A Chicken in Every Pot

We frequently encounter people who are "on the verge of chicken".  We also encounter a lot of people who are just on the verge, but that's a subject for another time.

This whole backyard chicken thing is a trend, and we can't really take credit for much of it, since most of the documentation we have read or cited for the ease with which chickens may be maintained in an urban environment comes from numerous folks who have done this gig before us.

Nonetheless, we are pleased and happy to help out with anybody who wishes to embark on a poultryful existence.  You want chickens, we'd be glad to help.  It's in the news all over the country -- usually on a slow news day, of course -- that people already have birds in the middle of town.  This article from the Burlington Express is a good case in point although anyone not familiar with Vermont's largest city might have assumed the entire state was one big barnyard.  Not true, but Myrtle can only hope they are working on it.  :^)

Meanwhile, closer to home, we are in the initial stages of putting together a Brazos Valley Backyard Chicken group of some sort, though we need a catchy name, among other things.  It's hard to get organized unless you sound like it's already a "thing".

So... anybody in the Brazos Valley who wants to get into the gig, we initially plan on having some sort of Fall festival similar to Austin's Funky Chicken Coop Tour, only, we'll be more forgiving of the use of maroon in the color scheme.

If you are interested, please email us and tell us your interest level; we are looking not only for people who already have birds, but also people who are just "on the verge".  We can help you navigate the city ordinances on chickens, and help you select the best breed for your family (we have an ongoing feud with an Ameraucana family; Myrtle is, of course, a Barred Rock), and we can give you a lot of advice about bedding, feeding, etc.

Maybe you don't want the chicken in your pot, but you really need her in your backyard, trust us!

Happy farming!

Just Where Exactly Does Everyone Think This Stuff Goes?

We recently commented on the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, noting that "dispersants" and "evaporation" are misleading terms, because thanks to a little concept from elementary physics known as the Law of Conservation of Energy and Matter, nothing just disappears.  Oil is being dispersed to somewhere, and in the case of the Gulf oil spill, it's being dispersed to the underwater ecosystems that no one is noticing; Bobby Jindal is all upset about the Louisiana coast, but the fact that all the fish in the Gulf are dying is a distant concern to him as a human politician.

We were surprised and humbled to have been noticed by The Mike Malloy Show for that post.  Sorry for bumming you out, Mike, but it had to be said.  Anyway, we have in the interim had another instance forced upon our notice of people just not getting it when it comes to fouling our own nest.  The City of College Station evidently sprays herbicides in the storm gutters on our street.  Why they would do this is, to us at Myrtle's, a complete and baffling mystery.

Of course, we don't view weeds as a detraction around here; our chickens absolutely love dandelions; chickweed is called "chickweed" because chicks really dig it.  Dollar weed is a little trickier to harvest, but they gulp that down, too.   In short, all the things that people around these parts pour thousands of dollars of chemicals over the course of their lifetimes onto their lawns in order to kill are, on our backyard farm, considered a crop.

We suppose Shepherd's Purse doesn't look all that attractive to someone who is aspiring to a Better Homes and Gardens manicured St. Augustine lawn, but then, we consider it a damned sight better looking than a basal cell carcinoma.

 

And that's the bottom line:  we as a society have stopped thinking about long term consequences, and don't have the first clue about how to meld aesthetics and functionality.  A beautiful field of well-kept and manicured wildflowers is infinitely to be preferred to a chemical-laced poisonous field of perfectly manicured croquet lawn.  And weeds, unlike herbicides or pesticides, have never been linked to ADHD or other rampant childhood maladies.   Nobody came back from Vietnam with cancers caused by dandelions.

And no accidents, to our knowledge, have ever been caused by weeds growing in cracks in the cement in our city storm drains.  Can you just see Myrtle rolling her eyes?

When deciding how to care for our lawns... or our storm drains, for that matter... the question we ought to be asking ourselves is, "Do I want to eat or drink anything that has come into contact with this stuff?"

Because, honestly people, do you really think it just magically disappears once you've put it "out there"?  Are we really that daft?

