Have a Heart... Yeah, Baby! Have a Heart!

"Vous au moins, vous ne risquez pas d'être un légume, puisque même un artichaut a du cœur. (You couldn't even be a vegetable — even artichokes have a heart.)"
--Amélie Poulain

One of the things we at Myrtle’s place find fascinating about people who ask us gardening advice is the idea that there is a legitimate calendar which can be followed for exactly when certain plants should be put in the ground.  Newsflash:  if such a calendar had ever been valid in the past, it most definitely is no longer valid, thanks to global warming.

One of the concomitant truths of which we find people (on a more or less regular basis) ignorant in some degree or other is the notion that gardening in the Brazos Valley is a year round event.  In some measure, this means that during each season of the year, there is some crop that can be grown. 

However, there is another sense in which gardening here is year round – there are a wide variety of perennial plants which do well here, and in the world of comestibles, this is not limited to just herbs and fruit trees and vines.

We recently visited some friends of Myrtle who have a smashingly successful crop of asparagus growing in a pile of chicken-enhanced compost, and while for most folk, asparagus is considered a “northern” crop… it is possible, with care and attention (particularly during our blisteringly hot summers) to keep it going.  We wait with bated breath (and hovering forks) for the results of our friends’ efforts.

Meanwhile, we have decided to get into the perennial vegetable game ourselves this year, with a new raised bed which we will dedicate to the growing of artichokes.  A friend of ours from Turkey (a botanist, no less) gifted us with a packet of seeds, and it would be the height of rudeness not to take up the challenge.

Cynara cardunculus var. scolymus otherwise known as the “globe artichoke” is grown commercially in the part of California where so many other Mediterranean delicacies seem to be localized; in fact, Castroville, CA, is the “Artichoke Capital” of the United States, and there are no challengers to their claim.  The long and the short of it is, even there, artichokes require protection from frost in winter, making consistent production a challenge in most of the U.S.

For a climate to be considered truly “Mediterranean” there are strict limits on both annual temperature extremes, though in the case of artichokes, the more important limit is the winter lows; technically, they can be grown as far north as U.S.D.A. hardiness zone 7, though for most of the U.S., that hardiness zone gets cold enough that they may only be grown as an annual.  It is possible to get a limited crop in one growing season from the artichoke…. but the vast majority of the harvest from commercial production is from plants that are at least a year old.

So, what are we going to do about that here in College Station, Texas, where just this past winter we had at least one stretch of thirty-six consecutive hours at or below freezing?

We’re going to do for our artichokes what we have been meaning to do for a couple of years now for our tomatoes:  we’re going to “hoop house” them.  A full-blown greenhouse would be too much, and between the chicken coop and our proposed new tool shed, we are pushing the limits of the city ordinances on permanent structures anyway.  Temporary coverings draped over a PVC frame, however, would be just the thing.

Assuming we can work out the logistics, we can probably even heat the interior of our artichoke frame with, say, Christmas lights, or maybe a heat lamp designed for chickens (delightful irony, given that we never use such a thing in the chicken coop, it never getting that cold in there).

And if it works well enough on the artichokes, it’s a dead certainty we’ll do the same thing with our tomatoes – which, after all, are also naturally perennial in their home habitats.  Provided they never encounter a frost, and they can manage to survive the heat of July and August, tomatoes can provide fruit for multiple years as well. 

Meanwhile, as a hedge to our betting against Mother Nature, we will not just be planting artichokes (much as we love them).  We will also be planting the hardier relative (and probably ancestor) of the artichoke we know and love.  Cardoon (Cynara cardunculus) is really just “an artichoke that doesn’t have the cool head/fruit”. 

Cardoon is native to drier portions of the Mediterranean, though notably it is an invasive species in the Pampas of Argentina, an area where, let’s face it, it requires a particularly tough and hardy character for a plant to survive.  In the culinary world, cardoon is a little more difficult to utilize, as only the stems are typically eaten, but if treated much like asparagus, the same artichokey flavor comes through.

And while technically perennial as well, it usually dies off after just one season when grown in more extreme climates than in its native Mediterranean home.  However, the advantage of cardoon is that it reseeds heavily when allowed to do so; the result is a more or less perennial patch – much like clover or alfalfa hayfields.

We are not yet ready to plant – we have, however, finished building three new raised beds, and will be doing all the soil treatment necessary for our new perennial food crops.  And next fall, we’ll be putting in the hoop frames.  New projects, same old story – lots and lots of energy investment upfront; if you want a project to “take care of itself”, you’ve got to put in all the effort up front.

We’ll keep you posted.

Happy farming!

Busy as Bees... and our responsibility to the same

“Gentlemen!  You can’t fight in here!  This is the War Room!”

