Garden Girl

Jun908sunflowers 003.jpg, originally uploaded by TheHerbGirl.

Jun908sunflowers 001.jpg, originally uploaded by TheHerbGirl.

The houses on the street behind ours’ have fenced in postage stamp yards. And their whole neighborhood has a perimeter fence around it. So does our park.
That’s a lot of fences.
Between the fences, do you know what I found thriving?
Beauty.
Bugs.
Brush.
Sunflowers.

Today we get some much needed rain, but yesterday was no wet & all whoosh. 40 mile an hour winds across our little patch of prairie– tugging hard at my cowboy hat (firmly tied under my chin) while Mr. Garden Girl & I went for an afternoon walk.

When the left over tortillas pile up enough in the fridge, we know it’s time to go feed the lone duck in the park near our home.
That duck is a survivor, so a neighbor confided in us.
The coyotes have snatched every other duck in the pond, and I feel a bit sorry for the remaining little dude (birds are very social & it must be hard for him without company save for the occasional egret), but he seems well fed and he recognizes us from yards away & comes waddling up to greet us whenever we visit.
That’s one reason I love walking in my neighborhood. Here are some others:
Purple martins whip under the gusty winds, passing within feet of us, up & down the street, hunting bugs ferociously fast.
Two kids hang out in a tree talking. The kids in our neighborhood laugh & play in the streets & throw balls in the drainage fields & climb trees. I think the free range kid movement is a great idea, but it’s never been lost from a lot of working class Austin neighborhoods. Here, it’s just taken for granted. Kids being kids.
My neighbors’ happily chaotic gardens– a crazy mix of natives, tomato plants, & traditional flower beds all thrown together in a gleeful hodge podge. Ours’ is one of the few homes in the park with a front yard & back yard. Most people just have little slivers of growing space or a few feet of yardlette, but most everyone grows something– even if it’s in pots on their decks.
I really wish I could take pics to show you how crazy creative some of these small gardens on a budget are, I admire them so, but it seems like an invasion of privacy to snap someone’s garden without asking, so I won’t.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

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.

Monsanto Invents the Pig » Celsias

If you haven’t already started a tool pool in your neighborhood, there are some online sites to help you rent and share your stuff (think freecycling, but you get your stuff back ). I’m definitely putting a few things up on the loanables.com site, which has a good number of members in Austin. More info here:

Rent / borrow stuff from your neighbors and save money! - Loanables

& speaking of Austin & surrounding neighborhoods, Mr. Garden Girl and I just beat the rain when we were biking home from the Pflugerville Farmers Market this Tues., but it was well worth it to score some organic black bubble tea from the owner of the Formosa Tea House & to share a rose cupcake & a rootbeer cupcake from The Happy Vegan Baker under a tree while listening to live music.

Here’s just some of the vendors at the market:

http://www.pflugervillefarmersmarket.com/vendor_list.html

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May2408bug 004.jpg, originally uploaded by TheHerbGirl.

in my front yard this AM.
This guy was 3 inches, at least. No lie.
I have a horror of huge bugs– so much so that when I had to do a bug collection for 2nd grade science & my father found a grasshopper in our garage, he had to threaten to put my hamster in the trash before I would go try to capture the grasshopper (with my eyes tight shut & shrieking the whole time).
So, anyone who knows– what is this dude? Cicada? Locust? OMGWTF bug? Anyone know? (More pics of him at my flickr, just clickie the pic).

& thanks to Mr. Garden Girl for the macro shots of Herr Bug’s stunning coloring!

Everything looks better when your head’s in the sand: The USDA stops tracking pesticide use