Lifescapes

Copper canyon daisy: In bloom this week

Delightful Tagetes lemmonii, or Copper canyon daisy--a tumble of bright marigold-like blossoms in the fall, a strong scent that's unforgettable but hard to describe: fruity, woodsey, minty, lemony. This southwestern native perennial bravely endured the drought without a drop of extra water and is heaped with blossoms this week. I love it. Want more of it, so will dig and divide early next spring.

More El Nino news from the climate-change folks: the current mild event is strengthening, the water temperatures in the central tropical Pacific are soaring much faster than expected. Which means hotter temperatures around the globe but (paradoxically) a cooler, wetter winter for us. So far, our autumn has been simply splendid. Next spring's wildflowers are putting up their leaves and pushing down their roots, so if you were thinking of making a wildflower trip to Texas next April, do put it on your calendar. 2010 is likely to be a make-up year, when the ungerminated seed that's been in the ground during the drought wakes up and blooms like crazy. But El Nino also fosters exaggerated weather events in Texas: tornadoes in November, torrential rainfalls, winter icestorms. Cool and wet is good. Wild and stormy, not so much.

This weekend, I'm reading the copyedited manuscript of An Extraordinary Year of Ordinary Days, the journal/book I wrote in 2008, which will be published next year by the University of Texas Press. Feeling deeply grateful to Sally, a very fine copyeditor, who reads with careful attention, checks the facts, corrects the errors. And this, on top of the readings and comments by Theresa and Lynne, as well as two anonymous jurors who offered extensive comments. Truly: takes a village--and lots of time--to make a book. And a book, thoroughly vetted and checked and re-checked, is truly different from much of the stuff that's thrown up so quickly on the Web.

Reading note: When writers die, they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.--Jorge Luis Borges

Stevia: In bloom this week

 
I haven't kept up on the FDA's latest position on stevia (if you have, please leave a comment), so I don't know whether this super-sweet herb is now legal for import. Last I heard, the American Botanical Council was petitioning for recognition as a GRAS herb ("Generally Recognized as Safe"). You can listen to a fairly technical discussion of this issue with Mark Blumenthal (American Botanical Council). If you don't know what stevia is or how to grow it, you can read about it here. If you're interested in finding out why import has been banned in the U.S., go here. Short version: it's opposed by the sweetener industry. Of course.

Whatever the progress on the legal end of things, my stevia plant is growing happily--and yes, it is legal to grow stevia in your garden. I bought my plant from Carolee's Herb Farm when I was there in April, and it thrived, even during the drought. I harvested it this morning, and am drying it my dehydrator. I use it mostly for tea, although one of  my favorite muffin recipes (Oatmeal Apple Pecan Muffins) includes stevia as a sweetener. With obesity and Type 2 diabetes looming as huge threats (thanks to our addiction to calorie-dense sweeteners), stevia could be part of the answer.

Cool and damp here. Many of our native perennials went into dormancy during the record heat and drought of last summer and have been deceived into thinking it's spring. The crepe myrtles are blooming, as is the trumpet vine and crossvine, the pyracanthus (which is bearing red berries at the same time). I've even seen some Bradford pears in bloom. The rain is pushing the fall garden into production: lots of peas and green beans right now. We're still in a serious rainfall deficit, over 27" over the past 24 months, but things are looking up as El Nino intensifies out in the Pacific. Reading more about climate change: this week, Tim Flannery's The Weather Makers. If you haven't read a good book on the subject, that's a place to start.

Hoping to finish The Darling Dahlias and the Cucumber Tree this week. Cancelled a couple of trips to Austin so I can focus on the book. Lots of little cleanup/fix-up details to attend to.

