Awesome Austin

Where do I begin? We only spent 2 days and 3 nights in Austin, but boy did we pack in a lot of fun and it will take at least 3 postings to do it justice (just a hint of what's coming...a funky, famous chicken place in Round Top, TX; Madalene Hill's gardens at Festival Hill, a trip to see Mexican bats on Segways, some great food, an afternoon watching chicken sh#et bingo, just for starters). And gardens all along the trail.

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU 

CHAD AND SUZY!!!!

Josh's niece and husband, Suzy and Chad, and their delightful 6 month old son, Liam, very generously offered to come and give us a weekend on our own. What sweet people and I am so grateful for their kindness. (Of course, letting Liam and Great Grandma Barbara get acquainted, was great, too!. They bonded immediately).

It's always a pleasure to see other people's gardens and one of our first stops was at our long time friend, Lucinda Hutson's garden. Austin's famous purple house, Lucinda's home, has been on my list of places to visit for years. I know the house from her books, from numerous articles in Southern Living and many more, but I had not actually seen the house myself. We've known each other for years but this was the first time to visit Lucinda at home. What a sweetheart she is!

Lucinda is, without a doubt, the most colorful, fun-loving person I know. From her house (inside and out) to her garden, her views on food and writing, this is one fun lady. Look at the pic, below. This is the back steps of her house. (Click on the picture to see the embellished cat door). Does your back door look that good? Ours certainly doesn't.

Lucinda is a landscape designer and has a perfect eye for decorating the outdoors, and in. Even the very flowers in her garden are seemingly beyond reality. Check out this one in her front yard (sorry, I don't remember what it is).

And this vine, below, which I wish I could grow here. Notice the top of the house is purple, the wall behind the vine, is yellow. Do you have the courage to use color that way? I wish I did.

Or this, a great Mexican bathtub set in her mermaid garden. When Southern Living came to do the photo shoot of her garden, they bashfully covered parts of the mermaid with a leaf. Above the grotto with the mermaid tub is another mermaid and lots of plants. It's a small garden and it would seem crowded were it not for Lucinda's eye for design. Instead of crowded, it unfolds like small rooms, each with fascinating features that invite you to keep moving forward to see more, and more beyond that. (I've had dreams like that, when sleeping on my Creative Dreams Dream Pillow).

Lucinda's garden rooms showcase a wide variety of plants, from cactus to vines, bloomers and lots of herbs. Herbs are everywhere and Lucinda and I share a love of herbs and food. She's known for her innovative cookbooks which you can see on her website.

That's Lucinda and Josh on her back patio, her very rustic-elegant writing office to the left where she creates her books, and a garden shed to the right. What a delightful visit we had and no photos can do Lucinda's garden justice. . More of Austin to come. But today, after weeks of dry, hot weather and dragging garden hoses around - we got rain!

Here's a recipe from Lucinda's Herb Garden Cookbook for Frijoles Negros en Olla (black beans in case you don't speak Spanish). A dish of lack beans is one of my favorite meals, over brown rice, topped with fresh salsa, diced avocados and a dash of hot sauce. Last year I grew black beans, aka frijoles negros, in the garden to see what they looked like in bloom.

1 pound dried black beans
Water or broth to cover to about 2 inches over the beans
3 T. olive oil or bacon fat
1 whole onion, quartered and studded with 2 whole cloves
4-6 garlic cloves
1/2 tsp. whole cumin seeds
1 bay leaf
1-2 whole dried chile peppers (ancho or pasilla)
Salt to taste
1 tsp. crumbled, dried Mexican oregano
3 sprigs fresh epazote - (epazote is known as "pig weed" in the Midwest), or substitute. Mexican mint marigold leaves

Wash beans well to remove dirt and any stones. Cover with cold water or broth, and remove any beans that float. Add oil, onion, garlic cumin and bay leaf and bring to a boil; immediately reduce heat and cover. Add chiles and cook for approximately 2 1/2 hours. If necessary, add more water to prevent beans from bursting. When almost tender, add salt, oregano and epazote. Uncover and cook another 15 minutes. When beans are tender the liquid should just barely cover them.

More gardens, more food to come!

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A Garden Tour

 Above is the Herb Shop with bell tower and tiny viewing deck, above.

Sometimes all the planets align, the weather cooperates and the garden grows. Yes, there are weeds, especially a variety of so-called spurge. But otherwise, a few bugs, too much rain and a lot of heat and humidity, are only small issues, I want to give you a tour of this summer's garden. Thanks to a lot of work from  Adam, Josh, me and The Fates, it is a GOOD garden.

There are two blue gates that you can enter through. This one (above) has a series of bells as weights, to make it self-closing. On the left of the gate is the red-leaf hibiscus (Hibiscus acetosella) and overhead is the grape arbor with wild grapes and muscadines.

If you climb the bell tower above the Herb Shop and look down on the garden, this is what you will see, a partial layout of the garden beds. If you look us up on GoogleEarth, this is also the view but from directly above, via satellite.

Looking over to the right (east, toward the Long Creek arm of Table Rock Lake) you'll see the old barn where the goats and chickens live, the garden shed and the little water garden.

Native medicinal plants are on the left, some of the culinaries on the right (grape arbor straight ahead, blue gate on the right).

Notice there are trellises along the fence on the left. Pathways are gravel and wheelchair accessible.

Edible flowers bed with grape arbor in the background. The early blush of roses are over, the Japanese beetles devastated the flowers but they're about done with, and the roses will be back in bloom, shortly.

A garden angel resting on the rock wall next to the chives and Mexican mint marigold (Tagetes lucida).

You can't see the goldfish pond in the middle, but this is the bed that Bessie, the box turtle has been coming back to for the past 28 years to lay her eggs. The gazebo is in the background, which has a variety of vines growing upward.

Ahead is the Myoga ginger bed behind the bench. To the right is a bed of all salvias and the lengthwise bed to the right is mostly lavender.

I'm growing 17 varieties of hot and super-hot chilies this year. No, that's not an outhouse in the background. It was once a ticket booth for the Boone County, AR Fair. I rescued it from a ditch and it serves now as housing for stacks of plant flats, pots, row covers, and an occasional pack rat, which Molly removes promptly.

The tomatoes are in the old sweet corn bed. Lots of new research shows that corn leaves beneficial bacteria that tomatoes avoid some fungal problems.  To the right is the row of Potawatamie bear beans, a Native American variety. You can barely see the deck of the house in the upper left corner. It looks down upon the garden in a nice view.

This is a statue I like because it reminds me of the late Adelma Simmons of Capriliands Herb Farm near Coventry, Connecticut.

An especially elegant white althea grows just outside the kitchen door.

Well, there you have it, a tour of some of our gardens at Long Creek Herb Farm. We launched our new website this week. If you have old bookmarks to my books or products, they won't still work. But the web address http://www.longcreekherbs.com does work, that address has not changed. Now, when you go there, in order to place an order you have to create an account and sign in, with a password of your choosing. It's an additional step for security, as well as obeying new rules for web businesses beginning the first of July. It's an added bit of security that will help over-all, although our customers tell us it's frustrating in the beginning. (You may recall that in the past we have had no safe way to keep credit card numbers on file for extended periods, so our method has been to ask for it each time, then shred the orders afterward. The shreddings go into either the garden compost, or as nesting material for the chickens. Either way, it was safe, but this new method complies with all the regulations for web businesses. But we'll still be shredding and composting customer information, just like before.

Check out the new website, and forgive the parts that still need attention. I think you'll find more to see and do, including pictures of the goats, garden, and more. Happy gardening!

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