2nd Annual Brazos Valley Pulletpalooza!

“A chicken in every pot, a car in every garage”
--Herbert Hoover, 1928

Gallus gallus, the Red Junglefowl of Southeast Asia, is the ancestor of the modern chicken, having first been domesticated well over 5,000 years ago.  By a curious coincidence, that may be how long ago Herbert Hoover’s economic philosophy was calcified, but that is a subject for a whole other line of inquiry.

Gallus gallus domesticus, the domesticated chicken, can be found in increasing numbers in backyards in virtually every community in the United States these days, and in large measure, the newfound popularity of backyard chickens owes to increasing economic insecurity and a desire to distance our families from the possibility of hunger of the sort evoked by the mere name “Hoover”.  We consider the chicken in every backyard to be far more important than the car on every driveway, and we aim to do something about it.

Enter an annual event of which the proprietors of Big Myrtle’s place are proud participants:

The 2nd Annual Brazos Valley Pulletpalooza.

This upcoming December the 4th, from 2-5 pm, several backyard chicken coops will be on display in Bryan and College Station.  As of the first week of November, we have had four coops confirmed on the tour, and a fifth is a tentative yes.  A sixth coop had to back out due to scheduling conflicts, but we are hoping for more participants to appear over the next few weeks.

This is quite a jump from last year’s showing, where we had a grand total of two coops on the tour.

Details will be forthcoming as we get closer to the event, but it promises to be quite a show.  We have asked participating families to do very little beyond showing their coops, but the emphasis we are making is pretty straightforward:

• Promote backyard chicken-raising and encourage people to build their own coops
• Explain the health benefits of home-raised eggs
• Explain how chickens fit into the life of the home garden

These are pretty simple goals.  And we talk about them… a lot… to anyone who will listen, and to many people who won’t listen.

Pulletpalooza is different, though.  Now, we are asking folk to come and see for themselves, and not just at Myrtle’s place, but in other folks’ backyards, too.  It turns out there are many, many different ways to raise a family-sized flock of birds, and we invite everyone to come see.

If you already have chickens, and would like to be part of the tour, please email us at motheromercy@yahoo.com; if you don’t have chickens, but are curious how raising birds in the middle of the city works, be looking for maps to the coops of Bryan-College Station on the Pulletpalooza website and come on out on Dec. 4th.

See you then!  And

Happy farming!

Time, as it relates to everything Myrtlish...

"In fact, entropy can grow both into the far future and into the far past; the overall multiverse can be completely symmetric with respect to time. Think of two particles moving on straight lines in an otherwise empty three-dimensional space. No matter how we choose the lines, there will always be some point of closest approach, while the distance between the particles will grow without bound sufficiently far in the future and the past."
--Sean M. Carroll

The certainty displayed by advocates of religion and of politics have always been the starting point for a marriage of those two unhappy disciplines.  Most of the the world’s worst social experiments, and all of the world’s pestilential wars, have been brought about by people who just “knew” things that were so self-evident and “common sense” that anyone who questioned them was somehow deranged – never mind that such “common sense” assumptions are all too often utter poppycock.  How could it be otherwise when two opposing camps each describe their mutually exclusive ideas to be “common sense”?

Science, when done right, avoids this trap by insisting that no question is truly settled – even our most basic assumptions, that 1 + 1 = 2, that up is up and down is down, that day follows night and vice-versa, are falsifiable, and if and when evidence is presented which disproves our most basic of premises, we must change premises.

Time itself is a wonderful example.  California Institute of Technology physicist Sean Carroll argued in a whimsical essay entitled “What if Time Actually Exists?” that the notion that the universe has a beginning (and, specifically, time as an aspect of the universe has a starting point) is a product of our limited imagination.

For physicists, a “starting line” is a natural assumption based on what little we know with any certainty about how time seems to function.  Basically, we only know that time goes from past-to-present-to-future because the one measurable element we can observe is entropy – systems “move through time” by transitioning from a state of lower entropy to a state of higher entropy.

Think of a game of pool – the first player breaks the racked billiard balls, and from a state of having one ball at one end of the table and a bunch of balls in a tight triangle at the other end of the table (a state of low entropy), moving from past-to-present-to-future the game quickly proceeds to a state where all the balls are randomly scattered about the table (assuming the break is a good one, of course), placing the system in a state of higher entropy.

But this explanation is no explanation at all, because the physicists who advocate it have set up a circle of meaning – “entropy” only means something based on the idea that it relates to distribution of matter and energy through space and… wait for it… time.

Carroll’s solution to this problem is way over the head of most lay persons, and, frankly, is over the head of most physicists, too.  It does, however, lend itself on a very practical level to logical minimalists.  Carroll’s solution is to describe the universe as infinite.  Space and time, we know thanks to Einstein, are two different ways of looking at the same entity (“SpaceTime”) much as electricity and magnetism are the same energy described from different mathematical points of view.  An infinite universe, therefore, has space going on forever in all directions… and time going on forever in all directions, too.

If there was a state of minimum entropy at some point (the mythical “start of time”), then logically, before that point, there was a state of even less entropy than the state of minimum entropy.

How does that work?  Myrtle hasn’t got the foggiest.  She’s just a chicken, after all.  “Negative Entropy” would be a cool band name, though.  If we had to guess, they would probably end every show with the “One Note Samba”.  (Free eggplant to anyone who both gets that joke and thinks it’s funny…)

Moreover, this notion of eternal time lends some new piquancy to the question of “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”  In the context of cyclical endeavors such as backyard chicken raising, or gardening, or just getting through life, the most important step is always some combination of “the one you just did” and “the next one you have to do” – very seldom allowing you to concentrate entirely on what you might be doing at present.  The cycle may or may not have started at some point, but once you are in it, it hardly matters – the last thing you did leads to the next thing you must do, which leads to other tasks that seem to roll on forever, repeating themselves just the same way the seasons repeat.

In Myrtle’s case, the autumn harvest of velvet beans, pumpkins, honeydew melon, squash, jalapeños, fall tomatoes, etc., is also the time of planting winter vegetables.  Garlic, broccoli, fava beans, kohlrabi, carrots, spinach, quinoa – all go in the ground right around the time we traditionally think of as “harvest time”.

Samhain, the Celtic New Year celebration we have morphed into Halloween, marked the death of the old year and the birth of the new for the residents of cold, foggy reaches of ancient Europe.  They may not have grown as much in the winter time as we do here in Brazos County, but they had their own winter tasks which had to be performed if they had any hope of a successful garden the next Spring.  Garden beds need attention even (perhaps especially) when nothing is growing in them.  Weeding, mulching, turning in of compost – these are things best done well in advance of the season in which one wishes to grow tasty veggies.

The chickens, too, will soon be requiring some special attention.  We raise Barred Rocks for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that as a heavier breed, they are more winter-hardy than many of the lighter Bantams which have become popular in Texas backyards.  “More” however does not mean “completely”.  We will be adding new leaves as insulation, and preparing to enclose their coop with wind barriers, and should the need arise, we will have to put a heater in the coop – the girls don’t complain much about getting down into the 30°ish range, but 5-10° cooler than that (which happens once or twice a year), and we pretty much have chicken-cicles instead of egg layers, so that’s when the heater comes out.

And while we will be planting plenty of vegetables which thrive in what passes for “cold” in our part of the world – broccoli, onions, garlic, etc. – we will still have to tend to our perennials with some loving attention.  We will be mulching the fruit trees and berry vines, in addition to adding a new layer of leaf-mulch to our perennial herbs.  It is also prime time for cilantro/coriander in Texas, so we will have to work a few patches of less-deeply mulched soil in the herb beds, where this 2-3 month project can thrive at peak efficiency.  A winter garden is really a jigsaw puzzle of odd tasks like this – and in the context of a year round garden, that makes sense, because “the rules” only apply to a small portion of what we are attempting at any one point.