Reading note. 1986 marks the year that humans reached Earth's carrying capacity, and ever since we have been running the environmental equivalent of a deficit budget, which is sustained only by plundering our capital base. The plundering takes the form of overexploiting fisheries, overgrazing pasture until it becomes desert, destroying forests, and polluting our oceans and atmosphere, which in turn leads to the large number of environmental issues we face. In the end, though, the environmental budget is the only one that really counts.--Tim Flannery

 

Salvia: In bloom this week

I thought I had lost the salvias in the drought, but here they are, bursting into exuberant bloom after the rain two weeks ago.I don't think I've ever seen them bloom so abundantly. These natives (Salvia coccinea) are terrific for dry-land landscaping and the bees and hummingbirds love them. Here in the Hill Country, they bloom in spring and again in fall--in the years we have rain. In this photo, the white flowers in front belong to garlic chives, which are wonderful in omelets and soups.
 

Here's another salvia, S. guaranitica, blue anise sage or Brazilian sage. It's not a Texas native, but this one has more or less adapted, I'm happy to say. Neither of these species is the same as the Salvia that has gotten all the attention lately: S. divinorum, a psychoactive herb--as you might guess from the name, which can be translated to "sage of the seers." I've had my share of adventures in the past, but these days, I'm not inclined to smoke my garden salvias to see if any of them might share that characteristic.

And then there's plain old garden sage, S. officinalis, which of course is never plain or old. It's the first herb I remember, because it's one of the few my mother grew in her 1950s garden (parsley and dill are the others). She grew it specifically for poultry stuffing and pork sausage. Mine did well in the drought. In fact, most of the salvias prefer dry soil and resent it when their feet get wet. During the drought, they just curled up and waited patiently. I love plants like that.

Lots going on in the garden: melons, zukes, spaghetti squash blooming, English peas and snow peas, too. A few eggplants ripening, Irish potatoes looking good, tomatoes coming along. Remember those tomato seeds I sowed in the ground? The Early Girls are about six inches high and looking fine, but I think I got them in too late. Don't think they'll have time to set fruit. (Hope I'm wrong!)

A good writing week past, another coming up--except that I have to take a break on Tuesday and go to Austin for a photo session. Time for another author photo for book jackets. I always have to tell the photographer to put away her airbrush on these photos: when I'm speaking to a group, I see people looking down at the photo on their book jackets (a year or two or more old, depending on the book), and comparing the image to the real person. Makes for some interesting questions, sometimes.

Speaking of speaking. I'll be in Boerne TX on 9/29, at the library. I'll also be in Groesbeck, San Marcos, and Austin and a couple of places I need to add to the list: Wimberley (11/7) and Mason (11/15). Check out the page and mark your calendars. Used to be, authors wrote a book, the publisher distributed it, bookstores sold it, and that was that. No more. Like every other author in the country, I'm expected to get out there and talk about the books. It's a good thing I enjoy doing that. But if I didn't, I'd have to do it anyway.

Reading note. The shelf life of a modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.--Calvin Trillen

Goldenrod: In bloom this week

Goldenrod--a welcome sign of autumn. A cold (well, cool) front in the past couple of days, another one coming. The goldenrod is ready, and so am I. I wrote about this lovely plant in my memoir, Together, Alone: A Memoir of Marriage and Place:

Here [at MeadowKnoll], summer’s squaw-weed is replaced by a spectacular autumn goldenrod. The genus name of this remarkable plant, Solidago, means “to make whole”; it has been used as a healing herb since ancient times. The goldenrod market perked up when Solidago was discovered growing in great plenty in the American colonies. The colonists cut and dried the plant, baled it, and shipped it to England, where it was sold in the apothecary shops. Traveling all those miles, it was pricey: Two ounces of goldenrod might fetch a gold crown.

