I regret not having the time to do a better job of this investigation, but I was already late to a business meeting this afternoon when I happened to catch sight of this sign out of the corner of my eye:
A brand spankin' new temporary vinyl sign tacked to some oriented strand board. But Clear Lake it ain't - those are Dow Chemical's frac columns visible in the background.
This is the establishment to which the sign belonged, at 103 W. Plantation Drive in Clute, at the corner of Plantation and Main, essentially, near where El Torro (never been there) and Brian's BBQ (it's excellent!!) are also located.
The reason why this might be noteworthy is as follows. If you remember back to March of this year, I wrote a post titled "Tragedy on El Dorado Boulevard".
And by tragedy, I wasn't referring to the loss of the sign, but rather the well-known eatery (Korean BBQ) that went with it.
At the time, Houston food critic Alison Cook had a Twitter thread going which included the following comment:
Clute... Freeport... it's all the same to just about everyone who doesn't live there.
How many Korean restaurants could there possibly be in that area? A Korean restaurant named alternately "Seafood Joy" and "Seafood by Joy" has been at this address for a few years now, but look at this yelp I found while trolling for information on it.
They reportedly shut down for a few months and then re-opened, which is strongly suggestive of a change of ownership or operatorship.
I had time to stop in just very briefly. I asked an Asian gentleman behind the counter, "Is it Mia?" referring to the former proprietor of the El Dorado location. He said little, but gave me a knowing smile. I continued, "From Clear Lake?" An even wider knowing smile.
He gave me a copy of the lunch menu to take with me, and it was also brand spankin' new, just like the vinyl sign outside. Note the all-important Bi Bim Bap. It's very different from this previous published menu for the place.
I told the man that I would return as soon possible to have a meal there, so that I can confirm or deny whether the food is as heavenly as it was at the El Dorado location. The only question at this point is, will @AlisonCook beat me to it?
In Part 1 of this series, I described a singleton culvert installation that I'm using to develop the root ball of a Meyer lemon tree.
In Part 2, I showed a triple culvert combo I'm using to contain the specialized conditions needed to cultivate (yum!) blueberries, which cannot grow in unmodified greater Houston soils.
Photo taken before the vegetables were removed and blueberries installed.
Part 3 is also a triple combo, but rather than a clustered staggering of height, it's the equal-height linear array that the useable space called for:
Organic herbs elevated above both drainage and dog poop.
You can see the obvious difficulty - talk about sub-standard real estate. I have long bemoaned the microscopic size of our back yard and the restrictions it places on my gardening efforts - I need every inch I can get, and I don't have that many inches to work with. But as they say, necessity is the mother of invention, and nowhere has that been more true than in this location. I literally had only two feet of width available, because there's only a five-foot set-back between the fence (and property line) and our eastern patio slab.
This area next to the fence is also the principal drainage swale for our property. During heavy rains, it will temporarily submerge beneath six or eight inches of water. Even if I had wanted to plant anything edible on grade here, it would never survive.
Here's a view through the fence gate during construction. Those concrete pavers were just thrown down semi-randomly as a temporary measure. I wanted to get the landscaping finished in this area before deciding what kind of walkway to put here. Retaining three feet of clearance is just enough to squeeze lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, trash carts, and other equipment through this corridor. Oh, for just another five feet of yard width...
The build sequence was similar to what I showed in the first two culvert posts.
Equal heights were important for visual cohesion in this case. I basically ripped out sod and leveled the three of them.
I knew I'd be infilling the base with bull rock, which looks nice and also helps to move the stream of storm water efficiently through the area. Landscape fabric beneath the rock helps to minimize weeds.
The quality of the soil will impact how tasty the herbs are. I did a blend of stock soil (poor quality), composted manure, Microlife natural fertilizer (a Houston company), and...
Once again, I liberated long-suffering plants trapped in substandard pots, including this small root-bound bay tree.
The current array of herbs. Yes, there are a few insect holes chewed in the sage, but that's to be expected with organic growing. You sacrifice a bit of yield in exchange for no chemical residues and far better taste.
As with other types of elevated gardens in our subtropical area, the main thing to keep in mind is that evaporation losses will be higher than for plantings on grade. Raised gardens of all types need to be watered frequently and consistently because they dry out more quickly during our mean season (summer).
As with the other culvert gardens, the cost of this installation was minimal, perhaps $30, which is low mainly because I rescued the culvert scraps from a disposal site and thus did not have to pay for them. The bull rock was only $0.06 per pound at Wayne's Landscaping on Dixie Farm Road, and the rest of the expense came in the form of plants, soil, and amendments.
We haven't yet decided how to best upgrade this paver path into something more permanent. Our residential gas line runs under this area, so we're hesitant to add a permanent cover. More on that in a future post.