How far back in time the concept of a year round garden goes, is anybody’s guess.  Whether you are asking for the sake of asking, in the spirit of a good scientist, or whether you are asking because you want to know what to plant right now, in the spirit of an eternally optimistic gardener, you really ought to take a break, have a pumpkin pasty, and maybe a swig of some good hard apple cider.  Happy Halloween!  And…

Happy farming!

Fall has.... well... fallen

Some things that happen at Myrtle's place are similar to those that happen in other places.  For example, we just harvested some very nice looking pie pumpkins, both orange and blue, and are patiently waiting for our jack-o-lantern pumpkins, which should be ripe in about three weeks.

Almost as pretty on the table as they were in the garden...

Other things that happen at Myrtle's place... well, they're kind of backwards.  It's hard to make out just exactly how many bees are flocking to the African Blue Basil you see here, but there are literally dozens of bumblebees and carpenter bees, and hundreds of honeybees in this one shot.

There is undoubtedly a treasure trove of anise-flavored honey somewhere on our property...

We haven't written much, lately, and it's for some obvious reasons -- we're a little busy, and what free time we have had has been consumed by trying to nurse our garden along through the most miserable drought conditions we've ever gardened in.

Blech.

But the good news is we'll be able to write about some fairly exciting successes in the next few weeks.  Velvet beans, tomatoes, peppers, and herbs are all thriving, and even a volunteer eggplant seems to be doing okay.  We even have a 2nd season of amaranth which we are about to harvest, and that is a far sight better than what we thought we might be reporting as few as 2-3 weeks ago.

Happy farming!

Fiddler on the Rooftop? No, that's some nut with a paint brush...

Barrington Farm is a living history museum on the grounds of Washington on the Brazos State Park, just about a 30 minute drive south of College Station.  For anyone in the area who has never gone, let us highly recommend it – the museums related to Texas history are, of course, significant (Washington on the Brazos was the location where the Texas Declaration of Independence was approved and signed, and was the first capital of the Republic of Texas), but the real draw is the living farm.

There are interesting things to see and do on the farm all year round, but the most interesting, to us, happen in the summertime, when the weather is the most unbearable.  That’s because it is instructive to see how folk managed to survive at a time when there was no air conditioning, and Slurpee® was not even yet a dream.  There are inevitable comments, too, from any women in your tour about the unpalatability (to put it mildly) of wearing corsets under such conditions.

While we must admonish our ancestors for their foolish fashion choices, we also must admit there are numerous things they did to make use of what few cooling tools they had, and we would do well to emulate these strategies.  For starters, the orientation of their houses was often chosen more for the ability to capture prevailing afternoon breezes through the dog run that was a staple in early 19th century Texas farm houses.  On a 100°F afternoon, the porch would often feel 15-20 degrees cooler than the fields.

Similar effects could be found in the placement of arbors about the grounds.  At Barrington Farm, the slave quarters are surrounded by grape arbors whose purpose is less about fruit, and more about shade.  Again, taking advantage of orientation and the afternoon breeze, we once visited the farm during corn harvest, and despite the high heat and humidity, the guide was happily roasting corn over an open fire, from under the shade of a muscadine trellis.

Another thing we noticed at Barrington Farm the last time we visited was that “the big house” was painted the brightest white imagineable.  We particularly made note of this fact because we last visited about the same time that we decided to paint our tin roof white for the purpose of cutting our cooling costs.

Non-white roofs are the modern equivalent of the lunacy of wearing corsets in 100° weather.  To put it simply, the laws of physics are either your friends, or your enemies, depending on how stubbornly you adhere to social norms in the face of real needs for change.  Light colors absorb less heat energy and both reflect and emit more heat energy, while darker colors absorb more heat energy and both reflect and emit less heat energy.  In plain English, a dark-colored house with a dark-colored roof makes no sense whatsoever in a Texas summer.

Traditional roofing surfaces in the United States can reach summer peak temperatures ranging from 150-185°F (66-85°C), which not only makes it much more difficult to cool the building, but also contributing to something called the “urban heat island”.  When you consider that the average city is approximately 20% rooftop by area (per a survey done from 1998-2002), that means there is a considerable amount of heat being retained in our cities by black tar, gray slate, and other dark roofing materials which amplify heating problems, making bad situations worse.

There are several solutions to this problem, the best of course being to encourage the growth of trees tall enough to shade not just your yard and maybe a few windows, but also the roof of your home.  Sunlight which never reaches the surface cannot, obviously, contribute to excess heat.  Barring the advent of magic beans to make your trees taller, however, the next best solution is to change the surface of your roof to reflect more sunlight and emit more heat into the atmosphere and away from your home.  That’s where “cool roof” technology takes over.

Cool roofs are basically just like normal roofs, with one of two differences – either a coating which adds albedo (reflectivity), reduces absorption and increases emission; or else a basic material which accomplishes the same functions.  An example of the kind of coating we are talking about is the specialized white paint we used on our own home.  Available at all major hardware stores, and many of the minor ones, look next to the roofing materials rather than in the paint section because while this is technically “paint” it is not like other paints.

To begin with, most house paint is not designed to be applied to surfaces which regularly reach 180°F.  Further, this stuff is designed to be laid down in a fairly thick swath.  We used a regular roller to apply it to our metal roof, but it would not be amiss to suggest simply pouring out a quantity on the area you are wanting to cover and then using a push-broom to even it out at 1/8th to 1/4th of an inch thickness.

Once it is spread and dried, a roof painted white with an elastometric polymer will provide 65% or higher solar reflectance and have a thermal emittance of 80 to 90%.  We noticed almost immediately that the areas where we were standing while spreading the material were exceptionally hot (and it was still just March!) whereas the areas with the paint were almost immediately cool to the touch.  And as the satellite photos from Google Earth show, there is a tremendous amount of sunlight getting reflected straight back into space.  Our attic is kept cooler, and College Station is also a tiny fraction cooler.

There are other kinds of roofing paints, including a cementitious paint (paint with cement material), and a combination of cement and polymers.  The advantage of the polymers is that they provide a waterproof seal; the cementitious paints would only be practical on surfaces which are themselves already impermeable – we could have used one ourselves had that been our only option, but we painted our roof long before we learned all the different elements of cool roof technology.

In addition to paint, there is also the option of using a polyurethane foam barrier on a rooftop.  This is common on commercial buildings; Texas A&M started putting this type of cool roof on buildings as early as the early 1970s, and that same technology is fairly common all over the country even today on new school construction, as well as in some industrial and warehouse developments.

Finally, rather than using a coating, there are the cool roof building materials, where the roof itself is simply built from material which has high reflectivity and emissivity.  An example of this type of material would be a white vinyl sheeting, used instead of traditional shingles or metal sheeting.  By contrast to asphalt (which has a reflectivity between 6 and 26%), white vinyl rooftops reflect more than 80% of the suns rays, and emit at least 70% of the solar radiation the building absorbs.  Depending on roof tilt and latitude, a white vinyl roof is the cool roof champion.

One final strategy worth mentioning is the ‘green roof’ system.  Particularly common with rammed earth and strawbale houses, a ‘green roof’ is literally a roof with a garden on it.  While it takes some sound engineering to guarantee the necessary load-bearing qualities of the structure below, a ‘green roof’ provides some of the soundest thermal principles for environmental control of a building you could wish for – in summer, the solar energy is absorbed by the plants growing on the roof, and converted into leaves and (possibly) fruit and produce.  While the soil will undoubtedly absorb more energy than it can possibly emit back into space, it provides far better insulation than is found in most attic spaces.

