Details (and an actual logo, hopefully, if our resident artist is up to it...) to follow soon, but we have tentatively scheduled the first annual Brazos Valley Pulletpalooza tour of backyard chicken facilities for the first weekend in December!
We currently have three definite spots on the tour, and numerous others who are probables. The idea will be to visit with each backyard chicken family, see how their birds are sited and cared for, and enjoy refreshments (with a heavy egg theme, naturally!)
This event will be in lieu of a monthly tour of a local farm on the part of the Brazos Locavores, which is a truly fine organization which promotes local foods. The Locavores actually have a wide variety of programs on their horizon which will be geared towards encouraging home production over the next few years, not just of eggs, but also of anything else you can grow in your backyard. At some point, they will be working in a tour of local gardens (though perhaps not in the same year as a tour of chicken coops, but as you know, we at Myrtle's place think you ought to have both anyway, right?) and maybe even a workshop or two.
Any and all backyard bird owners are more than welcome! And anyone who is on the verge of bird (Leslie? Y'all got your birds yet?) is encouraged to get involved, too!
We are very excited about this, and will post a lot more as time draws near.
We say something so frequently around our place that it would be a motto, if only it didn’t sound so much more like the barking of a drill sergeant: “Don’t tell me can’t!” We do not believe in “can’t”.
Our primary income at present is a regular ol’ day job with a largish company which, among other things, provides for our health insurance. In keeping with a national trend, our coverage is dependent upon undergoing biometric screening, and again as part of the zeitgeist, we will receive discounts on our premiums should we reach certain metrical goals, such as a body mass index (BMI) rated below 30, which is the standard definition of obesity.
We have heard numerous complaints about all the scores which will be used, including blood pressure below 130/90 (which is borderline hypertensive!), or about blood sugar levels, or about being nicotine free, but none of the complaints has been as loud as the complaints about the use of BMI to determine who gets a discount and who doesn’t.
A colleague recently exclaimed over lunch “Have you ever even seen what your ‘so-called ideal weight’ is? Nobody can reach that! It can’t be done!”
Hmmmm…..
Now, Myrtle Maintenance Personnel have been fighting our bulging waistlines for quite some time, just like most Americans. And we have had infrequent successes coupled with a staggering number of setbacks, just like most other moms and dads throughout this great land of ours. Our track record, in short, is no better than anyone else’s.
But don’t you tell us it can’t be done.
In fact, a very brief review of the relevant statistics will show that not only can it be done, it was being done by practically everybody until just very, very recently.
“In 1990, among states participating in the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, 10 states had a prevalence of obesity less than 10% and no states had prevalence equal to or greater than 15%. By 1998, no state had prevalence less than 10%, seven states had a prevalence of obesity between 20-24%, and no state had prevalence equal to or greater than 25%. In 2008, only one state (Colorado) had a prevalence of obesity less than 20%. Thirty-two states had a prevalence equal to or greater than 25%; six of these states (Alabama, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, and West Virginia) had a prevalence of obesity equal to or greater than 30%.”
In just 20 years, we have gone from having a relatively small proportion of our population destined for hip and knee replacements, coronary bypass surgery, and early death from complications due to hypertension and diabetes, to having anywhere from 20-30% of our population disabled by our own corpulence.
There is a tremendous desire, when reviewing these statistics, to get on a soap box or a high horse, and flay the sorry hides of all those lazy, disgusting overeating underachievers. The problem, of course, is that we and practically everyone we know would have to be included in that group, which would make for a highly ineffective bout of hypocritical preaching, not to mention making us extremely unpopular at parties.
A spate of recent studies, too, suggest that there is more going on than meets the eye. For starters, obesity can rightly be described as epidemic, for a variety of reasons. The most obvious is purely statistical – the fact that between 1/4th and 1/3rd of our population is clinically obese qualifies this condition as epidemic. More than that, though, the disease is catching. If you are related to someone who is chronically overweight, you are more likely to be overweight yourself.
Worse still, if you know someone who is overweight, you are more likely to be overweight yourself. And the capo di tutti capi is this: if someone you know knows someone who is overweight, you are more likely to be overweight yourself.
Clearly, there is more to obesity than simply a breakdown in the willpower of individual fat and lazy slobs. Oh, sure, there are people who are obese because they don’t have any gumption… but come on, get real. Are you really going to sit there on your bean bag chair munching your Cheetos and tell us that the reason close to 1/3rd of our nation is obese is because they don’t try very hard? That stretches credulity.
We at Myrtle’s suspect that there are several factors involved, and a loss of will is not one of them. However, an improved sense of determination can be part of the solution. What needs to change? We really believe the answer lay in thinking about what things have changed in the 25 years since everything started going haywire.
Supersize me. Portion sizes are much, much bigger now than at any point in human history. The average American consumes over 800 more calories per day than they did in the 1970s. That is too much. We need to reduce portion sizes.
Sleep. A recent study suggests that a person who has not received enough nighttime rest will eat a Big Mac's worth of extra calories the following day above and beyond their already too calorie rich standard, just to try to give themselves an energy boost.
Get up and move. As our economy has shifted from a manufacturing economy to a service economy, “going to work” has meant, more often than not, going to a cubicle and sitting down all day. We don't walk nearly as much as we used to just in the course of everyday living.
Get the good stuff. The nutritional value of practically everything we eat is less now than it used to be. This is the natural consequence of soil depletion – fewer nutrients in our soils means fewer nutrients in our fruits and vegetables – which we are not eating enough of as it is.
You want some food with that high fructose corn syrup? Check out the ingredient list of everything in your kitchen. No, wait, don't. It will just scare you. Getting the good stuff should include getting organic whole foods, not just for the increased nutritional content, but also to keep yourself from consuming the addictive sugars which agribusiness has been stuffing down our throats.
One pound of human flesh represents roughly 3,500 calories, give or take. This is not exactly a precise kind of science, but if you visualize a pound that way, it gives you a great place to start in figuring out how to get rid of all those extra pounds – you need to run a calorie deficit of about 500 calories per day throughout the week to lose a pound a week. That means eating less and exercising more.
It's that simple. It's just a math problem, and not even a hard one, at that.
The trick is putting it into practice. We have been lackadaisical about that around these parts, just like everybody else. Not any longer – somebody told us can't. We don't take kindly to those words. We don't take kindly to them at all.
Our exercise will come in the form of digging and digging. And then digging some more. Our diet will consist of locally and organically grown fruits and vegetables, supplemented by oily fishes and lean meats. All of these good whole foods will be served in small portion sizes, and washed down with copious quantities of distilled water. And a year from now, Myrtle Maintenance Personnel will each have a BMI in the 25-27% range. We have spoken; it will happen.
Happy dieting! And happy farming! (For us, these concepts go hand in hand.)
