- STEAM Garden
- Dec 4
Updated: Dec 4
November 1
This adorable young man is exploring our rock-stacking station. The gravel we have in our herb garden area includes a variety of small, flat stones that are fun to find and collect. We encourage garden visitors to stack them to form mini-carins. This is a good eye-hand coordination activity for young children and it demonstrates the force of gravity as students experiment to find a point of balance (center of mass) using irregularly shaped stones. I find it calming, too.
November 3
There is a pipevine plant seedling in each of these red 16 oz. drink cups. We will definitely have more food in the spring for pipevine swallowtail butterflies if these seedlings make it through the winter! Notice that they are covered with a fine mosquito net. This prevents the adult pipevine females from laying eggs on them. One clutch of hatched eggs would produce enough caterpillars to devour most of these tiny seedlings. When the temperature drops into the thirties (F), we will cover the seedlings with clear plastic to protect them.
November 4
We received the 24 comfrey root cuttings (Block 14) from Amazon that I mentioned ordering in my October 28, 2025 post. The cuttings are small, but they feel firm and they have visible nodes.
In this November 30, 2025 updated photo, you can see that many of the new root cutting have sprouted. I think the rest of them will sprout over the next few days.
November 5
This arbor was made using half a 5’w x 16’l panel of galvanized livestock/utility panel. After cutting it in half, the 2.5’w x 16’l section was curved around and wired to the top and bottom of four 4' rebar stakes that had been pounded into the ground. If you have been reading this journal, you know that we are constantly trying to keep enough pipevine plants for our egg-laying pipevine swallowtail females. We just planted several vining pipevine plants, Woolly Dutchman’s Pipevine (Aristolochia tomentosa) in pots on either side of the arbor.
This is our first attempt to raise this species of pipevine.
Our moss verbena plants are large and cascading over the sides of the feed tub planters. The plants are still covered in nectar-rich flowers in November! This is their ninth month of flower production this year making them our most continuous blooming nectar plant. Our gardens are in zone 7b and we are 1,427 feet in elevation compared to San Antonio which is zone 9a and 650 feet. Moss verbenas bloom nearly year-round south of the Hill Country.
November 8
I’ve ordered bare root plants for the garden. These butterfly weed plants (Asclepias tuberosa) were dormant when they were dug up for shipping. The soil was removed, the roots were washed, and they were packed in damp sawdust and placed in plastic bags before shipping. We are awaiting their emergence in spring! Fruit trees, berry plants, asparagus crowns, rose bushes and some perennials can be shipped with bare roots.
November 11
Josh Durdan and his amazing crew (fstbuilders.com ) have started building our new chicken pen. Hazel, Hattie, Harriett, and Henrietta are ready to get in this beautiful new structure. The roof of their old pen was collapsing, and we had to constantly work to keep predators out. My husband is an architect, and he designed this new chicken pen to match the greenhouse he designed for me nearly 20 years ago. We have been referring to this new structure as Coup de Ville (town coup) since it will be enjoyed by the community, garden visitors, and tourists driving through town.
November 12
We are so happy that Sarah Roznovsky is continuing to help us do research and work in our gardens! Here she is potting a variety of seedlings raised en masse in our First Aid pots. They will have a head start for our Spring 2026 garden. Instead of using the red drink cups and 4” black-plastic pots, we are now experimenting with 16 oz. bamboo cups that can be composted. It is easy to punch a hole in the bottom of each cup using a pencil or a screwdriver. The cups are taller than the 4” pots, and this extra height will give more space for their developing root systems.
November 14
We use our well-established perennials to make new plants. Many of them can be propagated by digging up outer sections of the plant that have at least one stem and a section of root. Luis was able to dig twelve well-rooted Turk’s Cap starter-plants for our new 2026 gardens. With some perennials that have a smaller root base, it is best to dig up the entire plant before dividing it to create two or more plants.
We have a garden rule, “Move it before you lose it.” This rule can apply to plants that are struggling to survive in their current location due to inadequate physical conditions, but it can also apply to plants that seem to be diseased and need a new start. We had three white penstemon plants (Penstemon albidus) with leaves that were turning brown. After digging them up and spraying them with a diluted Listerine spray, we divided them into nine trimmed plants. Hopefully they will be healthier next year; we will also plant them in a different location.
November 18
About thirty lyre sage plants were growing volunteer in our walkways and open garden spaces. We decided to dig them up, pot them, and nurture them in our greenhouse before planting them in spring. We had a wheelbarrow full of plants; however, the right photo shows what they looked like after they were separated into smaller sections and trimmed. We left them soaking in this shallow pan of water for 16 hours until we had time to pot them.
This photo shows one of our First Aid pots with an en masse planting. Sometimes when we use this method, we are lucky if get 10 seeds to sprout and grow. Other times we have hundreds that emerge, like these lance-leaf coreopsis (Coreopsis lanceolata) seedlings. We follow four steps when transplanting the seedlings. a. Water the container well.
b. Work when temperatures are the coolest of the day. c. Use a trowel or large spoon to remove a small section of the seedling-packed soil. d. Gently separate the seedling as you plant them. The roots need to stay moist and not exposed to air.
It is difficult for us to cut a perennial plant back in mid- to late summer, but it pays off in the fall. Look at these Texas red salvias (scarlet salvia). They had a few blooms on them when Luis trimmed them at the end of August, but they are covered in blooms now, two months later when fewer plants are blooming. November is a time when nectar is needed by butterflies that are migrating and ones that are preparing to winter over.
Unfortunately, we have not had enough rain to break our regional drought, but we have had a few light showers, mist, and fog. When this happens it gives us hope that someday it will rain again on a regular basis. La Nina conditions are predicted to continue through the winter possibly transitioning to a neutral period in March. This means a dryer and warmer than average winter for our area. Condensation from fog can be seen on the leaves of this passion vine. Water droplets form due to high surface tension. Cohesion and gravity cause them to have this shape.
Some of the many sacks of leaves that we have collected from the community will be used to protect our hardier potted plants. The Gregg’s blue mist plants pictured in the one-gallon pots were thinned from our rapidly expanding mist-plant flower beds. They have well-established roots that should survive our mild winter. Before a hard freeze, the plants will be watered, and the entire area will be covered by a double thickness of clear plastic. The plastic will be removed during periods of mild temperatures.