And in winter, this natural insulation makes a green roof practical in northern climates in ways a typical cool roof might not – although heat loss in winter from the roof is greatly exaggerated; the greater danger is from excessive draftiness, not from albedo and emission.

The principal advantages of cool roofing technology apply to the individual buildings where these technologies are applied – whether a domestic building where a family lives, or a warehouse where goods are stored, or a factory, where people and machinery require constant environmental controls – but there are additional benefits to the greater community, as well.  Municipalities with the forethought to subsidize cool roof technology see almost immediate impacts in the mitigation of the phenomenon known as an “urban heat island”.

As long ago as 1818, amateur meteorologist Luke Howard described the effect in his seminal work The Climate of London, wherein his careful observations of wind direction, barometric pressure, temperature and precipitation led him to conclude that there was an ineffable something about the urban environment which made it warmer and drier than the surrounding countryside.

Thanks to the far greater scope of data available in the 21st century, modern meteorologists are able to model urban heat islands far more effectively.  Basically, the darker synthetic materials used in urban construction (asphalt roadways, dark colored bricks, dark tile roofs, the darker shades of cement) absorb far more heat and emit far less back out into space than would be true of the more natural materials found in greater quantities in suburbia and the countryside.

For an experimental confirmation of this idea, try standing barefoot at noon in a garden bed, say in the shade of a nice rosemary or basil plant, and then stand on the sidewalk – most sensible people would just take our word for it, we think.

Several factors combine to make this phenomenon worse in some cities than in others – “tunnels” created by skyscrapers focus heat energy in some downtown neighborhoods and prevent its easy escape; other cities get lucky in the orientation of prevailing winds, or maybe juxtaposition to the ocean gives the heat sink an easy drain for some, while being situated in a desert basin causes others to simply sit and bake.

And sometimes seemingly unrelated weather events are the direct result of this island effect.  There is an unofficial term related to College Station weather, the so-called “Aggie Dome” which prevents rainfall on relatively small scale.  We cannot count the number of times we have sat in front of the radar, watched massive storm systems move into the area, headed directly towards us, only to see those same systems break apart just outside the College Station city limits, only to reform once the system reaches the other side of town.  This happens whether we are talking about Pacific moisture streaming up from across Mexico and the Rio Grande region, or Gulf moisture streaming up from Houston and Galveston, or with a Pacific cold front sliding in from the Northwest.

Likewise, the folk wisdom that if there is a trailer park in a town hit by a tornado, you can be sure the tornado will find it, has more truth to it than one might imagine.  Trailer parks, you see, are more likely to be on the outskirts of a town… and thanks to the urban heat island, that is also where storm systems are most likely to be.  The air over the heat island is hot and dry relative to the air in the neighboring environs; as a consequence, there is updraft and an outward force pushing against any incoming downdraft and incoming force.

Cool roofs help counter these effects by muting the initial warming quality of the urban surfaces.  Over twenty years ago now, the City of Atlanta started working with cooler technologies, and they are just one of dozens of communities where engineers have discovered that replacing blacktop roads with lighter colored materials can reduce urban temperatures by several degrees.  The difference between 100° and 97° may not sound like much to a Yankee, but to us at Myrtle’s it sounds like a pretty huge difference.

It’s the sort of thing 19th century farmers in Texas would have paid attention to, as well.  Barrington Farm doesn’t have a special roof, but I guarantee you in 1830s Texas, if they had the opportunity to use a roofing material that would have dropped the summertime temperature of their houses by any amount at all, they would have jumped on it – assuming we are only talking about 1830s Texas farmers not wearing corsets, that is; we can’t vouch for how they could possibly have jumped in those ridiculous clothes.

Anybody who doesn’t currently have a cool roof, you’ve been placed on notice – next Spring, we expect to see you climbing a ladder, carrying a big white bucket with a paint roller.

Keep cool, and

Happy farming!

Beef... It's Why There Is No Dinner!

“The fact is, though, that we can be law-abiding and peace-loving and tolerant and inventive and committed to freedom and true to our own values and still behave in ways that are biologically suicidal.”
--Malcolm Gladwell, in the New Yorker, reviewing Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond

The Dust Bowl drought gets mentioned on a regular basis every summer in the plains states, not just in a year like this one where a horrid drought has everyone talking about peak water, but every single year, because every summer we get hot and dry and we wonder when will it ever end.

And then along comes Pollyanna,  reminding us that we actually have it pretty good. Sure, there’s a drought, and our economy seems on the verge of a double-dip recession, and there’s rioting in the streets of London, but for the most part, Americans have roofs over our heads and food on our plates. So cheer up, right?

This, of course, is a selfish point of view, because what we do affects how other people live. The choices we make regarding how we dress, how we eat, how we get to work, have a direct impact on the lives of people halfway around the globe, whom we will never meet.

That bears repeating. It’s not just a bumper sticker, it is a moral code to guide our behavior:

“Live simply, that others may simply live.”

In context of drought, then, we at Myrtle’s place have made arguments in the past for direct improvement of individual lives by collecting rainwater, passively cooling homes, and eliminating unsightly turf grass from urban landscaping palettes. Now we would like to make an argument for indirect improvement of the lives of those in developing countries by a cessation of the consumption of beef.

This is, so to speak, the sacred cow of American (and, in particular, Texan) dietary arrogance. We like meat, so we say we will never give it up. But, as with so many other things we know intuitively we ought not be doing, we develop monumental psychological barriers to facing up to the truth. There is not a single living soul who does not know, deep down, that eating red meat causes obesity, heart disease, hypertension, colon cancer, lethargy, ulcers, and gude kens wha’ else.

In addition, though, cattle raising is the most prolific waste of water ever devised. Eating beef literally means that somewhere in the world, someone will die either of dehydration or of starvation. When The Smiths wrote Meat is Murder, they were thinking of the cows. But they may as well have been thinking of villagers in the Tibetan plateau, or in Sudan, or in Yemen, or in any one of dozens of water stressed countries around the globe. And someday soon, the same fate will await the citizens of Las Vegas, and of Memphis, and of dozens of other communities in the United States where water consumption (for personal use, for agriculture and for industry) far outpaces the ability of Mother Nature to play catch-up.

It takes tremendous quantities of water to raise animals for food. According to an estimate from David Pimental, professor of ecology at Cornell University, it takes 900 liters of water to raise a kilogram of wheat; it takes 100,000 liters of water to raise grain fed beef. Translated into units most Americans can understand, one pound of wheat requires around 108 gallons of water; one pound of beef requires 12,008 gallons of water. Given that within half a century, finding a city in the United States (let alone in the world generally) which is not in some state of water stress will be the exception rather than the rule, consuming that much water, that inefficiently, seems criminal.

Yet we are culturally prepared to eat our way into oblivion. Beef – it’s not “what’s for dinner.” It’s why there may be no dinner. Even the recently revamped food pyramid (and how often does the food pyramid really need to be revamped, anyway?) is a “My Plate” featuring “protein” as a prominent part of the plate.

Why?

When was the last time you heard of  someone having to be hospitalized for a protein deficiency?

Protein is perhaps the single easiest portion of our diets in which we may reach a satisfying stasis. Sufficient sources of protein may be found in legumes (beans, peas, certain nuts), in spinach (especially in combination with mushrooms), even in potatoes – really, in virtually all foods. “Protein” is actually the basic building  block of all DNA, so there is protein in every living cell. Not all of it is assimilable, of course, so vegetarians pay attention to how much comes from which plants. And not everyone is amenable to a vegan diet, but even if you limit your meat consumption to an occasional fish or game bird, you don’t need nearly as much
protein as the Beef Council would have you believe.