The primary drawback with wine is the dreaded tannin-induced headache. This risk is doubly noxious when it comes to wines made from fruit other than grapes. A 2004 paper entitled The Effect of Two Methods of Pomegranate (Punica granatum L) Juice Extraction on Quality During Storage at 4ºC makes note of the fact that the chief reason tannins exist in fruit juices is the damage to cellular tissue when fruit is squeezed as part of the extraction process. With pomegranates in particular, this leads to a bitter taste; in spite of having high citric acid content as well as a host of interesting sugars, this is the overwhelming sensation most people experience when drinking pomegranate juice.
Juicers invariably represent the cheapest, easiest way to get at the goods – the most obvious examples in the typical kitchen include orange juice squeezers, which really amount to just a catch-all device with a protrusion on which the sliced orange is crushed; alternatively, think of the humble garlic press, which crushes garlic and excretes it through a grate or grill. In each case, manual force pulverizes and pulps the produce until the finished portion is in the desired form.
The superior method in terms of juice quality is the use of a centrifugal juice extractor. Naturally, being the superior method, it is also the more expensive method. Most centrifuges are fairly straightforward in their construction; however, a high powered motor necessary to create the extreme forces involved in this extraction method carries a higher price tag than does the crank or handle on a device which relies more on good old fashioned elbow grease for the requisite force.
We are not close enough yet to bringing in the kind of volume from our fruit crops which would justify the extra expense, but we are seriously thinking about it. A good quality extractor is on the long-term list, because if we can reduce the bitter taste of pure pomegranate juice, that would be pure gold for us.
Additionally, we have always scoffed at purists in the vintner world. The questions we ask when discussing a fine wine are never the same as the questions asked by aficionados; we want to know “Does it taste good?” “Does it go with spicy food?” “Does it go with chocolate?” Whether or not it was blended, has a good nose, is dry or sweet, we could care less about any of that.
Disdain for fruit wines, in fact, reminds us of all the conventional wisdom in the National Football League about Washington Redskins quarterback Doug Williams: “A black man will never win as a quarterback in this league.” Horse-hockey. A winner is a winner; Mr. Williams has his Super Bowl ring; the scoffers have their sour grapes. And good wine is good wine, regardless of whether it was made with pinot grapes from a vineyard in Provence, or from concord grapes growing wild in Massachusetts, or from blackberries growing on our backyard fence.
Our challenge, obviously, is not going to be getting it correct. Our challenge will be to get it right. Propriety can take a flying leap; we just want our guests to be as pleased with their beverage as they always are with their cobbler.
All that having been said, we now come to the difficult admission: the reason conventional wisdom about wine is so difficult to shake is because it is founded upon thousands of years of experimentation and endeavor. Traditional wines are categorized the way they are precisely because for so long, the traditional methods have worked.
Most novitiates know only the difference between "white" and "red", and might be familiar with the aversion of wine enthusiasts for the more plebeian "rosé". What makes a pinot grigio different from a pinot noir, or what Miles meant by "If anybody orders any (expletive) merlot, I'm leaving!" is a mystery to most consumers; the truth is, however, that these distinctions all come from much research and experience which has led to a host of subtle rules-of-the-road for producers and consumers.
However, we believe that as with most things in life, wine can be vastly improved by steady application of principles borrowed from other disciplines. The best jazz musicians all borrowed from blues; the best novelists all allude to classical Greek comedies and tragedies; the best wines all taste like something the consumer can't quite remember, but they know it makes them feel good. Maybe it is the lavender overtones of a particular burgundy which reminds one of homemade lime sherbet their grandmother made. Maybe the pungent anise of a chardonnay made from grapes grown next to a basil field brings to mind the pleasant memories of a stern father relaxing at the end of the day, putting down his accounting ledger, and smoking a pipe.
We don't know what other people's favorite memories are, we just know that we at Myrtle's place like sweet fruit drinks, including sweet fruit wines. Messina Hof Port is perhaps the best tasting beverage we have ever consumed. We don't aim to be better than Messina Hof; we just aim to be better than other home grown beverages.
And part of that will involve experimentation. If the big problem with two of our basic crops, pomegranates and wild grapes, is that the natural sweetness of the fruit does not translate to sweet juice, then we will attack that problem first. Given that our trees are probably 2-3 years out from production, we have some time, but it's never too early to start thinking about experimentation.
So. We're on the lookout for inexpensive centrifugal fruit juicers. We'll report excitedly when we find (and, more importantly, figure out how to pay for) one. Until then,
Bulding Soils for Better Crops, Fred Magdoff’s and Harold Van Es’s homage to organic matter and its importance to soil health, references several case studies where the addition of readily available cheap or even free soil nutrient sources, such as leaves or wood chips from curbside trash pickup, must eventually be reduced once soil has reached an optimum percentage of organic material – somewhere between 3.5-5% – because further input of rotting material would lead to nutrient leaching after harvest.
At Myrtle’s place, we are used to asking ourselves “Why?” And we are not at all pleased when we are told “You can’t do that!”
Now, we typically apply these irreverent and anti-authoritarian qualities towards those who suggest ridiculously conformist ideas, like “You can’t grow vegetables without fertilizer and pesticide.” However, even people who know what they are talking about occasionally say something that makes us go, “What?”
Nutrient leaching is a concept that we simply refuse to accept. It is real enough, of course; that’s not what we are saying. Nutrient leaching is the runoff of things like nitrates or phosphorous from your topsoil, and it has serious consequences for groundwater supplies. We are in no way suggesting that these very real issues are not a concern.
Rather, we don’t believe that high nutrient values in post-harvest soil necessarily have to result in those nutrients running off, at least not in the context of the small farm or garden plot.
Every good thing has its point of diminishing returns, of course, but to date we have seen no literature which suggests it is even possible to reach the level of organic matter in your soil which plants simply cannot take advantage of. For anyone who has ever gone a week without turning their compost, you can relate to what we are saying. Having to pull weeds from the compost before turning it shows just exactly how lovey-dovey the relationship is between growing things on the one hand and dead and decaying things on the other.
We are going to experiment this fall with a garden plot design whose intent is to maximize organic matter. As we have described on numerous occasions, soil in the Brazos Valley is equivalent to the wet clay any potter would be proud to slap on a wheel. In addition, however, it is also sadly lacking in what Magdoff and Van Es describe as “living, dead and very dead” materials. Weeds do very well here; everything else has traditionally required a lot of external inputs.
We aim to break that mold on a large scale by doing what we have been doing all along, only in a more concerted way. We have often talked about the deep bedding method we use with our chickens, wherein we lay down about three feet of composting leaves in the chicken coop. The chickens then poop on the leaves, and turn the leaves over as they scratch for bugs. This stirs the compost tea in such a way as to reduce the manure smell to negligible levels, in addition to creating the perfect external input for the garden.
