Big Myrtle's Tea Shoppe and Egg Emporium

A Fool and His Garden... Or Something Like That...

2012-01-30T15:23:00.002-06:00

“Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.”
--Alan Perlis, Epigrams in Programming

Gardening in the 21st century is an exercise in programming rather touchy liveware. We misdoubt much that Alan Perlis, the first winner of the Touring award for advances in computer programming, would know one end of a shovel from the other, but his advice to programmers rings true for gardeners, as well. Simplify, simplify!

The size and scope of practically any book on the market regarding urban homesteading, urban farming, backyard vegetable raising, square-foot gardening, or any other system or nomenclature you care to use, suggests that there are an infinity of issues involved in growing one’s own food. This is an inescapable truth, made only more mind-boggling by things like climate change, land degradation, water, air and light pollution, urban heat sinks, and whatever the Kardashians may be up to these days.

“Keeping it simple” has seemingly never been harder.

However, there are a few guidelines we have come to live by over the past five years of attempting to recreate our grandparents’ idyllic country homes here in the middle of the city. We hope you find them either useful or at least mildly entertaining:

Don’t bother experimenting. Just dive in to full production, and adapt on the fly. We have noticed that those projects where we just dabbled, like our first attempt at water collection, were too timid by half, and have had to be redone entirely. 100 gallons of water in barrels is nowhere near enough to maintain a full scale half-acre garden, and we are totally redesigning the gutters on the roof and the outlets from which they drain accordingly.

We would have been better off just going for broke and hooking the whole thing up to our pond from the get go. The pond, meanwhile, is not an experiment, it is a completely nutty idea that we just said “What the heck, let’s do it” about, and it is fast becoming one of the better decisions we made – it will provide all the water for our garden this year, and will keep our bees cool througout our brutal Texas summers.

The amaranth which is the pride of our garden from May to November is another example of our having skipped any empirical research and gone straight into production – we just dove in and planted it everywhere, and the results speak for themselves. We have tasty greens for the six months out of the year when our neighbors are paying the most outrageous prices for greenhouse greens or, worse yet, trucked in greens from cooler climates.

Anything worth doing is only worth doing as well as you have to. Put another way, don’t try to make anything in your garden perfect – the best garden, like the best manufacturing process, or the best sports team, or the best computer network, train system, school of fish, etc. – is not the one with the best individual parts, it is the one with the best relationships between the parts.

In other words, a crooked row here or there, a few more weeds, a few extra bugs in your tomatoes, or a few more dried branches on your perennial herbs – really, any little blemish – is not nearly so important as the overall theme of “how does the whole thing look and feel?”

The best example of this is weeding – getting all the “non-edible” plants out of your vegetable beds sounds like a good idea when an expert tells you to do it, and they put all sorts of justifications for it in their big hardcover books which sell for $29.99 at Barnes and Noble, but… they’re wrong. Leave the weeds. If you do anything to them, cover them up with dead leaves and such. At worst, pull them and feed them to your livestock.

The healthiest soil is soil that is allowed to be a living, breathing system, and so-called weeds are part of that system.

Don’t give up too soon. About the time you feel so hot and dry in the middle of a Texas drought that you say, “The heck with this! I’m not even bothering with a fall garden!” is abou the time that you need to be putting in a fall garden, because you’ll invariably end up with the sweetest, most nutritious fall veggies you’ve ever had, right when your neighbors are paying through the nose for bland, flavorless imports from parts unknown.

Yes, it can be frustrating, but slogging through is just about always worth it. We discovered this last fall when we were ready to pull up our tomato plants, which had somehow survived the brutal summer, but were not putting out any fruit… we were too lazy to get around to actually pulling them up out of the ground, though, and the end result was some rather tasty tomatoes around Christmas time.

We currently have a wide variety of winter goodies growing – fava beans, several kinds of spinach, kale, lettuce, chard, kohlrabi, broccoli, carrots – but we also have some other things growing, too. Sunflowers. Sunflowers? Yes, sunflowers. Who knows whether they’ll actually bloom, or if winter weather will intrude sometime in the next few weeks to kill them off, but either way, they have been a fun trap crop to watch as our tender winter greens have struggled to get going, and other than the initial effort of scattering the seed, the sunflowers haven’t actually cost us anything.