The U.S.D.A. daily recommended protein intake is orders of magnitude higher than it needs to be, and it is not difficult to figure out why. There are not millions of dollars being spent in Washington, D.C. by broccoli growers, or by peach farmers, or the onion lobby, or by farmer’s markets or community supported agriculturalists, with all their organic turnips and greens and potatoes and what-all-else, all of which is sufficiently high in protein to produce big beefy cattle, but evidently insufficient to support weak, flabby, addle pated weekend warrior “dittoheads” who order male-enhancement supplements from the back of Golf Digest and talk about how those vegetarians can’t possibly be getting enough to eat – wonder if they were chanting “USA! 
USA!” while vegan Carl Lewis was winning gold medals?

No, we have “protein” and “dairy” featured prominently in our daily recommended allowances precisely because we have such hefty (obese?) beef and dairy lobbies. One has to suspect that in addition to continuing to heavily advertise and push their addictive and destructive product, the Beef Council and their friends will in the future continue to advocate for their clients not just in terms of corrupting our nutritional standards, but also when it comes to allocating water.

During the health care reform debates of 2009 and 2010, the concept of rationing got more airplay than just about any other hot button keyword. It seems Americans do not ever want someone to tell us that we can’t have something – to tell us that there are limits to anything we desire.

Unfortunately, as many communities in the desert southwest know all too well, water is something which will have to be rationed at some point, regardless of how long we manage to stay in denial. There simply is not enough of it to go around, but until the actual time comes when scarcity is not just staring us in the face, but actually beating down our doors, we don’t seem capable of recognizing the plain and simple truth – fresh water is not a renewable resource. And since beef production takes a disproportionate amount relative to other healthier foods, the logical conclusion is…. Come on, put down that hot dog and answer, we know you
can do it…

Sigh.

To return to our opening theme, we are in the midst of a drought which reminds people yet again of the Dust Bowl era. Some people wonder whether the Dust Bowl was a trial sent by God to test the resolve of the American people. Anyone wondering this should seriously turn in their driver’s license, turn over their voter registration card, and admit themselves to the nearest mental hospital. God(s) had nothing to do with it.

The Dust Bowl was caused by farmers. By monocropping, not rotating, deep tilling and not using cover crops, farmers allowed topsoil to lose its ability to retain moisture. Prior to the 1930s, a drought would be bad, but it wouldn’t be devastating. Several pioneering soil specialists foresaw the danger of growing nothing but miles and miles of wheat and corn, but American farmers knew better than “those eggheads” and planted mile after mile anyway. After ignoring all the evidence before their eyes in the name of convenience and economic growth,  though, farmers all across the Great Plains watched their fertile lands literally just blow away.

Now, in spite of all the accumulated evidence, we are watching ranchers let their intransigence and greed shrivel our watersheds. Cows are slurping away our future, and we are looking the other way. Maybe we’re staring at our pretty emerald green lawns. We’re certainly not watching our aquifer levels.

It will be quite some time, we are afraid, before people reach the right conclusion on this one. It would be nice, though, if just once we could say that our society thought long enough with its collective head rather than its collective belly to solve a long-term problem before it overwhelmed us. Oh, well.

Happy farming!

Little Girls are Sometimes Very, Very Mean

While global warming features prominently in Myrtle’s gardening lexicon, the largest climate impact on vegetable growers comes from a different phenomenon sometimes in the news – the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) Effect.  In short, for Texas, years featuring El Niño are moderately cooler compared to average, and much wetter.  Years featuring La Niña are aggravatingly warmer, and much drier.  In addition, El Niño has the tendency to thwart tropical storm development, while La Niña tends to encourage it.

El Niño occurs when the Pacific Ocean surface temperatures are warmer than normal in certain zones near the equator associated with changes in atmospheric patterns, and La Niña is the description given to the phenomenon of cooler than normal temperatures in the same regions.  Neither is good or bad in isolation – they each have more or less opposite effects in different places.  El Niño may bring lots of rain to the American southwest, for example, but it causes drought (and sometimes famine) in parts of Asia and Australia.  On the other hand, El Niño causes increased wind shear in the Atlantic, reducing hurricane development, while La Niña causes reduced wind shear, making Atlantic hurricanes more likely.

Obviously, while weather impacts elsewhere affect other people in sometimes devastating ways, it is nevertheless true that as a general rule, Texas gardeners do better in El Niño years than otherwise, and we suffer harsh conditions during La Niña.

The recent drought is coming at the tail end of a La Niña.  To say that the Niña event “caused” the drought would be, perhaps, a bit of an overstatement, but it certainly did not help.  Even when ENSO-neutral conditions were reported starting in May/June, the Niña effects have lingered, and so has the drought.  This is part of the self-sustaining pattern of high temperatures and drought – heat bakes the soil, making moisture less available, and ensuring that the soil retains still more heat.  The best way to break the cycle is to add a significant amount of moisture in the form of rain from a tropical storm, which is a “solution” replete with its own dangers.

And now, as we bake in the dog days of August, comes word from the Climate Prediction Center in the form of their 4 August 2011 El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) Diagnostic Discussion, that “ENSO-neutral is expected to continue into the Northern Hemisphere fall 2011, with ENSO-neutral or La Niña equally likely thereafter.”

What does this mean, exactly?

For starters, we have a small window of opportunity to receive normal (or at least normalish) rainfall, starting in September and running for a few months, up to about December or so.  Otherwise, we can expect drought conditions to continue probably through at least next summer.

This second La Niña event is not altogether unexpected; historically, a weaker “little sister” Niña frequently accompanies a stronger first wave.  This makes sense if you picture what we are really talking about when we discuss the ENSO phenomenon – we are looking at an area of energy, more or less, in the form of either lower (Niño) or higher (Niña) temperatures in the water roughly riding the equator in the Pacific, from Asia to the Americas.  Water moves in waves, right?  And when is the last time you ever saw a body of water with just one wave in it?  So this is not a static phenomenon – ENSO undulates, more or less, like water in a bathtub after you plunk a baby down in the middle of it.  (It’s about that messy, too, but that’s a whole other discussion…)
The second Niña will probably not be as strong as the first, which is good news for people living on coastlines – Summer 2010 saw the development of a large number of exceptionally powerful hurricanes, assisted by Niña conditions.  Only shear dumb luck kept them away from land, because landfall from any of last summer’s hurricanes would have been a major calamity.  This summer still has the chance to produce some Katrina-esque storms, even though we have returned to ENSO-neutral at the moment, meaning atmospheric conditions are basically “normal” instead of being overly hurricane-friendly, as is true in Niña conditions.
However, as it relates to drought, a weaker Niña event won’t really help much.  This is because one of the primary drivers of our drought is now the lack of soil moisture from having been in drought for so long – literally, we are more likely to be in drought because for so long we have been in drought.  And dry soil warms up much more quickly than moist soil, so in addition to having no rain, we can expect a repeat of this year’s record temperatures, too.  A strong Niña would be worse than a weak one, but not really by all that much.

The City of College Station is starting to discuss the possibility of water rationing, which is good, we suppose, because water use is at all time high levels.  Water rationing probably should have started long before now, though, particularly given that this is not going to be a “one and done” water shortage.  The time for short-term thinking has been over for many, many moons.  Delaying rationing rules until we reach the limits of available water guarantees that rationing will cause maximum pain to everyone involved; coming up with smarter water use rules before reaching crisis point makes much more sense.

We are not the only community facing this problem; the time has come to get serious about water use and reuse.  We need revised city codes making it easier for residents to recycle gray water; we need increased subsidies for rainwater collection.  Lawns should be discouraged; xeriscaping should be incentivized.  Low-flow toilets (or even composting toilets), low-flow showerheads, and a host of other water saving gadgets ought to be subsidized.  Dishwashers should be sent the way of the Edsel – handwashed dishes are not only cleaner, more water and energy efficient, but also have the advantage of not throwing a lot of chemicals into the air you breathe.

