In Praise of Good Eggs

“Value of all egg production in 2009 was $6.16 billion, down 25 percent from the $8.22 billion in 2008. Egg production totaled 90.4 million eggs, up slightly percent from the 90.0 million eggs produced in 2008. In 2009, all eggs averaged 81.7 cents per dozen, compared with $1.09 in 2008.”
–Poultry Production and Value, 2009 Summary USDA  April 2010

Pulletpalooza was a rip-roaring success, considering that we did everything in our power to keep people from showing up, and about 30 intrepid chicken fans showed up anyway.  Part of the reason, we suspect, is that even though prices for factory farmed eggs have been coming down of late, dissatisfaction with factory farmed eggs (or, indeed, with any factory farmed foods at all) is driving a larger number of folks to consider backyard birds.

One of the most common questions we received related to production costs and return on investment.  This was a practical question, indeed, given that it was asked while small children were gleefully tossing popcorn at our hens and squealing “Chickie like popcorn!”  Clearly, backyard chicken ownership comprises both a practical and an emotional component.

Practically speaking, the biggest investment vis-à-vis backyard flocks relates to housing.  Areas that allow free-ranging your birds give a tremendous advantage in this respect, since in such places, the only coop you need is a small cabinet-like space where you can lock them up at night.  This is traditionally what a chicken coop looked like, many years ago when practically every home had chickens; you’d let the birds out in the morning, and at night, your children would be responsible for searching your yard for eggs, and then just before dark, you’d put the birds back in the coop and lock it.

At Myrtle’s place, however, we have to keep the birds caged all day long, so we needed a bigger coop.  our structure is 10’ x 12’, with a large nesting box elevated on one end, and a 10’ x 2’ ‘run’ on top, giving our birds a total of 140 square feet in which to roam.  Our roosting poles are about 6’ each, and our birds have a choice of two on which to sleep at night.

All told, we have about $200 in materials invested in our coop.  We initially believed that this cost would be dwarfed by feed expenditures, and in fact, when we first started our little venture, that seemed like a reasonable assumption, since we would go through three to four $7 bags of lay pellets each month; throw in the gas we burned driving to Producer’s Coop ever week, and they seemed awfully expensive right out of the gate.

However, these costs were grossly exaggerated due to our inexperience.  We were totally unaware of how much we could save by feeding our birds table scraps and weeds.  Toss in the occasional grubworm, caterpillar, dragonfly, or (saints preserve us!) cockroach, and Myrtle and the girls are down to only a bag of lay pellets every month or so.  Given that an hour of sitting, sipping coffee, and watching the birds scratching in the leaves replaces a month of psychotherapy, and the $70 or $80 a year we spend on feed really seems pretty paltry.  I’m sure the American Association of Liscensced Professional Counselors would agree.

The flip side of the cost question is the question of return on investment (ROI).  This is harder for us to measure, of course, given how many benefits we get from the chickens apart from their primary output, eggs.  As alluded to, our chickens are also our primary means of composting kitchen leftovers, in addition to being excellent disposers of yard waste.

Still, the simplest means of evaluating ROI is to calculate expenses per egg.  This, of course, leads to another common question – “How many eggs do you get?”

The rate per bird varies wildly, as does the rate in each given season.  We have noticed numerous trends worth mentioning – first off, our chickens lay larger, healthier, tastier and more numerous eggs the more we ply them with weeds.  Lay pellets are fine, they seem to be telling us, but weeds are much, much better.  They also like stalks of sunflowers, broccoli, tomatoes, and the like, but even these tasty consumables pale in comparison to good old fashioned weeds.

We get, on average, 200 eggs per year, per bird.  Some parts of the year, every bird is laying virtually every day; some parts of the year, each bird only lays every other day or so.  On the whole, though, we are getting 0.55 eggs per day, per bird.

This comes to 1,400 eggs per year total for our flock of 7 birds.  Given that we are paying at most $84 per year on lay pellets, that comes to $0.06 per egg at a maximum, not counting initial capital outlay.  This puts one dozen low cholesterol, high Omega-3, hormone free eggs at $0.72 in production costs. 

This is cheaper than the nasty chemical laced factory farmed eggs with their potential salmonella infections and god only knows what other health hazards.  We are paying far less for our eggs than for the equivalent healthy eggs from a natural foods store, where you might expect to pay anywhere from $3 to $5 per dozen for eggs as healthy as those we get from Myrtle and the girls.

If you want to throw in the capital outlay for the coop, then we would be paying $284 in the first year, bringing the cost of each egg to $0.20, or about $2.43 per dozen.  This, obviously, is less than $3 to $5, and it is only capitalizing for one year.  Our coop will more likely last for at least ten years, and hopefully more like twenty, which would drop our cost-per-egg back down to anywhere from $0.08 to $0.10.

On the whole, then, we would argue that there is a fairly significant ROI on backyard chickens just from measuring their primary output – eggs.  We don’t really have the analytical tools to calculate the ROI on their secondary output, but we are fairly confident that the value of chicken-poop compost is at least as profitable as the eggs.  Given how much every plant in our yard loves the stuff, we suspect it is probably actually much greater.

And then there is the tertiary benefit of avian psychoanalysis.  Maybe we should replace our lawn chairs with outdoor couches.  “Myrtle will see you now…”

Happy farming!

"Here we go, a-wassailing, whatever that might mean!"

December is a strange month for chickens and for gardens.  Virtually every Texas gardener has abandoned fruits and veggies this month in favor of pansies.  Weeds for the chickens are as hard to come by as are peaches or plums for the people.

Yet, it is the time of year when every table is topped with delectable goodies, and every kitchen smells of ginger and cinnamon.

We are hosting our share of festivities at Myrtle’s place this year, and will be serving our share of sugar.  In lieu of gardening advice, or pontifications about poultry, let us offer you a serving suggestion.  Wassail is not just a word in a Christmas carol.  It is also a tasty beverage.  And it explains why, even in warm climates like ours, Santa is so jolly in spite of his heavy suit, and his nose is still a bright cherry red!

Traditionally, wassail was a hard cider warmed in a turreen full of sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger and topped with pieces of toasted bread to serve as ‘sops’.  If you live somewhere with a copious quantity of sweet and tart apples, and have access to good hard cider, may we suggest you go traditional – there is absolutely nothing in the world as tasty as home grown cider spiced and warmed over a fire and drunk with a host of friends in a cozy room with windows overlooking a frozen garden.

Many of those ingredients are not available at Myrtle’s place – we would have to import the hard apple cider, we don’t have an indoor fireplace, and our garden is far from frozen.

Modern recipes for wassail, however, are somewhat forgiving, and so long as your group of friends doesn’t contain any picky purists, you can get away with calling a good old-fashioned mulled wine “wassail”.  It’ll do in a pinch, anyway.  Take a large quantity of any good sweet red wine (the cheaper, the better, in our book), toss in sugar, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, apples, oranges, raisins, etc. to taste, maybe a splash or two of cinnamon schnapps if the mood strikes you, and heat the whole thing up.

A cauldron over a fire is a nice touch, of course, but barring that, a crock pot will suffice.  If you don’t have a crock pot, try a stew pot and your kitchen stove.

This year, we may experiment with putting in some pomegranate arils, since in future years we hope to be celebrating a fruit harvest in late fall.  We also hope to have a field of flowering quinoa as a backdrop to future wassail parties.  For this year, though, we’ll settle for a firebowl, a few flowers, and a good sit.

Winter festivals mean many different things to different folk, but one thing they all have in common is the theme of lights in the darkness, and of warmth in the midsts of cold.  We hope you can find your own island of warmth and light in the coming month.

Happy farming!

Old Man... Winter? Sorta...

