Leaping into Spring Projects

by Celia Hayes

In between those days of bone-chilling cold, my daughter and I finished up the raised flower-bed part of the entryway to the house this week. The stump of the photinia is buried deep in garden soil, home-brewed compost, with a layer of weed barrier on top of that, and a thin layer of river rock on top of that. We visited Lowe's over the weekend and were sorely tempted – and succumbed to several interesting varieties of day-lily and gladiola corms, and a rose-bush. I might, at a later date, put in some lavender plants, as the soil mix in the raised bed is just what they like; sandy, easily drained, full of good nutritious compost – the very opposite of the heavy clay which occurs naturally around here.

We raked in some good rose-food, planted the corms and the rose bush – and for good measure, my daughter scattered seeds from of a good handful of packets of annuals around the edge of the weed barrier, covered it all in river-rock ... oh, we'll need to go and get a few bags more of the river rock. We always under-estimate these things. The tools are cleared away, the empty sacks removed and the sand swept up – and the front entryway now looks pretty good. Not Parade of Homes quality, but still pretty good. There aren't quite enough bricks left to continue paving over the narrow little flowerbed which runs along the side of the house between the walkway and the exterior wall of the garage. This has always been an annoyance for me; when I first bought the house it was filled with ivy. It took five or six years to eradicate the ivy. Now there are a couple of rosemary bushes, and a climbing rose that goes along the house wall – but the base of the bed always looked a mess; leaves blew in and it was a chore to rake them from underneath the rosemary. We'll pave it with the last bricks, augmented with concrete pavers, leaving small square areas filled with more gravel around those established plants – which ought to reduce the mess-quotient by several degrees.

The cold snaps this winter have done a pretty thorough job of killing off everything that wasn't sheltered in the greenhouse. Likely we will have to start all over again with Bell and jalapeno peppers. Among the other temptations in the garden section at Lowe's was a good assortment of seed potatoes. I'm hoping that when the weather lets up a little I can plant them – and do better than last year. I'd like to eat more produce from my own garden than I buy at the grocery store, but so far, the only thing that flourished regularly were salad greens.

Potatoes weren't the only temptation in the spring starts, seeds and roots – I committed to another grape vine; this one I intend to train up on wires strung between eye-bolts screwed into the back fence. My neighbors with the beautiful garden had done this; why not go vertical, in a small enclosure. My daughter bought a blackberry vine – and that will also go up on the trellis wires. Finally – among the stock at Sam's Club last weekend; young fruit trees; apple, apricot, plum and peach, for a very reasonable price. Yeah, I bought two of them; when we lived in Utah, it seemed like every house of a certain age had at least one bearing fruit tree in the yard. With the mulberry cut back, I think there will be sunshine enough for the peach and plum saplings. So, that's my plan for this spring in the garden...

The Shape of the Porch to Come

by Celia Hayes

All righty, then – last week to Lowe’s for two bags of mortar mix and an inexpensive bricklayer’s trowel, so that we could complete two segments of the porch project. For reasons known only to the original developer, the basic plan of my house (and a handful of other small garden cottages in Spring Creek Forest) were built with the front door actually about half-way along one side of a long narrow house – with a kind of square divot indented into the side. A third of a divot was made into a small, covered front porch and the rest just left open. Most people chose to make it into a flower bed, although the whole thing in concrete would have made a generous porch with wide steps going down to the walk.

The original owner planted a photinia in it, which eventually quite overwhelmed the raised flower bed that I made of that space and turning the room behind it into a cave. Finally I had the tree guys take the whole thing out, cutting the stump back to ground level. My daughter and I re-vamped the raised flower bed a couple of weekends ago, laying most of the bricks in a bed of leveled sand – but those along the edge needed to be mortared together, for stable footing, and three courses needed also to be made into a low wall to surround a smaller raised bed.

