Can You Dig It?

We're getting closer and closer to realizing our vision.  A 900 square foot house sitting on a 9000 square foot lot -- you can see by our purchasing decision where our values lay. 

Anyway, the creme-de-la-creme of our little project, the capstone, as it were, will be our 500 square foot, four-to-five foot deep fish pond.  We've finally got the 500 square foot part down; the depth is another matter.  We're planning on waiting for this August to dredge the portions which are currently underwater, but this weekend we managed to reach a milestone.  We have put up a bank around all 100 linear feet of the pond's perimeter, and have established where to plant the pine trees which will form the erosion barrier.  this week, we will be planting our mosquito-repelling herbs (basil, catnip, and anise) and we will begin research in earnest for our aeration project -- a windmill, hopefully from an engineering design circa 1850 or so.

There are a lot of other goodies to show you this upcoming week, but they will have to wait.  Friends have invited us over for grilled shrimp and yummies from their winter garden.

Happy farming!

By Their Fruits Shall Ye Know Them

This whole self-sufficiency thing is a long term project.  Sometimes we are reminded of just exactly how long by the kinds of milestones we celebrate.

This week, our plum trees are in bloom, the first time in the three years since we planted them.  You can't have fruit without first having flowers, so we consider this a pretty important event.  Of course, the trees are still only about four feet tall, so any fruit we actually get this year probably won't be all that impressive -- but it's a milestone event, nevertheless.

There are other projects around Myrtle's place that are equally long-term.  We moved roughly 1,500 pounds of dirt out of the catfish pond today, and the digging is still only roughly 40% complete.  Which means we probably won't have fish in the pond until next March at the earliest; given that we started digging roughly 18 months ago, that makes this a fairly long-term event.  That first fish fry is going to be a doozy, let us tell you.

Speaking of doozies, our corn crop this Spring ought to be fairly impressive.  In addition to planting in a couple of our traditional raised beds, we have this new 'S' shaped bed which marks the spot where we are putting more olive trees next year.  Since it was available and doing nothing at the moment, we thought "Why not?" and proceeded to plant more corn here.  Among other things, it will add to the privacy between us and the rent house you can see in the background here.  Corn, wild grapes, pomegranates and morning glories (on the trellis) ought to keep our Myrtle-related activities private from the sorority girls doing all their non-Myrtle related things.  Because really, who wants to see someone doing something non-Myrtle related?

It has also come to our attention that in our discussion of Forsythia, which we have never planted before we slighted one of our favorite plants by saying we never plant ornamentals.  Irises grow practically like weeds in our yard; they spread via rhizome, and if they are growing where you don't want them, you practically have to dig up the entire yard to get rid of them.

We, of course, don't want to get rid of them.  They don't actually produce anything to eat, which is our usual standard for whether we want something growing in our yard or not, but on the other hand, they don't demand any attention, and seem to take care of themselves under all kinds of circumstances, bouncing back even after harsh winters like the one we just went through.

So, if and when you eventually visit Myrtle's place, you'll see these beautiful white flowers in the odd irregular bed around some of our shade trees.  They may not be producing yummy plums, but they make us enjoy the wait for all our fruit trees to come into production.

Hopefully, for Myrtle's next update we can show you some sprouting spring veggies!  Until then....

Happy farming!

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Hope Springs Eternal

It's the first day of Spring.  So why did the temperature fall to 38° last night?  And why, oh why, a week after we planted all our veggies, given that we had passed the average date of last frost by a full week, is it supposed to get down to 34° tonight?

We'll tell you why:  'cause that's the way the ball bounces.  Life is experienced in non-linear, fractal geometric fashion.  Things happen, then other things happen, and then something changes.  No observable cycle is any more circular than the Earth's orbit which, if we remember our 5th grade science at all, is actually elliptical, not circular.

So.  We've got plants in the ground, we're going to cover them at night, and hope for the best.