So, to the good news:  Weeds are good!  Provided you're willing to do a little extra work, you can have a beautiful yard with lots of surprising little variations and pockets of color.  If you want to get rid of a certain species, overseed that area with clover.  In Texas, that means red clover in fall, white clover in spring.  If you have too many weeds and too much yard, get chickens!  Or better still, get a goat.

And happy farming!

Of Chickens and Monkeys and Textbooks (oh my!)

The anniversary of State v. John Scopes seems like an excellent time to apologize to the rest of the country for the absurdity that is the textbook industry.  The great state of Texas has undue influence on that industry nationally, and now we have word that the lunatic fringe has managed to cause all kinds of half-truths to be included, and whole-truths to be wholesale excluded from our history books.

We wonder two things about this controversy:  first, is anyone really surprised?  This is, after all, the state where a governor once famously exclaimed "If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it's good enough for Texas!"  We have a Tea Party favorite of a governor now, who brags about balancing the state budget (in contrast to the federal budget), but conveniently "forgets" the fact that only several billion dollars in federal assistance allowed us to balance said state budget....  And second, why is textbook revision a big deal, anyway?  It's not like these books are going to be read or comprehended, regardless of what they say.

In short, we are an ignorant state, and have been for a very, very long time.

We recently saw a bumper sticker for some Texas secessionists who quoted Sam Houston.  They forget that Sam Houston encountered a secession movement before; he told them to go to hell.  He'd say it again today.

So, as we savor the irony of the educational devolution taking place on the anniversary of a trial about evolution, just remember:  at least we aren't being eaten by saber-toothed tigers anymore.  Big Myrtle can tell you how scary cats can be; almost as scary as theological bigots in elected office.

Happy farming!

A Bit of Perspective

"The one thing people cannot afford to have," wrote Douglas Adams, "is a sense of perspective."  Given that we are all microscopic dots on a microscopic dot in the vastness of space and time, if we ever truly had a sense of our own insignificance, we would go mad.

There are those who would argue, of course, that we are already mad, and they may have a point.

Either way, we couldn't help but be struck by a strange sensation this past weekend when we were up on the roof blowing new insulation into our attic.  Myrtle's place looks a lot different from a bird's-eye point of view, and it got us thinking about our use of space in slightly different ways, which will hopefully bear fruit this fall when we begin reorganization of the garden along more ambitious lines of production.

One of these years, we may invest in a panoramic camera so we can give you a proper grasp of the wideness of our project; these broken glimpses don't do proper justice to what exactly is meant by 1/2 acre.  It's not as vast a space as a sprawling ranch, and yet... by comparison to the miniature strips of dirt and turf attached to most modern homes, it is a sprawling wilderness.

We've noticed, however, that by sticking with any kind of recognizable geometry, we have severely limited the practical growing spaces for our consumable crops.  We will get a full year's worth of salsa and pasta sauces from the tomatoes and peppers in the planters pictured here, and we will get a sizable quantity of corn, as well, but there is room to produce so much more.  We are therefore going to break up these spaces with fenced in areas and build micro- versions of the macro- schema.  The whole thing will take on some qualities of an agricultural equivalent of a fractal drawing.  The smaller pieces should reflect qualities of the whole project.

We have written many times about having to rely on personal experience, given the lack of specific science in the area of microfarming and this, we believe, is part and parcel of that paradigm.  There are, however, some pioneers who have gone before us in the realm of space optimization on smaller plots for the purposes of sustainable food production.

Surely if small-scale farmers can make a go of it on an acre of degraded land in Tibet or Uruguay, we can make it work on a half-acre in the middle of a town whose entire purpose is to support the largest agricultural university in the world.

Of course, the town whose entire purpose is to support the largest agricultural university in the world is, itself, deficient in many of the qualities of progressive thinking necessary to support ventures such as Myrtle's, but that is a whole other topic of conversation.  We will undoubtedly expound upon it when it comes time to start putting in facilities for a goat; we certainly discovered the limitations of the City of College Station when our friends Hugh and Linda first got their chickens.  One thing at a time, though.  Next project:  maximum veggie space.  Then dredging the pond.  Then goats?

Happy farming! 

Poseidon... and the Need for a Garden...

