Breaking News About Iris Changing Color in the Wild

A year or so ago, I dug up and brought home some iris rhizomes I found growing on the grave of my gggrandfather in a long-neglected cemetery in East Texas and planted them in a container when I lived in New Orleans. When they bloomed they were a dingy white that looked like they may have been violet or pink at some time in the past and had faded while they were growing in the wild. I revisited the cemetery recently and dug up a few more to plant in Glynn's Farm. I wrote to Schreiner's gardens in Oregon to ask for information on my "wild" iris and received the following email from Tom Abrego at Schreiner's Gardens. He writes:

"There are no bearded iris native to Texas (or anywhere else in the New World) so I believe these are iris that were once cultivated and have now escaped. Iris do not change color, so the color of these new iris in your garden is the color they have always been, as you said, an older iris without vivid color. The makeup of the soil, its pH, water and climate may cause subtle shifts of color in an iris, but a pink iris will never be a blue iris. Even if this iris lacks vivid color, you know it will grow well with little help, as you have discovered at the cemetery and the area surrounding it. Believe it or not, there are people who are specifically interested in old iris. I had a friend (we've lost touch) from the rural Midwest who used to put ads in small town papers looking for iris like yours. They may not be the biggest and the brightest, but they are tough!"

Thanks to Tom for his help. I have also learned that there is no plural for iris: it's one iris, two iris, three iris, etc. Anyone out there want an old-timie iris? I've ordered a couple of sample packs from Schreiner's Gardens so I can have some splendid, vividly colored specimens alongside my old ones.

I Laid a Purple Egg on My Handyman's Cap

I laid a Purple Egg (Plant, that is) on my "handyman's" cap today. Hey, excuse the National Inquirer style headline, but the competition in farm blogging is hog eat hog.

This is the first fruit from the egg plants. I had to stake them up yesterday. They all had fruit big enough to weigh the plants down and they were almost on the ground. I harvested the biggest one this morning because it's so big it will be a life-time supply by tomorrow. Looks like I'll be eating egg plant every day for the next day or two, plus freezing some too, I guess. If you slice them and coat them with deli-battering before you freeze them, and fry them (slowly) in cooking oil (I prefer olive oil, but you have to keep the oil temperature moderate.) straight from the freezer, they're delicious.

It rained most of the day and all night two days ago--which was a welcome relief from a long dry spell, although there were several thunderstorms the last week or two, they don't deliver enough rain to matter much when it's dry.

The only down side is that now the grass needs cutting again and it will push me to get it done before Sunday, but if I wait any longer than that it will be so high it will be that much harder to get mowed in one day, and I've got other things on my plate right now--trying to get the final manuscript of Arise Beloved to the printer and the bishop's visitation on Sunday.

Gardening and Stem-Cell Research

Anyone who is not a gardener would probably not recognize the link between stem-cell research and a very normal part of growing plants. It starts with the fact that unless you always buy plants at a nursery (or hey, even occasionally at WalMart) most of what you grow starts with planting seeds. Also, anyone who's ever read the instructions on a seed package knows that most of the seeds that come up will have to be thinned out. Maybe I'm a little too sensitive, but I've check with other gardeners and they usually know what I mean when I say that I suffer a tiny (very tiny sometimes) bit of remorse every time I pull out and discard a little-bitty seedling to make room for it's buddies on either side to grow up into healthy plants. A plant needs growing room to produce the blossoms or vegetables or whatever. . . for which I planted the seeds in the first place. Thinning is not something that can be done once either because, as the plants grow, sometimes you have to go back and thin more than once, so each time, you destroy a plant that is further along in its life cycle.


Occasionally I do try to save some of the little ones that would otherwise be lost, by transplanting some to another location, but it's usually too hard to do, and too likely to disturb the plants on either side of the one you're trying to save. So you're left with a hard choice; destroy two plants trying to safe one or destroy one plant so that another can survive. (There's a human parallel here. Every time doctors and parents are forced to separate Siamese twins who are joined in fashion that would prevent them being able to live in the world, they're making life and death decisions that favors one life over another--particular when the twins share vital organs.)