For Native Americans, goldenrod was free. It was a staple medicine, and since some two dozen species grow across the continent, nearly every tribe was within arm’s reach of at least one. Called “sun medicine,” it was used to treat everything from wounds and fevers to rheumatism and toothache. It was also used as a charm, smoked like tobacco, woven into baskets, burned as an incense, and made into a dye. And if that’s not enough to demonstrate the significance of this golden plant, consider this: Learning that goldenrod sap contained a natural latex, Thomas Edison, that relentless inventor, bred the plant to increase its latex yield. He then produced a resilient, long-lasting rubber that Henry Ford made into a set of tires for his own personal automobile. Edison was still experimenting with his rubber when he died in 1931. His research was turned over to the U.S. government, which apparently found it of little importance, even when rubber became almost impossible to get during World War II. Goldenrod rubber. Fancy that.

I thinkof Edison and Ford and those goldenrod tires every time I see this plant. But of course, we'd rather import our tires from China.

Oh, and one more thing: goldenrod does not make you sneeze. Unfortunately, it's often confused with ragweed. Don't believe me? Go here, to the University of North Dakota Allergy Learning Lab.

Book Report. I spent the weekend learning Word Track Changes and reviewing the copy-edited manuscript of Holly Blues, China Bayles #18. I'd prefer to do it on printed pages, but the publisher is moving into electronic text management in a big way and the efficiencies are hard to argue with. I'm not complaining. I have good work to do, work I love, and that's the important thing.

Back to work on The Darling Dahlias and the Cucumber Tree. The book is almost three-quarters finished. I'm loving the period (early 1930s) and the setting (small-town Alabama). Also loving the way the story is pulling me forward into places I didn't intend to go. It's not writing itself, exactly, but sometimes it almost feels that way.

Story Circle projects. I'm beginning a new series of posts at HerStories, the Story Circle blog. These posts are about the goings-on in the organization--plenty right now, since we're in the process of putting together the program for our fifth women's memoir conference, Stories from the Heart.

Reading notes. Writing a first draft is very much like watching a Polaroid develop. You can't--and, in fact, you're not supposed to--know exactly what the picture is going to look like until it has finished developing.--Anne Lamott

Mesquite: Drought Notes #5

One tree that is unaffected by our two-year "exceptional" drought is the mesquite, an important tree in the ecology of our area. So many different species depend on it, from insects (especially bees) that thrive on the nectar of the flowers to raccoons, deer, coyotes, rabbits, and more that eat every ripe mesquite bean they can find. The other day, our neighbor noticed a fox under one of our mesquite trees. Pausing to watch, he saw another fox jump out of the tree, and the two foxes trotted off together. I love the story: I didn't know that foxes can climb trees! There's more about the mesquite here, but I want to tell you about my own adventure with this remarkable tree.

Yesteray afternoon I went out to the garden and collected a basket (about two pounds) of ripe mesquite beans. I picked them up inside the fenced garden, where they littered the ground, safe from the deer and other animals that have cleaned them up around the other trees. I dried the beans in the solar oven (2 hours, about 180 degrees). (Click on the photo for a larger view). Then I snapped them and ground them in my small metate, using a mano. I also tried grinding them in my blender and in the coffee grinder (I don't own a food processor), but stuck with the traditional hand-method, which seemed to me just as fast and considerably more satisfying.

This is what the grinding process looked like. The pods ground readily, to a fine, sticky, sugary meal. The seeds were much harder. With a great deal more effort, I might have been able to grind them too, but I gave it up: everything I've read suggests that the protein and sugars are mostly in the pods. The grinding itself was extraordinarily interesting. The tools--the metate and mano--are ancient, and as I was working with them, I felt a wonderfully strong connection to the uncounted and unnamed women of past times who have used these same tools to perform this same vitally important task: making meal of their wild-gathered or gardened seeds and grains--mesquite, maize, amaranth.

The result of an hour's work: about two cups of fine mesquite meal. It's surprisingly sweet to the taste and sticky with sugars. (As a medicinal, mesquite is under scientific study as a possible control for diabetes.) I've refrigerated it and will make some muffins with it in a few days, when Bill gets back from his trip to New Mexico. I'll let you know how it tastes.

