Woodland Violets February 4, 2017

My sweet little woodland violets are blooming.  Their foliage is a little freeze-burned from the three days of freezing weather we had a couple of weeks ago, but they are in bloom right in the middle of winter.

Weekend at the Farm February 2 - 4, 2018

This is one of my camellias. The blooms look pretty good considering we just came out of a three-day freeze.  The blooms and buds on my other camellias all died.  I don't know the name of this variety unfortunately.  I bought it long before I began to record the names of my plant varieties.  I moved it from my Houston house when I lived on Adkins Forest.  It was a sad little branch when I moved it.  Now it is healthy, large, and green.  It seems to love it in the Shade Garden where I planted it.

February 2nd was Bert and my 18 year anniversary.  We helped Mom and Dad with some of their move into their new place on Friday.  Arrived at the farm on Friday evening.

• Saturday morning I met up with a group of folks at Amy Thomeson's house to go on some site visits to small restoration projects like mine (in fact, our house was one of the visits).  We started at Amy's property where she gave us a talk about various topics related to doing a restoration ( herbicides, invasives, tools, the history and use of her property, etc.).  We walked her property and she identified grasses - both natives and non-natives, and also invasives.  Next we drove to my place just down the road and walked my small prairie restoration project.  I am just beginning, so I didn't have much to show, it was more a discussion of my vision for the area.  The last house on the tour belonged to Polly and Joe.  They have 40 acres, and their place is very impressive, all converted to grasslands.  They are having a lot of trouble with KR Bluestem which is, apparently, a scourge.  You can't burn it because it thrives after controlled burns.  Quail can't move through it, and it crowds out everything.  We talked a lot about the methods for eradicating it.  It was very cold and rainy, so I was glad to get home in front of the fire!
• When I got home I loaded the cadet with mulch and spread a load in the large bed behind the house.  
• I loaded the cadet with mulch again and decided to mulch the asparagus beds.  I cut back all the dead vegetation, I spread fertilizer (asparagus needs fertilizer all the time, winter and summer), and then I mulched the beds.
• I raked all the leaves out of the Vegetable Garden and did some weeding and general clean-up.
• I used the rest of the second load of mulch in the big bed, one more load ought to do it.
• I pulled out the ladder to tie back my Climbing Pinkie on its support.  Two large canes have been chewed off right at the base.  Mice?  Voles?  Not sure, but it took about 20 minutes to cut the dead canes away from the support (which is a conveyor belt that we set upright in some concrete) because they were wound all through it. 
• Pulled weeds in the Orchard and the Star Garden.  
• Sunday morning I started right out sowing the seed that Amy gave me on Saturday.  She gave me two plastic grocery sacks, one was full of little blue stem and various grasses from a relic grassland and the other was full of Indian blanket flower. I used the last of my native grass bales and surrounded my seed areas with the hay.  My purpose was to mulch around my seeds, try to keep the crab grass from encroaching and basically to help me identify the areas that I want to keep weed-free.  All of that took about three hours.  Then I remembered that I had several sacks full of seed that Amy and I collected last fall.  I had a sack of silver bluestem, and sack of mixed wildflowers - Illinois bundleflower, an annual sunflower, horsemint, and a native rye grass.  I scraped the soil and ground it into the soil.
• I loaded the cadet with mulch twice and finished mulching the big bed in the back.  Yay!  That took a lot of effort.  
• Bert helped me tie up canes of my Peggy Martin rose onto the chain we have it trained on.
• I raked the entire Rose Garden and dumped wheelbarrows of leaves in the edges of the Star Garden and the area adjacent to the Long Border.  I don't garden those areas, I keep them well mulched with leaves to keep the weeds from growing.  It works very well.
• Watered in the Rose Garden. 
• We stayed Sunday night and watched the Superbowl.

Weekend at the Farm January 6 - 7, 2018

Winter in the Star Garden.

Last week was very cold, but it's starting to warm up a bit this weekend with highs in the 50s.