We told you last week about the changing needs of winter gardeners in our little corner of the world.  Since that time, we have eaten too much turkey, and had a borderline frost/freeze. 

It is an exceedingly bittersweet time of year when we finally have a drop in temperature sufficient to keep the tomatoes from ripening on the vine, and worse still, when we get a freeze deep enough (which is to say, any sort of freeze at all) to kill off many of our producing vines.

Some varieties of tomato are hardy enough to take our little snippet of cold air, of course.  We allow volunteers to go crazy in our garden, so we can't tell you for sure which varieties they are -- we just know they aren't the Brandywines you see here all nice and green.

Still, we had some vines make it through, including some volunteers in the potting soil we were using in our little black current experiment.  With a little bit of luck, we might actually manage to get a few more ripe tomatoes later this season.

We had mixed results with basil, as well -- for some reason, our sweet basil did better than many of our exotics -- the thai, for example, and the apple basil both froze to the ground.  Our purple curly-leafed basil plants had some leaves crimple, and others keep going strong.

Evidently, we were just exactly at the threshold temperature for winter mischief.

Still, we know what to do now.  First, we hoe down all the frozen plants (or, better still, get our daughter to do it!); next, we cover the bed with a fresh layer of leaves.

In mid-February, we will add a layer of compost from the chicken coop, and work it in with a pitchfork.  Then, in late February or early March, we will start seeding this bed with new plants.

Sometime next spring, after volunteer basil has started cropping up all over the yard, we will transfer a few of those plants to this bed, and any volunteer tomatoes which choose to join our newly seeded tomatoes will happily join forces to turn this plot into a wild tangle of solanaceous goodness.  We'll probably mulch it, as well, sometime next April or May or so.  And undoubtedly we'll put some sunflowers and nasturtiums on the borders as trap crops.

Much the same treatment will meet our other garden beds, in their own times, and with their own particular combinations of plants.

We could put more seed in the ground now, of course.  Our cabbage, spinach, kale and broccoli all acted as if this week's dip in temperature was manna from heaven, and kale and cabbage can both go into the ground all the way up to the end of December according to the planting calendar available at Producer's Co-op.

And next year at this time, we will be planting more quinoa seeds, as part of a rolling quinoa planting season.

But for now, we are getting ready for the First Annual Brazos Valley Pulletpalooza, and we really feel fairly satisfied with how the garden is growing.  In future years, we have plans to install rebar reinforced PVC hoops over the top of our tender veggies, and cover the contraption with greenhouse plastic prior to our first frost, so as to extend our season.  Today, though, we'll be enjoying the fruits of our present labors, and cleaning up Myrtle's place for next weekend's show-and-tell.

Happy farming!

Thanksgiving in Texas... Climate is Changing and So are We

Vernalization, stratification, weatherization, whatever you want to call it, the concept is one we hadn’t really bothered ourselves with much until this fall at Myrtle’s.

However, several events have conspired to make us pay even as much attention to climate as we do to weather.  This is a subtle distinction, but one which will become increasingly more important as as climate change takes fuller hold over the course of the next several decades.

The Brazos Valley is not quite in the wettest region of Texas, roughly defined as the greater Houston area eastward.  We joke in our family that if there is a 40% chance of rain, “Sure hope they enjoy it over in Huntsville.”  Houston gets over 50 inches of rain a year; College Station gets just under 30 inches a year, for now.  This makes us wetter than most of the state, even if not quite putting us in the rice-growing marshes of the eastern sliver of Texas.

We are likely to get less rain in coming years, though.  A wide variety of climate change models suggest that we will increasingly look less like a sub-tropical climate, and more and more like a semi-arid climate, with some suggesting that in as few as ten years, we may see our precipitation averages drop by 1/3rd.  That would mean that instead of getting around 30 inches per year, we will likely get roughly 20 inches per year.

Our normal precipitation pattern is changing, too.  Not only will rain be less abundant in the Brazos Valley, it will also come at different times.  Normally, we have a wet season in May and June, followed by a dry summer, with mild fall and winter months.  In future years, however, winter will be our wettest time of year; May and June will only see significant rain when we get moisture from tropical storms.

And then there will be fluctuations such as those caused by El Niño and La Niña.  This year is a strong La Niña year, so our fall and winter are proving to be excessively dry.  In fact, some models show that tropical moisture during El Niño years will be so prevalent that we may actually on average get more rain, even as soil moisture disappears during our rain-free months – we’ll be both wetter and drier, like some sort of crazy climatic performance art piece.

So what does this have to do with seeds, and planting, and Myrtle’s place?

As it turns out, quite a lot. 

We have spoken before of our strong preference for collecting rainwater; we have spent the last several months working on our collection system.  Roughly 80% of the rain running off our roof will now be collected – first, into two 50 gallon barrels, and next, after the barrels are full, into our fish pond.  These preparations are vital – the fact that our pond is currently sitting dry really stands as the only evidence you need that we just don’t get enough rain here to grow crops without supplemental watering.  We are now prepared to do supplemental watering without relying on the city’s untrustworthy water.

There are other elements of our little experiment in self-sufficiency which are also heavily affected by climate change.  Not only how we are watering, but what we are watering.  Traditionally, the Brazos Valley has two basic growing seasons, spring and fall.  There are winter gardens with greens, but typically very few local gardeners even bother with these tender plants – usually broccoli, kale, spinach and maybe radishes or potatoes, but very little else.  No, for the most part, gardens in Bryan/College Station run from March through June, and August/September through November.

However, while the July/August heat will continue to make that the one time of year when nothing gets planted, and what little is still growing must be tended very carefully to keep it alive, the rest of the year is changing ever so slightly to make our climate a year-round growing season.  The traditional spring and fall veggies won’t change – corn, squash, cucumbers, beans, tomatoes, peppers – these are timeless and are likely to be grown here as long as there are people with garden hoes to grow them.

But there is now more than ever a need to diversify, and our changing climate has provided not only a greater need, but also a greater opportunity.  We have spoken before of our desire to branch out into grains.  We started our experiment in grains this fall, with a small planting of quinoa.  While our planting was somewhat small (only about fifty seeds total), our crop will prove even smaller, as only a handful of the seeds actually germinated.

Concerned that perhaps we overestimated the ability of this crop from the colder climates and higher elveations of the Andes mountains to thrive in the still-subtropical Brazos Valley, we did a little research.  What we discovered made us slap our heads in self-accusation, yet also gave us tremendous hope.

As it turns out, in Colorado, several farmers have been experimenting with quinoa for years.  This makes a lot of sense, as they are farming in a mountainous region with much more in common climatologically to the Andes than our own garden can boast.  The planting season in Colorado starts in late May, when the ground has warmed enough, with a harvest in September and October, just before the freezing precipitation begins.

The limiting factor which has prevented quinoa from becoming a major cash crop for this region is the fact that sometimes the summer heat is too much.  When the temperature is in the 80s or 90s for an extended period of time, the quinoa doesn’t go to seed – the heat stress doesn’t always kill the plant, but for all practical purposes, at that point it is not a grain crop any more, it is a greens crop, and in a nation of carnivores, that really isn’t a great sales pitch.

However, several elements of this story stand out to us as hopeful – first, we need a stronger period of vernalization.  We planted our quinoa in late september, when ambient temperatures were still in the mid 80s in the Brazos Valley, and goodness only knows how hot the ground still was.  Next fall, we will wait until early October, and we will have had our seeds in the refrigerator for a week before we put them in the ground.

Second, we are hopeful that our growing season for quinoa may be, in most years, a full six months long – from October to March, there is a risk of temperatures above 90 degrees, but in most years, it will not happen.  Thus, we can stagger planting from October through December, and guarantee ourselves that in most years, we will get grain from our quinoa.  There is also a slight risk of killing frost early in the season, but not much.  Once it gets to flowering – typically somewhere between 45-60 days – quinoa will survive temperatures into the low 20s, which are already extremely rare in the Brazos Valley, and are becoming even more rare as each year passes.

