Reviving the Garden – Tomatoes
by Julia Hayden
So, round two of reviving the garden has been undertaken, thanks to my daughter finding several of those Topsy-Turvy suspended tomato-pot gadgets at the severely marked-down shelf at the local HEB. You know, those things that are actually a heavy insulated plastic bag, with the tomato growing out of the bottom? Theoretically, it spares having to park them in cages, and the warmth of the sun and the water all get to the roots of the tomato plant, with the result that you have just oodles and oodles of ginormous fresh tomatoes hanging from the branches of the tomato plant hanging out the bottom of the suspended tomato-pot thingy. So, we bought some marked down tomato plants and a bag of extra-nice potting soil, filled them all up, and now there are three of them, hanging from the edge of the back porch.
My daughter anticipates a tomato-bounty, but I am not holding my breath. I despair of growing tomatoes here – in the ground, in a pot, in a box, with a fox . . . the magic of a tomato bounty has eluded me every year. It’s horribly frustrating for me, as I grew them in Utah, in the backyard garden plot! Tons of them . . . well, not tons of them, but a fair number, enough to justify the time, trouble and flat of 2-inch pots of seedling plants. And there is nothing on earth better than a fresh-picked, perfectly ripe home-grown tomato, warm from the sun, just-pulled from the vine, coming away easily into your hand. It’s as if some malignant power has put a curse on my garden here. Other people grow tomatoes: a friend in Alamo Heights grows sweet little cherub tomatoes on bushes that are small shrubs, so many that she gives them away, right and left. Once, when I had occasion to speak to a professor of agronomy at Texas A&M, I plaintively asked him right out, if there was a reason why I can’t grow tomatoes here in San Antonio, and he answered that yes, there was – but he’d have to charge me tuition before he could tell me what it was.
Peppers I can grow here – quite easily. There was actually a seasonal jalapeno pepper plant that happened to take root in a fortunate, south-facing and sheltered place, and thrived for three years. It grew into a fairly large shrub, covered with red and green peppers – in fact, I still have a zip-lock baggie full of them in the deep-freeze. Small lemon and lime trees in pots – they’ve been thriving for years. I’ve had pots of parsley and chive what have gone on steadily, winter and summer, also for years . . . but nothing works with tomatoes. The flowers don’t set, and start producing tomatoes, or the whole plant just ups and withers . . . really, I despair, sometimes. It’s almost less trouble to buy a box from Ernie, the veggie guy who sells produce out the back of his SUV, parked under a tree on the corner of Stahl and Higgens – straight up from the Valley.
But my daughter says that everyone who has tried to grow tomatoes with the Topsy-turvys has been thrilled no end. Sigh. One more time . . .
We went to Wimberly last weekend, first for the 
We took the back way, from 
So – Wimberley; a sweet little town, halfway between Austin and San Antonio, well-grown with oak and cypress trees, and stocked with cute little places selling artistic tchotchkes, kitchenware, antiques and the like. It still has a small-town feel about it – it is not laid out in straight lines and squares like the older parts of Fredericksburg, or 
We took our lunch at Marcos’ Italian, right on the town square; which was a perfect place to sit and recover after the heat. They make their own rolls, as I discovered, when having an Italian sausage roll for lunch – and the same dough is used to make little rolls to dip into spiced olive-oil. We completely missed the turn-off for the River Road, which is where we wanted to go, as I discovered when checking the map again. Instead, we blundered off into the entirely opposite direction – still, it was scenic enough: a cool green river, with cypress trees lining the riverbank, and tiny green feathers of cypress seedlings coming up from the mud. My daughter waded in the water, to cool off – she promises that next time, we’ll bring some inflatable pool toys and float around a bit on the river.
Gardening with me comes in fits and starts, and it depends on a lot of things – is it too blazingly hot to spend much time out of doors? Are the various native plants relatively thriving? Was there enough rain to keep everything relatively well-watered without having me spend a lot of time out there with a garden hose? I did myself a favor a good few years ago, by taking out the grass and doing xeriscape, but that was something done in gradual stages, and as soon as it was done I sold the lawn mower to a neighbor for 45$. Month in, month out, all the way around the year, the water bill runs about 30$, and the yard usually doesn’t look too bad. At it’s very best, of course – it looks darned good. Alas, it hasn’t looked darned good in a bit, being struck by several disasters in sequence.
