September 30th, 2009 admin
1. Buy lurid plastic washtubs at a giant Asian grocery store and plant a snackbar for some chewing sucking insects you’ve never seen before.
2. Plant agave pups in washtubs that will strangle their roots and stunt their growth, but not enough that they won’t puncture you once in a while.
3. Plant a rusted out propane grill with purple Jew — I can say that because I’m Jewish, otherwise I’d need to use the latin name.
4. For a healthy splash of green, you can’t beat weeds.
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May 28th, 2009 admin
Next to the zip-tie, Craigslist is a gardener’s best friend. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, skip this and go to Smith&Hawken.com. If you know exactly what I’m talking about, tell me which keywords you type in when on the hunt for stuff. Quick! Don’t over-think this! Personally, I read FREE, MATERIALS and FARM & GARDEN on Craigslist. Then I search for “plant” “rock” “mulch” “clawfoot bathtub” and “vegetable.” In this manner I have wasted many hours driving all over hell and gone buying cheap daylillies, a pot that looks like a two-faced lion and a 350-gallon plastic vat that once held Kool-AId concentrate, but also loading my Honda Fit with random free rocks. I don’t have enough rocks. I need more rocks. They don’t call it the Fit for nothing. Those rocks are heavy. Sometimes I need to make 2 or 3 trips. Who cares.
Last week, I was thrilled to spot 80 bales of hay on the FREE page. Hay, even when baled, is lighter than rock, and I needed serious mulch. I sped to the scene of the free hay give-away, which turned out to be a fraternity on the UT campus. Its imposing brick presence was encircled by a wrought iron fence, every gate of which was locked. But frat boyswere drinking on the roof, as you would expect. I yelled up at them and one came down and took me around to the service entrance where the last 5 bales were stored in an F-150 pickup. I had a lot of questions: where did the other 75 bales go? What Johnny-on-the-spot rancher beat me to the punch? Why does a frat obtain 80 bales of hay only to give them away? Was this some kind of agricultural philanthropy PR scheme undertaken to take people’s minds off hazing through binge-drinking? But Preston, or whatever the boy’s name was, had Lone Stars to attend to.
I stuffed in the first two bales behind my daughter Gus, who has seasonal allergies. Then I crammed every available leftover space with loose hay, until my rearview mirror showed nothing but a barnyard scene. On the way home, Gus stopped sneezing long enough to ask what a fraternity was. As usual, I launched into an interesting lecture. Again, I didn’t know what I was talking about, but she was receptive. “The Greek system?” she asked. “Do they speak Greek?” I threw in some details about Greek yogurt and began fantasizing about Greeking yogurt in my home kitchen. Before dinner, I unloaded all the hay onto my heat-stressed vegetable garden soil. It’s gorgeous. I feel great. I wish the interior of my car weren’t black velour, but I consider it a day well spent.
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April 17th, 2009 admin
Please read my Austin American Statesman story that will actually appear in tomorrow’s paper, but just follow the link and you can get there today. It’s about my favorite highway rest area garden. Actually if there’s any other rest area garden worth swooning over, I’ve never seen it. The story behind this story is rich. Ladybird Johnson makes an appearance.
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April 15th, 2009 admin
I love this time of year. My Lamarque roses are blooming on a rebar trellis in my front yard.
And now–ODE TO THE ZIPTIE.
Cheap plastic zip-tie. Price is right.
And oh, its noose! It yanks so tight!
Its tiny ridges so tenacious,
Loop of power adjust from spacious
To quite small, in just one zip,
At leisurely or rapid clip.
But natch’ral is my garden gear.
I keep my liquid seaweed near
At hand. I do not fertilize
With Orthodust, nor do I prize
A bale of peat, a pesticide,
Roundup and all the rest-icide.
Yet in my bucket I make room
And when my Lafter roses bloom
I-zip!-attach them to the fence.
(Brute strength makes all the difference.)
And-zip!-I bind all drooping plants,
Or-zip!-the rip!-within my pants,
And-zip!-a compost-sifting screen!
But dang, a zip-tie isn’t Green.
For when a zip-tie’s obsolete
I clip said zip. Its job’s complete,
Which makes it garbage, plastic waste.
It’s time this troubling fact was faced.
Oh, please. On second thought, forget it.
