The Babycakes Quest
Garden Journal March 17, 2025
Last week I talked about getting the potager in place. This week I was planting into it, slowly filling it in. There are spaces still waiting on warmer-weather plants, but frankly spring in Texas is fleeting and we already have had a ninety-degree day. I don’t believe we will see another frost. I went ahead and put pepper plants in the potager, and then I scored a chili pequin!
I’m getting ahead of myself, though, I’ll back up a little. My husband has been more interested in the garden this year than in the 12 years we’ve been together, and I’ve been eagerly fostering the interest. Not that it’s been hard to do, I’ve rather enjoyed catering to his desires (stops, reads that sentence again, waggles eyebrows happily). Ahem. So the purple flower beds, the pink climbing rose… and on my own I came up with the idea of putting berries into the dooryard garden. He loves blackberries, and fortunately, they do quite well here in Texas. I decided to get a couple of container blackberries, having seen them advertised.
Well, seeing something online is not the same as finding it locally. I took off Saturday and made the rounds of my local nurseries. One said they might have it in another week, but they weren’t sure. Another said they had never heard of such a thing. One said this blackberry over here was suggested by a Google search on his phone for containers. I looked dubiously at that one, with a cane height of 5-6” but at least it is thornless, and bought one, because I can do a nice tall trellis in a pot. I also acquired a few other plants, like the native chili pequin, which is legendarily the spicy pepper used on cattle drives to add vim and vigor to the endless pots of beans. I’m really looking forward to seeing what it grows up into.
I had almost given up finding Babycakes blackberries when I did a search online for them, realized I could always just order one… Did that. Then stopped in one more place and to my surprise, they had one! Well. They had two bare-root, but one was very dead. I bought the survivor. Which brings me to two container-sized blackberries (one to arrive soon) and a tall thornless to be kept in check with a trellis. If all goes to plan, he will have three blackberries to pick from this summer, hopefully. From the looks of the bare-root Babycakes, that one may be next summer.
Looking over from the driveway to the porch, there is a peach tree, a dwarf apple which is a bit of a stick this year, my tropical hibiscus I overwintered in the garage, a wee little Nanking Cherry out of sheer defiance (cherries do not do well in Texas. This was a cheap little bare-root and I’ve put it in a sheltered spot. We shall see). The daffodils are past their prime but still putting on a brave show. Inconspicuous in the foreground are two Texas Sages which are native and will bloom heavily with a light-purple blossom later in the season. Purple is becoming a theme, at least for now!
I pulled the citrus out of the garage, even if it frosts all of these will withstand temps down to 28F easily. Both the lime and the Meyer Lemon are full of flower buds, and the Satsuma still needs to do some growing. I will finish placing the pots and cleaning up this back bed in the coming week.
While I was at the one nursery where I did not ask about container blackberries (because they specialize in native plants), I’d made plans with them to come back for a Redbud tree. This spring the mature Redbud in our backyard, which likely was planted about when the house was built in 1950, had to be pruned severely. About half the tree did not survive the winter. On the idea that the loss of canopy left a likely gap between it and the pecan, I had decided I would plant a young Redbud to replace the old when it finally gives out. Today was the day I went back right after work to pick up the tree and some mulch for projects.
They know me pretty well at Wichita Valley Nursery and when I showed up the nurserywoman greeted me with ‘I have just the tree for you. It needs a good home.’
I’d been thinking I would get one of the waist-high saplings I’d scoped out on the weekend, but she led me to a different part of the nursery and pointed at a tall Redbud. ‘What do you think?’
Which is how I came home with a tree fully eight feet tall and a decent root system, freshly dug. I planted it right away to minimize the shock to it’s system, and will prune it tomorrow once I have a chance to give it a really good look in it’s new home.
The Redbud really is the beau ideal of trees: lovely flowers, attractive heart-shaped leaves, nitrogen-fixer, many parts are edible. I’d happily have more if I had space. I’m very pleased with this new tree and look forward to decades of enjoyment as the old fades into the new.
I also came home with a truckload of mulch. Wichita Valley Nursery gives a free tractor scoop of it with purchase of tree, but I bought a couple more scoops as I use it heavily for moisture retention, all through the gardens. It helps with weed control as well, for best results layer down cardboard, then 2-3” of mulch on top of that. I dislike the dyed mulches at the box stores very much, and prefer this, not to mention it is a lot cheaper way to get it in bulk. If you don’t have a friendly local nursery, some municipalities offer mulch and compost through their waste-removal systems.
A friend gifted me a bag of mixed daffs last fall, and these are blooming a little later than the King Alfred’s which came with the house. I’m very pleased to have their sunny little faces all over. These two, along with some perennial onions and a few little garlic, are planted under the apricot tree.
The perennial onions allow me to have green onions year round, I just snip off leaves when I want them, leaving the bulbs to grow and multiply. This fall I’ll be ready to divide some of the clumps.
It has been a busy week! But I successfully completed a quest, and ordered an arbor. Next week, we will see how that project goes! I need to give my dear husband’s Zephirine Drouin a trellis as well, as it has really started to take off now that spring weather is warming up and we had a bit of rain.