The first disaster was a pair of young boxerish dogs that my daughter found running loose in the neighborhood late in the fall; they had collars but no tags, and very little evidence of having ever been domesticated . . . aside from being overwhelmingly, exuberantly affectionate. She eventually found some suckers . . . er, a good home for them, but not before they carved a wide swath of destruction through my back garden.
Let’s see . . . demolished the all-weather padding on the chaise lounge, scattering fabric scraps and stuffing everywhere, broke a pottery garden ornament, brutally uprooted a good-sized lemon tree in a large pot, dug several holes in flower beds, including two which uprooted a pretty-well-established rose bushes, ripped the gas barbeque cover to shreds, and destroyed the sliding screen door. They had also begun chewing on the wooden porch furniture; a sturdy wooden chair and a swing. I was more than happy to see them depart to a new home, and glad to hear there was nothing in their new owner’s back yard but a fence and a large patch of grass.
Barely had the garden begun to recover, when the second disaster hit in late January – a bitter cold snap which seemed to last for days. There was only room inside the house for a handful of the more tender and valued potted plants. Everything else was moved onto the back porch and covered up – but alas, it was too cold for far too long, and by the end of it, just about everything except the roses were dead. The hanging baskets of spider plants, the scented geraniums, the lemons and the Key lime tree, the herbs and the ferns . . . all reduced to dry brown sticks and leaves, the native plants all gone dormant and frost-burned right down to the ground. I’d look out at the garden and think – if I could afford it, I’d have the whole thing plowed up, scraped clean down the caliche and start all over.
But the natives came back, green and lush and vigorous . . . and then I began to find new green sprouts shooting out from the lower stems of lemons and the Key lime, new shoots coming out at the base of the olive tree. I had let them go, because I was much to disheartened to cut them down or throw them out at the start, but a reassuring number of them have turned out not to be dead at all; just resting, and pining for the fjords. This last weekend, I spent some money on plants at Wimberley Market Days, and out at the Antique Rose Emporium – not a whole heck of a lot of money, but enough to fill enough of the empty pots . . . and it’s starting to look good again.
It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that the downtown Riverwalk is the heart of San Antonio – after the Alamo, it’s the other completely unique tourist attraction. Water, trees and skinny riverbank gardens in the heart of a high-rise city – not many other places like it, and all hail Robert Hugman, the architect-genius who conceived the idea of a riverbank promenade, lined with shops and adorned with bridges and gardens.
Water and plenty of it drove the establishment of a settlement and missions here in the first place: an oasis in what was otherwise near enough to a desert. Early San Antonio looked to the water, measured out careful amounts through the acequias, the irrigation ditches. By the mid-19th century, travelers and visitors noted that many of the best houses had gardens that stretched down to the riverbanks, and there were little bathhouses and pavilions, so that residents could go swimming in the hot afternoons. Mills and breweries also sprouted up along the river, having a need for fresh water, or water-power . . . and now we are turning to the river again.
My daughter and I had business at the Pearl Brewery last week and we thought – oh, let’s bring the dog, and explore the new part of the Riverwalk, which we had seen from previous excursions to the Farmer’s Market and to La Gloria. So off we went, intending really to only go a few blocks – my daughter was only wearing light sandals, hardly the right footwear for a prolonged city trek. But once we got down to the level of the new walkway and gardens, there was just too much temptation to go a little farther, just around this bend, to see this bit of river, this view, the school of flying fish suspended underneath the IH-35 – hey, they light up those fish at night, how cool is that?