A zip-tie aims to please, so let it.
Note: I write custom odes, for all your special occasions. Proceeds donated to Meals on Wheels And More, in Austin. Write me at blue.ox@sbcglobal.net.
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February 5th, 2009 admin
The following appeared late last December in the Austin American Statesman.
My husband doesn’t get survivalist gardening. This can cause tension, because I’m obsessed with it. When I harvest twenty giant cabbages, I expect him not only to join a giant sauerkraut-canning operation, but to eat the resulting sauerkraut. Sauerkraut, after all, prevents scurvy.
But he refuses to sign on to my perfectly reasonable plan o’ panic. I desperately want us to be self-sufficient. One world-wide recession and three authors are responsible for this.
1. John Jeavons, author of How to Grow More Vegetables and Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains, and Other Crops Than You Ever Thought Possible On Less Land Than You Can Imagine. Jeavons advocates a “Biointensive” method: double digging, elaborate seeding and transplanting, and the conversion of one’s land into a completely self-contained unit. In other words, you grow not just produce, but grains–such as bulgur. No person with a day job, a family, or a forgetful nature could possibly manage Biointensity, but it has a grip on me all the same.
2. Laura Ingalls Wilder. The Pa of the Little House books slapped together whole houses without a single power tool. Or even nails. And then there’s Ma, who fed the family on sacks of flour and whatever she could forage or grow, making my mouth water in the process.
3. Eric Sloane, a twentieth century renaissance man who painted, wrote, flew fighter plans and invented the job of TV weatherman, among other things. As a teenager living in New York City, I happened upon Sloane’s books on early American craftsmanship and sucked up intriguing, if anachronistic, information. In 1700s New England, for instance, transportation was easier by sled than by wagon, so people waited for deep winter to get things done. And every farmstead had its woodlot, a half-acre of carefully tended hardwoods that provided tool handles, sled runners, barrel staves-all the necessities. I’ve wanted a woodlot for 35 years.
Instead, I have a backyard filled with stuff that might come in handy, crude piles of lumber, rocks, rebar and raw material scavenged on large item pickup day.
“Our backyard is a woodlot for the modern age,” I told my husband one recent Saturday. “We should go out and see what we have and make it into useful tools and supplies. We’ll never have to go to Home Depot again. We’ll be in this together!”
His face didn’t light up.
“Come on,” I said, “it’ll be inspiring.”
We started poking around in the underbrush.
“There’s a lot of bamboo,” my husband said. “How about we make a Burmese tiger trap?”
I grabbed the notepad out of his hand and made a proper inventory:
Banana leaves–for steaming fish from the well-stocked pond we don’t have?
Two cans Day-Glo spray paint–What would Norman Rockwell do?
Broken rake handle–file to a sharp point, and. . .?
Bits of metal roofing–make sharp, dangerous raised beds?
200 feet orange plastic caution fence?
Old laundry detergent container–coat with Day-Glo spray paint for one-of-a-kind planter?
There was no embarrassment of riches here, just embarrassment, and I seemed to have become the kind of crazy old person who collects short lengths of string. Dejection set in. Seeing his opportunity, my husband fled to the gym.
Why did I think I had anything in common with John Jeavons, Pa Ingalls or Eric Sloane? Could it be the same impulse that persuades me I can break-dance because I saw someone do it on TV?
I sat down underneath the pecan tree that failed to produced pecans this year. Four ten-year-old girls emerged from the house to take turns on the rope swing tied to one of its branches. “Back in the day,” I said to the tree, “you would have coughed up artisan axe handles. Now you work part-time as a playground. Or you stand there and shed.”
Dry leaves were everywhere, a collective fire hazard designed to prevent me from the useful, Pa-like act of burning diseased tomato vines, falling across the path like a red carpet before an arriving celebrity.
Suddenly, I knew just who that celebrity should be–Patricia Lanza, author of Lasagna Gardening, the 1998 book that created a craze for what used to be known as sheet composting. Without bothering to dig, a lasagna gardener lays down newspaper or cardboard and builds her own soil out of organic layers such as coffee grounds, manure, lawn clippings and shredded newspaper, all of it interspersed with tons of leaves. Lanza argues that with enough leaves, anything is possible, including the gigantic gardens she’s built at B&Bs all over the northeast.