This means that we will be able to rotate several of our newfound favorite crops from a variety of places of origin in such way that we will always – spring, summer, autumn, winter – have a green, a legume, or a grain, and in many cases a combination of the three, growing in one patch or another.  Amaranth will sometimes have delayed germination if the ground has not sufficiently warmed, but even so, a staggered planting from March through May will overlap nicely with the staggered quinoa plantings.  Interspersing velvet beans, cow peas, and maize in these plots will give us a colorful and tasty year round edible landscape.

The coming era of permanent drought in the greater part of the State of Texas will cause hardship for many, and will lead to social and economic unheaval unprecedented in this part of the country, but it needn’t be the end of the story for us.  The time to adapt is upon us.  Ironically, as winter warms up, it is the time of year we need to start leaning on.  We have some heretofore unavailable opportunities coming our way.  Quinoa is just the tip of the iceberg.

When approached calmly and rationally, the problems presented by climate change on a microeconomic level do not represent any particularly terrifying difficulties – finding climates which currently have limits roughly approximating those projected to be likely in the future gives a pretty good indicator of what needs to be done. 

In future years, the Brazos Valley will get roughly the same amount of rain as is experienced in a good portion of southwest Texas today, on a line from roughly Kerrville to Uvalde.  This is excellent territory in which to raise crops only slightly different from what we currently grow. 

Rio Grande peaches have low chilling requirements and thrive with hot and dry summers.  Pomegranates produce exceptionally sweet fruit under these circumstances.  Blackberries and plums also excel in this semi-arid climate.  One particular species of wild black cherry does exceptionally well in this region, even thriving southward into the arid reaches of northern Mexico.  The most prolific olive orchard in Texas sits in the middle of this region.  Corn and okra are ubiquitous here; imported grains like amaranth and millet could (and if we have anything to say about it, will) grow like weeds in our new climate.  And in our mild, wet winters, we will be growing short-day cool weather vegetables that elsewhere only grow at altitude on the shaded slopes of mountainsides in summer.

If the world is going to evolve as a result of humanity’s collective bad behavior, it is only right that our behavior and culture, including agriculture, should evolve right back.  This means things like making the kinds of good friends who will help you replace a burned out stove at a moments notice (thank you Browns!) to collecting all the rainwater that falls on your little tin roof, to planting crops you've never heard of before if that's all that will grow in your new climate.  This ain’t your grandaddy’s farm.  With a little forethought, though, and a for us, a newfound attention to winter gardening, it could belong to our grandchildren.  As long as we can still work a garden hoe, we can adapt... for which we give thanks.

Happy farming!

Ideas for Good

We won't go into all the details, because, frankly, Toyota is a giant multinational corporation and, in general, that means they are the epitome of evil.  Still, we think they got a bum rap on the supposed "unintended acceleration" controversy about a year ago.

User error, that's all that turned out to be.

We believe that Toyota has found a way out of the morass of bad publicity, though, with their latest promotion, "Ideas for Good".

Myrtle has submitted her ideas; we recommend you submit yours, too.

We'll be back soon with "real" Myrtle postings, but for now, check out what an evil megaconglomerate is doing that might actually be "For Good".

Happy farming!

The Year Democracy Died in America

"The twentieth century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.”

–Alex Carey, “Taking the Risk out of Democracy:  Propaganda in the U.S. and Australia”

The decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission will go down in history as the decision which killed the possibility of real democracy in the United States.  Assuming, of course, that at some future date, it is still possible to write history books, rather than tomes of propaganda supporting the corporatist-statist idolatry which will be left, should a cultural and social revolt fail to materialize, and soon.

Basically, the Supreme Court held in a 5-4 decision that electioneering communications may be paid for by corporate entities without any oversight whatsoever.  Conservatives claim that this is an evenhanded application of existing law, and that labor unions are also allowed to spend unlimited amounts of money, so what’s the big deal?

The big deal, of course, is that a) corporate entities – including labor unions – are not people, and ought not be granted personal rights, such as free speech; b) corporate entities are uniquely capable of cooption by unknown and unknowable economic and social forces, including forces outside this country, and with ill-intent for our Constitution and its associated freedoms,  and c) unlimited access to electioneering media means that only the very rich will be able to afford to influence election outcomes.

“That’s just class warfare!” cry the conservatives, conveniently sidestepping the first two objections through a sleight-of-hand whose demogoguery is just a harbinger of things to come.

Hmmm…..  One class cleanly and neatly defines itself into permanent political power… and its opponents are guilty of class warfare?

Let there be no delusions of corporatist “good intentions”.  The entirety of the political debate, under Citizens United, will now be framed by institutions with no motivation whatsoever other than corporate profits.  What does this mean?

• Weakened enforcement of the Clean Air Act.  Smog, air pollution, sudden infant death syndrome, and lung cancer?  Deal with it – government intervention to prevent air pollution “Creates deficits and costs American jobs!”  That’s the new conventional wisdom, as bought and paid for by the Coal Powered Electrical Plants of America.
• Weakened enforcement of the Clean Water Act.  Infertility, diabetes, metabolic disorder, liver diseases and hepatic disorders?  Deal with it – government enforcement of limitations on pesticide and herbicide runoff “Creates deficits and costs American jobs!”  That’s the new conventional wisdom, as bought and paid for by Archer-Daniels-Midland, Monsanto, and Dow Chemical.
• No action whatsoever on climate change.  Famine, water shortages, third world hunger, disease?  Deal with it – “Global warming is a myth.”  That’s the new conventional wisdom, as bought and paid for by Exxon-Mobil, Halliburton, Sonic Automotive, and a host of others.
• Infant mortality?  Inner city crime?  Lower standard of living – especially for marginal populations such as migrant workers, children of single mothers or from broken homes, or from historically impoverished communities?  The solution to all these problems is tax cuts for the wealthy.  That’s the new conventional wisdom as bought and paid for by AIG, CitiCorp, Goldman Sachs, and a host of others.

The ability to manipulate public opinion on the part of a small corporatocracy – less than one tenth of 1% of the American public is part of the influential decision-making class responsible for the management of publicly held corporations – ought not to be underestimated.  As Noam Chomsky pointed out in “Manufacturing Consent:  The Political Economy of the Mass Media”, the filter of corporate ownership of the media is virtually impossible to overcome.

ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN really are biased, just as the right-wing zealots of Fox News would have you believe.  But they are not biased in favor of Liberalism.  They are biased in favor of Disney, General Electric, and God-only-knows what other corporate entities.  They are biased in favor of profits and in favor of stable advertising revenue.  They are no more interested in genuine investigative journalism than they are in taking vows of celibacy and poverty.  They are not “news” organizations, they are “sales” organizations.

Even “oppositional” media is typically vulnerable to cooption by corporate sponsorship.  One of our personal favorite bloggers is Nate Silver, whose fivethirtyeight.com often comprises a lonely objective outlet of political reporting; however, Mr. Silver’s pet project has been subsumed by the New York Times in the past few months; thus far, there have been no obvious or evident changes in the way the site operates… but the very nature of corporate sponsorship means it is inevitable that eventually some form of substantive lack will appear in fivethirtyeight.com (or rather, not appear), which will be a direct result of being a subset of corporate culture.