I didn't curate my two (count 'em) pepper plants properly this summer and as a result, yields were reduced. However, hatch peppers (Anaheims) grow so prolifically in this climate that even a half-tended plant will produce at least three dozen peppers. Yes, you heard correctly: three dozen per one plant.
The question with these vegetables is as before: growing them is only half the battle. What do you do with a bunch of them after harvesting?
Do we want to eat those all at once? No. BTW, I don't advise letting Anaheims remain on the plant long enough to turn red. The skin gets too tough.
My favorite thing to do is roast them on the BBQ and then...
Strip the skins (which will come off very easy after roasting) and most of the seeds (I got lazy here and left some in), chop, and freeze them in small batches for use in future omelettes and tofu dishes.
My bell peppers were similarly neglected.
They were shaded by one okra plant and turned out healthy but small. This is about half the yield from that one plant. One of these summers, I'm going to get around to doing this pepper growing thing right, with more plants and better spacing.
I chopped these guys and added them to a big batch of spaghetti sauce made for the freezer.
Here's a clearer picture of it - wow, the energy!! Many different artisans produce some variant on the end-grain cutting board theme, but Larchwood Enterprises does it best, IMNSHO. When we got this one several years ago, my husband did not want us to use it - he wanted to hang it on the wall as a piece of art. I dragged it back to Houston on an airplane flight from far, far away, but I actually saw one of them for sale at Williams-Sonoma in Baybrook Mall earlier this year.
I've also grown jalapeno peppers in previous years, and they grow in our summer climate without any attention whatsoever. However, I haven't found an efficient way of "putting them up", as Texans say. Do I cook them, freeze them, what?? I have to have some way of efficiently incorporating each micro-crop into our diet, preferably by freezing with or without incorporation into a prepared meal, or else it's not worth the trouble to grow them. Maybe someday I'll figure that one out. Until then, it's bell peppers and Anaheims.
Just a wee one hunkering down trying to avoid his Kodak moment. Virginia opossum.
I knew I'd find him sooner or later. The enthusiastically-dug hole at the base of our outdoor shed was a dead giveaway that we had increased our homestead head count. Fortunately, I got to him before our dog did.
"YYYYIKES!! I'M FLYING!!"
See all the wildlife warnings in the turtle rescue post. Opossums are not known to carry transmissible zoonotic diseases, but they are well-supplied with teeth and claws. Note the firm grasp of the neck to immobilize the business end of the critter.
I bet this bucket wasn't on his bucket list. He got a send-off with a strawberry but wasn't interested in eating it. I took him over to the open fields surrounding the stormwater retention ponds where hopefully he will be able to develop a prosperous future for himself.
The content below may not load properly on the mobile devices which are increasingly used to access this blog, but remember Centerpointethemovie, which I published about a year and a half ago? My husband put it together by image-processing low-altitude aerial photographs, and it shows the progressive build-out of the eastern section of our subdivision over a ten-year period (linked through to this Youtube):
I had to refer back to that in order to launch off a Houston Chronicle piece which, in turn, references an entry by The Atlantic in which some guy imagines that maybe he has done something original and meaningful by creating the same type of image progression, only his version encompasses greater Houston in its entirety:
Oh ye of little technical skill: I can't seem to embed the thing in a frame, so this is the GIF image courtesy of The Atlantic. The little smudge represented by Centerpointethemovie is somewhere in the lower right hand corner.
What's striking about this effort is not the content but the judgments rendered in conjunction with it. The author deems this visible build-out to be "devastating" and likens the resulting image impression to the growth of "slime mold".
Devastating in what specific ways? Devastating to what, exactly? Where is the substantiation? Most importantly, where is the alternate proposal as to how this development should have progressed, in the author's view? Greater Houston added one million people between 1990 and 2000 - where ought our newcomers have decided to live if not where those newly-developed areas are visible in the photo?
Decrying a situation without proposing a viable alternative is not an existentially valid process. Not only does that kind of practice not further the debate, it's actually worse than not saying anything at all, because in producing nothing new while consuming attention, it simply wastes everyone's time and energy which would be far better spent contemplating possible solutions.
I'm the first one to admit that population growth poses balance challenges - I did that originally with Centerpointethemovie and I did it again just yesterday. But to liken families with children and hard-working suburbanites to "slime mold" only makes people feel bad and sets our collective social evolution back a small but meaningful step. When you make people feel bad, they tend to just retreat mentally and emotionally, and as a result of this, less gets accomplished overall, which is a fine result to be cultivated by an author of national visibility (linkback me please, as microscopic as I am) who presumably believes that he cares about "the planet".
From a local perspective, this particular rant couldn't be more timely, because today is the fundraising deadline for the Deer Park Prairie...
...and the organizers have apparently not raised the $4 million needed to save it from a suburban developer's bulldozer and concrete.