We have been thinking about the ocean a lot more lately than we usually do.  Mr. Myrtle Maintenance is from a small town near Corpus Christi, so he thinks about the ocean more than Mrs. Myrtle Maintenance, who is from out on the Llano Estacado (far west Texas, for the yankees among you).  However, the ocean has been impressed upon all of us lately, due to the criminal foolishness of our oil industry.

Oil doesn't really have a future; it hasn't for twenty-plus years, but our culture has become too fat and lazy to realize it.  Oil is dirty, lazy, and cheap, and those who make their money from it are equally dirty, lazy, and cheap.  We have known for a long time, at least two decades, how to garner enough solar and wind energy on a house-by-house basis to get rid of the electrical grid altogether, and we have been able to run cars on natural gas for decades; on top of that, for about five years now, we've had alternatives to internal combustion engines we could have been using already.

So why have we stuck with oil?  Because it was cheap to produce, and people could make a lot of money doing it.  But there has never, in the entire history of the industrial revolution, been a less effectively regulated industry.

And now we are paying the price for our collective laziness.

The real scope of the tragedy in the Gulf of Mexico has not even been hinted at yet in the mainstream media; talk of "dispersants" and the "evaporation" of oil has dulled our sensibilities on the nightly news, but anyone who remembers their basic physics knows that nothing simply disappears.  Where is the oil being dispersed to?  It's being dispersed to a vertical column beneath the surface of the Gulf of Mexico.  Which happens to be where a lot of fish live.  A LOT of fish.  Fish who form the basis for a whole other industry, a whole other lifestyle, a whole other economic basis for an entire region.  And it is going to, quite unlike the oil, simply disappear.  Dead zones in the ocean are not easily repaired once they appear; coral reefs, which form the basis for whole underwater ecospheres, take centuries to develop.  And in just a few short weeks, already at least a fifth of existing underwater coral in the Gulf has been contaminated.  Those are conservative estimates, and the oil is still pumping out.

Think about that.

Even if not one more drop were to enter the Gulf, 20% of it by the most conservative estimates is already likely to be dead for centuries.

There is simply no repairing that damage, and it is not likely to be limited to the Gulf, either.  This oil is going to end up washing up on the shores of Great Britain before all is said and done.  British Petroleum is quite literally coming home.

Adding to the cheerful news, we have only recently had, thanks to the invention of the "Argo float" pictured at left here, the ability to measure ocean temperatures effectively enough to tell whether the ocean is cooling, staying the same, or warming.

Surprise!  It's warming.  Which means the Earth is warming.  The oceans are far larger than land masses, and far deeper than the earth's habitable surface areas.  The heat-retaining capacity of the oceans is several orders of magnitude (10,000+ times greater) than that of either the land or the atmosphere.  And the water warms up more slowly, and cools down more slowly, than either the land or the air.  Which means if you want an accurate measure of how much heat the planet is retaining, you measure the water.  It comes as no surprise to Myrtle, who is a graduate of elementary physics studies, that in a partially closed system like Earth (far more energy is added to our global system than escapes from it), cranking up industrial production and greenhouse gasses is likely to cause an overall increase in temperatures.

Certain ostriches (well funded by the sleazebags in the oil industry) have attempted to deny that warming is occurring, but those foolish shenanigans should be well and thoroughly over now.  Denying global warming with the evidence from the oceans is tantamount to Ptolemaic astronomy in the Hubble telescope age.  It's not just stupid, it's evil.  Because we can't afford it any longer; we are already well past the time to take action.

So.  Is there any good news?  Yes, there is, though it seems faint at times.  The good news is, we can adapt.  Those who have space and can meet city ordinances, we say you should get chickens, and plant gardens.  In the short run, it may not seem like much, but in the long run, it will work wonders.  We also suggest buying an electric vehicle as soon as possible.  As soon as we are able to get off the electrical grid ourselves, we'll blog about how we've done it; if you're in that process yourselves, good for you!  Keep up the good work!  Maybe even drop Myrtle a line and tell us what we can do ourselves, or what we can do to help you.

We're all in this together, ultimately, so let's keep our chins up, and keep working the land.

Happy farming!

For the Birds... (or so they think!)