But back to seeds. Of course, you could always plant seeds at sufficient distance from each other so that you don't have to thin out the ones that come up, but every gardener knows that not every seed will come up, or that what does come up will actually be a healthy plant, or even that what comes up will actually be the kind of plant you thought you were planting. Nurseries that produce seeds can and do make mistakes. So, you have to plant way more seeds than the plants you expect to grow to maturity.

One could make a connection with thinning seeds and drowning unwanted kittens when yo' mama cat gives in to a bout of indiscretion with a persuasive tomcat, but there is not really a legitimate connection since a responsible owner of cats will have them neutered thereby doing away with the moral question of drowning cats (or puppies) or whatever.

And not only does a gardener have to sacrifice beneficial plants, he also destroys life every time he pulls up a weed, and no body objects to weeding the garden on moral grounds, I hope. Although if there were something to be gained poltitically, I suspect somebody might. (An exception perhaps being the parable of the tares (Matthew 13:24-30.)

So the brutal reality of nature is that a lot of life and potential life has to die in order to make way for the life that survives. There's an old joke about the fact that every female alligator lays a zillion eggs every mating season and the male alligator eats 95% of them. There's a moral to the story; the reality is that if it weren't for the male alligator, we'd be up to our asses in alligators. By the same token, if every acorn produced an oak tree, we'd be up to our asses in oak trees. So, in the actual world that God created lots of potential life never gets to live. It's not tragic however, it's just an example of the tremendous natural abundance that God provides.

Which gets us to stem-cell research. The prohibition of stem-cell research is based on the notion that using the surplus fertilized eggs produced by fertility clinics for research "destroys life" in the same sense that abortion does. That's making an unacceptable, and one could say blasphemous connection. In the first place, not every fertilized egg can or should be implanted in a woman's womb--remember the story of the alligators and oak trees? In the second place, it puts a surplus fertilized human egg on the same moral level as one that has been implanted in a woman's womb, which really does have the potential to become a viable embryo. A surplus fertilized egg that will be discarded if not needed is not an embryo and only with a stretch beyond reason can it be considered as such. And finally prohibiting stem-cell research trivializes the issue of abortion, which is always morally reprehensible even in cases where it has to be considered the best of two bad options. (And using abortion purely for birth control, as if it were just a form of contraception, is always evil and, to a rational religious person, always sinful.)

Opposition to stem-cell research is a silly and misguided idea, and one deeply suspects those who argue for it are either invincibly ignorant themselves or are simply grandstanding to the ignorance and gullibility of a political base. Far from destroying potential life, stem-cell research has just the opposite potential; saving lives. Condemning stem-cell research is the actual immorality because it interferes with using reason--a gift from God to the human race--for good.

So, every time, I have suffer that little bit of guilt when I pull up a tiny seedling so that its brothers and sisters can live, I remember that because God has been so generous in providing the potential for life in the world he created, that I'm not destroying life, I'm saving it. If there were some way to use my discarded seedings for research, I'd do it in a heartbeat, but in the meantime, I'm satisfied that destroying unwanted seedlings is my only moral option.

Who said gardening was a mindless way of killing time? Hey, it's one of the few chances I get to think deep thoughts without being interupted by the telephone.

Big Blow Last Night

A thunderstorm came through last night and blew down some pecan tree limbs. Pecans are brittle and are bad about losing limbs when the wind gets up. The wind also blew down the support for my black-eyed peas that I worked all morning yesterday putting up. The thunderstorm brought some rain however, so I won't complain about the damage to the trees (which was not too much really) or the support for the peas. I hear on the radio that the wind blew down some power lines south of town and up in Shelby County. My lights went off a couple of times too during the storm, but they're on now so I had better luck than some of my neighbors.
My new digital camera came in the mail on Tuesday, so I've made some new pictures.

