Landscaping made easy, Part 15: Even more edible landscaping

After seeing several recent news stories about local blackberry growers, I decided I had to take the plunge and try some for us.  But as with my other suburban planting efforts, it can't just be about gardening - our back yard is so small that we do a lot of food-gardening-as-landscaping, as this series of photos will show.

This Meyer lemon tree (shown in this 2013 pic as a newborn) had grown to the point where it was too large for this space, so this became one of my intended blackberry locations.

See this post for further information on culvert gardening.  

I moved the Meyer and began work on rejiggering this space with a blackberry trellis.  Mind you, it's mid-summer in Houston Texas.  My photos are going to look unfinished because most of the heavy lifting will need to wait until the average temperatures are about 30 degrees lower than what they are right now.  The main thing I needed to accomplish in the short term was to get the Meyer moved and the blackberry bushes into the ground.  

I used two simple $20 redwood trellises - not very fancy but this is my first trellising effort and I wanted to start small.  Annoyingly, I cannot find this exact model on the Home Depot website, but it's similar to this one (except the two I bought are wider).  I fastened them to the fence using three-quarter-inch metal brackets of the type that are available in the plumbing department.   

You can see from the photos above that the soil in this location is very light-colored, suggesting that it's not very high in organic matter (like most greater Houston soils, it's largely clay).  For this reason, I did one of my periodic compost excavations in order to retrieve enough material to amend it.  This pic shows the wheelbarrow loaded with newly-dug compost.  

And this is what my Earth Machine looked like after I had removed the composted material from the bottom of it.  THere is now room to make more as the cycle of decomposition and growth continues.  You can read more about the Earth Machine in this recent post.  

Here is the hole that I dug (did I mention that it's really bloody hot outside right now?!) and some home-made compost in the bottom of it for color comparison.  Very different composition, eh?  Where gardening and landscaping are concerned, the general rule of thumb on soil fertility is as follows:  Light-colored is bad.  Dark-colored is good.  

For a planting like this, the trick is to make the hole about 1.5 times wider and deeper than the plant that is going into the ground, and then blend the native soil and the amendments together to fill the extra space (as well as using my own compost, I also augmented with Microlife fertilizer).  You want to go to this hole-widening trouble in order to give your new plant a leg-up, a head start on growing where you've placed it, but you don't want to go so far as to create special soil conditions for the plant that you can't possibly sustain over the long term.  The initial boost helps the plant to get established in imperfect soils.   

I chose to try Rosborough blackberries (that's a PDF link), which is a line developed by Texas A&M and released in 1977.  I got the plants from Faith's Garden Shed Naturally which sells out of the Clear Lake Shores Farmers Market.

BTW, mini-blind slats can be recycled to make really good plant markers.  They take both marker and pencil very well.  

First blackberry coming out of its nursery container.  Loosen up the roots of newly-purchased plants a bit before placing them in the ground, so that the new roots will not continue to grow in a bound-up state.  

Here it is placed in the hole for sizing purposes.  The hole needs to be wider than the new plant, but it's important not to bury the top of the plant because the root ball needs to breathe.

This is a thorny bramble (ouch!) and so I plan to train it rigorously to go straight up the trellis rather than outward.  Vertical plantings are a good idea for any back yard that is lacking in space.  

Whew - one down, one to go.  I'll fix the landscape bed's rock edging in October maybe (did I mention that it's hot out right now?).  

This was my second chosen location, next to one of my large garden mirrors (they are made from recycled bathroom sheet mirrors that were taken out during someone's home remodeling and then sold to me during a garage sale).  Part of the point from a design perspective was to break up the continuous unbroken line of the fence by using staggered heights.  

The second blackberry was installed much as the first, and now we'll see what time and cooler temps will bring.  

Landscaping made easy, Part 14: How to make a small yard feel larger

Answer:  This can be achieved by intentionally harmonizing the plantings in your yard with those plantings that are outside of your property boundaries, such that the result appears as a single integrated scene which draws the eye into the distance.