--Peter Sellers fictional American President in Dr. Strangelove

We experienced a hive death this winter, and while experienced bee keepers have all had this happen to them at some point or other, we are not (yet) experienced bee keepers, so this was more than just a little traumatic for us.

That having been said, we are not a family that rests on its laurels.  Every experience must be milked of all possible lessons, and made worth its own pains by serving as a teaching moment.  So the first thing we did after cleaning out our first top bar hive, naturally, was start reading source materials again.

And we have learned a lot, as ought to be expected.

There is no solid evidence one way or the other, of course, as to exactly what happened to our first colony of bees, apart from the fact that one day they were there, and then a few days later, they simply weren’t.  There are some telltale signs, though, which give us more than sufficient clues.

First, there was still about a pint or so of honey in the combs.  Our bees, more than likely, did not starve to death.  There were only a small number of dead bees trapped in the comb, which suggests that while our backs were turned, they simply migrated, probably due to queen death.

There was no brood left in the comb anywhere, either.  Granted, the die-off happened in late February/early March, so there would not have been a lot of eggs there in any event… but it looks like our queen either died or left.  No way to be sure which… but it is safe to say that she was not in the hive the last time we checked.  Lesson learned – don’t open the box without locating the queen, and making sure she’s still there.

We have learned other lessons along the way, some of which had nothing to do with our colony die off, but which are important all the same, and how we handle things will be completely updated when our new package bees arrive in May.  Some of the more important changes to bee keeping at Myrtle’s place this year:

·         No more smoke.  The classical description of why smoke is used actually even hints at why we will not be using a smoker any more… from the Wikipedia page on collecting honey:

“Collecting honey is typically achieved by using smoke from a bee smoker to pacify the bees; this causes the bees to attempt to save the resources of the hive from a possible forest fire, and makes them far less aggressive.”

Less aggressive, maybe, but also more stressed.  Pacifying the bees by kicking in their fight or flight instincts?  Sorry, that is on its face an intuitively bad idea.

Instead?  Pacify the bees the way they pacify themselves.  Prior to swarming, bees gorge themselves on honey, storing up for the uncertainty of flight and finding a new home; swarming bees are the least likely to attack of bees in any state in nature.  This state may be duplicated with the use of a spray bottle full of sugar water or honey water… and even better with a light dusting of confectioner’s sugar.  Puff them ‘til they are a dusty white and they will be peaceful and happy, not peaceful and panicky.

·         New front door – the traditional entry to even top bar hives has been located fairly low on the box, mostly out of habit, tradition, and sloth.  Langstroth hives are designed with the entrance on a “landing board” at the base of the hive, in fact, and on our old hive, the holes we drilled in the side were near the bottom.  Landing boards, of course, are a human invention – old hollow logs in nature don’t have them, so why did they ever gain hold in the mind of bee keepers as a necessity?  Who knows, but they go hand in hand with a “front door” at the bottom of the hive.
This is the wrong place to put the entrance, as a simple observation of hives in nature would have told us, had we bothered to observe.  Bees prefer to enter near the top of the hive, for a very practical reason – diseased bees (and mites and other intruders, as well) fall to the bottom.  If the entrance is at the bottom, then every single worker has to pass through the hives’ mortuary on their way home after every single flight.

A much better arrangement is to allow the detritus to be collected at the bottom of the hive where only the worker bees tasked with cleanup have to deal with them.  Exposure to disease, pesticides, mites, etc. is inevitable; however, by moving the entrance to the top of the hive, the amount of exposure is reduced.  By how much?  Well, only a few hundred bees are necessary for cleanup; by contrast, there may be as many as 50,000 workers who have had to cross the debris with the traditional setup – that’s not just a minor change, that is an orders of magnitude change.

·         Related to the new front door, actually…. Instead of a screen at the bottom of the hive (suggested in some designs because it “allows trash like dead bee carcasses or mites to fall out”), we are putting in solid bottoms on all our top bar hives from now on.

How will we remove the dead bees, mites, etc.?

We won’t.  The bees will.  Remember those bees tasked with cleaning up?  Yeah.  Turns out in nature, they do their job.  When entomologists study wild hives, they do not find a lot of detritus – there are very few carcasses because they are removed from the hive and flown away several yards. 

On the other hand, when an open mesh exists at the bottom of the hive… it doesn’t just allow things to fall out, it allows other things to crawl in.  Bees choose to live in seclusion for a reason – they want to be able to control their environment.  We should let them, as much as it is possible to do so.

There are all sorts of elements of “natural” bee keeping that make it a better system.  Experienced Langstroth hive keepers ask all sorts of wrong questions, like “how do you limit the number of drones” or “what do you do about temperature control” or the like.  And the answer is “nothing”, because the bees know their business better than we do.  In any hive, there are exactly as many drones as there ought to be.  And one of the reasons is because they help regulate temperature.  There are others, which we can’t even guess at, because we are big lumbering primates, not small and nimble bees.

