2011 MAY - SOPHIA'S GARDEN DAY

Email about Sophia's garden day flew back & forth in the Merrie Month of May.
On Tuesday before the big day we heard from Sophia:
Let's first start out with a weather report. I am hearing we have a small chance of that wet substance coming down. I haven't seen it for so long that I'm questioning if we will ever get some.
We will be working in the backyard (no more pulling of the asiatic jasmine in the front-ha) expanding the beds where the grass dies every year.
General composting, mulching, etc...
Come by at 8 am-breakfast will be served at 8:30. I am thinking we could get started earlier taking advantage of the cooler morning and avoid some of the heat later.

I would like your opinions on a bay laurel tree I just purchased-should it go in the ground or keep it in the pot for now?
Whoa-thunder just now! maybe there is hope...
See you all Saturday

Weather reports came in reply on Thursday

Glinda: Yay! We should be digging in nice soft soil on Saturday ... think my yard had about 1.3" of rain today and heard that some parts of Austin got 3". And right now the predictions are low 80's so Sophia's workday will be different from our last few hot & dry projects.

Mattie: You said it! I swear that I feel how happy the plants are. I know my yard was parched and all the buckets I left around are now filled with rainwater. Sounds like a great day at Sophia's house.

Sugar: YAY Rain!!! I’m in Houston & it poured for about 3 hrs yesterday here....I called my neighbor & she said we did get it pretty good. Wonderful. Hopefully it’ll make things much easier at Sophia’s when we start digging in the dirt! See you all then.

Annie: Yipee! I got rain here too, think about 2 inches. It really made all that grass sod you laid soooo happy! Me too! See everyone in the morning.

Mindy: Well, my rain gauge in SW Austin only has a half inch in it but that is better than none!!! Guess the rain dancing finally paid off ..sweet dreams!!!

Before going inside on Saturday morning we checked out the raised vegetable beds that were our project last April.
- the tomato plants were looking bouncyand look at this cucumber plant mixed in with the peppers..Closer - here's a cuke!The dining room looked dreamy -Sophia and Roger started this summery day with a trio of melons- Watermelon, Honeydew and Cantaloupe, with Juice & coffee to ready us for the day ahead while an egg bake with asparagus & mushrooms, banana bread and chicken-apple sausage patties were just plain delicious.On the patio we found that Sophia had collected lots of stuff to pretty up the garden - annual flowers and some small shrubs. The hope is they'll soften the wooden fence now, their roots will catch hold and eventually they'll give some screening and privacy to the back yard.A large area along the back house wall was once a sort of banana plantation, but they had not survived. Sophia wanted it to be a larger bed with shrubs and trees - she hoped the Bay Laurel could be planted as the anchor of the border.The beds along the side and back fence were too narrow and undefined - enlarging & edging would give space for the shrubs.This corner looks OK in summer when the burgundy-leaved cannas are tall, but it looks barren for months when the cannas go dormant in cold weather.Do you think Sophia has gathered enough mulch & compost? How much do you want to bet that we will use it all?The Divas fanned out and started making a difference. Over the next few hours they will weed, divide, scavenge rocks, move around plants and ornaments, and compost and mulch everything that can't run.Now there's an evergreen shrub behind the cannas. This is a division of an old-fashioned Lindley's Butterfly Bush - a passalong from Roger's mom. It looks a bit exotic, attracts bees and butterflies and has done remarkably well even in heat and drought.The bay laurel bed is coming along - liriope divided from another part of the yard and some passalong Bengal Tiger cannas are now in.The canna corner is now edged with rock, planted and mulched against the heat.And the side fence bed is also composted, planted, edged with rock and mulched... and we Divas amused ourselves by reorganizing and redistributing Sophia's garden ornaments to go with the new plants.

Lunch was Spectacular!
Bowls of Gazpacho were perfect (the Ina Garten Food Network version ). Two kinds of "Not your usual Grilled cheese sandwiches" offered creamy, melted hearts of either Smoked Cheese with Pear Slices or Cheddar with Apple Slices on nut bread. A fun touch was Sophia's huge bowl filled with kettle chips, served with slotted spoon, and a Chess Pie was the perfect ending.
That was the end of the feasting, but that wasn't the end of the garden day. Sophia had shrubs for the back fence: a Xylosma (often recommended by John Dromgoole), a Southern Wax Myrtle and a shrub she'd found on sale called Leucothose axillaris or Coastal leucothoe - this one was an experiment.The Bay laurel bed is edged and mulched, tooAnd after its grooming session the oft-worked-upon seating area is once again a star!
We always have a good time at Sophia's house and we liked her reaction:
Happy good-morning-day-after diva day to you all! I am sure you all are pretty sore after yesterday...but what a marvelous job.
Thanks to all of you from the bottom of my heart for the superb garden help I had yesterday. WOW! WOW! and WOW!It looks beyond fabulous!
You all added your special touches and your unique personalities really show in the garden. I watered again later yesterday afternoon and everything looks so perky this morning. I think I'll go work a little more today. I also see a road trip for more flat rocks.
...can't wait until our next date at your house Glinda!

