Winterizing Our San Antonio Backyard Garden

by Celia Hayes

So, now that it is cooling off a bit, and maybe the seasonal trees are about to start thinking about the possibility of perhaps changing color sometime soon, it's time to sort out the garden for winter. A few of the hanging tomato plants still had a few slowly-ripening tomatoes on them, but the rest were pretty well done for the year. So this last week before the rain kicked in, we pulled them up, and tossed them into the mulch pile, and moved the hanging frame around to hang facing the kitchen window. Oddly enough, the eggplant, okra and various Bell and jalapeno pepper plands are

Guten Tag, Y’All - This is Texas!

by Celia Hayes

When I first came to Texas, at the express request of the US Air Force some (mumble) seventeen (mumble) years ago I thought I knew all there was to know about the place: the Alamo of course, and the Riverwalk, too. I knew that Houston had a Grand Opera, that Lubbock was a flat as a pancake griddle with some Monopoly houses set on it, I had read Edna Ferber's Giant, and I knew about cattle drives and the King Ranch, and that Texas was called the buckle of the Bible Belt ... I knew pretty much what any well-read traveler could pick up through the medium of pop culture and the base library.

What I did not know, until well after I got here and began to look around – was how very much more there was.

Festival on the Hill

by Celia Hayes

One of the things that drew me to the house that I eventually bought when I was first house-hunting in San Antonio in the early 1990s was that although it was the smallest, square-foot-wise of all the houses that I looked at  . . .  and it backed on a wide green belt that ran between Nacogdoches and O'Connor Roads. My backyard might be only a little wider than the house frontage, and about twelve feet wide – but beyond the fence was the green belt, which made it seem all the larger. Over and beyond the back fence was a good few acres of green and rising ground, crowned by St. Helena's  . . .  one of those cubist modern shaped, in pale buff brick, which looks vaguely like a ship.

Over time, the Stahl end of

The Colors of the Seasons

It took me a good while to get to living in a place with four distinct seasons - spring, summer, fall and winter - and a little longer to get to a place where the third of those seasons was absolutely spectacular. That place was not New England, but Northern Utah, where large swaths of the lower ranges of the Wasatch Front turned to one glorious sweep of gold - the mountain aspens, of course.

The mountains were granite grey, their summits a jagged outline against the blue sky . . . and at their feet, in the town that I lived in, there were more aspens and poplar trees also turning gold; their fallen leaves thickly-piled on the ground underneath turned the streets and sidewalks to

The Autumn of Butterflies

Summer has been mild here in South Texas, and so also has autumn. The fierce afternoon heat has broken, it’s no longer necessary to run the air conditioning. It has been so mild, that the leaves on the trees are just beginning to fall; we haven't had that prolonged cold snap that briskly reminds them that they need to be letting go and moving on, chop-chop. I trimmed one of the grapevines in front a couple of weeks ago - and the poor innocent thing is putting out new leaves already, under the delusion that winter has come and gone.

This has been truly the year of butterflies; they are everywhere, about the puddles and in the late afternoon a whole fair of them orbits the almond