash in half, microwaved it, shredded its innards with a fork, and then served it with fat free marinara sauce from a jar. Is it any wonder I've had a hard time loving spaghetti squash?

But it turns out there is much to love about this squash. It's easy to grow, drought and insect tolerant, and most of all, stores forever on a counter top. Last summer I planted a single hill from some seeds I'd saved from a supermarket squash. Then I forgot all about that hill, moved some of my beds around, and rearranged my watering system. Somehow the spaghetti squash got left out in the cold, metaphorically. More literally, it got left in a spot that I completely forgot to water and often tromped across, dragged a hose over, and snapped of bits of vine.

Still, I ended up with dozens of squash. Dozens and dozens. I gave some away. We ate a few. And I filled a huge basket with about twenty of them back in July. We're down to four, after eating two of them last night as a main course, with garlic, butter, and parmesan. Which brings me to what I consider the primary virtue of spaghetti squash. Because they store forever, without canning or freezing, you can have fresh summer squash in February. That's right -- fresh, not frozen or canned, summer squash. Not winter squash.

It wasn't until I realized this that I started to really, really love spaghetti squash. You see, this squash had been sold to me under false pretenses. It was supposed to be like spaghetti. In fact, except that you can shred it with a fork and make something vaguely spaghetti shaped, there is no similarity.

Which is why I am announcing to all spaghetti squash everywhere that the jig is up. You are not spaghetti. You are squash. Stop pretending. Be proud of your vegetable nature. You are delicious, just like you are.

New Well

2010-01-27T19:04:00.004-06:00

After a long, full day of helping supervise the guys who are drilling our new well, dogs are tuckered out.

Some stats:

The well is 185 feet deep.

The diggers tell me they hit top soil, white limestone, gray limestone, slate, and red clay, in that order.

It took about 4 hours to complete the digging.

I would have posted pics of the well, but there's nothing much to see. Just a capped off pipe sticking out if the ground. And the dogs are so much cuter.

The main thing, in my mind, about the new well is that it means we can garden again, on a large scale AND we can be more waterwise. Before, when we were on the community well, it was really hard to attach meters, for reasons I won't get into. So the first thing I'm going to do is investigate water metering systems and devices for measuring moisture in the soil.

Black Bean Chocolate Cake, Part II: A Warning

2010-01-27T05:00:00.000-06:00

I've been making this cake for a good while now. I've made it for Widget Man and for company. I've taken it for a pot luck. I served it at a writing workshop once and people who had just met were licking their plates. In front of each other.

You'd think I'd have the recipe pretty much down by now.

You'd think.

But here's what happened. My eighty year old dad has been living with us for a little bit and he needs a fair amount of care. And I've been a fair amount of tired. But I wanted some cake! I mentioned making a cake to Widget Man and he wanted some too. So in a fit of greed and laziness, I used canned beans to make the cake. This was not my first fit of greed or laziness, and not the first time I've used canned beans for this cake either.

But this time, something went very, very wrong. So wrong that Widget Man took one bite of the cake, put his fork down, and looked at me with a very carefully neutral expression on his face. Then I took one bite and gagged. Then he felt free to make really loud gagging noises and bulge his eyes in a dramatic fashion. And I thought that was quite enough, thank you very much. No need to be rude.

The cake tasted, not to put too fine a point on it, like a big plate of crazy. I mean, not just bad, but crazy. Crazy because it was a moist, rich, chocolate cake, with icing and pecans, infused with the most intense flavor of bacon. Wait, not bacon: overwhelmingly powerful, fake bacon flavoring.

So I blame the canned beans, although the only thing on the label that looked suspicious was the word "spices." And let me reiterate that I've used canned beans before and the cake came out fine. Delicious, even.

And just in you want to use canned beans in your cake, I should tell you I've used Progresso brand beans with complete success in the past. I hate to name names but I will, for the sake of those who might want to avoid the shrieks of grief that accompany throwing an entire chocolate cake in the compost bin.

Window Farms

2010-01-26T11:54:00.004-06:00

Most of my adult life has been spent gardening in very small spaces -- a tiny urban yard, a deck, a porch, a windowsill or two. Only recently have I had the luxury of gardening on several acres. And I still feel a great fondness for tiny gardens. They're smart; they're what most people can manage; they make peak oil sense; they can be really stinking cute.

So when I came across Window Farms I spent hours browsing through the site. Window Farms is a non-profit based in New York City helping folks grow food in really innovative ways. Do check it out.

By the way, my own little low tech window farm is shown here: some tomato starts.

Our Brothers and Sisters in Haiti

2010-01-17T10:37:00.001-06:00

Here is a list of NGO's responding to the crisis in Haiti. A really good place to start if you're wondering where to send money.

Long Term Emergency Food Storage

2009-12-21T10:50:00.002-06:00

Long term emergency food storage can be a bit involved. But this is really easy: order kits of dried beans, rice, and other grains. These kits come in cans and are supposed to last thirty years or more.

2009-12-20T12:46:00.003-06:00

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

-Robert A. Heinlein

This morning, standing in front of the yet-to-be-built kitchen backplash area, I made this to-do list:

outline the final chapter for my novel
finish designing a new writing workshop I'll be giving in January
catch up on laundry
clear out dead plants from the garden
wrap Christmas gifts
buy Christmas gifts

In addition, I'll be on call as assistant construction monkey while my husband builds our new kitchen backsplash today.

What I've done so far:

outline my chapter
one load of laundry
breakfast with my husband
chat on the phone
stand in my garden and daydream about the spring planting

Later I'll go to a Christmas party at a friend's house.

Like most people, my to-do list is far more ambitious than I am. But while I was daydreaming about the next garden I was also thinking about non-specialization, about the coming year in which I hope to build more skills, learn more things, embrace more self-sufficiency. I want to keep this list do-able, though, unlike my daily lists tend to be. Here's what I have so far:

learn to really sew -- not just hemming, mending, straight seem stuff like I do now, but from a pattern

learn to really knit -- not just scarves, potholders, and washcloths, like I do now, but actual patterns

What else?

Just a Quick One

2009-12-19T15:24:00.003-06:00

The single mandarine on our small potted tree. It's in a big pot on wheels and I roll it inside before freezes.

Roast Figs Two Ways

2009-10-15T07:56:00.004-05:00

Our enormous fig tree normally gives us more fruit than we can handle -- plenty t0 can, dry, freeze, and give away. We normally don't do much of anything to keep animals away. The tree grows right by the back door and the dogs keep that area on SuperMax-style lockdown.

This summer however, the dogs were no match for squirrels and birds. I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that this was a desperate, starving season for the local wildlife. The drought meant our cove was bone dry and the creatures who call the normally lush, green surrounding area home got bold, drinking from dog bowls on our deck, lurking around trash bins, grazing in our front yard. Often I'd go out to the fig tree to see six or seven squirrels in it, bending the limbs with their weight.

So not enough figs to preserve, but we did get a few for snacking and dinners. Here's one of our favorite ways to have figs, as a main course, along with a salad, or as an appetizer:

--Split figs

-- On half the figs, sprinkle with brown sugar and a pat of butter.

-- Wrap the other half with a bit of bacon, jamon serrano, or prosciutto

-- broil on high until bacon is cooked and sugar/butter is sizzling

The Patient Gardener

2009-10-13T10:36:00.002-05:00

Here's a dream: my own mangosteen tree. I've been dreaming about it since a recent trip to Costa Rica where we ate them by the bucketfull. Luscious, light, fragrant mangosteens. We brought back some seeds, but growing mangosteens is not a short term project. I was told it takes fifteen years for a tree to bear fruit. Hope they let me bring the tree with me to the nursing home.

Last of the Summer Flowers

2009-10-12T11:34:00.016-05:00

Last of the summer drought survivors.

The Return of Water

2009-10-07T01:58:00.002-05:00

A few days ago we had a lovely, thundering storm. Our cove, which had been completely dry, suddenly looked like a rushing river, complete with roaring whitecaps.

The water drained into the main body of the lake within a half day, but still, it was a beautiful sight while it lasted.

Fall Renewal

2009-10-07T01:50:00.005-05:00

It's amazing how quickly this little hilly land can bounce back from a drought. The crunchy seared grass, shriveling trees, cracked earth -- it swells and brightens, it softens and unfurls. We've got blooms and fruit. I guess I shouldn't be surprised. That's what this land, these plants, made themselves for: to survive and thrive in our ancient weather pattern of boom and bust, drought and flood.

Rumor has it we're in for a long, cold, wet, winter. We, the plants and I, say, bring it on!

Central Texas Springs Back

2009-10-06T16:14:00.003-05:00

The drought isn't over. We're still many, many inches behind our average rainfall. The lake is still half empty. But we've had a series of storms, green is reappearing.

And look, here's the first rainbow I've seen since I don't know when. It was huge, glowing. And if you looking carefully, you can see it's a double.

End of the Spring Garden Whirlwind

2009-07-15T01:05:00.000-05:00

After a day spent in town, running errands and teaching a class, I got home with just a few hours of daylight left. It was enough to harvest a surprising number of lemon cucumbers, along with another two or three gallons of tomatoes and assorted squash as well as a few ears of corn. Poor, poor peppers are looking pretty wilted, so it won't be much of a harvest, I suspect.

The busy day left me too tired to cook. Widget man was in no mood either, so it was melon for supper and then some soaking in the solar tub.