We can’t really add any more chicken poop to the mixture, having maxed out how many chickens we can have in our coop, but we can do something about where the organic mixture gets off to once it’s in the garden. Runoff from topsoil requires two key elements: somewhere to run off from, and somewhere to run off to. The from is still the same – the places in the garden where we apply the compost. The to, however, is something we can control.
We are going to kill two birds with one stone; we have a lot of useless clay, compacted to the point of almost being adobe brick, which we are removing from the fish pond. We need some way to stop topsoil from running off from the vegetable plots.
Put two and two together, and you come up with a low berm surrounding the vegetable garden, composed of solid clay. Any soil eroding from raised mounds or rows in the vegetable garden will simply fill a furrow between the sides of the roughly rectangular berm, and will be a great place to plant the next season’s row of vegetables. In fact, if we play our cards right, this may be a way to improve the soil tilth when we eventually move to reduce tillage – meaning we may not have to turn over the soil so often, or resort to using a roto-tiller. Since our garden plot will eventually be comprised almost entirely of the detritus of rotted leaves and chicken poop mixed into the slimy, sludgy soil, the aeration should improve dramatically over what you get with solid Brazos Valley clay.
This would not be a good idea for a large plot, nor for a plot where the prevailing soil type is not compacted clay, like it is here in College Station, because runoff is not the only source of groundwater contamination. Seepage is another means for high nitrogen or phosphorous content of topsoil to pollute the groundwater supply, and if you were working in a rocky or sandy topsoil, the seepage would be unacceptably high; excess nutrients would therefore be almost as bad a thing as insufficient nutrients in such soils.
In the Brazos Valley, however, if we can minimize the amount of water retention, we can minimize the amount of seepage. This secondary source of contamination we hope to contain through aggressive planting of sunflowers on the perimeter of the garden. This solves multiple problems, first as a trap crop keeping birds from harvesting our vegetables, and second as a means of soaking up water and nutrients from deeper in the soils. Studies in the plains states have indicated that sunflowers do a good job of drying out soils to a surprising depth of 8-10 feet, which is more than sufficient, given how close to the surface our bedrock lay, to prevent excessive seepage from our topsoil.
Since we have a fairly small plot, we will be able to test the soil within the berm, the soil surrounding the berm, and also the mineral content of the nearest source of groundwater (the fish pond!) and get a pretty good idea of whether our theory is correct.
What we expect is that without having the open irrigation so prevalent in large scale operations, where there is simply no preventing rain water from running off the crop land and into the surrounding ecosphere, we should be able to get organic matter percentages in our soil of 10% or more and still have no appreciable impact on the surrounding water supplies. If this turns out to be true, we suspect that our produce yields should increase geometrically, with no negative consequences to the environment.
Magdoff and Van Es actually make numerous references to small market produce plots when discussing methods for adding organic matter and for reducing tillage; they point out that some of the unique qualities of this type of business preclude the preferred methods of improving soil, notably the use of cover crops.
This makes perfect sense; if the “growing season” is actually a year-long term, the way it is in most of Texas, then a vegetable gardener is likely to have no true “fallow” season as it is understood by large scale farmers from anywhere else in the country. However, by essentially containerizing a roughly 1200 square foot vegetable plot, we believe we will be giving ourselves a shot at making the perfect soil.
Fingers and wingtips are crossed! Shovels are at the ready!
Our chickens love bugs. Crickets, grasshoppers, dragonflies, wasps, spiders, junebugs, roaches, beetles, butterflies, if it creeps or crawls, they will joyfully scoop it up and do a victory lap around the coop, whether the other chickens notice them or not.
Like most people, the very word “bug” has always conjured up for us an image of nasty creepy crawlies, and the idea of the chickens eating said critters cheers us greatly. However, bugs are more complicated than that, and their relationship to a healthy garden is also much more sophisticated than a cursory and prejudicial review might indicate.
We have mentioned before that we intend to install an apiary some time soon; we have a wild honey bee hive on the property at present, and we would like to move the bees from their present home to a box where we can get at their honey; we’d ideally like to have a couple of boxes, and go into small-scale commercial production of the golden stuff. It doesn’t hurt that bees pollinate fruits and vegetables, either.
However, in researching bees and their role as pollinators, we have discovered that the equation is not so simple – there are important limitations on what bees can and cannot do for a gardener, and there are subtle relationships between various plants and insects which must be respected. Some bugs, like honey bees, are vital, but do not do everything we always thought they did. Other bugs, like bluebottle flies, are annoying as all get-out, but do some helpful things we never thought they could.
Anecdotally, one of the more remarkable prejudices we have personally been forced to face down comes from literature. When reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Poisonwood Bible, we remember thinking it highly unlikely that the story of an American missionary being unable to grow familiar garden vegetables in Africa due to a lack of pollinating vectors could possibly be true. Sure, African bees would be unfamiliar with American veggies, but a flower is a flower, right?
Wrong.
As it turns out, the relationships between insects and plants are intensely affected by geometric, chemical, and photochromatic concerns, all of which should be kept in mind by gardeners who, all too often, reach for the can of Raid any time the buzz of six-legged ‘interlopers’ is heard.
As an example, the most popular plant in the American backyard vegetable plot is the tomato. If you grow any vegetables at all, this is likely to be the first one you plant. And we are all familiar with the bright yellow tomato flower. You may assume that if you have honey bees, you will have no problem with tomato pollination, but you would be wrong.
Tomatoes must be “buzz pollinated”, meaning that in addition to having a bug land on the flower, the bug must generate sufficient vibration from the flapping of its wings to dislodge the pollen; honey bees are incapable of this degree of vibration. Bumblebees, however, do the job quite well. As do bluebottle flies! If you don’t have bumblebees, the odds are your tomato crop is successful only if you have enough flies; something to think about at your next picnic.
Red clover is another popular plant with which honey bees can’t do a thing. The flower is too deep for them to reach the nectar, and as a consequence, they never get the pollen stuck to their legs, and so never take it to the next plant. Some bees (again, the bumblebee being prominent) have longer tongues, and can pollinate red clover. Some moths and butterflies, too, love this cover crop.
There is a whole field of research devoted to maximizing the ability of vectors to pollinate certain crops in certain conditions. There are even researchers who are investigating the proper means of covering a greenhouse where certain species of bee (who navigate via their vision of ultraviolet light, with which glass or plexiglass greenhouse walls usually interferes) must be contained.
