Shift Happens

Last fall, Ranch Boss grew tired of the pummeling we'd received from the historic Texas drought and the endless US recession; so he took matters in his own hands.

In November, Kirk Ranch Consulting accepted a new management position in East Texas - a place that looks an awful lot like Louisiana, because it has swamps and trees. As such, the geography of Kirk Ranch Organics has changed again.

The beautiful thing is, we do what we do no matter where we are. So we've got people working on Gorman, while we are firing up Kirk Ranch East.

As of February 10th, the lavender, basil, tomato and pepper starts are germinating and the spring garden is ready to plow. Our fabulous new neighbor Bobby, a retired Amtrak conductor, got into the blueberry business a few years ago and then quickly got out. He and his wife are swamped with more blueberries than two humans can eat. So Ranch Boss and I plan to help out - expect jars of Texas blueberry jam in your stockings next Christmas. Bobby is a big gardener and has offered to plow me a plot when when the rain stops. Yep, it rains here.

It didn't over the summer of course, but it is now and the lakes on our new project property are refilling. Tanks in Gorman are full now too, as the picture on the right attests. The one on the left was taken last August on the 40th day over 100 with no rain. Looking at it makes me hot.

One of the exciting surprises of our new venture was learning that the house we were to move into had, for numerous reasons, fallen into disrepair. So, we are remodeling it. If you are keeping track, this is the third house, Ranch Boss and I have remodeled together in five years.

So here we are starting afresh in Mineola, Texas, home to former Texas governor Jim Hogg, who, and I am not making this up, had a daughter named Ima.

Stay Tuned.

Baby Steps.

A really smart person once told me that the key to success is to:

a. Start.
b. Keep going.

Yesterday, we started; taking one baby step toward our vision of long rows of lavender undulating their way to the porch of the Kirk Ranch house.

Here is what the front of the Kirk Ranch looks like right now.

Please cut us some slack as we have endured an unprecedented eight-month drought. Happily, the temperature has begun to drop, a few small showers have graced us and fall seems to be settling in.

Here's what we want the front of the Kirk Ranch house to look like eventually.

We are big believers in photographing our dreams and putting them  in conspicuous places, as a reminder to the conscious or subconscious mind to plan accordingly.

Here is our first baby step toward that goal.

Three test plants of the lavender variety - Grosso, Provence and Laceleaf - have been planted in cultivated, sandy soil with a 7.0 ph and given a cool drink of water. They should have at least 60 days before our first frost to get a little bigger and stronger. Their performance will determine what varieties get planted next season and if we can propagate their very own genetics with cuttings.

Taking this little obsession into consideration, it's easy to explain what I am doing in this picture and why my sister is laughing about it.

It may have been a fake lavender field hanging on the wall of a skin care products store in Avignon, France, but I figured I ought to check out the soil anyway.

We're thorough.

Wanna Go?

I bought a print in the South of France weeks ago that I have been toting around by hand, since it won't fit in my suitcase. The image is such an emblem of everything I love about France, that if I accidentally leave it in a yellow cab in Istanbul, I will cry.

The print is an art deco-period woman in a swimsuit standing in front of a restaurant - probably in the 1930's. Oh thanks Google, there she is. She isn't the point though. Like all good memento purchases, she has a story.

On Sam's last week in France, we walked to the far side of the port looking for the beach that our new friends, Tristan and Kathryn, who are American/Italian/British travel journalists living in Nice, suggested.

Along the cliffs hangs a shell of a building, with an equally decrepit structure perched on a small rock promontory rising out of the turquoise sea. Nothing is left of the structure but a three-story spiral staircase attached to a concrete pillar and a rickety, rusty metal gangplank that hooks the promontory to the main.

Local teenagers gather there to perform the universal teenage mating rituals - shoving, squealing, strutting etc. They also rockclimb the cliffs, swing their legs up onto the rusty gangplank to access the platform, climb the spiral staircase and the concrete pillar and then....

Jump off.

It's at least a 30 foot jump, maybe 40, from the top of the pillar. Girls climb up the slippery and overhanging cliff too in order to sun and preen and jump, well away from any parental supervision.