We walked past little bits of reconstructed marshland, banks covered in jasmine, the locks that lift the river-taxis up to the slightly higher river level, patchwork gardens of native plants, the tilework bench at the river-landing by the old convent school that is now a school of art and crafts, a fountain behind a classical-style arcade . . . the oldest VFW post in Texas – housed in an old white mansion which looks like it escaped from the set of Gone With the Wind, and bits of art, everywhere. There also seemed to be a lot of birds – not only the usual pigeons and ducks. Under one of the concrete bridges, swallows had built dozens of nests. There was a water-bird of some kind, standing so perfectly still, on a rock in the water-garden opposite the Museum of Art that at first we thought it was a sculpture itself. But it wasn’t – and the hawk that roosted on top of a telephone pole near the AT&T building, leisurely dining on fresh-caught pigeon (we knew it was a pigeon because the feathers were falling down all around us) – that definitely wasn’t a sculpture.
We’ve always been do it-yourselfers when it came to . . . well, a lot of things. Mom made all of our clothes, for instance: all of hers, mine and my sister’s dresses, for ordinary and for special occasions. My Dad practically built his and Mom’s retirement home himself – the first iteration, anyway. When it burned down, and had to be rebuilt Mom and Dad were fifteen years older and took the easy way out. He had always done all the maintenance on the family cars – in fact, he was still working on cars, almost to the last day that he was fit and well enough to . . . which led to some awkward moments when Mom donated the car that he had been working on to the local PBS station this spring, and the tow truck came to pick it up. It seemed that Dad had removed one of the wheels, in order to work on the brake pad, or something, and put all the nuts in the upturned hubcap, as was his habit . . . and he never got back to work on that car, and in the interim a ground squirrel came and stole three of the nuts . . . anyway – DIY; long tradition in the family, as well as a certain bent for improvising.
Anyway, my daughter and I have branched out to making home-made cheese. We like cheese, we cook with it a lot, and it’s getting expensive. And what better way to get in touch, as a writer of historical fiction, with how women used to put food on the table, translating the bounty of the fields, vegetable patch and dairy – than to do it yourself. We’ve already run through making bread from scratch, making pickles, jam, fruit-based wine and cordials, and beef jerky, so on to the challenge of coagulated milk in all it’s delicious forms.
Well, it is personal, the stuff that you hang on the wall, or put on the shelf to ornament the particular place where you live . . . and anything original and artistic, and not done by you or any member of your family . . . that’s even more personal. Seriously, I’d like to be a mega-best-selling author just so that I could afford to buy some of the original art that I have seen, here and there around San Antonio. I know that most of those artists would like very much to sell something to someone who can afford it, like me – so everyone would be happy. (Even more, I’d like to have a larger house with wall space enough to properly display those objects d’ art that I would like to buy, but one thing at a time.)
The original art that I do have in my house . . . four of them are paintings that I bought, and one was a gift to my mother, who gave it to my daughter for safe-keeping, which was just as well, because if Mom hadn’t given it to my daughter, it would have burned with just about everything else that was in their house when the big fire swept through in 2003. My daughter wound up with it, because it’s a painting of two cats. This is nice: two cats in my house who do not need to use a litter box . . . something of a welcome change.
Two of the paintings were bought for my daughter’s room when she was a baby. There was an art show in a mall in California, and I saw them, and thought what wonderful, fantasies they would be, to hang on the wall of a children’s room: a children’s birthday party, in a magical garden, of flowers and children playing, the cake and the presents on the table and roses growing over a yellow house in the background. The other was of a pink elephant and other creatures in another magical garden. The painter’s name was Martha Krohn: I went to her house to buy the two paintings, since I didn’t have the money on me. The inside of her house was entirely hung with her paintings – one of these was actually in the laundry room.
There were actually three paintings by the other artist: she was Spanish, married to a serviceman at Zaragoza AB, and I had a table next to her at the NCO Wives’ Club Christmas bazaar, one year. I was selling Cabbage Patch doll clothes, which were going like hotcakes, and she had only made one sale all the day. She was so discouraged that I bought the small one of boats on the shore, because it looked like the sea front in Greece. She had painted it from a postcard. I bought two larger ones later: one was of a street market in Spain, which I later gave to my brother as a wedding present. The one that I have left, I have to put in an out-of-the-way spot in the house, because it is of a Spanish religious procession, a confraternity – in their robes and with their drums and banner, carrying a pair of religious icons through the streets – and people who don’t know about confraternities assume it’s a particularly flamboyant chapter of the KKK.
