The Big Island: Animal Edition

Rainbow over Kilauea Ike

Last month my husband and I were lucky enough to travel to Hawaii, the Big Island, for someone's big digit birthday. (Hint, it wasn't mine.)

When I saw all that was growing on the Big Island, I thought about a post comparing the beautiful, luscious plants to the same variety growing (or rather, not growing) in my yard. I quickly realized that such a post would be just overwhelmingly depressing. If you wanted to see dead plants, you could look out your door. After the summer we've had, I decided we needed a happier post. (And if I had actually gotten the post up two weeks ago as I'd planned, it would have been even more depressing. I think the rain is starting to make us all feel like our summer was just a bad nightmare.)

So here's a little summary of our trip.

We started our trip on the Hilo side of the island, otherwise known as the wet side. Hilo averages more than 130 inches of rain annually. Drought restrictions are enacted when the wet stuff falls below 70 inches per year. It's no wonder these signs are needed: (And, knock wood, it's beginning to look like we might need some of those signs here in Central Texas!)

We left Hilo driving along the northeast coast and of course had to stop at the Hawaii Tropical Botanical Garden. It was raining as we toured but you don't let a little rain stop you when you live on the wet side so we took our borrowed umbrellas and forged ahead.One of the first plants we came across was this white bat plant. It's highly doubtful that it will grow in Austin, but it would be cool if it did.These are called lobster claws. I was not tempted to eat these because I am one of those freaks who don't like lobster. Plus, after I ate some mystery berries at Kilauea volcano, my husband wouldn't let me out of his sight when potentially ingestible plants were in my range.

(In my defense, he had read me Mark Twain's description of the berries as juicy. I assumed that meant that Twain had sampled them. And it's my husband's issue, not mine, that he doesn't want to spend his vacation speeding his wife to an emergency room.)My husband wouldn't even let me sample these beautiful flowering bananas. (Of course, I wouldn't eat a plant in a public garden.)I'm not sure why but a lot of plants had animal-related names like this cat whiskers and
this mule's foot fern and
this peacock fern.

I don't know the name of this beauty but had to include it because it was so pretty. (It was a little hard trying to write down plant names while maneuvering the camera and the umbrella and making sure I didn't slip on the walkway and once again potentially force my husband to take me to the hospital.)One of my favorite animal-related plants was this old-man palm.
with its cute little braid. I wonder if that's a gardener's task? No. 12 on to-do list: Braid old man.We traveled from the wet side to, you guessed it, the dry side of the Big Island. As we drove down the coast surrounded by nothing but lava fields and brown plants, I was unpleasantly reminded of Austin.

But then we checked into our free hotel (yea for the husband's travel points!) and had this view from our own private balcony: I immediately felt much better.

Add a bathing suit and a hat to this turtle, and this is pretty much how I spent the rest of our vacation.From time to time I wandered into the Pacific to cool off: Sometimes I had to flip over on my back.And of course, all this relaxing made us hungry so here's the last animal shot I have for you:
Roasted pig at the luau. Yum.

Rose City

In early July, I had the chance to leave hell and visit Portland, Oregon. I'm not even sure I was actually invited before I started packing my bag. Of course, Portland ended up having its way with me. I left on June 30; our flight delayed by thunderstorms in Austin. The next day Portland had its highest temps of the year--low 90s--while Austin was chilling in lower 90s.

"Are you serious?!" I yelled at the city. I had traveled half way across the country in search of cooler weather only to find myself hotter than I would have been had I stayed put.

Of course, the next day the temps in Austin were back at hellacious levels (tm Annie in Austin), and the temps in Portland were, well, less warm. If I'd wanted to, I could have even worn a jacket in the morning and in the evening. I didn't because I wanted to appreciate the novelty of being cold outside in July, as opposed to paying $8 to be cold inside a movie theater.

I'd only been to Portland briefly before so it was really nice to be there for several days. A couple of things about the city surprised me.

1) the food. Good god. These people know how to eat well and pretty cheaply. A lot of it inadvertently involved a lot of pork: pork belly, bacon, bacon, sausage, and more bacon. If you're planning a trip there, let me know, and I'll send you my personal list of recommendations.

2) Portland is the rose city. This really shouldn't have surprised me. The one place we did visit in our short trip five years was the International Rose Test Garden in Forest Park. But I thought the garden was a special place where people with magical rose-growing gifts that I do not have practiced their mystical art. Instead, everyone in Portland can grow a rose. Every yard, nook, and cranny had at least two varieties, healthy and in bloom. Roses grew around the city like weeds. (Or maybe they grew like purslane, Carol?)
We saw lots of roses at the Test Garden on our first visit years ago in late August, but the blooms were nothing like we saw this trip in early July.

