in bloom

I've been too busy lately for gardening, much less writing weblogs about gardening, but I wanted to take this opportunity to post a few pictures from Jenny of Rock Rose's lovely garden.  While I've seen beautiful photos of it in the past, I didn't realize how extensive it is!  I had a lovely afternoon with the other Austin garden bloggers.  (The boots above belong to Lori of The Gardener of Good and Evil.)

Please enjoy these photo highlights:



Welcome Cactus



Variegated Agave




a Texas Spotted Whiptail posed for me



Poppy Seed Pods


 

A gorgeous fountain empties into an amazing pool, surrounded by wildflowers.




A portico opens up to another room of the garden.




Cornflowers




A beautiful reseeded columbine




Cactus! 

I tend to prefer polite plants, willing to stay in their places and lacking in spikes and points, but I admired the way that Jenny uses poky plants in her garden, especially offset as they are against adobe walls.

Thank you again for hosting our get-together, Jenny!  I loved getting to know your garden.

It's time again for Garden Bloggers Bloom Day, when garden bloggers across the world share what's blooming in their gardens!

The weather of the past week notwithstanding, Austin is in the middle of a long, hard drought, and we need every drop of rain we can get right now.  The past few days have been gray, cold, and rainy, and while no self-respecting gardener is allowed to complain about the rain, I might have wished once or twice that it was a slightly warmer rain. 

This afternoon, it sprinkled AGAIN in my garden, and this yellow iris bud was covered in pretty raindrops.  It seems representative of the last week or so, so it's my signature image for this GBBD. 

I have no idea what variety this iris is, or even where I got it.  I've slowly amassed quite a few iris plants, but I think this one is one I've acquired since last spring - maybe at a plant swap.  I love irises, and I love the way they spread, too.  I may need to start collecting more.  I'm particularly envious of the white irises that I've seen on other people's weblogs in the last week or so.

It's March, and spring is indeed springing in Austin.  I'll admit to having some untidy beds in need of weeding, but this time of year, things look like I might have even planned them that way!  I mulched over some of my weeds after taking photos today, so... just imagine my gardens tidy, mulched, and entirely weed-free, alright?

Okay, here goes.


What do I love about spring?  Wild combinations of colors, like these luminescent California poppies, next to a brilliant iris (probably "Amethyst flame," though I don't know for certain).


Or for some truly riotous color, check out these snapdragons.  I planted these last spring, and they've survived both summer and winter to come back this spring.
This photo was taken yesterday, as the beautiful parrot feathers of this iris started to emerge.  Fortunately for March Bloom Day, the irises finished opening today:

I LOVE this iris.  I love its beautiful symmetrical form.  I love its blue flowers, with the offsetting yellow markings.  I love that it came back from last year.  The only thing that would make me love it more would be to plant it alongside some California poppies.  And maybe to know what kind of iris it is.  Can anyone help?

It's time again for Garden Bloggers Bloom Day, when Carol of May Dreams Gardens asks us to share what's blooming in our gardens!

Last week brought us some much-needed rainfall - close to an inch and a half in my area, according to the weather reports - and during that rainy day came the first sunshiny bloom of my GORGEOUS California Mikado poppies.  I've coveted these since I saw MSS' California Mikado poppies at the Spring Fling last year.  They are delicate, and the first bloom has faded already, but it was replaced by two new blooms and several buds.  I adore this plant already, and I have more starting to spring up now, hopefully to be blooming in another month or two.

I have to say, though, that I'm disappointed that the web browser doesn't render these quite true to color; they've got more of a luminescent orange tint to them than is obvious here.


Speaking of luminescent orange, the bulbines in the front garden are about to take off.  I love their pretty conical form; they remind me of the golden Thai crown that's apparently called a mokot.  I speak often of how much I enjoy my bulbines; they thrive on neglect and bloom even on the hottest days of summer.  I really prefer the orange form, but I'm considering picking up some yellow bulbines, as well.


This Nierembergia gracilis 'Starry Eyes' is the newest addition to my garden.  I picked it up from the Natural Gardener yesterday.  The label promises: "Argentinean species with an airy mounding habit. Tolerant of poor soils, easy to grow.  Never stops blooming! XERIC."  That's the kind of flower I can get behind!  It remains to be seen whether it will be tolerant of my completely forgetting to water my front bed for weeks on end.  It's quite charming for now, and covered in little buds.