Farmers’ markets, that is – and not just in metropolitan San Antonio, although the every-Saturday at the Pearl Brewery reigns supreme for location and places to eat, and sheer variety of offerings. Not to mention the live music and the family friendliness of it all. One could actually work up a schedule of hitting the local markets and doing a bit of sight-seeing in certain towns within driving distance of San Antonio: they’d be something to do, every Saturday – and better for you than vegging out in front of the television.
First Saturday of the month: Wimberley Market Days, which is just about the granddaddy of them all, being the oldest outdoor market in the state, and the second-largest, with more than 470 booths. Many of them are permanent – about the size of very large garden sheds, and decorated in a number of interesting and charmingly rustic ways, scattered along a network of paths in a grove of shady trees. Once in Wimberley, just follow all the traffic. It’s a small town, you can’t miss it. Myself, I am still waiting to see the guys who had the old portable gristmill, and who would grind fresh wheat flour and cornmeal, while you waited. The flour and the cornmeal were splendid – alas, no one at Market Days had seen them for months, the last time I was there.
Second Saturday of the month: Boerne – just up IH-10 west. I know what it looks like, but it’s pronounced Bernie. The market is set up in the town square, just off Main Street – you can’t miss the bandstand. There was a food-vendor there last time, who had absolutely splendid gorditas, and another one who built funnel-cakes, each one sufficient to feed a large family or several hungry teenaged boys. The town square is lined with huge, shady pecan trees – it’s not a permanent venue, like Wimberley. The pavilions go down, when the market is over.
Third Saturday of the month: it’s Gruene, they say, on the far side of the hill! The sleepy and historical little village of Gruene, just north of New Braunfels has their specialty market on the third weekend, on the grounds in front of the Adoble Verde restaurant. The particular appeal of Gruene’s market is that the goods displayed there are all created by the vendors and artists themselves. None of this made in China stuff – it’s all real.
And I didn’t even mention the Christmas markets . . . later. And if all this does not appeal, or is too far to drive, or just too darned pricy – well, there’s always Busey’s Flea Market, just up IH-35 North. Every weekend, and just look for the concrete armadillo.
You know, there are so many signs about, on any street given over to commerce these days, sometimes you just sort of blank them out. Unless you are looking for that particular business – but that’s what a GPS unit is for, isn’t it? This must be very disappointing for the specialists, the agents, marketing experts and the sign-painters, for when everyone has a dazzling sign, then no one has a dazzling sign. It all becomes just part of the blurring together of the cityscape, and at worst one long and protracted eyesore. The louder and more raucous it all becomes visually (or any other way) the less we pay attention and the more that the sign-painters or designers or marketing experts have to up their game. How do you attract attention to your business – I guess the next step is to paint the whole building in an eye-catching color . . . Erick’s Tacos, on Nacogdoches Road in San Antonio has already done this, by the way – a brilliant, brilliant glow-in-dark even when your eyes are shut you can still see it neon orange. I really don’t know what’s coming next . . . which reminds me, at some point we’re gonna have to stop in and try the tacos.
So, having worked over Mothers’ Day weekend delivering edible fruit centerpieces, my daughter and I decided that we would slack off – yes, indeedy, we would go off and do something interesting – the Saturday Farmer’s market in New Braunfels, and a pit-stop at Granzin’s Meat Market . . . that’s the meat and grocery store tucked cunningly away behind Bluebonnet Ford, on IH-35N . . . which offers the most divinely delicious sausages and frankfurters around. We found out about Granzin’s almost by accident, by the way – when I went up to the Sophienburg earlier this spring, to do some publicity for one of my book appearances. There was an estate sale my daughter wanted to check out– so it was too late for the Farmer’s Market, but I suggested, “What about a late lunch at the Gristmill in Gruene and Granzin’s on the way back?”