In fact, I’d always wanted a couple of edible flower beds in the backyard, but was daunted by the rocky dust that passed for soil. In other words, though I’d been expecting a big bowl of dry quinoa, it seemed lasagna was on the menu.
On a second tour of the woodlot, I discovered bags of used Starbucks grounds and a stash of half-rotten cedar fence posts, perfect for holding in the edges of the new lasagna beds. In thirty minutes, I raked up an inspiring mountain of leaves, with plenty more left over for compost, fallow-vegetable-bed mulching and conversion into leaf mold. It was starting to look like a productive and self-sufficient afternoon–an inspiration for future generations, even.
“What we want to do,” I explained to the future generations on the premises, “is make these leaves even smaller. That way they break down faster and turn into good dirt.”
Apparently, the early American skill of autumn-leaf-jumping has not yet disappeared from our genetic memory. Squealing and shoving, the fifth-grade girls reduced the pile by eighty percent. What remained was dense and valuable. Patricia Lanza, who admits to stealing other people’s leaf bags right off their curbs, would drool. Before dark, I’d have built and seeded three new gardens-all with the products of my own piece of land, or something like that.
It’s no Burmese tiger trap, I thought, but it’s a start.
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December 15th, 2008 admin
The story below appeared in the Austin American Statesman last week.
Everyone knows someone for whom it is impossible to buy a present. Because it only gets harder over time, there’s finally nothing left to give them but tube socks. Where’s the joy?
On the other side of the gift-receiving scale are all the gardeners in the world. When someone else is buying, we’re neither stoic nor frugal, and in this lousy economy, we’re particularly starved for gardening stuff.
I used to buy myself such things. I saw my landscape as a potential garden of unnecessary delights, full of meandering pathways and vine-covered gazebos. These days, however, I’m thinking more like the guy who invented the grain silo. All garden supplies must contribute directly to survival — otherwise, forget it.
I can justify a flat of broccoli seedlings, in other words, but not another rosebush, even though I absolutely crave one, and even though broccoli, no matter how organic, is still a pretty run-of-the-mill vegetable.
But all this is good news for anyone who owes a gardener a present this holiday season. The suggestions that follow are opinionated, but I guarantee they’ll appeal to most gardeners of the non-Martha-Stewart variety.
Start at a plant nursery. Pick one that’s locally owned and staffed with active gardeners, or risk coming home with something that couldn’t grow in Texas even with a full-time nanny.
Tough, beautiful plants: Society garlic, purple fountain grass, Mexican feather grass, trailing lantana, blue plumbago, passion vine, Turk’s cap, bamboo muhly, any ruellia, inland sea oats. Four-inch pots start at $1.99 at Barton Springs Nursery, but buy the biggest size you can afford at your favorite nursery.
Plants to covet: Pride of Barbados, Kieffer pear, Brazos blackberry, Meyer lemon and crossvine (from $10) and anything from the Southern Bulb Co. (www.southernbulbs.com, from $5) .
Finding the perfect gift plant: Ask for help at any independent garden store. Make sure the person who responds has dirt under the fingernails. Describe your gift target, his or her land and tastes. (For example, my yard has a lot of dappled shade, and I hate hot pink.) Ask for a recommendation.
Roses: In the old days, I would have suggested a four-color catalog of gorgeous heirlooms, but my standards have changed. I now expect a rose to live through the same boot camp of neglect as the rest of my flowers have. What I’d really like is any non-hot-pink rose certified by Texas A&M University and Texas AgriLife Extension as Earth-Kind — Ducher and Sea Foam come to mind ($15.99 at Barton Springs Nursery).
Vegetable seeds: Anything from the Botanical Interests company works for me, especially the tricolor bush beans and the collection known as Summer of Squash (botani calinterests.com, from $1.50) .
Watering supplies: A 100-foot length of Submatic pressure-compensating drip hose ($54.95 at the Natural Gardener) would excite me more than anything that comes in a box from Tiffany. I already have a Water Wand, the ingenious hose-end waterer that allows you to shoot a fine spray of water under leaves — a great help in hosing off spider mites and aphids. Available at www.waterwand-usa.com for $24 to $32.