2011 APRIL- DIVA-ANNIE'S GARDEN DAY

Our fourth garden project for 2011 had been set for the end of April. In addition to some tree pruning, weeding, edging and mulching the front beds, our hostess Annie had a flat area that needed lawn replacement. She arranged a sod delivery for her project day so we could help her with it.

Buffy had a realtor emergency so she missed this delicious breakfast of fruit salad, French toast with almonds & glaze and bacon, but she planned to join us later in the day.The sod-truck had arrived! Diva-Annie had ordered a full pallet of St Augustine grass for front and side. We have much more experience in digging up lawn to make new borders than in putting it in, but for a variety of reasons lawn was a reasonable choice for this particular area at this particular time. We went to work getting the ground ready while discussing how best to arrange the pieces so there were few gaps.Some Divas tilled the ground
Some worked on getting the squares laid straight and flat and tight, Some Divas weeded, fluffed up, composted and mulched the front beds We took time to admire what was in bloom. Those lantanas are doing well!We brought our pole pruners to take off bad branches on the Arizona Ash. This electric pruner was perfect for shaping the Chinese Pistache.
It made us sad to see the Cassia tree - once a full and beautiful native evergreen - reduced to a few sticks by the previous winter. Austin always gets some freezing weather, but the temperatures usually bounce above freezing sometime during the day. February 2011 brought us 72 straight hours of temperatures below 32°F with most areas dropping into the teens at night. That solid block of freezing cold turned out to be too much for many plants - even native shrubs - to handle. But the Mexican oregano looked good and was in bloomBuffy arrived in time for lunch. She had saved Diva-Annie a trip to the nursery by stopping on the way to pick up even more mulch & more bags of compost. Lunch was Chipotle-style chicken bowls with beans a big bowl of lettuce and a lavish array of toppings. (Does anyone else read the word "Toppings" and imagine it as said by Paul Rodriguez in the wonderful movie "Tortilla Soup"? That scene cracks me up every time. Toppings... heh, heh. )
A Diva birthday was on the horizon so Sugar helped us celebrate with this beautiful handmade birthday cake.We loved the bird theme for Annie's table- from cloth to napkins, to vintage Czechoslovakian bird flower holders. And each place was set with a pair of white ceramic salt & pepper shakers in the form of birds. You can imagine how delighted we were to be told out these were gifts for each of us to take home!We went back out for awhile and got more done. The day's temperatures had reached the low 90's by late morning, but a cool front now came in, bringing more seasonal 70°F by late afternoon. Even for Austin this was shaping up to be a hot year and 'Hot Lips' Salvia may soon be our signature plant!

2011 APRIL - MATTIE'S GARDEN DAY

By March we knew that Sugar would once again be be living in Austin so there would be 8 Divas of the Dirt in 2011. Juggling and trading dates gave us a new schedule... we'd sneak in two project days during the month of April.

First up was Mattie, recently moved and ready to make the garden her own. The house was old enough to have some good-sized shrubs in place in front, but the enclosed back yard needed more green and growing things to soften the privacy fence.

"Dear Divas ... the cold front won’t have arrived by Saturday..it is supposed to be 92! ...Breakfast: 9:00 a.m. sharp (we’ll save some for late comers) Projects: Plan/create beds, trim large bushes and dig holes for plants if possible. I am looking forward to seeing you all Saturday!"

Walking around Mattie's house for the first time was so much fun that Glinda forgot to take photos at breakfast. Our first meal together in Mattie's new dining room was delicious: a Fritatta, chocolate chip waffles & syrup, a fabulous fruit bowl, juices, and rye toast - a favorite.

Mindy heard about a clearance sale on shrubs and Mattie took advantage of the great prices, meaning a large group of shrubs needed to get out of containers and into the ground. The shrubs included
1 pink-flowering Indian Hawthorn/Rhaphiolepis indica
3 white-flowering Indian Hawthorns
2 Loropetalum/Chinese witch hazel in the more common pink
2 Loropetalum of an unusual White-flowering variety
2 nandinas
3 Southern Wax myrtles
1 passalong Barbados Cherry.