The more holistic the researchers, however, the more successful they seem to be. Beneficial insects and pest species really ought not be considered separately; the whole ecosphere needs to be taken under advisement when thinking about how to best manage your garden. Book 7 of the handbook series from the Sustainable Agriculture Network – National Outreach Arm of USDA is entitled Manage Insects on your Farm: A Guide to Ecological Strategies, and it offers this advice:
Select and grow a diversity of crops that are healthy, have natural defenses against pests, and/or are unattractive or unpalatable to the pests on your farm. Choose varieties with resistance or tolerance to those pests. Build your soil to produce healthy crops that can withstand pest pressure. Use crop rotation and avoid large areas of monoculture.
Stress the pests… Interrupt their life cycles, remove alternative food sources, confuse them.
Enhance the populations of beneficial insects that attack pests. Introduce beneficial insects or attract them by providing food or shelter. Avoid harming beneficial insects by timing field operations carefully. Wherever possible, avoid the use of agrichemicals that will kill the beneficials as well as pests.
These are the fundamental building block steps to achieving balanced management. Pests should not be eradicated, they should be gently led away from those places in which you do not wish them to be. Control is always an illusion; the best we can hope for is to take advantage of predictability.
If you know, for example, that you want more bumblebees in your yard because you have a large crop of tomatillo plants which flower like crazy, but have not yet produced fruit, the answer is fairly obvious: plant red clover. The bees love the clover, but they will also eventually notice your tomatillos.
If you want to reduce the population of Colorado potato bugs who are munching on your tomatoes, attract some beneficial bugs like the Assassin beetle by planting a cover crop of hairy vetch, crimson clover, or rye.
Improving the quality of your soil, too, reduces the need to worry about whether your plants are being attacked by any sort of pest. From Manage Insects… again:
“Healthier soils produce crops that are less damaged by pests. Some soil-management practices boost plant-defense mechanisms, making plants more resistant and/or less attractive to pests. Other practices – or the favorable conditions they produce – restrict the severity of pest damage by decreasing pest numbers or building beneficials.”
Further, even where pests persist, healthy plants are not likely to be taken down by them:
“Practices that promote soil health constitute one of the fundamental pillars of ecological pest management. When stress is alleviated, a plant can better express its inherent abilities to resist pests. Ecological pest management emphasizes preventative strategies that enhance the ‘immunity’ of the agroecosystem. Farmers should be cautious of using reactive management practices that may hinder the crop’s immunity. Healthier soils also harbor more diverse and active populations of the soil organisms that compete with, antagonize, and ultimately curb soil-borne pests. Some of those organisms – such as springtails – serve as alternate food for beneficials when pests are scarce, thus maintaining viable populations of beneficials in the field. You can favor beneficial organisms by using crop rotations, cover crops, animal manures and composts to supply them with additional food.”
For most of human history, the prevailing motif has been the casual acceptance of the idea that “Man vs. Nature” is an unending battle which we have no choice but to enjoin. That paradigm is a roadmap to extinction, not just for all the species left in our wake, but also for ourselves.
We cannot haphazardly poison half the planet just to try (and fail!) to rid the other half of particularly pestilential potato bugs. True wisdom in pest control lay in the question “What is the least amount of force which will work?” In that regard, gardening is a lot like parenting.
Sometimes your garden even talks back. And, as with your children, it might be a good idea sometimes to listen, instead of complaining about their “backtalk”. Your kids are smarter than you give them credit for. So are your bugs.
We recently had houseguests from Austin, which provided two unique garden-related topics of conversation. First, we had to apologize for the fact that they were visiting at the time of year when we have droopy, sad peppers, a bunch of herbs, a few brave sunflowers, and nothing else in the garden. For those with tunnel-vision, the sunflowers are pretty, and so are the basil and rosemary, but in the second week of July, nothing else in our garden is attractive in the least.
The second topic of conversation was the difference in environment between the Hill Country, which starts in Austin just after you cross I-35 going west, and the Brazos Valley, comprising Bryan/College Station, and surrounding counties. We have very similar weather, with College Station being somewhat more humid than Austin, and getting slightly more rain on an annual basis (although not this year).
However, we have very different soils. Acidifying the soil is, for us, not particularly difficult, given how much rotting organic matter we deal with on a regular basis; in Austin, soil alkilinity is a serious consideration. The desert proper doesn’t start for another 150 miles or so westward, but they still have to deal with numerous desert characteristics, including relatively high soil pH.
Another difference is soil type; we live on clay soup; the Brazos Valley is basically built on sludge. In Austin, however, if you dig down more than an inch or two, you stand a pretty good chance of hitting rock. They threw out their most recent batch of broken granite, saying “it was all ugly trash”.
We wish they had not been so efficient; trashy Austin rocks would beat all-hollow the non-existant Brazos Valley rocks; we use scrap-heap broken cement slab pieces as borders in our front yard, because they are the most attractive “natural” features available in College Station. Fortunately, no one notices that they are not slabs of limestone, which is some comfort, but we will always know they are not really natural, even if no one else does.
July is really the best time for assessment of things like soil conditions, because unlike the other eleven months of the year, July is rigidly predictable. In this part of the country, July is going to be hot and dry; you can’t do much of anything in terms of actively growing things, but you can do plenty in preparation for the following seasons.
Most of the country speaks of “the growing season” as the time of year between the last frost in Spring and the first frost in Fall; in Texas, we actually have three distinct growing seasons: 1) Spring planting, around the time of last frost, roughly from the start of February in the Rio Grande Valley up through late March/early April in the northern third of the state, and lasting until roughly the last week of June; 2) Fall planting, starting roughly July 15th and lasting through first frost, roughly late November to early December; and 3) Winter planting, starting shortly before first frost, approximately late October to early November, and lasting until just before final frost in February or March.
In most of the country, you can’t grow anything in Winter; in Texas, the only time you can’t grow anything is the 2-3 weeks between “die off” in late June, and the mid-point of July. Even then, when you plant in late July, you often have to do your due diligence and put up shade barriers to keep seedlings from burning to a crisp in the afternoon sun.
So what does one do in this fallow time?
For one thing, you lay fallow yourself. One of the more fascinating dichotomies we have observed in modern life is how frenetically we move while doing so very little. Sleep experts have long recognized that the Spanish tradition of siesta has physiological merit; our bodies need a deep sleep event roughly half-way between our long night-time slumbers; an afternoon nap would literally cure half our ills. In addition to clarity of thought, recent studies have also suggested that getting enough sleep is a key to fighting obesity.
July is a good time to institute the regimen of the afternoon nap, for those who do not have to undergo the indignity of a day job. When that is not possible, we suggest at least taking naps on the weekends, particularly during the heat of the day. We are constantly amazed at just how much we can get done in the garden during the evening hours after having first taken a good nap.
We are reminded of the Buddhist injunction: “Don’t just do something, sit there!”
