I went for a walk in my back yard yesterday morning, to check on, and possibly clean out my bluebird nest boxes for the upcoming nesting season, when I looked down and found this mushroom. Isn’t it beautiful? There was dew on everything and the air smelled moist and fresh. I had to run back to the house and get my camera. It was a glorious morning.

As you can see in the picture below, we have some erosion problems. This site is on a light slope and heavy rains have washed the soil away and exposed the limestone, rocky gravel underneath. Nothing will grow here until I control some of the runoff from my property. I would like to eventually get some native grasses and wildflowers to grow so their roots might help hold the soil in place.But first I have to slow the water down to prevent it from rushing into the nearest drainage ditch and taking all the soil with it. It’s so much better for our ground water to let rain slowly percolate into the ground to eventually refill the aquifer below us, instead of just rushing down the gully and into the river carrying all the soil and pollution with it.

Here is my first attempt at creating a little berm to stop the water. Luckily I have NO shortage of rocks on my land and this took no time to build. Only a strong rainstorm will tell me if it was built sturdy enough to hold back a gush of water.

This tree looks dead, but thankfully it’s not. It’s a Live Oak which is considered semi-evergreen because it usually keeps it’s leaves on till early spring when the new leaves push the old ones off. But this little fella had lost all his leaves by the end of September and I thought he was pretty much a goner. However today I went to take a closer look and I saw all these tiny little red buds showing up on his naked branches. Excellent! Looks like he may make a comeback. Only time will tell. I recently spoke to an arborist and he mentioned that it can take up to 2 years for the damage of this last drought to take effect on some trees. Hopefully this very rainy winter will help them survive and recover.

And what a glorious day it was! The morning air was fresh and cool after all that rain from the day before and the sun was brilliant, coaxing us into the garden. I could hear the cardinals and robins singing in the fields and I was in heaven! I couldn’t resist and decided to plant two more trees and clean up and mulch the other trees from last year’s planting project.

A newly planted Texas Persimmon we planted. He's a native and should do well.

I just read about Ruth Stout. She was well known for her books on vegetable gardening and using hay to cover and mulch/compost her gardens. I was impressed with her way of working with nature and letting nature do what it does best – which, amongst other things is to decompose. She covered her vegetable garden in thick mats of rotting hay, which kept the ground and plants protected and the moisture in. And of course all the weeds out. I sort of tried to apply her technique to my own yard yesterday (not having any old hay laying around) and I would call this just an experiment.

In the picture above you see a young Mexican Buckeye that I had planted last year. Due to the drought I had to water these trees 3 times a week. By the end of the season the only place that had any grass growing was around the trees that I had been watering. I did not want to mow it in the fall because it was the only grass that had any seeds growing for the birds. So I kept them there for the winter, which the birds appreciated. Yesterday I cut all the old seed heads and dead blades of grass and laid them down around the tree (after giving them a good dose of compost), like you would do for regular mulch. This should decompose over time. That’s the theory anyway. We’ll see how that works out.

This winter has been so warm that after some coddling of the tomato plants they have bloomed all winter long and I was so surprised to see that they even set some more fruit for me. How wonderful! All I had to do was pull them in at night when the temps went down below 45 degrees, and bring them out into the sunshine on warm days.

Container tomatoes