We’ll be back in the honey production business soon… probably as soon as June… but we’re only partially in it for the honey.  Mostly, we’re in it for the bees.  Well, the bees and the flowers.  No garden is ever going to thrive quite as well as a garden well tended by bees.  We’re hoping to make our next colony of bees as happy and healthy as they make us.

Happy farming!

How Not to Be a Sucker... or at Least Not Get Bitten By One

Reasons to avoid mosquitoes are not difficult to find.  Their bite does not particularly hurt, at first anyway, but even one bite can become an itchy nightmare, and they seldom bite singly.  In addition to being a nuisance, these bites carry numerous diseases, not the least important of which is the dread West Nile virus, frequently the cause of an extremely uncomfortable illness, and too often fatal.

So, mosquitoes bad, no mosquitoes good, right?

Here is the point in a Big Myrtle posting where you expect us to whip out some kind of scientific explanation for why it is important to keep in balance, yada yada yada.  If that is what you are waiting for, you are going to have to keep on waiting.  On the subjects of fire ants and mosquitoes, we are not objective in the least.  We hate the little blighters.  And at least some scientists agree with us – a July 2010 article in Nature entitled “Ecology: A world without mosquitoes” posited that there would be minimal impacts if all genera in the family Culicidae were eradicated.  We don’t hold quite so extreme a view, but still, it’s nice to imagine.

So… what to do about them?

More on fire ants in a later posting, as they are the more difficult pest with which to deal.  Mosquitoes, for a resourceful gardener, are actually one of the easier problems to solve.  All it takes is some resource allocation (and no, we don’t mean money, though you may have to outlay some of that), and the sweat equity necessary to put things in their proper places.

The secret to fending off mosquito attacks is partially to be found in the advice given by practically every municipal government in the world – limit the availability of standing water in which the creatures breed – but more importantly to be found in limiting the spaces in which mosquitoes are comfortable.  Yes, the mosquito has a life cycle, and interrupting the larval stage of that cycle will reduce the overall population, but you still need to be prepared for the dangers represented by adult mosquitoes on the prowl, and the best way to do that is to design your living spaces in such a way as to make them feel unwelcome.

What do we mean by that?  Well, stop and consider how the mosquito spends its day.  A creature that small would rely very heavily on one sense above all others – smell.  Sight, they have… but they do not primarily rely on it to discern friend from foe, food from fen.  No, they spend their time sniffing out either the sweet, sticky smell of plant nectar (particularly of smoother grasses), or the telltale odor of mammalian perspiration.

There are a few other chemical markers they track, notably carbon dioxide, but the chief thing to note is, it’s their sniffers you need to attack if you want to make them leave you alone.

And the easiest way to mess with their sniffer is to create an environment in which their sense of smell is completely overwhelmed.  A pretty herb garden is not just pretty, and it’s not just useful for natural medicines or for culinary delights, it is also your first line of defense against biting insects.

As it turns out, you are orders of magnitude less likely to bit by mosquitoes when tending a bit of garden comprised of pungent plants like rosemary, basil, catnip, sage, lavender, oregano, fennel, anise, mint of all kinds… the smells simply overwhelm the ability of small insects to differentiate plant from person.  And if your garden is not monocropped, but is instead a healthier random hodgepodge, even better.  The more interspersed the smells are, the greater the effect.

We had read about this phenomenon before, of course, being English literature baccalaureates who don’t’ believe something exists unless it is in print, but experiencing it firsthand has lent us an air of expertise on the subject we might not otherwise have acquired.  We noticed several years ago that we were far more likely to get bit in the backyard rather than the front.  Numerous experiments reduced the possible number of variables to an acceptably low level to allow us the rather novel conclusion that, by jove, those organic gardeners know what the heck they are talking about.

The usual approaches to the art and science of repelling mosquitoes, of course, are the familiar bug sprays (both those designed to kill and also those designed to repel), in addition to the use of excluding or filtering spaces with screens and netting.  The limitations of these approaches are telling – sprays designed to kill end up poisoning more than just the bugs being targeted, while sprays designed to repel end up wearing off (particularly in water); and screens and netting, of course, limit your movement in addition to the movement of the bug – plus, once a hole in your armor is found, the bugs will simply pour through in an unstoppable wave.

The advantage of smelly herbs is that they are there year round (particularly the perennials, such as rosemary, lavender and oregano), and just so long as you plant enough of them all around your yard, they are effective all the time, everywhere, rain or shine.  If you happen to have a backyard pool, the effect doesn’t wear off after a dip, either. 