Case in point - our rear fenceline.  We stained our fence dark three years ago (still looks great, doesn't it?) so that it recedes and appears unobtrusive.  Furthermore, this group of plantings was intentionally designed to go together, as I will show.  

This is what I mean by "go together".  Notice how the progression of heights has been engineered to transition smoothly from inside the yard to outside of the yard.  From lowest to highest, vegetation heights 1, 2, and 5 are on my property.  Heights 3 and 4 are in the common area behind my property, but because of this cohesive visual progression, all of this vegetation actually feels like it's "mine", and therefore this back yard feels more expansive than the paltry 23 feet (!!) of depth that we have here.   

Think about it.  A twenty-three-foot backyard depth could be downright oppressive, like some kind of a prison yard, if it were not designed correctly.  Twenty-three feet is less than the depth of the great room in our house, for crying out loud (and we have a small house by Houston standards).  But with an optimized landscaping layout, that depth actually feels pretty good, especially with three different colors of crape myrtle flowers.  There's a lot of good stuff happening here, and that distracts from the physical limitations of the space.  God bless Houston in the summertime - it may be hotter than the southern hinges of hell, but what a riot of amazing subtropical vegetation this place is capable of sustaining with very little effort on our parts.

So there is my advice as to how to put lipstick on that particular landscaping pig.  If you are adjacent to an open space or common area, evaluate how you might tie your landscaping in with whatever is existing behind you or beside you.  If you back to a neighbor, look at what they have installed and perhaps even collaborate with them on how you can make your respective small spaces feel larger through coordinated strategic planting on both of your parts.  Trust me - it will do your property values a world of good.

Don't read it and weep - instead, weed it and reap.  Most back yards in our subdivision are very small, with houses pushed close to the rear fenceline.  But that doesn't mean that those spaces can't be beautiful and expansive-feeling via the clever use of landscaping.

Screengrabbed from Google.  

Landscaping made easy, Part 13: Crape and wax myrtles revisited

This scene from Landscaping made easy, Part 5:  Crape myrtle (unmurdered) has probably been Pinterested and shared more than any other pic I've ever published.  And I don't even really like it, but apparently a lot of other folks do.

Our rear fenceline a few years ago:  That's a crape myrtle in the middle flanked by wax myrtles on either side, with a small sage and two loropetalums in the foreground.

See this 2011 post for information on fence staining.  

In that "unmurdered" post, I encouraged folks not to "knuckle" (over-prune) their crape myrtles.  Houston landscape specialist Randy Lemmon's "Annual Crape Myrtle Massacre" speech remains the gold standard where that kind of advice is concerned.

Fast forward two years and my evidence for the non-murdering approach becomes even more compelling (I think):

Notice the shape contrast between my white crape myrtle in the foreground and common-area purple and pink crapes in the background, beyond my fence.  Mine has an over-spilling, softly cascading type of shape whereas those in the background show the "feather duster" habit in which the flowering branches stick straight up and out, the form which is so characteristic of over-pruning.  

If all of these crapes in this extended view had been similarly knuckled, the entire assemblage of new leafy growth would stick straight up.  There would be no softening element - it would look too harsh.  My crape myrtle is in harmony with the others in simply being a crape myrtle.  But it's free-form, over-spilling structure lends a more flowing energy that otherwise wouldn't be here.

You'll notice another change relative to my 2012 pictures.

I dropped the height of our wax myrtles by a good three feet because I no longer need them to provide visual privacy.  Time marches on and our subdivision is growing up - literally.  The trees and shrubs in the green space behind our property have now increased in size to the point where I can maintain our wax myrtles as a more conventional hedge rather than as a collection of towering bushes.  That was my original plan several years ago when we first installed them - they were specifically intended to remain responsive to the changing conditions that we anticipated were going to occur beyond our own fenceline.  As I said in Landscaping made easy:  Part 1, that's the beauty of wax myrtles - you can do whatever you want with them at whatever time.  They can be pruned any which way and they will usually thrive, because they are especially versatile that way.