I went to Lowe's in Nacogdoches on Tuesday and bought netting and stakes for supporting the peas and beans. I also got Roundup Concentrate and some Periwinkles to replace the petunias in the birthbath flower bed and the one outside the back door. The petunias succumed to the heat and I'm hoping the periwinkles will stand up better. The zinnias are up in the birdbath bed too. This morning I plan to use the Roundup on weeds behind the garage where I plan to put in a bigger garden in the fall. I also plan to use the Roundup to kill the grass for put a flower bed across the back in front of a rock wall. I've got eight azaleas to put in the bed in front of the rock wall. The azaleas are left over from the ones I bought in the spring to put in front of the house.

I don't remember of I mentioned it or not, but the black-eyed pea seeds I planted were part of some I bought to eat from the grocery store. Evidently the peas were from running plants because they've got shoots 6 feet long. I'll not make that mistake next year since it looks like all I'll get this year will be lots of plant and not many peas. The yellow wax beans, which were supposed to be the bush type, are trying to run, but the problem may be that the soil is so rich all the beans are making lots of bush. Both both types of green beans and the wax beans are full of blooms and tiny beans. Maybe next week there will be enough to make a mess to eat. Hope so.




I got out the dehydrator and expect to set it up to dry the figs I gathered on Tuesday. I also downloaded the instruction manual for the pressure canner from the Internet yesterday and intend to can some chicken broth that I made when I deboned some chicken thighs earlier in the week. I make the broth by simmering the bones all day then cool it in the refrigerator. In the past, I've always frozen it, but I plan to can this batch. I like to use the broth as liquid when I cook stew meat.

Here's something interesting I found on the Internet. The link is below if you're interested.

Scientists decode how plants avoid sunburn

I Finished Mowing

I finished mowing on Monday by 9:30:AM before it got too hot outside. After finishing the mowing job, I did what is probably the part gardeners love most of all: puttering around the yard. Puttering amounts mostly of tidying up--dead-heading spent blossoms (I throw them on the ground around the plants because in some cases, like marigolds, some of the blossoms are mature enough to include seeds that come up -- "volunteer," to use the old-fashioned term -- and surprise you the next season.) If you don't want them where they come up, you can always transplant them or treat them like weeds, but since they usually come up earlier in the season that seeds you sow or than plants are available in retail shops, you get an early start on the season. In some cases too, as with coleus and zinnias, the volunteer seedlings turn out to be hybrids that are unique and (we can always dream) valuable.

My stepfather, Joe Grado had a dream like that. He was a great gardener and was an amateur cross breeder of day lilies. He sometimes came up with new and very beautiful new varieties, but (alas) he never hit the jackpot he dreamed of: a blue day lilie, which he believed would make him rich and famous. Everybody needs a dream like that even if the chances are better of getting hit by lightening or winning the lottery.

Monday's puttering included pulling up the few brave weeds that have committed suicide by coming up in my garden and flower beds. (I am ruthless.) If you pull it out every time you see a weed, then big-time weeding is never needed--you just need to put in some puttering time every day or so.

Not only have we been suffering through a major heat wave, it's been dry too, so I decided it was time to irrigate the garden by running the hose in the trenches between the rows for about 1/2 hour per row. You can tell when it's enough by watching the "wet" line as it creeps up by capillary action of the soil towards the top of the row. When it's almost to the base of the plants, you've done enough. I don't usually sprinkle with the hose unless the plants looked wilted or the leaves are dirty from debris thrown up by mowing. A little sprinkling at the end of a hot day perks up the wilted plants nicely, but I do it early enough for the leaves to dry before dark. If you sprinkle and the leaves are still wet when the sun goes down, you take a chance on mildew--which is ugly and interferes with a plant's photosynthesis because it blocks the sunlight.