This passalong yellow kalanchoe is the first of my kalanchoes to bloom.  The others have miraculously survived rather overwhelming odds and have budded out.  They should be blooming by March Bloom Day.



I've been very pleased with my sweet alyssum, which has bloomed so well this winter.  The violet Easter bonnet alyssum has been a bit more fickle, but it's doing well in our square foot bed in the front yard, with full sun and reasonable amounts of irrigation.



Here are the paperwhites that used to live in my office.  I brought them home so they wouldn't fragrant up the joint quite so much.  At home, they're living outside, on my pretty new red plant stand, in part shade.  They're starting to fade a bit now, but I've really enjoyed growing them this year. I had no idea narcissus were so easy to grow!

I got a great question in my comments about my new square foot beds.

Zippy wrote:

Hi Rachel, and thanks for your site! Good to see other Austin bloggers out
there working with square foot gardens! I had a question on my blog from a
fellow Austin gardener about using the Hill Country Garden soil in an SFG.
I remembered that I had come across your site last spring when I was
researching using SFGs in Central Texas, and how you talked about using the
Hill Country rose soil in your raised beds, and now I see you're doing the
SFG with the HC Garden Soil and compost. I referred her/him to your site,
but thought I'd ask you myself: why did you decide not to do the
traditional Mel's mix of compost, vermiculite and peat moss, and how is the
Hill Country Garden soil working out for you? I used Lady Bug Revitilizer
compost, perlite and peat moss in my two SFGs last spring, but if the HC
Garden soil + compost works well, that would be a heck of a lot easier than
mixing up stuff for the new SFGs I will be planting this spring.

So in case anyone else is curious about why I'm using Hill Country Garden Soil in my beds instead of Mel's mix of compost, vermiculite, and peat moss, here's my answer:

Hi Zippy! Great questions.

Last year, when we made our first raised beds, we chose Hill Country rose soil on the advice of one of the guys at the Natural Gardener.  He suggested it because it was slightly acidic, which can be helpful in our alkaline soils.  Over time, the alkaline will leach in, but having slightly acidic soil is a bit of a buffer.  I hadn't read the "All New" Square Foot Gardening book at that point (though I had read the original book), so I didn't know about Bartholomew's transition to raised beds or his soil mixture.  Our first raised beds weren't technically  square-foot gardens because there weren't any grid, but let's just say that when we started building the new raised beds for our first  front yard SFG, we knew what needed to be done.

Before we got started on our new gardens, we attended a seminar at the Natural Gardener called Prosperity Gardening - which was basically all about square-foot gardening.  John Dromgoole is apparently working with Mel Bartholomew on an even better soil blend, so they have several square foot test beds set up to try out different soil combinations.  They've found that most of their soils (which are all blends of decomposed granite, compost, and topsoil in varying combinations) work just as well as Mel's mix - as does the bed of straight compost.  If you haven't been out to Oak Hill to see their SFG's, you really should go if you get the chance - they're quite inspirational!

In general, I've tried to avoid peat moss, one of the main components of Mel's mix, from a sustainability standpoint.  I'd read that the harvest of peat moss was unsustainable, though my quick google search just now indicates that the jury might still be out on that one.  In any case, it's trucked in from Canada, and if there's anything my Canadian husband and I know for sure from our many months of long-distance dating, Canada is a long way from Austin!

So far, I've been very pleased with the Hill Country Garden Soil, and I've been pleased with the Rose Magic in the back yard beds, as well.  There was no real thought behind our switch - just another employee recommendation.

Happy New Year to the loyal few who haven't given up on me ever posting another weblog entry.  One of my New Years resolutions is to be more organized in documenting the changes and progress I see in my garden.  Not all of that is likely to get posted on this site, but some of it hopefully will!

In October, 2007, we built our first raised bed, a 4' x 8' x 10" box of untreated pine, in the back yard, so we wouldn't have to fight with our dense clay soil and the weeds that continually sought to overtake our vegetable garden.  In January, 2008, we added a pair of 4' x 4' cedar boxes.  In general, I love my raised beds.  I love that I can dig into them with a trowel, that they're largely weed free, that the soil is rich and well-drained. 