There are some limited reasons for optimism, in spite of the overwhelming strength of the forces arrayed for self-interested exploitation of everything and everyone.  There is very little reason to believe that anything will be accomplished in the federal government for the foreseeable future, of course.  Democrats had fairly overwhelming control of the legislative and executive branches for the past two years, and only managed to worsen the corporate stranglehold on government.  Republicans are about to wrest at least one house of the legislature from the Democrats, and not only do Republicans not have a solution to this problem, they actively seek to make the problem worse.  Tea Party slogans about “taking back our country” are rife with Orwellian irony, as the “typical American” who purportedly comprises the Tea Party will have less, not more, power in a Tea Party political universe.

Nevertheless, there are means to lessen the stranglehold of corporatism, and those means lay squarely in the provence of creative individuals – corporations may emulate, but may never fully coopt the creativity of human beings.  Keeping truth alive in the public conversation, even when it may not be heard by everyone over the din of propaganda, will eventually lead to acceptance – too late, in some cases, to be sure, but it will eventually be heard.  In the case of global warming, for example, the State of Texas will have to accept, in spite of the oil industry’s opposition, that in 2035, with higher temperatures and not enough water for businesses or residences, let alone agricultural users, maybe, just maybe, there was something to all those scientists’ warnings way back when…

Corporate ownership of media ought not be confused with the notion of corporate control of media – the pervasiveness of internet usage, as an example, means that even where corporations coopt outlets which were once free, such as youtube.com, or nominally independent sites, such as drudgereport.com (on the right) or dailykos.com (on the left), there will be someone somewhere who catches them in the middle of their shenanigans, and the truth will out. 

The number of times FoxNews.com has posted an embarrassingly revelatory bit of propaganda, only to have it taken down minutes later, and yet have the damage done by some clever blogger somewhere with MWSnap and a free minute or two to post the evidence, is now beyond count.  Pervasiveness of a medium may overwhelm the perverseness of that medium.  There is just too much interactive media out there for even the most diligent censor to excise it all.

The danger is that it is fairly easy to drown out a single voice.  It doesn’t take a secret police force to silence a voice of reason – another of Chomsky’s favorite sayings is that “propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.”  The ability of corporatist media to generate a mob slobbering and salivating with the bloviations of a demagogue like Rush Limbaugh can only be countered by the creation of an equal and opposite mob of bespectacled intellectuals, dripping with witticisms and understanding, and maybe the sweat of their brows, particularly if they have been gardening, and harvesting, and gossiping with their fellow farmers’ market attendees.

We would much prefer to be members of a community whose convictions are formed over tea, or barbecue, or mutual fence repairs.  That may not be the vision of Justices Roberts, and Scalia, and Thomas, but we can’t help but feel contempt for them as being modern day incarnations of Justice Taney.  Only, instead of sending Dred Scott back to slavery, Roberts et al. have opted to have their judicial robes sized for corporate logos.

One logo they will not be wearing is that of Big Myrtle’s Tea Shoppe and Egg Emporium.

Happy farming!

Onward Through the Fog (or, hopefully, lack thereof...)

As a preliminary step to putting solar panels on our house, we have received an energy audit from the City of College Station.  The city has a wonderful program whereby they pay a considerable portion of the cost of installing solar panels and the necessary equipment to connect the photovoltaic system to the current electrical grid.  Naturally, to guarantee that this investment is properly assured of success, they want to confirm we are not wasting energy anywhere else in the house.

We expected a huge laundry list of things we would have to change; in fact, we don’t expect to go solar until next year at this time at the earliest.  We wanted to give ourselves plenty of time to fix not only the ‘low hanging fruit’ (things like weatherstripping, etc., which we have been slowly but surely handling on a weekly basis), but also any major structural problems.

We were pleasantly surprised by how short this list of necessary fixes really is.

Our air-conditioner, perhaps the most important piece of equipment in a Texas home, is in good shape.  We need to repair the ceiling of the A/C closet, because it is basically open air to the attic, which the inspector estimated is costing us roughly 150 kilowatts a month.  That’s the sum total of major repairs necessary, though.  Everything else falls under the category of tweaks.

Some of the more interesting suggestions:

• Heat the chicken coop in winter with a passive solar water heater.  This actually could be part of our rainwater collection system, although we are going to have to think long and hard about how to make this work correctly.  Basically,  the principle would be to place a large black water tank alongside the chicken coop; the sun will warm the water (even in the middle of February), and this in turn will keep the coop warm.
• Solid barriers for walls of the chicken coop.  This is actually something we were thinking about for summer cooling, as well – we are thinking along the lines of some kind of open-and-close contraption like the lean-to closing of a roadside kiosk, where we could provide additional shade for the ladies in summer, and perhaps make the coop more critter-proof at night.
• Digital monitor for the Air Conditioner.  At a cost of roughly $25, the estimated savings are significant, because we have a less-than-reliable analog monitor at present.
• A new grape arbor for the western exposure.  We actually intended to do this already, but our intrepid inspector assured us that there will be a significant energy savings from having vines (like our trusty muscadines!) soak up the sun’s energy before it ever reaches the house.  In winter, the deciduous vines will actually allow sunlight through, so there will not be any problem in terms of extra heating costs – it’s an all-season arrangement!

Between these small changes and the institution of our rainwater collection system, we figure we have plenty to accomplish between now and next October (when we hope to go solar).  That’s not even taking into account the gardening, or the organizing of Pulletpalooza, or the rearing of two junior Myrtle Maintenance personell.  We’ll keep you posted.

Happy farming!

The Spice of Life

There are two related aphorisms by which we check our overexuberance from time to time.  First, ‘You can be a fundamentalist anything,’ a reminder that a tendency to extremism is possible regardless of what philosophy you espouse.  And second, ‘Just because something is indigenous does not necessarily mean it is healthy,’ a reminder that going for the novel and recreating the past ought not replace doing solid research and making appropriate choices.

We recently got very excited by the discovery of a series of books about “The Lost Crops of Africa”, not least because one of the first vegetables mentioned in volume 2 was Amaranth, which is one of the plants we are experimenting with this year.  “Lost Crops” goes on at great length in rather excitable prose about the benefits of Amaranth as a nutritious potherb, about how it grows in sun or shade, elevation or the plains, humid or arid climates, how easy it is to grow… by the time we were done reading the glowing evaluation of Amaranth, we were ready to sell the stuff door-to-door.

Then we read an equally glowing account of Marama, and the adrenaline came back to proportionally healthier levels; that stuff ain’t growin’ in our yard.  Sorry.  We are exceptionally happy for the Khoisan peoples of the Kalahari Desert that there is a plant like this to provide seeds and tubers with high protein and moisture content, but honestly, there is just no way we could possibly grow every exciting new thing to come along, especially when it isn’t being actively cultivated anywhere in the world.  Myrtle likes experimentation, but sometimes somebody somewhere has to be even-tempered enough to say “Whoa, Bessie!”

Ultimately, every gardener has to make some fairly basic choices regarding what to plant.  We like variety, and this is well represented on our “to do” board.  We have categories for “Planning”, “On Order”, “Germinating”, “In Production”, and “Dormant”, covering the gamut of things we’d like to plant but have not found sources for, things we have already purchased and will soon plant, things we have planted, things currently fruiting, and perennials and fruit which are currently out of season. 

We only have a half-acre lot, but even so, we are at 60 varieties and counting on the big board in all categories.  Part of this is by design – we wish to avoid the perils of mono-cropping at all costs, to the point of trying to not plant even two tomato plants of the same variety next to each other whenever possible, although that degree of pickiness may not be practicable on the macro level.

Part of this cornucopia of variety, however, is due purely to enthusiasm.  We see something new or different, and we want it.  Like everything else in life, this has its ups and downs.  The advantages to giving in to such impulses are obvious – if you are excited about a plant, you are more likely to be careful in tending it.  We just planted currants, for example, and even though they are just seedlings, they are getting far more attention than our native muscadine grapes receive.  Every advantage these out-of-region specialty plants can get, we intend to give.