I've been involved with gardening and food-raising most of my life, and I'm always impressed by how much work it takes to make anything "from scratch," whether it's growing and cooking our own potatoes or corn or green beans or chickens or other meat. Making mesquite meal certainly belongs in the "lots of work" category. But while I was working, I was thinking about how dependent we are on our extraordinarily complex, fossil-fueled food production system, and how little capable most of us are at the task of producing our own food, "from scratch." It was sobering thought, and a sobering experience.

I'll let you know how those muffins turn out.

Reading note I don't think we're looking for a single model [of food production]--one size fits all. The problem with our current food system: it is a monoculture economically, as well as on the ground. We have to let a thousand flowers bloom. We want to have many different food chains in this country because some of them are going to fail. We want to know that if there's a problem with organic, that we have local. And if there's a problem with local, that we even have conventional. We’re not looking for the right answer, the single answer for all of us, in all places. It's going to have to be locally adapted. And the more different food chains you have, the more resilient your food economy and the less likely you are to go hungry.--Michael Pollan, NPR, "Science Friday," Aug 21, 2009

Drought notes #4: no clouds

Here's a crepe myrtle blossom, keeping the faith--not much else in bloom these days, except for the stubborn portulacas, which just keep on keeping on, heat be damned. Today: #59 in the countdown of 100+ degree days, on track to break the record of 69 days set back in 1923. The difference between 1923 and 2009: the drought. It rained in 1923, so it was hot and damp. This year, it's hot and dry.

Here's a note from Bob Rose's blog. Bob is the meteorologist for the Lower Colorado River Authority, which is keeping an eye on the water in the Highland Lakes, all dangerously low. I was interested in his comment, because I hadn't thought of the heat from this angle.

But another reason this summer has been so oppressive for humans, pets and vegetation has been the number of sunny days. We’ve had very few days with enough clouds to block out the hot sun. I looked back at the weather records beginning June 1st and found only 2 cloudy days in June, 4 days in July and just 1 day so far in August. So all of us have literally wilted in the hot sun.  Of course it will take a lot more than clouds to break this drought, but they could at least help moderate the temperature.

He's right. We're all wilting under the constant sun. Another result of the heat: high electrical use. We're as frugal as possible with the AC and appliances and we have a small house, but our kWhs hit a record (for us) last month. And that's without my clothes dryer: I'm using a solar dryer now (called a clothesline).

Book report: Having more fun with the Darling Dahlias, primarily because of the 30s stuff. The time period just opens up so many possibilities--certainly makes the writing lively for me. I love learning new things. Today's rediscovery: roll-on garters. Thankfully, these were gone by the time I started wearing nylons (BP: before pantyhose), but I remember Mom wearing them. Ack. Wonder about the correlation between roll-on garters and varicose veins.

Don't forget the Cottage Tales Festival (see the post at the top of the page). Lots of chances to win a book, lots of fun stuff about Beatrix, the animals, the Lakes, and more.

Reading note. I think we are bound to, and by, nature. We may want to deny this connection and try to believe we control the external world, but every time there's a snowstorm or drought, we know our fate is tied to the world around us.--Alice Hoffman

  

Sumac: In bloom this week

The sumacs--our native flame-leaf prairie sumacs--are in bloom right now, and irresistible to bees. Can you see how full their pollen baskets are? Loaded and ready for return flight to their hives. The nectar that lures these busy workers must be especially sweet, for the trees (shrubby, no more tha eight feet tall) are covered with bees.

In the fall, the bright red fruit lures raccoons, which climb the trees and strip off the berries, and birds. They make a lightly tart, refreshing drink, too--brewed, strained, cooled, and sweetened with honey. Wherever sumacs occur, Indians found medicinal uses for them. A decoction of the root was used for urinary disorders, fevers and colds; a tea made of the berries treatedirregular menstruation, dysentery, and fevers and colds. A poultice of pounded roots and berries was used for warts, hemorrhoids, and canker sores, and the crushed leaves for the treatment of skin disease. Leaves and seeds were used to dry oozing sores, ulcers, and gangrene, and the leaves treated venereal disease. A pharmacy in a single plant.