We've got other plants not yet in the ground because they weren't in stock -- most notably African Basil, which we have on order, and Goat's Rue, which should be coming any day now.

And, we have ordered an abundance of new trees from The Arbor Day Foundation, including a slew of new Loblolly Pines, White Pines, and Bald Cypresses.  The perimeter of Myrtle's place, particularly around the fish pond, needs to be more forested, and we want an abundance of pine-needles on hand to mulch the blackberries every year.

One unusual addition (unusual, at least, for us) is a Forsythia, which the Arbor Day folks threw in for free.  We don't usually go for ornamentals -- we planted some Raspberry Autumn Sage (Red Salvia, for those who may have heard it by another name), but that and our daughter's Morning Glories are the only inedible plants on the place (excepting a few of the trees, of course).

The Forsythia is an interesting case.  Free is always good, naturally, but in addition, it has this going for it:  it's a member of the Olive tree family:  As an Oleacea, it naturally comes near and dear to our hearts.  We only have four Arbequina Olives on the place, but we're hoping that now they will feel a little less lonely.

We're not yet sure what to make of the Forsythia's bright yellow flowers, but we're sure we'll adapt.

In other news, we have moved garden plots around, expanded some, contracted others, but mostly we've gone about the business of getting as much good chicken-poop compost as possible in the places it needs to go.  Two of our 6'x6' garden beds are dedicated to sweet corn, in addition to a new 4'x20' "S" shaped bed which we placed where the 2nd Olive bed is going to go next year.

Also, we replaced the chickens' plastic water feeder with a stainless steel variety.  It holds more water and, more importantly, is not a source of leached bromides.  Perhaps we are partly motivated by a sappy, syrupy-sweet fondness for our chickens, and we do not wish to poison them any more than any other member of our family.  But mostly, we just don't want getting bromides in our eggs.

For the next couple of days, keep your plants and maybe even yourselves warm, and...

Happy farming!

Never Leave 'em With a Problem, Always Leave 'em With a Solution!

We recently advised our fellow Myrtlians that plastic food containers are little more than slow poison.

Of course, some people are in no hurry, so this is not really any scarier a thought than any of the other alarming things we seem to hear on a daily basis, should we choose to log on to our favorite news blog of choice, or even (dare we dream anyone still does this?) read the newspaper.

However, we discovered in daily interaction with many of you followers of Myrtle that we needed to do a little more than raise the alarm.  We needed to be a little more proactive in providing some solutions.  To that end, may we introduce to the western world a little item that many people living in developing nations take for granted?  It's called a "tiffin" in some circles, although in Wikipedia, the best information is in an entry on "Dabbawala", the etymology of which we won't bother to describe here, although it seems pregnant with pun possibilities.

So, what exactly is this "tiffin" of which we speak?  A relatively inexpensive exemplar is in the Amazon.com link to your above left.  You can also find them at World Market.  Of course, if you live in a community of any size, there will be a half-dozen Indian food grocers or international bazaar style outdoor markets, etc. etc., from which it would be better to buy said item; still, for those of us who live in backwaters such as College Station, ordering online may be your best bet.

Why are you ordering this "thing"?  Because it's a lunchbox and because it is convenient, in addition to being non-toxic! 

In India, millions of workers all throughout the country rely on delivery persons to bring their hot fresh home-cooked meals to them in their tiffins; Myrtle Maintenance Personnel have a similar arrangement, although we must confess that we send refrigerated foods and rely on that most odious of modern conveniences, the microwave, to heat up said foods on a ceramic plate.  Still, we stay as true to the original intent of the tiffin as practical.

And best of all, you buy this item once, you never need buy it again.  It doesn't go in a landfill, it doesn't sully your system, it doesn't block iodine.  And it encourages you to eat cool foods -- when is the last time you took kebabs with spinach dal to your workplace?  Myrtle might cringe at the thought, but we are sure you could even take tandoori chicken in one if you so desired.

Happy lunchtime, and happy plastic-free farming!

