Celia Hayes – The Accidental Texan

How it looked at the beginning of this month

And sometimes it goes spring into summer in the same day – or even from winter to spring to summer. Yes, it’s a bit of a trip, having to have the heat and the AC on within the same 24 hour period, but that is Texas for you, where a cold front can blow in and the temperature drop from the mild 70s to freezing within the space of hours – just as it did a couple of weekends ago.

Fortunately, the most of the plants in my garden which lived through that experience are recovering nicely, and the ones which didn’t are replaceable. I’ve lost about two weeks in the development of the pole and bush beans, and about four pepper plants – plus another two or three pepper plants where a rat came in and ate off the tender leaves. Four pots of lettuce and mesclun greens did very well under a thick blanket for those few cold days, so we’re ahead there, too.

I don’t know if I want to try again with squash and zucchini again. For heaven’s sake, everyone can grow zucchini – and I hear tales of two or three plants being so prolific that the people who have them are reduced to dropping bags of ripe zucchini on their neighbor’s doorsteps, ringing the doorbell and running away. But after two years of trying to do just that, I’m beginning to think my garden is squash-cursed. One year, they thrived and blossomed … and then suddenly nothing, and they all developed mushy stems and then died, and the next year they grew to a certain point and then died.  Well, at least I had harvests of fresh beans and salad greens to comfort us, and oodles of little tomatoes the year before. Hope springs eternal, I guess.

I also west as far as to buy a pair of fruit tree saplings, upon seeing them for sale at Sam’s Club a month ago; a plum and a peach. Now I regret not picking up an apple tree as well – I have room for them all, now that the big tree is cut back. So far, the peach is shyly putting out some buds, the plum is just sitting there sullenly – but it’s not dead yet. The field beyond the back fence has largely been built over in the years since I bought my house, so there are stretches of it now that could do with a good masking from a deciduous tree in summer – and looking how a couple of the trees that I did plant early on kept growing and growing and growing – well, there is hope for the plum and the peach.

How it looked in April, 2012

The firecracker plant and the penstemon bushes – which had all the leaves on them killed by the frost are coming back as well. They always do, even though sometimes I have to cut them down almost to the bare ground. When they are going full-bore, they form a pair of sprawling shrubs, one covered with orange and the other with red flowers – which the humming birds love. Right now, with everything either just leafing out or a week out from being planted, the garden still looks pretty bare, but at the rate that the days are warming up, it will not be long in that condition.

So, we have been having fun with a new kitchen gadget – nnnooo, not the kitchen gadget what is on the to-buy list at the Scratch and Dent Superstore (the awesome side-by-side refrigerator freezer which is on layaway and due to replace the 20-year old Whirlpool in the next month or so) – but the Food Saver vacuum device which came with half a roll of the plastic medium and the instruction manual. I spotted it at a neighborhood yard sale, barely used and for the unbelievably low, low price of $5 cash. The previous owner said that it worked – but not why she was letting it go, when it is so useful a gadget. This, when new went for a cool $170 or so. I had been considering purchasing a home vacuum-packing system now and again, but was always put off by the price. Yeah, I’m turning into my pinch-the-penny-until-a-booger-comes-out-Lincoln’s-nose grandmothers. Deal with it.

With the price of groceries going up and up, my daughter and I are running through all the means of saving here and there; to include copious use of coupons, buying on sale and freezing, and making a whole lot of different things from scratch. But the trouble with freezing is that even the sturdiest zip-lock freezer bags grow frost on the inside, and the stuff gets refrigerator-burn and generally unappetizing, and within a short time you forget what the heck it is and how long it has been in there anyway.

Insert the truism about the freezer being only interim storage for leftovers, before they are old enough to be thrown away.

But the Food-Saver eliminates the frost and freezer-burn, along with the air from the sealed package. We also discovered to our joy and surprise, that it makes the package of pre-made and pre-flavored hamburger patties or marinated chicken-leg quarters so much smaller that space-saving in the freezer is achieved almost instantly. Now we can buy the family-packs of chops or chicken-breasts or whatever, and package them in two-serving-sized bags which will not degrade the quality of the meat when frozen, or leave me trying to pry apart lumps of hard-frozen meat.

I’m already considering my options as far as purchasing a half or a quarter of a cow in one fell swoop … and we are racking our brains now, for the names of people we know who hunt. I’d like to have a bit of venison or wild boar in the freezer now and again, also.