But there was energy for thinking and planning. I'm thinking the best idea is to freeze all or most of those tomatoes. Really, it's just crazy to heat up the house right now.
I'm happy to hear that spagetti squash last a good while without needing additional preservation. For now, they'll just live in a basket on my counter in the kitchen. Through a combination of obsessive opening and closing of windows, a series of solar screens, heat chimneys, and ceiling fans, as well as running the AC a few hours a day, we keep the house right around 80 degrees, which I'm told is a good temperature to store these thick-skinned squash.

As for the eggplant, well, let's just hope preserving them is something I get to worry about. As of this evening, some insect is enjoying gnawing on their leaves very, very much.

More on Heat Resistant Armenian Cucumbers

2009-07-14T10:00:00.000-05:00

Not only are Armenian cucumbers heat tolerant, drought resistant, tender-skinned, and non-seedy, they have the additional virtue of staying crisp for a day or so after they're sliced and drizzled with vinegrette.

We usually try to make just enough of a tomato, onion, cucumber salad for one meal, because we know by the next day, any leftovers will be a little soggy. Not these crunchy things though. And the slices look like pretty little flowers.

In a Drought, Abundance

2009-07-13T19:21:00.005-05:00

This is what my kitchen table has been looking like lately. I'm canning, freezing, and dehydrating as fast as I can.

We're breaking heat records that stood for as long as anyone's been counting, for numbers of days in a row of 100+ degree weather, for high temperatures of 105+. Coupled with record low rainfall, and record low humidity, plants just don't stand a chance. It's been so dry that our lake is losing a foot a month of water just to evaporation.

It's been nine days since we lost access to our water for the garden, but about 2/3 of the garden is still going strong. I would not have predicted this. I give credit to Steve Solomon, and his fantastically useful book, Gardening When It Counts. He outlines some strategies for dry farming and for suddenly losing a water supply. I had already implemented a few of them before we hit our water crisis.

Space plants widely so they can spread their roots to the largest possible area.
Start with vigorous, home-sprouted seedlings (as opposed to nursery seedlings), raised in your own garden soil (as opposed to commercial potting soil).
Use drought tolerant varieties.

Once we lost our water for the garden, I implemented another Solomon strategy, and for this I had to gird my loins: I took a sharp hoe to every second or third plant and removed it. This instantly reduced moisture consumption while providing double the capillary moisture to the remaining plants. I chose carefully, picking plants that were the weakest, or that had almost finished making fruit. For example, most of the cucumbers were barely hanging on anyway, and probably would have produced only a few pounds of fruit before they died. But the tomatoes and tomatillos are still going strong so I'm hoping they'll make it a bit longer.

Solomon doesn't think mulch does much to reduce moisture loss, since plant transpiration is the greatest source of water use, but I mulched earlier in the season anyway. I added some green mulch, in the form of weeds and sacrificial garden plants, piled high around the roots of the remaining plants. I hope they'll add just a tiny wisp of moisture to the ground as they dry up, but who knows if that will make a difference.

Earlier this year, I built a small series of berms and swales, so if we do get a few drops of rain, my garden will be there to take advantage of it and soak up every last bit.

Meanwhile, I'm just so happy that in this, my first season of gardening on anything but the tiniest of patio-sized lots, and in any ambitious way at all, the garden has thrived. It's been a strange year to start a new endeavor like this -- spring came really late, we had oddball hail storms, tornadoes, and late-season freezes. And now we have this drought and heat. Despite all that, the freezer is crammed with veggies, the cupboards overflow with canned tomatoes, salsa, and pickled everything. The dehydrator runs twenty four hours a day.

Widget Man is hard at work designing our barn and rainwater collection system for the garden while I harvest what I can, as fast as I can, until the fall veggies give up. I'll start a very small fall garden near our house, where we can water a small bit. We'll just grow a few things in the mini-garden -- a couple of tomato plants, some greens, some herbs. These are the kinds of things that are nice to have fresh and we're lucky to be able to grow them during most of the winter in our area.

Heat Tolerant Cucumbers

2009-07-10T13:13:00.004-05:00

Not too long ago, most of the cucumbers gave up the battle against the summer sun. Even the lemon cucumbers, which had continued setting fruit long after the picklers stopped, were finally ready to cry uncle.

But not these babies. They're Armenian cucumbers, and I've never seen or eaten them before. Earlier in the summer, they just kind of sat there, taking up space, so I more or less ignored them.

Then the 100+ heat wave came, and the Armenian cucumbers took off. The vines, festooned with pretty yellow flowers, seemed like they grew a couple of feet a day. I still pretty much ignored them because there was so much to do, and I was sure they'd never set fruit in this heat.

But they have set fruit, and with a crazy heat-living vigor. They're delicious too -- sweet, not too seedy, and very firm. The texture is closer to a young carrot than the cucumbers I'm familiar with. And I think they have a slight celery flavor as well.

This may be just the cucumber for central Texas and other hot summer places.

Recipe for a Zucchini Explosion: Spicy Migas with Zucchini

2009-07-10T00:10:00.005-05:00

Migas are a traditional Mexican dish, and a fine way to use up leftover corn tortillas. They are, in the simplest form, simply torn or cut corn tortillas, cooked in a little oil, and then scrambled with eggs. Common variations include adding cheese, tomatoes, mushrooms, onions, salsa, or chorizo (spicy Mexican sausage).

Around here, this dish is ubiquitous and you don't need to go to a Mexican restaurant to have it served up for breakfast. It's as commonly as bacon and eggs or pancakes. And it's a favorite Sunday brunch item.

My favorite variation includes zucchini, especially at this time of year when those green squash are coming out of the garden in truckloads, and if you're not careful, the size of baseball bats.

Spicy Migas with Zucchini
2 medium zucchini, cubed
4 corn tortillas, cut evenly into strips or squares
3 eggs, beaten
olive oil
comino (cumin)
dried ancho chile powder
dried chipotle chile powder
salt
shredded Oaxacan string cheese

1. Saute cubed zucchini in a very hot skillet, with olive oil. Sprinkle with salt, comino, and chile powders. I usually use about a tsp of comino and ancho and just a pinch of chipotle. Chipotle is the hottest of the two chiles, so adjust according to taste. You want the zucchini to end up slightly crisp on the outside, lightly coated with the spices, and creamy on the inside, so don't toss too much while it's cooking. Allow the squash to brown instead.

2. When the squash is brown, add tortilla pieces. There are two schools of thought about how tortillas should be cooked for migas -- some like them crisp, like a chip; others like them soft and chewy. I'm from the soft and chewy school myself.

3. Add eggs and scramble lightly.

4. Top with shredded cheese. Take pan off the heat and allow the residual heat of the dish to melt the cheese.

5. Serve drizzled with your favorite salsa.

A word about the spices: Comino is the most important spice in many Mexican dishes. Ancho and Chipotle just happen to be two of my favorites and are always at hand. By all means, adjust the spices to your taste and to what you have available.

Also posted at Food Renegade's Fight Back Fridays!

Hot and Cool Summer Salsa

2009-07-08T12:03:00.001-05:00

When my good friend came back from a trip to El Paso and brought with her some amazing homemade tamales, I knew we needed a side dish worthy of their deliciousness. Just the ticket is something light -- the best homemade tamales are filling, dense, and intense.

Here is one of my favorite fast, easy ways to make a quick salsa cruda (a salsa made with raw ingredients). It combines the hot spiciness of raw serrano chiles with the cool, sweet smoothness of cucumber, avocado, mango, and of course, fresh-from the garden tomatoes.

Hot and Cool Summer Salsa
2 or 3 fresh serrano chiles
5 or 6 ripe tomatoes
1 large avocado
1 small mango
1 small sharp onion
1 large cucumber
a splash of olive oil
juice from 1 lime
salt to taste

Chop first 6 ingredients; toss together with olive oil, lime juice, and salt to taste. That's it! Of course, you can use a milder or hotter chile, according to your taste. You can even use a canned, picked chile for an even milder salsa. And by all means, remove the seeds and white membranes of the chile's to take some of the bite out. I don't have an extremely high tolerance for heat, so that's what I do. And the sweet, cool tomatoes, avocado, and mango seem to take some of the bite out of the chiles. Also delicious with fish and chicken.

On a related note: It might seem counter-intuitive, but hot spicy food is perfect for hot weather. It provides a strangely cooling, almost euphoric experience. All the finest world cuisines from hot climates are hot and spicy, after all.

This post part of Real Food Wednesday.

Solar Powered Outdoor Bathing and Soaking Grotto

2009-07-07T13:01:00.005-05:00

I learned to love outdoor bathing during the year Widget Man and I spent in Mexico. For a month we lived on an isolated beach in the Yucatan, in a bamboo palapa with an outdoor shower. There was something so amazing about washing my hair every morning in the middle of a white sand beach, watching waves break on the coral reefs.

When we go camping, we try to reproduce the experience with a Sun Shower, which is just a plastic bladder with a show nozzle attached, that we hitch up to a tree limb. It holds five gallons of water and heats up amazingly fast if there's any sun around. What really amazes me is that we can both shower with a shared five gallons of water, once we learned not to dilly-dally.

We have low-flow showers in our house, but I can guarantee we use far more than two and half gallons of water, even when we try to move fast. I also love soaking in a hot tub of water at the end of the day. I hate to even think about how many gallons of water that uses.

So even though we don't live in a palapa anymore, and we don't have a white sand beach or an ocean to gaze at, we are setting up an outdoor bathing and soaking space, in the interests of water conservation and for the pure pleasure of bathing outside, in nature, under the sky.