In the long, sad history of scarecrows we have known, one fact becomes very clear very quickly:  crows don't scare too easily.  And that's just your garden variety crow; by the time you move on to other rapacious species, such as thrushes, and grackles, and pigeons, oh my!  We feel certain that had Harper Lee been a corn farmer, she would have written "To Kill a Flamingo" instead of "To Kill a Mockingbird".

No, scarecrows don't work.  What does work, however, if you want to keep your avian friends from reaping what you sow, is trap crops, and around here, the best trap crop is sunflowers.  We have planted a wide variety of sunflowers this year, in the belief that at least some of these different species will surely yield big bulging disks of seeds that the birdies will flock to instead of to our precious corn crop.  And judging from the first few flowers to bloom, we've done well this season.

No sign of birds pecking the seeds out yet, but it's really just a matter of time.  And just in time, too, because the corn is ripening quickly.  This Spring's corn crop is a variety called "Kandy Korn", and we'll know it's ripe when its tassels get so long and pink it looks like Cousin It trying out for a Flock of Seagulls cover band.

We are always fascinated by the reactions we get from the neighbors when we have a large corn crop in the ground.  This is the crop people think of when they think about a vegetable garden, but it is not really all that common a non-professional crop.  Corn is a space hog, for one thing.  Also, it takes a lot of water; in a year like this one, where we are three full inches behind our average rainfall totals, that can be a critical problem.

And then there are the aforementioned birds.  What they don't eat, they knock over.  It's enough to make a backyard farmer batty.  But don't fret; just plant some flowers!

They're pretty, some are tasty, and most of all... They're for the birds!

Happy farming!

Ares and Aphrodite in the Garden

We believe fervently that the Greek gods and goddesses really need to hire some new publicists.  All their best lines have been stolen, and all their worst foibles have become all-encompassing moral warts.

It's just not fair, really, but what is an immortal Olympian supposed to do about it, put down their goblet and intervene?  Please.  That whole deus ex machina thing is so first century Levant.  It just isn't done anymore.

 For divine image reconditioning, the Gods need to look to modern metaphor merchants, like Myrtle, for instance, who has already rendered the opinion that Apollo and Dionysus symbolize the conflict between domestic and wild horticulture.   Nor are the poet and the vintner the only members of the pantheon to get Myrtle's attention.  Demeter and Persephone have each had some part of their stories told, as might be expected.  What little appreciation remains in our culture of these ancient myths is often associated with plants, farms, and gardens.  Demeter and Persephone have gotten less publicity, perhaps, than some others of their kin, but at least what publicity they have received has been mostly positive.

Not so for Ares and Aphrodite.  This pair has been relegated to the celestial tabloids for all eternity, and the rendering of their identities and stories has only gotten worse with the passing of time.

But is our modern dismissal of these archtypal figures reasonable, let alone fair?

Placed in the context of a garden, Myrtle's answer is "no", with some important caveats.

For starters, it is important to recognize that the Ares and Aphrodite we think we know are really just romanized bastardizations of themselves.  Pop psychology may be comfortable saying men are from Mars and women are from Venus, but this is puerile poppycock.  The Roman versions of these immortals are the inspirations for monster truck rallies and junior high girls dressed in practically nothing and dancing wildly to  "Brick House", respectively.  We'll leave you to be the judge of which is the more corrosive influence.

But Mars and Venus lack the moral depth of Ares and Aphrodite -- Aphrodite in particular.  There are some martial elements to gardening, particularly in the initial stages, where a wild copse is beaten into submission with plow and shears, so Ares has some place in the creation of a green, growing place, but it is Aphrodite who in particular has not received proper recognition in the agricultural arts.  Ginette Paris gives credit where it is due in her fascinating tome Pagan Meditations: The Worlds of Aphrodite, Artemis, and Hestia; indeed, she points out that there are a variety of myths about Aphrodite, who probably served the Greeks as the replacement for a series of earlier goddesses, running from Isis in Egypt through the various Ishtar cults which cropped up as far afield as the Indus river.

Paris also writes of "the interplay between fire and water, between Ares and Aphrodite."  The sexual ecstasy central to the National Enquirer version of these star-crossed lovers' tales is important in their metaphorical realm, as well, but it is not the only element, nor is it even the most important characteristic of the union of Ares and Aphrodite.