Tools: If you frequent garage sales, keep an eye out for an antique rake or shovel, perhaps with a hardwood handle whittled by someone’s great-grandfather. Or you could purchase a 13-inch King of Spades, the supermodel of the digging genre, at Way Cool Tools (www.waycooltools.com, $88). Harbor Freight Tools carries a full line of tarps (from $4) for filling with leaves or weeds and dragging to the compost pile, eliminating the need for lawn-and-leaf bags. While you’re at it, pick up a six-pack of gardening gloves (from $6).
Mass quantities: This is where truck ownership really pays off, because gardeners love bulk deliveries of rocks (but no pebbles), paving stones or bricks, decomposed granite (for pathways), compost, or pine straw (for mulch). Find these materials cheaply in the American-Statesman’s classifieds (and at statesmanclassifieds.com) and on craigslist.org, or get free recycled glass and wood mulch at the City of Austin Landfill, 10108 FM 812, from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Mondays-Fridays. It’s first come, first served, and you do the work, so bring a shovel, gloves and closed-toed shoes. Another gift idea? Believe it or not, manure is a special treat, especially if it comes from a chicken, rabbit or llama.
Good things in smaller packages: Red wiggler worms (500 for $17 from www.unclejimswormfarm.com) accomplish great things in both garden beds and vermicomposting bins. A bottle of liquid seaweed ($8.10 at Barton Springs Nursery) is appropriate for any occasion. A $2 package of hose gaskets shows you care.
Clothes: Callahan’s carries Carhartt and Pointer overalls ($47 and up) that last forever, as well as live chickens and bulk seed. Everyone needs a good no-gimmicks straw hat — no perky floral hatbands or visors, if you know what’s good for you. Thrift shops are the best source for extra-large men’s dress shirts made from the thinnest possible cotton. On 100-degree days, I cinch them with a tool belt to create a strangely attractive gardening frock.
Books: Here’s what I don’t want — a crafty primer that explains how to paint a birdhouse or hot-glue dried flowers onto a Styrofoam wreath. Much better would be something in the survivalist line, perhaps the reissued edition of Bradford Angier’s 1972 classic “One Acre and Security” (Willow Creek, $15.95) or Stella Otto’s “The Backyard Orchardist: A Complete Guide to Growing Fruit Trees in the Home Garden” (Ottographics, $15.95). There’s no orchard in my future, but I have a rich fantasy life. A copy of Mark Bittman’s “How To Cook Everything Vegetarian” (Wiley, $35) will help any gardener turn bumper crops into remarkable meals.
Frivolous luxuries, in no particular order: Blue bottles for bottle trees. A wildly expensive knife for chopping homegrown produce. A larger-than-life metal sculpture by a local artist. A drawing of the gardener’s own garden by any artist at all, the more primitive the better. A massage to undo the aches of double-digging. A pedicure for battered, sandal-wearing feet. If I had a battery-powered radio, I’d have a way to listen to the Natural Gardener’s John Dromgoole on KLBJ-AM on weekend mornings while actually gardening. I know what you’re thinking, but an iPod wouldn’t work in this situation — I wouldn’t be able to hear birds, the sound of approaching rain or the ice-cream truck.
And finally: You could always offer a bottle of Old World red wine with notes of earth, leaf mold, aged compost and/or crushed tomato leaves. What could be better to drink in the garden? But if you prefer, the gardener will accompany you to Vino Vino for a glass. For that, she’d change out of her overalls.
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November 17th, 2008 admin
Below is a link to my story from this Saturday’s Austin American Statesman. It includes an unconscionably ham-bone picture of me, but I was able to rant about watering, finally.
Google News Alert for: Robin Chotzinoff
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November 7th, 2008 admin
Job Description: Parallel playmate for uneasy vegetable gardener who says she wants to be alone.
Qualifications: must be willing to sit around in the garden reading the Sunday New York Times and drink ice tea, offer occasional snippet of national news analysis or share two funny sentences. (Just the two.) Once per hour say something along the lines of “is that tough and stunning rose the one you call Martha Gonzales?” or “you just picked ALL THOSE BEANS?” or “I gotta say, no one looks hotter in overalls than you.”
Age: Not important. Ten-year-old applicants may substitute Holes by Louis Sachar for the Times. Or anything by Laura Ingalls Wilder.
Perks: Shade umbrella, plastic Adirondack chair, ice tea with real ice, all the raw green beans you can eat.