Once you are certain that you are not overworking yourself, ask whether or not your soil is being overworked. Dirt is the lifeblood of a garden; we pay a lot of attention to whether plants have too little or too much water, but seldom do we ask whether the soil is tired or vibrant. There are numerous methods described in the literature for maximizing crop yields, and we are guilty of having proponed some of these methods ourselves; there are times, however, when it is important to exercize the Swedish concept of ‘lagom’ which loosely translates to English as “plenty good”; if you are getting enough, then that’s enough. You don’t need to supersize in your garden any more than you do in your diet.
At Myrtle’s place, the routine is actually very simple, because we have one solution which answers all our soil problems; our entire plot is, as mentioned, comprised of clay. Half our yard is alkaline, thanks to the vicissitudes of urban development. We grow corn every spring and fall, which depletes nitrogen more rapidly than just about any other garden crop. The answer to all these issues is the same: work in more chicken poop and rotting leaves.
In the Spring and Fall, this is actually a fun task; the chickens absolutely love “new leaf day”, when their old matted bedding is taken out, and the floor of the coop seems to have magically dropped several feet, and worms they never knew were crawling around are suddenly wriggling in the dirt like animated spaghetti, just begging to be eaten. Bringing in the new leaves, too, is exciting, because in addition to the sheer fun of scratching and clawing through the big piles of leaves and covering their coop-mates in a shower of crackling oak leaves and pine needles, there are oodles of creepy-crawly bugs in that new mixture, again with a gastric component no self-respecting chicken could forego.
However, in July, this is perhaps the least appealing task we can imagine. It may be hot out in the garden; however, imagine a steaming pile of rotted leaves and chicken poop out in that heat. Before it is removed from the coop, the surface of the compost tea is not too bad – it is relatively cool for the chickens to walk on, the heat somehow being dispersed sideways (we haven’t figured that one out, yet, but we aren’t looking a gift horse in the mouth, either!), and there is no smell.
But once we’ve removed the first shovelfull, it’s a different story. The stench and the heat suddenly discover the direction “up”, and it’s a race to get the muck out of the coop before either we or the chickens succumb. This, naturally, leads us to want to get this job done in the relative cool of the morning, so that we and the chickens each have an opportunity to recover during the remainder of the day – for the chickens, this means getting hosed down with cold water and spreading their feathers in front of a box fan; for us, this means cold lemonade and a hammock. Fallow, indeed.
This year, we have decided to extend our fallow time a little. We are going to plant green manure crops on the entirety of our vegetable beds for the fall, with the intention of planting a full winter bed of green leafy vegetables, and getting ready for a much larger scale of production next Spring.
We have the best possible reason for this: We are now registered to do business as "Big Myrtle's Tea Shoppe and Egg Emporium", and we will begin making home deliveries of eggs and selected produce starting early in 2011. The idea is to provide weekly deliveries of a half dozen eggs, a fruit product when in season, seasonal vegetables, and sachets of herbs. The herbs are the particular pride and joy of Mrs. Myrtle Maintenance, and we have received numerous compliments on their variety and aroma, so why not make a business out of it?
We will be launching a separate URL for strictly business concerns; the blog will very much remain the repository for Myrtle's thinkitude. Although, with all the digging we will be doing to get ready for next year, Myrtle's brain may be going a little fallow, too...
Psychology researcher Martin Seligman has done a tremendous amount of work in the field of happiness research over the last forty years, and is best known for his studies on “Learned Optimism”; his work can really be summed up in one sentence, however: You can either be right about everything, or you can get stuff done.
We at Myrtle’s fight a never-ending battle against forces of cynicism and despair; we suspect you are fighting the same battle wherever you are. And there are good reasons for this; there are seemingly endless sources of pessimism inundating our senses these days, from global warming, to rogue oil wells, to soaring unemployment, to fanatical terrorists of every stripe threatening “those people over there because they don’t believe in this book we’ve got over here, which makes them infidels who must be blown up.” That describes Maoist rebels in Peru every bit as much as Muslim extremists in Afghanistan, or Christian Militia in Michigan, by the way; crazy people come in all ideological flavors.
It’s enough to make a chicken moult.
There are numerous possible responses to such stories, of course. We believe that when confronted with significant problems, the appropriate response is to look for transcendent solutions which turn problems into opportunities. Unfortunately, many people instead choose to throw cold water any time they see the bright flame of optimism. It is not enough, they seem to think, to face a huge problem; they seek to make a huge problem insurmountable, presumably so they can be excused from having to do anything about it.
The impetus for such behavior is actually not so malicious as it seems, although benign neglect can sometimes be worse than malice. Seligman’s research highlights one of the grandest traps which sentient thought presents to its practitioners: pessimists see the world more accurately than do optimists; optimists, however, are better able to actually accomplish tasks.
This is very reminiscent of an old dilemma posed by logicians regarding the ethics of belief. In a modern context, say you were diagnosed with a terminal condition, and doctors gave you an historically accurate and very believable chance of survival of only 5%. They tell you there is no proven treatment, but that there is one option they can give you which will improve your odds slightly, but only if you believe it will be 100% effective. If you believe it will be 100% effective, then your chances of survival actually increase to 10%.
The belief that it will be 100% effective is patently not true. It is a lie. Is it not obviously ethical, however, to believe in this lie, since it makes you 5% more likely to survive? Yet in believing this lie, haven’t you essentially thrown away your moral capital? You are stating unequivocally that honesty is not the rule and measure for belief or disbelief in established fact. Facts, in other words, are necessarily subjective. Not because they are not true, but because you need their truth or falsehood to be subjugated to other concerns.
Clearly, doing the smart thing puts you in a dicey moral position.
Unless, of course, this is not a valid way of looking at the problem…
Here is where the pudding shows its proof: the truth or falsehood of this particular claim – that the medical treatment will be 100% effective or not – cannot be determined prior to the actual application of the treatment. To say that it is only 10% likely to work even if you believe it is 100% likely to work is a fable. Statistically, you can verify that 10% of the time it has worked for people who believed it was 100% likely to work, but a future event has no probability whatsoever. It has an unrealized potentiality – it is 100% certain that whatever the outcome is going to be will be the outcome for which it will then be historically categorizable. Either it 100% worked, or it 100% didn’t. One of those outcomes was 90% more likely before you started, but that’s not the same thing at all; reality on a macro level is not a series of probabilities; it is a series of actualities.
In other words, “Que será, será.” If you guess right and die, are you really any better off than if you guess wrong and die? But if you guess “wrong” and live? ¡Olé!
In the classic quantum thought experiment, Schröedinger’s Cat is not 50% likely to be alive and 50% likely to be dead even though on a quantum level, a decaying particle is 50% likely to release a poisonous gas during the process of his captivity in the box. He is, rather, 100% likely to be either alive or dead, and we won’t know which until we have opened the box and either killed or liberated him. Whichever one he turns out to be, he won’t be the other one, too. The quantum reality, loaded with its paradoxical probability waves, is not the cat’s reality. The cat’s reality is unknown (except, presumably, to the cat, who, being a cat, won’t tell us) until the box is opened, but it is definite, one way or the other.