And then there is this ancillary factor – we think of mosquitoes as “blood suckers” but the truth is that mammalian blood is only one part of their diet; mosquitoes mostly thrive on nectar from their favorite plants.  A grassy field is their favorite abode (watch a squirrel or rabbit run through an open expanse of unmown grass and see the midges fly up from the ground if you want visual evidence).  By replacing their natural roosting and foraging grounds with pungent herbaceous plants which provide neither food nor shelter, you can reclaim your territory, enjoying it more on every level conceivable.

There are other advantages to this approach as well, most notably the idea that interspersed herb beds are an excellent exemplar of the forest gardening approaches favored by permaculturalists.  Edges are the microecological hotspots, and permanent herb gardens form an exceptional intermediate layer in this multilevel canopy approach to gardening.

We get requests for advice from all over, and one of the more common (and eternally surprising) questions is “How do you keep your rosemary from spreading too much?”  The answer, of course, is “Why would we want to stop it?”  As far as we are concerned, the rosemary, lavender and fennel can spread as far as they like.  Not only do we enjoy the smells…. we know from hard earned experience that mosquitoes don’t.

One final note, about that standing water idea.  We have heard numerous people comment on our rainwater collection ponds, saying they would be too nervous about mosquito control to attempt something of the sort.  This is a common misconception – the “dangerous” standing water to be worried about is in open containers – old tires, uncovered buckets, clogged gutters and the like.  As with so many things, manmade structures are the worst danger – places where mosquitoes might thrive, but none of their natural predators can get at them.

In a natural setting, there are few places less hospitable to mosquito larva than a well tended garden pond – in addition to natural predators such as fish, dragonflies, turtles, lizards, frogs, crayfish, and gude kens wha else, a pond tended by a careful gardener experiences enough maintenance that any mosquito infestation can be readily observed – and dealt with.  Baccilus thuringiensis dunks are available at practically every garden supply store, and even these may not be necessary, provided enough natural flora and fauna exist to keep larvae in check.

And, as it turns out… our ponds are not the source of the few mosquitoes we see each year anyway.  Scientists have a word for the nesting preference of the truly dangerous mosquitoes – “phytotelmata” is a fancy word for “natural reservoirs on plants” and it is here that the mosquitoes carrying disease are most likely to be born. 

Water standing in the stumps of trees, or in standing water in a clogged gutter, or in open buckets, old tires lying around with water in them, or open sewer drains are far more likely to be the cause of a rampant mosquito problem than ponds, creeks or even drainage ditches.  This is both because the presence of natural predators is inhibited in these out-of-the-way breeding grounds and also because these places are also the best environments for disease-causing bacteria and viruses to thrive, out of sight from cleansing ultraviolet radiation from the sun, which kills virtually all bacteria and viruses, given enough exposure time.

For those things you can control, like any containers on your own property that you can either remove or clean, or gutters on your own roof that you can clear of debris, the solution is straightforward:  clean it, clear it, remove it.  For those things you cannot control, like the cleanliness of your neighbors’ yards or gutters, the solution is smelly herbs.  Areas of your property where there is likely to be an incursion of visiting mosquitoes should be overplanted with every variety of pungent plant you can imagine – go wild.  A rosemary hedge can be a symbol of health and wealth, and a talisman against irritation.

So, as you prepare for summer, you can either get ready to smell like deet, or you can take Myrtle’s advice, and decide to smell like a lovely bouquet of mint, lavender and rosemary.  Our approach is more pleasant, we believe, but to each their own.

Happy farming!

Spring has Sprung... and Our Personal Hibernation is Almost Over

Spring has sprung in the Brazos Valley.  We have had a fairly eventful Winter, in which temperatures were yet again above the monthly 20^th century averages (as they have been every month since the late 1970s), and yet… enough freezing events happened that we were worried for a good long while about our pomegranates, figs, and peaches.

We are pleased to report that all the fruit trees save perhaps one of our six peach trees made it through unscathed.  We lost a eucalyptus, but then, we never really thought of it as a permanent fixture anyway – it was always just a matter of time before it froze back.

Meanwhile… our overwintered crops are doing well.  Fava beans should be ready to harvest in a month or so, onions are blooming, and our garlic is as big as I ever remember it getting before.

And the inevitable signs of Spring are here, too.  Sometime shortly after the blue jays return in full force to our canopy, we know the blackberries will be in bloom, and the wild grapes will not only sprout plentiful foliage, but there will also be plenty of little clusters of baby grapes.

And the long, dark winter of the blog is hopefully over, too.  For plenty of reasons, we have not written much lately.  Knock on wood, that may change soon; we’ll certainly have plenty of things to talk about, particularly on the beekeeping front, as we have experienced our first tragic die-off… and have learned many, many things as a consequence.  Our new colony will be installed in May, and we should definitely have a lot more to say about bees leading up to that event.

In the meantime, enjoy some photographic evidence of Spring…

Happy farming!