Perhaps if environmentalists didn't have a long-standing inclination to disparage "slime mold" suburbanites to the point of prompting people to tune out, there might have been more public interest in this initiative, which is an important one. Basically what happened is that amateur naturalists recently discovered a 53-acre remnant of virgin prairie in the City of Deer Park. Bayou Land Conservancy has been trying to raise the money to preserve it and turn it into an educational center. You would think that in a wealthy metro area of almost six million slime-molders, a sum like that could be raised, especially given the resulting media blitz (e.g., here, here, here, here, and here). But if you're a slime-molder, you're already damned, right? So why bother even thinking about developmental balance?
Rant concluded for this morning. Have a slime-free suburban day.
For those of you who are not regular readers of this blog, from time to time I post about well-known regional venues and attractions, but I try to do it from the perspective of a village elder rather than a mainstream consumer. I have no urge to participate in any follow-the-herd experience. I'm not looking for mindless entertainment. I have no compunction to deal with throngs of people, screaming children, drunkards, velvet ropes, and long lines at the entrance to whatever it is that everyone else is trying desperately to access.
But life is what happens when we're hoping for high-quality experiences, and so the trick is to compromise to the point where you can get something out of those well-known venues while still responding to the needs of your wider situation. It can be done, but it takes a bit of discipline and forethought.
Such was the case this weekend when my teenager and I joined three other Clear Lake families for a tubing trip down the insanely-popular Comal River in New Braunfels.
Here's one of the reference maps for this venue, with the Comal being that little stub below the dashed red line. Do you notice how the very first directive on this map is to "drink responsibly"? Not "welcome" or "have fun" or "enjoy yourself" or "be safe". A quarter century I've lived in Texas, but I'd never before gone river tubing, because every tubing story I'd ever heard revolved around the extent of alcohol-based partying associated with it (although there are currently efforts to rein this practice in). That's the last social climate to which I'd ever expose a young teenager.
Most of the mighty Guadalupe is reportedly not tube-able because the water levels are now too low to support it. That leaves only the Comal, the shortest river in the United States, to receive the central Texas water recreational crowd almost in its entirety, a predicament that sometimes proves to be harrowing.
What's visible in that photo above doesn't qualify as outdoor recreation - that's nothing less than a scene from a horror movie. With or without public drunkenness, this is increasingly what you find on the Comal when you try to go with the flow, literally and figuratively.
I screengrabbed that section of this KGNB radio website because the volume of spam in the comments section suggests that the site is not being properly moderated or curated, which means that it is more likely to disappear from the internet, and I think it's worth saving that very telling snippet for posterity.
"As long as cities continue to overdevelop housing tracts and underdevelop parks and other sites for natural play, our regional parks and beaches will be crushed by demand, necessitating ever more stringent enforcement"
(p. 239 in the 2008 paperback edition).
In the example shown above, the phrase "crushed by demand" was quite literally the case. According to that article, eighteen people were injured to the point of requiring EMS services that day.
Anyway, that's the worst-case Comal River scenario, so the question then becomes how to achieve a best-case experience, especially when traveling with friends or family such that the logistics are impacted by the diverse needs of multiple people. Here is how we handled our Comal float to the point of actually having a pretty good time:
We researched the vendors in advance and chose Rockin R for tube rental and transportation (put-in and drive-back following the one-way float-down). Service and facilities were good. They had change rooms, restrooms, and a privately-owned pull-out location.
We were in the river by 10:00 a.m. Sunday. You want to maximize your sanity?! Get there early, wherever "there" happens to be. Rockin R actually had a recorded phone message noting that they "now open at 8:00 a.m.", but with multiple families, breakfast, packing up and checking out of our rented condo, etc., it took us a bit of extra time to get there. Despite our delay, our Rockin R driver noted that we were his first group of the day, a comment which will tell you exactly what you need to know about the crowd distribution.
We were out of the river by 12:30 p.m. Sunday, just when things were starting to get truly crazy (it did not help our sanity goal that we were forced to do this during the last full weekend before the start of school, but we had to mesh different family schedules). By that time of the day, there were no parking spots remaining anywhere near Prince Solms Park, which is the tubing put-in area for both self-propelled and rental patrons alike. Fortunately, Rockin R Comal allowed us to leave our vehicles in their parking lot such that we could walk one block to Pat's Place for lunch when we got back at 12:30 p.m.
Here's a screengrab from Googlemaps showing the location of Comal Rockin R, Pat's Place, and Prince Solms Park.
This Google pic must have been taken on the coldest day of the winter, because there's nobody there!! This is the location in Prince Solms Park where folks mount their tubes for the float downstream.
I don't have any decent photos of this float because my cameras are not waterproof.
You and all your stuff will get wet on a trip down the Comal River - no way around it. This is a close-up of the first "tube chute". None of us got dumped completely out of our tubes, but one parent did lose her expensive sunglasses in these rapids.