It will eventually rain again.  And one of these years, we will probably even get too much rain – it may be difficult to remember such times, but they have happened before, and will come around once more.  But the new normal, at least in Myrtle’s neighborhood, is hot, and dry, and plenty of it.  The sooner we adapt to this reality and move on, the better.

Happy farming!

The Pray for Rain Brain Drain

Texas Governor Rick Perry believes we should pray for the end of the Drought of 2011.  We would say “Couldn’t hurt anything,” except that in order to get to his Day of Prayer event, the simpleminded, unscientific, superstitious fools who will be doing this praying will be driving predominantly low mpg pickup trucks and SUVs, so, in fact, in can and will do harm.
For the record, cause and effect are far too complicated a set of notions to say that our current drought is “caused by” global warming and anthropogenic climate change.  But get real; we all know it is consistent with global warming and anthropogenic climate change, and that increasing droughts of increasing severity are part of the forecast model.  A few short decades from now, a year with as much rain as we have had this year will not be described as “dry” but rather as “exceptionally wet.”

For a sense of perspective, we’ve lifted the attached pictures of the Aral Sea from Wikipedia – check there if you want to see licensing info, etc.  In 1989, two years before Mr. and Mrs. Myrtle Maintenance met each other, people living on the shores of the Aral Sea were, by and large, from small fishing villages, and were living much as their parents, their grand parents, and great-, great-grandparents had lived, in generations stretching back beyond the times of the Czars and the Khans and who knows what other unnamed rulers in prehistory.

Now?  Good luck finding any fish other than, perhaps, a few petrified examples in the dry, cracked salt flats which used to be deep under water.  The Aral Sea used to be slightly bigger than Lake Michigan – imagine, though, if Lake Michigan were to shrink by 90% in just 20 years.  Apart from the Port of Chicago being shut down, it is difficult to imagine the sea of troubles such a change would make; Illinois, though, would look less like the Midwest, and more like the Middle East.

It isn’t really all that difficult to conceptualize such a scale of change actually happening – probably not in the Great Lakes, at least not any time soon, but in a variety of other watersheds around the country, where self-inflicted stupidity has closed-minded political fools praying for deus ex machina.

Here in Texas, the northern half of the state is hydrated either directly or indirectly by pumping from the Ogallala Aquifer, which is being depleted at an unsustainable rate.  This underground water reserve stretches from the High Plains in Texas all the way up to the Dakotas.  The nation’s corn belt swells precisely because farmers take water that they cannot replace out of holes in the ground.  And the Ogallala Aquifer going dry is not a question of “if” but a question of “when”.

This is almost exactly the formula followed in Central Asia, where Russia and surrounding states took too much water from the Aral Sea over decades of exploitation in the name of economic growth, until the logic of hydrological extraction tipped towards desertification.

“But Myrtle,” you’re saying, “What choices do we have?  We have to feed people something, and they have to drink water from somewhere.”

Too true.  However, if you’ve been paying attention for any amount of time at all, you can probably already guess Myrtle’s answer.  Feed people from their own back yards, front yards, porches, kitchen windows, rooftops, etc.  And provide them water from their own cisterns – and while you’re at it, provide them the water which would otherwise have gone to grow your indefensible grass lawns, which (being the nice people you are) you dug up and replaced so very long ago with more sustainable and less water-insatiable edible landscaping.

Depending on where you live, the coming age of water scarcity will take varying spans of time to truly come home to roost, but rest assured, this is an issue which will ultimately affect everyone now drawing breath in one way or another.  Some areas will likely not see overall scarcity – New England, for example, is likely to be wetter, according to many climatologists, over the next century. 

However, changing global patterns will even affect those whose water supply is increased rather than decreased.  Why?  Changing sea levels will mean that water tables will see rising salinity boundaries – New York City is a good example of a community currently drawing water from wells which may not have more than 50 years at most of viability left in them (some estimates are much shorter and gloomier, depending on polar ice melting and sea level rise).

All of which means potable water will be the real gold standard of the coming century.  The ability to collect water from what rain does fall (when it finally falls!), and then make it as productive as possible while it is under our stewardship, will be the real test of character for our species as we head into the next phase of the anthropocene.

So Governor, pray if you’d like, but it’d be more productive if you’d grab a shovel and some PVC pipe.  Judging from your collected speeches, you’re pretty handy with a shovel.

Happy farming!

It's not so much the heat... Oh, wait, yes it is...

Want some perspective on global warming?  Look at overnight low temperatures, not daytime high temperatures.  The record “warmest low” (that is, the low temperatures which were the highest on a given day) for the month of July have almost all come from recent years.  In fact, 15 of the 31 “highest minimums” have come in just the last two years.  15 of 31 high min records were set in 2009 or 2010 for the month of July.

On the other side of that coin, the “low minimum”, or “record low” for each day in July has not been set since 1994.  For any of the 31 days in July.  In fact, only five of the 31 daily record lows have been set since 1990.  25 of the 31 were set before 1968.  21 of the 31 record lows were set prior to 1936.  It simply doesn’t cool down at night here any more – it’s hot during the day, but that has always been true.  What is new is that it is also hot at night..

Climate change is real.  Just ask a gardener.  Seriously, the fact that there is still anyone at all debating whether global temperatures are actually rising or not astounds us.  For anecdotal proof, ask anyone who has grown tomatoes for any length of time whether or not the fruiting season is shorter now than it was a couple of decades ago.

The answer, of course, is almost definitely “Yes, the fruiting season is shorter now than it was when I was younger.”

Why would that be, do you think?  The answer is fairly simple.  Tomatoes are dependent upon relatively cool nighttime temperatures for pollination.  In some parts of the country, this still happens well into the summer, but in most of Texas and the Deep South, there is no longer any evening relief between mid-May and late September.  Essentially, July tomatoes are now a rarity in many parts of the country, unless they are grown indoors.  Those fruits set before the nighttime temperatures soar into the upper 70s and lower 80s are all the tomatoes you are going to get.

Jennifer Freeman of the American Meteorological Society wrote an excellent piece entitled “The New Climate Normals: Gardeners Expect Warmer Nights” in NOAA’s ClimateWatch magazine, in which all the gory details of evening temperature data are summarized fairly succinctly.  Some places may be experiencing relatively cooler July high temperatures, but on average the country is warmer everywhere, mostly due to nighttime temperatures having soared.

The implications of these findings are fairly serious for society generally, but if we just restrict our thinking to what goes on in the garden, there is still more than enough to give one pause to reflect.  The bad news is that the growing season for some crops – like tomatoes – is quite simply disappearing, at least for the Spring garden.  We will probably reach a point at which we can only get Spring tomatoes for a month, maybe a month and a half each year.  In the Fall, on the other hand, we will probably be able to get good tomatoes for a three or four month stretch in a good year, because the date of first frost will probably get pushed back further and further.

There are other implications, though, for a wide variety of fruits and vegetables, which will require experimentation.  Gardening “experts” will increasingly be sought after, and their advice will be increasingly worthless, too, as changing temperature patterns make some old truisms about gardening in various places no longer true. 

Squash, for example, is an old standby in most of Texas – “The one thing you can count on in July is getting plenty of squash.”  Well, maybe… if you plant the right variety.  It never used to matter before, but it certainly does now.  Some varieties have pollen with low toleration for nighttime heat stress, you see.  Butternut squash, for example, has big, vibrant, thriving foliage and blooms during a Texas heat wave… but unless the nighttime temperature dips into the lower 70s, those big beautiful flowers are better as filling for quesadillas than as potential new butternut squash fruit.  Varieties with smaller flowers and higher-temperature pollen tolerances still produce prodigiously, but experimentation will be required to discover which varieties these are, since this is not one of the factors most seed companies advertise – it simply wasn’t a concern before, so nobody has thought seriously about it yet.