We've been growing veggies in our raised beds with fair to middling results.  We've had enough produce to be able to taste a bit while we're wandering around in the garden, but not enough to really use or give away or save for later.  Gardening is, even at the best of times, a moving target.  Each year is different from the one before it, and it can be hard to pinpoint what factor made the difference.  Are our beds getting enough sun? Are they being watered sufficiently? (Goodness knows there hasn't been enough rain for them in the past year! 2008 was the fourth driest year in recorded history in the Austin area.)

We've concluded that our back yard beds aren't getting enough sun, and that we haven't been organized enough to maximize the potential of the beds.  I've been researching square-foot gardening for the past few months, as a  way to better organize our planting efforts, and over the holidays, we've been working to put together a couple of boxes in the front yard.

Thankfully, we don't have an HOA.

We decided on the front yard for two reasons:

1) We get much more sun in the front yard.  We have a couple of live oak trees, but they're young enough not to block the sunlight on the beds for several years, at the least.

2) We want people to know what their food looks like when it's growing.  Kids ride their bikes up and down the sidewalk all the time, and I suspect most of them don't get the chance to experience much gardening.  We decided that sharing some of the produce with passers by was a fair tradeoff for locating our new raised beds in the front yard.

So we built our two new 4'x4'x6" beds out of cedar.  We originally went to Lowes to get the lumber, because we had a coupon for a discount, but... well, either their saw couldn't cut 2-inch planks, or the employee operating the saw didn't know how to use it.  We have a small car, and fitting 8-foot planks in it isn't a viable option, so we went to McCoy's in Georgetown and got our lumber there.  It was a bit of a drive, but it was a good excuse to have lunch at the Monument Cafe with my friend Claudia, so it was well worth it. 


Scott used 3" wood screws to fasten the planks into 4'x4' squares, and then we used bamboo staking to make the permanent square-foot grid.  We filled the beds with Hill Country Garden Soil from the Natural Gardener, and then we top-dressed with farm-style compost, for extra rich soil.  We used several layers of newspaper as weed barrier, both in and around the beds; you can see some sticking up that needs to be mulched over.

And then we started to plant our squares!  Two beds give us 32 squares for planting, and most of the squares can be subdivided for maximum production in minimal space.  It turns out, 32 is a lot of squares.  We definitely aren't using our square-foot garden to its maximum potential yet, but having extra squares gives us a way to pace our veggies; we have a couple of squares of lettuce and greens seedlings, and a couple more where we've planted seeds for various kinds of greens, which will be ready to be harvested in several weeks.  I interspersed several squares of pansies with herbs and vegetables, to keep things pretty and colorful, and I plan to transplant some of our strawberry offshoots from the beds in the back yard. 

And from there, we'll see how it goes! There's a chance for rain tomorrow, so we're keeping our fingers crossed.

Hey, it's Bloom Day!

I had the foresight to take photos yesterday, while the weather was beautiful and (more importantly) I had the day off. Today has been grey and quite cold; in fact, it's freezing (31F) in my zip code right now, and has been since before 7:30 this evening.

It froze a few nights ago, as well, so some of my fall bloomers have gone to bed now. My tomato and peanut plants have gone to the Big Compost Heap in the Sky Backyard

I participated in Bloom Day last December, too, and it's interesting to see which plants were doing well last year.  Last year, we were preparing for a freeze, but my blooms included: roses, grapes gomphrena, haworthia, oxalis, pansies, bulbine, and guara. 

This year, I have many of the same blooms:

Bulbine, nourishing a hungry bee

Sweet Alyssum (purple and white), in a pot with nasturtiums and a panda ear kalanchoe

African Blue Basil, which survived our last freeze but probably won't survive tonight's

Lavender, which survived the summer and currently looks great

"Ruby crystals" grass in the front bed

...and, of course, for striking color, the fiery edges of a pansy.

Everything is covered and tucked away for tonight, but hopefully it will be back out in the sun again tomorrow.