Landscaping made easy, Part 12: Incorporating planters

I take the idea of incorporating "large planters" to an extreme in our landscape plan, using stock tanks for vegetable gardening in our tiny subdivision back yard.

One of my favorite stock tank pics from 2011 before we stained our fence and incorporated stone edging around the mulch beds.    

But this is not a landscaping aspect where you need to "go big or go home".  Smaller planters of the type that are found in any home improvement store make wonderful additions to the landscape, especially when grouped together.

Here is an example.  To the left of this waterscape are hibiscus, asparagus fern, and a strawberry cultivar spilling out of that pot in the foreground.

See this post for information on constructing the waterscape, which includes the basalt fountain visible in this photo and a kettle pond to the right of this photo.  

You can see that this available space would be too small to hold multiple in-ground plantings.  Furthermore, from an artistic standpoint, a couple of rounded containers are helpful in softening the hard stone edges of the house corner and waterscape.  

Here are a couple of things to keep in mind from a design perspective when arranging a planter configuration:

1. Remember the rule of cross-referencing (repetition of elements).  In the example shown above, there's stone in the waterscape and also stone "mulch" surrounding the planters.  The color of the fountain is very close to the color of the strawberry pot, which is an ordinary $17 Mexican-style clay vessel from that I got at Home Depot and spray painted with a metallic Rustoleum to make it look more modern.  The form of the large hibiscus flowers is repeated in the art glass flowers in the middle of this grouping.   
2. Plants in close proximity look best if they incorporate extremities of color and texture because otherwise, they blend together and don't look distinctive.  In the grouping above, you see a strawberry plant sending runners over the side of the pot, an upright, dark-leaf'd hibiscus with bright red flowers, and a light green airy asparagus fern with tiny white flowers.  Furthermore, there's an extremely tall bamboo in the background.  These plants could scarcely be any more diverse.  
3. Particularly in greater Houston where the land is flatter than a pancake, the attractiveness of any given grouping is maximized when the heights of the plants are staggered.

It creates interest because your eye moves from one level to the next.  And again the cross-referencing - the staggered heights of the plants repeat the staggered height of the chopped stone in the waterscape.  

There's another advantage to using pots.

Keeping plants within pots initially can help you to determine if they are going to do well in your chosen locations.  This hibiscus is really too large for a pot like this, but with the tall bamboo behind it, I wasn't sure if it would receive enough sunlight to thrive.  But after a month of being plopped in this location, it is still showing good form and good flower production.  Therefore I will go ahead and plant it in the ground here (after our daytime temperatures fall by about 30 degrees, that is).  The other two of this grouping I will retain in planters to maintain the visual interest.  

The only downside to using planters in a landscape setting is the degree to which they dry out in hot weather.  In greater Houston, you're basically on the hook for watering planters daily in the summer months, unless they contain cacti or succulents which can withstand our temperature extremes.  If you don't water daily, your plants simply won't survive.  

But there's always room for hibiscus, isn't there??  Potted or ground-planted, they are worth the maintenance hassle.  Nothing else has quite the same visual impact.  They are relatively hardy and flower readily if they are given proper soil, fertility, sun exposure, and watering.  

  

How to clean a birdbath

The simple delight that they generate is unprecedented.

I have my front-yard birdbath up against my home office window.  The birds can see in, but they are so acclimated to the situation that unless our dog rushes at the window, they don't mind the human and canine proximity.  They come and enjoy, every day at dawn and dusk like clockwork.  

I explained how to attract birds to a birdbath in this post.  If you live in modern suburbia, it's really a no-brainer.  We now engineer subdivisions to drain rainwater so efficiently that a residentially-installed birdbath will often be the only source of standing water for quite some distance.  Birds have little choice but to use them.

WOO-HOO!!   POOL PARTY!! 

These shots were taken from inside my home, through my front window.  Camera info here.  

