Water in the Creek, Progress in the Garden

 by Celia Hayes

Well, it’s been another quiet week in Spring Creek Forest, the little suburb that time forgot… I am improving my little patch of it as fast as I can and as the growing season allows. We were assisted last week by rain… lots and lots of rain. There actually was running water in Salado Creek. And since it was running over the path, we needed to wade through it – up to our shins, and with a perceptible current, too. Yes, we like to walk on the wild side, what with the mad risk-taking and all. The Weevil thoroughly enjoyed a romp through the water, and when she flushed a couple of…

 Soil Aeration and Compost Top Dressing Your Lawn

by Randy Watson

Much of San Antonio has dense clay soils that begin heavy and may be further compacted from heavy use from play, sports activities and pets. Roots require oxygen to grow and absorb nutrients and water. Compacted soils reduce the amount of air and water within the soil. This results in poor top growth and lawn deterioration. Core aeration is recommended to maintain a healthy lawn and can benefit your lawn by allowing for the increasing water, nutrient and oxygen movement into the soil. From personal experience I can also say that aeration and top dressing with compost kept my lawn much healthier through last summer's drought and a healthy lawn helps choke out the weeds,…

To The Man-Cave!

by Celia Hayes

We took the opportunity, this last rainy weekend, for a quick jaunt through Bussey's Flea Market, thinking that with the rain and the cold, that there might be bargains to be found, and so there were. Bussey's is a half-acre ramble of sheds and covered tables, on IH-35 North; if you get off at Wiederstein, just trundle along the access road until you see the giant concrete armadillo. This is possibly the only armadillo in Texas which is not dead in the middle of the road, but it should be easy enough to recognize. Anyway, we are terribly fond of Bussey's as many of the vendors are permanent fixtures. Lamentably, a fair number of them know what they have and exactly how much to charge for it: the bargains are most…

Spring and Tiger Pop

Visit Mission Realty for free online San Antonio home search

by Celia Hayes

Having a couple of dogs and a garden works very well at getting one out from behind a desk and a computer ... in that one of them – well, both of them – need to be watered frequently. The dogs must be walked, and the garden needs to be weeded and mulched. All these things must be performed often enough that anyone who has either or both is no danger of becoming fused to the task chair...

So – anyway, it's clear that spring has come early to the San Antonio metropolitan area: we started early vegetables in pots and planters a month ago ... and by the last week in February, the mountain laurel trees were in full bloom. Mountain laurels –…

A Matterhorn of Mulch

by Celia Hayes

We were walking the dogs the other day when we saw a bucket truck parked in front of a house down the road. There was a worker with a long rope and a chain-saw, busy taking down some higher branches. When we got closer, we saw that there were already the remains of a great many large tree limbs piled up in front of the house. And that the bucket-truck was actually one of those covered dump-truck arrangements used by tree services, with a portable industrial wood-chipper hitched to the back of the truck. One of our neighbors was obviously having a great deal of work done on the trees in their yard – only one of which was a…

Spring in the Garden

by Celia Hayes

Yes, we know very well that the official date for 'last frost o' the season' for San Antonio is March 15th – but the trees are tentatively beginning to put on new leaves, the new grass – or what passes for the grass in weedy fields and verges – is already thick and green, and so it is time to get back to the garden. The suppliers have gotten the early spring vegetables starts in already. So – we went out this last weekend to get started in a bigger way, especially since the early lettuce and greens that we put in pots a couple of weeks ago did very nicely.

The topsy-turvy planters had been emptied of last year's plants and the soil; we were so encouraged by the success of growing peppers…

Never Too Early Garden Start

 … in the spring to begin reviving the garden.

But if I knew then what I know now about the topsoil in the yard around my San Antonio home, when I first moved in, I would have hired someone to come in with a small bull-dozer and scrape off the top few inches of topsoil. Then I would have had a third of it put back into place, and mixed with another generous third of sand and a final generous third of well-rotted compost.

This is what I have finished up with in most of those places where I have plants growing, by the way – doing it at the very start would have saved a lot of time and trouble. The prevailing topsoil around my neighborhood is clay – splendid for making adobe bricks from. It’s dense, heavy…

The Splendid Hanging Gardens of Spring Creek Forest

 by Celia Hayes

As the backyard of my Spring Creek Forest home is small, I must make the absolute most of it when it comes to plants both ornamental and vegetable. Space is at a premium, and those places which offer a favorable exposure to maximum sunlight are at even more of a premium. The back yard of our Spring Creek Forest home looks to the west south, but half of it is shaded by a very large mulberry tree planted by the original owner … and a couple of Carolina laurel-cherry trees that planted themselves. There are only about three places in the back yard which get hours of afternoon sun – and I can only hang so many topsy-turvy planters and hanging pots from the edge of the back porch,…

 Looking Ahead – 2012

by Celia Hayes

It's axiomatic that the year seems to fly faster, the older you get. Someone explained it to me, thusly: the year is merely a portion of your total life. When you are four years old, a single year is a whole quarter of your entire life. By the time you are forty, that year is only one-fortieth of your entire life. This makes sense, if you don't think too hard about it. But 2011 was a year of events, portents and wonders. Sometimes I felt as if we were skidding from one extreme to the other, in between every kind of loss and gain imaginable, both personal and professional. We lost my father, for one – the day after Christmas, 2010 – and I spent a month in California early in the year, helping my mother…

Reviving the Garden: Tomato Victory

 by Celia Hayes

The curse on growing tomatoes in my garden has definitely been lifted: we have ripe red tomatoes on the vine, and promising clusters of green ones – and although they are not all very large, they are tasty. So the Topsy-Turvys do the trick as promised; even if they haven't resulted in simply bushel-baskets of tomatoes, they have indeed tomatoes, which is about three steps farther than I have ever been able to go before. Next spring we will try out some of those heirloom varieties, and if my daughter, the queen of all garage sales, manages to score a few more Topsys at marked-down rates, we'll soon have so many suspended from the tree in the back yard that it will be more than your life is…