One wonders at what point in their history this union  became a chronicle of infidelity; why did some ancient poet or bard ever decide to marry off Aphrodite to Haephestus in the first place?  One suspects it is because, crippled though he is, Haephestus (Vulcan, to the Romans) has a potent maleness, a fertile virility, all his own.  But he is really just a metaphor for more of the same qualities Ares brings to the table -- he is rugged, dry summer to Ares' wet, sensual spring, when his fire melts the snows of winter, and he is overcome by passion for the dewy earth.

And both are central to the growth of life-giving vegetables.  That's right -- the gods of war and of the anvil are basically steroid-laden ploughboys.

As for Aphrodite, Demeter and Persephone have stolen all her laurels.  A sachet of lavender is an homage to sexy, slinky Aphrodite, not frumpy Demeter.

Think about this seriously, for a moment, please.  What is a flower?  It is the in-your-face sensuality of a plant that is letting its hair down and telling its neighbor, "Hey, baby, wanna buy me a drink?"  And it wouldn't smell nearly so sweet if it was imbued with the essence of "I'm really wholesome!  Don't I remind you of June Cleaver?"

No, a garden is basically one giant metaphor for sex.  There is no getting around it.  There is only proper placement of context, and appropriate balancing of one need against the other.  Venus and Mars were both too narcissistic to be anything other than lousy lovers, but if you listen to your garden closely, you can hear the ancient echoes of Ares and Aphrodite, whom we think probably had a far better thing than the modern storytellers would have you believe.

In other news, our corn is almost ready for harvest!  We'll update you soon!

Until then...

Happy farming!

Dionysus v. Apollo, redux

Any metaphor worth stretching too far is worth repeating too often.  From a chicken-brained point of view, the fundamental inadequacy of your argument should always be obfuscated by the superficiality of your affect.  To that end, we submit that our little urban homestead is increasingly a microcosm of the age-old conflict between two different paradigms -- the orderly and poetic on the one hand, represented by Apollo, and the natural and chaotic on the other, represented by Dionysus.

We, of course, are attempting to produce enough fruits and veggies to provide all our dietary needs.  Naturally, this means we have planted all sorts of "intentional" looking things, like pecan trees, pomegranate trees, olive trees, corn, squash, etc.  These plants require a lot of tender loving care; pecans are notoriously thirsty; we have heavily mulched our baby and built a clay retaining wall to assist this needy little artist in its never-ending quest to get enough water.  However, the entrance to our property is announced by a beautiful little yellow flower, sprouting from a prickly-pear which never actually needs any attention at all.  We'll be harvesting more fruit from the poet, true, but the libertine is, at present, far more aesthetically attuned.  Curiously, the cactus, lacking in artificial discipline, has a natural discipline which serves us well; we manufacture the protection for the pecan, but the cactus brings its own.

Who is the harder worker, we wonder?

Likewise, the Apollonian domesticated seedless grapes will eventually be less work for us than the wild, Dionysian mustang grapes, particularly in the matter of getting rid of the pits, but Apollo is not nearly so productive as his eastern cousin.  The fact is, this is a beautiful grape vine, and it will some day be an attractive shade provider for a bench we intend to place on one side of this arbor... but it is really nothing compared to the vast, sprawling wild grapes in our faerie ring area, and around the back porch, and along the fence between the pond and our neighbors...

At this point in the conversation, we really must mention the Greek notion of ergon; what is the proper thingness of a thing?  If that sounds like a horrible translation to you, congratulations! You're paying attention!  Meanwhile, of course, there is a reason for this apparent lack of etymological deftness -- "ergon" doesn't really translate all that well, but the idea is a fairly straightforward one:  each object in existence may best be given a particular application.  The "ergon" of a toothbrush is the collection of qualities which contribute to the use of a toothbrush in dental hygiene, for example.  the "ergon" of a knife is the sharpness which allows it to cut steak.  Or broccoli.  Different knife, of course, so slightly different ergon.  With us so far?

Good.  Because the "ergon" of a domesticated seedless grape is fundamentally different from that of a wild grape.