I didn't catch a photo of grapes gomphrena when I took these other photos; it was looking a bit worse for wear after the last freeze.  I thought it died last winter after the first couple of freezes, because I never saw any sign of it again. But this summer and fall, it came back bigger than before and was a pretty little plant until it froze again.  I'll be happy if it's a reliable summer/fall perennial!

Yesterday, I embarked on a photo excursion to Mayfield Park and Preserve with a few other Austin garden bloggers: Sue of Cool as a Cucumber, Vicki of Playin' Outside, and Jenny of Rock Rose.  I spent a little time beforehand compiling some of the compositional and photographic techniques I've learned in photography and visual design classes I've taken in the past, but I wasn't entirely sure what to expect, having never really taught about photography before.  I learned a few things from the process that I can hopefully incorporate in the future, if I do this again.

The plan was to talk about composition for 15 or 20 minutes, then send the group out to take some pictures incorporating what we'd talked about; then we'd talk about camera technique and the science of basic photography, then go take more pictures incorporating ideas like depth of field.  It turned out, the group had plenty of questions to fill the time, so it became challenging to fit photography into our two-hour timeframe.

We wound up having 20 minutes or so to shoot at around 4pm.  Mayfield Park is fairly shaded, with pockets of clearing throughout, and even at 4pm, it was challenging to chase the light, now that the time has changed.  Next time, we might want to start at 2 or 2:30, so that the light will be a bit easier to work with when it's time for shooting!

Normally, I edit my photography very heavily before I post it on my weblog.  I'll seldom post more than 10% of the shots I take.  However, in the interest of providing a bit of further instruction, I thought I'd post more of my photos from this particular shoot, talk a bit about what I was thinking when I took the shots, and discuss what worked and what didn't.

First, I should point out that my photographic subjects were determined in large part by where I could find good light.  If the area was shaded and the light was flat, I didn't even bother.  Also, for reference, I used my 105mm Sigma macro lens for all these shots.  I didn't really have enough time for much lens switching.

For the grackles above (f/32, 0.5 seconds), I was really trying to practice capturing water motion.  This was definitely a tripod shot, at a half a second shutter speed.  Doing long exposure shots is extremely difficult with living subjects, and you can see where the grackles moved while the shutter was open.  (The grackle on the left does not have a vestigial third eye.) I actually expected to see the grackles move much more and turn into black blurs.  I was surprised to see they held relatively still!

For the next couple of photos, I was experimenting a bit with framing.

I think (though I'm not positive) that this is a crinum (Crinum angustifolium).  It reminds me of the bog-loving spider lily (Hymenocallis occidentalis) native to east Texas and Louisiana.


  My camera data for these two shots was f/2.8, 1/6000 sec.  f/2.8 is the largest aperture my macro lens has available, and it gives a very shallow depth of field when I get up close to the subject.  This means I have a razor-thin plane of focus.  It's challenging to catch something meaningful to focus on in that plane.  I'll generally focus on the stamen of a flower, if that's my subject.  In landscape photo above, only one stamen is in crisp focus, but the topmost petal is in good focus, and one of the lower petals is crystal-clear.  I consider that kind of a mixed result, but the swooping lines of the petals and stamens give this photo a painterly quality that I like.

On the portrait version to the left, the top petal is in crisp focus, and the stamens look even more painterly.  I think I like the execution of this photo better. 

I experimented with the portrait and landscape formatting because of the shape of the plant and the form of its blooms.  The landscape format gives me access to the full breadth of the bloom, but the portrait format hints at the verticality of the plant itself.  I'm not sure which I like better - what do you think?

I wish I'd noticed the bud at the bottom, which is blocking the petals I was shooting, or the wilted bloom below.  It wouldn't be appropriate to damage the plant at Mayfield Park, but I might have been able to hold them out of my way.  In my own garden at home, if I'd noticed the spent bloom, I would've pinched it off and done a bit of housekeeping before snapping the picture.

I had a chance to visit Gabriel Valley Farms, a local wholesale nursery, to do some photography.  I got a chance to wander around a bit and found these spectacular Mexican flame vines (Senecio confusus), which had attracted this male queen butterfly, who posed prettily while I snapped pictures.

I had to do some googling to figure out that he's a male queen butterfly - you can tell by the dark spots on his hind wings.