Celia Hayes – The Accidental Texan

I went through a phase like this once before, when we were stationed in Utah for a couple of years. The house that we lived in had a garden patch out in the back – which was customary for older houses, and a couple of bearing fruit trees – also customary. In the case of our house, the fruit trees consisted of about fifteen apricot shrubs along the southern fence line of a deep but rather narrow back yard, and an aged cherry tree towards the back of the property. I loved that house, incidentally. The other long fence line was lined with lilac shrubs, which produced heavy bunches of dark purple, white and pale lavender flowers for about two weeks in spring. I am certain that it was the cherry tree which sold me on renting the little house in the first place … but as delicious as the best of the apricot trees were – and two or three of them did produce huge, meltingly-sweet and flavorful fruit –  there would be a lot of them. In fact, that part of the yard was mined with several layers of hard, blacked and barely decayed apricot pits from past seasons. There were more than I could ever eat, or dry or make jam out of, or even bring in sacks to work to give away.

Because everyone else at work lived in the same kind of neighborhood; the best that we could do was to trade sacks of seasonable fruit, and vegetables to people who had different fruit trees in their yards. And preserve, dry or freeze what you could. It was an atavistic impulse, and also part of the culture of Utah, settled as it was by members of the LDS church. It was encouraged; one of those done things, like Lutherans bringing lime Jell-O salad and tuna-noodle bake to pot-luck luncheons. This resulted in the local ZCMI department store chain having mind-bogglingly extensive housewares departments, and bulk staples in the fifty to a hundred pound sack range pretty freely available. What can I say? It was in the water, or something. I came away from that assignment with a standing freezer, a dehydrating unit (with additional trays), several boxes of Ball jars in assorted sizes, and a Kitchenaid mixer. All these items I still have, and lately we have begun to put to use again.

I used to say that if you had champagne tastes and a beer budget, there were three alternatives available to you: learn to like beer, drink mineral water six nights a week and champagne on the seventh … or learn to make champagne. If you like the high-end stuff, but can only afford the cheap and usually horrible – learning to make it yourself is about the only alternative there. So in recent years, we have branched out to experimenting with home brewing of beer and wine, and making our own cheese, with very pleasing results, although my barely-barely-twenty year old Texas tract house could use a good portion of the storage capacity of that little, sixty-year-old Utah house had, what with the root cellar, larder and cupboards everywhere. (No kidding – there were built-in cupboards everywhere!)

Now, what with reviving the garden in the back yard, and with success at the brewing and cheese-making, now my daughter wants to branch out. She bought a canning kettle and some other home-canning things last week, and searched out my collection of Ball jars, and we’re back at it. One can only eat so much jam and jelly, and I am not interested in exploring the many ways that you can get botulism from home-canning, or investing in a pressure-cooker. So, most of our home-canning ventures will be in doing pickles, relishes, sauerkraut and other high-acid content things which can be done safely in an ordinary kettle. This will leave us only one problem … where to store the finished products. Seriously, we’re running out of room.

It’s coming on to spring in the Texas Hill Country … and time for pictures of bluebonnets! (Enjoy)

It’s nowhere near official, but it is pretty clear – Spring has Sprung, and it’s only the edge of February. By the books, the last freeze in this part of Texas is mid-March, but this year, we have already had one over-ninety degree day already. Well, it was only one day, and it was the tippy-topmost high for that day and I think that the high only held for about an hour and a half … but it still necessitated running the AC for half a day. Hold that thought in your mind for a moment. Air Conditioning. In late February. Fortunately, the next day, a cooler front blew in, and since then, the weather has been more or less back to something more or less resembling normal late-winter weather. Which is to say, highs in the seventies or so, lows in the fifties, with a ten degree deviation either way, enlivened by the occasional rainstorm; quite pleasant, as winters go, especially when the northern hemisphere is suffering under two or three feet of snow, and roads covered with black ice.

Anyway; because the weather has been so mild, we’ve been able to get started on spring planting. This year, it looked like early vegetable starts were everywhere, especially lettuce, mache, corn salad, mizuna – and early tomatoes. We had a couple of earth-boxes, lots of pots, and some topsy-turvy planters, so we bought some enormous bags of potting soil … and several trays of plants, and set about reviving my garden.

Among the empty pots was one of those strawberry planters, with the little pockets on the sides – which never quite work as advertised, as the soil leaks out before the plants grow roots enough to keep it all in place. This time, my daughter cut circles of thin coir with a slit in the middle to accommodate the plants – and not strawberries, but eight different varieties of mint. Mint is tough, invasive and grows like a weed, so what better way to keep it confined. Peppers and tomatoes went into the earth boxes and into the topsy-turvys, and the lettuces and greens went into ordinary pots, and everything looked very, very well … but that’s not all.

Last Thursday, we went out walking with the dogs, and saw that one of our neighbors was having their trees pruned back – in some cases, the limbs being pruned were pretty substantial. They were all piled up, waiting to be sent through the chipper – and so I asked the crew supervisor if they could drop off some of the mulch in our driveway once they were done working. He was agreeable, but warned – the mulch coming off the truck would mount up to at least two or three cubic yards. I said, cheerfully, that we could use every bit of it … and so we did.

That afternoon, they dropped off what amounted to a Matterhorn of mulch; good stuff, with hardly any twigs and green leaves in it. My daughter and I spent two mornings, scooping it into the wheelbarrow and trundling it hither and yon. We did have a dispute: I wanted it to go to the back garden first, as that is the part of it that we look at the most, but my daughter said that the front is what everybody else sees, and we didn’t want to be ‘those people’, did we? The neighbors whose house looks like it was just declared a disaster area? Well, no … We could have maybe used another cubic yard or two, but my daughter said flatly that her back couldn’t have stood another barrow-load. But the yard does look lovely now – and once again, something that I am proud to have people see.