Other critters will visit the bath as well.  Here a brown anole does his best to look ferocious.  This particular species is invasive on the upper Texas coast, but anoles are generally indispensable in a southern suburban garden because of the number of harmful insects that they eat.  Brown anoles tend to remain close to the ground whereas the green Carolina anole will climb.     

However, if you keep birdbaths on your property, eventually you're going to have to deal with a build-up of algae and lime scale.

My back yard birdbath, looking rather yucky.  I keep an additional bath in our back yard because I find that, on hot days, birds will peck open my tomatoes to get at the water within.  In other words, they aren't so much interested in eating the tomato itself as they are in getting hydration.  Therefore, I offer them this option.  Those are volunteer tomatoes growing to the left of this bath.  

Even if you flush out your birdbath(s) daily with clean hose water, every couple of weeks you're going to have to scrub them to get rid of this gunk.  It's easily done, as this photo sequence shows.

Detach the bowl and set it on the grass.  Use a plastic bristle brush to remove the loose stuff.  

I use ordinary vinegar to remove lime deposits (it's cheap - about two bucks a gallon or less at the grocery store, and you'll only need about a cup for any given birdbath cleaning).  I add a bit of vinegar to the bottom of the bath, swish it around with the brush, let it sit for five or ten minutes, then scrub with the brush again. 

Repeat as many times as needed with new applications of vinegar until all the scale is loosened and/or dissolved.  You can't always see scale when the bowl is wet, but you can feel it with your fingers as you are scrubbing (it feels rough to the touch whereas the cleaned ceramic of the bath will be very smooth).  

Then simply replace the bowl and re-fill until next time.  

And there will be a next time.  

Successful composting in the suburbs, Part 2

I am so sick of seeing the likes of this:

A League City grocery store, pic taken within the past few weeks.  Apples, oranges, squash, tomatoes - you name it, straight into the trash.  It's a twofold atrocity - first the fact that the stuff is wasted by lack of human or animal consumption, and second the fact that the stuff is totally wasted by not composting it.

That is money being thrown into the trash above.  Pure money.  It is organic matter that represents a sequestration of energy, and every form of energy has a price attached to it.  And at long last, people are starting to wake up to the magnitude of that squandered energy and the profit that could instead be made from it.

Economist featured a high-tech solution in this article (may be paywalled depending on who and where you are).  Screengrabbed from Facebook.    

Screengrabbed from a New York Times article published yesterday.  Once again, the aim is to turn the food into compost to be sold, i.e., for money.  

The potential for profit is not just limited to the institutional realm - it can also be realized on a much smaller scale.  In 2012, I published "Successful composting in the suburbs", which showed how I used a crappy five-foot building setback to house my Earth Machine which generates high-quality compost that I'd otherwise be forced to purchase at ten to fifteen bucks a bag.

Here's the picture that tells the thousand words.  There is very little trick to composting, supposing you follow a few simple rules as I described in that post.  You throw pretty much everything non-protein-based and non-fat-based (except St. Augustine clippings) in the top, wait a few months, and then you shovel really good compost out of the trap door in the bottom.  Greater Houston's subtropical climate, with its heat and humidity, is superbly suited to the biological process of composting.

Good compost is extremely expensive to buy, and every homeowner needs it.  Even if you don't grow fruits and vegetables as I do, you will have raised landscape beds somewhere around your suburban dream home.  You won't realize good plant health unless you augment the soil with compost.  Synthetic fertilizers are not capable of adding necessary organic bulk to your poor quality Houston clay gumbo soil.  And mulch alone tends to suck too much nitrogen from the soil as it decomposes.    

As thoroughly disgusted as I am with every useless leaky rain barrel I ever bought, I can't tell you how pleased I've been with the Earth Machine.  The design is really optimal and it has withstood a lot of my abuse (such as me repeatedly hacking away at the inside with a shovel, trying to carve compacted compost out of the interior).

