Claudia Alarcon and the Chronicle checked in recently to make sure the garden still had a pulse after the beating it took this summer.  Still alive!  http://www.austinchronicle.com/food/2011-10-28/roots-to-riches/ Glad to report that our late-season bounty is complimented with cool-season plantings of calendula, Mexican herbs, nasturtium, other flowers, and my favorite, strawberries, which should give us another great crop next spring.

To survive another summer, we’re gonna go deeper, just like roots chasing groundwater.  We want to make every drop count.   Those drops might as well support plants that make viable seeds, heirlooms that we can use over and over each season and support a more sustainable and self-sufficient food system.  And a more diverse set of plants to feed pollinators and other wildlife, or that don’t need as much water to produce something useful for the restaurant, like flowers.  We plan to go deeper in our uses of compost teas and mulches and smart water use to reduce our need for water to begin with, including the addition of rain barrels to supplement our water use.  We’ll start with the simple stuff, then start experimenting.

Until then, look for the fruits of perseverance in the restaurant this month – tomatoes, squash blossoms, papalo, Swiss chard, lettuce, mint, verdolaga, and cut flowers are making an appearance, all straight from the garden, fresh and chemical free!

Jose, Willie, and Papa Jose at City Hall

We had free breakfast at City Hall with fellow bike commuters, and even caught notice of Ricardo at the Statesman:

Jeremy, strategically positioned to completely block Papa from the camera, and waving like a jackass in an obvious and successful attempt to steal the spotlight and to blur out Willie and Jose. What a hero.

Thanks to Ricardo for not capturing the spill I took hitting a concrete post while waving to a tree.

For the rest of the landscape, we installed Austin-native foundation plants like Twist Leaf Yucca, Spineless Pricklypear, Kidneywood, Nolina, Cedar Sage, Mexican Buckeye, and Big Muhly, then seeded the rest with buffalo grass and blue grama, and a mix of wildflowers that don’t mind a little shade.

April 2008

Seeds, native or not, generally need constant soil moisture over several days to germinate into baby plants.  Baby plants need regular water to establish roots, which is hard to get during dry conditions when you don’t have an automatic irrigation system.  The first summer after finishing the project didn’t go so well, even after another round of seeding.  With no response to my followups, I assumed I made someone mad and just sorta gave up on it.  It became one of those projects I just cringed to think about.  Until this week.

April 2011

It’s actually starting to fill in nicely despite three years of funky weather and a super slow start.  And in a backyard shed somewhere in Allandale, a lawnmower is corroding from disuse.

Peace Out, Lawnmower

We took that idea for a condo community project in NW Austin, and did nothing with it. 

Actually, that’s not fair.  We did squeeze in Matt’s Rain Garden idea in one spot.  It was an area outside the banks of the ditch, a little lower than the rest, and it collected rain water from a small roof section that wasn’t guttered, pooling water against the building. 

Sort of like an isolated wetland, only without the plant and wildlife diversity and with no environmental benefit, unless you count its repeated threats to flood at least one condo unit during heavy rains…like in the same context of that Talking Heads song where Mother Nature takes back lands that used to be covered by parking lots and Pizza Huts. 

So instead of just digging another gravel tributary to connect it to the ditch, here, we also dug deep.  Down past the 6″ layer of topsoil and into about 3″ of caliche.  We mixed in pure compost, and planted a couple of plants you normally see growing along seeping banks of spring-fed creeks around Austin.  The idea was to use the water that previously pooled on top of the caliche layer, and the compost to create air pockets deeper in to the soil, allowing the water to saturate the soil where the roots are instead of pooling on the surface.   The caliche traps the moisture down there, making it available to plant roots for longer periods of time after a rain.  A structural hazard is converted to a functional wetland.

In another move,  inspired by the desire to keep a 20k-dollar project from looking like the 8,455-dollar project that it actually is, we added some field boulders from a Florence quarry, and used two different sizes of gravel pulled straight from the pits along the Colorado River in East Austin. 

We also used local Honeycomb boulders to terrace a small slope that previously dumped soil all over the sidewalk during rains.

Now we wait for a big rain, and see what happens.  It the meantime, the condo community is happy to look at something other than bare, washed-out dirt.

We then brought in 18 tons of limestone from a local quarry to create some terraced beds along the full length of the house, while some little kid raked the dirt around.

Next, we brought in dump truck loads of compost blended with sand and soil, and planted a variety of native and adapted plants, testing out what we thought would be the most deer-resistant plants.   This includes a large patch of one particularly common hybrid found in only the most boring landscapes of Central Texas; a plant which will remain unnamed out of a self-conscious fear of at least one person calling me out for including it.  This plant whose name will not be spoken ended up being the most deer-resistant and colorful plant to survive the last 20 months.