It's solar heated and pumped, with a UV filter. If there's anything we have plenty of in Texas, it's sun, so the water gets as hot as we want it to. The barrel is from Snorkel Tubs and the solar pump and various components are from a dozen different solar power vendors.

Our plan is to add an outdoor shower, also with hot water from the solar panels, so that we can have a Japanese-style bathing and soaking grotto.

The tub is surrounded by grape vines, cedar, oaks, and a huge fig tree, on a terrace below our house, so it's completely private.

Water Rights, Water Choices

2009-07-06T12:03:00.004-05:00

We never really intended to live out here. We bought this place as a weekend escape and somehow, fell in love.

Our little lake cove has eight houses, and we're the only ones who live here full time. The rest come in from Houston, El Paso, and Austin, on weekends and holidays. We all share a well. It's not much of a well, really, sunk shallow, built on the cheap, without a water holding tank. The decision to build a well on the cheap was made long before we moved out here and we didn't realize how much this was going to effect our lives. Most of the time, it's just fine, but when the weekend people come, they bring guests. Lots of guests. Who are heavy water users, not used to water conservation.

This weekend, with the cove packed with weekenders and their guests, the water situation came to a head. We had hardly any water pressure, and the well pump was really struggling to keep up. While we worried and tried to conserve, our sometime-neighbors stewed over my use of water to irrigate our little patch of garden.

The truth of it is, I have no rights to irrigate with our well water. The well belongs to our neighborhood, and my annual dues pay for household water, and specifically exclude any outside watering. The truth of it also is, if we were watering a patch of lawn or some ornamentals, no one would blink -- they all do it. But this neighborhood has always been uncomfortable with my veggie garden. They feel it brings down property values. It's just too...rural.

So I have some choices now. We could sink our own well, and do it right this time. Nothing in our neighborhood bylaws precludes us from doing this. But I don't want to. Another well would stress our already-drought-stressed water tables, and possibly further deplete the neighborhood's water situation.

We have been planning to build a water collection system for the garden, drawing and re-drawing plans for a barn, from which we'd collect the water. Rainwater catchement is the perfect solution for our area, where we get plenty of water in the winter, and often in the spring too. But that's going to take some time -- a lot of time. And I need an immediate solution.

So here are my choices to get through the next few months, until the rainy season, and until we build a water catchment system:

1. Buy a water tank for the garden now and have a commercial bulk water supplier fill it. Use this water to get through the next few months.

2. Abandon the garden until we build a water catchment system.

There is also a third option that I'm trying to think through. Our house perches on a steep hillside overlooking the lake. To get to the lake we have a wooden stairway, in three flights of about fifty stairs each. At each flight, there's a landing, and along each landing is a naturally terraced strip of land. The second terrace might be a suitable place for a garden.

When I think about having a lovely, secret garden, away from dissaproving stares, I get pretty excited. I'd love to just make the tension go away. But I need to think this through logically -- building a brand new garden is a lot of work. So here are the advantages and disadvantages to each site:

Advantages to the Existing Garden:

Open field with plenty of sunshine.
Fenced.
Reasonably good soil.
Garden beds already constructed.
Plenty of room to add more garden beds, orchards, or even to have animals like chickens or goats.

Disadvantages to the Existing Garden

In full view of my neighbors. They drive by frowning and muttering and I hate that it makes them so unhappy. I also hesitate to do other things that I know would drive them crazy, like have big piles of compost, dirt, and manure. Or get chickens. Or try making biochar.
No trees for windbreak, which is very rough on young plants.
Far enough from the house that I can't see what's going on -- like a deer or raccoon invasion.
Open field make it less pretty, and more simply utilitarian, despite my efforts to plant vines on the fence and flowers in the beds.
No easy water source.
Will be very expensive to build a water collection system here. Since it's uphill and across a private road from our house, we need to build a barn for water collection. The barn will have to be approved by the neighborhood architectural committee.

Advantages to the New Garden Spot

Very pretty place to garden, with a view of the lake, across the cove to unspoiled land.
Shade trees nearby.
Trees provide a windbreak.
Will be very easy to create a waterwise irrigation system. I can hook up to our existing lake-water pump, and/or build a simple, gravity-fed rainwater system, fed by the house above.
It's private, with no possibility that the neighbors will be disturbed by it (unless they sit on my dock below and stare up at us with binoculars.) I'd be more experimental without their frowning stares.

Disadvantages:

The land is very rocky. I'd need to either bring in new soil or try to find a way to move the soil from my existing beds.
It's located two levels down from my house. Every trip to the garden means descending two flights of outdoor stairs. It's impossible to get a tiller down there and pretty difficult to move soil, manure, etc.
It's slightly smaller than my existing garden.
I'd need to build a new fence.

Well? What would you do?

Local Foods and Happy Fourth of July

2009-07-04T19:54:00.005-05:00

A mostly local foods Fourth of July at our house:
-- Hot dogs from Bryan, Texas
-- Buns made in San Antonio, who knows where the flour came from
-- Grilled tomatoes and onions, from the garden
-- The first of the Mexican Sweet Green corn, from the garden, seeds from my sister
-- baked beans, cooked in my kitchen, who knows where the white beans were grown.

Don't look at the beer. I could have easily bought a local brew but forgot all about it because well, Pacifico is fabulous in the summer heat.

Happy Fourth of July, all!

Mouthwatering Black Bean Chocolate Cake. Yes, Really.

2009-07-01T00:19:00.004-05:00

A friend of mine, who grew up in China, shudders at the way we eat beans here -- salted, with bacon, in chili con carne. In short, we eat beans as a savory dish. To her, they are a dessert. She likes them made sweet, in puddings, cakes, and as a pastry filling.

When you think about, beans really are a neutral tasting vegetable, and depend a lot on how we season them. So when I was looking for a way to make a gluten free cake, I wondered about beans as a flour substitute. Beans have a few distinct advantages over white flour:

-- they're a high protein, whole food.
-- they're high in a kind of soluble fiber that helps stabilize blood sugars. This is great for everybody but especially for diabetics and pre-diabetics.
-- in my area, they are grown locally, while wheat is not. So since I try to eat locally and in season, I'm trying to cut down, and perhaps eliminate, flour products.
-- they're great for people with gluten intolerance.

I've made this cake three times and even served it to company. It's dense, moist, and rich with no hint of "beaniness" at all. There are no weird, non-food, chemical ingredients -- all simple, whole foods. And it is extremely easy and fast to make.

Mouthwatering Black Bean Chocolate Cake

Preheat oven to 325 degrees.

To prepare the cake pan:
Grease a 9" cake pan with butter, then dust with cocoa powder. Line pan with parchment paper cut to fit bottom of pan.

To prepare the batter:
In a blender, combine 1 and 1 quarter cup rinsed black beans, 3 eggs, 1 tsp vanilla, 1/2 tsp salt, 6 tablespoons cocoa powder, 1 tsp baking powder, and 1/2 tsp baking soda. Blend until there are absolutely no lumps.

In a bowl, whip until smooth, by hand or with electric beater, 1/2 c honey and 7 tablespoons butter. Add 2 eggs and whip until smooth.

Pour butter mixture into blender with bean mixture and blend until incorporated.

At this point, the batter should look glossy and smooth and very much like any traditional chocolate cake batter.

Pour batter into pan. Thump pan on the counter several times to smooth batter and dissipate air bubbles. Bake for about 45 minutes.

Allow the cake to cool in the pan for ten minutes, invert onto a plate, and then turn over again onto a cooling rack.
Allow the cake to finish cooling completely on the rack -- the longer it cools, the better the texture will be. I usually cool mine overnight.

The cake is great on its own, but I my family likes it best with honey sweetened whipped cream and a sprinkling of pecans. And, I confess, I've also iced it with traditional powdered sugar chocolate icing -- not all that healthy, I know, but company was coming and I panicked.

One more note: I've recently been seeing recipes using beans as a flour substitute all over the internet. Many, if not most, use some form of artificial sweetener instead of honey, and many also use oil instead of butter. Other use no fat at all. I suppose this is an attempt to reduce calories or carbs, but because I'm not crazy about fat free recipes, and because I'm not crazy about artificial sweetener, I haven't tried any of these versions.

**Also posted at Real Food Wednesday**

Fire Roasted Tomatoes

2009-06-30T00:05:00.006-05:00

My San Antonio grandmother used to make a fresh batch of salsa for each meal. She'd stab a tomato onto a fork and hold it over the flames of her gas stove until the skin began blackening and curling away from the fruit. Then she mashed it in a mocajete, also called a mortar and pestle, with salt, spices, and chiles, and that would be a meal's worth of salsa.

I don't know anyone anymore who makes fresh salsa for each meal, although I'm sure there are still some who do (note to those who do: when's dinner?). But a quick roast on the grill or under the broiler adds an amazing flavor boost to canned tomatoes, sauces, and salsas.

Here's how:

First wash and remove stems. Then pop tomatoes on the grill or under a very hot broiler. After the tops turn crisp and brown (about 5 or six minutes), turn over and brown the other sides.

Let cool, then remove cores and most of the skin, leaving behind a bit of the browned skin. Now continue with canning or salsa/sauce making.

This batch is going into some canned salsa.

Water, Weed, Harvest, Preserve

2009-06-29T10:53:00.004-05:00

We're in survival mode here. Not the kind of survival mode that comes from not having enough,

but the kind of survival mode that comes from having more than we'd imagined possible.