Sam and I found this deeply entertaining and noted that it really was a perfect way for teenagers to express their considerable teenage angst. In America, of course, such a place would be wrapped in concertina wire and plastered with keep-out signs. Not so, in France.

Besides being a demanding and dangerous climb, the platform provides a perfect stage for the young men to perform feats of aerial bravery and make obscene gestures to the incoming Sardinia/Corsica ferries.

Of course this impresses girls.

The day before I left Nice, I wandered through the old town, photographing architecture, drinking cafe au lait and breathing the Catholic incense burning in 17th century cathedrals. On my way, I happened into a shop selling art deco posters. One caught my eye.

It was a woman in a bathing suit standing on the rocky shore, under a restaurant called The Reserve. The restaurant was perched on the cliffs with the conspicuous elegance for which France in the 30's was so famous. Across a small gangway, restaurant guests were invited to gaze at the Mediterranean from a milk-white, wrought-iron three-story gazebo attended by tuxedoed waiters and a string quartet.

How swank and delicious this place must have been at a time when Nice was bustling with British aristocracy and famous French
impressionists. Today, there is still a swank and lovely restaurant next to the former location. Happily, the restaurant's current website has another picture of it's former glory.

The salesgirl saw me get really excited, when I figured out what I was looking at. When I told her I wanted it, she said in French, "do you know where this is?"

"Oui, oui" I said. "Les garcons sautent."

Believe it or not, "The boys jump" was one of the first sentences I learned while studying French with the Rosetta Stone. The shop girl was clearly pleased that not only did I, an American tourist, knew the site of Restaurant De La Reserve but that I was able to explain myself and my excitement in French.

This exchange marked the end of my keen observance of French culture and the start of my love affair with it.

Americans like to say that the French are rude or even less kind adaptations of that word. But I think the French and their value system are misunderstood by my people.

The French are exceedingly polite and bristle at American informality and presumption. They rigorously defend their beloved cultural institutions from tacky global influences, so that even MacDons on the Promenade des Anglais has flower beds out front.

Because the French haven't surrendered their singular cultural aesthetic in the name of efficiency or commerce, (I'm thinking WalMart) when you stumble into a small town in Provence on a Wednesday morning, you find a local market fairly bursting at the seams. Vendors are selling artisan bread, cheese, porc, chocolate, wine, grass baskets, lavender bunches and warm bread all as a matter of daily course. Normal people - not just tourists or French with boatloads of cash - shop, socialize and conduct business there - like humans have done in the marketplace for millennia.

In my opinion, this is at least one reason why France is the #1 most visited nation on the planet, according to 2010 global tourism statistics. Believe it or not, the US is second and we have the Grand Canyon.

I told you all that to tell you this:

1. I just spent six weeks in Provence, the Cote d'Azur, Haute Provence and The Jura.  

  

2. I plan to be near-fluent by this time next year and I plan to go back.

3. I would like to bring a few of you along: A few smart, fun women who, like me, appreciate high-quality, local food, wine and culture. Who are up for soulful, sensuous travel, where people and their lives trump cities and their buildings.

4. I have scouted a route through lavender fields, roadside cherry stands, mountain lakes, antique markets, wineries, Roman ruins, Mediterranean beaches and other natural and man-made wonders. 

So, my question is, what are you doing next June?

Brave or Crazy

In honor of my upcoming 39th birthday, I decided to quit agonizing about it and finally do something with my hair. 

My current style, which I like to call aging-hippie-spends-too-much-time-in saltwater-chic, I believe is the main culprit behind people inquiring which of us, me or Christy, is older. This is intolerable.

So this morning Christy took me to her Turkish hairstylist here in Istanbul. She had an approximately 30 second, halting conversation in Turkish with the salon owner, pointed to my grey hair with exasperation, and then left. 

My stylist knows the word OK in English and I know the words Hello and Thank you in Turkish. Hooray, what else do we need? Let's color my hair.

Some of you who know Christy might be saying, "wow you let Christy tell them what color to dye your hair?"

I know, that thought crossed my mind as I sat helpless with ammonia based goo all over my head. I resigned myself to the fact that the horses were really out of the barn on this one. 

I comforted myself by remembering what she said as she left; "don't worry you can always grow it out."

