Mysteries of St Augustine

As I rip out his namesake grass, I just had to look up some info on St Augustine: He was bishop of Hippo Regius (present-day Annaba, Algeria) located in the Roman province of Africa. He lived around 350 AD- over 1600 years ago. He is the patron saint of brewers, printers, theologians, the alleviation of sore eyes, and a number of cities and dioceses....

Still no idea why the grass is called St Augustine though..

Here's the spot in front I have removed (mid-removal)..

So many possible reasons for the various white dead spots..

- Some of it was grubs. Being able to feed them to the chickens as treats completely transformed the experience of digging them up from disgusting to a bona fide treasure hunt.

- Some of it was silty sandy clay-ey soil. Was the soil dry because the grass was dead or vice-versa??

- Some of it might be cinch bugs, and ground pearls..

My solution was to remove a wide swatch. I plan to add compost, cover the area with weed block fabric, plant some xeriscape lovelies and add mulch.. Digging out 250 square feet of sod? Exhausting. Planting this weekend- should be fun!

The Mexican wire grass is flourishing- I've been pulling off seedheads so it will spread!

Must re-home this volunteer Pride of Barbados, squeezed up against the sidewalk..

Relocated coneflowers- with the grass gone they can reseed and spread to their heart's content!

The chickens have merged "flocks". That is, Ruby's flock of 1 has merged uneventfully with the teens. Tonight they even put themselves to bed in the bigger coop. Watching "chicken TV" has become a major pasttime around our house..

Treasure grubs- one reason Houdini has come to love me..

I thought Silverwing (on the left) was the top hen, but Houdini kept all the grubs to herself..

I thought about leaving the earthworms where I found them, but the chickens slurp them up so happily..

Even Silverwing is less skittish around me now

Ruby's eye is all better, and she roams around doing her thing..

Houdini begging for another treat.

Lush plants everywhere, but this caterpillar picks an isolated clover in the rocky section to munch on..

Cheerful

Bees swarm my borage. 

The chicken's jungle hide-out. A few last poppies- I'm letting them finish going to seed before I clear them out.

Easter pinata toy. Not a toy soldier- toy skateboarder.

Brief snippets

Gorgeous old dog in an old Ford. Decidedly not cute, not friendly (growled menacingly at me as I got in my car next to him) but absolutely dignified...

Colorful Mulch

 Cascarones brought out the kid in my extended family today (photos by my talented 16 y/o niece). Everyone joined in and left paper jewels sparkling on my porch and my yard...

Chicken Drama:

A shift in power.. Silverwing (with her head ducked in the food) stared down sweet Ruby, who is older but less pugnacious.  Dottie (below, watching Silverwing eat) wandered into Ruby's coop, and I decided to keep those two together for now- the two loners.. see if they bond..

Easter prep...

Last minute scramble to find last year's plastic eggs for the youngest's daycare. Class Easter egg hunt tomorrow, every family needs to bring 10 eggs. I use left over Valentine's Day kisses and some foil wrapped chocolate daisies to add to the slivers of stickers in the eggs. Perfectly respectable..

For my eldest he casually mentions that he needs an egg with the yolk taken out to decorate tomorrow. When he sees we have four eggs total, he asks for them all. I use two yolks to make blueberry muffins (I can smell them baking as I type) and place the other two in a container for my breakfast tomorrow.

My dining table looks festive, with the real brown and speckled eggs drying in their cardboard carton and the brightly colored plastic eggs tucked into a decorative bag.

No eggs from my chickens yet- Ruby the eldest is a few weeks away I think. The youngsters are growing rapidly, happily perched three abreast on their roost tonight.

Couldn't I just be a farmer?

When I was applying to graduate school, people would ask me what my back up plan was. At the time my response was that I'd become a scuba divemaster if the other career didn't work out. Such a mid-twenties-no-kids fantasy- working in gorgeous tropical locales spending my days floating weightlessly staring at gorgeous coral reefs. I'm sure the reality is wildly different, with cranky customers, uninformed thrill seekers and cold and boredom. I haven't gone diving since I had kids, but I do get to stare at pretty growing things in the garden.. Nowadays I fantasize that if I get too burnt out I'd drop out of the intellectual rat race and plow the earth instead. It is as unrealistic a fantasy as the divemaster one (look at my tomato plants below), but it's awfully tempting on a Sunday evening facing a tsunami of work responsibilities on Monday...