I know, 
But it was lively enough on Saturday – pleasantly and reassuringly full of sightseers and music-lovers. We stopped into the Gruene Hall, the oldest still-running dance hall in Texas, where all the window-shutters along the side walls were open and dropped down for the breeze to wander in and the sound of live music to wander out. Then some serious time in the two antique malls – me thumbing through books, and my daughter sneering whenever she saw Indiana pressed glass miss-labeled as Carnival glass. (She has become quite the snob about such things, but vintage pressed glass has become her obsession.) I know that there are hard times in many places lately – floods along the lower Mississippi, fires in West Texas, general depression in the Rust Belt states . . . but not much of it was showing in Gruene. Even at mid-afternoon, we still had to wait twenty-five minutes for a table, but it was a very pleasant wait with more live music – a guy with his guitar, doing a medley of solos and songs that he had written himself, in between some patter about the musician’s life. (Which always reminds me of the joke: what do you call a musician who has broken up with his girlfriend? Broke 
Conservative me, I just had the basic burger, but my daughter went all adventurous and had a beef tenderloin sandwich – which was fantastic, or so she said. We split an order of French fries, as the Gristmill makes them, which are sort of like thick-sliced potato chips, and some tortilla chips and salsa, which were just as good. The tortilla chips were freshly-made and scrumptious, but the salsa wasn’t quite it’s equal, being lumps of mooshed-up tomato and chilies, with tomato-water. Still – a lovely afternoon, and with the rain this week, Gruene and the Hill Country may be at the best they’re going to get this year.
Ah, at long last - respite from the customary brutal heat of summer in south Texas, when that glorious day dawns. The low temperature at night drops into the fifties, the high of the day is maybe for about twenty minutes in late afternoon when the thermometer crawls up to the mid-eighties, and all over the city one can hear the sound of windows being raised, cranked open and flung wide to admit the delicious fresh and unfiltered air . . . yes, the woman rushing from window to window last week and screaming ‘fresh air, fresh air, good god almighty, fresh air at last!' - that was me. Pay no attention, I do this every year, round about this time.
The other thing that I do round about this time every year, is anxiously look around for the date of the yearly San Antonio Herb Market; This years' market is set for Saturday, October 16th at the Pearl Brewery. The Herb Market is now in it's nineteenth year. Gads . . . it's been going on that long? I moved to San Antonio in the spring 1994, courtesy of the US Air Force, and am pretty sure I discovered the annual Herb Market event that year. I've made an effort every year since, to get there, by hook or by crook, even if I only had a budget of $20 or so.
Every penny spent at the Herb Market would be worth it. The yearly Herb Market was at Aggie Park, then - a funky oak-tree grown patch of pocket-park at the corner of 410 and West Avenue. For a glorious Saturday, Aggie Park would be full of vendors and potted plants, and the little pavilion with vendors of herbal products like soaps and teas. Last year, they moved to larger and more up-scale digs at the Pearl Brewery, in conjunction with the Saturday Farmer's market - I missed the shade of the trees, though. Ah, well - march of progress and all.
The garden that I have, in front of and round the back of my house is chock-full of plants originally purchased at the Herb Market in 2 or 4-inch pots: who knew that South Texas would be such a bountiful place for growing useful kitchen herbs? Rosemary grows the most rampantly, and without any special care at all, but sage - all varieties - thrives as well. Oregano, and Echinacea, parsley and mint; given half a chance mint would grow like kudzu and take over half the neighborhood. I have a thriving olive tree that I first bought at the Herb Market, an acacia, some Kaffir limes, a nutmeg bush, and a young bay tree that now is closing on sixteen feet tall.
There is no need for me - or anyone else in my neighborhood to buy dried bay leaves at the HEB, just snip off a fresh one when required. Lavender grows beautifully also; with the caveat that enough sand must be dug into the bed where it is planted in order to break up the solid clay. But the other essential herbs in my garden - basil, thyme and scented geraniums, all must be renewed yearly, and sheltered during the coldest days of winter. The Herb Market is be very best place to do that renewing - don't miss it.