The story has a happy ending. They were in fact incredibly competent and my hair looks much like it did when I was 20. This is good because I have been invited, this afternoon, to be a panelist for a United Nations Development Program agency seminar on organic farming. I'm pretty sure I will be the only Texan there.

It's a long story how this happened and I will post more after it happens but at least I can go with good hair. July 11, 2011

It's a New Day

It hurts a little to note that my last post was in July. It's telling to note that grasshoppers were mentioned. 

Farming is so humbling. 

One of the advantages of living in a rural place is that you can usually throw a raging temper tantrum in your driveway, unwitnessed. One afternoon I was doing just that; smashing grasshoppers with a shovelhead and shouting expletives when, unfortunately, my neighbor Durwood pulled in. I failed to pull it together in time and Durwood, who knows a thing or two about crop failure after a lifetime of peanut farming, watched with sympathy. Then with great kindness he suggested I fog the whole show with Sevin and poison the little suckers.

"But I caaaaaaaan't do that Durwood!" I wailed.

Sometimes holding the line blows.

Later that same day, Ranch Boss drew his own line by announcing that the grasshoppers on the balance of the Kirk Ranch would be sprayed in the morning, to protect his hay crop. I know when things are non-negotiable. So, last summer the Kirk Ranch became something like a restaurant with smoking and non-smoking sections.

But thank God hope springs eternal and we are back at it, with our second year of organic gardening in Central Texas. We are wiser and better prepared now.

Seed catalogues arrive daily, baby green Bermuda shoots are poking up through their dormant beige brothers and we've had four calves in seven days. Here are a few things on the horizon that have us excited. 

1. Lavender. I decided, over the winter, to quit pretending I don't want the front of my ranch tolook like a farm in Provence. I have surrendered and plan to plant several hundred lavenderplants in the open space between vegetables and orchard. In my mind it looks like this. Lavender likes sandy, loamy, sweet soil with good drainage, which I have, it is a drought tolerant plant as well, which, well duh..There are thriving lavender farms in Austin, which we may visit in an upcoming post.

2. Bees. If we aren't concerned about bee colony collapse, we should be. Remember the plants that sustain us are pretty undemanding except for a couple things. Their need for pollenators is absolute. Given that the EPA says that pesticide overuse is at least one probable cause of colony collapse, we hope to provide a haven - if possible. Plus bees love lavender. I love honey. See how this works? Of course I know almost nothing about beekeeping, but I know people who do. Stay tuned.

3. Pullets. I am happy to announce that my baby pullets are becoming hens. Six fresh brown eggs this morning! This may deserve its own blogpost but these little babies came from the Leon Valley Hatchery just down the road. Come to find out they are the largest distributor of fertilized eggs on Ebay! Who knew? People buy fancy breeds of chickens for 4-H or whatever, the eggs are shipped in special packages and then incubated by the buyers. By the way, because I wondered about this too, fertilized chicken eggs are dormant until somebody with a fluffy butt (or other technology) sits on them.

Oh and did you notice the funny looking comb on Tom the Rooster? Do you know what happened? Frostbite! Yep, it got that cold for that long in Texas a few weeks ago. When it doesn't break 18 degrees for four days, it's hard to keep your comb warm.

He's fine though, surrounded by six "blossoming" pullets, if you know what I mean.

4. Farmers Market. The bottom line is this: I don't want to drive to Dallas to sell produce - especially with trouble in the Suez. So I wonder, if somebody started a Farmers Market in Gorman with a mess of backyard growers and then marketed the pants off it, well....If you build it will they come? Perhaps its worth a try. Saturday mornings starting in April/May? More on this to come.

5. Raised Beds. You might recall the industry that double digging 500 square feet of raised beds required last spring. Because Ranch Boss is a genius, he promised he could duplicate the process with all the required finesse if I would just come "look at" this sweet backhoe attachment for his tractor. See how things work around here? Turns out he was right. We more than doubled our raised bed planting space in less than eight hours. Last year each bed took 8-10 hours to dig by hand. We are so ahead of the game that shallots, onions, peas and spinach have been in the ground for a week now.

I promise greater diligence here, stay tuned. February 26, 2011

Shop Your Local Farmers First!

