Living Small in Austin TX

Burclover and my "un"compost pile

Burclover.  Does it have any redeeming qualities?  My chickens won't eat it.

I know what I don't like about burclover.  You ever step on one of the burs?  It stays stuck in you and if you try to pull it out, it pulls your skin up into a little baby mountain.  You have to just wince and keep pulling until it finally wrenches free.  It goes right through bike tires...I had to replace the inner tube on my jogging stroller twice last summer, and I hardly ever use the darn thing!

Have I mentioned my little boy doesn't like to wear shoes?

I have spent most of the spring planting season on gardening infrastructure as opposed to actually gardening (I know, I know...) and so the burclover sort of ate our vegetable garden.  I noticed the other day that I was almost out of salads and the thought of actually having to buy lettuce at the grocery store, or even the farmer's market pains me. Time to clear things out in the hopes that I'll have something other than chard and carrots to harvest.

So, aside from scattering about a zillion little burs all over the darn place, thus ensuring I have an even more abundant bounty of burclover next year, what did I notice?  The burclover kept the ground underneath moist and soft - huzzah for living muclches!  There wasn't really anything else growing under it - let's go weed suppression! Big, stubborn, deep roots - aerating the soil!  Lots of critters - spideys, snails, grubs, caterpillars, ladybugs, ants...I know some of them eat my food, and some of them sting the heck out of me (why, ants??!?! why?!?!) but it's always a good thing when the microherd is movin' and groovin'.

That's my "un"compost pile to the left.  It's just a cylinder of wire fencing.  I put yard waste in there that I don't want mixed in with my compost - bermuda grass, weeds that have gone to seed, the big spiky "leaves" of the palm out front - anything that would overwhelm the compost bin, or deposit unwanted seeds.  There's all the burclover I pulled sitting on top.  I'm not sure what else to do with that stuff.  It will break down eventually.  I never seem to run out of room in the "un"compost pile, so something's happening down below;)

Here's what the interwebz had to say about burclover, or Black Medic...it fixes nitrogen in the soil, prevents erosion, builds quality soil, and mines minerals from the subsoil.  A significant percentage of the seeds are "hard seeds" meaning they can take 2 or more years to germinate.

I think I like burclover.  I think I like the name Black Medic even more.  A lot of what I found online related to the lengths people will go to eradicate it from their lawns.  One woman actually suggested using a shop vac to suck up the seeds to prevent them spreading in the yard!  And of course the usual suspects suggested broadleaf herbicides.  Crazytown and Twitsville.

I'm not going to let it take quite so many liberties with the vegetable garden in the future (famous last words) but a shop vac??  I'm going to let it be.  Suggest the boy wear shoes.  Stop taking shortcuts across the grass with my jogging stroller - maybe if I actually jogged with it, there'd be no need for shortcuts.

Combat Peak Soil with weeds!!!

 

I need a new fence...

A few weeks ago, a drunk driver hit my neighbor's car, plowed through our fence, clipped a pecan tree in our front yard, and landed on our front porch.  Thankfully, the porch is concrete, and a brick column (apparently not load bearing) took the brunt of the impact.

The chain link fence was a little warped, but I just grabbed a couple of t-posts from the backyard and got the fence back up so it was functional, if not pretty (oh, look, it's like a theme...)  Our insurance company sent someone over to move all the bricks out of the way so we could open the front door - yeah, don't get all excited and ask me who they are...I just got the bill from the company they contracted that little polite action out to.

I finally received my check from them today, and have been thinking about how to go about repairs.  We had been planning on eventually replacing the chain link fence with something that afforded us more privacy, so may just go ahead and get that started.  I was never all that fond of the brickwork out front anyway, so we will likely replace it with wooden beams instead.  I'm thinking rough hewn cedar posts would be gorgeous, and easy to source locally.

As for the fence, I want something a little creative.  I'm hoping to alternate sections of wood fence with hog fencing so I have a built in trellis for climbing vegetables.  I also really want to be able to use reclaimed wood...but my google fu's been so off lately.  I can't seem to find anything!  I'm worried my vision is going to be prohibitively expensive, not to mention difficult for my contractor to implement.  

What I really want is rough boards like this:

I'd like to use them horizontally, with slightly bigger gaps in between.  The fence in the photo is down at the Natural Gardener, possibly the best garden shop ever, and my go to shop for seeds, plants, tools, expert advice and a bit of good natured flirting with the staff - I think it's written into the employee handbook or something - I wonder how many other customers go for the ego boost alone?  

I suppose I could just call them and ask about the fence.  Or I could just stop in at any one of the numerous lumberyards in my neighborhood with the photo - there are two on my street alone.  Let's hear it for light industrial zoning!  They are small shops, with pretty creative fences themselves...