It's the second week of over 100 degree weather and our area keeps hitting new records. According to the weather service, this is the hottest June in recorded history in Central Texas. Last week, it was 110 at the airport, but with our pleasant lake breezes, we only made it to 108 at our house.

Couple the record breaking temps with a record breaking drought and you'd think everything on the ground would be brown and dead right now. But this is a tough little land, with a long history of extremes, and though some native plants respond to this type of weather by going dormant, many others stay bright and green, and even bloom like crazy.

But garden veggies aren't tough native plants, so everything ought to stop producing about now, give up, die on the vine. And lots of stuff is slowing down, gasping its last breath, shriveling up in the white hot intensity. But most of the garden is keeping on keeping on, surviving with the sips of water I give them, wide spacing so they can dig their roots in deep, and lots of mulch. The tomatoes look ridiculously showy, the melons are fat as babies, the squash just won't stop, the tomatillos are as big as Volkswagen buses, and the peppers couldn't be happier.

And me? Well, I'm a heat tolerant native too, but I'm barely keeping up with all the harvesting, weeding, watering, and chasing off hungry animals. Most of all, I'm barely keeping up with canning and freezing. I had not predicted that preserving would be such a time consuming part of food independence. Hours and hours of peeling, chopping, brining, pickling, freezing.

Other than that I try to spend as much time as possible submerged in water.

How to Weather a Storm Sustainably

2009-06-13T00:52:00.002-05:00

We really don't live that far from civilization, but sometimes it feels like we do. We're only 3o minutes from Austin, and 10 minutes from a small lakeside town. When we first moved here, I didn't quite realize that because of the way the highways are built, the geography of our immediate area, and the way services are clustered around urban and suburban populations, we would have to learn how to be independent at times.

Our main route to civilization is a small county road that crosses several creeks which tend to flood during storms. So we can be cut off pretty easily, once for almost two weeks. And we tend to be last on our power utility's list to restore services when storms take out transformers.

Last night we had tornadoes in the area as well as hail. The big stuff missed us, but we were without power for about twelve hours. Normally, twelve hours is not a big deal at all, but my eighty year old dad was visiting, who has some mobility difficulties and I didn't want him tripping in the dark, or becoming disoriented in the middle of the night.

Of course we have flashlights and candles, but even better, we have a set of outdoor solar path lights, the kind you stab in the ground. We gathered them up and placed each one in a quart mason jar for stability. We spent a pleasant evening talking and watching the storm roll in and out, with the house lit by a soft solar powered glow. When we were ready for bed, we left a few of them around the house to help orient my dad.

Unlike candles, they pose no fire hazard and unlike flashlights, their batteries weren't going to run out. In the morning we awoke to find our electricity working again. We returned the solar lights to the path outside, to recharge and light our way wherever they are needed, inside the house or out.

What's for Dinner?

2009-06-12T00:05:00.001-05:00

Here's tonight's dinner. We're having a tomato, cucumber, onion, and basil salad and a zucchini frittata. We'll use all of those zucchini. All six of them. And we'll use all the tomatoes, basil, and cucumbers. And we'll eat all of it. Just the two of us.

Because we're crazy about fresh spring vegetables. So is this dinner healthy or greedy?

When to Harvest Melons

2009-06-10T22:44:00.008-05:00

Am I wrong or do garden fruits become ready for harvest according to the size of the fruits? Here's the order I noted: cucumbers, round French squash, Roma and Italian paste tomatoes, large slicer tomatoes, yellow squash, zucchini. And finally.....

The Queen and King of all Garden Fruit: Cantaloupe and Watermelon!

OK, OK, it's not a perfect system -- some garden fruits are unruly. Cherry tomatoes come after cucumbers and then kind of do what they please for the rest of the summer. Eggplants, okra, and hot peppers need super hot weather and around here, come along when it seems like nothing at all should really be thriving.

But besides idle speculations on garden fruit hierarchy, what's been on my mind ever since I started anxiously watching these babies grow is, how do I know when melons are ready to harvest?

I never had room in my city garden for such ramblers and frankly, half the time I can't even pick a ripe melon out in the grocery store produce section. So I had my sister call her friend Rhonda, a small scale sustainable gardener who knows about all things flora and fauna. Here was her advice:

How To Know When Melons Are Ripe

1. Cantaloupe: ripe when it slips easily from the vine.
2. Watermelon: ripe when the tendrils nearest the fruit dry up, or when it has a happy yellow underbelly.

It's dark outside right now, but I feel tempted to go to the garden with my flashlight. I mean, we are talking melon.

Hot Pink Salad

2009-06-10T00:49:00.003-05:00

For some reason, no one I knew ate beets when I was growing up. I think the first time I saw a beet was a pickled version at a Wendy's salad bar during the happily short-lived salad bar craze of the 80's. (Mmm...wilted lettuce and mayonnaise salad.)

I don't know why we didn't eat beets, especially since it turns out they're so easy to grow here. And beautiful. And delicious.

One of our favorite ways to eat them is a variation of a salad I make with potatoes, which is itself a variation of a dish we tried in Paris.

Ingredients for 2 very generous, main course portions
For the vinaigrette:
Whisk about 3 parts good olive oil to 1 part vinegar, 1 part water, and 1 part Dijon mustard
Add sea salt and fresh pepper to taste

For the salad:
Clean and chop or tear into small pieces about 2 dinner plates worth of mixed greens, some sharp and some sweet or whatever is in the garden at the moment. Basil makes a nice addition too.

For the beets:
Puncture 3-4 large beets and microwave until soft but not mushy. While they're still pretty warm, cut into thick slices and place in a bowl. Add about a tablespoon of flour (I like semolina, which gives a nice nuttiness), plus salt and pepper to taste. Quickly sear in a hot pan with a little olive oil, just until a nice, light crust is formed.

For the finished dish:
Quickly, before the beets get cold, toss lettuce, beets, and vinaigrette. Serve right away.

There's something about the contrast of the warm beets and the cold greens, the sweetness of the beets and the tang of the vinaigrette, that is just right for a summer supper.

And by the way, you may notice that the photo above is of sliced, raw beets, and in this recipe, I cook the beets whole, then slice, then sear. Well, I guess a confession is in order. I made the dish, and we ate it before I remembered to take pictures. The photo above is from several nights ago, when I was slicing beets to add to a mixed veggie roast. So now you know. We were too greedy to wait.

Also posted on Real Food Wednesday.

Our Kind of Normal

2009-06-09T10:43:00.000-05:00

The plant you're seeing is a chile pequine. It grows wild around here, although this is one I planted in a xeriscape garden about ten yards from my house. I love it because it's pretty, it's perenial, the little bitty chiles are tasty, though hot, and it needs absolutely no care or water. Last night I noticed three different cottontail rabbits loving it too, munching away in a nervous bunny frenzy. A few hours later I saw a deer doing the same. This morning one of my dogs started barking madly and I saw a bunny fleeing for its life.

Now I wouldn't normally be surprised to see rabbits munching of a pepper plant. They do have a taste for strange things. When I first moved out here, I tried to plant an unfenced herb and pepper garden, but would find the plants nibbled away by the bunny population.

But what rabbits and deer don't usually do is loiter about where dogs and humans live.

I guess it's the drought.

When the first German settlers came here it took them awhile to discover what the plants and animals, the native people, and the early Mexican settlers already knew about our weather patterns.

In the first letters they sent home, they compared the sweet little hills and valleys of this area to Germany -- lush, green, plenty of water, but with mild winters and teeming wildlife.

When they tried to build a grain mill, they had a mill stone brought in from Germany and found a likely creek. The next year a flood washed the whole thing away. They rebuilt on a different creek but it went dry the following year. It took them close to ten years to find a river that stayed reasonably constant, that was big enough, that had the kind of banks and followed the kind of course that could absorb our cycles of drought and flood. The settlers were trying to find normal but we don't have that kind of normal here -- just cycles of extremes that we learn to adjust to.

Sort of. During Rural Electrification, which LBJ was prominent in bringing to this area, the Colorado river was damned to create a series of lakes, in part to mediate the effects of extreme weather patterns. I live on one of those lakes now, Lake Travis. It's the largest of these lakes and its size allows it to absorb fierce flooding. During floods, the other lakes drain into it, and the level rise twenty or more feet in a few hours. During droughts, water is released to feed other lakes, municipalities, and the rice farmers below us around Houston. Then, the lake falls to the extent that the deep, clear cove I live on goes muddy or even dry.

Living on a lake like this keeps me aware that our climate is cyclical. I knew this growing up, near farmers, and among people whose wells could go dry. I sort of forgot this from living twenty years in a city, where weather is just background, not a main event. Cites like Austin are trying to remind people about weather cycles, with water conservation programs such as rebates on rainwater collection systems. Most suburban and exurban areas seem unconcerned with weather patterns, and merrily pour water on huge St Augustine lawns. Yet climate scientists tell us that extreme weather patterns are only going to get worse.

I don't have a happy ending for this story, but I sure hope our species can avoid an unhappy ending.

By the way, the last remaining of these old German mills is still working and under the care of a gardening club not too far from me. A friend of mine lends his engineering expertise to keeping it running and every year they grind a batch of corn as a fundraiser.

A Drought and Deer Proof Vegetable? Maybe.

2009-06-08T22:00:00.000-05:00

Where I live, the small, green, hilly bit of land on the edge of the Edwards Plateau, right in the middle of the state, is an extremely pleasant place in so many ways. We have a long, long growing season that stretches almost the entire year. We have mild winters and a gorgeous spring and fall. (I won't discuss the months of July and August because I'm trying to be complimentary.) We have lakes and rivers and creeks.