In a similar vein, we intend to scatter “lazy” crops throughout the garden this spring. None lazier than amaranth, we might add, which will probably grow all over the yard whether we do anything about it or not, since the seed was scattered far and wide, willy-nilly, this last summer/fall. That’s as it should be. Masanobu Fukuoka would be proud, even if messrs. Perlis and Touring would be utterly befuddled. And we are 100% certain they would not want to hear our theories about “debugging” either. But to each his own, we suppose.

Happy farming!

The Beeswax of Which it's None of Your...

2012-01-04T20:08:00.002-06:00

“When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.”
--John Muir

For those who are unfamiliar with John Muir, he was the Scottish born 19th century naturalist who became known in his adopted United States as the “Father of the National Parks” – most of his time was spent in the wilderness. He founded the Sierra Club, and spent a great deal of time in Yosemite, and probably tramped more through the Sierra Nevadas than did much of the wildlife there. His perspective on nature was predominantly focused on wild places, but his wisdom rings true for backyard naturalists, as well. When you tug on any one strand of your gardening environment, you find that it is all connected. What happens a thousand miles away has a dramatic impact on your tomatoes, or your trees, or your vine-shaded pergola.

So, too, with bees.

The rules for the organic certification of honey point to the dilemma of trying to live a healthy life in the 21st century. For starters, an organic bee hive must be no less than 2 miles distant from any recognized source of any kind of substance on a lengthy list of inputs which would contaminate the honey supply – this includes things like any agricultural facilities where chemical fertilizers, pesticides or herbicides are employed, and also includes things like plastics processing facilities, plants producing fire-retardant chemical foams, petrochemical facilities, even something as seemingly innocuous as a maraschino cherry packing plant. And organic honey from an urban bee hive? Forget it. Not going to happen – not unless you convince your city to give up automobiles, air conditioning, lawn fertilizers, hairspray, and probably electricity.

There has been a considerable increase in interest in backyard beekeeping since the introduction to popular consciousness of terms like “colony collapse disorder” and “Varroa mites”; paralleled with an increased interest in local foods and sustainable agriculture, one would think sustainable beekeeping would be on everyone’s lips.

One would be wrong.

Not only are beekeepers faced with the aforementioned organic obstacles, but “natural beekeeping” is not really all that popular an approach, either. At least, it hasn’t been historically. Myrtle is jumping on a bandwagon which has just left the station, however, in the form of an ancient method which is making a comeback. It goes by the nifty handle Top Bar Beekeeping.

Basically, the default setting for any information search on how to start keeping bees will reference a type of hive which has had almost unanimous market share ever since it was invented – the Langstroth hive. This is the contraption most people immediately envision when thinking of beehives, complete with the keeper in his hazardous materials suit and thick mesh veil. But bees have been “kept” for thousands of years, and the boxes of hives (built for suitability to human purposes, not the health and happiness of the bees themselves) have only been around for less than two centuries.

What did people do in order to harvest honey prior to the invention of the Langstroth boxes?

The earliest honey harvesters, of course, simply raided natural hives in trees. And if you want to be a “natural” beekeeper, this would seem to be the most natural method. A little compromise seems in order, though, given that there is no way to harvest the “natural” hive without destroying it.

The next step up was a type of hive called a “skep” and this is the type you’ll find in much of Eurasia to this day – it is basically a “wild” hive in form, like an upright log or a clay pot or some such, covered with a straw “hat”. Much like wild honey, however, honey in a skep can only be harvested by destroying the hive.

The final step on beehive evolution before we get to the “modern” hive is the top bar hive – literally just a box (sizes and dimensions varying from place to place and culture to culture) with bars across the top, along the bottom of which the bees build their honeycomb just as they would in a tree.

The chief advantages to the top-bar method (as compared to wild honey harvesting) involve the ability manipulate the bars – that is, you can take out one bar at a time and (after gently brushing off the bees) cut off the comb and harvest the honey and wax.