Note: Although the gardener doesn’t, for some reason, want to be alone, she doesn’t really feel like chatting.
Obstacles: Chiggers, mosquitoes and low-flying purple martens—although for some reason they leave the gardener alone.
Pay: to be arranged by karma.
Offer expires with the gardener herself, but not before.
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October 10th, 2008 admin
Five maple leaves, regulation autumn orange, hang in a plastic bag from a magnet on the fridge. These were collected last week by my daughter Gus, as proof. While we were in Boston visiting our other daughter Coco, the one who just started college in that part of the world, the leaves were doing their northeastern thing, but Gus knew no one would believe it in Texas. The only reason I believe it is that I went to boarding school not far from Boston, and saw trees change overnight there in October. Like everything else from my childhood–the sight of authentically deciduous trees, the smell of old leaves decomposing under feet walking in the woods, twilight approaching in a uniquely stern and Yankee way–it is all weirdly familiar, especially considering that every news story I read in this morning’s paper has all but left my head. (I remember the economy is collapsing, but that’s about it.) Now my 18-year-old daughter lives in this place, with its four definable seasons. It hasn’t been a seamless transition and sometimes she is lonely. More often, she is just plain cold. As a mother, I feel the opposite of omnipotent. Nullipotent? All I can do is promise a pair of Ugg boots for her birthday and, if I can find the right sort of botanica, a bar of magical cold-and-lonely-begone soap that scrubs away discomfort and washes it into the municipal water system.
My distraction in Boston was this:
Cortland apples, with flesh so white as to be nearly light green. So crisp as to snap your bridgework right out of your face. The only living thing that really deserves the world “bittersweet.” We made a special trip out into the country to pick more giant apples than we could possibly cram into the overhead compartment. The farm looked like this:
It looked like a farm from the kind of children’s books I read growing up in the city. Deep green grass set off deep blue sky and Puritan work ethic seeped out of the bark of the trees. 100 years before the battle of Lexington, some tough family had grubbed enough stones out of the soil to make miles and miles of Robert-Frostian stone walls. The work didn’t end there, and it still hasn’t, and don’t you forget it. It’s no picnic milking cows at midnight when it’s twenty below.
No one on the farm gave me this vibe–in fact, the farmer was damn near as friendly as a Texan–so I had to make it up out of my own horticultural neuroses. It was easy, much easier than battling the four seasons of the northeast or trying to forge an iron will for myself this late in a life of indolence and hedonism.
What does this have to do with gardening? You tell me. All I’ve done since I got home is dig and dig and dig, dragging all kinds of artifacts out of the depths of the ground. Today, for instance, I saw two earthworms tied in a kama-sutra-like knot. I don’t have time for a bigger vegetable garden and I should be writing something marketable instead of empire-building. But I feel unusually comfortable out in Mother’s Day Farm, and I’ve always been a sucker for that.
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August 19th, 2008 admin
The following story ran last week in the Austin American Statesman.
Ten years ago, Becky Barsch Fischer’s husband James suggested she try growing vegetables and herbs in their Georgetown yard. After all, both Fischers worked as the kind of chefs who seek out fresh, organic produce from local sources. Becky said she was too busy, and besides, it was too hot. The grounds of their 1919 house already sustained cool green lawns, big pecan trees and plenty of ornamentals. But she finally agreed to plant a few seeds.
“Next thing I knew, I had lettuce and arugula all winter long,” she remembers. “Next thing after that, our own vegetables.”
The arugula was particularly persuasive-there’s something about growing your own version of produce that may cost a fortune at a grocery store, but doesn’t taste as good. (Figs. Snow peas. Heirloom tomatoes. Arugula!)
Hooked, Becky became a true four seasons gardener, growing successive crops in a cycle that ranged from winter greens to summer squash, and spending more time in the herb gardens at Hudson’s Bend, where she worked as executive chef. When her interest in home-grown produce edged out her passion for cooking, she reinvented herself as The Culinary Garden Hoe, a designer and installer of mostly edible gardens.
Since then, she’s worked for such high-profile clients as Central Market and the Dell Children’s Medical Center, but “not as many residential clients as I’d like,” she says. “Individual clients are so happy to be started off with a design. They don’t have time to put in the garden, so I do it for them and then they take over. It takes gardening back to the family.”