The wild grape is useful both as a border, and also as a wine producing crop.  It looks beautiful, but it is beautiful in a completely different way from the seedless cousin.

In short, we happen to like the balance struck in our garden at present.  We have plenty of "tame" plants, but they are almost always paired with a "wild" neighbor.  Marigolds and basil, meet catnip and anise.

Olives and pomegranates, meet black-eyed-susans.

Speaking of wildflowers....

Until next time...

Happy farming!

Singin' in the Rain

Our green, growing grove of great goodies never looks quite as nice as it does when it's wet.  And usually, it's wet for pretty much the entire month of May.  In College Station, we average about 5.5 inches of rainfall every May, and that is far and away more than we get in any other month.

Until today, however, we had gotten a total of (and I am estimating here, so forgive any rounding errors) zero inches of rain for May.  Zip.  Zilch.  Nada.

We're very, very glad to see the wet stuff falling from the skies this evening.  Very glad.

Myrtle doesn't think much of complainers, however, so we aren't complaining.  This extended dry period has provided us with plenty of opportunity to deepen the pond, and what little grass we have left in the yard hasn't needed mowing in a while, so that's a plus, too.

We're going to eliminate grass entirely this fall -- "green manure" crops will replace grass.  Red clover in the winter, white clover in the spring; we're quite hopeful that in addition to fixing nitrogen in our soil, it will be quite pretty.

Meanwhile, keep checking the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration web site for news about more wet stuff and...

Happy farming!

LangDetectzh>en GoogleDicC

having the colour of blood or fire, of the eyes, of the face, of hair or an animal's fur, having very left-wing political opinions, involving opposition or competition that is violent and without pity, something that is likely to make somebody very angry, the colour of blood or fire, red wine, a person with very left-wing political opinions, to owe money to your bank because you have spent more than you have in your account, to become very angry, Something that is , If you say that someone's face is , You describe someone's hair as

An Unbelievably Satisfying Moment

Picking the first blackberries of the year proved to be as phantasmagorically satisfying as an experience could be.

They're still just slightly red when you pick them right now; usually, folk wait until the red has turned to complete blackness (hence, "blackberry"), but we are 1) not patient enough for that, and 2) perfectly happy with that tart little bite at the front end of the berry experience.

There are few things in life as tasty as berries from your own backyard.  The fact that they also double as a thorny hedge is just a bonus.

We'll probably have several buckets of berries by the end of the week (you can see all the red ones on the vines right now, and they turn very, very quickly); we've already noticed numerous canes volunteering their way up in between the current plants, so we'll have to mark carefully when we pick the berries -- the idea is to prune this year's producing canes all the way back to the ground some time after harvest; next year's berries are on the empty canes from this year.

They are about a month away from harvest, but we are also going to get our first production quality wild grapes this year.  We probably won't get enough for wine-making, but we will almost definitely get enough to try our hands at some mustang jam, which will be quite an experience.  Hopefully, next summer, we will be producing our first batch of home vinted dark black cheese accoutrement.

Which brings us to the week's big rumination....  We want to make our own cheese.  But what do you have to have in order to make cheese?  Some form of dairy product, right?  Like, say, goat's milk?  Which would require... let us think... what is it?  Oh, yeah, a goat!

There's no telling exactly how many complications we will run into along the road to goat ownership -- a tall fence around the pond area, for one thing, not to mention getting permits and all that legal folderol -- but when the proprietors of Myrtle's place set their hearts on something related to self-sufficiency, we've come to expect that it will happen, sooner or later.

Just witness the berries!  Two years ago, we planted puny root stock, and now we are swimming in juicy, sweet, tart little berries!

An incredibly satisfying experience, indeed.  Now we just need to make some good mustang wine, bake a nice blackberry cobbler, and eat a good home-grown salad topped with home-grown feta.  If you can think of a better way for us to be spending our time, by all means let us know.

In the meantime,

Happy farming!

It's a Jungle Out There

We have in the past ruminated on wide-row planting, and the dangers of 'sub-optimization', wherein overall production is limited due to a desire to maximize the production of an individual plant.