Other plants, though, thrive in the warmer weather, including the warmer nighttime temperatures.  Some of these plants are old favorites, and are welcome everywhere – cantaloupe and watermelon, for example.  We have some thriving volunteer cantaloupe – we weren’t sure at first what these plants were, and even after they started fruiting, we couldn’t be certain until the husk took on the characteristic woody muskmelon texture.  We also have some Sugar Baby watermelons which have not only produced prodigious vines, but have also produced more fruit than we ever imagined would come out of a 5’x10’ plot.

Then there are the plants which are not so welcome for most gardeners.  We have many times described our fondness for weeds – chicken feed, actually, is what we call them – and we will doubtless have ample opportunity to do so again.  Most varieties of invasive plant do better in high carbon-dioxide environments than do domesticated crop varieties of plant. 

We are strongly considering harvesting the chenopodia variety you see here nestled amongst our Hopi Red Dye amaranth.  The Native Americans grew chenopodium berlandieri and chenopodium album intentionally as an excellent grain source and potherb, much as we grow amaranth and quinoa.  In fact, these native pigweeds are closely related to chenopodium quinoa, and while they are not as colorful, nor as prodigious in their production of grain, they do have the advantage of growing in summertime in Texas.

Likewise, the common dandelion is an excellent salad green and forage food for chickens and other domesticated livestock.  And while its growing season is shifting also due to its particular temperature sensitivities, it has the tremendous advantage of not relying on human hands to determine when the right time for planting comes along.  We can rest easy when planning our garden, knowing that we simply harvest the dandelions when they are ready – if ever there were an easier “crop” to care for, we don’t know when it might have been.  Climate change has done nothing to make this any more difficult.

We have mentioned before our philosophy when picking fruit crops to incorporate in our garden, and it is worth mentioning again in the context of warmer nighttime temperatures.  We picked pomegranates as the most prominent fruit tree in our garden due to their ability to withstand extreme heat and cold.  The fact that this plant grows in every temperature and moisture extreme from Istanbul to Kabul makes it an excellent fruit tree for the changing climate of southeastern Texas.  Likewise, the variety of blackberries we chose to plant – Brison – was developed to be more heat-tolerant than the many Arkansas cultivars of blackberry.  Recent trials in Arizona have borne out the wisdom of this choice – the Arkansas varieties burnt to a crisp in low desert farming, but Brison berries were producing five pounds of fruit per plant by the third season.

Peaches were a problematic choice for us – the best peaches in the world, with all due apologies to Georgia, where they are rightly proud of their peaches, come from the Texas Hill Country.  We live in a region too warm on average and historically too wet to produce the high quality sweet peaches we remember eating when we were younger and lived in the western half of the state.

However, there are a few varieties with relatively low chilling requirements – Earligrand peaches only require 100 hours of temperatures below 45° in order to set fruit.  As the “new normal” begins to include less and less rainfall, the sweetening influence of water stress will hopefully improve the quality of our Earligrand crop, though we still doubt the quality will ever match that found in the high chilling requirement peaches found in Fredericksburg and Luckenbach.

Rio Grande is another lower chilling requirement peach variety – 400 hours of temperatures below 45°.  This represents something of a compromise for us, because while this sounds like not a lot of time – even calculating at just being 45° or less for only 12 hours a day, this is only about a month (33 days) of “low” temperatures – but it is nevertheless a difficult target, only likely to get more difficult as the years go by and the greenhouse gasses mount up.  To put this in context, while 90° temperatures in January are not exactly common even here, they also don’t surprise us when they do happen.

So, some years we expect our Rio Grande peaches will not set fruit.  On the other hand, when they do, they should be sweeter than the Earligrand.  Another advantage lay in the fact that Rio Grande are “mid-season” producers, meaning that in a typical year, we will likely have blackberries in May and June, with Earligrand peaches in June and July, and Rio Grande peaches in July and August.  If we stagger our plantings of watermelon and cantaloupe, we should be able to have fresh fruit clear through from the last week of April up through when the pomegranates peter out in December or January.  If we ever figure out how to produce a strawberry crop, we will be set almost year-round.

First, though, we have to just survive the heat...  A nice cold glass of water, followed by a snack of peaches sounds good right about now.

Happy farming!

Thanksgiving in June

We get all kinds of visitors at Myrtle's place, from the curious-but-not-on-board, to the gung-ho and ready-to-roll.  Recently, one of the latter came to see our little project, and she brought her charming father, who brought a wealth of experiences which would interest the most casual of observers.  He graduated from Texas A&M in the early 1940's, and spent three years in World War II fighting in the Far East.  The daughter wanted to talk plants; Mrs. Myrtle Maintenance, however, upon discovering that the father grew up on a farm in West Texas during the Great Depression, would not allow him to speak of anything else; we feared a lack of hospitality on our own part, but more, we feared not getting to hear his fascinating stories.

Among other things, our esteemed visitor discussed all the food his family produced which they could not eat, since they collected eggs and cream for the purpose of trading -- rather than selling -- said produce in exchange for things they couldn't grow themselves.  He smiled when we talked of our own grandparents' fondness for peaches and cream -- getting to keep the cream, after all, would have been a remarkable treat, only reserved for special occasions.  We were, needless to say, all attention.  We were also thankful.  "The Greatest Generation" set an example which our society has lamentably forgotten, of sacrifice, of work-ethic, and of long-term thinking.

These were the thoughts foremost in our minds as we set about our other task for the day, harvesting the grain from our amaranth.  Harvesting amaranth is really unlike any other harvest we have made to date.  It involves three discrete steps:

• Separate the seed heads from the stalk
• Dry the seed heads
• Remove the seeds from the husks

Step one is fairly self-evident; the stalks of our grain amaranth plants were as much as an inch-and-a-half thick, so a good pair of hand clippers was necessary.

To dry the seed heads, we hung them on the grape arbor in our driveway, the grapes being currently six months old, and therefore not having yet climbed the trellis.  We don't know where we'll dry next summer's crop, but then, that is a problem for next summer, not now.

Removing the seeds from the husks will, we imagine, be much the same as it was for our quinoa crop last winter -- we shall have to make a party of it in the kitchen, everyone rolling the dry husks between our hands and collecting the grain as it falls into a bowl.  Fun for the whole family, we expect.

We gave the stalks to the chickens, the leaves now being too bitter for use as potherbs (although we imagine we might not have thought so in 1933!), and much as with our corn harvest, the stalks will also give the birds a much-needed break from the western sun... at least, it will do so until they eat their own sunscreen, bless their little bird-brains.

We then turned the remaining stubble in the garden plot back into the soil with a vigorous hoeing.  After adding a bit of chicken-poop compost, we planted our Halloween pumpkins and a variety of winter squash where our amaranth had been.  The calendar pushes relentlessly forward, even for those who take the time to look however fleetingly backward.

Meanwhile, most folk rightly associate harvest with autumn festivals, most notably the American holiday known as "Thanksgiving".  For a year-round garden, though, harvest happens on a fairly regular basis.  What a shame, then, that "Thanksgiving" only happens once a year, particularly when we have so much to be thankful for.  The hunger felt by the vast majority of Americans in the 1930s is unparalleled in contemporary society, and where it does occur, it fills us with outrage.  It was simply another day, though, for so many who struggled and suffered through it at the time.

We don't often get visitors who remind us of such things, but when we do, we remember them.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Grass: Illegalize it!

On a mid-morning jog this week, Mr. Myrtle Maintenance had to choke back his outrage, upon seeing a resident of Pebble Creek – the upper-middle class enclave of College Station – watering his pristine St. Augustine grass in the middle of the day.  Now, some of you might think it was the “middle of the day” part that inspired this ire, but you'd be wrong.  It was the St. Augustine part of the story that really wrankled.