The flip side, however, is serious and important.  Because excitement can lead to the procurement of plants which are unique, it often means getting plants which are not well adapted.  The aforementioned currants, in our case, are a dicey proposition.  They may do well because our yard represents a microclimate they would not encounter elsewhere in Texas – we have sufficient moisture available from collected rainwater to offset the drought which would shrivel them even fifty feet away from their new home, and plenty of shade to protect them from the noonday sun of August and September – but then again, they may do very poorly due to the undeniable fact that they are Zone 5 plants and we are Zone 8, verging on 9.

To counterbalance our enthusiasm, we remember some general principles learned from a lifetime of overcoming obstacles.  The first principle in avoiding catastrophe while doing something risky is to counterbalance your risk with something equally safe.  This is part of why we have so many fruit vines around the place, particularly the native Muscadines.  We couldn’t kill those off if we wanted to.  Between blackberries (which grow wild in the Brazos Valley on every fence bordering every borrow ditch) and wild grapes, we will always have success with something, even if our crazy new ideas don’t go over so well.

Then, too, there is the basic fact that old standby crops like tomatoes, peppers, cowpeas and broccoli all thrive in chicken poop compost.  We can afford to take a chance on a few harebrained schemes like currants, given that the success rate with the staples will remain fairly steady, so long as we are willing to muck out the chicken coop.

So, we won’t be planting all of the “Lost Crops of Africa”, nor will we plant every exotic from the Arctic Circle, nor every colorful plant we hear about from the Amazon basin, but we will occasionally take a stab at something out of the ordinary.  We tend to think of cayenne as the spice of life, but variety comes in a close second.

Happy farming!

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Is that a cover crop in your garden, or are you just happy to see me?

We have written before about the importance of soil quality.  We are of an accord with a local horticulture personality who recently argued that Texas gardeners deserve some kind of medal for their heroic battles with nutrient poor soils; we are equally certain that if we are ever famous for anything, it will be for our advocacy of the universal benefit to be derived from spreading chicken-poop compost on anything you want to grow in the ground.

However, chicken poop and rotting leaves are not the only means of enriching one’s topsoil.  As part of our never ending quest to maximize our efficiency, we have begun researching the most effective possible cover crops for our little patch of heaven, and several candidates display the kinds of qualities we are looking for.

A good cover crop is like anything else – it is only “good” if it does what you want it to do.  We want cover crops to be a lot like everything else we put effort into.  They should do more than one thing.

• A cover crop should be a “green manure”.  A good cover crop ought to affix nutrients, particularly nitrogen, to the soil both to enhance the following crop, and also to prevent nitrate runoff, which is one of the more egregious forms of water pollution from agriculture and home lawn care.
• A cover crop ought to be aesthetically pleasing; a hay field may look attractive to the farmer who knows what he is looking at, but it may look like nothing but tall weeds to his neighbors, or more importantly in an urban setting, to the city code enforcement office.
• A cover crop ought to have some sort of production value – either as food, as herb or supplement, or even as animal feed.
• A cover crop ought to be a “companion plant”, adding proven value to other crops in your garden much like in the “3 Sisters” farming method.
• A cover crop ought to choke out the kinds of weeds which tend to persist from season to season so that, even if they reemerge later to compete with your follow crop, their success rate will be greatly diminished.
• A cover crop ought to blend with the general theme of your garden, providing a kind of segue from one area to the next.  Permaculturalists frequently talk about production values being highest “at the edges”; a cover crop is a way to transition from one edge to the next – from pasture to vineyard or orchard, for example.

We have found several potential covers which we will be testing over the next several planting seasons which fit these criteria to a Texas ‘T’.  Some are commonly used throughout Texas already; others, we hope to be part of making popular, if only for novelty’s sake.

Red clover is something we have been interested in growing for quite some time.  This is actually a fairly common cover crop throughout the northern tier of states, because it is not especially adapted to our hotter climate.  In fact, it is only advisable to grow in Texas in the fall and winter months.  Most cooperatives will stock crimson clover, but not the red, which we believe is a shame. 

Red clover is not all that different from crimson or other clovers in terms of its ability to affix nitrogen – pretty much any clover you plant will be excellent in this regard – however, the red variety has a tremendous advantage over many of its counterparts in its multifunctionality.  As an herbal supplement, red clover is used in the treatment of cancer, showing tremendous potential as a complementary tool in making traditional cancer protocols more effective.  Drinking an effusion of red clover tea has also been shown to be effective in a number of gynecological regimens, not only for breast cancer treatment, but also for cramping and as an aid in reducing the severity of symptoms resulting from uterine fibroids.  While the best evidence is anecdotal, there is reason to believe red clover even has benefit for some women with fertility problems, as well.

A summer crop we will be experimenting with next year is buckwheat.  Since we have decided to experiment with quinoa and amaranth, we are planning to call this the "year of going grainy"; buckwheat is perhaps most famous as a pancake ingredient, but it is also a useful cover crop.  It has a short growing season, is relatively drought and heat tolerant, and has a propensity to choke out the nutsedges and other noxious weeds which have free reign in most Texas gardens from late June through the end of the summer growing season – a season, we might point out, in which precious little is usually actually growing in a Texas garden.

In fact, in late July, it is a rare thing to find a Texas garden with much more than a few brave pepper plants, maybe a pumpkin vine or two, and a patch of okra.  For a gardener trying to maximize yields, a lot of the spring planting results in dead vines or stalks by the early part of July, and by then it is just too hot to plant anything else.  Buckwheat, however, is our hopeful answer.  If it works, it will solve a serious riddle for us – namely, what to do while waiting for the blast furnace to cool off enough to put our fall salsa plants back into production.

Winter rye is a fairly common cover, particularly for cattle ranchers, because it makes a pretty decent hay crop.  It is also fairly common for cotton or other cash crop farmers in Texas because, especially in areas where winter wheat is not a possibility, winter rye is the best fast-growing plant to choke out competitive weeds between the fall harvest and an early spring planting of a crop like corn or sorghum. 

In our garden, we are not going to use rye very often, but when we do, it will be partly with an eye to weed and pest control, and partly with an eye to having greens available for our chickens in the middle of the winter.  Kale, spinach and cabbage are all in production in the middle of January, but frankly we’d like to save that for ourselves – we appreciate all our hens do for us, but there just isn’t much to be harvested in the dark of winter, and we’d like to put as much of it on our own plates as we can.  Giving rye to the girls is one way to accomplish that.

Finally, we come to a novelty cover crop which we only recently discovered.  During the northern hemisphere winter, an inordinate percentage of our national tomato consumption comes from Florida; this has presented some interesting soil quality challenges in the Sunshine State, which have lately been answered by the use of a unique cover crop native to South America that goes by a variety of names:  “Cow Itch”, “Velvet Bean” or Mucuna pruriens.  The plant is a trailing bean vine, and like most beans, is enormously successful at affixing nitrogen in the soil; it is for this reason that Florida tomato farmers make extensive use of Mucuna pruriens in their year-round production schemes.

The seed-pods are unusual for beans, basically looking like small fuzzy pouches; the fuzz consists of fairly long, wiry hairs which poke fairly sharply, and cause extreme irritation.  Joke shop afficionados will recognize this irritation – the hairs are actually used as a key ingredient in manufactured itching powder formulations.

The beans are relatively small and look for all the world like black beans – turtle beans, as some folk know them.  We have not yet sampled them to see what they taste like, but we are fairly hopeful that, if the taste is not too overwhelming (and no anecdotal evidence so far uncovered has suggested that it will be) we will be able to use them in similar fashion. 

Black beans, for the uninitiated, form the basis for most bean-based recipes in the form of Tex-Mex associated with Austin, our de facto home.  We may be refugees living in College Station, but a corner table at Kerbey Lane or Mother’s Café is really where we would prefer to be, and if you order nachos in either location, they will come with black beans.