Gardening at Night, and Other Absurdities

Those of you who have been paying attention may have come to the conclusion by now that we're a little odd.

No denying it.  The proprietors of Big Myrtle's Tea Shoppe and Egg Emporium do not care much about conformity; the surest way to make us yawn is to talk about a master-planned neighborhood, where every home on the platte is painted the same color, and none of the houses is allowed to have trees or shrubs at unauthorized heights.

Which may go a long way to explaining why we're posting pictures of plants obviously taken at night, when the photographic capabilities of our cheap little digital camera are dwarfed by those of your average pinhole camera made by enthusiastic 3rd graders.  See, we planted our brand-spankin'-new olive trees at night.

Why?  Because that's when we bought them, and we were so excited, we couldn't wait 12 more hours before putting them in the ground.

We had assumed we were going to have to travel over 100 miles and pay much higher prices to purchase arbequina olive trees, and we were on the verge of despair because between gutting the lighting in the house, building a new bedroom for our daughter, and putting a new roof and new laying box on/in the chicken coop, funds for major improvements were beginning to run a little slim this spring, and we thought we may have to put off the olive tree purchase until next fall at the earliest.   Then, miracle of miracles, when we stopped at Farm Patch (a local produce stand which also sells garden plants), with the express purpose of buying african basil (much nicer plant than your standard "sweet" variety), we noticed a group of olive trees bunched in the corner.

We naturally bought them all.

So, our two big projects in the garden this year were pomegranates and olives.  We have now succeeded in installing the two plants in our garden which we have been expressly discouraged about by the priggish pessimists of the Brazos Valley gardening world.  And, more to the point, we have a solid plan, we're sure it will work, and we are executing the plan precisely.

If we can't get the western side of our yard to grow into a sicilian paradise using chicken-poop compost and rancid pond water, then it can't be done.

Tomorrow, we'll put in our traditional summer veggies and some more herbs, we'll weed, and we'll mulch.  But in the meanwhile, we have olives and pomegranates growing in our yard!

Happy farming!

Pick Your Poison

We've told you before about the importance of pure water.  We even mentioned parenthetically that it is important to store your distilled water in glass containers, not plastic.

We've now gone guano-loco with the logical conclusion to this line of reasoning.  We are getting rid of plastic containers altogether.  There are a wide variety of reasons, but the most fundamental is this:  most plastics leach bromines and bromides in one form or another.  And together with fluorides, our body is so flush with these chemicals in our contemporary habitat that they have effectively blocked our iodine receptors more completely than any insidious plotter from Dr. Strangelove could have hoped.

"Now, hold on a minute!" you might be saying.  "Isn't fluoride a good thing?"  Yes.  In moderation.  Fluoridation of water has dramatically improved dental health in this country for nigh on five decades now.  It's just that, along with out-gassing and leaching from plastics, fluoride and bromine/bromides have had disastrous unintended consequences.

Hypothyroidism is the condition which first brought the importance of iodine to Myrtle's household  -- Myrtle Maintenance Personnel have been fighting this condition for over a decade now.  But this is only the tip of the iceberg; iodine deficiency has been linked to breast cancer, among other things; we would not at all be surprised to find that there are links to autism, ADHD, polycystic ovarian syndrome, and all sorts of other conditions which have been on the rise like some demented Vanity Fair review of uncomfortable conditions.

Think about it... the onset of an "obesity epidemic" has only come in the last three to four decades.  "Super-Size me" has something to do with it, of course, but what else happened in the late 70's, early 80's?  Coca-Cola switched from glass bottles to plastic, that's what.  So did all sorts of other acidic foods (Tomato ketchup, anyone?), not to mention car upholstery no longer being cloth or even leather, for the most part.  We get out-gassed to the Nth degree in our cars.

You want further circumstantial evidence?  The worst offenders for obesity are in the deep south.  Where there is no public transportation... and you have to drive a long time through the blazing hot sun every summer to get anywhere...  We would love to see an epidemiologist get a grant to thoroughly investigate this question.