That's a lot of bounty and all it takes to be able to enjoy it is a tolerance for a few difficult things. Chief among those difficult things right now are drought and deer. We're into year two of a pretty tough drought. It's supposed to end next year when El Niño resumes its regular pattern and allows some moisture to head over our way. In the meanwhile, the deer suffer incredibly. They are driven by thirst and hunger into places they'd rather not go -- like my front yard, where they chew even thorny rosebushes and agave back a few inches each visit. They are not naturally inclined to hang out in places where dogs live -- even fat, spoiled, geriatric dogs like mine -- but they do it out of desperation.

So I was pretty surprised to see this volunteer eggplant growing outside of our deer fence. Yes, outside of the fence, right next to the spot where deer like to hang out and nibble on the cucumber vines I planted inside the fence. (Look closely and you can see cucumber plant nubs on the inside of the fence.) This tough little plant is growing in the middle of foot high and foot deep native grass thatch, and has never been watered. It just wants to grow there. And so far, it appears that the deer do not want to eat it. Stay tuned.

Do Sentimental Gardeners Finish Last?

2009-06-07T07:12:00.001-05:00

Garden Inventory
Six catywumpus raised beds, about 20x4
A field of raised berms,
Some fruit trees
A stretch of grape vines
A stretch of cucumber hills,
A stretch of pole beans

All within a quarter acre open field, surrounded by a deer fence.

Before I moved in, this field was already occupied by a dense system of tough native grasses, fierce pig weed, several kinds of stinging nettle, cactus, needle-thorned mesquite, and other
things that hurt very much when encountered by frail human flesh. So I should keep the whole thing mowed down, at the very least.

Here's reason number one reason I don't always do that:

Wildflowers. I just can't resist them, so I let the grasses grow far too high, until I step on a mesquite thorn that goes straight through my gardening boots, and my eyes water as I plan on mowing first thing in the morning.

The Tomatoes Your Garden Chooses

2009-06-06T07:00:00.003-05:00

This year I grew tomatoes from seed. Not just any seed, but some very fine and exotic heirloom varieties. I lavished them with attention, time, perfect soil, heat, and light. They were, I believe the very best tomato starts ever grown anytime, anywhere, in all of tomato history. They had stout bodies, emerald green leaves, juicy, strong roots. They were the Platonic idea of noble tomatoe-ness. They shone with pure tomato essence.

After I planted them out, they adjusted like warriors, growing even stronger. Their future looked spectaular. But a freak late season hail storm took out half the plants. Still, half were saved, so I went to a ridiculously overpriced boutique-type nursery in central Austin and bought the very best starts money could buy -- exotic varieties, well cared for, slightly snooty. I planted them next to my warrior tomatoes and they seemed pretty happy to be here, and didn't really look down on their country neighbors too much.

Then another freakishly late freeze + enormous hail storm came and took out every single tomato plant. Every single one. Frozen and broken to a sad little nub, row cover hardly visible beneath pounds of icy marbles.

I was feeling more than a little broke and more than a little broken by this time -- so much money and time spent and so little control. That's just the way it is I guess. Whatever a gardener may have -- the beauty of the garden, the pleasure of delicious food, the satisfaction of co-creating with nature -- she does not ever have control. We gardeners can try to work with nature, rather than in opposition. We can observe natural patterns, and try to flow with them in as productive and painless a manner as possible. But we never have the last word. Or the last laugh.

So here's nature's big joke on me. I ended up trudging to the nearest crummy, poorly cared-for nursery in north Austin. This is one sorry nursery, with half dead, rarely watered plants, wierd, soggy, moldy outdoor carpet on the ground, and employees who never met a plant they gave a whoop about. Without much interest I picked out what I could find that was still more or less alive. They were the most common and ordinary hybrids for this area -- Celebrity, Early Girl, Better Boy, Sweet 100. Not exciting but dependable. I put them in the ground, watered, added fish emulsion, composted turkey manure, all the usual suspects, but frankly, I wasn't getting too attached to these tomatoes.

Or so I thought. The truth is, there's no way to tend and care for something like a garden without falling in love, at least not for me. And now that enough tomatoes are ripening for a salad, snacks, an occaisonal ensalada caprese, I can't help but be proud of these plain old, hard-knock tomato plants, heavy with fruit.

Recipe for a Garden Surpise

2009-06-05T10:17:00.005-05:00

I've been boo-hoo-ing all summer because I can't seem to locate seeds for my favorite squash. When I was growing up we called it calabacita, which means "little squash." It's also called tatume, in grocery stores and on seed packs.

Let me sing its praises:

1) It's delicious -- sweet, tender, and meaty. And it won't go bitter in hot weather like zucchini can.

2) It's extremely drought tolerant. Last summer an unplananed event kept us away from home for 3 weeks. When we came back everything was dead except the peppers and calabacita. They were a bit shriveled, but still had fruit, and as soon as I gave them a drink of water they sprang right back, like nothing had ever happened.

3) It's extremely pest and disease resistant. In our area, the squash vine borer is endemic. Almost everyone gets hit by this creature sooner or later and once you've got it, forget about growing yellow squash. I had it in my garden in Austin and would get maybe two squash before the borer appeared. It attacks the vine at its base (by laying eggs that become huge slug-looking things) and kills the whole thing seemingly overnight. I keep hearing rumors of cures but I've never known anyone to be successful. And calabacita? The squash vine borer doesn't seem to like it.

So like I said, lots of moping around here when I couldn't fine any calabacita seed this year. Then, this volunteer appeared in the spot where I had last years compost pile. I ignored it, dragged hoses across it while I was watering other plants, stepped on it occaisonally rather than walk around it, but it persisted in living. Now I see this fruit which looks exactly like a calabacita. I don't know that it actually is my favorite squash; the vine looks different than the one I'm familiar with. But I live in hope.

Meanwhile, if you have access to calabacita seed, especially if you live in a hot, dry climate, you won't be sorry f you plant it. If you have access to the fruit itself, you won't be sorry if you eat it now.

So here's my favorite way to fix it. It's an old San Antonio, home-style, Mexican dish -- easy, quick, fresh, and comforting:

1) Take several bone-in pork chops and cut them into stir-fry size pieces. Leave the bone attached to one of the pieces.
2) Cut calabacita into inch-thick half rounds.
3) Remove corn from cob.
4)Cook pork in a large heavy skillet (a wok is great), at a very high temp (think stir fry temps).
5) When pork is cooked all the way through, add calabacita. Cook until tender. Don't stir too much. You want the outside of the squash to carmelize.
6) When the squash is cooked, add corn. Just cook it long enough to heat it. The corn should remain crisp.
7) Remove from pan, add a little water to the pan to deglaze juices, pour juices over pork, squash, and corn.

The idea is very much like a stir-fry -- food is cooked quickly at high temps and the veggies get a dark, carmelized glaze. The corn adds a sweetness and the squash should be slightly crisp and carmelized on the outside, creamy and soft on the inside. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Some people add comino but I like the pure flavors of the foods themselves.

Easy Roasted Veggies

2009-06-03T10:00:00.000-05:00

Now that lettuces are slowing down and getting bitter, salads are no longer the main event at our house. Instead it's vegetables, cooked a thousand ways. Easiest of all is drizzling with a little olive oil, some sea salt, and chopped rosemary. Bake at around 350 until tender.

Here's the catch, though. The oven heats up the house -- precisely what we don't want to do when it's high nineties outside and humid as the tropics.

Fortunately, I have an electric roaster/steamer, bought many years ago when I was under some delusion that I'd be able to make tamales all on my own, like my mom did from time to time. One attempt at lone tamale making was all it took for me to recall that Christmas tamale making always required an army of aunts and cousins as well as my mom and grandmother. How my mom managed to whip up a batch on her own I don't know.

So I'm glad to have a use for the electric roaster, which I put out on the deck while the veggies are roasting. It's already as about as hot as the surface of the sun out there anyway.

The Quatrosquash

2009-06-03T09:21:00.000-05:00

I don't know what to call this mutant yellow squash. Weird? Disturbing? Yummy?

Watermelons Make Me Weep

2009-06-02T09:41:00.001-05:00

Watermelon is one of those sentimental fruits for me. My dad used to bring them home as Sunday treats. Mom cut them up just like my grandfather taught her -- a thick layer of newspaper on the kitchen table to absorb the juices, a huge knife, half-moon slices, heavy, heart-red, and sweet as summer.

Rumor has it that the best place to store them is under the bed and I have a vague memory that my San Antonio grandparents did exactly that. But I don't know, maybe I'm making that up. I do know Grandfather said thunder is the sound of the devil rolling watermelon under his bed.

I planted mine a little early this year, without realizing it, but so far, seem to have gotten away with it. You never know when nature will decide to be forgiving of a gardener's ignorance.

Composting Bucket for a Bad Permaculturist

2009-06-01T01:59:00.000-05:00

Permaculture people are familiar with the idea of zones used to conceptually divide a human habitat. The zone closest to where you live is 1, and it's where you should keep things like the compost heap for kitchen scraps. For a million reasons, I haven't figured out how to keep a compost pile in Zone 1. Mine is closer to Zone 3, where my garden is, about 200 yards from my house.

I can see why a compost heap should be in Zone 1 -- it would be so much easier to haul my compost bucket out there several times a day. But alas, I do not, so the bucket often looks like this, especially this time of year, when folks in my area are harvesting lots of something every single day.