Pink roses,yellow roses,
orange roses,
red roses, white roses, lavender roses, (the last time I saw a lavender rose was in a Buenos Aires rose garden)I took pictures of the hundreds more roses, but I think you get the picture. The roses began to blur together.Amidst all these exuberant blooms, two areas of the garden stood out because of their quiet beauty. Who knew that I would find a beige rose so beguiling?And then over in one shady area of the garden, I enjoyed the cool colors and textures of these hostas and ferns. I also enjoyed the shade, because even though Portland was 15 degrees cooler than Austin, 93 is still hot.(And now the poor folks in Portland are having 100-degree days! I'm sorry, I really am. I had no intention of bringing Austin's weather with me. I was supposed to bring Portland's weather back to Austin, but I guess I got my spells mixed up.)

Outside the entrance to the park I saw a couple of unusual things: this sign,
and these roses covering the fencing around some tennis courts.
Roses covered the fences around the courts but failed to muffle the curses of the older man playing doubles.

But the strangest thing is about this picture has nothing to do with rabid rose growth. The most unusual aspect is that there isn't a Subaru to be seen in the parking lot.

Seriously, people, that's funny.

The Garlic Haul

As there's almost nothing growing and happy in my yard now, I thought I would post my round-up on growing garlic, because you need to start thinking about ordering garlic if you want to plant in the fall.

Last October I planted five varieties of garlic. I marked the rows. I marked the bags with the corresponding row number, and then promptly forgot to make a note of that somewhere. So I can't really tell you which varieties succeeded, and because of that I also can't conduct a taste comparison that would yield any more insight than this one tastes the different than the other one.

I never claimed this would be a helpful blog, now did I?

But I do have some thoughts on the process, the outcome, and the likelihood that I will grow garlic again.

Planting garlic: I pretty much exhausted all that can be said about planting garlic here.

During the season: I need to knock wood before I type this: easy peasy. Ninety-nine percent of the cloves sprouted. No pests, low water need. There was even some stuff from the sky that we used to know as rain that came down during the growing season. I eventually add some mulch but that's it. Sounds like the perfect plant, doesn't it?

Here's a shot of the first shoots to come up.
At the bottom of this shot, you can see how some of the garlic bed looked in April. (After searching and searching through my photo archives, I can not find a picture of the whole bed. I guess I got too distracted by the tomato/fish head adventure and the Beast.)
2) Outcome: Here's the haul in May.You're supposed to harvest when half of the leaves are dead. I might have waited to harvest a little longer for some of the garlic, but it was getting hot, and I was more worried about losing the garlic than harvesting it too small.

I tied up the garlic and hung it in my shed to cure. On Friday it finally struck me that it was probably way too hot in the shed for the garlic. (The heat's slowed down my brain power.)So I cut down the garlic bundles from the shed rafters and started cleaning. I did lose some of the garlic, particularly the smaller heads. They just couldn't handle the heat.Others looked to be perfectly roasted. I am actually contemplating cooking with them.
I also had a little fun. This hairy guy reminded me of Wilson, Tom Hanks's friend in Cast Away.The final, cleaned haul:
This may or may not be more than I planted. Of course, some of it I harvested as green garlic. Some of it I lost in the shed, and some of it I gave away already.
Overall, I am quite happy with the whole growing garlic adventure. It was easy (yay! for a lazy gardener). I cook a lot and use garlic in almost every dish I make (I obviously don't bake much). I will probably use all of this long before the next crop is ready.

For next season, I'll save some of these heads to plant the next crop. I'll also probably add some cloves from Boggy Creek's heirloom garlic. It's a variety the farmers found in Mexico.

And I might even plant more than I planted last year! With the way the weather has been this past year, I'm narrowing my focus to plants the succeed easily.

Now This Is Texas

Last weekend as temperatures reached triple digits, my husband, dog, and I headed out to South Llano River State Park in Junction. I don't have any pictures from the wonderful park because as soon as we got there I got in the river and then five hours later I got out. It was perfect.

In fact, it's given me an idea for a way to survive Austin's summers: a wearable river. I'm thinking kind of like a Michelin man outfit or ones of those blow-up sumo wrestlers with water next to your skin. Of course, people would then have to wear their bathing suits all the time (or perhaps au naturel) and there would be inevitable difficulties sitting, driving, and navigating sharp corners. But just imagine spending your whole day floating on a river. Sounds better than spending your whole day covered in your own sweat, doesn't it?