Langstroth hives are the technological “advance” from this concept, wherein bees are forced to build their comb on a frame, going up rather than down and in a square rather than in a naturally drooped comb. In addition, numerous “improvements” on bee culture have been made in Langstroth hives, including the ability to sequester the queen in one section of the hive so that brood only inhabits certain parts of the comb, leaving other parts to be entirely comprised of honey.

Langstroth hives, in short, are built for maximum production for humans. Top bar hives are built as a compromise position, allowing the bees to behave as naturally as possible while still allowing for human consumption.

Which approach is more likely to be healthy for the bees, and as a consequence, for the surrounding environment?

If you have to ask which we would prefer at Myrtle’s place, you haven’t been paying attention. Langstroth hives are symbols to us of all that is wrong with the human relationship to our food sources. It is little wonder to us that in an era when billions of dollars are spent on apiculture, Varroa mites and various bacteria, parasites, and viruses contrive such a thing as colony collapses.

Bees, in short, are smarter about apiculture than people could ever hope to be.

Case in point – next time you venture near an herb garden, pay especial attention to which flowering herbs attract the most bees. Some are obvious – basil (particularly the pungent anise-flavored basils such as African Blue) will literally buzz because the bees love them so much. They are rich sources of pollen, and it is only natural that the bees should love them.

Other plants, though, like lavender, are also buzzing, in spite of not being a tremendous food source for bees (or any other insect, for that matter). Lavender has a great deal of nectar proportionally to the size of its blooms, but those blooms are rather small, and they are chock full of irritating oils to boot; and while it smells lovely to humans, lavender is not particularly appealing to bees, who only make lavendar honey when (such as is the case in much of France) humans force them to by monocropping the plant for miles and miles. Why would bees flock – in rather impressive numbers – to a plant that does not provide them with the nutrients they need?

The reason bees flock to lavender, it turns out, is that lavender is noxious to mites. Commercial beekeepers use many tons of chemicals every year to combat Varroa mites, with the result that they are genetically selecting stronger and stronger mites, and putting poisonous chemicals in their honey. They ought to instead be spending much less money to plant natural remedies around their bee fields – lavender, juniper, cedar, creosote, and a host of other plants which in addition to making the bees healthier, make their honey tastier.

Unsustainable practices such as chemical treatment for mites are a natural consequence, though, of the shape of agriculture generally, not just of apiculture. The vast majority of bees in this country are kept not for honey production, but for pollination. Huge flatbed truckloads of Langstroth boxes go flying down our highways and byways each season chasing after the next crop needing fertilization.

Doesn’t this strike anyone else as just plain odd? Why do we have to truck in bees to pollinate our almonds and apples and peaches? Don’t answer, it was rhetorical. We know what the industry says – it is “more efficient” to mass produce monocrops using trucked-in bees.

But the fruit doesn’t taste any better. It isn’t as nutritious. And the honey, frankly, sucks.

Wouldn’t it be better to have smaller hives in smaller orchards, producing better food?

We certainly think so. We have been privileged to live on the same half-acre as a wild hive for the last five years, and have only a couple of stings to show for our nosiness. We plan on offering our bees a new home this Spring, a 30” top-bar hive of our own construction, with a viewing window on the side. In exchange for letting us have some of their honey and beeswax, we hope to make our bees as safe and snug as we possibly can. Maybe not organic, maybe not even entirely natural, but a fair sight better than what we see going on in American agriculture generally. We’ll keep you updated.

Happy farming!

2nd Annual Brazos Valley Pulletpalooza!

2011-11-03T20:06:00.002-05:00

“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...

2011-10-26T21:54:00.001-05:00

"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

2011-09-24T14:45:00.000-05:00

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...

2011-08-20T15:34:00.002-05:00

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!

2011-08-11T21:37:00.002-05:00

“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

2011-08-05T18:09:00.000-05:00

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

2011-08-02T18:59:00.000-05:00

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...

2011-07-01T06:38:00.002-05:00

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

2011-06-19T06:28:00.004-05:00

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!

2011-06-16T18:01:00.001-05:00

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

2011-06-12T16:59:00.001-05:00

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...

2011-05-06T20:59:00.003-05:00

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!