Close-up of the first tomato I've seen this season. It's in the plants in the square foot garden which handled the hail well and look green and lush on their new leaves (though you can see battered spots on the lower ones). Compare this to the saddest tomato plant ever:

It got thrashed in the hail and I was going to replace it and it's equally sad neighbor with a new ones until I saw..

Two tomatoes.. I got sentimental and wistful and thought about babying the plants, but I've decided to call upon my inner stoic farmer and replace them. I want bushels of tomatoes, not two ever-green ones that stay puckered and small because the plant is too brown to grow them big and juicy.  

Happier hail survivors include some chard (love the colors, need to remember to eat them!!)

And lemon balm which was in tatters but quickly grew new leaves..

A couple of poppies got bent but most shrugged it off..

I sweet talked the kids into visiting the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, forgetting that it was their spring plant sale weekend. My eldest happily showed us the "secret pathways" he'd found on a previous school trip, and we stopped and admired views from the tower and views of sunning turtles...

Prickly pear peep hole atop the tower..

Their patience wore thin so I didn't get a chance to either take pictures of them in the wildflowers, nor buy any plants. Good for my wallet, though I'm sure I could have found something wonderful to add.. 

Friday (a free-range day off!) I created a new border bed near the fence in the back corner, which previously sloped precipitously and run off detritus built up against the fence. You get a lot of loose blocks of stone with construction, so I rummaged in the strip behind the bamboo-barrier retaining wall and found enough stones to make a mini-retaining wall along the fence, then filled in the depression with surprisingly good soil (I guess the builders had put the soil from my old compost heap there since it was fairly loamy with many earthworms and less full of clay than the rest of the back lot). I envision it as a raingarden of sorts (it is still at the bottom of the slope), hopefully the plants can handle some runoff when it rains (and some dryness when it doesn't) . The soil should drain well and the rock wall stayed pretty porous. I had visited Barton Springs nursery earlier in the week and picked up the xeriscape plants I posted about before as well as some new lovelies..

Desert bluebells

Copper canyon daisy photobombed by some Four Nerve Daisies. 

I'm frequently cheap and buy little plants in little pots since it gives me room to experiment (the Copper Canyon dailsy is an exeption). After all, the massive rosemary in the front is blissfully happy at 5 feet wide and it started from a 4" pot. When plants fail to do well in my yard I can move them if they live or not miss the $1.50 I spent if they die. The downside to this is that I have to be mindful of spacing the plants well, and be patient as they grow and fill in. This weekend made me impatient (especially with the Wildflower Center visit). Can a person will their plants to grow? Or is it another exercise in Zen patience (which is what attracts me to gardening in the first place)? Plants live. Plants die. In between, you enjoy them...

Sometimes I cheat though.. I couldn't resist a few proper zinnia plants while I wait for the seeds to pop up. After all the butterflies are here now!

This sweet potato vine may look small, but I fully expect it to spill over the edges of its hanging planter ASAP.

Mother nature may have thrashed a few tomato plants with hail, but she also brought the gorgeous rain lilies that thrive in the deserted spot near the front curb..

And in the shady forgotten weedy corner of the back back yard, a spiderwort flower cocks its head at me, looking monkey like..

Hail, drought, construction, weeds? Eh, it'll keep popping up!

Raised bed..

I found two pieces of lumber under the house- left over from the deck construction 8 years ago. Perfect for a xeriscape raised bed in the back.

I'm on a sedum kick recently, but was having a hard time figuring out how to highlight them/ protect them from the fall leaves/weeds/garden detritus. I found the round blocks at the in-law's house last weekend- they came from my husband's grandmother's old house in Houston. I think they fit in perfectly, and I love how they will hold the sedums up high (until they trail over the edge).

Other plants in the bed include a Jerusalem Sage, a Beargrass (Nolina texana), and  two Octopus agave that looked wonderfully quirky (and unarmed..) as well as a Mexican honeysuckle, some rescued bluebonnets and an aloe plant.

The mystery of the blooming tree at Big Stacy is solved- it is a Mexican Buckeye (Ungnadia speciosa). I found an old seed pod and the seeds were shiny and beautiful. They are reportedly poisonous, so I did not take them home..