Soft foliage and airy branches can deflect the eye from the utility boxes but how exactly to place them? Good-sport Sophia volunteers to act like a shrub so we can get a sense of the scale once the shrubs are established.
Then it was time to dig holes and plant shrubs. Rocks and roots often hide in the soil and progress is slow but we're getting it done! This Southern Wax myrtle will have a chance to expand and growA second native Southern Wax myrtle is in placeWe like the front of Mattie's pretty house with its mixture of sun and shade on a quiet street. But Mattie was not happy with the big green blob on the front corner of the house - an overgrown red-tip photinia, no longer a recommended plant for our area.We'd given a similar redtip at Sophia's house a drastic kill-or-cure pruning and shaping which allowed filtered light to reach the base and gave the shrub a lighter, more graceful appearance, making it look like a small tree rather than a green blob.
Mattie was up for that. The pruning revealed the trunks and there would be space underneath for something more interesting.
Wait a minute - let's take a closer look at this branch. The trunk has divided into a 'Y' about a foot off the ground, then those two branches have grown a few more feet, touched, and grown together at the top, forming a sort of oval shape. This kind of natural grafting is called "Inosculation".
Kind of cool, isn't it?
Breaking for lunch is delectable but sometimes dangerous - Mattie, do you really think you'll get more work out of us after this feast?Chicken breast rolled & stuffed with mushrooms & sage,

Spaghetti squash with vegetables & feta cheese
and a beautiful salad
Everything was delicious ... and this was followed by some fantastic chocolate chip cookies, white chocolate & macadamia gelato, and the pie Mattie hesitated to serve at first. After if did not turn out exactly as she wanted, we rechristened it "Deconstructed Lemon pie" and dug in. The boxwood in front still had to be tamed a bit but uh-oh - you're supposed to prune the boxwood, Buffy - not the cord!Although we couldn't plant everything in one day, we enjoyed working together to kickstart Mattie's garden plans.

"What a great day! You all exceeded my expectations greatly--my plants are almost all planted!! I had nothing around the perimeter of my backyard (you know how I hate that) and I now it is beautifully planted with 11 great bushes (thank you Mindy). "

Next project only a few weeks ahead!

2011 - MARCH, BUFFY'S GARDEN DAY

The mists of February barely dampened the ground and the heat was firmly in place by the time we met for our March project at Buffy's house. As always, entering her beautiful dining room made us feel special.
Then the delicious eggs, potatoes, sautéed peppers, fruit and biscuits kept that special feeling going... good grief! Buffy had cooked up a batch of homemade Apple Butter for the biscuits!The long bed next to Buffy's drive had been on her wishlist for a few years but some other task always took precedence. Today she designated the drive bed as the #1 Project.
When the bed was first made more than a decade ago, the rosemary and Cenizo/Texas sage plants were chosen for their toughness and drought resistance. But even tough plants wear out here. Texas sage (Leucophyllum frutescens) can look good for quite awhile in the home landscape, but within Austin city limits, our hot nights & high humidity eventually win. Buffy's Texas sage was half dead.
The rosemary was alive on the outside but a ratty, brown mess underneath. It insisted on growing over the driveway, the sharp branch ends attacking cars and passengers. Now not only Buffy but scratched-up family members were calling for a complete redo.
Some Divas of the Dirt began the dismantling of this bed, others worked on the border near the fence gate or the yaupon border or the long parkway border. There was enough cutting back, weeding, composting, mulching & pruning of shrubs to keep us all busy. Back at the drive, it took a long time to get the old plants cleared out. Newer subdivisions in Central Texas usually have the utility boxes in the front yard, making access easier, but disguise more difficult:The Texas Sage/Cenizo trunk had been wrapped in vines - making a twirled design in the bark. The Texas Sage may have been half-dead, but it sure did not want to leave!At one point we called my husband Oz and asked him to bring a chainsaw, but by the time he arrived, Buffy & Mindy somehow hauled that monster plant out of the ground.The existing stone blocks were reused, and new ones sawed to reshape the bed and give it some definition

Now the bed could be replanted! A native Anacacho Orchid Tree (Bauhinia lunarioides) would be the new centerpiece, with starts of heat-and-drought tolerant plants like salvias, Butterfly weed (Asclepias curassavica) Blackfoot daisies and Russian sage set in place. It doesn't look like much now, but give it time!
The Shrubby Germander (Teucrium fruticans) and Fall Aster looked good after the shady yaupon/oak bed was weeded, composted & mulched
The strip along the street was back in shape, too - this mulch will help the plants survive an Austin summer.
Inside the cool house, another feast awaited the tired-out Divas of the Dirt as Buffy served up fish tacos with a wonderful soup - Black Bean with avocado sauce:And for dessert, a triumph of a Flan -

Set on a plate with fruit, bathed in caramel sauce and topped with home whipped cream. We said goodbye, knowing we'd be together in three weeks, each leaving with a precious jar of that Apple Butter. Thanks, Buffy!