On Depth and Deepness

2011-04-20T17:00:00.002-05:00

We believe that we live in the 'age of information,' that there has been an information 'explosion,' an information 'revolution.' While in a certain narrow sense that is the case, in many more important ways just the opposite is true. We also live at a moment of deep ignorance, when vital knowledge that humans have always possessed about who we are and where we live seems beyond our reach. An unenlightenment. An age of missing information.
--Bill McKibben, The Age of Missing Information

We recently read a game-changing work by paleoclimatologist Curt Stager, entitled Deep Future: The Next 100,000 Years of Life on Earth, and its implications have somewhat staggered us. Stager asks that mainstream thinkers move beyond the question of global warming to consider “then what”? This is a natural concept for someone whose daily fare involves the study of geological time – not days or weeks, or even years or decades, but minimally centuries and milennia.

Why, then, if we wish to discuss one book, do we start with a quotation from a different book, nay even a totally different author? Simple, really. Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy forms the intellectual backdrop against which the depth of Deep Future may be plumbed.

Progressives, Liberals, Hippie Freaks, and other post-modern intellectual types append the word “deep” to practically any form of endeavor in which they wish to express the notion that even after all the measurements have been taken, and all the facts have been explained, there’s still something else going on.

This is the ineffable je ne sais quoi of every pseudointellectual charlatan of the last two hundred years, and yet the concept lingers. Why?

We would contend that this notion, the idea that the truth is something other than what you happen to be seeing, or hearing, or touching, or tasting at any particular moment, has such staying power because ideas which tend towards preference for empiricism and inductive reasoning have every bit as much susceptibility to the bias of invalid predicates as do the a priori prejudices of religion – which is to say, garbage in, garbage out, and the more sophisticated your input mechanism, the more sophisticated your garbage.

Basically, ecological economists like McKibben get into arguments with environmental economists, and on the basis of rational scientific evidentiary inquiry, the environmental economists (who have much better math skills) are right practically every time. The ecological economists, though, get invited to better parties, because they have a more robust message to spread, having moved beyond simple measurement of sensory data as is expected of an impartial observer – the role science has always claimed for itself – into the more contentious role of social activist – a role the environmental economists claim is inappropriate for anyone involved in the exercise of “science”, not because activism is wrong (the environmental economists are almost universally also politically active in advocacy of a wide range of issues), but because activism is not a form of inquiry. The activities, they say, ought by nature to be separate.

The ecological economists, though, counter that the very act of deciding what to measure is a form of activism, and that the environmental economists, even those who vote for radical political candidates and petition for radical direct-democratic causes, are actively supporting status quo economic and political structures through their adherance to status quo scientific methodology.

Fascinating stuff, really, if you’re sufficiently geeky for it.

And this is where Stager’s Deep Future comes into play. Stager is not the first person to use the word “anthropocene” but he is the first to introduce us at Myrtle’s place to the idea. We are living in the first geological epoch which is not merely marked by the presence of a particular species, but is defined by that species. Everything about our world is changing, and it is changing because we have changed it.

Most paleoclimatologists tend to mark the beginning of the anthropocene, the Age of Humans, with the invention of the steam engine in the 17th century, but there are those who argue that many thousands of years before that, when humans were still hunting and gathering, we wiped out large mammals, and chopped down forests, and began belching excess carbon-dioxide into the atmosphere in quantities larger than the ecosphere could reabsorb. Much if not all of the holocene, they argue, should actually be subsumed by the anthropocene.

And when what you are studying is the impact of everything done by humans upon everything surrounding humans, dividing what you are studying from what you intend to do about it becomes a blurrier proposition.

This is the point at which we become less sympathetic to those who insist upon scientific and academic integrity and more sympathetic to those who argue for redefining the very field of inquiry from economic growth to something less tangible – economic satisfaction.

Stager, of course, ignores economics altogether, because his field is climate, and he does a remarkable job of explaining the various scenarios in which global warming will eventually peak (in as little as a few centuries, or as many as 50,000 years), and will be replaced by a time of global cooling, as all fossil fuel is already spent, and all the excess carbon is eventually subsumed in the oceans, and things “return to normal” at some far future time. He then turns to a discussion of the various scenarios of necessary cultural adaptations to the changing climate, and the sorts of communities that are likely to thrive, and those that are likely to suffer. The time frames? Far longer than most contemporary climate writers have bothered to speak about.

