We have way too many Cocozelle Zucchini.  These are certified organic heirloom plants, easy to grow, and ready to be planted right now in your vegetable garden or patio pot.  They’ll need about 2′ of space, so I usually plant them at the corners, letting them spill over the edge to save room for other plants. 

We’ll have at least 60 of these 4″ plants, first come first served.

Fonda San Miguel Vegetable Garden
2330 North Loop
Tuesday, April 19th, 2011
8:30 - 9:30am

Stop by, say hey, check out the garden, and grab a plant or two or three!  If you send me a note that you’re coming, I’ll even have a breakfast taco with your name on it.

Forget the propane mowers, our ecologically-balanced approach, the respect of a loyal customer base, the best crew in the business, and our unique philosophies on landscaping.  All of these are just fleeting wisps of superficiality.  There is only one thing that makes BioGardener stand alone on the top: women.

Johnna, cheering compost out of the wheelbarrow

Monica, the Mo-chine

Topdressing with Dillo

Johnna and Monica have been helping us topdress lawns with compost this month.  Not only are they strong enough to sling it with a smile, their attention to detail borders insanity.  My friend Ben says one sign of wealth is an appreciation for networking, which is a business term for community.   These two women crossed the border from personal community to BioG community when they enthusiastically agreed to help out during the season of 16-hour days.   I’m the richest guy I know.

Even the prettiest girl in the whole world is chipping in this season; with not but a brush of her wrist, flowers will bloom with radiance all year:

Princess Winecup planting herbs

So to the ladies of BioGardener who ease the burdens of spring:  Thank You.  Your cheeriness, work ethic, and ability to get it done is a beautiful thing.

• Membership for farmers and consumers is $40/year.
• Farmers set their own pricing, and use free web-based software to update their inventory and market their produce during each ordering cycle. 
• Farmers keep 92% of everything they sell.
• Consumers shop on-line, browsing a grocery store-style selection of locally produced goods: vegetables, shampoo, bread, honey, meats, cheeses, soap, flour, tortillas, coffee, herbs, tea, eggs, clothes, etc.
• Members pick up the boxed up grocery list from a designated pickup site on a designated day once every two weeks.
• There is no waste.  Its a very efficient way for farmers to sell their stuff, as they make one drop to reach a large area, don’t have to man a booth at a farmstand or farmers market, and sell their goods at almost retail prices. 

(working in some compost at FSM garden)

A quick seasonal note as we bundle and hunker and hum quietly to ourselves ”I told you so” to all those who like palm trees and other tropical plants.

This year’s annual tree sale will the friendliest and best one yet!  We have a variety of native shade and ornamental trees for sale, along with a hefty variety of fruit trees that are adapted well to Central Texas climate and soils.

This sale is good for the entire months of January and February, 2011.  Price includes purchase, delivery, mulch, and installation.

NATIVE TREES:

Lacey Oak – 10-gallon – 20′ tall x 20′ wide – Sun, Part-shade.  Native to the Texas Hill Country.  Beautiful little oak with a slightly blueish leaf, not a tree you see everyday.  Deciduous.  $125

Montezuma Cypress – 10-gallon – 50′ tall x 35′ wide - Sun.  Native to Mexico, a dry-loving cousin to the Texas native Bald Cypress.  Fast-growing, and semi-evergreen.  $110

Anacacho Orchid Tree – 15-gallon – 15′ tall x 10′ wide- Sun, Part-Shade.  Native to the Anacacho mountains of West Texas, and possibly near Enchanted Rock in Central Texas.  White blooms in summer.   Deciduous.  $100

Mexican White Oak - 15-gallon – 55′ wide x 50′ tall – Sun.  Native to Mexico and parts of S. Texas.   One of the best oaks to plant in Central Texas, disease and pest free, and relatively fast growing.  New leaves in spring are light pink, almost like a flower.   Semi-evergreen.  $100

Redbud (multi-trunk or single trunk) – 20-gallon – 15′ tall x 15′ wide – Sun, Part-Shade, Shade.  Native to Austin, these are the first plants to bloom in early spring, a cheery pinkish red to announce the arrival of spring.  Deciduous.  $145

Mexican Buckeye – 30-gallon – 15′ tall x 15′ wide – Sun, Part-Shade, Shade.  Native to Austin, these sprawling trees are more like giant shrubs, and bloom pink in early spring.  Cool seed pods in summer, fall, and winter.  Deciduous.  $190

Texas Mountain Laurel – 30-gallon – 15′ tall x 15′ wide – Sun, Part-shade, Shade.  Native to Austin, these popular trees are found under oaks, but bloom best when planted in full sun.  Evergreen.  $215

Cedar Elm – 30-gallon – 40′ tall x 25′ wide – Sun.  Native to Austin, leaves are usually the first to turn in the fall, from green to yellow and orange.  Deciduous.  $190

Texas Red Oak – 45-gallon – 35′ tall x 30′ wide- Sun.  Native to Austin, the champion of fall color with deep, almost maroon, red leaves.  Deciduous.  $325