• Saturday morning I loaded the cadet twice with mulch from the load Bluebonnet Electric dumped outside the fence to our place.  It's not great mulch, full of sticks, etc, but it's finally starting to rot a little.  I mulched my large bed in the back yard.  I don't really try to grow anything in that bed - I have a few bluebells and columbines, and last fall I planted some Lycoris bulbs that I dug up from a crowded bed in the driveway circle.   
• I cleaned out the Rose Edge Border which is mostly wild with Brown Eyed Susans, Mexican Sunflowers and a few daffodils.  I cut all the Mexican Sunflower seed heads off and threw them in the bed.  There wasn't much to do there so it didn't take long.
• Watered in the Rose Garden and ran the sprinkler system.
• Spread Butter Pat mum seeds in various places throughout the Rose Garden and a few in the Star Garden near the La Marne roses and in the Orchard next to the Satsuma.  If they sprout I will soon get a good fall showing of the pretty yellow flowers, time will tell.
• I pulled the frost cover off my Lider #9 Satsuma.  It won't get much below freezing next week, and if it does I imagine it will only be a quick dip below freezing.  Satsumas can take some cold, so it should be fine.
• I transplanted my Gruss an Aachen rose from the Star Garden (where it was being smothered to death) to the Rose Garden.  Mulched around it, pulled up coreopsis that would eventually crowed it.  I have one more rose to move this winter - a Cadenza seedling that sprung up near the mother shrub.
• Turned over the compost pile.
• Sunday, did lots of little odd jobs.
• I raked part of the Star Garden and dumped the leaves behind the Vegetable Garden to make a new compost pile.
• Did some more watering in the Rose Garden.
• I moved four big Ox Eye Daisy clumps that I have let alone for a couple of years, but they are totally in the way sitting right in the big fat middle of a path.  I moved two to the La Marne bed in the Star Garden and two to the Long Border.
• I raked the path adjacent to the Long Border.
• Transplanted two more clumps of Ox Eye Daisies from the Star Garden paths over to the Long Border.  
• More raking.

Progress On My Small Acreage Prairie Restoration December 17, 2017

A lot has happened since the first post I did several months ago all excited about the dozen or so species popping up in my freshly bulldozed acreage. 
We cleared the land some time in late May / early June.  Not good timing, but one does these things when the people are available to do the work. 
Immediately, crab grass began growing.  I was uncertain what to do about that - was crab grass better than nothing in terms of protecting the soil from the sun burning up all the microbial activity?  I ended up doing nothing.  The crab grass seeded and there you go, billions of crab grass seeds were released. In hind sight, it seems obvious that I should have at least mowed the area to keep the crab grass seed from maturing and setting seed.  But the other thing that was going on was that 1) it was 100 degrees outside and I was not real anxious to go outside and walk around and think about next steps that involved a lot of work in 100 degree weather and 2) I was reluctant to mow down the native plants that were taking root.  I had hoped that I was going to see growth from a seed bank that held billions of native seeds resting in the soil just waiting for sun and space.  But no, crab grass.
The next thing we did is mow the top half of the clearing and spread two round bales of native grass hay across the area.  This was an effort to stifle crab grass growth, compost the soil, and mulch the soil.  By this time we were coming in to fall, in fact this was around the end of October. 
November passed with little activity beyond me spreading hay over the top half of the clearing  over a couple of weekends.  After the hay was spread, about two weeks after that, I raked away the hay forming circles of space, and I seeded the areas with Tickseed and Standing Cypress. I did this in maybe ten spots in the top half of the cleared area.  The seedlings have taken off - the weather has been very cooperative.  I did not seed the lower areas for several reasons.  We had those massive rains with Hurricane Harvey, and all the seeds that I spread in early fall (resulting from seed-gathering forays with Amy) were surely washed down the hill  (I expect to see some interesting growth in the spring (if the crab grass doesn't stifle it) due to seeds pouring downhill) and also because - one thing at a time!  I can't take on all these challenges at once.  After all, I have about 2 acres of gardens I'm already contending with.
During December I dug up bunch-grass plugs from around the property and transplanted them into the clearing.  Most of my efforts were in digging up what I believe are Little (big?) Blue Stem plugs.  So far I have dug up 42 plugs of native grasses.  I think most of them are Blue Stem, but there are other varieties as well.  All of them send up tall seed heads (some of the grasses I found on the property have adorable seed heads - real treasures).  They should be very pretty, they are certainly pretty when I drive around the place and look at them.  I think I will have better luck with the grasses taking off if they are moved in the winter while they are dormant.
I plan to try seeding grasses in the spring as well, but this winter effort is just to sort of get me going and get something established. So, when I plant these plugs, I am raking away the hay that I spread as mulch and compost, digging holes and planting my plugs.  Then I sort of "scooch" the hay back around them to protect them from drying out and also so that the hay can continue to decompose and fertilize.
I transplanted some verbena plugs from the back part of the property over to the clearing, I did that today, actually.  This is perennial evergreen native verbena. I have a lot of it in the back of the property.  I transplanted five plugs.  Hopefully it will thrive.  I'd love for it to take hold here.
I see a lot of mature tickseed in the clearing.  This is not from my seeding efforts, this is from the bull dozer work.  It's fairly near the Vegetable Garden, so clearly it is resulting from my throwing seed heads in the compost pile and then the bull dozer dragging it across the area immediately adjacent to the Vegetable Garden.  Whatever works!  I'll get some pretty flowers in the late spring from that.
One thing I really need to do is walk around and pick up all the patty squash lying on the ground.  That's another thing the dozer work did - spread squash seed all over the place.  I had 50 or so squash plants pop up after the dozer work.  The plants have since died off but the patty squash they produced are lying all over the ground near the Vegetable Garden.  I don't want them to re-seed again next spring.  I need to gather them up and throw them in the fire!
So, there we are with the state of things in my small acre prairie. 
 