But when Stager speaks of the conditions to be faced by future civilizations, it gives us pause to think about posterity in entirely different ways. We are all used to the platitudes of politicians who speak of leaving a legacy for our descendants, a world in which our children and grandchildren have at least as much opportunity for success and happiness as we have enjoyed, and these platitudes have replaced much of our serious ethical thinking, because they are easier than would be a studied analysis of what we are actually passing on.

We are used to the notion that we can grow out of any crisis, that by the time one resource is depleted, technology will have found its replacement. This notion is a prima facie lie, but we have continued to believe in it since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution because it is a comfortable fiction.

We can’t grow forever, nor should we want to. The ecological, physical, emotional, cultural, and spiritual costs are simply too high. The scars on our planet and on ourselves are too obvious for all but the most hardened to ignore for too much longer. Growth has not made the masses happy even where growth has been the most impressive. Growth has definitely not made the masses happy in those places where resource exploitation has been the greatest.

As it turns out, the legacy we ought to be passing down, if we are to reclaim any kind of life worth living in future years, addresses both the needs of “deep economy” and of “deep ecology”. Learning to live sustainably has the potential to soothe our tattered nerves, and to level off our abuse of our planet and our neighbors. Living, and buying, and eating, and entertaining on a local scale will do more for our personal happiness than any amount of growth could, and will do far less harm to the world around us.

These are things we all know intuitively, if only we allow ourselves to listen to that quiet voice in the back of our heads that says, “Yes, this is pleasant.” There is a concept in Sweden that the Swedes insist has no valid translation in English – “Lagom”. We at Myrtle’s think we know an idiom from the American South that is a fairly close approximation: “Plenty good.” And we say plenty good is good enough.

Plenty good is as deep as depth ought to get.

Electrifying the Eightfold Fence

2011-03-17T21:11:00.000-05:00

The earthquake and tsunami damage which led to calamitous events at the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant in Japan lay plain the futility of attempting to end catastrophic failure through engineering.

There were several backup plans in place to prevent a meltdown of the six reactors at this facility, some of which were dependent on the idea of either having access to the electrical grid – which failed because of the earthquake and tsunami – or else, barring that, to being able to generate sufficient energy for the cooling systems with on-site generators – which failed because of the earthquake and tsunami.

The control rooms for some of these backup systems were submerged in floodwaters; years of careful planning and consideration were rendered completely useless in just a few short minutes of Mother Nature getting up and taking a brief stretch. Between infrastructure (toppled because the land on which it lay suddenly got fundamentally fed up with being where it was), and water (appearing in massive quantities where no water had been before), the engineers in charge of safely operating this nuclear power plant were simply overwhelmed.

Why would a nation like Japan, whose proud civilization has withstood century after century of natural disasters, including earthquakes, typhoons, blizzards, mudslides, red tides, plagues, and volcanoes, put itself in danger by relying on nuclear energy, when one small misstep – let alone the series of missteps which were taken at Fukushima – could cause a bigger disaster than had ever been seen before?

The answer is simple. Japan does not have much in the way of natural resources. They import all of their oil, virtually all of their coal, and most of their raw materials for manufacturing. To be self-reliant, the Japanese have developed an extensive energy grid, of which nuclear power is a major component.

We at Myrtle’s place have been thinking about energy production and consumption a lot lately, and the events in Japan have put a morbidly human face on the question. The catastrophe would have been bad enough had it involved only natural sources of destruction. Entire towns were washed out to sea – the satellite photos show before-and-after scenes that simply defy the imagination.

But because the nuclear genie was let out of the bottle, the story of the Sendai earthquake has become a tragic cautionary tale about the dangers of dependence on centralized energy grids. We say “centralized energy grids” and not “nuclear power” for a very important reason – while nuclear radiation is an easily sensationalized danger, the very palpable fact is that any other sort of power generation plant would have proven equally incapable of dealing with the overwhelming force of shifting tectonic plates and surging tidal waves.