I have a wheelbarrow of cucumbers waiting to become pickles. I have about 30 lbs of sweet, fuzzy, drippy, baseball-sized peaches sitting on top of the cucumbers. A friend loaded me up with about 10 garlic heads yesterday, the chard is, unbelievably, still producing in the sweltering July-ness of Texas. Plus, the grasshoppers have descended heavy enough to make us guard for the Four Horsemen of the apocalypse.

No wonder I haven't blogged.

Summer is in full swing here and I am going to bang the drum once again for local farmers.

A study just released by Virginia Tech found that if each household in the State of Virginia spent just $10 per week on local food - squash, milk, pork, fruit or whatever, it would add $1.65 billion - that's billion with a B - to the State's economy. Holy smokes - how many jobs would that create?

If that doesn't convice you to stop by your local Farmer's Market this week with a ten in hand, here's a story:

Across the street from the Kirk Ranch is a roughly 25-acre field farmed by some friends of ours - a couple in their 70's, named Charles and Carolyn. For decades, the two of them have grown squash and cukes on this land, harvested, sorted and driven this totally fresh, never refrigerated produce to the Dallas Farmers Market. Since 1941 DFM has sold local, wholesale produce in South Dallas. The farmers market, as a trend, has clearly taken off, with the number of markets more than doubling in the US in the last 10 years, but for DFM it's not a trend - it's old hat!

The chefs show up at dawn every day in the summer and buy their produce direct from the farmer - it is an elegant win-win situation for hardworking chefs and farmers both. Charles and Carolyn have been taking their produce there for DECADES. This requires them to get up in the middle of the night, drive 120 miles to Dallas, arrive before dawn for a good spot in the local vendors shed and be ready for the chefs and other early birds.

Ranch  Boss asked Charles yesterday when and where they sleep - do they get a room or something. Charles, who is a hilarious character anyway, said , "Heck no, you sleep right there with your vegetables."

So let's review. 

A couple in their 70's gets out into the field in the morning, harvests squash until noon then washes, sorts and boxes it well into the afternoon, completes all their other normal chores - which for Charles probably means spending the balance of the day on the tractor mowing hay. Then they load up at midnight to drive to Dallas to sell vegetables at dawn. They repeat this procedure as long as there is squash.

As you are taking your second coffee break of the day, stretching a little from a morning of answering e-mails, I'd like you to pause and calmly consider Charles and Carolyn. Consider how hard farmers actually work to grow and sell food. What's sad about this story is there is a glut of squash on the DFM right now- maybe because of all the rain we got, I don't know, but Charles told Ranch Boss they had to bring a bunch home. All that work for nothing. Ugh.

So this is a battle cry!

I implore you shop your local farmers first! Sure you can buy squash at thesame time you buy toothpaste and charcoal and that's super convenient - but just remember somebody busted their tail to grow that squash and if they can't support their families doing it (as all the farming trends suggest) they will quit.

Then what? This isn't a small problem.

We at the Kirk Ranch are awaiting news about a Texas Department of Ag grant called "The Young Farmer Grant" designed to help young people get back to farming. Think about Charles, can you blame twenty-somethings for their reluctance to go all in on a farm?

Now of course, Charles and Carolyn are an absolute delight to be around, they have farmed their whole lives and Charles is one of the happiest guys I know. I can't imagine trying to keep up with his 1000mph lifestyle and I'm half his age. So certainly there are joys inherent to a life spent outside in the sunshine and air with plants. But don't kid yourself, it's hard work.

So make a day of it, take your kids to your local farmers market and spend some money there. Texas is crazy ripe and delicious right now.

See for yourself! July 13, 2010

Why Heirloom Matters - A Primer.

It's so hip to be green right now, it's awesome.



Consumers are panicking about the recent Harvard study which suggests that pesticide residue in fruits and vegetables may increase the occurrence of ADHD. Analysists predict the demand for organic produce will double by the end of the decade and every urban restaurant worth its salt, has heirloom vegetables on the menu.


Unfortunately, the lexicon has become ponderous - USDA organic, non-certified organic, locavore, F1 hybrid , non-GMO, heirloom etc. If you are lucky enough to eat heirloom vegetables but have no idea what they are, we are here to help.