So, we split the effort; my daughter did the edge, and I began on the low wall. This is one of those things which looks so easy when the professionals do it, but it is possible to do it yourself with satisfactory results … although it will be a bit messy at first, and likely every professional bricklayer in town will be rolling on the floor, laughing uncontrollably at your efforts. Spraying down the bricks first with water will make the mortar stick to where it should, and a certain degree of obsession-compulsion when it comes to keeping things in a regular, tidy, symmetrical pattern will come in handy. So will a level and a mallet; the first to ensure that the bricks are indeed level, and the mallet for whamming them into place. Sprinkle with water, spread with mortar, wham the next brick into place, scrape off the excess mortar … and repeat as needed, several hundred times. Let set, sweep away the excess sand and crumbs of mortar, and there you are.

We plan to fill the raised bed with a mixture of sand, compost and garden soil, topped with gravel to keep the rainwater falling from the roof edge from splashing dirt onto the side of the house. Since it faces south and is a very sheltered space, we’ll plant it with sun-loving, flowering plants like lantana, salvia and Russian sage. There’s a concrete bird-bath to go in the middle of it – just about where the stump of the photinia will – we hope – peacefully will rot away. I also have a number of low, rectangular terracotta planters that will fit nicely at the foot of the raised bed – that’s where the mixed lettuces and salad greens will grow, as soon as it is warm enough to set out seeds. And that’s the plan – next weekend should see it all complete.

Eye on the Bottom Line

by Celia Hayes

An eye on the bottom line of the receipts at the grocery store, of course. I've been through a good few years of this, after being well-trained by my mother and grandmothers. All of them were disposed to pinch pennies until Lincoln begged for mercy, although they took slightly different ways to go about it. Grandma Dodie did coupons and sales; when she and Grandpa finally sold their house and moved into a retirement community, there was a stash of canned goods in the garage which would have fed a family for a couple of years. Grannie Jessie, the country girl, kept chickens, did a lot of preserves and pickles, and saved Green Stamps to purchase certain useful appliances, furniture and luxury goods. My mother eschewed coupons, chickens, Green Stamps and the preserving kettle; she preferred a membership in a food coop, which offered bargains on meats, fruits, grains and vegetables, and making almost everything – even granola – from scratch. It was her opinion, which I found to be a pretty well-grounded one, that unless you used the coupon for something which you would have bought anyway, it was a waste of money and effort. We did wind up eating some very strange things from the coop, though. I recall beef hearts, and rabbit, and other odd cuts of meat.

I saved on the grocery bill myself by patronizing the street markets when living overseas; once a week, the farmers and vendors in Greece would set up tables in a two-block length of street and sell produce straight off the farm. In Spain there was a central farmer's market downtown, in an ornate cast-iron and stone Art Nouveau style building – and besides that, there was always the military commissary. By the time I settled down in Texas, though, the commissaries were less and less of a bargain, and my default money-saving strategy was based on a Sam's Club membership and purchasing certain stapes in bulk ... and in hitting the reduced-for-quick-sale racks at the HEB. All this, let it be clear, usually meant stocks of canned goods, paper towels, oils, beans and grains, sugar and flour. Until lately, coupons on offer were for prepared foods – which, as my mother trained me well – we avoided, mostly.

Curiously, in recent months, it seems like HEB has been producing specialty coupons at the check-stand for us, based on some mysterious algorithm which reflects what we have actually bought. Suddenly, we have a number of coupons offering discounts, or even free items; milk, eggs, salad greens, and pet food. And you can bet that we have made full use of them. The last two times we hit our local HEB, the eventual bill after the coupons were tallied up and deducted was reduced by nearly a third of what it had been at the start through using them. Considering how the price of many grocery items has been creeping up – or the actual package size of the items has been creeping down while the price remained the same – this is a very good thing. I won't be holding my breath for it to last for long, but we'll be making the best of it while it does.

Out With The Old, In With the New

by Celia Hayes

The New Year, that is. Bye-bye to 2013, hello to 2014; this an exception to the saying about preferring a known evil to the one you know nothing of, but then it's not like we have a choice. Here we go, on a rocket-launch into the unknown, willy-nilly – without any guidance save being certain to eat black-eyed peas on New Year's Day.