I go through this every year about this time – sometime after Christmas – yet well before it becomes time to turn on the AC again. That is, that time to start thinking about what to do in the garden this year. The yard of my little suburban house has gone through a number of changes since I first bought it; there was nothing much of a garden at all, actually – just two Arizona ash trees in the front, a huge mulberry in the back, a wisteria on the back porch which was only in bloom one week out of the 52, a bed of of English ivy filling the narrow space between the walkway to the front door, and in the back, hugely overgrown mounds of Chinese jasmine. All of this scenic garden bounty was wrapped up in a sweep of St. Augustine grass. Which, because it is the cheapest to purchase is the grass that the original owner planted.
The ivy was the first to go, then most of the jasmine, one of the ash trees … and bit by bit the grass replaced with plantings and hardscape. For a good few seasons, I had a number of rosebushes, and later on some native plants intended to attract humming-birds. Of late, I have wanted to have as much edible garden as possible, through a combination of raised beds and hanging containers,
since the actual soil is about the consistency of the clay they make adobe bricks from. It’s heavy and sullen when wet and nearly as hard as a baked brick in the dry – and there is actually only about eighteen inches of it, over a layer of caliche which must go to the depth of the outer mantle, if not to the earth’s core. If I had known at first what I know now, I’d have had someone come in with an earth-mover, scrape up ever scrap of the clay and bring in a couple of truckloads of the good garden soil. Too late, now. But at least on average, the yard has looked quite pleasant and attractive in spots, given a good year, a mild season and a certain length of time since the most recent catastrophe (various dogs, a particularly vicious hailstorm and some hard freezes) … well, not so nice. It’s a work in progress, of which the best that can be said is that it is as good as or better than about three-quarters of the houses in the neighborhood. Of course, the best three gardens in the ‘hood are what I am shooting for. Maybe I will make it there someday – although I fear that I will never be able to have huge and sturdy bushes of lavender, such as grow on the hill below my mother’s house.
At the end of last month we had the tree-guys come and prune back the enormous mulberry tree in back, which had gotten first overgrown – to the point of shading almost the entire backyard – and then many of the longer branches were dead. They cut out all the dead stuff, allowing sunlight to spill in again – and took out the photinia by the front door which had turned the front porch into a cave. Last week, we saw some sapling fruit trees on sale at Sam’s Club, and took a venture on two of them; a plum and a peach, for the newly-sunny spot along the back fence. Lowe’s also had thornless blackberries and seedless grapes – so I took a chance on those, too. I hope to be able to get them to grow on a wire trellis on the back fence. Time will tell, I guess. Over the next month we’ll be renewing the raised beds with new compost and fertilizer, and getting everything ready to go in March. That is the last chance for frost in South Texas – and with the mulberry trimmed back, the raised beds will have an even greater ration of sunshine. I’d like to grow more of what we eat, since the stuff fresh from the garden tastes so much better. We had a good-sized garden plot behind the house where we lived in Utah, and I’d go out in the late afternoon and pick whatever was ripe to have for supper.

A house, as Dave Barry once cogently remarked, is a square hole in the ground, into which you pour money. Well, after all – it is the place that you live in, and which has all your stuff in it. How much one counts on that sort of thing – well, my parents were reminded of that, when their retirement house burned to the ground in 2003, in one of the catastrophic brush fires that Southern California is so famous for. My parents, having a liking for living away out in the country and preferably at the end of at least half a mile of dirt road, were accustomed to the risk and indeed, the possibility. Still, it was a wrench when the house went up in flames. They had half an hour to get out some of the most valuable stuff, but not many other things; Mom’s wedding dress, the family heirloom christening dress, a huge box of photographs that my daughter had intended to sort out, all of Mom and Dad’s books, the motley assortment of Christmas ornaments – to include the Christmas stockings that my grandmother had knitted in wool, with all our names worked into the top – all of the Danish Christmas plates from the AAFES catalog that I had sent Mom over the time I was stationed overseas – the letters that my uncle had written to his family during WWII. All gone – as Mom said, “They burned up real good.” Everything – and I still think about the things lost in the fire, although some of them I did not miss. The Danish Moderne teakwood dining table and chairs, for example – the chairs hit the back of your knee like a karate chop. (Mom bought them for cheap in the early Sixties, and it turned out they were valued at much, much more than what she had paid originally. In that particular case, I’d have rather had the insurance money.)
Whenever the house seems to get too crowded, the bookshelves crammed and overflowing with books and trinkets, and I think about how nice it would be not to have so many things, and to move into a tiny little cottage in the Hill Country … then I remember Mom and Dad and all the precious, accustomed bits and pieces that they had to let go of, all on a Sunday afternoon in the space of an hour.

I could probably do with less – not with fewer books, though. The constant moving at the pleasure of the Air Force did help us by whittling down the extraneous things every three or four years. But I have been in this house now since 1994, and the stuff has been creeping out of the closets and corners – so perhaps it is time for a belated New Years resolution, to sit down and sort out the storages spaces in the house, and purge the things for which we have no present or foreseeable use. The den closet, I am pretty certain, is home to some boxes from the last move which I threw in there when I got tired of unpacking them. We had to get a new washing machine this weekend, which necessitated a good clean-out of the closet where the washer and dryer (and a few other small and relatively little-used appliances) live. Result – A much cleaner closet and a trash can filled with useless stuff – pillows stained beyond all hope of cleaning, a box of the disposable plastic receptacles for the long-gone automatic litter box – which never really worked properly and some other bits and bobs which we steeled ourselves to throw away. It got easier as we got down to the bottom of the cupboard.

So, my daughter and I have gotten ambitious; the pantry cupboard is next. It’s one of those with deep shelves, spaced too far apart, with the result that stuff gets lost in the back and forgotten forever. The plan is to rip out all the wooden shelves and their supports, repair the walls, and put in closely-spaced shallow wire shelves along all three walls, so that it will be easy to see what all we have in there – no need to go in with a rope and a headlamp next time I am looking for a can of tomato sauce.