This is a huge old soup pot that never really worked that well for soup. It's so thin that I believe it possible to burn water in the cavernous interior.

But it works just fine for the heaps of kitchen scraps I collect this time of year.

Clean and Fresh Mosquito Repellant

2009-05-31T09:00:00.000-05:00

Mosquito season is upon us! Not high mosquito season, no. That will come later, and we'll need a proper arsenal of citronella oil, long sleeves, and darting inside quickly at dawn and dusk.. For this light part of the season, it's been enough to put an enormous citronella plant on the back deck, and when the devil-insects start swarming, rub a leaf between hands, on faces, necks, ankles, and over hair.

By the way, I should say this plant used to be enormous. It's been plucked back, leaf by leaf, every evening, right at dusk.

Line Drying Clothes

2009-05-30T13:14:00.000-05:00

It ought to be harder and more time consuming to line dry clothes compared to machine drying. If I told my friends it was actually easier, they wouldn't believe me. They'd think I was trying to be brave in the face of difficulties. Or trying to lure them into my insane peak oil fantasies.

But seriously, I think it's easier, most of the time. And I've always considered laundry to be the most tedious of household work. Here's my previous routine:

1. Put a load of laundry in the washer.
2. Switch the load to the dryer, add another load to the washer, go do something else, oops, got distracted and now the clothes in the dryer are wrinkled.
3. Add another load to the washer. Pile wrinkled clothes on the bed, planning to figure out what to do with them later.
4. Come back in a few hours later and discover dogs have decided to nest in clean, wrinkled laundry.
5. Start over at step 1.

The problem is there are so many things to do in a single day that I can't seem to stay close enough to the washer and dryer to make the process efficient. At least one out of two loads of laundry ends up sitting in the bottom of the dryer, wrinkled as a Shar Pei.

But with line drying, here's how it goes.
1. Put a load of laundry in the washer.
2. Hang out laundry.
3. Sometime during the day, remember to pull fresh, unwrinkled laundry from the line, fold right laundry into baskets.

Of course, the other benefits to line drying are pretty obvious. It saves energy, doesn't heat up the house, clothes smell wonderful and are naturally disinfected by sunshine. Additionally, the dryer is pretty hard on fabric. All that lint you take out of the lint trap? That's your clothes, disintegrating.

We don't have an ideal set up for a clothes line. The house is situated on a steep hill, with lots of trees. If I put up a clothes line anywhere around the house, I'd have to tramp down about 100 hillside stairs every single time I wanted to use it. Or, I could hang it near the garden, which is about 200 yards from the house. Instead, Widget Man installed a retractable line on our deck, which get lots of sun and is conveniently located adjacent to our actual house. It looks kind of crazy, I guess, when I've got undies and socks drying on the back deck. But we've gotten used to looking crazy.

Grapes on the Back Deck -- A Central Texas Tradition

2009-05-29T09:00:00.001-05:00

When I was growing up in central Texas, all the old German houses and businesses had some kind of grape arbor. The fair grounds had a beer garden, of course, with a huge cedar arbor, big enough for dozens of picnic tables underneath. We had an actual German oompah band in our town, which used to play in the beer garden. Our neighbor, a genuine old German farmer, with the demeanor of a friendly elf, used to play the tuba in the band. The arbor was a shady, cool place to hang out in the summer and the bright green leaves created a beautiful, glowing light.
In the winter the leaves dropped and the gnarled vines took on a sculptural quality.

We don't have a beer garden but we do have a west-facing deck that gets incredibly hot in the summer. A few years ago we planted some grape vines on the hillside beneath the deck and added some fencing for them to climb. The grapes have finally climbed the twelve feet or so from the ground below and are reaching the deck. Besides the delight of having grapes grow right on our deck, we hope to follow the example of those early Texas settlers and take advantage of the leafy green shade in the summer, once the vines complete their journey up the cedar posts of our deck.

In the winter, when the leaves drop, we'll be happy for the extra warmth and sunshine of our west-facing deck. The gnarly vines will add a little character to an otherwise ordinary-looking deck and remind me of a sweet little old German farmer who played the tuba in an oompah band.

Technicolor Artichokes

2009-05-29T09:00:00.000-05:00

I let some of my artichokes go to flower, not on purpose, but because I've never grown them before and didn't see it coming. These poor photos don't do the flowers justice. You can't really see how they shimmer and glow in the sun, like some floral mirage. They're huge too.

If I had a sunny spot in the beds in front of my house, I'd plant them there.

If I lived in a suburb with an anti-veggie garden property owners association, I'd pull all the bedding plants, all the box wood and red-tipped photinia, all the dull, uniform shrubbiness, right out of those beds, and fill them with artichoke plants. I'd fill them with huge, spikey, architectural artichokes, that need virtually nothing but an occaisonal sip of water, and once a year put on a showstopping, technicolor display.

How to Create a Deer Banquet, or: A Fundamentally Unsound Idea

2009-05-28T09:07:00.000-05:00

I have some advice, just in case this ever comes up: If you live in deer country, and spend a great deal of time and money installing an eight foot deer fence around an acre of garden space, do not think to yourself, "Hey, wouldn't all that fencing make a fantastic trellis for cucumbers?"

And before you break your back digging up the foot-deep, native grasses, enrich the soil with composted turkey manure and build eleventy million cucumber hills, try to recall why you built the fence in the first place.

And during the several hours it takes to run new irrigation tubing, to hook up said tubing to the main water manifold, to pull it all out again and re-rout it for a more efficient path, ask yourself at least once, "Now why did I build that fence?"

Because if you do not remember at least once during the several days of digging, double-digging, spreading manure, running tubing, and planting seed, why you built a deer fence in the first place, you will feel very, very foolish when all those cucumbers become a deer banquet -- when you go out to your garden every day to see the grass trampled on the outside of the fence, to see the leaves on the cucumber plants gnawed back to sad little stumps, and sometimes, to see a couple of extra-bold deer chawing away like they're at a Luby's on Sunday after church.

I'm just saying.

Toasting Chili Powder

2009-05-27T09:00:00.000-05:00

We know that roasting veggies intensifies their flavors, mellows bitterness, and carmelizes the sugars. This is especially true for hot peppers. But what if you're not using whole peppers? What if all you have on hand for a recipe are dried, commercial chili powders?

Well, you can get much of the benefit of roasting by a quick toast in a dry, hot pan. What I've got going here, which I'll add to a pot of beans, is a mixture of ancho and cascabel powders. Even a commercial chili con carne chili mix is improved by a quick toast in a pan.

Just start with a heavy, dry pan. When the pan is hot, add the chili powders and stir. Keep the chilis moving so they don't burn. They're ready when they've darkened nicely.

That's it!

Favorite Pickling Blend

2009-05-26T09:00:00.000-05:00

Favorite Pickling Blend

5-10 peppercorns

10-15 coriander seeds

1 Myrtlewood leaf

A goodly sized sprig of dill

1. Drop spices and herbs in the bottom of each jar.

2. Use a proportionately upsized amount of herb and spice blend in the cooked pickling liquid + salt and dash of sugar to taste.

I normally use this blend for jalepenos, but this time I was making watermelon pickles.

About that mytlewood leaf: Of course you could use basil, but I discovered this leaf on a trip to Oregon and love the flavor. I used up the supply I bought in Oregon and ordered more online -- I think it was a couple of dollars for a large package.

Curing Onions for Storage

2009-05-25T09:00:00.000-05:00

We had an unexpected rain storm today and so I ran out to the garden to gather these onions in a hurry before they got wet. I have them drying on the back deck now, and I'll put them back in the sun tomorrow, where they'll cure for a few days more.

This is the first time I've grown enough onions to store so I'm not quite sure what will work. My dad used to hang them in nets from rafter in our store room but I don't have a store room or rafters. Just a small kitchen with vaulted ceilings, impossible to hang anything from. I also have a garage that gets really hot in the summer -- approximately the temperature of the sun. And a climate that stays humid most of the year. Any ideas on how to best store these onions?

First Loquat

2009-05-24T20:41:00.000-05:00

Still very tiny, and the tree is still young, so we'll be lucky to get just a few this year.

But they make beautiful trees and are easy, easy, easy to grow under the toughest conditions that central Texas can offer.

There's a restaurant in town with a loquat tree growing in the middle of a parking lot. As far as I can tell, it never gets watered, or cared for in any way. Yet it puts out bushels of fruit every year.

Green Smoothies

2009-05-22T13:30:00.000-05:00

What's a gardener to do with an overabundance of garden greens? Use them in salads, frittatas, omlettes, stews, and soups. Make veggie enchiladas, tacos, and lasagnas.

But the best, easy, fast, filling no-cook meal is a green smoothie. This one is made with about 2 cups of cilantro, a banana, water, and ice. Spinach makes a fantastic smoothie too. It might look like pesto but the taste is lightly sweet and creamy. So delicious that on weekends, when Widget Man is home in the mornings, I usually make 2 blendersful -- one for our breakfast and one that I transfer to mason jars and refrigerate for lunch or an afternoon snack.

Don't be skeptical. I was at first and so was Widget Man. But they taste delicious and power us through long hot days of gardening and working in the hot Texas sun. Plus, very little clean up and no cooking to heat up the house.

You can make them sweeter by adding more fruit, if you like. I especially like bananas and pears, because they add a creaminess. Yogurt's good too. And with bitter greens, a bit of lemon or anything acidic (like pineapple) cuts the sharp flavor.

Texas Sized Centipede

2009-05-22T13:22:00.000-05:00

See this visitor to our garage? Very mean, mean sting.