I looked back at certain resolutions that I made at the end of 2012 – sell the relatively useless (to me) property I owned in California and buy a piece of Texas paradise, finish my next book and sell a great quantity of copies of all my books at year-end events, to switch over from a national bank to a Texas establishment for all my banking needs, pay off a major creditor, ditch cable television and switch over to a Roku box with internet video amusements for an evening, and to have an extensive vegetable garden in my back yard. Yea, verily – I wanted to have enough vegetables and greens for all our dining needs for a good part of the year, and that is one of the things that I still want to happen. I did accomplish just about all the other items, though – selling the California property, paying off the credit union, switching to Frost Bank, ditching cable TV, and the book – The Quivera Trail – was finished on time, too. Alas, I did not have quite as much in sales at various events as previous experience led me to expect; it seems that everyone was counting the pennies this year. Not that I mind, as I was counting them myself.

And there were some unexpected things which happened this last year as well; the transmission of my daughter's car needed a rebuild, the sale of the property allowed us to afford a totally rebuild of the HVAC system in the house, one of the cats died (of old age – dear old Sammy!) but we acquired another, a kitten who promises to be as large, friendly and eccentric as Sammy ... and another dog, a dump-ee in the neighborhood. This one is mostly terrier and thinks he is a cat, being nimble, insanely intelligent and totally fearless. We call him Nemo because ... we found him. We also found a mountain bike – abandoned in the creek-bed which runs through the neighborhood. No one has claimed it yet, so I can see that biking the various trails along the San Antonio creek greenways is in our future.

The garden simply has to happen – that is a given. Raised beds, edible stuff grown in various patches, the folding plastic greenhouse made complete use of ... and the dog poop cleared out on a more regular basis. In a few days, I will call the tree guy who works our neighborhood to come and sort out the magnificent mulberry which shades the back yard – which was butchered almost to the point of dying, first by the local utility crew clearing away errant branches from the power-lines, and then a couple of years of serious drought. It recovered, but this winter it simply has to be shaped properly into a dense and compact lollipop of a shade tree. And the pair of weed shrubs which planted themselves and grew into small saplings have to go – as well as the red-leaved photina which the first owner of my house planted too darned close to the house. That will give scope to re-doing the front entryway; those are my plans for the 2014. What are yours?

Christmas Time in Boerne – Dickens on Main

by Celia Hayes

I love those celebratory events fielded by small to medium-sized towns and suburbs in Texas; when everyone pulls together for that once-a-year holiday extravaganza; New Braunfels for the Weihnachtsmarkt, Christmas on the Square in Goliad, and going the full Griswold with Christmas lights in Windcrest, and now Dickens on Main in Beautiful and Historic Downtown Boerne. For the first two Friday and Saturday evenings in Boerne, they block off several blocks of Main Street in downtown, decorate all the storefronts with extravagant lights and ornaments, set up a stage for a performance of Dickens' A Christmas Carol, and costumed carolers. We took it into our heads to check it out.

And oh, what fun – live performers, two coaches giving rides up and down Main Street, a good few food carts to supplement the half-dozen restaurants ... and all the stores along that stretch of Main open until 10PM, which must in some way be a strike back against those big-box stores opening in the wee hours on Friday morning. And there was more – Santa, of course, set up in a fairy-light wonderland, vendors selling roast corn ... and we had even heard there would be roasted chestnuts available! Well, everyone knows about chestnuts roasting on an open fire, but darned few people who know the Christmas carol have even tasted them. We have – they were almost our favorite winter street food in Greece, where vendors would set up little charcoal braziers on the sidewalk and sell six large chestnuts or eight small in a little paper cone for 50 drachmas. Alas, it seemed that the roast nut vendor had run out on Saturday night, so we had to content ourselves with walking up and down the street, looking at the lights and dodging being run down at very slow speed by the horses pulling the open coaches.

The street got progressively more crowded as the evening went on, but it was all a happy and family-friendly kind of crowd – especially around the petting zoo set up in the town square. The goats were pretty pesky about getting fed, the little white piglets didn't seem to be enjoying it a bit, the hens and ducks were kind of sullenly uncooperative, and the one little donkey wasn't supposed to be given the goat food anyway, so he munched on hay and contemplated the infinite. This didn't seem to matter to the kids; I am certain that most of them have rarely gotten up close to farm animals. (That was another nice thing about living in Greece when my daughter was small; even if we lived in suburban Athens, sheep, goats, rabbits, chickens and donkeys were everywhere. There was even a herd of sheep which went up to the hills every day, on the street going past the house that her baby-sitter lived in.)

