by Geoff | Jan 29, 2009 | Gardening
On Monday afternoon I went out to my garden to harvest spinach and chard for the evening meal. However, I discovered some friends who were also helping themselves to the spinach and devastating the beets: Texas Leaf Cutting Ants (Atta texana.) I hadn’t noticed any sign of them the previous morning, but in less than a day they had eaten about one third of my beets to the ground and severely damaged the rest. Initially panicked and upset about the rapid loss...
by Geoff | Jan 21, 2009 | Gardening
Last January the Arthouse at the Jones Center here in Austin hosted an exhibit by architect Fritz Haeg called Attack on the Front Lawn. The hands-on installation presented examples of projects from Los Angeles to London to South Austin that transformed front yards into food gardens. The presentation inspired a couple of good friends of mine, Courtney Morris and Martin Perna, to rip out the front yard of their East Austin home and fill it with vegetables. Last...
by Judy | Jan 17, 2009 | Gardening, Recipes
As I used a handful of our fantastic dried tomatoes in last night’s veggie sauté it brought to mind the very thought provoking book that I read a couple years ago by Barbara Kingsolver, ‘Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life’. This is a story of how the Kingsolvers lived and ate as locally and as seasonally as possible growing much of their own food and raising their own animals. My local book club recently discussed this so I had the...
by Anneliese | Jan 15, 2009 | Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day, Gardening
I have never participated in Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day for a few reasons. First of all, I’m an infrequent blogger, and remembering to post on the same day each month never felt like an important priority. Also, I travel a lot, especially in the spring during garden show season, so I’m not always around to see what’s coming up outside. And probably most importantly, I don’t really care that much about flowers. I know, sacrilege! Okay,...
by Noel | Jan 11, 2009 | Gardening
It was about 20º F when I took this picture of the garden yesterday afternoon. The snow has covered up the precise delineation of the beds. I’m looking north. The raspberries are to the left. I won’t cut those back until late February. In the back center are the dried asparagus fronds in the north beds. Those aren’t cut back until a March thaw takes away the snow. We’ve had about three feet of snow so far, but thaws have taken the snow...
by Judy | Nov 16, 2008 | Gardening
Well we harvested our leeks. I couldn’t face the thought of mulching them heavily, covering them up and hoping they wouldn’t be so frozen into the ground that I couldn’t dig them out when I felt the need for a batch of leek and potato soup! The leek section was about 3 feet by 4 feet on the end of the same raised bed on which we grew our onions. I’d been harvesting a few here and there for the last couple of months taking only the biggest...