My only problem at this point is that my gardening and landscaping endeavors have expanded to the point where I need at least one more Earth Machine for the volume of organic waste I am generating, and Earth Machines aren't easy to buy.  They are available through Amazon (what isn't?) but as of this writing, the price was four times what municipalities typically charge when they host mass distribution events.

Unfortunately I accidentally missed the last City of Houston distribution event, which reportedly was held in late 2013.  Wildly popular fellow Houstonian Blogspotters Two Men and a Little Farm were wise in purchasing two at one time.  Screengrabbed from one of their posts.  

Of course there are other devices on the market and other ways to compost, but I'm hesitant to mess with success (especially after my rain barrel debacle).  I lined the underside of my Earth machine with metal hardware cloth, which has proven effective in keeping rodents and opossums out of it.  Very often when municipalities do distribution campaigns, they offer both rain barrels and composters...

Old City of Houston announcement, screengrabbed from this site. 

  ...however when the City of League City did its recent campaign, for some reason they chose to distribute rain barrels only.  Maybe next time they'll do both, which would bode well for conservation PR especially given the failure rate of rain barrels versus the near-automatic success of composting.  LC guys, make a note for future reference - the Earth Machine is a good product.  Please choose it for your next campaign.

For those of you who are not familiar with the logistics of composting, typically what happens is that you combine both non-lawn-grass yard waste with kitchen waste.  You can accumulate your kitchen waste in any kind of bug-proof container, but the best option I've ever used is this attractive "cookie jar" type offering from Delafield Pottery, shown here in the center of this countertop grouping.  Every few days, you just walk your kitchen scrap bin out to your composter and dump your fruit and vegetable waste, rinse and repeat.

I designed my kitchen (especially the backsplash) around my existing stoneware collection which was hand made by a very skilled potter named Marilyn Farrell of New Brunswick, Canada - I used to import the stuff and she'd personally pack and ship it to me in big wooden crates.  Unfortunately Ms. Farrell passed away in 2007, and there my collecting ended.   However, Delafield uses a number of glazes which coordinate quite well with my existing collection, as this photo indicates.

Delafield sells out of the Clear Lake Shores Farmers Market and other locations.  Mr. D. has mentioned to me that, when he Googles his own products, my blog posts show up prominently in his search results.
:-) 

Name that popular Centerpointe shrub

Answer:  Vitex.

Quite a stunner, isn't it??  Every year at this time, folks ask me "What IS that?!"  Why it took Vitex so long to become popular in our area, I don't know, because it's a natural choice.  

It's a great plant for the common areas - very hardy and drought-tolerant. Probably not so great for small back yards, though, as it spreads quite wide.  It also tends to droop low over the sidewalks, forcing us dog-walkers to duck, but it's so pretty we can forgive that much.   

Front yard onion harvest

A year ago, I distinguished myself not-in-the-slightest with this post describing the trend toward suburban front yard vegetable gardens.  The movement was well underway by that point, so nothing I was doing was innovative.

The front yard fieldwork begins to look a bit more impressive at the point where food actually starts coming out of it, however.  We are now harvesting the onions that the neighborhood kids and I planted back in November.  

Stereotypical suburbs?  A four-door sedan, a dog, a manicured lawn, a front walkway, and 52 Spanish and Texas 1015 onions completing the Rockwellian scene.  I planted close to 100 but we've been hauling them out of the ground routinely over the past couple of months, using both the immature bulbs and green tops in a variety of dishes, plus we've been giving some of them to neighbors.  So I'm down to probably 65 or 70 for the main bulb harvest.  

Of course, the onions don't get left lying on that manicured lawn - that was just the temporary staging area.

They get set out to dry so that the bulbs will keep.  

I have not yet mastered the art of onion drying.

We do the first phase with the green parts still attached, but some folks cut them off at the outset.  You're really supposed to do a combo sun-drying and longer-term curing phase.  The first year I did this, the onions cured fabulously and kept for about five months.  Last year, they apparently didn't get dry enough and began to rot within a month after harvest.   