Heirloom vegetables come from plants, usually old varieties that maybe your grandparents grew, which have undergone no genetic modification or hybridization. Simply put, if you save a seed from an heirloom sweet chocolate bell pepper and then stick it in the ground, you will grow a sweet chocolate bell pepper plant.

"But wait," you say. "I've never heard of sweet chocolate bell peppers, I can't even imagine what one tastes like." That's because sweet chocolate bell peppers look weird, they're delicate and don't fare well in shipping containers crossing the ocean. So, in our industrial food system, farmers don't grow them because wholesalers don't buy them. Therefore, you don't get to eat them.
The good news is you can save seeds from bell peppers and plant them in your garden. Humans have done this for millenia. Unless, of course, the supermarket bell pepper you are eating is an F1 hybrid - which it probably is.


With apologies to Gregor Mendel; a first generation hybrid is the product of two different plants with desirable characteristics, like heavy-bearing, frost-tolerant etc. Their union creates a new, uniform variety with those desirable qualities. These days hybrids are bred not so much for flavor and novelty but to withstand the rigors of the industrial food system.


Say you were inclined to save hybrid seeds to plant in the garden. You'll wind up with a pasty, wilty mess of a plant that is good for nothing. "So what," you say. "Seeds are cheap. I can just go to Walmart and get more." Well..yes..but those are probably hybrids too and they make plants that can't reproduce themselves either, so you go back to Walmart the next year and buy more seeds and...see where I'm going with this? Also, the seeds for sale at your neighborhood garden supply are, due to supply changes in the industrial food system, a narrow genetic slice of the variety that was once available.


Are you Irish-American? I am. Two and a half million Irish were displaced in the 1840's because they basically all planted the same variety of potato. Nature likes diversity and if the Irish had planted several varieties of potato, maybe one of them could have survived the blight; and I could be drinking a Guinness in County Cork right now.


Seed Savers Exchange, whose members have saved an estimated 1 million varieties of rare garden seeds since 1975, put it thus: "The vegetables and fruits currently being lost are the result of thousands of years of adaptation in diverse ecological niches around the globe."


Renowned plant collector Jack Harlan said of seed saving, "These resources stand between us and catastrophic starvation on a scale we cannot imagine."


Whoa.


In addition, seed company scientists are churning out varieties that have been genetically engineered - Genetically Modified Organisms or GMO. For instance they might splice a cold-water fish gene into a tomato to make it more frost-tolerant. Unlike hybrids, which are like breeding a horse and a donkey to make a mule, this is mating fish and tomatoes - something that could never occur in nature.


So is this food safe to eat? Thirty countries from Japan to Austrailia and the entire EU don't think so. These countries have passed restrictions or outright bans on GMO. The US is a different story. According to the USDA, in 2007, 91% of the soy grown was GMO. By the way, if you eat anything processed, you eat soy.


Health questions aside, there are two other facts that freak me out as much as the phrase "catastrophic starvation."


Problem #1 - Worldwide 81% of GM crops were genetically engineered to resist herbicides, says research by the Center for Food Safety. That means you can spray the whole field and everything dies, including beneficial insects, beneficial microbes in the soil, birds, fish, frogs, etc., but the crop doesn't. This is the wonder of modern science.


But oops... this just in,  farmers across the US have found 10 weed species growing quite well in their Round-Up Ready crops. Round-Up Ready means the plants are genetically engineered to tolerate the application of glyphosate. The presence of weeds means the weeds are evolving to resist the chemical. So what do we do now? Spray more? Yum!


Problem #2 -  Fans of the recent documentary Food Inc will recall a fellow in it named Maurice Parr. He travels from farm to farm, for a living, helping farmers save their seed.. However, since genetically modified crops are developed in a lab they can be patent protected as intellectual property.


So the film tracks Parr's legal troubles with Monsanto - who according to Wikipedia is the largest conventional seed producer in the world, who produces 90% of the GMO sold and posted revenue of $11.3 billion in 2008. In the film, Goliath has been punching David in the face without pause for several years now but David just won't lie down. Look at Monsanto's website, they defend their position.