Garden report. We had a brief rain at mid-week, got .6". Not much, when we're down 24" for the drought period, but the garden, the grass, and I were all very grateful. Miles (my garden helper) and I finished building the new beds (there are now eleven 4x8 beds and a couple of odd-size ones, plus containers) and I've been planting for fall: zukes, spaghetti squash, peas, beans, potatoes. And waiting for the arrival of El Nino. While I'm waiting, I cut some rosemary and made a batch of rosemary bagels. Yum.

Moving forward with the first book in the new Darling Dahlias series. If you're on Facebook, check my page every so often. I'm documenting some of the more interesting research in the early 30s, the time-setting for this series. You'll find most of this in my "links" section, lower left on the page.

Reading note. I got the blues thinking about the future, so I left off and made some marmalade. It's amazing how it cheers one up to shred oranges and wash the floor.--D. H. Lawrence

Lindheimer's Muhly: Drought Notes #2

The color of this grass says it all, doesn't it? This is not an exotic "ornamental," but four clumps of the distinctive native grass called Lindheimer's Muhly, native to Texas, first recognized (and named for) the botanist Ferdinand Lindheimer, who settled in New Braufels in the 1840s and went about the task of identifying "new" species. Muhly is a tough, adaptive grass, much loved by cows and horses, that flourishes along creek banks and seeps in calcareous soils, here in the Hill Country. Meadow Knoll was part of a huge a ranch through the early 1970s, and much overgrazed. When Bill came here, he fenced out the cows. When we settled here, we found the muhly and encouraged it by careful trimming. The color you see here is it's normal October/November, post-freeze color, indicating high plant stress--and when the muhly is stressed, you can believe that everything else is even more stressed. You can also see several other brown trees in the background, and if you could look down the creek (dry now for 12 months, a record here), you'd see that all the little trees and shrubs are brown.

We got some rain on Thursday (.8"), just enough to green up the grass a little, temporarily reduce the fire danger, and cool the air a bit. We're very grateful. However, that relief doesn't change the fact that July, 2009, was the hottest month on record, since records have been kept in Austin TX. Not the hottest July, but the hottest month (an honor usually reserved for August). Here in the country, we used to be a few degrees cooler, but the soil temperatures are now as high as the asphalt temperatures in the paved-over city, so our temps here have been just as high as the 104s and 106s recorded in Austin.

The Dahlias are blooming. I'm starting Chapter 2 today, after fiddling for several days with the voice. I'll have more about that later this week. I want to answer a reader's question about place ("Why Alabama?") by posting about setting.

The garden is keeping on keeping on, with the summer plants (what's left of them--I've been ruthless, because I don't want to waste water) doing their summer thing. The eggplants and watermelons are producing, the corn is struggling (too hot, too windy), and the sweet potatoes look pretty good, although I have no idea what's going on with them underground. They hide their secrets until the day I dig them up. I don't know what's going on with the peanuts, either: this is the first time I've grown them. Maybe they're waiting for cooler weather to put out their peanut-producing runners? I've cut my Irish potatoes and have them ready to go into the ground this week--the cut sides need to dry for a few days. This week, I'll also be putting in some fall beans, spinach, and peas, for harvesting in September/October. We're building some new beds, so I'll have more space for experiments.

If you haven't seen the trailer for my new memoir, Together, Alone: A Memoir of Marriage and Place, please do take a look. It's beautiful. I love it.