A more traditional use for Mucuna pruriens in its native habitat is as a hot beverage; several tribes in the Amazon basin roast the beans much like we roast either coffee or yaupon, and then brew a hot beverage with the ground up beans.

There is no caffeine in Mucuna pruriens, however.  The beverage is imbibed for an entirely different reason.  Mucuna pruriens is shockingly high in L-Dopa; consumption of velvet beans results in a dopamine “high” which elevates mood, as dopamine is the essential building block of that neurotransmitter miracle known as “happiness”, and it also has, um, other elevating effects.  We’ve never really been fans of raw oysters, and now we’ve discovered that we don’t need to be.  Of all purported aphrodisiacs in the literature, Mucuna pruriens is one of the few which has documented clinical studies to back it up; oysters won’t grow in the yard, but velvet beans will.

Of course, rest assured that we will only be growing it to keep the tomatoes happy.  Myrtle’s place is a family establishment, after all.

Happy farming!

There's a Certain Freedom in Being Completely Screwed...

Public debt is a hot button these days.  Most people have the impression that they personally have to balance their budgets, and are mystified that our government does not.  This of course is a gross oversimplification and, frankly, an expression of economic illiteracy, but it is fairly universal.  And it is understandable, given that debt this large cannot be paid back without serious pain.  However, it needs to be placed in context.

The United States ranks 47th in the world in terms of size of our public debt as a percentage of our gross domestic product (GDP), with our national debt standing at 52.9% of what we produce as a nation every year.  Our debt is large, but our production is monumentally huge, globally speaking, so we do okay – there is room for improvement, certainly, but we are not in the same ballpark as some other countries noted as fiscal basketcases.

Greece is the example most often noted lately, because they have undertaken extreme austerity measures to get their debt under control – their national debt currently amounts to 113.4% of their GDP.  This is high enough to rank them as the 7th most debt-laden economy in the world, and their austerity measures to correct this debt have led to riots and full-scale social upheaval.

The worst debt-offender is Zimbabwe, a nation which has struggled under the radar with a quasi-socialist dictatorship (emphasis on dictator, as philosophy really has nothing to do with Mr. Mugabe’s stranglehold on power -- he plays "Robin Hood" as a sometimes brilliant advertising campaign), and is now paying – or not paying, as the case may be – for their fiscal mismanagement to the tune of a debt equalling 282.6% of their GDP.

Numbers 2 and 6 on the list might surprise most observers, however, whose economic news comes from the front page of USA Today.  The 2nd biggest share of debt belongs to Japan, a nation most Americans think of as an economic powerhouse.  Number 6 is Italy, a nation in constant turmoil economically and politically, though not in our consciousness as a “troubled” nation in any real sense.  They have enormous personal savings in place, which offsets their national debt; personal responsibility, in other words, stabilizes their nationally irresponsible spending habits.

In fact, most of the list of debtor standouts are not countries undergoing any kind of major upheaval:  Iceland at number 9, Belgium 11, France 15, Portugal 17, Canada 18, Austria 21, England/Great Britain 22, Netherlands 27, Norway 29, Brazil 30, Ireland 36, United Arab Emirates 42, and Spain 45 are all nations with significantly more debt than the United States, none of which are under any kind of eminent collapse threat, at least as compared to their fellow nations.  They are all feeling the pinch, but not in danger of going under.

Interestingly, having mentioned Zimbabwe and post-Soviet communism, China is number 109; Venezuela is number 106; Cuba is number 75.  There are not a lot of communist or even communist leaning countries left in the world, but there are enough to spot a trend – although it is counterintuitive, they do not have large public debt burdens.  They all have better debt/GDP ratios than the United States.  They are also not nations where we would wish to live.  We would like to emphasize that we only included Venezuela in this list for the sake of argument; Hugo Chavez is belligerent, but he's no philosopher.

Maybe the size of a nation’s public debt vis-à-vis their GDP is not all that significant a measurement.  Fiscal conservatives rule the roost in nations which are mostly stagnant and bland, with no real growth, little standard of living, and no leadership on the important environmental or social issues of the coming century.  Maybe, just maybe, we ought to focus more on what that money is being spent on, and less and less on whether it is being spent at all.

The same is true for individual families.  We at Big Myrtle’s place are too cheap to spend a lot of money on frills and thrills, so we don’t own iPhones or drive a Prius, nor have we been to Disneyworld or even out of state for that matter in recent memory, but we conversely don’t believe that not going into debt is of itself a legitimate business plan.  Some time in the next couple of years we intend to borrow money, for example, to put up solar panels and convert our house from a grid drain to a grid provider.

This weekend we are going to track down cheap alternatives to new gutters for the roof, so as to collect water in the “gently used” rain barrels we recently had donated by friendly neighbors (Thanks, Brooke and Kathleen!), and while we would dearly love to get the gutters for free also, we recognize that we will probably have to pay for them.

It turns out the strongest measure of the strength of an economy may well be how much collectively the households in a nation spend.  The United States is measured as the world’s largest economy by GDP, and that is equalled by our rank in terms of household consumption.  At $10,010,111,000,000 in 2008, we spent a little more than three times as much as Japan who came in number two with $2,838,964,000,000.  For those of you trying to count the zeroes, U.S. Americans spend roughly $10 trillion a year; the Japanese spend roughly $3 trillion a year.

Equally telling, we spend as households roughly 71% of GDP; #2 Japan spends 58% of GDP; #3 Germany spends 56% of GDP; #4 Great Britain spends 64% of GDP; #5 France spends 57% of GDP.

Our economy, in other words, is driven by the sale of items, and items are only sold when there are people buying them.

The question, then, is not “should we spend” but rather “what should we spend on”?  Our vote at Myrtle’s place is for sustainable infrastructure, like solar panels, clotheslines, water collection systems, alternative fuel vehicles like an EV or a high-mileage hybrid, gardening equipment, insulation for your attic, etc.  And maybe some books.  Anything but a Snuggie.  Because lets face it, we should all really prefer a recession to collective materialistic dweebitude.  However, we assure you that personal spending can attain sufficiently impressive numbers to bolster our global standing while spending purely on goods and services which will make our planet a better place to live.

Our own purchasing decisions will be based largely on the production system we have placed on our “big board”.  We have a category for “On Order” items which must be either purchased or otherwise acquired, “Germinating” for things we have planted or started working on, “In Production” for currently fruiting plants and/or projects currently providing payoff, and “Dormant” for perennial plants or projects which are currently not “In Production” but which will be again.  While our board is not limited to just plants or chickens, we find gardening to be a good metaphor for everything else in our inventory of projects.  And our motto is to “Water what will grow,” a slogan we stole shamelessly from Rev. Dan De Leon from Friends Congregational Church, whose wit and wisdom make him a valuable Friend of Myrtle. 

We do track our debts, including mortgage, car payments, student loans, and a couple of other bills, and we do everything we can to avoid adding to this list.  Credit cards are an absolute no-no at our house, for example.  But our conversations about money are not debt-oriented – our focus is on productivity.  We suggest that this ought to be part of the larger sphere discussions about money, as well.  It will be all well and good if we get our national spending problems under control only to discover that we lack the requisite will to spend money on those things which will do the most good for our future sustainability in the coming decades of climate change and global workforce greying.  We’ll be doing our part; we hope you join us.

Happy farming!

No Coffee, No Cry

Coffee won’t grow in the Brazos Valley.  In spite of the fact that this is self-evident, we checked.  We had to do so – life without coffee is inconceivable, yet once we came to the conclusion that locally produced foods are superior in every possible way to foods shipped in from parts unknown, we felt obligated to see what we could replace on our grocery list with, as one of our more colorful friends puts it, “food shot in the yard”.