This is a subtle distinction, but philosophically an important one. Those who apply probability and degrees of certainty to everything from climate change, to mass extinctions, to stock prices, to carcinogenic exposure, to crop yields, to effectiveness of organic herbicides are enslaving themselves to a quantum principle which does not actually apply on a macro level. And to assign a foul looking probability and then give up on attempting a fair outcome makes one likely to become a quitter. Quitters are losers, and we really advise not joining their ranks.
And for those who say one should not waste resources on unlikely outcomes, we say Gambler’s Ruin is a real phenomenon, but it doesn’t apply to games of polynomial incompleteness, where none of the players knows all the rules and all the possible outcomes; rather, it applies to the kinds of games you play in Vegas. Life is not a casino, and day-to-day reality is not stacked in the house’s favor. In the real world, counting the cards is acceptable, and the house has just as good a chance of going broke as you do.
To apply a sporting analogy, in January of 2006, the University of Texas Longhorns were in desperate straits: 6 minutes left in the 4th quarter of the national championship game, the Horns were down by 12 points against a USC Trojans team sporting two Heisman Trophy winners, with a coach widely regarded as the biggest genius ever to pick up a piece of chalk. Yet at the time, every fan in burnt orange simply knew how the game was going to end. Vince Young was going to run for two more touchdowns. We knew this to be true, in spite of the very palpable fact that no statistician in his right mind would have ever predicted it in 15 million lifetimes.
It was not logical; it was not practical; it was exceedingly unlikely. But we knew because intuitively, there simply was no other alternative. We have had discussions with every fan we have met since that time, and there is near universal agreement on this score; even usually non-intuitive people had this sense that it was all going to turn out okay.
Why?
Seligman’s research hints at the answer, although on an individual level; look to Jung if you want an explanation of group synchronicity. In the world according to Seligman, optimism senses a different sort of “fact” than does pessimism. Pessimism very clearly sees the world as it is. Optimism, on the other hand, just as clearly sees the world as we would like it to become.
Seeing the world as it is frequently gets mislabelled as being “realistic”. We would argue that what is truly “realistic” is that which really happens; and since what “really happens” is not a static event, but a dynamic one, sensing how things currently stand is not a complete picture. A complete picture of reality includes that which things are becoming.
A good example in a contemporary context is energy consumption. Citizens of the industrialized world are poisoning the planet with fossil fuel consumption. Electrical power generation and internal combustion engines for transportation are pumping unsustainable amounts of carbon dioxide and other noxious gasses into our atmosphere, and if it doesn’t stop soon, there will be no recovery; we will go extinct.
However, that is only part of the equation. Numerous alternatives are in various stages of development. Researchers working with wind and solar electricity generation have made huge strides in recent decades. Electric powered vehicles are hitting mass production lines this fall.
The “realists” say that these measures are inadequate, that oil will have to continue to be the primary fuel for modern society for decades to come. They cite numerous deficiencies in solar and wind power generation and distribution, and point out that power grids are currently strained to the breaking point without the added stress of also powering electric cars. “Can’t be done” they say.
This is not a “realistic” point of view. It is, rather, childish pouting.
The idea that solar power and wind power cannot put enough energy into the grid to get rid of coal powered electrical plants misses the point altogether. They don’t have to replace the same amount of electricity. They just have to provide enough energy for one home at a time, and the technology has been well proven to accomplish that much.
Were 40 million American homes to be retrofitted with solar panels and/or wind turbines, at a current estimate of ~$10,000 per home, the total price tag would be roughly $400 billion. That used to sound like a lot of money. Really, though, which would you rather be spending that money on – a bailout of major financial institutions, or a one time government program which would end – for all time – your monthly electric bill?
The “realists” would not even conceive of such a plan, or would scoff at its scope or price tag. Or they would bicker and quibble about current manufacturing capacity and argue that it simply “couldn’t be done”. We say, put $400 billion on the table and see how quickly some firms currently manufacturing video game components figure out a way to convert their factory floors to solar film production. Necessity may be the Mother of Invention, but profit is its Prom Date.
There is an infinite array of other such possible solutions, some of which are even crazier, some of which probably really are impractical, and none of which would be proposed by “realists”. But the best solution to our energy and climate dilemma is somewhere in that array of proposals no one is seriously considering.
There are some very smart people who have given up on our species entirely. The Leakeys, who introduced us to a love of science and a sense of awe and wonder at the enormity and beauty of our evolving biosphere, have written a very informative book about The Sixth Extinction, which we are currently witnessing. A microbiologist from Australia has even predicted the extinction of the human race within the next century, but won’t give interviews about that well-documented paper because he just finds it too depressing.
Maybe he’s right; maybe we’re doomed. We at Myrtle’s place don’t really care two figs whether he’s right – we’re going to go right on planting our vegetables and pruning our fig trees. Because if he’s right, then we may as well go out fighting. And if he’s wrong, it might only be because some wild and crazy optimists ignored the “truth” long enough to actually get something done.
Cynics are quick to point out that unless life also gave you sugar and water, your lemonade’s gonna suck. But even sucking lemons, to us, seems like more fun than hanging around with a bunch of Debbie Downers. Yes, there are a lot of things wrong with the world today.
Myrtle recently expounded upon the possibility of replacing chemical herbicides with common household vinegar. This set off a teapot-style-tempest over the possibility that 5% acidity vinegar could, at any level of application, be as effective as horticultural vinegar, which comes at a 20% acidity level.
We are quite happy to report that Myrtle was correct: 5% acidity vinegar does the trick just fine, although much larger quantities are required in order to achieve complete eradication of weeds.
Anecdotal evidence found on numerous organic gardening bulletin boards offers the following advice: if you want to permanently defoliate an area, add salt to your vinegar mixture; if you merely wish to defoliate weeds prior to planting desirable crops, just use vinegar, maybe with some citrus oil added to it.
Now Myrtle can add her experience to the voices of those recommending vinegar; the following pictures and observations are from 2 hours into our experiment; obviously, we will be monitoring and updating as we have more recommendations; we also have some hypotheses which will require further testing.
We applied roughly one quart of 5% acidity household vinegar to a patch of weeds in our driveway comprising approximately 40 square feet (roughly 2 feet by 20 feet, on an arc); we left a control patch of weeds in the same swath of sunlight, and in the same gravelly conditions, for comparison. Application was done with a common household window cleaner sprayer device, using the "spray" rather than "stream" setting for broadest application.