A few months into this, and I totally get why most working farms are not pretty.  Okay, I should clarify.  I think most farms are gorgeous, soul restorative places, but inevitably there are piles of broken down machinery, plastic feed buckets splattered with mud or pigshit or, most likely, both, and ramshackle outbuildings - and I'm not talking about picturesque weathered barns, but dubious looking repurposed "manufactured homes" with an old tarp thrown over the rusted out metal siding.  Functional?  yes.  Pretty?  No.

To the left here?  This sort of thing is not pretty.  And I have a lot of this sort of thing going on.  

On the other hand, form is certainly following function here, and that's something I can get behind.  This is the "gate" to our chicken run.  it gets moved around a lot, to allow them to forage on fresh wild greens and then allow grazed areas to recover.  What's not beautiful about happy chickens?  And not needing to weed?  And not throwing this old bungee cord into the landfill because there's a second life waiting for it here on the micro farm?

With time, I think my little backyard farm will be both functional and beautiful, but for now...mostly it's about quick fixes, like yesterday afternoon when I took advantage of a break in the rain to go out and check on my dear little hens, only to find the covered run of their coop completely flooded.  They couldn't get to their feed without standing in a deep puddle of cold, dirty water...so I shoveled in a makeshift island of mulch for them to stand on, dragged over a panel of the moldy and rapidly crumbling wood panelling I've been stripping off the back shed to create more of a shelter...not pretty at all, but the chickens sure appreciated it.

 

Chickens are cheaper than therapy.

How is it that I haven't posted a single photo of my beloved little backyard flock yet?  Thanks, facebook.  I knew I wanted chickens, but I had no idea how much I needed chickens.

Mornings, one of the first things I do is let them out of the coop, see to their water, and fill the feeder.  I find myself extending the time this chore takes.  I pick up toys left from the previous day's adventures, look in on the compost, or...just sit on the edge of the sandbox and be with my birds for a while.  

Everything that awaits me back inside the house slips away.  My girls cluck and scratch and investigate stray threads on the cuffs of my jeans.  They haven't a care in the world and while I'm out there, I haven't either.

 

Chickens are gateway fauna.

Once you've got the care of a flock of backyard chickens under your belt, it seems like nothing at all to take in a friend's pair of ducklings she can no longer keep.  And then one day, you open an email from someone selling Dwarf Nigerian goats and you look over at your unassuming little 45 lb. mutt and think, I could handle a couple of goats that might not even get as big as you, NoNoBadDog.

You could keep a pair of Dwarf Nigerian Goats in a standard sized urban lot, even one that's largely given over to food production. I ruminated on this (see what I did there?) awhile.  A couple of goats could share 1500 square feet with 8 chickens, 2 ducks and a few fruit trees.  Not much else would grow back there, but it could be done.

Or, if you lived next door to a small urban farm, you might one day broach the subject of a goat share with your neighbor and be pleasantly surprised when they enthusiastically welcome the proposition.  Ah, their land, half of my goats...half the cost, half the work, everybody's up to their elbows in goat milk, goat cheese, goat yogurt, and excellent source of manure for the gardens.

Still, the care of living creatures is a responsibility best not taken lightly, so the other morning we (my farming neighbor, the kids and I) drove a little ways to visit a couple of Boer goats and their owner.  I'd posted a message on a local permaculture yahoo group about my desire to keep goats in a more urban setting and asked if anyone was up for letting me visit and ask a few questions.  

Boers are a lot bigger than Nigerian Dwarves, and I have to say, walking up a hill towards these goats was a little...intimidating.  At four years old, they were still quite playful, which pretty much translates into pretending they are going to cripple you with a head butt.  Pretend is the operative word though, because these two stopped just short of actually butting you every time.  Which is not say goats aren't a full contact kind of animal.  There was much leaning in for nuzzles and scratches, but I never did get used to them rearing up on their hind legs and hurling themselves in my general direction.  

I still need to find some goats to visit in a more urban setting than Bill's 2 acre backyard - his goats are a couple of lucky fellows, getting to free-range his property and go on accompanied foraging walks in a tract of undeveloped land adjacent to his property.  Still, before he kept these Boers (primarily for companionship and to keep the vegetation under control), Bill kept a small herd of dairy goats, so had a lot to share with us about milking schedules, equipment, etc.  We're going to go back and visit when the vet comes at the end of February.  I know I'll have even more questions, and hopefully get an "in" with a ruminant vet that makes house calls, sorry, ranch visits.

Goats!  I'm so excited!

 

Repurposing some ugly stuff I found around the micro-farm.

Who thought planter boxes were a good idea in Central Texas?

A couple of these were kicking around our yard when we moved in, and I'll admit, my first thought was to...you know...stick a plant in them, but then it got to be about a zillion degrees.  You'd need to water anything in those boxes a hundred times a day and even then they'd croak.

There were also these heavy concrete bench supports hiding in the weeds behind the shed.  Hmmm, bulk trash day?