Our people have done a great job on maintenance, re-attaching popped off micro-tubes in the sprinkler lines, weeding, and pruning back the perennials.  Thanks to their dedication to maintenance (and a little rain), it’s been one of our most successful projects yet.

Landscapes of East Austin homes in the 1930s were not what you call inspiring.  East Austin homes that are most period-accurate for that time are either cluttered with random pots and trinkets celebrating Catholicism, or are nothing but small compacted dirt plots maintained with a broom.  We didn’t have much to go on.

So Raul decided to keep it simple.  Don’t do anything to take away from the house.  Don’t make it modern, gaudy, or too simplistic.  Add a little color, but make it easy to maintain. 

We laid ‘Zorro’ Zoysia grass, famous for its thick bear fur texture, on a 3-4″ bed of Thunderdirt from GeoGrowers.  We filled the existing beds with Fall Aster, Twist Leaf Yucca, Orange Bulbine, and Mexican Oregano.  We added a ‘Desert Museum’ Palo Verde.  We also installed a fully automated water-efficient drip lines in the beds and MP Rotators for the lawn, and a simple path using sawed limestone slabs.

Maybe not exactly period-accurate for BioGardener 2010 with its..gasp..lush green lawn!  But it’s an appropriate turf for the site, on top of well-drained rich soil, and the sprinkler system uses about 50% less water than typical systems.   And we just want to roll in it, so that’s nice too.

We’ve had problems in some beds, most like due to poor soils and insufficient amending during bed prep, so we’re trying to correct those issues for the next planting season with lots of manure compost. 

Planning for the fall season has begun, as we’ve already cleared out one expired watermelon bed, and will do the same to the doomed cucumber bed next week.  Seeds will be ordered this week, and sent to our friends at Gabriel Valley Farms in Georgetown to start for us, so we’re ready to plant in the next month or so.  Be on the lookout next month for freebie starter plants, we’re planning on giving away the leftover plants we don’t have room for!

As the heat sets, we’re also giving the irrigation system a little extra attention, making sure those little leaks are patched and that everything is functioning properly.  The hackberry got a little trim, as did the interior perennial beds that are filled with pollinator plants.  And the weeds, including the not-weed Horseherb, which is taking over the pathways.  We’ve left this native wildflower growing on the edges of the path to help insulate our raised beds, but weeded out the ones blocking the path. 

The heat is making the colors of Mexico happy, as the Zinnias and edible Purslane explode from seed planted in May.  The Zinnias will provide cut flowers for the restaurant all summer as most everything else withers later in the season.

We’ve harvested several gallons of Sun Gold tomatoes, some old garlic, and several buckets of yellow squash, both of which are being used by the kitchen regularly.  Watermelons are just about ready, and should start showing up in bar drinks by early July. 

We’re just about done with planting for the summer season at the Fonda garden.   Which is a good thing, cuz there’s a six-foot thorny weed in the back corner, assembling an army to take over operations.  I think the big one threw a rock at me last week.

Early this month, Fonda inspiration and author Diana Kennedy visited the garden and gave us some pointers for what we should and shouldn’t be growing.  Most of the stuff we planted this month was her recommendation.  A run down of what will soon be appearing on Fonda plates and tables:

• Squash – Ronde De Nice, Straightneck, Zucchini;
• Tomato – Sun Gold, Creole;
• Pepper – Early Jalapeno, TAM Jalapeno, Poblano;
• Dill – Hercules;
• Sweet Marjoram;
• Thyme;
• Mint;
• Cinnamon Basil;
• Cucumber;
• Watermelon – Sugar Baby, Crimson Sweet;
• Purslane;
• Zinnia;
• Hoja Santa;
• Epazote;
• Chard;
• Random edibles running wild throughout the Fonda landscape

Buffalo grass is weedy.  The time spent mowing, fertilizing, watering, and bugging in other turf grasses is compounded and concentrated into just one simple task for Buffalo:  weeding.  This is especially true for highly disturbed sites, and which sites aren’t?

But after a tip from Jon Ahrens, we tried out the ‘Density’ variety from a grower in Poteet (south of SA, esay) on a recent project in NW Austin.  Already, the ‘Density’ is much thicker than other Buffalo grasses, so we’re hoping the fur chokes out nut sedge and other stuff that we woke up when amending the soil in preparation for planting.  If it works out, we’ll have another solid alternative to non-native turfgrasses in our little green tool box.   Go us!