FRUIT TREES:

Pretty much anything you could possibly want, including fig, pear, peach, apple, plum, pomegranate, apricot, persimmon, and jujube, these come in 2-4′ bareroot “whips.”  Cost per Fruit Tree:

1-3 Fruit Trees
$20/each delivered,
plus $40/each installation 

4+ Fruit Trees
$20/each delivered,
plus $35/each installation

Installation cost includes the addition of 1-2″ of compost, an Actinovate treatment (an organic product that helps prevent and treat fungal diseases and other problems), a compost tea treatment, and mulch.   This will help get your tree off to a good start.  We’ll also include our helpful annual maintenance schedule, compiled from several different sources,  (though Tree Folks’ “Fruit and Nut Tree Growing Guide” is an excellent resource too).

Remember that some fruit trees need a second variety of the same fruit to pollinate (like plums and apples), and others are self-pollinating (like peaches and pomegranates).  We’ll help you pick the best types and varieties if you need help deciding.

Deadline for ordering trees is January 7, 2011.

Six, 4-inch, certified organic, ‘Chandler’ Strawberry plants.  Put them in well-drained soil with lots of compost now,  give them even moisture through the winter, and taste just how sweet dirt can be come spring.  Free to the first person to leave a comment.

We are in the process of taking out the last of the warm-season plants and filling the garden with cold-season varieties.  The last signs of summer this season were the peppers, still fiery hot and tasty, even after several nights of freezing temps. 

For the hard-working tomato beds, we’ve covered them with compost and Alfalfa hay, allowing them to rest and recoup during the winter months.  For the rest of the beds, we’re working pure compost into the soil, loosening with hand tools, and sending them back to the production lines.  Some Little Kid helps plants lettuce, Swiss chard, strawberries, beets, carrots, and radishes.  He loves it.

Thanks to Matt for sharing a growler of Lovejoy’s Espresso Stout a couple of Sunday mornings ago, and for guiding a quest to find a little inspiration.  He’s got some good ideas for water conservation, using a site’s terrain to channel and absorb rain water in designed “rain gardens,” which embrace the free water instead of allowing it to run-off.

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.

I’m sure everyone deals with this.  Maybe it’s a moon phase, or some Mercurial alignment issue, or a change in weather, or a switch to a beer with a higher alcohol content, but it’s time for one of those disruptive yet potentially inspiring dives, usually lasting a couple of weeks.  Head first, into the waters of discovery and perspective, I have plunged.

We all want our jobs to have meaning, but brother, that sure is a hard figure to measure.  Matthew Crawford wrote an essay for the New York Times about the contradictory value we put on people who live by their wits, backs, and hands for a living.  I, like several of my friends from our small town high school, was programmed to go to college so that I can get a good job.  You know, an office job.  Because mowing grass for a living leads to a dead end.   Crawford writes: 

 “High-school shop-class programs were widely dismantled in the 1990s as educators prepared students to become ‘knowledge workers’.  The imperative of the last 20 years to round up every warm body and send it to college, then to the cubicle, was tied to a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy.  This has not come to pass. To begin with, such work often feels more enervating than gliding.  More fundamentally, now as ever, somebody has to actually do things: fix our cars, unclog our toilets, build our houses.

When we praise people who do work that is straightforwardly useful, the praise often betrays an assumption that they had no other options. We idealize them as the salt of the earth and emphasize the sacrifice for others their work may entail. Such sacrifice does indeed occur — the hazards faced by a lineman restoring power during a storm come to mind. But what if such work answers as well to a basic human need of the one who does it?”

Right.  The work of lineman can be personally fulfilling.  Then consider those dissenters of the office cube world; it’s not uncommon for someone from my generation to quit the office job and go to work on an organic farm.  Many people who work for the Information Man blatantly and openly voice their jealousy of people who sweat for a living. 

So summarizing this argument, we can say that salty workers are generally happier than their cube worker peers, because: 1) they don’t have to deal with the absurdities of the office environment; 2) their work is easily defined, and; 3)  there is usually a tangible result of the day’s labors, which brings fulfillment.

Now we enter the mind of a salty worker, for example, a landscaper.  He’s standing in the front yard of a house that backs to Barton Creek, the vein that carries the sparkle and shine of Austin to its crown jewel, Barton Springs.  The owner of this front yard has consulted with this landscaper, to find a way to reduce his $800+ monthly water bill and the 100,000 gallons of water he uses to keep his 1.5 acres of St. Augustine green and soft.  The owner’s idea is to drill a well, and use that water for irrigation, thus saving environmental resources by greatly reducing his use of City-treated water.  Then, get a list of organic products from the landscaper, and use them to replace the bottles of lawn chemicals in the tool shed.  Take out the recycling bin on Thursdays, buy a Prius, and boom, save the world.

The path of least resistance here, for the landscaper, is to agree.  For the landscaper who is a landscaper because he has “no other option”, this very path is the only path that exists in the universe.   The actions required of this solution fall right in line with the three arguments for why the salty worker jobs are superior to cube worker jobs.  Encourage the man to drill a well, apply an organic fertilizer on a regular basis, and keep that shit mowed.   Check’s in the mail.