I did turn the sprinkler on for the flower bed at the back door, the one around the birdbath and the ones in front of the house. The zinnias are up about 2 inches around the birdbath. Zinnias literaly spring up almost overnight when it's this hot. They'll be blooming too in a week or two.

The neighbors' dog slipped his rope this morning and kept me (not entirely welcome) company while I worked. Dogs, God love them, love to hang out with people, even strangers and they can be a pest, mostly because they want to be involved in whatever you're doing and they get in the way. If they just watched it would be OK, but they want to help--or whatever. And when you turn your back on them, they'll find the very place to lie down for a rest where you have been working. I lost the better part of a zinnia that was about to bloom to doggy bedding on Monday.

I went over to the neighbors' house to tell them the dog was loose at about 9:30AM when I thought they'd be awake, but they didn't come to the door, so I left the dog to wander when I went inside.

The last piece of puttering Monday was to pick 12 1/2 dozen ripe figs from the tree in the back yard. Now I have to get out the book on dehydration and learn how to dry them.

One on other thing, my new digital camera arrived in the mail Monday, so I'll have some new pictures of Glynn's Farm to put up soon.

And. . .in reading back over Saturday's issue, I think I may have been painted too rosy a picture of what cars and gasoline, etc. were like in the 1930s, 40s and 50s. I'll back-track to that discussion later on.

I have been invited to give the invocation at the San Augustine Chamber of Commerce meeting today (Tuesday) at lunch, so I have to quit posting now to get ready to be presentable there.

Keep your hoes sharp and your tillers fueled.

Mowing Today, But It Was Too Hot To Finish

I got up early this morning to mow the yard, but I only finished the front and side yards because it was 90 degrees (F) by 10:00AM. I didn't crank up the mower until almost 8:00 AM because it's Saturday and somebody was probably trying to sleep in. If they're still asleep at 8:00, then they stayed up too late and if they're that tired, they can probably sleep in spite of the noise. Anyway, it got too hot and I'll finish Monday.

I don't mow on Sunday. I'm old fashioned about keeping the day holy--or maybe, I just like to take a day off from physical labor at least one day a week; more than one day if I feel like it. Hey, I'm retired.

When I was growing up no one did chores on Sunday, at least not where anyone could see them. It was considered disgraceful to hang out washing (Nobody had driers then. I don't even think they had been invented except for commercial operations then ca. 1935 to 1954 +/-. The neighbors would talk if you even got out and swept the steps in front of the house. I can't remember when "blue laws" were repealed--some time in the sixties I think--but before then stores were never open on Sunday, except for "emergency" places like "filling" or "gas" stations on major highways. Neighborhood stations were all closed. That was when most people had two days off a week and women didn't usually work outside the home, except for widows and spinsters (spinster means and "old maid" stupid.)

I remember when petroleum companies stopped calling their retail outlets "filling" or "gas" stations too, and started insisting they were "service stations." That went by the boards with the first gas crunch in the seventies when "service" got to be an antique concept and everyone had to pump his own gas. Before that they wouldn't let you pump your own gas. Not only that, but back when "service" was still part of how they kept you as a customer, they'd check the oil and put air in the tires and wipe the windshield for you too. Finally filling your gas at a "service station" also became an quaint antique concept too and now you fill your own tank (and wipe your own windshield) at a "conveniene store," or a "retail outlet" if you're feeling real pissy. I suspect most people never check their oil now--or change it either. They just drive the sucker for a couple of years on the same oil and let the next owner (or the next) worry about the consequences. Few people check the air pressure in their tires either, which is one reason they don't get very good mileage--besides driving too fast. I plead guilty on the last count, so sue me.