As much as I hate accumulating stuff, I can't bear to just throw it away.

So I got to deconstructing...

and reconstructing...

I actually really like how they look!  Kind of rustic and actually quite comfortable.  I dragged them to a sunny-in-the-morning spot and now have the perfect place to warm up with my coffee and plan my day.

 

Remember that duck deficiency I was rappin' about...

Okay, maybe not actually rappin' and I honestly don't expect you to remember something I wrote...shit...four months ago???

Anyway, I've been meaning to share that we got us some chickens and those leaf cutter ants?  Mmmm, mmmm, chickies love themselves some tasty little ants!  Unfortunately, there's a massive hawk who likes to look in on my wee chicks, so they don't quite have free range of the yard yet.  I think once they're grown, the hawk will start looking elsewhere for his dinner.

And as for the ducks?  They're camped out in my bathroom until they de-fuzz enough to spend nights outside.

 

 

Plant I.D?

For some reason, I got it into my head that this was some non-woody stemmed variety of hibiscus, but now I am really not so sure.

Here's another photo, that will probably be of no help whatsoever, but if it is, then help a girl out with an ID, please.  There's a rather leggy little assemblage of them behind the shed-that-will-one-day-be-a-greenhouse.  

Alrighty, I'm off to the HOPE Farmer's Market to learn how to build a solar dehydrator.  Whee!

 

 

 

Getting naked.

Not me, the trees.  To be more specific, my crepe myrtles are being denuded by an extremely diligent colony of leafcutter ants.

I didn't even know we had leafcutter ants!  I thought leafcutter ants lived in...I don't know...Borneo, or somewhere equally remote and/or exotic.

See that green trail all along the fence?  It isn't grass; it's a very long trail of partially cut leaves.  

See?

It starts at the base of the crepe myrtle on the north side of our house, runs along the length of the house, curves around the back of the house, crosses a cement walkway, crosses an expanse of grass, goes underneath the fence along the south side of the house, and stops at the street.  I'm assuming the trail originally crossed the street and the leaves have since been blown away.

The ants are fascinating to watch and their industry is staggering.  They harvest the leaves to feed to a fungus they farm down in the colony.  The fungus helps compost the leaves and provide food for the ants.  They carry the leaves an astonishing distance.  A couple of weeks ago they were working on a different crepe myrtle on the south side of the house and carrying those leaves quite a distance around the driveway, as opposed to a much more direct route across it.  I don't think it's the heat of the cement they are avoiding either, because they walk on the driveway, just all the way up to the top, cross it there, and then all the way back down!  

I'm hoping they don't completely decimate my garden and am only slightly heartened by the fact that when they were actively harvesting leaves off the other tree last week, they seemed to reach some agreed upon stopping point that left a fair amount of leaves on the tree.  

Bill Mollison, the bewhiskered grandpappy of permaculture, when describing a garden beset upon by slugs, declared there was no slug problem, but rather a duck deficiency.

So, channeling Bill, I now have to determine the deficiency and shift the balance, but soon, because before you know it will be fall and I have trees to plant!

 

 

There *really* aren't enough hours in the day.

Have I mentioned that the new house has a dedicated arts and crafts workspace?  It is truly awesome not to have to spend the precious little time I actually have to be creative setting a project up and then cleaning it all up just so we have somewhere to eat dinner.

Ahhh, project overload.  I love it.

From left to right:

The crumpled up dark fabric is a skirt my daughter is upcycling into something a little more her style.

There's a painting in the works, again courtesy of my creative girl.

A little ziplock bag of clay being revived with some water so I can "make snakes" with the boy at a moment's notice.

In the foreground, a reupholstery project which deserves its own post.

The orange knitting is going to be a pouf, very much like this one!

Some of the balls of yarn are resting on what will soon be shelf supports in the linen closet (a previous tenant removed them in an act of sheer brilliance).  I need to paint them.

The little white unit is a wall shelf with hooks I picked up at Savers, thinking it might work in one of the bathrooms, as neither has a medicine cabinet and/or enough storage space.  It will not work in either bathroom, so it will go in my daughter's room.  11 year olds are always amassing "collections" and she needs some "display space".  It's in the middle of a paint job.

Sewing machines!  Ambitiously left on the tables, as if I'm going to actually get to use them one day soon!

Right now they are apparently a place to lay un-mailed packages.

I need to do something about the doorway to the right.  It's a very big closet/pantry/laundry room that came with very ill-fitting bi-fold doors.  It needs a curtain or something.  And I need to put a little piece of wood trim or something between where the tilework ends and the wood floors begin.

Oh!  And I kept those bi-fold doors, because I think they will make an excellent set of low benches for somewhere outdoors.  Going with the re-used door theme.

It feels good to be busy, even if I don't get quite as much uninterrupted creative time as I'd like.