It's fascinating and provokes questions like: "Who owns the global food supply?"  A question which is worth calm consideration and then complete hysteria.


So here's what it boils down to.


If you buy seeds from places like Seed Savers or Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, you can skip all this nonsense. You can save your seed and grow it again next year without being sued or growing crappy plants. And you are personally helping prevent a catastrophic starvation event by encouraging genetic diversity in your own garden.


If you can't swing all that, just eat a prosciutto and melon appetizer made with an heirloom Charantais melon at your favorite restuarant. After you freak out over how good it is, find the owner, thank him or her and then go get all your friends and repeat the process as often as you can.


We can handle supply, if you handle demand. May 22, 2010

Free Lunch!

They say there's no such thing as a free lunch.

They are sooo wrong. There is one. It is absolutely free, it's everywhere and we all learned about it in fifth grade. Its called photosynthesis!

Now before you roll your eyes and go check your Facebook page, consider the following excerpt from Second Nature, Michael Pollan's fine treatise on gardening, which he wrote before the Omnivore's Dilemma made him the prophet of the local food movement.

The first person to verify that indeed this is a miracle was a seventeenth-century Flemish scientist by the name of Van Helmont. He planted a willow sapling in a container that held 200 pounds of soil and, for five years, gave it nothing but water. At the end of that time, the tree was found to weigh 169 pounds, and the soil 199 pounds, 14 ounces - From just two ounces of soil had come 169 pounds of tree.

Pollan's relays this story after considering the giant, warty Sibley squash he planted from seed in May and harvested in October. It took nothing from anyone but water, air, sunlight and time and here's the best part: Pollan ate it. He may have even fed his family with it.

Herein lies the miracle of agriculture and it's so simple we miss it three times a day. Through photosynthesis, plants take air and sunlight and turn it into food for us.

If that isn't the quintessential free lunch, what is? May 13, 2010

Courtesy of a Generous Rain

Some days I wonder if I have the faith to farm.

It takes faith to believe that tiny, delicate seeds put in the ground are actually going to grow into radishes. It takes faith to believe the rain will fall at the right time and bugs won't destroy everything and more faith that our organic approach will even deter them. It takes yet more faith to believe the mulch layer isn't too acidic and the baby tomato starts we yanked from the greenhouse won't fall over and die at the prospect of living outside.

Faith is the substance of things hoped for but not yet seen, says Hebrews.

I remind myself of that daily when I stare at my beds waiting for new things to sprout. Aren't we all waiting for new things to sprout? Really?

Nothing sprouts without rain and despite a wet winter, the drought topic has been creeping into casual conversation around town. But yesterday it rained hard and it galvanized this gardener's faith in a much-needed way.

On a physical level, 68 degrees and raining couldn't be better for vegetables. The soil is warm and wet, the wind is calm - things can't help but grow well, like weeds. So I'm grateful for the approximately 2" that has fallen since yesterday. 

Despite the drizzle, I took 24 tomato babies out of the greenhouse and planted them in their beds. Ty Wolosin - an organic growing neighbor friend - said don't kid yourself, April15th - no sooner. 


Late frost and wind are a topic of great paranoia to Texas gardeners, so I've been agonizing over this. Consider taking your kindergartener to New York City and turning him/her loose in Times Square to "grow up." That's kind of how planting tomato starts in Texas in April feels - it's a cold world and predators love innocent, little babies like these.

No sooner had I begun, the rain got serious. I was halfway through wrapping protective plastic around my kindergarteners' cages when it really started coming down. Incidentally, 13 gallon kitchen trash bags with the bottoms cut out fixed with clothespins make pretty good mini-greenhouses for tomatoes.

Rather than dashing for the house, a move Ranch Boss suggested from the covered porch, I just kept working.

I recalled days when I used to take dude ranch guests riding in the forest. Panic would descend the moment it began raining. After we put on our rain gear I would always suggest that everyone hold still, notice how dry they actually were and how the horses seemed to care less about the rain. Once the panic subsided, people remarked on how much mist warm, wet horses create and how each rider got to swim through it. We noticed how much louder the birds and frogs got and how the pine trees smelled.

Oh, how a wet forest smells. 