But what about this new breed of landscaper, the one scarred and mangled from his educational background and former career path as a cube worker, which he eventually rejected so he can purse a career that allows him to be physically spent at the end of each day?  That juicy plum from the Tree of Knowledge taught him a few things after all, like the basic principles of hydrology and geology.  A simple connection is made, and suddenly, the absurdity of drilling a well feels a lot like those loony tasks required of him in the cube of his former life.  Now, his role in the situation becomes more complicated as he scrambles to be a diplomat between a fragile environmental resource and his paycheck.  The outcome will not be tangible, and will require bending a mind before action can be taken.  The Fruit is now poison, infecting the three arguments for the salty worker until they rot in a sad little puddle.   

So: 1) he sweats for a living, which when you get past the glorification of the romance of such work, take its toll on the body if he’s not careful, and can turn that end-of-the-day fulfillment of his youth into pain-with-every-movement horror of his adulthood; and,

2)  he’s still dealing with absurdities he thought he was escaping by leaving the office job, which makes;

3) his role a depressing shade of grey, rather than simple black and pure white.  

The three arguments for the superiority of salty work over office work are obliterated.

On top of that, as a small business owner, this landscaper is juggling, somehow both sullenly and in desperate panic, obligations and responsibilities he didn’t sign up for:  trucks that get stolen; employees who don’t show up for work; employees who get arrested; employees who completely disappear for weeks at a time; equipment that fails in masses, at all the same time, when he needs them the most; clients who want to squeeze as much service for as little money as possible; clients who value the truly local small business, but only when they’re the lowest bidder; clients who ignore the 99 awesome things he did and blow up at the single mis-communication in a single email; clients who want service, dedication, and quality, but don’t want to pay for it; self-centered business partners who always take and never give; trying to do the right thing and still stay competitive; trying to provide a beneficial community service and still stay profitable; trying to give clients what they want, when they want it, for a fair price, and still maintain a healthy relationship with his wife and son; trying to develop and demonstrate a more environmentally and financially sustainable business model for those who will come after him; and on and on and on. 

Turns out the grass isn’t greener after all.  There are cubers that stand on the edge, and leap with all their strength, realizing with horror as gravity delivers them to the salty world that, at a closer resolution, it isn’t covered in soft, lush, green grass after all.   It’s actually a thin film of flesh-eating algae, deceptively masking a deep dark pit full of alligators, piranhas, sharks, and very sick people.   The arguments for salty work disintegrate in the poisonous fog, and the promising dreams of independence and self-reliance are uncovered to reveal smothering monsters of unbearable weight and despair.  It isn’t long before these poor souls take the walk of shame back to the other side, with a resigned relief to be back in the cube.

But, and here finally is my point, this is not the fate of everyone who is fooled by the three arguments, or the superficial lure of owning a business.  Some of us, when discovering the truth of the deceptively green grass, still hang on.  In this cold dark world, we find kindred spirits.  We find clients who appreciate what we do, respect our efforts, and who look past our faults to see our strengths.  We find employees who become friends, backed by a mutual respect and dependence on each other.  We find a mechanic who smooths out the jagged wrinkles of uncertainty, vendors who evolve into mentors and role models, and competitors who become unofficial partners for a common cause.  We find a rhythm in the volatility of business ownership, learn how to take advantage of our freedom instead of allowing it to crush us, and harness the potentially dangerous power of independence and use it for good.   

And gradually, in our daily actions to support each other and keep bread on our tables, we twine invisible threads.  We become a collective force, strong enough to resist the flesh-eating algae, alligators, piranhas, sharks, and very sick people, powerful enough to prevent anyone from crossing back over to the safe side.  We overcome all the challenges that our ignorance kept us from anticipating and despite the mountains of circumstances that threaten to drag us down, we thrive and succeed.

We become a community.

It’s that one thing, community, that outweighs the disappointment of the three false arguments and negates the disparity of being a small business owner.  It’s community that provides the inspiration, validation, and encouragement to counter the negative forces that threaten to drag me down and break me.  Community, created by accident, born in response to all the bad things that are bound to happen, is the secret to happiness in my work. 

It’s my community: my clients; my employees; my wife; my family; some of my fellow landscapers; the local vendors we rely on to keep our equipment and trucks running; fellow small-business owners who keep our website up to date and deliver bulk materials for us; vendors that provide us quality soil, mulch, plant, stone, gravel, and building materials to make us look good; local service providers that make it easy to dispose of our waste, recycle our brush, provide us with alternative fuels, and keep us efficient; local restaurants and food manufacturers that provide us with waste oil to fuel our trucks; and local farmers, editors, writers, poets, biologists, non-profits, long-time friends, musicians, and mamas who inspire us and back us up when we’re low.

God help me if I ever lose them, my posse, my people.  It’s my community that, no matter what, keeps the grass browner on the other side.