The wet rainy spring season continues to cause trouble in the garden.

We are feeling the effects of the wet cool spring at Spooky Action Ranch this week.

May 18th through May 24th, 2015 The Blanco River Floods Whatever else may have been happening on the ranch this week, it was all overshadowed by the incredible act of nature that took place on Saturday May 23rd.  The area had been wet and rain soaked for the last few months, and then on Saturday a huge storm blew through the Hill Country.  This storm system dropped nearly 6 inches of rain here at the ranch in just about an hour, and other areas of the Hill Country received as much or more rain in the same period. All of this rain in such a short time on already rain soaked ground led to massive run-off.  High water crossings in the hills started to be flooded, and then it all converged on the major waterway through the area, the Blanco River.  Like the speed of the rain falling, the river rose to flood stage and beyond in a matter of minutes.  At about 1AM on Sunday morning a wall of water at times 44 feet tall roared down the Blanco river remaking everything in its path. The solid concrete bridge that carries us from our ranch to the town of Blanco was ripped from its foundations, shattered into several pieces and strewn downriver.  Cypress trees were stripped bare of their bark or knocked over and carried down stream to serve as battering rams to knock down houses and trees further along the way.  The river spread wide on the lower plains, a rushing lake of water and churned back up as the walls of the river basin rose again.  In Wimberley, the flood waters surpassed the record which had stood for nearly a hundred years by over eleven feet and another bridge was struck and crumbled.  The water kept going, down into San Marcos, filling the center of town, flooding over the freeway that connects Austin and San Antonio, and spreading across Martindale. Hundreds of houses and thousands of trees were swept up in the flood waters.  Cliff walls crumbed and took new shape, pebble beaches were reformed.  Wildlife, livestock, pets, and people were caught up in and washed away by the rushing river.  The power of the river was awe inspiring and terrible.  As the people of the Blanco River basin begin to rebuild, I am simply dumbstruck by the power of that river.  Lives were lost, homes were ruined, and the very shape of the land has been changed.  People are coming together to help reshape our Hill Country community.  The river is settling down into its new banks.  The bridges will be rebuilt.  Still, it is wonderful and frightening how much we are at the mercy...

I am happy to say that all of the new grapevine arbors are now installed in the vegetable garden, here is a quick description of how we built them.

April 20th – April 26th, 2015 The Final Harvest : Carrots With spring now in full swing, it was time to pull out the final produce of our winter garden.  The last survivors of the garden were two of our carrot beds.  This final harvest of the carrots brought in over eleven pounds of carrots.  In addition to those we ate fresh or juiced, we put down 15 quarts of carrots for later.  Carrots are fairly easy to can, although peeling them can take quite a bit of time.  I prefer to can the carrots already chopped, so that they are easier to fit into the containers and ready to be used in a variety of recipes.  I do try to cut them into very large chunks, too, though, so that they retain as much firmness as possible.   That won’t be much, though, since high temperature processing as in a pressure canner really takes the firmness out of them. One of the really nice things about canning carrots is that they can be canned raw, which means you don’t have to do the prep work to cook them and keep them hot before stuffing the jars.  Simply Canning offers some very nice directions on how to get the job done.  It is important to follow the instructions carefully when you can, as not doing so can run the risk of deadly disease or simply the loss of valuable crops.  We take our canning pressure gauge into our local Agriculture Extension office every year to have it checked to be sure it is reading the right pressure and try to keep a close eye on the whole process to be sure the proper temperatures are being met to kill off any potential bad guys that might have hitched a ride on our food. Plantings of the week We were also pretty busy this week refilling all of the beds with the spring vegetables. Tomatoes Our tomato bed was already over half full, but this week we put in the last of the tomato varieties we will be growing this year, Bush Goliath Tomato.  I picked up six babies for transplant from The Natural Gardener, one of our local gardening supply stores.  I was drawn to the plants because they had a very firm, compact, and deep green growth pattern.  I decided to go with them because they also had a special resistance to damage from root knot nematodes, which we have a problem with in our garden.  I have been trying to get resistant varietes of all of our vegetables this season to help reduce the population of the problematic parasites.  I have also brought in a host of beneficial...

BEETS! This week we harvested the last of the beet beds, and I thought that I would offer you a photo journal of the whole process from garden to pantry.  I hope you enjoy!