Some other forms of energy production would present their own dangers – petrochemical explosions, for example, in the case of oil or gas powered electrical plants; chemical exposure for coal plants; etc. – and all would have equally been incapable of producing, for the foreseeable future, electrical power on the scale the civilization built up around them requires in order to continue.

We would like to suggest the radical idea that the alternative to imported oil, or nuclear power, or coal, or whatever source is currently being used in whichever part of the industrialized world we are looking at, is not new electrical plants relying upon a renewable resource, or any other sort of energy alternative.

Wind farms, large-scale solar power plants, wave power plants, hydroelectric dams, these are all impressive engineering marvels, and they are all superior to the use of fossil fuels, in that none of these alternatives require spewing greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, but they all also feed the structure which places civilization in danger in the first place.

The alternative to the current energy structure is a different process altogether.

Currently, energy is dispensed from the top down in a centralized model. The “grid” is not really a grid at all; it is a giant plinko game, in which energy is dropped in from the top, usually in the form of a particular kind of fuel (say, oil) which is processed in one central location (say, petroleum refineries along the Gulf of Mexico), and then scattered along various paths, with increasing costs passed along at each of these steps, until it finally falls into a slot (say, the tank of your car).

Renewable energy sources like solar or wind make sense not just because they don’t involve much pollution (which, of course, is a strong argument in their favor), but more because they enable a paradigm shift in terms of how energy is distributed.

Rather than relying on a central electric generation station, energy comes from discrete points such as your own home solar and wind generators, or distribution points much like vending machines. Japan, in fact, had recently announced the creation of many of these sorts of outlets for electric vehicle recharging.

This is hinted at with one of the favorite phrases of the DIY (“Do it yourself”) movement: off the grid. Getting off the grid typically evokes images of a solitary shack in the woods, or even out in the desert of West Texas, where solitary hermits ranging from benevolent Grizzly Adams types to raving lunatics like Ted Kaczynski types, have turned their backs on civilization.

We think these hints are drawn with fear and trepidation, both on the part of DIY devotees and also on the part of a civilization which has grown afraid of its own shadow. Mainstream consumers do not even dream, much less plan, of off grid living, because the image has been sealed off from them. The propaganda war has been won by the fringes; there is no room for this new way of thinking for the vast majority of us, who live comfortably in the middle.

But “off the grid” should not apply only to individuals; it should apply to us all, collectively, not just “also the middle”, but especially the middle.

As it stands now, most large businesses have already made contingency plans to at least temporarily operate in the absence of city utilities – backup generators for their various computer server farms, water storage, cooling facilities, the works – and some have even made the logical leap to installing wind and solar generators to produce at least some of their energy needs on a permanent basis.

Homes, though, are probably an easier place to start. Some homeowners have already begun making the switch to wind and solar power; most specialists in the conversion of domestic buildings to wind and solar suggest that maybe a quarter of home energy needs can be met by sun or wind sources. This, however, is a gross understatement, based on a couple of fundamental misconceptions.

First, and foremost, the engineering of homes is not typically all that energy efficient. We have dark-colored roofing materials, thin walls, windows in the wrong places, and a host of other problems, all of which can either be avoided in construction phases, or corrected when retrofitting one’s home for energy efficiency. Painting our roofs white, or better still, covering them with solar panels or solar tiles, adding insulation and planting sun-absorbing trees and vines in the appropriate spaces in our landscapes, correcting our windows and window treatments, these are all fairly simple steps to take.

Further, our lifestyles can easily be changed to consume less energy. Some changes – like riding a bike instead of driving a car – would be considered radical and difficult. Others, however, like replacing light switches with rheostats, are basic and simple.

Look around your home for any appliance with an LED light that stays lit when the device is off – put it on a power strip, and turn off the power strip when not using the device. Presto! If you are a typical American, you have just cut on average 20% off your utility bill. Really? Yes, really. Televisions, computers, modems and routers, printers and faxes, coffee makers, bread machines, microwave ovens, stereos, DVD players, game consoles, these are all gadgets which expend a lot of energy even when they are technically “off”.

