Near our new neighborhood, at the corner of Duval Road and Amherst Drive, is the designated wildflower area at Balcones District Park.  I drive past it almost daily.  Yesterday afternoon was sunny and clear, with a temp of more than 80 degrees, and I enjoyed a rare solitary afternoon there with camera in hand:

Balcones District Park oaks and cedar elms

False garlic growing under the oaks.

Also under the trees were yellow wood sorrel and Southern anemone (above).

There were a few of these around…

And lots of broomweed (I think).

Broomweed covered the shady slope under this oak as well as the sunniest spots of the wildflower area.

I saw only this one Indian Paintbrush at Balcones District yesterday afternoon.  But I spotted blankets of them this morning in the median along 360.

Prairie verbena

Indian Blanket

Anyone know what this is?  Looks like some kind of poppy?

Here it is again, growing along Duval Road.  I loved the way the drooping seed heads looked next to the road.

Here’s another that I don’t know.  These spikes were about a foot tall, I think.  Can anyone ID it?

Six months since my last post, and now we have a new garden.  Last October we moved from North Central Austin to Northwest Austin, just south of Duval Road. We moved in search of more space for our growing family and better schools.  We’re also within a bike ride’s distance of Nathan’s current job, and in a neighborhood with lots of other young families.  We’re enjoying our new home immensely.

The soil here is different; I’m discovering how each time I dig.  The soil here is rockier than the black clay of our previous garden, but still seems dense.  It is unfortunately tightly compacted in most spots.

The most exciting thing about our new outdoor space?  The trees!  I was in love with them the first time I saw this place.  A big Arizona ash tree sits in front of the house, as well as several cedar elms.  Behind the house, we have a large live oak, lots more cedar elms, and a few young red oaks.  Glorious shade!

I don’t know anything about gardening the way I want to in the shade.  I want to grow natives/well-adapted non-natives and vegetables.  I have a sense that I have only to research and learn more about the former.  As for veggies…there’s a sunny spot or two in the front yard, and I can only hope our HOA will be amenable to the raised bed or two that pops up out there.

That’s it in a nutshell: we’ll be caring for more trees, we’ll be learning about shade gardening with Texas natives, we’ll be trying to grow veggies in the front yard.  Wish us luck!

I’m still caring full-time for two other little seedlings under the age of three, too, so who knows?  It may be another six months before I post again.  Until then, we’ll be checking out bugs under the shade of the cedar elms, daydreaming about tomato vines in raised beds, and trying to loosen the dirt here a little.

We suffered through a summer with record high temps and one of the worst droughts in Austin’s history, and now in the early days of fall we’re being rewarded with frequent cool rains.  It rained most of the day yesterday, and by the time I stepped outside yesterday evening, everything looked crisp and clean and cool, including this Blackfoot Daisy:

The daisy, which is in the new circle bed we installed last spring, managed to survive this nasty beast of a summer with truly minimal care and watering.  It’s now flourishing on the fresh fall rains, and is officially on my list of favoritest Central Texas plants ever.

It’s good to post here again.  Almost as good as it is to be able to tolerate being outside again.

I’ve missed lots of garden moments, and I’ve missed lots of you, but this year has been intense in more ways than one.  Caring for two littles under two leaves precious little time for gardening or for blogging!

Hope you’re all enjoying the turn of the seasons wherever you are, too.

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?