We did not soak the plants to the roots, so our expectation is that without further treatment, weeds will return regardless of success or failure of this experiment. However, we did completely cover all exposed foliage.
Two hours after application, the control patch retains its original green and vibrant foliage, and shows no signs of stress. The treated patch is yellowing and browning, and is dry and brittle to the touch; where we attempted to remove it, the foliage pulled easily away from the base of the plant. As expected, the root was not dislodged by this cursory treatment.
Several conclusions can be reached even this early in our experiment. First, vinegar even at low concentrations is a highly effective defoliant. There is absolutely no need, and given the mounting evidence of danger, absolutely no defense, for the use of chemical herbicides. It is an indefensible, inexcusable practice.
Second, for vinegar to be completely effective at lower acidity levels, a soaking treatment will be required. To kill the roots, the roots will have to be exposed to the citric acid in the vinegar: QED. We do not yet know what quantities will be sufficient for this kind of treatment, but again, it will almost definitely not be an excessive amount; if 20% acidity vinegar works at a treatment level of 80-160 gallons per acre, we are fairly confident that the same application levels will be sufficient with the levels available in vinegar you can buy from your local grocer.
As a final note, grocery stores in College Station appear to carry two different acidity levels: 5% and 9%. We have seen a lot of literature discussing 7% vinegar, but none regarding 9% vinegar. We may run tests at that higher level soon, but given our success at lower levels, we are not sure such tests will be necessary.
Next up: tests on soaking level applications to our new vegetable beds for our fall garden!
"When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security." --The Declaration of Independence
At the time Thomas Jefferson penned the Declaration, practically everyone who read or heard his words was either a farmer or a gardener. There were no grocery stores, although there were farmer's markets. A person might buy their produce rather than grow it themselves, but they were distinctly in the minority.
By 1800, there were only a little over 5 million people in this country; most of them lived on farms.
These were not the same sort of people as those who inhabit our shores today. Today, the vast majority of us live in cities; even those who say they don't live "in the city" are usually fooling themselves. In 1800, New York City comprised a little over 60,000 souls. Today, that would be considered a smallish sort of town; that is roughly the size of College Station, Texas, for example.
There are numerous implications to the changes which have taken place over the 234 years since the members of the Continental Congress declared some self-evident truths; unfortunately, one such implication is a lack of independence. The average food product travels over 1,000 miles before it reaches our plates; some folk look at the fact that American agribusiness concerns are ultimately making the profit on food production and assume that this means our country has food independence, but those folk aren't paying attention: if the food travels 1,000 miles before it reaches our plates, then it is moving by the power of oil. That makes it no longer an American concern, because we are the world's largest importer of oil. It isn't even close; Japan, a nation with no oil reserves at all of their own, is the number two importer; we import three times as much as they do.
We are, in short, not an independent nation. Where the oil companies twitch, we follow. Do you want to know why our waters have been permanently infested with hydrocarbons? Why it is taking so long to clean up the mess of British Petroleum?
It is because we are too lazy to grow our own food in our own backyards.
We are lazy, and have sold our independence. Not to a foreign country; no. We have sold our independence to faceless corporations.
Thomas Jefferson, as President, led our nation in a successful fight against pirates from the Barbary Coast. Were he around today, he would be fighting against more insidious pirates from boardrooms around the world, and he would have done it with the hoe and shovel, rather than the sword and musket.
Jefferson, you see, in addition to being a statesman and philosopher, was also a successful farmer. Monticello was the sight of many of his agricultural experiments; he, along with fellow farmer George Washington, practiced a form of crop rotation unusual at the time, making detailed notes about what worked, and just as importantly, what did not work. He was not alone among men of the Continental Congress; even those who were not technically farmers, like John Adams, for example, were nevertheless either gardeners or else owned farms run by someone else for their families.
Very few Americans of the time of the Revolution would have been willing to put as many people in a chain of control between them and their food the way modern Americans have done. If we wish to recapture their spirit of independence, we should start with our plates. Grow your own food; if you can't grow it, buy it locally from someone who can. The British have come again; they have fouled our waters, and declared that if we wish to be independent, we are going to have to fight for it, for a long, long time.
But gentlemen, we must hang together, or we shall surely hang separately.
“July in Texas” would serve as a wonderful subtitle for Dante Alighieri’s Inferno. When July rolls around, it gets awfully hot around here. It’s also dry. On average, we get 1.92” of rain in July, making it our driest month of the year. Many years, we get no rain at all in July – the average is only as high as it is because every once in a blue moon we get the residue of an early season tropical storm.
This year, much of the area is getting precipitation from Hurricane Alex, which slammed into the Mexican coast the last day of June and first day of July. Much of the area, but not, of course, College Station. There is evidently an invisible dome over our fair metropolis, which causes rain to slide off to either side of us. It’s a big joke in our family to look at the weather forecast and say “40% chance of rain? I hope they enjoy it over in Huntsville.” So, there may be an occasional spot of relief, but even so, it is going to be hot and dry here for the foreseeable future.
We did our best to prepare for this year’s broiler month. After painting for reflection, our roof now shows up on satellite photos as an obnoxiously bright white spot in the middle of our plot, as does the roof of our chicken coop. We have added insulation to the attic. We have applied paint to our exterior walls and trim which includes a ceramic additive with heat reflective properties. We have cleaned our air filters and ductwork. We are installing new weatherstripping on the front and back doors this weekend.
In short, if our air conditioning bill this month is large, the only reason will be the obvious one – we live in Texas, and it’s July.
We are also prepared for the inevitable slew of whining observations coming from our fellow inmates of this natural insane asylum – “Hot enough for ya?” Why yes, it is, thank you very much.
We were cured forever of the impulse to engage in such ridiculous commentary ourselves by a visit to Barrington Farm, the preserved home of Anson Jones, last President of the Republic of Texas. The farm is a living history exhibit on the grounds of Washington on the Brazos State Park, and is a wonderful example of showcasing things folk used to do which they ought to consider doing again.
We visited the farm in late June, on a humid day with temperatures in the high 90°s, and we sweated. A lot. However, the curators were in full period regalia, and were doing the work of 1830s farmers uncomplainingly. The north-south alignment of the dog run in the house provided a cool breeze, and rickety chairs on the porch provided a perfect platform for doing all of the busy-work necessary when field work is next to impossible.
Stepping off the porch in any direction, the heat became close to unbearable; however, several varieties of corn towered over the landscape. We had trouble with a few plots of sweet corn at Myrtle’s place; the Barrington Farm living history exhibit had no such problems with their field corn, some of which reached heights of 10-12’, and boasted 3-4 ears per stalk. Clearly, decadence does not do as well in the Texas heat as do perseverance and hard work.