The University of Montana did a survey of grass lawns a few years ago, and came to the conclusion that the only places in the United States where grass lawns may be grown in a sustainable fashion are the Great Plains and a few locations in New England.  Everywhere else, grass lawns must be coddled in decidedly non-sustainable ways, including excessive irrigation, and chemical amendments in the form of fertilizers and herbicides to control “weeds” (the term most lawn growers use to describe native grasses).

Without these non-sustainable amendments?  Nature takes over.

One has to wonder why the cultural norm is an acceptance of this battle against Mother Nature, particularly when we must surely recognize by now Mother Nature will win this fight.  The question is not whether we can maintain our green grass yards; the question is, will we be alive or not when Mother Nature wins and the native grasses take over.

We currently consume three times as much water in this nation on the maintenance of grass lawns than we do on irrigating corn, our number one food crop.  If that number does not astound you, you aren't thinking clearly; we are already facing water shortages in much of the country, and aquifers such as the Oglalla are most assuredly not going to last much longer.  The grand irony of this last Spring was the flooding seen in Memphis where the potable water supply is diminishing at a rapid rate – an all too real example of “water, water, everywhere, and not a drop to drink.”

Lawns, let us be clear, are an avoidable evil.  They are morally wrong everywhere but the Great Plains and some parts of New England.

A tad strong a claim, you might be saying, but we insist it is true.  When there are hungry mouths in the world not being fed, and there is perfectly arable land being put to use for something as wasteful and environmentally damaging as a grass lawn, it is worse than neglect, it is spiteful and wasteful selfishness.

So what's the alternative, you might ask, astroturf?  Cement?  No, and no.  The alternative is a reasonable mix of whatever plants are native to your area, and whatever plants go well as companions in each of the many different microclimates in your yard.  Experiment a little.  Go nuts.  Just don't do any square or even remotely linear patterns; plant brambles of berries, bunches of shrubs, fruit trees scattered willy-nilly, and mix vegetable and herb beds in haphazardly, with sandy, wood-chippy, gravel, or flagstone paths in-between.  Your land can tell you best; you just have to listen to it, that's all.

One of the basic premises of permaculture as a design philosophy is that wherever possible, native and self-sustaining stands of groundcover ought to be encouraged.  In Texas, that includes a lot of possible grasses, most of which are considered “nuisance” grasses by the typical suburbanite.  Johnson Grass, in particular, is hated by the grass lawn crowd, but one has to wonder why.  It is really a relative of sorghum, and is about as drought-tolerant as grasses come.  The green in the few patches of lawn at Myrtle's place are almost entirely comprised of Johnson Grass, and if they have received any water at all when we have given moisture to our fruits and vegetables, it has been purely accidental, let us assure you.

More to the point, this grass might be unattractive as an intruder into a monocropped lawn, but it is highly attractive as a median plant in small patches between other groupings of plants.  In addition, it attracts pests which would otherwise be attacking our vegetables – why would we want to eradicate an effective trap crop?

The same logic that leads homeowners to attack native grasses causes many local hay farmers to curse the name 'dewberry'.  Wild blackberries, you see, are classified as 'invasive weeds' by most local farmers.  Is that not the heighth of lunacy?

Around our house, we encourage the blackberries to grow like weeds.  And they oblige us, let us assure you!  Before too many years are out, we expect that our entire perimeter will be a ring of what we think of as "yardberries".  If these be weeds, let us never hear of herbicides again.  "Weed berry cobbler" tastes better than anything they've ever served in a St. Augustine house.

We will undoubtedly expand on this premise in future musings, but for now, we must go weed out some of the neighbors' St. Augustine; it's encroaching on our wild Muscadine stands, and that cannot be allowed!!  Out, out, damned weeds!!

Happy farming!

Nostalgia for the Mud

The desire to dig in the dirt sometimes garners the pejorative description of “nostalgia for the mud” among those whose tastes run to the more comfortable and refined.  “Nostalgia for the mud” has a different connotation, though, for Texans.  We get a little more literal about the phrase, since we don’t get enough moisture on a regular basis to have much in the way of mud.

It may be a somewhat arbitrary way to track things, but if you start from last November, the Brazos Valley is now at the tail end of the driest 8-month period in recorded history, and there is simply no end in sight to our current drought.

The good news, though, is that La Niña is now over, so any dryness we experience from here on out will be because we are normally dry at this time of year, not because of any abnormal atmospheric events.  Small comfort, true, particularly since droughts can be self-perpetuating – dry ground warms up fairly quickly, and has already caused all kinds of temperature records to be broken all over East Texas this Spring.  In addition, since the ground lacks moisture, the phenomenon of afternoon thunderstorms springing up as a result of daytime heating building huge local cumulonimbus clouds can’t take place – no moisture, no storm clouds.

What’s a microfarmer to do?

Plan for the future, that’s what.  We have taken note of the weather, naturally, because it dictates much of what we can and cannot do in our garden, but we reject wholesale the bellyaching of people who refuse to accept that this is the new normal.  Even in the middle of a drought, we have still received more rain year-to-date than plenty of folk who farm in the middle of deserts all over the world, who manage to produce beuatiful fruits and vegetables.

We recently harvested our meager sweet corn crop, for example, and were grateful for the few ears we managed to salvage.  All over the Brazos Valley, folk who make their living from the monocrop monstrosity known as modern farming fall into one of two categories:  those who planted cotton instead of corn this year, and those who are in danger of going broke.  Corn was a terrible investment this spring for anyone who spent money on seed (we didn’t – we used old seed from a couple of seasons ago).

Tomatoes, on the other hand, are growing profligately, in utter defiance of the drought, and are producing some of the sweetest, juiciest fruit we ever remember tasting.  Same thing for jalapeños, which are currently keeping us in some of the best homegrown salsa anyone anywhere has ever tasted.

We have started cutting and drying amaranth seed-heads, and will be threshing them over the next several weeks.  This is especially important as Myrtle’s place recently became gluten free; homegrown grains are becoming a prominent part of our garden.  As fate would have it, this dovetails nicely with our need to grow crops which don’t particularly care two figs about whether it rains much or not.  Amaranth, sorghum, millet, buckwheat, quinoa, these are all crops which, once established, can thrive without a whole lot of attention.  And the summer trifecta of amaranth, sorghum and millet also doesn’t particularly object to the stress of 100°+ temperatures – each of these crops is perfect for a climate which is semi-temperate two or three months out of the year, semi-tropical two or three months out of the year, and flat out arid six or eight months out of the year.

We have mentioned before the three distinct growing seasons in the Brazos Valley, but we are starting to appreciate that there are “microseasons” as well.  For example, bush and pole beans of all sorts do okay from March through June, but require different treatment depending on when you put them in the ground.  Velvet beans, being tropical, require tons of sun and water, and can take anywhere from three to six months to come to harvest.

And then there's grain.  Amaranth, which we are harvesting now, can go all summer.  We'll have a “mini-season” for buckwheat, which will go in the ground in early to mid September, to be harvested in late October.  We'll start putting quinoa in the ground in October, and stagger plantings until January, so that we'll be harvesting some kind of grain from now until next March, when we plant more amaranth, sorgum, and millet, and start the whole cycle all over again.

We'll be planting avocados, raspberries, and evergreen huckleberries next winter in hopes of making our fruit and veggie harvest become year round, too.  And while strawberries have been the bane of our existance for four years now, we're going to try again this fall, in hopes that if they take off prior to next year's heat wave (May or June, depending), maybe, just maybe, we can harvest more than just a couple of berries from them.

Under no circumstances, however, will we assent to the presence of mopers.  Yes, it is hot enough for us, thank you very much.  Next question!

Happy farming!

