Garden Girl

Red, White & Grew - Victory Gardens and More!: This Letter Came in the Mail Last Week

More good news.

I’m happy to learn that oak galls are not that harmful to the trees:
http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/IN022

I’ll be happier come Fall when I can get the dead wood pruned & the trees inspected tho.

aaaaaaaaaaaaand… the peach that was showing no signs of life & even had some withered branches? It’s sprouting leaves & new growth, and it’s become the favorite hang out for the baby cicada killers from the nest on my front deck. It must have just wanted more heat & dryness. Plants can be tenacious, for sure & they’ll surprise you, if only you can find what each individual plant needs. There’s some good life lessons for all of us

Buying a house, or even buying property that someone once tended is a surprise grab bag of goodies.
When we moved to our not yet named Fig Tree Cottage lot last Jan., I noted the stumps of trees that had been razed so the last home that was here could be towed out. I couldn’t identify what these stumps were, let alone know if they’d endure after such abuse.
Heck, I didn’t know what the Bradford Pear in the front yard was (I’ve urged Mr. Garden Girl to buy me some books for my b-day to help me know my native CenTex birds, bugs & plant life).
The 3 Red Oaks I inherited, I knew would need some pruning of dead wood by experts, but they seemed otherwise healthy.
The stumps tho… well, I thought it was sad since some of them had clearly been large mature trees, but I resigned myself to possibly having them removed.
& so they sat like an old chest from an unknown ancestor, locked away in the attic.
But summer has brought me keys for that chest.
The huge stump in front now is a profusion of willow branches (perfect for a cottonwood borer to emerge from, it seems). I’m afraid it will have to go when we build our screened in deck.
3 stumps near the house have shot up, in spite of our record heat & the dryness, and proved themselves to be Crepe Myrtle (a tree I love, tho I usually prefer the purple & white varieties & I’m pretty sure these will all be hot pink). There’s a mature Crepe Myrtle on the edge of our lot now that is just raining down its profusion of delicate, showy, Asian blooms.
The stump bushes & the mini rose out back are all being treated with a mix of baking soda, Garrett Juice, and dish soap dissolved in water to address some powdery mildew (poor stressed things).

I’m definitely going to keep the Crepe Myrtles near the house, if I can.
I don’t know if they’ll ever be full trees again after what they’ve survived, but I’d at least love to get them into healthy blooming bushes.
Thru these plants I feel a connection to the couple who lived here before us, who we never met, but have been told stories about by neighbors.
They are a legacy and I feel like I’m honoring the lives of that couple & continuing their story by nurturing the trees & the rose bush.

Tags: gardengirl, victory garden, slow food, locavore

Yep, it’s June alright & we’re into Austin’s mid 90*’s no rain a thon that will last for several months. The prairie grass is already looking brown & the birds are quieter in the afternoon, but my blackberry plants are going strong!

Mr. Garden Girl & I did get two raised bed boxes up in the back yard & I’ve started sheet mulching in them for Fall. & we have a shiny new composter on the way (the gardening bug must be taking me over, I’m genuinely excited by the prospect of starting some compost.)
Speaking of bugs, thanks to the folks at http://www.whatsthatbug.com, I now know that the big advance scout for the alien invasion of earth I found in my front yard the other day was a cottonwood borer:

http://www.gpnc.org/cwoodborer.htm

I, for one, would like to welcome our new insectoid overlords.

YouTube - WSJ clip: suburban farming, an idea whose time has come

a brief & smile worthy clip from the Wall Street Journal

My blackberries are starting to bloom!

Tags: gardengirl

To combat the skyrocketing price of flour, several Massachusetts bakeries have taken on a project that’s part Little Red Hen, part World War II Victory Garden. The bakeries are recruiting their customers to till up their lawns and gardens and plant wheat.

Bakeries Urge Customers to Plant Wheat : NPR

Just one thing.
Find that one thing and do it passionately.

I saw a movie last night about a very idealistic, driven & lost young man who was named Chris McCandless. The movie is Into The Wild . He was a bright and sensitive soul, and after his college graduation he began tramping around the country living rough. He had lost his faith in people due to his parents abusive and volatile marriage and wanted nothing to do with the path they had set for him of social & economic ladder climbing.
Chris was inspired by reading Jack London & Thoreau. He liked solitude and introspection, traveling by his wits without possessions or safety nets, and testing his mettle.
He was, by all accounts, decent, honorable, a hard worker and gifted with a compassionate heart.
He hiked, without proper gear, alone into the Alaskan wilderness and due to his own ill preparedness and lack of knowledge, he died there.
One of the last statements in the notebook found with his body was this:
“Happiness is only real if shared.”

I resonate with what I know of Chris. Through most of my twenties, I too, disillusioned with and distrustful of what I perceived human nature to be, went on a walk about and like Chris, my privileged & yet emotionally crippling background didn’t prepare me for what I was to experience. The wilderness I wandered was urban, unlike Chris’, but there were dangers every bit as real as bears and starvation.

I’m glad that like Chris I found my answer, and I’m deeply happy that I survived to go on living that answer.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed with the glut of problems the world faces today. Easy to retreat from them, to hope someone else will solve it all, or to feel that one is too small a player on the world’s stage to be of use.
But for your own sanity and for the inspiration you will bring others, if for no other reasons, I urge you- find one thing you love to do that will help others as well and dive into it passionately.

For me, I think the garden I’m starting here will be that thing. First and foremost this will be a working food garden. A victory garden. I do have plans for wildflowers and weeds– probably a bed of them over the scarred ground contractors left by my office window. This will feed bees, so in a way, even that will be a food garden. Food for the soul, for sure.
Mainly, ‘tho. I want to focus on making my raised beds as bountiful as I can and finding ways to share that bounty and what I’ll learn in producing it with others.
Because, happiness is only real if shared.

april108fruit_trees_fig1

Originally uploaded by TheHerbGirl

The fig is downright verdant.