Squash Beds, Before and During

2009-05-22T00:33:00.000-05:00

Here's what my first raised berm beds looked like, right after I tilled and built them.

Here they are now, with zucchini, yellow squash, several kinds of cucumber, and melon.

Permaculture Bed

2009-05-20T09:32:00.000-05:00

Cilantro is a pretty plant any time -- bright green, delicate, excessively fragrant. But when it's in bloom, and luring bees and butterflies to the garden, it's a showstopper. I mean, I can't stay away. I just stand there and smile. So that alone would be worth letting a plant that takes up about a third of a raised bed take its sweet time going to seed.

But I'm hoping for more. This is in my permaculture bed, where I let about ten percent of everything go to seed or otherwise run its natural life cycle. I started planting it two seasons ago, and now I'm getting all sorts of happy volunteers -- kale, dozens of kinds of lettuces and greens, beets, and basil so far. I've also got some leeks in there that I'm letting go to seed, and redivide. This season I added chard, spinach, and tucked in some peppers, tomatillos and tomatoes. One nice result of this mixed bed is that pests never get a real foothold, as they might in a monoculture garden.

The Cruelest Plant

2009-05-20T09:13:00.000-05:00

This pretty, bright green, delicate plant seems to grow wherever soil has been disturbed. In the open field where I have my garden, that means it primarily grows wherever I am trying to work -- at the edges of the garden berms, around the raised beds, any place I've planted fruit trees or berries. I mulch pretty heavily but it still finds a foothold.

Don't let its lovely heart shaped leaves fool you. It's a killer. The tiniest touch leaves bright red streaks on my skin, and mean, lingering sting. I mean this plant causes some serious pain. Here's a measure that anyone from around here should respect: I'd rather be bitten by fire ants than encounter this plant. Aahh, now you understand.

Spring Harvest, Tonight's Supper, and an Almost Oops

2009-05-19T08:52:00.000-05:00

On the menu tonight is chicken soup, made with the first of the yellow squash, zucchini, the very first bell pepper, some onion and herbs, all from the garden. I was going to add potatoes and carrots from the store, plus some chicken broth I'd made and frozen several weeks ago.

Instead, I came this close to adding potatoes, carrots, and frozen banana/coconut smoothie I'd made and frozen last week. Must make labels clearer.

First of the Cucumbers

2009-05-19T08:40:00.000-05:00

This year I planted small picklers, some heirlooms called Lemon Cukes, names so for their color and shape, not their flavor, or so I'm told, and Armenian cucumbers, which are very, very long. I've got ity bity cucumbers on all the plants, maybe 30 so far, but these are the first to mature. I hope to have enough to can.

Paul James is Blogging

2009-05-05T09:41:00.000-05:00

Yippee, one of my favorite gardeners has a great website and an entertaining blog. Read it here.

And, nopal cactus is in bloom!

Beans Emerge

2009-05-01T23:38:00.000-05:00

Offhand, I can't recall if these are Scarlet Runner, Purple Hyacinth, or Chinese Long Beans.

In planted 6 foot sections of each along a fence, in an attempt to prettify a untilitarian deer fence, plus, have lots of beans.

Cheaper, Better, AND Faster: Homemade Deodorant

2009-05-01T13:12:00.000-05:00

My sister, who used to be a marketing exec, told me that in product marketing they say there are three basic attributes you can use to sell something -- cheaper, better, and faster. But you can only pick two. The idea is that nothing can be cheaper, better, AND faster.

I don't think this is true. In fact, when I play around with making things from scratch I insist that it be all three things. Here's the recipe:

Homemade Deodorant
1 part baking soda
1 part unrefined coconut oil
10 drops tea tree oil

Mix. Use.

I've seen some variations of this recipe all over the internet. Many call for more precise measures; some call for an addition of cornstarch, which is supposed to help absorb moisture. I doubt if this would help much for profuse sweating and when I used this version, it left white streaks on my black sweater. With just the baking soda, no streaks at all!

After this jar runs out, I may try this without the baking soda. This is because I think the coconut and tea tree oils are the key ingredients. Coconut oil is a gentle antibacterial (and antiviral!), will keep skin soft, and acts as a carrier for the tea tree oil. Tea tree oil is a more potent, though still gentle, antibacterial. And it's bacteria that make for smelliness, not sweat.

I think the reason that people are adding baking soda and cornstarch, besides the idea that they may ever so slightly inhibit the appearance of sweat, is that they want to mimic the appearance of a solid roll-on deodorant. I suppose this has the advantage of allowing people to reuse old solid deodorant plastic containers for storage. An easier solution is to reuse a small jar.

I was skeptical about this recipe, believe me. I'm as uptight as it comes about body odor -- not even remotely sophisticated or crunchy on this issue. But it has worked for over two months now, perfectly, 100% of the time -- in hot steamy weather, after hours in the garden, in stressful situations. And, because of my super-sensitive, cry-baby skin, I'd been looking for something that doesn't leave my skin all sensitive and bumpy, which all commercial formulations, even the so-called natural ones, do. This does the trick.

By the way, tea tree oil has a kind of medicinal, camphor-like smell, but it dissipates in just a few minutes. A possible alternative to this might be lavender, which is also anti-bacterial, though I haven't tried it yet.

Homemade Product Evangelizing

2009-04-30T15:48:00.000-05:00

I am having an imaginary conversation in my head with a good friend of mine. I had just given her a jar of my homemade laundry soap and was telling her how to make more, if she likes it.

She said, "Grating that bar of soap sounds like a lot of work."

We couldn't finish our conversation because her kids were climbing on our heads, so I'll finish it now.

It takes about thirty seconds to grate a bar of soap. Compare that to hauling a huge box of laundry soap home at least once a month. What if you could buy a few simple, basic, safe, inexpensive ingredients once a year and have everything you need to clean your house?

Compare a few minutes of grating or mixing to hauling boxes of laundry soap, softener, dishwashing detergent, counter spray, oven cleaner, bathroom cleaner, floor cleaner, shampoo, conditioner, bath soap, and deodorant?

What if you didn't have to haul all that stuff around in a grocery cart, wait in line to pay for it, load it in the car, haul it into the house and then find room to store it at your house? What if you didn't have to haul the empty boxes and bottles to the trash?

I know you're busy, my good friend, with kids and all. But this is easier, not harder. When have you ever known me not to take the easy way out when it comes to housework?

I'm just saying.

Best Homemade Shampoo and Conditioner

2009-04-30T15:04:00.001-05:00

There are all sorts of recipes out there for all- natural, homemade shampoos and conditioners. I'd say, off-hand there are about eleventy million of them. I would hazard to say I've tried them all. Why, when so many commercial versions are available, in all price-points, from super-industrial better-living-through-chemistry types, to supposedly all-natural, are so many people interested in making their own? Before I hazard a guess, let me list the versions I've tried:

1. Skipping shampoo, also known as no-poo. Ha ha. Slightly funny name. Allegedly, after anywhere from six weeks to six months, hair and scalp readjust and find their natural equilibrium. Maybe that does happen. I don't know since I start looking more than a bit feral after about a week. And that's as long as I've made it. A less radical version is to use only conditioner. This makes sense because commercial conditioners contain a small amount of surfactant which allows them to rinse out. So using conditioner only is like using just a tiny bit of shampoo. Of course, whatever it is that people are trying to avoid in shampoo is still present in conditioner plus some other stuff we might want to avoid.

2. Wheatgrass juice -- Hair smells lovely and fairly clean, skin feels great. But a big pain to make a fresh batch each day (it doesn't store more than a day or so in the fridge), and unless you grow your own wheatgrass, it costs about $4/day. And how do you wash your hair when you travel?

3. Various fruit juices, like orange or grapefruit -- smells nice, but that's about it.

4. Soapwort -- I grew my own for awhile and it did make a nice shampoo but then a freeze killed it all off and it didn't come back. Plus, same problems as with all fresh concoctions. You must make a fresh batch every day and then what do you do when you travel?

5. Honey -- a terrible choice, that some people are curiously in love with. It does smell nice and feel nice. It rinses out fairly easily, but never seems to get my hair very clean. And honey is a humectant. It draws water to it. That's why it's a common ingredient in homemade skin products. The last thing we want is to for our hair to be waterlogged. That's called frizzy hair.

So why the search for homemade, natural shampoos? Because virtually all commercial shampoos contain skin irritants. Seriously. Even the so called natural ones. Even if they claim to be all vegetable derived. And because they really do strip hair of natural oils, so we have to replace them with bizarre lab-produced oils, including the most common and favored conditioning ingredient, silicone and silicone derivatives. Which are seriously hard to wash out of hair. So we use harsh shampoos. Which strips our hair. And so on.

I have two other reasons to want a homemade shampoo. I have the most sensitive scalp on earth. So does Widget Man and so does Widget Man's mom. Anything with sodium laurel sulfate or its vicious relatives immediately makes our scalps break out. Even the most "natural" shampoos eventually get us.

Reason number two is I hate throwing away shampoo bottles. What good is clean hair if I also create a filthy earth?

So here's the recipe. It's so simple I'm embarrassed it took me so long to try it. I've been testing it for a month because I didn't believe anything so simple (and inexpensive) could really work.

In a bottle, mix about 1 part baking soda to 5 parts water. You want a thin slurry.

In another bottle, mix about 1 part vinegar to 1 part water.

In the shower, shake baking soda and water to remix. Squirt a generous amount onto scalp. Wait a bit, then rinse.