Weekend at the Farm December 15 - 17, 2017

This is White By The Gate Camellia.  The whitest of the white camellias.

The company gave us Friday off in preparation for driving to Marble Falls for our 2 day marathon Christmas party.  Bert and I drove to the farm to spend the night on Thursday.  Bert took the dogs in to Brenham for boarding on Friday morning.  We drove to Horseshoe Bay on Friday afternoon and returned to the farm on Sunday morning.

• Friday morning I watered in the Rose Garden.  I have all the water turned off at the source because in cold weather sometimes the timers will pop off and the water will just run until we discover the problem.
• I cut several castor bean plants down to the ground level that had flopped over due to the cold.
• Bert spotted some horse droppings on the trail that the neighbors' horses had left behind.  We drove around, and I collected them and mulched the roses in the Orchard.
• I plucked lots of seed heads off my Fireworks Gomphrena and spread them around in the Orchard and Star Garden.
• Cut the drying, seed-loaded branches off my Swamp Sunflower in the Orchard and threw them in the soggy part of the meadow.  Maybe some seed will take root. 
• Bathed poor Buddy before Bert took them to the vet to board them.
• Cleaned toilets and sinks.
• On Sunday when we returned, the first thing I did was drive around the farm and dig up grasses.  I planted 10 grass plugs in my meadow, and I also planted 4 plugs of the wild perennial verbena that grows on the far side of our property.  If that would take off here in the meadow, I would be very pleased.
• I spent an hour or so raking up pine needles in various places on the property where pine trees grow, loading them on the cadet (two big truckloads) and mulching the Bulb Bed.  The Bulb Bed backs up to the shed.  My Pearlbush and a Spicebush grow in that bed , the rest of the bed is covered in pink rain lilies, a few amaryllis, some iris, and those little red flowered bulbs that I can never remember the name of.  It can get a little weedy.  I didn't bother to weave the pine needles through the green growth of the bulbs, I just piled it on top.
• Made a stew to contribute to the Christmas family gatherings.
• Drove in to work on Monday morning.

Day at the Farm December 10, 2017

Saturday I babysat Koy and Cleo at my house so that Josh and Amy could get ready for Lights in the Heights.  Saturday night, party at Josh and Amy's.  Sunday Bert and I drove separately to the farm, and I drove in to work on Monday morning.

• There was clearly a freeze sometime last week although it was more like a dip below freezing and back up because not everything was lost to the freeze, only plants here and there.
• There are three roses that I want to move this winter.  They are not in good places, either too crowded or not enough sun.  I moved the first of the  three roses on Sunday - Martha's Vineyard.  I dug it up out of the shady part of the Long Border and moved it to the spot where Iceberg used to be.  I think I pulled a muscle in my back when I did it, it was a pretty big transplant, and my back is sore today.  Pulled up lots of Coreopsis growing in that space and moved two large plugs of it to the front bed leading into the Rose Garden, the rest I just yanked up. Spread mulch around the rose.
• I cut seeds off one of my white Philippine Violets and threw them on the ground in the Medicine Garden.  Maybe I'll get some seedlings in the spring.
• I cut the tops off my Hojo Santo and threw them in the compost pile.  Hojo Santo makes excellent greens in the compost.  Huge leaves. They were freeze damaged, but no need to let them wither on the plant when they can be of good use in the compost pile.  They say you should not cut back the dead vegetation on plants because it provides them with protection all winter.  But Hojo Santo is so invasive that I don't care to do anything that will help it along.
• I pulled lots of seed heads off my Fireworks Gomphrena and threw them down in the Star Garden and the Orchard.
• Deadheaded roses.  I probably should have left them alone so the hips could turn red, but I didn't. 
• Cut away some gingers that had flopped over on top of my Nikko Blue Hydrangeas.  Threw them in the compost pile.
• Pulled up freeze damaged Mexican Sunflowers in the Rose Garden.  Threw them in the wild area in front of the Rose Garden.  I'll deadhead them later.
• I dug up 12 more large plugs of native grasses and planted them in 4 spots in my meadow.  That's 32 grasses so far that I have dug up from around the property and planted in my meadow.
• Sunday night I came down with a stomach bug, and I was awake all night throwing up.  Yuck, miserable.  Slept in for an extra hour or so and drove in to Houston to work. 

Mexican Sunflower November 25, 2017

Mexican Sunflower is still blooming its heart out in the Star Garden, the Rose Garden, the Meadow, and the Vegetable Garden.  Today I saw one blooming in the woods far from everywhere.