After a day of sawing, drilling and wheelbarrowing I made myself sit for a minute, and saw lots of winged wildlife- an orange butterfly or two (perhaps a frittilary), multiple cardinals/blue jays and doves fighting over the birdfeeder, and a beautiful hummingbird eating at the coral honeysuckle. Of course, the only creature I got a picture of was this (kinda tattered) moth resting by the water spigot. It has elements of a wasp moth..

New chicken coop..

Really, I thought it would take a few hours. Drilling, cutting, stapling- how long can it take? The answer is - all day. I made a new (and I think fairly fabulous though a bit off kilter) chicken coop for the juveniles..

Let me mention that I am new to powertools.  Growing up, we were proud when Dad learned to program the VCR, but the usual refrain when trying anything technical was "God-damnit!!!!". I really thought that backing up a trailer always entailed 20 attempts, near jackknifes and inevitable frustration. My mother was good at assembling furniture, but my father was (bless him) a wildly impractical disaster. He had his amazing points, being wise and cerebral and goofy, but the man still wouldn't be able to cook an egg if his life depended on it. My parents have become a bit craftier with time: while Mom was the first to wield a chainsaw (on her foot when I was 16, requiring a low-key "not doing anything exciting" visit to our old family practitioner for stitches), they both now glory in the ability to chop down hundreds of cedar trees on their 400 acres near Mason, TX. Nonetheless, I did not grow up in a household that used powertools to make things. Recently I have learned to use them, and it's refreshing/liberating/fun to make stuff (instead of surfing Craigslist for a scam artist handiman to do things for me). Above is my circular saw, my new friend. A few weeks ago I thought it needed a new blade, but then I realized that the blade needs to be tightened back on every once in a while. Having used a handsaw a few previously crafty times in my life it is liberating and miraculous to be able to take things that don't fit and cut them to the right side in seconds. I have little flash-nightmares of cutting myself, but do a mental "time out" (thank you Atul Gawande) every time I use it. Honestly, I'm most paranoid about the power cord- apparently cutting it is not uncommon.

Ironically, my saw-horse/lumber cutting table is... the toy work bench my mother bought my youngest for Christmas. It's a bit of a parable for how growing up in Northwest Hills/the suburbs (and a lot like my post-structuralist wa-wa-wa cultural studies at Brown was): everything is a simulacrum, a copy, a pastiche and parody. Except when you have to (really) make a (real) chicken coop for chickens that you hope don't die this time. The (toy) work bench has been wonderful- just the right size, with everything I need. It came with a (toy but real metal and kinda sharp including a real handsaw) tool box that I used through the day. The 90 degree ruler was perfect for drawing lines on the wood I was going to cut and.. my cuts were straight today!

Halfway through (thinking I'd get to build a raised bed for sure in the afternoon, ha!). A big duplex is being built in the lot next door. Today there was no Tejano, no gangsta-rap music blaring, but I still tucked myself around the corner in the breezeway of the addition because I was self-conscious about what I was doing. I need to get over that- the feeling that I am a dilettante, silly, not to be taken seriously. That feeling affects me at work, too, which is ironic since I am good at what I do and if I had a Y chromosome and grey hair I think my ideas would be taken more seriously. Hmm. Need to get over that-anyone have ideas how?

Voila- the finished product. The girls are snuggled in there tonight and I am tickled that it looks similar to the addition with it's shed roof and windows. The roost bars ROCK (all three chicks were happily perched there the last I saw them) and I'm excited to either put wheels on it (Mom is bringing some back from the ranch this weekend) or just move it to the (unwatered and weed strewn) bed above the stone retaining wall on the south side of the backyard. Once they make friends I hope all four chickens can spend their days in the chicken tractor (eating grubs and fertilizing my yard), and they'll use the coops for overnights.

If she's got a white head I think she's a Cookoo Maran, settling into the new coop this evening. Of course she might be a Silver Laced Wyandotte..

Ruby is kinda lazy. Instead of hopping 6 inches into her own private coop, she inevitably snuggles down under the coop. After her terrible cold (that killed sweet Red) I finally heard her crow and talk this afternoon. I don't think I'd heard her since she got sick (perhaps she had laryngotracheitis, a viral infection that can prevented by vaccinations.. which my new chicks have had..). At first I thought she was making the sound chickens make when they lay an egg, but no such luck. I think she was sniffing the chicken tractor and loudly voicing her disapproval of the new gals. I hope they make friends in the end..