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

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?

Tiny Rain, Big Runoff

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

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.

A Central Texas Plant Heritage

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.

Paul James is Blogging

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

And, nopal cactus is in bloom!