Sweet corn needs no seasoning when you cook it; field corn by contrast is usually ground into corn meal, but it can also be either parched or roasted, and with a little added flavor in the form of salt, pepper, herbs and butter, is quite surprisingly delicious in its own right.
Out by the slave quarters, an outdoor ‘kitchen’ consists of a fire pit with dutch oven under the shade of a grape arbor. And even here, the superiority of careful planning is evident; in spite of hot coals for roasting corn and grilling meat, the breeze under the large canopy of wild grapes makes for a tolerable place under which to sit and watch the pumpkins and melons ripen.
There is no irrigation system for this farm; there are no water hoses; either they receive sufficient rain, or they have to carry water in buckets to their various fields. Being a destination for area school children, they do have the advantage of a lot of willing volunteers for this more tedious task – when asked by a woman in hoopskirts and an old-fashioned bonnet, children who refuse point blank to pick up their own dirty laundry at home are thrilled to carry a wooden bucket full of water to keep alive heirloom varieties of vegetables which they would never willingly eat.
We intend to implement several features of early 19th century Texas farming on our own living history diorama. Some are things we were going to do anyway – we have already established several grape arbors, and are planning on adding more areas of “live shade”, with two conjoined trumpet vine trellises on our western exposure.
In fact, we have a gravel driveway, and we are basically cutting it in half, creating a north-south breezeway which should in time become a sprawling vine-covered sitting area. Once growth is established here, our outdoor living space may well consist of a greater area than our indoor living space.
We also have an L-shaped grape arbor outside our south-facing living room windows. Three of the four grape plants established here are Mustang grapes; the fourth vine is Black Spanish, a multi-purpose grape which we intend to use to raise the sugar content in our wild grape must, making our wines a little less gamey. The fact that the vines will also shade our living room, in addition to creating a boxed-in porch area in our back yard, is just a bonus. The chickens will enjoy it, too, given that these vines will cut their western sunlight in summer to almost nil; since grapes are deciduous, winter sunlight will continue to hit the coop. Could this be engineered any more efficiently?
Some limits, of course, impose themselves when wild-eyed enthusiasts go hell bent for election. We will not be putting hog pens nor a cattle barn in the back yard. Nor will we be raising turkeys, nor guinea fowl. Our birds are occasionally fairly squawky, but they are nothing compared to the incessant noise of guinea hens such as those who free range in the woods at Barrington Farm.
We also will not be raising cotton. As much as we like the idea of self-reliance, we are going to have to draw the line somewhere. We will continue to purchase textiles from other producers, at least for the foreseeable future. We still haven’t given up on the idea of getting a goat, though, so who knows what the future may hold. We might someday turn up wearing mohair underwear and chicken-feather pants.
But probably not. And definitely not in July; we imagine that in addition to being itchy, the heat-retentive quality of these materials would be, ah, counterproductive.
In fact, now is as good a time as any for all gardeners, whether striving for frontier Texas style self-sufficiency or not, to review the dangers inherent in exposure to summertime heat. As noted by the Healthwise online health encyclopedia, heat-related illnesses include:
Heat rash (prickly heat), which occurs when the sweat ducts to the skin become blocked or swell, and cause discomfort and itching.
Heat cramps, which occur in muscles after exercise because sweating causes the body to lose water.
Heat edema (swelling) in the legs and hands, which can occur when you sit or stand for a long time in a hot environment.
Heat tetany (hyperventilation and heat stress), which is usually caused by short periods of stress in a hot environment.
Heat syncope (fainting), which occurs from low blood pressure when heat causes the blood vessels to expand (dilate) and body fluids move into the legs because of gravity.
Heat exhaustion (heat prostration), which generally develops when a person is working or exercising in hot weather and does not drink enough liquids to replace those lost liquids.
Heatstroke (sunstroke), which occurs when the body fails to regulate its own temperature and body temperature continues to rise, often to 105°F (40.6°C) or higher. Heatstroke is a medical emergency. Even with immediate treatment, it can be life-threatening or cause serious long-term problems.
Gardening, by definition, means working outside. When working outside in the heat, several precautions ought to be taken:
Work in the shade as much as possible. Take a page from the Barrington Farm book and work on the porch or under an arbor if you can. If you can’t, then take breaks in the shade on a regular basis.
Drink water constantly. If you are not having to stop on a regular basis to take a bathroom break, you are not drinking enough water.
Avoid sport drinks, soft drinks, or any other kind of drink than water. All the advertising slogans in the world don’t make talk about electrolytes any less fictional than it really is – what your body is lacking is not electrolytes and nutrients, it’s water. You get all the electrolytes and nutrients you need from meal times. Don’t let the hype fool you.
Dress in loose-fitting and scanty clothing. You may think “Nobody needs to see me in skimpy clothes!” and you may even be right. But if they’ve got a problem with it, they can go inside and close their shades. Unless you are travelling into the deep desert, uncover! The risk of overheating is, on average, higher than the risk of a little extra sun exposure (though, naturally, don’t overdo it in the other direction; SPF 15 or so on the sunscreen!)
Wear a hat. We like to wet ours down and put it in the freezer; by the time it gets hot, that means it’s time for a break, after which we put on a new frozen hat.
Pay attention to other variables – if you weigh a lot, for example, you are more prone to overheating. If you have diabetes or heart disease, pay extra attention to heat conditions. Age is also important – babies do not lose heat very quickly, nor do they sweat effectively; older adults also have problems with sweat regulation which prevent efficient natural body cooling.
Alcohol is a huge no-no. Save it for your relaxing evening after having worked yourself into the ground. And while we are big fans of home-brewed beer or home-vinted wine… in the summer months you really ought to consider switching to fruity iced beverages like margaritas and daquiris; the water content of the ice compensates for the diuretic qualities of the alcohol, effectively reducing the chances of dehydration and also making a hangover much less likely.
Of course, Anson Jones probably never even dreamed of something like a margarita, but then, even if it is living, Barrington Farm is still history. There are occasionally great things resulting from “Progress” and margaritas are one of them.
Keep cool, and…
Happy farming!
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a very large dangerous fire that is out of control, If you refer to a fire as an
So the teacher says, "Okay, Johnny, there are 10 chickens in the coop. If one of them finds a hole and escapes, how many chickens are left in the coop?"
"None, ma'am."
"Oh, Johnny, you obviously don't understand arithmetic."
"Oh, yes, ma'am, I do understand addition and subtraction. But you obviously don't understand chickens."
"ME" is really "WE"; we're a family of 4; husband and wife both come from "rural stock", but were raised by PBS.
We got married because we both love Jane Austen novels, which, when you think about it, is a lousy reason to get married. We got lucky, though. We're both sturdier than you'd think, given our effete intellectual tendencies.
And we're both willing to shovel chicken poop, which is a major plus if you are planning on microfarming in the middle of town.
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