We have, however, mastered the art of onion eating.  The onion and squash harvests are happening at the same time, and I've probably harvested 15 pounds of the yellow stuff already this month.  A lot of it is being made into frozen dishes such as this Mexican squash and pork stew, but this simple side dish of fresh sauteed onions and squash also becomes a staple  for us at this time of year.  Onions and garlic in olive oil with a bit of fresh oregano, salt, black pepper, and I like a bit of chili powder also.  

This could be yours with a little front yard frontiersmanship.  

Tomato planting frenzy

Get your tomatoes and other spring vegetables into the ground now.

Tomatoes have a very narrow window of opportunity in our geography - you basically have to get established plants into the ground in the month of March because they cannot tolerate extremes of cold or heat, both of which we tend to have in abundance.

Here is a link to this planting guide PDF.  

I mention tomatoes specifically because they are probably the most popular vegetable.  Even folks who do not garden will grow tomatoes in large pots.

Where possible, I buy my tomato starts from Farmers Market vendors, but they often don't have as much stock or selection as my hands-down favorite vendor:

Maas Nursery in Seabrook.  This is one row of tomato hybrids and heirlooms, as it looked yesterday...

This is another row of tomatoes...

...and this is yet another row of tomatoes.  The selection is unparalleled.  

Even with all those tomatoes for sale, Maas will often sell out. Last year, I was too late to the party, and I wasn't able to buy grape or cherry tomatoes, which are the only kinds we grow.

The stock sells rapidly.  This is what the Maas check-out lines looked like on Saturday around 11 a.m.  There's a time-compressed buying frenzy this year in particular because the winter was so cold, which means folks are now playing catch-up.

Do you see at photo center that there's a shopper wearing a goose down winter jacket?  In Houston, in the middle of March!  It was about 65 degrees outside when this pic was taken, but by this point in our unusually cold winter/spring, bundling up has become force of habit for many folks.

A long line at Maas is not necessarily a bad thing.  It's not a lower-end retail destination, so there are always plenty of hyper-educated and interesting people to talk to as you wait.  

Given my failure to get to the stores on time last year, we did harvest probably five to ten pounds of tomatoes, but they all came from volunteers that had sprouted up randomly in our yard because I compost most of my organic waste, including expired tomato plants.

We grow the miniature varieties exclusively because we place them whole in gallon-sized freezer bags - no blanching, no work, no hassle factor.  And then I use them in dishes that I prepare for months afterward.

This is all we have left from our last harvest, which ended in June of 2013.  Eight or nine months is really too long to keep frozen vegetables, but these guys actually still taste very good.  This last bit of frozen tomato dregs will probably go into a near-future omelette.  

Volunteer tomatoes still taste really good, but the plants are not as prolific and the tomatoes are not as sweet as the pure hybrids.

This year, there will be little if any harvest from volunteers.  Most of the tomato plants I bought at Maas were the Sweet Million variety, which I chose on the advice of a couple of local Master Gardeners.

This is one of the two oblong stock tanks into which we usually put our tomatoes.  About a year ago, I wrote a post called "Landscaping around utility boxes and lines" which describes the development of this encumbered space (that's a utility box sandwiched between the tank and the concealing hedge of POH Yaupon).  It has become one of this blog's most popular posts, with thousands of hits.   

Despite the rain we've had this weekend, I managed to get some other vegetable starts into the ground as well.

This is what one of the existing larger stock tanks looks like with winter garden plants still going strong.  It is overrun with Swiss chard, celery, dill, bunching onions (which are obviously taking over the place), bulbing onions, carrots, and some gratuitous weeds.  

In sharp stage-of-growth contrast, here is that tank's spring garden mate.  I use the rocks to suppress weeds and slow evaporation.  Because the stock tanks are elevated, they tend to get warmer during the day, increasing evaporation.  

Happy planting, and welcome to spring.  I think it might be here, finally.  Maybe.

Our tomato count from the 2012 growing season.  Yes, I was nerdy enough to jot down each day's harvest.