There's an additional advantage to being on the river early: you get to see the regular river denizens, the local characters who have the good sense to stay away when crowds are at their peak.
We were amazed and delighted to see dogs riding on stand-up paddle boards (SUPs), dogs running happily along the banks, and dogs swimming beside their owners, some of whom were out for their morning exercise. This chocolate lab stole everyone's hearts as he dutifully followed his Australian-crawling master for quite some distance upstream.
Screengrabbed from www.riverfotos.com, which is a vendor that takes photos from the edge of the river and sells them online. Most tubers don't have waterproof cameras so this is a neat service. I bought one of our group.
I didn't see any alcohol use that Sunday morning. I didn't hear any screaming or partying. Most of the folks on the river at that early hour were quiet family-oriented people interested in relaxing. There were numerous other tubers present, but it wasn't an oppressive or obnoxious crowd.
What I did see was a view into an extraordinary river whose natural beauty has not yet been totally crushed by the overwhelming public demand for access to it. I saw many fish and a baby turtle. I teased a pair of bizarre-looking ducks by tossing bits of vegetation as if they were the Cheetos the quackers were hoping for instead (they paddled behind my tube briefly, but soon became wise to the ruse and departed for better pickins). With unobstructed views through the crystalline and bracing spring water that feeds the river, my mind flashed back to scenes from The Unforeseen, which is a stunning documentary about an analogous natural area called Barton Springs in nearby Austin. Somewhere in all of this thronging, no-parking mess, there is a balance between preservation and public access, but as both Louv and The Unforeseen have shown in the most emotionally wrenching ways, that balance is no longer easy to find.
Within the past couple of months, a formerly-taboo subject has become the fodder of mainstream journalism: the impact of gut bacterial profile on health, and the fecal transplants that are restoring balance to certain individuals whose systems lack crucial bacterial strains (there are even DIY fecal transplant versions - I shudder to think). Prevention magazine had a story about The American Gut Project (surely for the sake of PR they could have come up with a more palatable title?) and one of the most hilarious medical puns of all time has to be the fecal-transplant-associated term "repoopulate", which Blogger desperately wants to autocorrect to its etymological precursor "repopulate".
And now you're thinking, "What on earth does this have to do with melons?!"
They're one of the few crops which we eat raw and in large quantity. Whatever bacteria is associated with that melon grown outdoors in Centerpointe goes straight down the hatch.
I have not yet grown tired of teasing my husband, "Eat your fresh fruits and veggies so you can get the bacteria you need, or else you might have to repoopulate." He never fails to blanche at the mention of that concept, but the idea behind (pun intended) it is valid: our gut bacteria is reflective of our surroundings, and researchers are starting to discover that people whose diets are overly sterile (think highly-processed foods) are having health problems. Good intake cultivates good guts. In its print edition this month, Prevention magazine claimed that researchers can now predict not only whether you are a gardener but how much gardening you do, just by looking at your cast of gut bacterial characters (they'd have a field day with mine!).
And yes, there are natural bacteria on our melons.
If it's not the anoles crapping on the melons, it's the birds. And yes, I wash them prior to cutting them up to eat (the melons, not the anoles), but it's not a sterile process and it's not intended to be.
Which is all well and fine for my family because our digestive systems are used to it, but sometimes I worry about other people who may be accustomed to grocery store fare. I warn my neighbors that there are no chemicals applied to our garden products. There are no sterilizing aerosols or acid washes or surfactant immersions or radioactive disinfecting regimes. That's the whole point.
So far, we haven't had any problems. The other day, a roving swarm of neighborhood children demolished the four-pound sister melon to the one pictured above, and they all lived to tell the tale. (And yes, I do seek parental permission where feeding them is concerned).
Incidentally, I've had better luck with this, which I believe is a type of honeydew cultivar, than I had last year with cantaloupe. I grew over 20 pounds of cantaloupe, but the taste was a bit boring. Melons are water-pigs. Their function is to suck up as much water as possible. It's very tricky to under-water a melon so that the sweetness remains concentrated, without killing every other fruit and vegetable growing in proximity. My cantaloupes got over-watered and turned out bland. Such was not the case with these.
The other thing that's tricky is to know when to harvest this type. The skin will start splitting on cantaloupes, which is a sure-fire sign that they are ready to harvest (and which also lets a whole crap-load of additional unwashable bacteria into them). But this one neither splits nor separates from the vine when ripe. This five-pounder was past its prime, as suggested by the color differentiation. But it still tasted great - almost too sweet.
I prefer the melon-baller method rather than slicing.
Ready for the next roving band of small children or the neighbors, whichever gets here first.
And with that, I whisper my last blogging goodbyes, but only for this afternoon.