Now squirt vinegar over scalp and through hair. Rinse. That's it.

The baking soda removes dirt and excess oil, without stripping. And the vinegar restores the hair's acid balance. You may want a little coconut oil on the ends of hair if you have long or dry hair.

Some recipes call for a thick paste of baking soda and scrubbing it into the scalp. Personally, I think that's too abrasive and not necessary.

A Perpetual Greens Bed

2009-04-30T01:01:00.000-05:00

This is a dedicated raw greens bed -- every few weeks I sprinkle some kind of seed that grows edible greens -- various kinds of red and green leaf lettuces, mache, Chinese greens, herbs like cilantro, dill, and basil. As we get into hotter weather, hardier greens like collards and New Zealand spinach will start sprouting.

I treat all these greens as cut-and-come-again plants, always cutting from the outer leaves and leaving the growing centers intact.

We have lots of volunteers too.

I can't think of anything more useful for a home garden, except maybe tomatoes. There's just no comparison between the weeks-old bagged lettuce mixes and the minutes-old lettuces from a garden. It's so easy and we have plenty of greens for huge salads with every single dinner, sandwich fillings, and green smoothies.

Ruby Chard

2009-04-30T00:24:00.000-05:00

Chard is one of those great cut-and-come-again greens. Remove outer leaves, avoiding the growing center, and the plant seems to last forever.

This is the first time I've planted it so I don't know when it will bolt, or die, or be attacked by summer bugs.

I read in another gardening blog that in their mild-ish, northern-ish climate, chard just goes on and on. We'll see what it does here.

Why Is This Spinach Still Alive?

2009-04-30T00:17:00.000-05:00

Now this is strange. Should I still be eating lots and lots of tender young spinach at the end of April? Shouldn't it have turned stringy and tough by now? Bolted and gone to seed? Been shredded by some insect? Fried in the afternoon sun?

And yet, here it is.

Bluebonnets

2009-04-29T23:59:00.000-05:00

Bluebonnets have been a bit sparse this year. I guess the rains came too late.

Still, lovely.

At Last, an Artichoke!

2009-04-29T23:53:00.000-05:00

I planted this artichoke last summer. What a huge, gorgeous, spiky plant. Really, if you have a sunny ornamental bed, this is the perfect plant to begin integrating edibles with.

So far, it's been a tough plant too -- living in heavy clay, highly alkaline soil, surviving a drought, freezes, and a hail storm.

And now, at last, a delicious, edible flower is forming.

First Fruits

2009-04-29T23:46:00.000-05:00

After an odd April which has been both perilous (two late season freezes and a freak hail storm) and luscious (several rains in the midst of a long drought) the tomatoes are looking great. There's fruit on about half the plants and four or five blooms on all of them.

2009-04-23T23:40:00.000-05:00

This is what the new garden space looked like last week, before I tilled. That's two foot tall native grass, that I suspect has never been cultivated. Ever.

I rented a tiller and Widget Man and I took turns going over and over and over this bit of land. We followed the suggestions in Gardening When It Counts for breaking up deep sod: First mow, then 1) run the tiller down the middle of the patch of land, 2) scoot the tiller over about 1 inch, so that it tilts slightly and can dig in a bit deeper, 3) walk the tiller down this new path, one inch over from the old one, 4) move the tiller over an inch, again, 5) repeat, repeat, repeat until you've covered the entire section you plan to plant, one inch at a time, 6) start the whole process over again, this time crossways from the direction you started, 7) re-till the whole area, in one inch wide sections, 8)repeat as necessary

I am not sure if I am able to convey just how slow, noisy, and bone-rattling a process this is. Unbroken sod is tough stuff. I rented the heaviest duty tiller I could find, but our sod was its master. Really, for this tough, grass-matted, deep rooted sod, I needed a team of good strong oxen. About four hours later, we'd managed to break up the sod and dig in four or so inches deep. Our wrists were buzzing with some weird electrical impulse apparently set off by the vibrations of the tiller. Our elbows and shoulders throbbed.

A lot of work, but the soil looked pretty good, and is surprisingly deep for this area. It's a little bit heavy, but compost will help with that. Like most people I know who garden, I usually follow some version of a no-till, square foot, or mulch layer system, in order to avoid disturbing the soil's capillary system, the happy micro-bugs inside the soil, earth worms, and what have you. That is, rather than dig deep into the soil, we just add new nutrients, like compost and mulch, to the top, or dig in shallowly.

So I hope never, ever, to till this plot again. I hope, seriously and prayerfully, that in the future, I'll just be able to add compost, composted manure, and mulch, and dig it in by hand.

After we finished tilling, I built these berms, about four feet wide, by hand, with a shovel. It took the better part of a day to do the whole thing.

This is the first time I've tried gardening directly in the ground in this area. What a pleasure it is to be able to easily kneel right next to the bed, instead of trying to stretch over the bed walls.

With the berms, I've got about two feet of nice, rich, soft soil. Time will tell how well this system works.

Texas Wants to Kill You

2009-04-18T22:44:00.000-05:00

I looking for some tape to wrap a package for the mail. I found it in my desk drawer. I also found this innocuous looking spider stuck to the tape.

"Look," I said to Widget Man, "What a terrible way for this poor spider to die."

He looked at the spider. He looked more closely.

"Put it down. Now, " he said.

He seemed alarmed so I did. I put it right on down, fast. I've grown up in Texas. I am familiar with the traditional farewell of Texas mothers as their children go outside to play: You kids watch out for snakes.

And the traditional greeting when they return from play: You kids go check for ticks.

And the traditional beginning ritual for swimming in rivers: You kids stay out of those rapids.

I've been bitten by scorpions, several times. My Dad regularly killed rattlesnakes with a garden shovel or hoe. My Mom was chased by some semi-feral hogs when she was pregnant with my little sister.

I lived for twenty years in a city, where I pretty much stopped worrying about scorpions, rattlesnakes, feral hogs, and river rapids. So it was good to know my instincts were still functioning enough to know that when someone says, "Put it down. Now," in an ominous voice, I put it down. Now.

Because the next thing Widget Man said was, "It's a Brown Recluse. And it's still alive."

Brown Recluse spiders are second only to Black Widow spiders in their reputation for pain-inflicting, dangerous venom. My little sister survived an in-utero pig attack only to be bitten by a Brown Recluse some nine years later and have a golf ball-sized divot of flesh removed as a result.

Funny, I had just finished nudging it with my little finger to see if I could release it from the tape, and it hadn't moved. I must have awakened it, because as soon as I put it down, it started wiggling like crazy. It was, indeed, still alive.

Aw, a happy ending.

The Accidental Huswife

Winter Sewn Garden, Dried Tomatoes, Soap Paste. Now with Tutus!

Occupy Wallstreet and Food Gardens

Vertical Food Garden for Small Spaces

Tiny Rain, Big Runoff

Cow Rampage

Advantages of Dehydrating Foods for Short or Long Term Storage, with Instructions

Planting Potatoes in Central Texas

Are Oak Leaves Safe for Garden Mulch?

Oak Leaf Mulch

Easy Homemade Laundry Soap

A Central Texas Plant Heritage

Everyday Emergencies

On Not Trying New Things

The Huswife's Home Pharmacopea: Mullein

Lost and Found

My Garden Wants to Kill Me

Volunteer Squash

Drought Tolerant Vegetable Garden

Something's Lurking Among the Tomatoes

Everything I Know about Planting Onions

A Day's Harvest from a Neglected Garden

Squash versus the Squash Vine Borer

Perennial Artichokes

Life versus Blogging

Two Kinds of Texas Winter

Making Sauce From Frozen Tomatoes

Wordless Wednesday: From the Pantry and Freezer

Planning the Tomato Crop

Toad For Breakfast

Using It Up

Frugal February

The Jig's Up, Spaghetti Squash

New Well

Black Bean Chocolate Cake, Part II: A Warning

Window Farms

Our Brothers and Sisters in Haiti

Long Term Emergency Food Storage

Just a Quick One

Roast Figs Two Ways

The Patient Gardener

Last of the Summer Flowers

The Return of Water

Fall Renewal

Central Texas Springs Back

End of the Spring Garden Whirlwind

More on Heat Resistant Armenian Cucumbers

In a Drought, Abundance

Heat Tolerant Cucumbers

Recipe for a Zucchini Explosion: Spicy Migas with Zucchini

Hot and Cool Summer Salsa

Solar Powered Outdoor Bathing and Soaking Grotto

Water Rights, Water Choices

Local Foods and Happy Fourth of July

More Questions Than Answers, or: How to Preserve a Harvest

Mouthwatering Black Bean Chocolate Cake. Yes, Really.

Fire Roasted Tomatoes

Water, Weed, Harvest, Preserve

How to Weather a Storm Sustainably

What's for Dinner?

When to Harvest Melons

Hot Pink Salad

Our Kind of Normal

A Drought and Deer Proof Vegetable? Maybe.

Do Sentimental Gardeners Finish Last?

The Tomatoes Your Garden Chooses

Recipe for a Garden Surpise

Easy Roasted Veggies

The Quatrosquash

Watermelons Make Me Weep

Composting Bucket for a Bad Permaculturist

Clean and Fresh Mosquito Repellant

Line Drying Clothes

Grapes on the Back Deck -- A Central Texas Tradition

Technicolor Artichokes

How to Create a Deer Banquet, or: A Fundamentally Unsound Idea

Toasting Chili Powder

Favorite Pickling Blend

Curing Onions for Storage

First Loquat