Coffee grows at high altitudes.  College Station may be high attitude, but it is severely lacking in altitude.  So, locally produced coffee is, sadly, an impossibility.  What might replace our morning cuppa joe, were we ever to make the environmentally responsible switch?

We moved on to investigate the possibility of growing tea in College Station, less enthusiastically on Mr. Myrtle Maintenance’s part, as Mrs. Myrtle Maintenance is perfectly happy with tea, but her partner in this enterprise is somewhat grumpier without the higher doses of caffeine.

No good on tea, either.  The climate is actually very good for growing the Carmella sinensis plant, in terms of soil quality, temperature, and quantity of sunlight.  However, it requires about 50 inches of rain a year.  So, if we were willing to utilize every drop of our irrigation systems on growing a few tea shrubs, we could do it; everything else would fall by the wayside, though.  We have Oxford aspirations for our children, but we lack the fanaticism necessary for this degree of anglophilia; tea is a non-starter.  We may grow black currants, and we definitely still love biscuits and preserves, but ix-nay on the ea-tay.

What in the world is an aspiring locavore to do?  Stimulating beverages are something we are used to thinking of as simply growing on trees, but our national heritage is fraught with tales of woe related to the dependency we have formed on imported caffeine.  The Boston Tea Party is perhaps the most famous example of Americans gone mad over our enslavement to “the good stuff” and the economic power wielded by those who control its importation.

The blockade of the South during the Civil War led to trials and tribulations in the Confederacy, as well.  Numerous diarists wrote home from the front lines of the insufficiency of coffee; soldiers brewed a mish-mash of acorns and chicory, hoping that a hot and bitter beverage would fool their taste buds, even if it couldn’t fool their central nervous systems.  Americans lacking coffee or tea have despaired many times over the course of our nation’s history.

At Myrtle’s place, though, we don’t know the meaning of the word ‘quit’.  (That may have something to do with the fact that we burned the ‘Q’ section of the dictionary during last winter’s freak snowstorm, but we digress…)

Given the near universal acclaim for caffeinated beverages like coffee, tea, cola, and “energy drinks” like Red Bull, etc., we started with the assumption that other cultures must surely have encountered some caffeine-rich plant which could then be converted to potable form via brewing, distilling, or some other means, which we would be able to duplicate in our back yard.

This turned out to be a perfectly reasonable assumption.  Many plants produce caffeine, not just the coffee or tea trees.  We knew, for example, that cacao, which produces the bean from which chocolate is manufactured, also has smaller amounts of caffeine.  Other plants also make use of this chemical, because it is a natural pesticide, and even slightly herbicidal.  The presence of caffeine protects, particularly young plants but also fruiting plants, from insects and from the encroachment of other trees.  It repels bugs and retards the growth of neighboring plants.

Two South American plants besides coffee and cacao which produce caffeine are Guarana (Paullinia cupana), which is a climbing plant in the maple family, native to the Amazon basin and especially common in Brazil, and also Yerba maté (Ilex paraguariensis), a species of holly native to Argentina, Bolivia, Uruguay, Paraguay, and southern Brazil.

Both of these plants are used by locals to make strong beverages; Guarana, in particular, is used in a variety of commercially available beverages, and is even the basis of numerous soft drinks which take considerable market share away from Coca-Cola and Pepsi in Brazil.

However, it was the Yerba which caught our attention.  Ilex paraguariensis?  We are much more familiar with another Ilex species, Ilex vomitoria, also known as Yaupon Holly.  Our land was overrun with the stuff when we bought it – the yaupon grew so thickly here that you couldn’t even tell there was a house on our property until we had cut it back.

Yaupon grows to about 10-12 feet tall, and for four or five months a year has bright red berries on it.  We had heard a rumor that Native American tribes had long ago made a beverage from yaupon which caused them to vomit.  In fact, that is how the latin name for the plant originated – Ilex vomitoria.

Juxtaposing the yerba story with the yaupon story, we decided maybe the yaupon related beverage required a little more investigation.

It turns out that a concoction known in English as “Black Drink” was, in fact, brewed from Ilex vomitoria in early America by a variety of peoples.  The leaves and twigs were harvested just prior to preparation – freshness evidently being vital – and then roasted, prior to grinding and brewing.  Colonists imitated the Native Americans and brewed this beverage as a replacement for coffee or tea, and called it “cassine” or “cassina”.

Caddo, Creek, Cherokee, Choctaw, and other tribes consumed this beverage in the belief that it purged the drinker of anger and deceit.  This made it a particularly attractive social beverage, as these qualities would obviously be detrimental in group environments – for evidence, try running a modern committee meeting without coffee or tea.

Because the consumption of the beverage was so often a social event, it naturally led to drinking vast quantities of the beverage, often in ritual manner, with special songs being sung as the large tureen was passed from person to person.  As part of these rituals, many tribes included a final act of purging themselves by vomiting.  This was not a biochemical necessity, it was a religious act, and not every tribe shared in this unfortunate ritual.  The Ais peoples of Florida, in fact, were often observed by European settlers to drink the stuff on a regular basis without ever suffering gastric distress.  To further illustrate the significance of the beverage, the ritual name Asi Yahola or Black Drink Singer is corrupted into English as Osceola.

Armed with all of these clues as to the potability of this beverage, sans the risk of (ahem!) unwanted emissions, the next question becomes whether this might be an acceptable substitute for coffee.  Clearly, early European settlers were willing to settle for Black Drink in the absense of coffee or tea, but just as clearly, they preferred to go back to the imported stuff as quickly as possible.

Chemically, we know yaupon has roughly six times as much caffeine as coffee.  This goes a long way to explaining the lack of groundcover underneath our yaupon stands; there are plenty of young tree shoots, but no grasses – not even very many weeds – underneath the Ilex vomitoria.  Naturally, this means the drink will be fairly bitter.  Too bitter to drink?  And could the bitterness be cut by the inclusion of some sweet herb or other?

There’s only one way to find out.  We made it ourselves.

The traditional way for at least the last 10,000 years in the Gulf Coast region has been to parch the leaves and twigs of yaupon in a ceramic container, so we did the same thing.  We then boiled the crushed leaves and twigs in our coffee pot, and strained them in our french press to make sure no extraneous leaves or twigs made it to the cup.

The resulting beverage had roughly the consistency of a very dark tea -- it even smelled a lot like a good orange pekoe, though the color was closer to that of a dark roasted arabica coffee bean.

The telling question, though, is naturally the question of taste.  What did it taste like?  It tasted like raisin-flavored tea.  There is no other way to describe it; it tasted like sweet raisins squeezed into a nice hot cup of tea.  The caffeine buzz was fairly intense, so much so that when our daughter asked to try it, we only gave her a small portion, which she drank with a heavy dose of sugar, and a qualified thumbs up.  She still prefers Earl Grey, but our parched yaupon tea will do in a pinch, she says.

We still prefer coffee, we must admit.  But we are mystified why this beverage is not at least as popular as many of the other forms of caffeine currently available on the market.  It actually tastes quite good, and it comes from a tree which grows like a weed throughout most of the Gulf region.  We chopped down a lot of yaupon to make room for vegetables and herbs; we aren't cutting down any more, though.  They put the "tea" in "Tea Shoppe".

Happy farming!

Small Farm Good, Big Farm Bad (Have we mentioned this before...?)

Non-renewable resources are, by definition, irreplaceable.  Once you have used them, they are not renewed.  The logical conclusion, therefore, is that you should not use them, but should instead opt for other resources.

In some cases, such as with fossil fuels, this is self-evident, and the solutions, though taking some effort, are obvious.  We need to take advantage of natural processes which will last as long as the planet does -- put solar panels on every home in the country, for example, and set up wind turbines, geothermal heating and cooling systems, and so on, instead of relying on oil and coal, the supplies of which are finite.