Reading note. How hard it is to escape from places. However carefully one goes they hold you--you leave little bits of yourself fluttering on the fences--like rags and shreds of your very life.--Katherine Mansfield

Record heat

I love this hot-color coleus, don't love but am learning to live with these hot-hot days. 106 yesterday, maybe cooler today as the high pressure that's been keeping the lid on the Texas hot-plate drifts slowly off to the west. The last thirty days: the hottest ever, EVER, since records have been kept in Austin. No wonder my beans are sulking. Blossoms, but no pods. Even the eggplants (a tropical nightshade, climatized for hot weather) aren't setting fruit. If you have that problem, too, I found some ideas here. Basically, though, we just have to wait for the end of this heat, probably another 30-45 days.

But the best news is El Nino. Computer models for October/November/December, JFM 2010, and AMJ 2010 show above-normal rainfall for CenTX. Even getting back to normal would be a blessing: above-normal seems almost unimaginable. Two years of 15" annual rainfall spells disaster for local gardeners, farmers, ranchers.

Working on the revisions to Extraordinary Year, staying cool, knitting a sock for an hour in the evening, watching a film (last night, Doubt, which I absolutely loved and will watch for a second time tonight), currently reading Cadillac Desert, which I ought to have read years ago but somehow didn't, and thinking about water resources and the Texas aquifers, especially the Ogallala, which we cross when we drive to New Mexico. The nation depends on the croplands that have been supported by this aquifer, but the fossil water there will be gone in a matter of decades. Another of the changes (along with climate change and energy depletion) that our children and grandchildren will be learning to live with.

Reading note. The irrigation of the Ogallala region, which has occurred almost entirely since the Second World War, is, from a satellite's point of view, one of the most profound changes visited by man on North America; only urbanization, deforestation, and the damming of rivers surpass it.--Mark Reisner, Cadillac Desert

An Extraordinary Year

 

Sunflowers. Lots and lots of sunflowers blooming right now. They seem to thrive on the heat, although I'm sure they'd like a brisk summer shower. Nothing on the horizon until the end of the week, when our rain chances shoot all the way up to--wait for it--20%. Wow.

The project I mentioned yesterday (and promised to tell you about today) isn't exactly new. If you've been reading this blog for a while, you know that I spent all of 2008 writing a journal-for-publication, with the idea that the University of Texas Press might be interested in the manuscript. I finished the manuscript and handed it over to Theresa May at the Press at the end of March. She sent it out to two reviewers, who just returned their evaluations. Both recommend publication--with plenty of suggestions for revision, of course. Armed with their notes, I'll be spending the next two weeks going back through the manuscript, getting it ready for final review. If all goes well, the book will be out in September, 2010.

When I originally pitched the project to Theresa May, I had it in mind that an "extraordinary year" would be about growing older ("sage-ing," as my friend Judith calls it). It was my 69th year, the first year of my eighth decade--a landmark year in anybody's life, wouldn't you say?.

Well. I had no idea.

For me (and I suspect for most Americans) 2008 was truly extraordinary. We elected the first African-American president. We watchd gasoline prices soar, oil production peak, the banking system go belly-up, and Galveston get totally whacked by Ike. We looked with astonishment at our 401Ks, melting faster than the polar icecaps, and at the forest of for-sale signs and foreclosures invading our neighborhoods. We began to count food miles and species extinctions and diminishing water resources and think about becoming locovores, ecovores, gardeners, chicken keepers, and seed savers. The electric car began to seem possible again (after it became extinct in California a decade ago), and wind turbines mushroomed across the West Texas landscape.

So forget the part about me being 69 and counting. Turns out that 69 is a pretty ordinary event. Everybody gets to do it once--those of us who live to be 70, that is. But 2008 was an astonishing year, a wonderful/awful/incredible year to document. Journaling it made me even more conscious of just how amazing it was.

So. Beatrix #7 gets printed today and mailed tomorrow. And I'm back to my extraordinary year, reliving 2008, for the record.

Reading note:  When we look back, 2008 will be a momentous year in human history. Our children and grandchildren will ask us “What was it like? What were you doing when it started to fall apart? Could you see it? What did you think? What did you do?"--Paul Gilding