Carrots, which we quickly devoured right after harvesting:

and beets, which I’ll likely steam with a little salt and pepper, oh yum.

Plenty of chard and kale to harvest now, too.

Last weekend Nathan, my father-in-law and I toured a few of the coops on the first Austin Funky Chicken Coop Tour.  Here are a few photos from the last coop we toured, on Justin Lane in the Crestview neighborhood, just a little south of our house.

After seeing the coops on the tour, we decided that we want a walk-in coop for ease of cleaning and maintenance; we learned that the deep litter method really works; we learned that you can select among breeds of chickens for different temperaments, heat tolerances and egg types; we learned about different feeding and watering set-ups; and we saw several different ways to integrate a chicken coop into a backyard garden.

We’re excited about starting our own backyard flock, but we’ll probably wait until next Spring to get chickens, when the babies are a little older.  Hopefully then we’ll be a little less slammed around the house than we are right now, and the babes will be better able to appreciate watching chicks grow up.  Which means we’ve got about a year to build our coop–whee!

Our most recent project, a new circular bed in the back yard:

The circular design is inspired in part by recent posts on Digging and The Grackle.  The stones for the limestone border are from the cemetery on Hancock Drive.  They dig up a lot of the stuff there at the cemetery, and they’re only too happy for gardeners to cart the limestone off for free. Random, but true.  A great tip that I got on the Austin Permies list.  (And lucky for me Nathan and my father-in-law were willing to haul rock from a cemetery for me.)

Can’t wait to fill this new space with native plants!  I need to get my hands on a copy of the new Grow Green Guide.

In the garden this morning

veggies are growing:

Detroit Dark Red beets

Calabrese broccoli,

Dinosaur kale,

Red Core Chantenay carrots,

and Ruby chard.

The redbud tree is blooming,

the apple tree is blooming,

the loquats are ripening,

and the figs are all leafing out.

Here’s hoping for rain soon,

water to sustain

this early spring burst.

I’m thrilled that a few of you are still reading after my nearly four-month hiatus.  I didn’t do any gardening or garden blogging from October through December, since those were the last three months of my second pregnancy.  I was on a kind of modified activity for the last trimester of this pregnancy due to a history of pre-term labor, which didn’t allow for much besides the basics of taking care of my toddler son–so no gardening.  I gave birth to my daughter Madeleine on Thanksgiving Day.  I was 37+ weeks along, and she was born healthy and perfect.  If you’d like to see photos and read the occasional update on what I’m up to besides trying to spend some time in the garden, check out our family blog, Sunrise Ruby.

I’m looking forward to getting back into gardening and garden blogging as time permits.  Which may not be very often given that I’m now a mother of two under two.  Most of my time and energy these days goes toward making sure that we’re all decently fed and wearing clean clothes.  Nevertheless, I found time last month to plant beets, broccoli, and kale in our raised veggie beds, and most of the seedlings survived last night’s hail.   My son is now old enough to appreciate digging in the back yard with me, so that makes it easier to get outside and get my hands in the dirt from time to time, too.

Besides these major changes to life in my family, I’m making a few changes to Seeds itself.  First, I’ve removed my list of other Austin garden blogs from the right sidebar.  I returned to garden blogging last month only to discover that new blogs about gardening in Austin are popping up faster than dandelions in my neglected lawn, and I just can’t keep up.  I don’t want to leave anyone out, and other bloggers, such as Pam of Digging, are doing a better job than I am of keeping a list of bloggers in our community.  Thanks, Pam!  I hope to get to meet some of the new Austin bloggers sometime soon.

Just for fun, I’ve added a map that tracks the location of visitors to Seeds to the right sidebar.  I’m keeping a link to current weather conditions here in the Wooten neighborhood as reported by Victor Engel’s weather station on Weather Underground.

Finally, I imagine that new Seeds posts will be relatively sparse over the coming year, and that the character of these posts will be noticeably different than those of the first year.  I imagine that I’ll have more photo-only posts, more posts consisting of short notes that I’m recording primarily for myself, and shorter posts generally.  I read and appreciate all of the comments I receive, and I’ll try my best to make timely replies.  Bear with me, dear readers!  It’s hard to type one-handed, as I’m doing now, while a baby naps in my other arm.

Happy gardening in 2009 to all of you, and thanks for visiting.

Red-bellied Woodpecker (in the photo above)

Blue Jay

Northern Cardinal

European Starling

Red-winged Blackbird

White-winged Dove

Red-tailed Hawk

Great-tailed Grackle

Carolina Wren

various other unidentified sparrows and wrens

Eastern Fox Squirrel, including one albino squirrel who lives in our neighborhood:

I’ve seen the albino squirrel around the neighborhood often over the past 6 months or so, but this is the first time I’ve been able to photograph it.

I should probably also mention that I’m not entirely sure I’d know the difference between a Great-tailed Grackle and a Common Grackle unless I saw them side by side, so the grackle listing above may be incorrect or incomplete.

Sighted in a cottonwood tree in a neighbor’s yard yesterday evening:

This is the second time we’ve sighted the hawk at the same perch.  Anyone care to ID?

We’re nearly at summer’s end here in Austin–thank the gods!  The mid- to upper-nineties forecasted over the next week will be a welcome rest from the brutal, mostly triple-digit summer we’ve endured.  I couldn’t help appreciating how cool it was this morning as the boy and I sat on the grass outside and watched birds, catching the first scents of fall in the breeze that ruffled his oatmeal-crusted hair.

Our summer veggie garden is yielding its last harvests.  Only the basil and the ruby chard made it this far (both of which I used to make minestrone over the weekend).  The pepper plants are still alive, but haven’t even thought about flowering in at least a month.  All the other summer veggie plants have returned to that great compost heap in the sky.

Basil leaf, photo by Nathan

I’ve learned a lot from our first attempt at summer veggies.  I learned which plants can survive a brutal Austin summer, and how far apart we’ll need to space them next time.  I learned that a good soaker hose and timer, rather than relying on my own sporadic hand watering, is probably a wise investment.  And I learned that rats really enjoy young tomatoes fresh off the vine.  Not sure what to do about that one.

Now I’m turning my eye towards clearing out the veggie beds, refreshing the soil with compost, and ordering seeds for fall and winter.  So far I’ve got kale and broccoli on my list.  I’d love to try garlic, too.  Any others that fellow Zone 8 veggie gardeners would recommend?

In the garden this morning:

Anyone have swiss chard recipes they’d like to share?

Another summer harvest photo from a couple of weeks ago, courtesy of Nathan:

Lest our harvest photos lead you to believe otherwise, our summer veggies are mostly a bust.  All of the yellow squash plants were infested with borers, the cucumbers managed to suffer both from a lack of water and some kind of powdery mildew, and the tomatoes were eaten by rats before they could ripen.  The only plants still surviving are the swiss chard, the basil, and the peppers.  But while the pepper plants look healthy, they aren’t flowering anymore, so not sure how many more of these hot green things we’ll see.