Upon further review of our current practices, we have realized that, while it is true that in some parts of the garden we have been guilty of sub-optimization (our cucumbers, for example, are growing in solitary stands against our western fence), it is also true that in other parts of our garden, particularly the well companion-planted portions, it is quite literally a jungle out there.  We have successfully crammed as much vibrant, active growth as possible into a few square feet in some instances, like the zucchini/corn/nasturtium combination you see pictured here to the left.

The contrast between the high-density beds and the low-density beds is really pretty remarkable; we will get a higher percentage of fruit from the cucumber shown to the right here than we will from any individual zucchini or corn plant in the first picture.  This cucumber plant will, on its own merits, be a champion.

But from the bed?  There will be no contest -- we will have far higher yield from the high density bed than from the cukes.  T'ain't fair, but them's the facts.

In light of this overwhelming evidence of the superiority of the high-density bed method of gardening, we are faced with some interesting decisions this summer, most notably, how exactly do we carve up our existing space in such way as to maximize how many plants can be successfully grown in small spaces?

There are a lot of different methods people use to solve this particular conundrum, and we are currently employing one of the more popular.  We have numerous raised beds throughout the yard, each about 6 to 7 feet long/wide, and each is essentially its own independent garden.

We also have a rather serpentine bed with some additional corn and sunflowers growing on one side of the yard, where next year we will plant additional olive trees, and then we have the grape arbors and the blackberry fences, not to mention the pomegranates, plums, the pecan tree, and all the shade trees we planted earlier this spring.


But is this method really sufficient?  We don't think so.  You'll notice, with a fairly cursory glance at our garden, that there is an appalling lack of climbing legumes.  No beans.  No snap peas.  What kind of a southern garden monstrosity is this?  We are facing a decision in one of two directions:

Take out the planters and put in a series of serpentine beds in parallel running the width of the yard from the olive trees to the pond area, two or three of which would have large trellises installed in order to handle vining plants like pole beans, etc.

Or...

Take out the planters and put in a series of three large fenced in areas, each of which will essentially be a giant raised bed. 

The advantage of the first method would be ease of working the rows; you simply walk between them and weed, plant, harvest, mulch, and so on.

The advantage of the second is maximum geometric effect -- there will be more surface area on the fence line for climbing plants, and the wide-row planting method can still be used internally in each fenced-in area.  This method would also have the advantage of discouraging rabbits, although we would still have to worry about other critters who are somewhat more mobile (raccoons, possums, etc.).

As with all else, Myrtle will keep you posted on what we end up deciding to do.

Meanwhile....  spring harvest is berry, berry soon!  Those berries may look red, but don't let that fool you.  These are blackberries.  If we picked them right now, they would be very, very bitter blackberries.  We'll let them ripen to their nice dark purplish-black before we pick them, and then we will most likely use them strictly for cooking... this year.  In the future, we have designs on making wine, mead, and goodness only knows what all else.  But you can only master so many skills at a time; we at Myrtle's place have our hands full at present.

Until next time,

Happy farming!

Great Place to Pick Up Chicks

We have six chickens in the coop right now, laying anywhere from three to seven eggs a day, depending on a wide variety of factors.  Since we are a family of four, that means we have anywhere from a heap to a ton of extra eggs every day.

The solution to having too many eggs?  Get more chickens, naturally!

Seriously, there's no such thing as "too many eggs".  What we don't eat, we give away (see earlier postings for our feelings about barter versus sale of eggs) and what we don't give away, we give away.

So, really, "too many eggs" isn't going to happen.

Lonely chickens, however, might happen.  We have been astonished at how incredibly social these creatures are.  The flock currently in the coop is relatively small at six birds, but they are constantly clustered in the same four or five square feet of space -- which leaves plenty of empty space in the coop.

We therefore decided to take the plunge recently and get four more baby chicks.  Barred Rock chickens are kinda fuzzy when you first bring them home, but our new birds are a couple of weeks old now, and have sprouted recognizable feathers -- not as many as they will soon have, true, but enough for them to flap around with, and flat-foot jump from the ground to the wire on which their heat lamp is hung.  We may get some roasted baby chicken some time soon if they don't stop it.