Drought? A Grain of Truth on the Subject...

Texas has four seasons:  Drought, Flood, Blizzard and Twister.

Unfortunately, we’ve been stuck in “Drought” for longer now than we remember having done in quite some time.  In the Brazos Valley, we ended 2010 down roughly 10 inches from our normal annual rainfall totals which, though the locals don’t want to hear it, is precisely the level at which climatologists predict we will be on a regular basis beginning as soon as within the next decade.

So, the fact that the long range forecast doesn’t look all that promising should come as no surprise.

La Niña is set to break up right on schedule next month, which will provide some measure of satisfaction, even if it doesn’t bring relief, because it will be nice to know that at least, if we are dry, we are not artificially dry.

However, there’s something to the notion that climate systems feed on themselves – had we been experiencing the wet weather our neighbors to the north have been enduring, there would be lots of moisture in the ground this summer, which would tend to cool off the air in the lower atmosphere via evaporation (kind of like “Gaia sweat”), and would tend to make afternoon thunderstorms more likely, since all that evaporated moisture might oversaturate the air on a local basis.

The opposite holds true, too, of course.  Dry soils do not sweat; no evaporation means that all those exposed dry soils – and in the case of the Brazos Valley, those are exposed dry clay soils – do nothing but bake, and absorb more heat, and leave us hotter and drier.

So.

We at Myrtle’s place are hunkering down for what looks like a somewhat uncomfortable four or five months to come.

We are also reflecting on what kinds of crops we are going to want to plant in future seasons.  Fortunately, we have made some headway on this project already, having begun our experimentation with amaranth and a few other experimental plantings this spring, and we can report some significant success in that regard.

The crimson variety pictured here is about two months old; grain harvest for this variety takes roughly 110 days from germination, so we expect to be harvesting around a pound of grain per plant sometime in late July or early August.  We have another bed which was planted right at two weeks ago, with more of this crimson variety, a giant orange variety from China, and Hopi Red Dye Amaranth, a variety we picked up from Seeds of Change which is used not only for greens and grain, but also for clothing dye.

This crop has proven to be a great boon to our garden for a variety of reasons.  First, it doesn’t require an awful lot of water.  While our sweet corn lay languishing in the hot, dry Texas Spring, our amaranth has been booming.  Further, it is multipurpose.  We still have some chard producing in our herb garden, but for the most part, greens have been hard hit by our high temperatures and dry weather.  Not so with amaranth, though.  The young leaves and shoots are particularly good in salads; as these parts of the plant mature, they get a little more bitter, but when cooked are still every bit as good as spinach.

We have not yet had the pleasure of a grain harvest, but we are looking forward to it with great anticipation, because amaranth grain is something of a celebrity item in the gluten-free world.  It can be pan-popped and served somewhat like quinoa, it can be blended into flours, it can be used to enrich hot cereals, it can be fermented and served as a beer.  The sky is the limit on what we might do with this wonder grain when we are done harvesting – and thanks to the long summer growing season, allowing us to stagger our planting, we will be getting greens from our amaranth all the way into July and August, and will be harvesting grain all the way from July and August into September and possibly even October, when we plant our fall quinoa crop.

There are some other grains we are looking at planting, too, in hopes of taking advantage of our hotter, drier “new normal”.  We have intended all along to include buckwheat in our summer rotation, and while we may need to rearrange our planting dates for this traditional cover crop, we are more convinced than ever of the desirability of diversifying with many different pseudocereals.

Millet – in particular, finger millet and foxtail millet, could well find their way into our crop rotation, too.  These are high-yield, hot weather crops which have seen tremendous success in arid regions of Africa and the Indian subcontinent; they are more nutritious than corn or wheat, and withstand weather that can only be described as abusive.  What’s not to love?

And finally, a food source which is already ubiquitous in the American South, but which hardly anyone in this country recognizes as a food source.  Sorghum.  Actually, in much of the South, it’s pronounced “Saw-grum”, but we digress.

Much of the world eats sorghum with minimal processing – stews, breads, popped grains, pastes mixed with pulses… any way you can think of to cook the raw grain, someone somewhere has done.

And in the U.S., too, there is a history of using sorghum flours, particularly when wheat was too expensive or otherwise unavailable.

However, most Americans have inherited a snobbish attitude about the consumption of sorghum, most likely owing to its association with poverty – only someone who could not afford processed white flour would cook with sorghum flour, after all – and as a result, if we think of sorghum and food at all, it is in the context of sorghum-based “molasses” (which, technically, isn’t a molasses, but that’s another huge digression).

We’ve got lots of sorghum-based recipes, though, for everything from peanut butter cookies to breading for chicken or fish, and while it is true that sorghum is somewhat more powerfully flavored than wheat, the difference is not really that much different between wheat and sorghum than it is between processed “white flour” and raw whole-grained wheat flour.  In fact, we suspect that most people would not require much time to not only get used to the stronger flavor, but come to prefer it.

Nutritionally, sorghum has wheat beat all hollow in terms of assimilable vitamins and minerals, though wheat is perhaps a tad more protein-laden.  Sorghum is extremely high in iron, though, which is the principle reason molasses is so often prescribed for pregnant and nursing mothers. 

As a crop, too, sorghum has wheat beat all hollow.  Wheat production is land intensive, water intensive, and highly susceptible to climate variations.  Sorghum, on the other hand, is a fairly tall plant with a large quantity of grain per plant and, most importantly, it is highly drought resistant.  In extreme conditions, the sorghum plant will roll its leaves tightly to reduce evapotranspiration and will even, should the need arise, go dormant. 

A field of dried out wheat plants is just hay.  A field of dried out sorghum, though, can be revived with one good rain.

There are those, of course, who will remember that we live in the middle of the city.  What are we doing raising grain at all?  Doesn’t that take, like, acres and acres?

No, it doesn’t.  We have been pleasantly surprised by how much grain we can produce in a relatively small area.  Quinoa was the first grain we grew, of course, and our initial planting was fairly small, but based on calculations done after an actual harvest, we have concluded we could have grown something on the order of 15 to 20 pounds of quinoa in the plots available last winter.  We have added more tilled plots since then, so who knows how much we may end up growing.

Amaranth, as we may have mentioned, can be expected to garner anywhere from ½ to 2 pounds of grain per plant.  We will probably get somewhere around 100 pounds of amaranth seed this summer; in subsequent years, we can greatly increase this harvest at little to no greater expense in anything except elbow grease.

Finger millet has a similar production capacity, with the seed heads basically being an overgrown version of cattails, and while we don’t yet have empirical data to work with, word-of-mouth from fellow microfarmers suggests that sorghum can be at least as productive as quinoa.

In short, we ought to be able to produce all the grain we need on our little half-acre of heaven without taking any land away from the production of our more typical fruits and vegetables.

In addition to all of the aforementioned benefits, growing grains ought to also prove a boon to our livestock.  Some of the best homemade chicken feeds we have encountered start with Milo, a fairly popular variety of sorghum.  And whether sorghum, amaranth, millet, buckwheat, quinoa, or some as yet undiscovered gem, bees will be flocking to these plants which are, after all, nothing more than glorified flowers.

Making sure something is growing out there which can withstand the scorching summer heat gives us confidence that our bees (when we finally put them in) will themselves be under less stress as they attempt to eke out a living in our increasingly harsh environment.  We will also have to rely less and less upon the animal feed industry to care for our hens in these same summer months.  This is a good thing all around.

So, if you see us occasionally smile through the haze and sweat this summer, know that it is only partly because we are completely bonkers.  Part of that smile will be because we are sensing possibilities in the challenges before us.  And given that Mrs. Myrtle Maintenance is one of the greatest bakers in the world, we expect that they are tasty, tasty possibilities.

Keep cool, and…

Happy farming!