I digress.

On our way home, our car broke down in the middle of nowhere of 290. Well actually we were about 30 miles outside of Fredericksburg near the one-light town of Harper. Fortunately, Harper is one of those places where old men sit around at the one store on Saturday nights ever ready to help stranded cityslickers.

All of this is a long-winded introduction to our trip to the LBJ Ranch on Sunday, where we stopped on the way home from Fredericksburg after picking up our car.

I hadn't been to the ranch since the house was opened to the public after Lady Bird's passing in July 2007. Ever since Denise Delaney, who worked at the Wildflower Center and now works with Austin's Grow Green program, had shared stories of her visits to the ranch with Mrs. Johnson, I really wanted to see the interior.So on Sunday afternoon we stopped for a visit. The tour has changed since I first went on it about 15 years ago. Back then we traveled in a small bus with a staff guide.Last time we entered the ranch via the low-water crossing seen above (just barely). The crossing is closed now and blocked off, but in the good old days LBJ liked to drive his guests over it and make them worry that the water was going to spill over into the car. (A lot of LBJ stories are about him trying to put others in uncomfortable positions. I find them hilarious, and such a part of LBJ lore. If I were on the receiving end of some of his tricks, maybe I wouldn't find them as funny.)

The tour now is a self-guided car tour. We picked up a map and an audio CD from the park office and headed out.

The first stop was the reconstructed one-room schoolhouse that LBJ attended and where he later signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
Next stop was LBJ's birthplace, a dogtrot cabin.
Several magnolia trees, which I really didn't think would grow well in the Hill Country, were quite happily in bloom around the cabin.
Across the road from his birthplace, next to the Pedernales River, is his final resting place.That's President Johnson's headstone on the right. The vase of wildflowers is Lady Bird's maker. According to the park ranger, the family is having trouble deciding on what to put on a marker, which is why Mrs. Johnson doesn't have one almost two years after her death. I actually think that the rotating display of wildflowers might be just what she would want.For the rest of the tour, we drove through the ranch and around the airstrip to the barn where a horse, a cow and calf, and this Hereford, named LBJ Mischief 712, were hanging out.All the animals, well all with horns, had LBJ carved into them. (Apparently, the president was very fond of his initials and wanted everyone--daughters, dogs, etc.--to have them.)My husband told me that the weights are to keep the horns from growing straight up. This contraption reminded me of the weights--pieces of broken bricks, rocks, etc.--tied to fruit tree limbs at the Natural Gardener presumably to keep those limbs from growing straight up. (See how I keep tossing in gardening references just so you know that I know this is a gardening blog?)
During the long trip around the ranch, the audio CD included a conversation of LBJ with a rather beleaguered sounding ranch foreman, and LBJ's favorite song, "Raindrops Keeping Falling on My Head" by B. J. Thomas. Maybe LBJ was being ironic in his choice of song?Finally, we reached the house, christened the Texas White House. The park rangers estimate this oak tree to be 400 years old. Look how big it is!
Park rangers lead guided tours of the interior. No photos are allowed so this shot of a barn swallow outside the front door is as as close as I can take you inside.Only a few rooms in the house are open--a living room with the cool triple-wide television cabinet Denise had told me about (so the president could watch all three television channels at once), LBJ's office, a wet bar, and the dining room--all restored to how they looked in the late 1960s, including the phone attached to the leg of the dining room table in case LBJ needed to chat mid-dinner.

The seat cushions on the dining room chairs reflected Lady Bird's interests. Each set had a needlepoint of a different Texas wildflower.

In the future, the park hopes to open more rooms to the public once they're restored. I can't wait to see the his and her bedroom suites.

The former hangar next to the house now houses an exhibition space, including LBJ's collection of cars. My favorite car was this 1962 Amphicar, a car-boat hybrid.One of the president's many practical jokes was to take "unsuspecting victims" out on the property in this car, careen off the road claiming that the brakes were failing, and head into the Pedernales. Can you imagine how fun that would have been?

There are a few photographs in the hangar of life on the ranch, including various visiting dignitaries, but my favorite photo was this one of LBJ crooning with his beagle.I particularly loved the look on his grandson's face: If you are visiting Austin or looking for a quick day trip, I highly recommend the LBJ ranch. Just be sure to pack a swimsuit or a wearable river. Driving by and near the river that runs through the ranch will definitely make you ready for a swim afterwards. (Unfortunately, there's no swimming at the ranch.)