Those of you thinking of taking the plunge and getting your own backyard birds, by all means, do so.  But just because we at Myrtle's are now kind of casual about the process, don't think it's all that easy.  We had to learn the hard way how to handle several variables.

For one thing, the "experts" all give you these incredibly complicated charts on what the temperature is supposed to be at each stage of the chicks' development.  As tricky as they make it sound, it makes one wonder how the genus gallus managed to survive in the wild, what with nobody running around with thermometers, or setting space heaters in just the right places at the right times.  Maybe... just maybe... poultry scientists have gone a little overboard.  Yes, they need to be kept warm.  How warm?  Warm enough that they look comfortable.  When should you change the temperature?  When they stop looking comfortable.  Got it?  Good!  Get some chickens!

We're going to integrate the flocks in about a month -- that will be a serious adventure.  We've done it once before, and the elder chickens did not, we must say, acquit themselves with any sort of ethical aplomb.  We had to stand out there with clubs like the Alabama National Guard to get them integrated.  It was not a pretty sight, and we expect more of the same.  But they will eventually get along; mostly, it will involve tricking them with games, like hanging cabbage heads from the ceiling of the coop.

Like people, chickens are easily distracted.

We'll keep you posted on the progress of these young'uns.  In the meantime...

Happy farming!

Gimme, Gimme, Gimme! We Want More!

We always feel a little uncomfortable when we make statements like, "Couldn't we get more out of this if we just...?"

Why should this make us uncomfortable?  Because, at its heart, every vice is really just an excess of virtue.  Even the clownish modern industrial society diet (which can no longer be claimed as exclusively "American", since McDonald's is now on every major city street corner in the world) is really just an excess of an evolutionarily sound principle:  fatty protein is harder to come by than other nutrients.  We are programmed by millions of years of hard living on the savanna to cram fatty meats down our throats as often as we can get them.  He who super-sizes most, wins.  That is, until the saber-toothed tiger catches them napping.  Oh, well.

It wasn't until modern industrial farming techniques, coupled with the massive expansion of wealth during the industrial revolution, that we as a species became capable of eating way too much of "the good stuff".  More is no longer better when it comes to meat.

However, it must be noted that "more is better" is not always a bad philosophy; like everything else, it just needs a proper context.  In the home garden, particularly the home garden which is attempting to aspire to the hopeful possibility of someday wishing to be possibly considered, if you suspend your disbelief just a little, a miniature farm, "more is better" is an apt description of the notion of yield-per-square-foot.

The leap from back porch container gardening to full-fledged farming is not so large as imagination has made it.  Indeed, just a couple of generations ago, American families were being encouraged to live as much as possible off of "Victory Gardens", which reduced the strain on the industrial complex of providing both for the needs of a domestic population and for the needs of an army in Europe and a navy in the Pacific.  Everybody grew as much as they could back then; they also had chickens, but that's a subject for another time.

Right now, we're talking about how to make the modern "Victory Garden" possible in a very limited urban space.  The answer, we are ashamed to say, escaped us until a couple of weeks ago.  Our garden this spring is planted in a traditional way in raised beds, with narrow rows which we can reach from all four sides of each bed.  Oh, it's good, in its way, but this method has a yield limit which we are not satisfied in accepting.

We have committed the classical production error:  we have maximized our individual parts.

We are getting as much yield as possible from each individual seed.  The problem is, the yield for our garden needs to be maximized, not the yield for each plant.

The solution is something called wide row gardening.  We have seen several good articles on this subject this past week, and this fall we are going to give it a go.  Basically, you plant in a "wide row"; rather than a line of plants single-file, you cluster your plants in a wide stripe rather than a line.  The plants are closer together, and as a consequence, the yield per individual plant will be lower.  However, the yield per square foot will be significantly higher.

This project will involve some considerable architectural changes to the garden; the "dead period" in College Station is July 1st-15th; we'll have to be careful with the peppers, which are the only plants which stay in the ground in the vegetable garden during that time; there will be some other interesting problems to come up as well, we are sure, but we hope to more than double our corn harvest this fall, and we may even find enough space to reinstitute melon farming this fall, too.

Next posting, we'll update you on the progress of our latest batch of baby chicks.

Until then,

Happy farming!