I think the big draw for the kids – other than Santa himself – was the ice sculpture. Two of them set up in front of an appreciate audience to carve ... something ... out of two 300lb blocks of clear ice. Chisels and smaller tools were in play, of course – but the most fun was when they used chain-saws, and the spray of ice shot out and showered the kids. The sculpture turned out to be Santa waving from the top of a chimney, set on a fireplace... with a real fire burning in it.

For brief intervals, they fired up snow-making machines, and it really looked like flakes of snow floating down. But it wasn't edible, so – not advisable to try and catch one your tongue. I don't know but the only way to better it would be to import one of those huge snow-making machines, and cover the whole street and fronts of the buildings with snow. Dickens on Main runs again Friday and Saturday, December 6th and 7th.

Once More, Decking the Halls with Feeling

by Celia Hayes

With one thing and another, my daughter and I haven't really felt all Christmassy the last couple of years. Well, we went though the motions, but without much enthusiasm; the wholly sudden and unexpected death of my father the day after Christmas 2010 put a pall over the holiday generally, and being close to broke as a joke usually didn't help. One year we had all the Christmas presents boxed and ready to go - but couldn't afford to mail them until the following year. But this year, we're doing OK – and felt like we should uphold the honor of our street in Spring Creek Forest by putting out the strings of icicle lights on the house and a bit of the expected seasonal jazz. No, we didn't do the Full Griswald – just a modest string of white icicle lights across the front and side ... but we did get adventurous enough to decorate the bay tree.

The bay-laurel tree is a 25-foot tall, classically-shaped-like-a-Christmas-tree and evergreen specimen that I originally bought (IIRC) as a small sapling in a 4-inch pot at the San Antonio Herb Fair. It went into an increasingly larger series of pots until I finally put it into the ground at the front of my property as part of my 'Greek Garden' – that is, plantings that reminded me of Greece. The bay tree flourished after a year or two – ensuring that I have never actually had to purchase dried bay leaves in the supermarket, and neither have any of my neighbors who know what it is. (And I have actually had people come to my door and ask if they can take cuttings from it.) So, we strung it around with garlands, and hung it with outsized ornaments...Although the top third of it is relatively undecorated; the ground underneath the tree is uneven, and our ladder is only an 8-foot one. I did have an idea for an invention to help in moving the strings of lights and garlands up higher – a tall pole with a Y-shaped bracket on the end. I'd have a shallower bracket on the other end, to place the strings of Christmas lights around the house eaves. Some years ago we installed cup-hooks every three or four feet along the fascia board; all we needed to do to hang lights was to un-reel them and thread the string of lights through the cup-hooks. Having my pole-and-bracket invention would let us put up the lights without the need of a ladder – much safer that way.

This year we circled around to doing cookies for those friends and neighbors. Tins from the Dollar Tree, lined with waxed paper and one of our old family favorites from the 1975 edition of Joy of Cooking – Pecan Angel Slices

Pecan Angel Slices

• Cream together until well-blended: ½ cup butter and ¼ cup sugar
• Beat in well: 1 egg and ½ teasp vanilla
• Combine and add to the above: 1 ¼ cup sifted flour and 1/8 teasp salt
• Pat dough evenly into a greased 9x12 inch pan
• Bake at 350° for fifteen minutes
• Remove from oven.

Combine: 2 beaten eggs, 1 ½ cup brown sugar, ½ cup flaked cocoanut, 1 cup chopped pecans, 2 Tbsp. flour, ½ teasp double acting baking powder, ½ teasp salt and 1 teasp vanilla. Pour over cookie layer and return to oven for 25 minutes

Combine 1 ½ cup sifted confectioner's sugar with sufficient lemon juice to make a smooth, runny glaze. Pour over warm cookie/pecan/coconut layer and allow to set.

When cool, cut into bars or squares. Bon appetite – and Merry Christmas!

