flowerweaver
Member since: Jan 10 | Last seen: May 13 | Years gardening: 36 | Organic gardener
My husband is a music and theater teacher and I am an artist, guitar teacher, and botanist. Together we raise rare breed chickens and organically farm on five acres in the beautiful Texas Hill Country. We are vegetarians and very active in the local food movement. Interests include permaculture, composting, seed saving, rainwater harvesting, alternative energy, and a healthy, sustainable lifestyle.
Our property is located in a river canyon in a ghost town at the base of the hills in a remote area. The climate is semi-arid, the soil is rocky, and the land is divided in half by a seasonal creek. Our water comes from a spring-fed, hand dug pioneer well. For as small as it is, the land exhibits great diversity: short grass prairie, cedar brake, riparian, oak-juniper savanna, brush land, and wetland. One of our gardening goals is to document the existing landscape using Folia and to increase the diversity of native species in the natural areas of our property.
Another gardening goal is to become as self-sufficient as possible by producing most of our own food and saving seeds. We are pretty good at this, but there is always room for improvement! Good, organic store-bought produce is a full-day round trip (and a tank of gas) for us, so we don’t make this trip often. It is so much easier to just pick the day’s meal out of our garden!
Gardens
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Zone 8b This is more of a project than an actual location, as the perennials I propagate will be planted out into different existing gardens. The idea came...
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Zone 8b The Backyard Garden is a very large fenced space between the house, Vegetable and Creek Gardens, with a tall Ligustrum hedge on the north and east ...
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Zone 8b This garden is a circle of mowed grass within the yucca patch of the Juniper and Oak Savanna Garden, where a package of 10,000 honey bees and an R....
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Zone 8b The Butterfly Garden is on a slope between the Short Grass Prairie Garden and the Sky Chair Ponds Garden. It was in this bend of the creek that stu...
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Zone 8b This is our first flock of free-ranging chickens we raised from day-old peeps in 2006. Not knowing anything about poultry we ordered a rare breed l...
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Zone 8b By the time we ordered our second flock of day-old rare breed chickens, we knew exactly which breeds we wanted and ordered enough roosters to start...
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Zone 8b Parts of the creek bed and banks are included in some of the other gardens, but there is a section in the middle that’s nearly impenetrable, ...
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Zone 8b This garden is a rocky, full sun area far from any hose spigot. Just crossing it one feels parched. Between the Short Grass Prairie Garden and the ...
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Zone 8b This is a fairly shaded area in the summer that includes the house foundation plantings, walkway, porch hedge, a small rainwater container pond, an...
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Zone 8b The front room of our house—now my art studio—used to be the Post Office of our little town from the 1930-60’s. The previous owne...
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Zone 8b Our greenhouse was previously an odd rectangular gazebo built by previous owners in our backyard that we enclosed with Solexx panels. It is outfitt...
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Zone 8b This native garden is characterized by tall grasses among Juniper and Oak trees and is located between the Wildflower Meadow and Chicken Coop Two g...
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Zone 8b The Permaculture Garden is located between the fence line and the the Juniper and Oak Savanna. Basically, it is a swath that follows the natural la...
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Zone 8b This garden consists of one table and a large shelf above, each with its own 4’ grow lamp, residing in one half of the laundry room inside my...
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Zone 8b The Pumpkin Patch is carved out of the corner of the Juniper and Oak Savanna Garden and is fenced to keep the bunnies out although the field mice a...
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Zone 8b This is the full sun rock garden along the street (actually on the County’s property, called ‘rip rap’ for erosion control) and t...
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Zone 8b The short grass prairie is a relatively undisturbed, mostly sunny, half acre of rocky soil directly behind our vegetable garden. It is home to over...
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Zone 8b The Sky Chair Ponds Garden is secret in that it is down in the ravine between the Wildflower Meadow Garden and the Butterfly Garden. There is a ser...
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Zone 8b This is the remainder of a once sizable, mostly caudiciform, collection, with a few other things added here and there.
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Zone 8b Our Vegetable Garden is around 600 square feet and is located between the backyard and short grass (wildflower) prairie. Our honeybee yard is locat...
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Zone 8b This garden is fenced and accessible from our kitchen. In the center is our hand-dug pioneer well, well house, and an extremely large box of pea gr...
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Zone 8b This is a large, centrally located, sunny expanse of native wildflower meadow that we enhance every few years with Bluebonnet seeds. A path around ...
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