Second, sources of energy like solar, wind, and geothermal do not have to be used exclusively – they can be “layered”. Why would we not fit homes with solar panels on the roof, on the garage or carport, on the fence line, etc., and also set up wind turbines on the roof and in the corners of the yard, and set up a geothermal system to (at the very least) power the HVAC system? Each of these sources of energy are currently available, and in spite of the fact that each is still a speciality niche for highly specialized contractors, each can be had for roughly $10,000 for the typical 1,500 sq foot American home on a .25 acre lot. Given the price of housing, adding $30,000 – which seems like a lot if taken by itself – is not really that much. It seems especially paltry when you add up 30 years of utility bills you won’t be paying, during the life of your mortgage.

There are plenty of examples of fully functional off-the-grid homes the size and scale of a typical suburban house, suggesting that it is possible (given the political and economic will) for houses currently consuming electricity generated at centralized power plants to not use one watt of “grid” electricity.

What would that do to our civilization?

Seriously, stop to consider the implications of not only having an individual here or there off the grid, but having entire communities off the grid. Rather than being pot-smoking, birkenstock and tie-dye wearing, hummus and pita-chip munching hippies, or else crazy pipe-bomb building math geeks with delusions of grandeur, those “off the grid” folk who generate their own power would be your next door neighbors, with whom you have conversations about the weather, or your favorite local sports team, or your childrens' schools.

Picture the next natural disaster – say, a hurricane or a blizzard – and think about all those stories you have heard in the past about so-and-so many thousands of people having to do without electricity for days and weeks and months at a time. Now imagine that at least half, or even just a third, of those people still had power and could help out their immediate neighbors who were not so lucky.

The next natural disaster wouldn’t seem nearly so bleak, would it?

Added to this communitarian idealism lay some tactical and strategic benefit for countries fighting terrorism; Mother Nature is not the only one to target power plants. But suppose, just suppose, al-Qaida or other miscreants wanted to disable our energy infrastructure... and they couldn't, because there was no target? We would be able to survive an attack as a group because we would be meeting our needs as individuals.

The dilemma posed by off-the-grid thinking is just this: far too many people have co-opted this idea, and made it essentially an anti-social objective. Getting off the grid, however, is not something for individuals. It is something for everyone. We must replace the grid with 6 billion individual cells; we must stop trying to give “power to the people” and instead let the people make their own power. We must, in essence, become collectively individual. We must be independent together.

Something of the spirit of this idea is discussed in Laura Ingalls Wilder's “Little House on the Prairie” books. Pa Ingalls makes a frequent point of emphasis in stating that everyone in the American West is “free and independent”; at the same time, neighbors do not think twice about helping each other out with various chores or situations that none of them could survive alone – things like raising a barn, digging a well, surviving malaria, or any of the other menaces pioneers faced.

In the 21st century, in urban and suburban areas all around the world, we are facing a new kind of pioneer difficulty. We live in an interdependent culture, economy, and ecology. What happens anywhere affects everyone everywhere. The benefits of that kind of interconnectedness are obvious, but so too are the dangers. The Kaczynski method of insulating oneself against those dangers is obviously wrong, however. Instead of cutting ourselves off from each other, we must find ways of helping each other regain our status as “free and independent” citizens.

If all of Japan were electrified via solar, wind, wave, geothermal, etc. sources of energy, no one would be talking about whether or not the Fukushima meltdown may prove to be as bad as Chernobyl. Instead, they would be helping each other bury their dead, rebuilding their towns, and moving on.

Pray we all learn the appropriate lessons from this tragedy. We at Myrtle's place have a ten year plan in place to get “off the grid” while still living right smack dab in the middle of the city. Ten years sounded like a long time when we put the plan together, but it gets shorter by the day; hopefully, your family can get started on your own plans soon too.

Happy farming!

Wherein a Good Idea is Laid to Rest....

2011-03-08T19:26:00.000-06:00

“An expert is a man who has made every mistake which can be made in a narrow field.”
Niels Bohr

We have a very fine solar-powered textile dehydration unit (aka “clothesline”) in our backyard. It’s painted the same blue color as the trim on our house, so it is very inconspicuous, even for those who can see it, and thanks to some clever landscaping, that does not include very many people. Our next door neighbors can see this contraption, but that will soon change, as our new black currants, blackberries and grapes on the eastern side of the house reach maturity.