But we're not holding our breath.  Or, maybe we should....

So, we're ditching plastic.  We'll keep you posted.

Happy farming!

A New Place for Myrtle to Park Her Woozle...

We're not quite ready to declare ourselves funky, but we have come quite a few steps beyond merely functional.  The latest addition is a new laying box for the girls, and in addition to giving them a fully protected eating and drinking area, it adds a good 10 square feet of laying space above and beyond what they had with their old re-designed IKEA dresser-drawers (hey, a girl's gotta rest her backside somewhere, right?), and, just as impressively, gives them fully 20 square feet more foraging space.

Plus, it's an extra windbreak in winter and an extra 20 square feet of good shade in summer. 

Of course, getting them to actually lay eggs in this new creation took a while.  You'd think architectural improvements would be enough to change even chicken temperaments to something grateful and cheery.  Sadly, no.  Quoth Myrtle:  "This is different.  Different is BAAAAAAAD!!!!"

Sigh.

Our next chicken-related improvements will be purely aesthetic.  We will be painting the exterior of the roof (top will be sun-reflective white, sides will be black, with biker-chicken related mural designed by our 11 year old daughter).

There are a lot of non-chicken related improvements going on, too.  We have embarked, for example, upon a new line of inquiry related to the reduction of our plastic usage about the place.  This is a more complicated line of inquiry, and may take some time before we can report on what success would actually look like, let alone whether or not we have accomplished it.  When we realized early this week that the bromides leached from plastic affect numerous endocrine conditions (particularly hypothyroidism), we opened a new "Myrtle File" on plastic.  A "Myrtle File" is something we have decided we're no longer going to do simply because everyone does it this way, and that's the way it's done.

It won't be easy.  We just got back from H.E.B. with as little plastic as we could manage on short notice (without having planned a non-plastic trip first), and we're stunned by how much plastic we brought into the house.  Eliminating it entirely, we have decided, will be impossible.  But as a first approximation, we believe we can reduce it by 90% over the course of the next year.  We'll keep you updated.

Meanwhile.... herbs and raspberry autumn sage going into the ground this weekend, summer veggies next weekend.

Happy farming!

A Rock and a Hard Place...

We're stuck in waiting mode.  As we've mentioned before, the end of Winter and the beginning of Spring is a difficult thing to gauge in Texas.  There are so many plants which should not go in the ground until "the danger of frost is past".  The problem, of course, is that some years, the final frost is at the end of January, and other years, it isn't until sometime in April.  Average final frost is the first week of March here in College Station, but we take that with a grain of salt.

We do have some indicators that it might be okay to plant our tomatoes and peppers this week; the Weather.com forecast for the next ten days shows us not getting below 40° anytime soon.  There is a lot to be said for this forecast's likelihood to be accurate, and it dovetails pretty nicely with the historical records around these parts -- a little chillier than usual, but not by a whole lot.

Of course, it did snow just a week or so ago, so there may be some justifiable concern that perhaps... just maybe... it is too optimistically sunshiney and warm.  Maybe?

The climate pages over at NOAA.gov tell a somewhat different story, even if not necessarily mutually exclusive.

Basically, for the next month, we will be "blue for 'Brrrr!!!'" cooler than usual.  That does not necessarily mean that we will have any freezing temperatures... but one never knows.  The latest forecast for El Niño shows that the actual ENSO (El Niño Souther Oscillation) event will be subsiding within the next 30-45 days... but that the effects of the event will linger past the actual "end" date.

So.  We are not going to plant peppers and tomatoes this weekend.  We are going to weed, turn over garden plots, and have guests over to sip wine, munch on cheese and crackers, and talk about religion and politics.  You've got to fertilize your garden at every available opportunity, you know, and nothing can do that better than heated discussion of religion and politics.

Until the weather breaks...

Happy farming!