For She's a Jolly Good Fallow...

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...

Happy farming!