It was about time. Growing up in San Angelo, Becky had just one distant relative who still gardened-at the age of 98. Her part-time teaching job at the Texas Culinary Academy exposed her to a younger demographic whose connection to the earth was even more remote.
“I brought in some peas still in the pod, and a student asked me what they were,” she says. “I realized that even culinary students don’t always know where real food comes from. But they’ll try to impress you by taking food and turning it into something it’s not.”
“What I’d really like to see,” Becky finally decided, “is the return of the Victory Garden.”
Others-from slow food devotees in San Francisco to garden bloggers to custodians of a few historic victory gardens-were coming to the same conclusion. In a time of rising food prices and newly converted locavores, the nearly ninety-year-old Victory Garden concept sounded less like a nostalgic relic and more like good idea.
Begun during World War One, the plots known as “war gardens” or “liberty gardens” were promoted as a patriotic measure in which citizens responded to food shortages by growing their own. They were an unqualified success. By 1944, the Pennsylvania State Counsel of Defense estimated that ten million home gardeners had managed to grow 40% of the nation’s produce. Eleanor Roosevelt was impressed enough to start her own victory garden at the White House. (Today, bloggers at eattheview.org are circulating a petition encouraging the next US president to do the same.)
Victory gardens appeared not just in backyards but in vacant lots and schoolyards, where committees oversaw a group gardening effort. They promoted ideas now thought of as modern–sharing seeds and labor among neighbors, donating excess harvest to food banks and using organic soil amendments. They could also be dictatorial-one manual offers no-nonsense techniques for dealing with “lazy gardeners.” But lazy or not, 1940s Victory gardeners came together over food.
“And that’s how we know our best neighbors today,” Becky says. “I take them lettuce and squash, and they share their persimmons, dewberries and pears. I tell my students food is the purest expression of love, whether you’re pulling it out of the ground or the sauté pan.”
A 1940s gardener may have been thinking less about love and more about war, but the Victory Garden message remains constant: Growing food isn’t as hard as you think. Give it a try. While you’re at it, save the nation’s food supply. And though the Alice Waters cartel has been doing an arguably rarefied version of this for decades, victory gardening, Becky says, is something any Joe can do.
“For sure I spend less on groceries,” Becky says. “And my garden is survival of the fittest, kind of an experiment. If I do something that works, I tell my clients. On the other hand, one of the tomatoes I grew this year was Green Sausage, and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.”
Becky’s garden looks almost as free-form as her philosophy sounds-completely unlike the string-marked row plantings of the 1940s.
“Honestly, it might be easier to grow vegetables in a rectangular plot,” she says, “but I’m not much of a rectangle person. Perfection is overrated and boring. I like to mix things in.”
On a recent afternoon at Becky’s place, beans grew up cornstalks, a massive old rose had climbed the fence and was headed for the street, artichokes were dotted among exotic flowers, and lamb’s ear crowded a hedge of thai basil. “It’s way more basil than I need,” she said, “but pests don’t like it, so I plant a lot.”
A few crops had failed the heat test-”would you like my recipe for fried cucumbers?” Becky quipped-but tomatoes were flourishing under shade cloth, paprika peppers soaked up the sun, and the complex smell of multiple herbs hung in the air. In a breezeway filled with actual breeze, bromeliads hung in wall sconces and tropical container plants lined the walls. Something crafty was underway at the old workbench Becky’s husband salvaged and converted into a potting table.
But all was not random. A designer at heart, Becky could look at the few edibles that flourish in heat-hoja santa, cardamom, ginger, a topiary fig tree-and imagine one season ahead.
“As soon as this tropical bed dies back,” she said, “I’m re-working the soil and putting in greens for fall.”
BECKY BARSCH FISCHER’S LEMON BASIL LIMEADE RECIPE
1 C Lemon Basil leaves, loosely packed (substitute Lemon Verbena, Lime Basil, Lemon Grass or Sweet Basil)
3 C Water
3/4-1 C Sugar
Juice of 4 limes
Combine water and sugar and bring to a simmer until sugar dissolves. Remove from heat, and add the herb leaves. Steep 15 to 30 minutes to infuse flavor, strain leaves. Add the fresh squeezed lime juice and enjoy
as is. Or add a shot of an adult beverage.
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