Funny how the words "service" and "convenience" stopped applying to the customer and became the right of the merchant. Back when "service" stations stopped pumping gas for you, if you didn't pump your own gas you had to pay 3-4 cents for an "attendant" to fill your tank. "Filling your tank " was not the usual way to buy gas either back in the day. Nobody I knew had enough money to just pull in and "fill 'er up when I was a kid." I don't remember Daddy ever filling up the car. He usually told the guy that pumped the gas: "Give me "5 gallons." Sometimes he'd put in 10 gallons if he was feeling flush or going on a trip. Gas was about .25 9/10 back then, so you were only talking about $2.00 to $2.50. I never remember Daddy getting less than 5 gallons however. It was just too much of a "white trash" thing to do. He certainly would never have pulled up and asked for 50 cents worth. That was really white trash. His picture, taken in about1940 is on the left. His name was William Bruce Harper and he was born February 23, 1908 in Jacksonville, Texas. He was a school teacher by profession and education, but he hated teaching school and got fired from his last school for cussing out the superintendent of schools, who happened to be his sister-in-law's husband. He was working as a ship fitter at the Todd Shipbuilding Company building Liberty ships during WW2 when he died of pneumonia on New Year's Day in 1945.

Anyway, back to mowing the yard. It takes about a tank of gas for the mower to cut the whole yard. I just emptied my first 2 gallon can and I've cut the yard maybe five times since I bought the mower, so it gets much better mileage than my Ford F-150 pickup truck. The pickup gets about 18 miles per gallon if I stay under 50 when I'm on the highway and about 15 if I drive 70, so I usually get about 14 miles per gallon.But what the dickens, the sucker is paid off. It's only got 88,000 miles on it (It's a 2001.) and will last me the rest of my life if I don't get in a wreck or something awful like that and don't live past 90 or so and can still drive without hitting the curbs too often.

I do think conservation is a good idea and I'm PC enough to worry about C02 and global warming--hey I had to stop mowing at 10:00AM because it got too hot. And, if I had to get a new vehicle, I'd try to find some kind of dual fuel or other "conservation" transportation. But I'm 70 and a pickup truck is a Texas icon and I still haul stuff for the garden, like mulch and plants and so forth, so driving the 2001 pickup is the best thing do to. If I got rid of it that doesn't mean it would be off the road anyway, so I might as well keep on driving it myself (and BTW changing the oil, getting regular tune-ups, and checking the air in the tires too.) I take care of myself too; regular check-ups and good dental care. I've still got all my original body parts in reasonable good operating condition too, including teeth.

Speaking of mulch before I got of on talking about teeth, I got a palletload of pine barck mulch from a fellow down in Pineville about 12 miles south of here on State Highway 147. It wasn't necessarily cheaper than buying the stuff from WalMart, but it's from local trees and if it's got bark beetles or something like that, at least they're local pests and not from some God-forsaken foreign trees with Lord only knows what kind of infestations.

That's enough for now. Tomorrow is church and I've got to start thinking about a sermon. You can check to see what I said at www.christchurchsatx.blogspot.com if you're really hard up for a holiness infusion, but don't expect me to get the sermon up until about Wednesday or Thursday. BTW there's a link on in the right hand column to the church web site as well as the blog

Hello and Welcome!

Welcome to my new blog where I hope to entertain you and myself with a journal of my "backyard farm." I'm located in the historic city of San Augustine in deep East Texas, behind the Pine Tree Curtain on the old El Camino Real de Tejas, a 300-year old road first laid out by the Spanish when Texas was a colony of Spain. You can read more about San Augustine and El Camino Real by clicking on the link in the column on the right. There are also links to Christ Church, Episcopal, where I am the vicar.

Gardening in San Augustine is a joy. The rich red-brown soil is just the right mix of sandy loam which holds water well and won't clot when it's wet. You can work it after a rain without it gumming up on you. It will grow just about anything when there is enough rainfall, but it is also suitable for irrigation during the drier summer months.

