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.

Everyday Emergencies

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

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

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

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

My Garden Wants to Kill Me

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

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

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

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

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

 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

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

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

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.