Camp Bullis

Established in 1917, Camp Bullis was originally used as one of many training sites for the American Expeditionary Force soon to be sent to Europe. Used as a small arms and rifle range for Fort Sam Houston, no units were stationed at the Camp. After World War I, the Camp served as a training site for various civilian and military organizations, including the Civilian Military Training Corps, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) and the Officer Reserve Corps. During World War II, the 2nd, 95th, and 88th Infantry Divisions used Camp Bullis. After the war, 500,000 soldiers were processed out through the separation center at the Camp. In 1977, the Air Force established the Air Force Security Police (Air Force Security Forces) Training Site at Camp Bullis. The Air Force was subsequently the single largest user of the camp until 1987.

Health-care specialists training in the US Army, otherwise known as medics, travel from Fort Sam Houston to Camp Bullis to complete a two week field training exercise at the end of their advanced individual training. During the two weeks, they learn much about a medic's role in infantry affairs. The first day they are issued M16A2s, and are introduced to chemical warfare. During the next eight days they spend a day and a half on various infantry tactics and the medic's role in such. During the last five days they put into practice everything they have learned. The most sleep the medics get through all their training is in the field- about eight hours of night, in addition to daily showers and hot chow in the morning and evenings, accompanied with MREs for lunch.

Winter Coming – Really?

by Celia Hayes

Well, one brief brush with overnight temperatures in the thirties – we even let the 'H' part of the new HVAC system out for a romp for a couple of nights running – and everyone was convinced that winter in South Texas had well and truly arrived. We've gone off Daylight Savings Time, Thanksgiving is just around the corner, and there is just about a months worth of shopping days until Christmas – and still the afternoon highs are in the 80s? All I can think to do at this point is to ask if someone couldn't invite Al Gore to come to town to make a speech about global warming, for unseasonable blizzards, rain and cold temperatures invariably follow him as a cloud of dirt follows the Peanuts character of Pigpen.

In an attempt to make winter really happen, I fixed one of my favorite soup recipes, which I found years ago in Nava Atlas' Vegetariana. Adding sliced kielbasa sausage to it takes off some of the onus of being vegetarian – and anyway, it is purely delicious. One time I settled down to make it and discovered that I was out of brown rice – but not to fear, I had wheat-berries instead. So wheat berries instead of rice – and it was all good. It might also have been just as good using wild rice instead. Another time I only had Rotel tomatoes with chilies – and that substitution worked so well I have used Rote with chilies ever since when I make it at home.

Winter Lentil & Brown Rice Soup

• Cover and simmer for half an hour or so, until lentils and rice are done.

(It is especially splendid when made with the Ro-Tel tomatoes & chilis, and a rich home-made vegetable broth.... plus you can take the onus of being vegetarian off it by adding about half a pound of kielbasa or other smoked sausage, sliced into rounds, towards the end of the cooking time, and serving it with a little grated cheddar cheese on top.)

This last time, my daughter made up a batch of Red Lobster cheddar biscuits to go with – absolutely sublime, especially made with extra-sharp cheddar cheese. She bought the box of cheddar biscuit mix at Sams' Club, but it's available on Amazon. Is winter here yet? Anyone seen any snowflakes?

The Moveable Market

by Celia Hayes

My daughter and I are moving a little deeper into the world of the gypsy entrepreneur market these days. I mean, I have been dabbling around the edges for good few years as an independent author, once I realized that there was more to be made – and a lot less ego-death involved – by taking a table at a craft fair, like the New Braunfels Christmas Market, or in Miss Ruby's Author Corral at Goliad's Christmas on the Square. But this – like strictly book events, like the West Texas Book and Music Festival in Abilene – involved only a table and a chair. I usually had to bring along some tablecloths, some informational flyers, postcards and my business card, and maybe something eye-catching to adorn the table.

Going hard-core and getting a whole booth at something like the Boerne Market Days meant going much, much farther. My daughter has started a little business making various origami ornaments, flowers and jewelry, and this year we decided to partner together. It helps to have two people doing this kind of event, by the way – you can spell each other, make jaunts to other venders, go to the bathroom – and setting up and breaking down the booth or table is much, much easier. Many vendors, like us, have a day job, or several day jobs. They create on their own time, and bring it to the local market circuit on the weekends.