It's not all that different in a wet garden. In fact, it felt like a benediction - a message to quit panicking, quit questioning and just focus on the task at hand. I calmly moved from cage to cage continuing to work as if I were not soaking wet. I just enjoyed the warm, heavy rain and a rested in what to me was a tacit confirmation that "the farmer who plants generously will get a generous crop." 

The soil is fertile around here. April 17, 2010

Oh Yah Spring!

Spring exploded all over the Kirk Ranch this week.

Apologies to our Pagosa friends for spreading on the "No way, you still have snow on the ground" routine. It's inevitable.

I'd like to think we are out of the woods with freezing weather, but the old timers say if it thunders in February you can count on frost on that same day in April. It did. So this gardener is betting on April 9th.

This is the fabled Texas Bluebonnet. It and several friends are growing in our front yard. The Lone Star State will be silly, gorgeous with them for the next month or two. Local lore holds that because of former first Lady and wildflower advocate, Lady Bird Johnson, the pockets of state highway workers were filled with wildflower seed. It is a fact, according to the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Austin, a 1987 federal law mandated one quarter of one percent of all highway landscaping funds be devoted to planting natives. This was largely due to her efforts. She was an early and avid environmentalist and a proud Texan.

I've been dying to show off this fabulous greenhouse. I'm dying even more to tell you that its mine. 

Well....It's not. This is the home of Hardwick Nursery & Produce in Rising Star, Texas. It is the mothership for three separate retail nursery operations. They must have, on site, fifteen or so 100x30 foot green houses packed to the gills with daisies, petunias, bouganvillea (which in Texas is a hanging, potted annual - smart) peonies, begonias. lobelia, hotpeppers, bell peppers, tomatoes, okra starts and countless other plants. 

It is possible to feel a little inadequate wandering through the Hardwick greenhouses, but I had to remind myself, they probably started with one, little recycled materials greenhouse too.

Grandaddy Kirk was able to celebrate his 85th birthday on the Kirk Ranch, last week.He was escorted all the way from Lexington, North Carolina by our good friend and gynecologist Dr. Quiche. (The gynecologist jokes, believe me, are never not funny).

A fried chicken, creamed-potato dinner was held in his honor and also in attendence was Ms. Garrett, who is our favorite 91 year-old neighbor/friend. After comparing some notes with Grandaddy on the Depression and dirt roads, she told some amazing stories about growing up in DeLeon, Texas (10 miles south).

Her family lived in a two-room house and farmed peanuts with teams of horses. As a child, she was the smallest and was often tapped to ride atop a cultivator of some kind and drive one of the teams! Due to my complete lack of mastery in the "southern woman" arts, I was preoccupied with frying chicken and I can't remember how many kids were in her family - but I think there were a bunch.

She told Ranch Boss that baths were taken on Saturday nights. That's where the expression "don't throw the baby out with the bathwater" comes from. Baths were taken largest person to smallest, so the baby got washed in some pretty dirty water. Ranch Boss asked "Ms. Garrett, did you have running water?"

"Oh Lord no!" she answered and giggled. She has a great giggle.

In our spare time, we also planted 27 new trees. The driveway now has a unique landscape design I like to call "compromise."

You see, the principals at the Kirk Ranch agreed that the driveway should be lined with trees. One principal favored a tidy, flowering manicured tree called a Bradford Pear. It is pictured at the right.

Another principal, who happens to also be pictured at the right, believes that Bradford Pears are not a "manly tree" and prefers something a little more "masculine" and "western." As such, the bottom half of the driveway features fourteen manly, western, Mexican Plums. The top half features eleven tidy, pretty Bradford Pears. 

We often talk about the amazing availability of resources here in Texas. All of these trees came from the Snider Nursery which is less than a half mile from the Kirk Ranch. The owner, Mike Snider, has a zillion trees for sale there, so if you are in the market for a bunch of really nice, high quality trees - masculine or feminine - Mike's the guy. He also set Ranch Boss up with a gorgeous Weeping Willow that will make some fabulous shade for our front yard in the long, hot Texas summers.

So yep, spring is pretty sweet 'round these parts. I know it is still snowing in Colorado, so y'all come visit now!  April 3, 2010