Irrigating might get expensive, especially since the city sewer bill is determined by how much water you use; usually about half the water bill. But---I have my own well and water system so I can irrigate without paying for the sewer. Most of the houses in San Augusting have water wells because until the 1970s the city water was from a deep well and the water was too hard and alkaline to use for watering plants. It was sure death for azaleas. In th 70s San Augustine switched to a surface source from a newly constructed Town Lake, so now the city water won't kill your garden, but the water bill will kill your budget. Luckily my home water system still functions and I'm not dependent on city water for watering the garden.

I like to work at landscaping my yard as well as work in the garden and my home was recently chosen as "Yard of the Month" by the San Augustine Garden Club. I'm posting some pictures of the yard and flowers as well.

The picture at the top of the blog is the front of the house. The beds in front are red salvia with white azaleas behind. In front of the azaleas are a row of white begonia and in front of the begonias are ageratum alternating white and blue. It's geting too hot for begonias now and they're starting to look sun-burned. The red salvia blossoms fade rapidly too in the sun, but they'll be back looking vivid agian in September and last until frost in the fall. The ageratum is going great guns in spite of the heat. I had a little trouble with some kind of spider that withered a few of the ageratum, but I just pulled up the effected plants and put put them in the garbage and that seems to have stopped a full-scale infestation.

I put down a weed barrier webbing in the front flower bed for the first three feet from the foundation of the house then added another three feet, curved at each side and mulched the whole bed with pine-bark mulch, which is readily available in bulk from Pineville, a small community close by.
I scooped out a shell-shaped bed outside the back door which has an old nandeena I inherited as a foundation plant. I planted a Don Juan "leaning" rose--a rad variety that is my favorite rose next to the nandeena. In front of the nandeena and the rose, I planted three crook-necked yellow squash plants, which have turned out to be producing fools. I've already gathered and frozen 5 pounds of squash, plus I've had meals of of them non-stop for about a month. They're still producing althought the plants are showing their age.
I planted a lantanna in the center of the bed in front of the squash, which I have to hack back once a week to keep it from taking over. I bordered the bed with yellow marigolds with purple petunias behind the border, and planted some ageratum left over from the front bed in the apex of the triangle the bed makes with the driveway and the sidewalk from the back door. The petunias have just about given up in the heat so I pulled up some of the worse-off ones and planted four pepper plants; two small "button" purple ones and two others that are also small. The latter start off yellow and get fire-red as they ripen. Both the purple and yellow/red peppers are hot, hot, hot, and make wonderful pepper sause for purple-hull peas and speckled limas.
The garden patch in the back yard patch is about 10X15 feet and has a row of okra, two rows of green beans, one row of yellow wax beans, a row of black-eyed peas, a row of bell peppers with three sunflower plants at the far end, a row of four egg plants with a hill of yellow crook-neck squash at the end, and a final row of climbing speckled lima beans. I didn't get the garden in until fairly late in the season because I didn't get the ground tilled in time. I planted everything except the lima beans on June 14 and everything was up in less than a week. The picture of the patch was taken about two weeks after I planted it. The black-eyed peas literallly shot up in two days. The green beans are blooming and I expect to eat my first beans in about two weeks (probably raw while I'm in the garden weedig.) I didn't get the limas planted until July 3 because I didn't know when I boughtthe seed that they were the running kind and I had to wait until I had something for them to run on. I'll post some later picture of the garden when my new camera arrives. (My old one died and I've ordered a new one.) Because the growing season here usually runs through October, I'll have a good harvest of beans and okra probably as late as the first of November.
The last picture is a small flower bed that is visible from my breakfast room window. It's the first place I broke ground when I moved to this house last September. I had a dog-wood tree I'd been wagging around in a pot during the time I was living in a travel trailer while I was promoting my novel "A Perfect Peace." When I moved in here I planted the tree and finally got around to digging out a flower bed around it in March. The second picture is what the bed looked like in March. I planted pansies in the bed then, but when it got too hot for them, I pulled them out. I've got some coleus and marigolds in pots sitting in the bed, but I've also got four coleus in the ground and have planted zenia ("old maids") seeds, which will probably be up next week.