If we keep it up, we will have to purchase our own folding tables, and pop-up canopy – the nice kind, with the zip-up panel walls which can be attached for shelter, shade and some degree of security. This time, we rented from the management of the Boerne Market Days – but the people who regularly have a spot at the various markets own their own, which will make some more things to stuff into the Montero. A couple of good-sized banners to advertise our two little enterprises are also in our future. I don't think we'll go as far as a friend did, when she was selling at faraway craft shows. She and her husband went in their travel trailer; where they slept and cooked their own meals rather than lay out for motel rooms and restaurant meals. The name of the game is to break rather more than even; if the costs of participating in a market; table fee, gas, lodgings, food and your stock – all come up to more than you'll make from sales, then you are doing it wrong.

We already have a lot of other necessary impedimenta – like a collection of sturdy covered plastic tubs in various sizes to store and transport our stock in, which can be fitted into the back of the Montero in a kind of three-dimensional game of Tetris. We saw quite a few venders with varied collections of tubs. We already have some necessary display hardware; metal and wooden stands for propping up books to display them, a rack for showing off pairs of earrings, some baskets and a magnetic board to show off the origami in. Many of the gypsy venders also have tall mesh stands, panels or folding screens to hang items on, or to attach narrow shelves for a wall display.

We already had a cash box, and receipt books – but for this time out we obtained a handy little gadget which only became available in the last year or so; a card reader which attaches to my daughter's cell phone so that we could process credit card payments. This is enormously helpful to us and many other gypsy entrepreneurs, who previously could only handle check or cash payments. It's the new old game again – small businesses run from a home or a farm, and selling at temporary markets.

Raising Heck in Helotes

by Celia Hayes

We ventured on a weekend outing to Helotes this last August for an art showing at a very pleasant little country venue, The Gardens in Old Town... which to our relief, turned out to be an indoors event. Frankly, mid-August in South Texas is just not one of those good times to be roaming around in the outdoors for very long. We prowled the art show, admired many of the paintings exhibited – a good few of which I would have bought for my own pleasure. I think that we were early enough in the day and the impromptu gallery was not so crowed that many of the artists had leisure and enthusiasm enough to talk to us as well. Ah, how well we know this routine; sitting by the table o' stuff, waiting to strike up a conversation with anyone slowing by, in their drift through the room! I think most people visiting Helotes that weekend must have been at the art show, for the other little shops in old downtown Helotes were pretty empty.

We hadn't been to Helotes in a while, and so when we had made a leisurely circuit, and the place became too crowded for my daughter's taste, we roamed around the little bit that there is of Historic Old Helotes; mostly antique shops set up on old homes, barns and what we were told had been a grocery store at about the turn of the last century. Yes, time was when Helotes, twenty miles and a good day's journey on horseback from San Antonio, was a separate and lively little town on the main road to Bandera. It was farming country, at first – the name comes from 'elote' – Spanish for corn on the cob. The eastern Apache tribe farmed along the waterways in that part of the Hill Country in the earliest times, growing corn for themselves until the Comanche roared down from the north and made it too dangerous. Like much of the Hill Country, Helotes was settled by German and European immigrants, and in the days after the Civil War, served as an assembly point for herds of cattle heading north to the railheads in Kansas, a feeder route to the great Chisholm Trail. It was a rather lively little town back then; there are two books about historical Helotes by local author Cynthia Leal Massey.

Now, of course, having turned into a suburban bedroom slipper of San Antonio, it is a much more sedate place, but still a very pleasant one, barely four or five miles outside the 1604 Loop. A clue as to how very quietly upscale Helotes has become is that the flagship HEB-Plus store – the largest store in the HEB chain was opened last year on Bandera Road, just inside the Loop. The store parking lot has nearly 1,200 parking spaces – and the store itself seems as large as a gargantuan aircraft hangar. 183,000 square feet of grocery and retail space; we walked in and my daughter said, "Wow!" Even though the parking lot was nearly full, the store itself didn't feel crowded at all. We only came in for three things – which did seem rather a waste, considering the sheer variety of items in stock.