However, there are some other non-renewable resources we don’t usually think about as being non-renewable, and the solution to their overuse is not so obvious.  The best example is groundwater.

Agricultural water usage accounts for 80% of the fresh water consumption in the United States; 60% of that consumption comes from groundwater sources, with the other 40% coming from well water pumped out of aquifers.  The Ogallala Aquifer, for instance, which supports a good portion of the central and southwestern U.S., is being depleted at an annual rate anywhere from 130-160% of the rate of replenishment, meaning only about 2/3rd of what is taken out in a given year is returned via rainfall.

As industrial agricultural production becomes more intense due to population concerns, there is little reason to believe this rate of depletion will do anything but increase.  The models are not clear on how much longer the Ogallala will be able to provide water, but obviously you cannot take out more than is put in indefinitely – at some point, it will be empty.  When it is empty, the environment in which it sits dry and idle has a name:  “desert”.  That is a dry and dusty sounding moniker to hang on the breadbasket of the country.

This raises a serious question:  what do you use instead of water to water your crops?  What renewable alternative is there?

Even in areas where the primary water source is not a limited resource such as an aquifer, water use – and increasingly, water reuse – is a life-or-death question, because degradation of our water supplies due to chemical leaching from pesticide, herbicide and fertilizer runoff, in addition to runoff from industrial sites, stormwater pollution from urban centers, and phosphate pollution from untreated greywater make what water is available less attractive as an agricultural resource.

The solution to these and other tricky problems lay in rephrasing the question. 

Rather than assuming we have to find ways to support the industrial agricultural model in a scenario in which resources are limited and collateral damage is unavoidable, a dramatic change in paradigm will make the whole class of worries disappear.  Rather than attempting large scale watering of industrial monoculture – ie, miles and miles of corn fields, wheat fields, etc. – we ought to decentralize, and instead focus on renewable and reusable water supplies for polycultural small plots. 

Places like small backyard gardens, for starters, are easier to supply with clean agricultural water.  But not just extensive backyard gardens – microfarms like Millican Farms, which require more water than does Myrtle’s place can almost as easily be watered in a renewable fashion.  It just takes a little planning and a little will and a lot of elbow grease.  At Millican Farms, they use a pond to irrigate greenhouses; the tomatoes are delicious, year round.

One of the chief criticisms of the permaculture movement and its related sustainable agriculture movements is that systems of no-till polyculture make industrial agricultural methods impossible and obviate mechanization.  We argue that this is not a weakness, but is, instead, one of the principle advantages of permaculture.  The chief disadvantage lay not in the inability of permaculture to generate yields sufficient to feed the world, but rather in the lack of will to provide consumers worldwide with the resources necessary to feed themselves.  Instead of using a tractor and a combine in Nebraska to feed a peasant in Thailand, why not use a shovel and a hoe in Thailand to help that peasant grow his own food?

The “Green Revolution” of the last half-century has, in fact, produced massive gains in crop yields, but far from eliminating starvation, as is often claimed as the brass ring to be grabbed by agritechnology, these incredible – one might even say ridiculous – increases in productivity as measured by quantity have been matched by stunning and monumental declines in quality, such that people whose primary problem used to be getting enough calories are now faced with an overabundance of empty calories.  By some estimates, the typical decline in nutritional value of produce over the last 50 years is on the order of 25-50 percent.

We are draining our water supplies in order to produce food no one should be forced to eat, and we are supporting a global economy in which people who should be given start-up loans to go to work are instead forced to sit idly accepting handouts of food whose quality could be surpassed by a hunter-gatherer’s diet.

Industrial agriculture is an evolutionary dead-end.

Small scale, local, organic production, on the other hand, produces crops generally acknowledged to be more flavorful, healthier, and easier on the environment.  And – more to the point – there is nowhere in the world where this type of production cannot be implemented.  There is no need for industrial agriculture; subsidized exports of wheat and other foodstuffs are an albatross around our necks, doing no good for the rest of the world, lining the pockets of a few corporate big wigs, and depleting our natural resources in the process.

The “starving peasants of Bangladesh” would be better served by the establishment of local cooperatives in Bengali communities, learning to grow sustainable crops there, than they are by the massive exploitation of lands in Kansas and Iowa to produce foods lacking the nutritional value of “home grown”, and contributing nothing to the Bengali economy.

Critics might argue that watering a hundred small farms would deplete just as much water as the process of watering one very large farm, but that is because the critics know nothing about the methods of permaculture, nor about the innovations inherent in small-scale sustainable production.  No-till practices by their very nature require heavy use of mulches which are almost always a form of “compost in place”, and which increase the moisture-retention abilities of topsoil by orders of magnitude.

Further, small-scale productions are much better adapted to water conservation methods like rainwater collection or greywater reclamation, and they have greater incentive to invest in these alternative procedures, given their relative size.

Then, too, small farms are more likely to practice polyculture, rather than monocropping.  As the coffee farmers of Central and South America have rediscovered in the last decade or so, “shade-grown” coffee, which is part of a multi-species ecosystem, rather than a single-crop field, requires far less water.  Yes, polyculture eliminates the ability to use mechanical harvesting methods, making it more labor intensive and therefore more expensive at market, but the reduction in water costs, fertilizer costs, pesticide and herbicide costs, transportation and fossil fuel costs, and improved quality and nutritional value and the associated reduction in future health care costs more than offset the labor costs. 

Ultimately, the accretion of risks involved in taking essentially natural processes and attempting to manufacture “improvements” is simply too great to bear.  The misuse of water resources by industrial agriculture is only one of its many malfeasances. 

Engineered solutions to biological problems are rife with unknown and unknowable risks.  The best possible example lay in supplemental nutrition for cattle – some time in the late 1970s, the practice of feeding meat and bone meal to cattle resulted in the evolution of a strain of protein molecules – not even an actual organism, just protein strands – into a prion capable of causing a new variant of Creutzfeld-Jakobs disease (nvCJD) known as Bovine Spongeiform Encephalopathy (BSE), aka “Mad Cow Disease”.

The assurances given to ranchers, and passed along to the general public, that bone meal was perfectly fine for cattle, were based on the best available scientific data, which was actually fairly considerable.  These were not careless scientists and bureaucrats who made the horribly tragic mistake of feeding animal products to herbivores – this was a well thought out plan, backed up by considerable data. 

It was also completely wrong.

This particular tragedy probably could not have been predicted; however, the fact of some sort of tragic consequences definitely could have been predicted.  A diet for a whole class of animals which evolved for very specific reasons cannot and could not be engineered, no matter how clever the researchers, to be so thoroughly and completely different from the diet naturally preferred by those animals without there being a swath of unforeseen consequences.

Feed lot biochemistry is just one area where we have been thumbing our noses at Mother Nature.  As Masanobu Fukuoka put it, “When we throw Mother Nature out the window, she comes back in the front door with a pitchfork.”  For many thousands of years now we have been planting fields with just one crop, depleting the nutrients in the soil and then moving on to new fields.  We have been taking water out of natural reservoirs, drying them up, and then moving on.  We have been burning down, bulldozing, turning under, planting something alien for a few years, and then moving on.

Maybe we shouldn’t keep moving on.  The original farmers were just tribes who found a place where what they wanted to eat seemed to be growing fairly well, and they stayed and protected those naturally occurring stands of wheat and figs, until they learned all they could about tending them and caring for them and propagating them.

We joke that we never want to move again – we want to be buried in the yard.  We haven't done the research, but if the product of the cremation process is at all compatible with the making of biochar, why the heck not?  We'll reside at Myrtle's forever.

Happy farming!