So, that part of our laundry de-mechanization has gone according to plan.

However, as we reviewed the budget (both fiscal and physical) this spring, we came to the realization that now just is not the time to invest in a hand-cranked laundry ringer. The calculus is simple – we have approximately $5,000.00 in capital improvements we can make each year, so we have to budget that money very carefully, with an eye towards return on investment (ROI). In addition, we are operating at a deficit on time available to work on our various projects. If we are going to invest more money, it needs to be for something which will give us more produce, or barring a financial ROI, it must give us more time.

Put simply, Mr. Myrtle Maintenance has a day job; between home, chickens, and children (not to mention various friends, acquaintances, and stray needy folk, oh and a home delivery herb business) Mrs. Myrtle Maintenance has three day jobs. Neither of us has the time or energy at the end of the day to hand-crank that blasted manual laundry contraption. And the cheapest one we found would have run us several hundred dollars. Several hundred dollars, and it will increase our time deficit? No thank you!

We suspect that our willingness to put our money where our laundry is will increase dramatically once our youngest farm hand is old enough to turn the crank. Child labor laws, after all, only apply to those who would pay their under-aged assistants. Room and board don’t count, right? So, don’t expect us to follow through on our manual laundry experiment for at least six or seven more years.

That having been said, our failure to launch on this particular project is an excellent example of balancing personal values with the scientific method in action on a small-scale sustainability project. Science, remember, is not the art of explaining what we ought to do; it is the art of explaining what is observably true – there are some major caveats to that definition, of course, but we needn’t be concerned with precision here. Our point is that we must continually balance what is true with what we ought to do about it.

The ancient Greek philosophers were the first recorded rhapsodizers about the tension between mythos and logos – between passions and reason, between Dionysus and Apollo, between DeForrest Kelley and Leonard Nimoy. However, because the Greeks had their heads in the clouds (or, at the very least, in their wineskins), they pondered all sorts of ridiculous questions which had nothing to do with home and garden. Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave”? Puh-lease. How was that supposed to make someone a more productive farmer?

We kid, of course; there is much to be gained from reading Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, and the gang. However, there is a kernel of truth in the notion that the Greeks hid as much wisdom as they uncovered. Prior to the rise of the Greek pantheon, the most prominent Mediterranean deities had strikingly different personalities from those we know as “Olympian”. And even the Olympian gods and goddesses we think we know are filtered through 2,500 years of literary interpretation, and may bear little resemblance to the gods and goddesses the Greeks actually worshipped. For evidence see: Percy Jackson and the Olympians, or Disney’s Hercules.

Many heavenly job duties were reassigned when the military might of the hellenic peoples overcame the more pastoral sensibilities of the predecessors of the Greeks – and yes, we know, there were some powerful military predecessors, too – just look at the surviving Minoan artifacts on Santorini, provided you’ve got a clear enough head after too many shots of ouzo. The point, though, is that the number of Greek gods and goddesses imbued with martial zeal and skill far outweighs Greek gods and goddesses imbued with knowledge of home economics, agronomy, or poultry science.

And those who do represent non-military ideals are far different from their predecessors.

Aphrodite, for example, is often considered a hellenized version of Ishtar or other manifestations of prehistoric “Earth Mother” goddesses. So, too, with Demeter. And many scholars attribute to the Eleusinian Mysteries – rites related to worship of Demeter and Persephone – ritual elements which seem strangely out of place for a mere “garden goddess” like Demeter – eroticism practiced underground for the purpose of ensuring crop fertility – these folk were clearly cut from a different cloth than the protestant west of modern America.

The division of divine job duties can provide countless hours of fun for those of us who enjoy watching scholars of obscure subjects get into nasty debates no one else can understand, because every classics scholar worth his or her salt is absolutely sure of the position they have painstakingly researched, in spite of the fact that equally qualified scholars with opposing points of view are fairly easy to find; the aforementioned Aphrodite – Demeter – Ishtar comparison, for example, for which of course there is only conjecture, not proof, could get a Greek specialist and a Sumerian specialist spitting at each other by their third respective glasses of wine.

Pardon the tangent – what does this have to do with our decision to keep our electric washing machine, even in the face of our own strong arguments against doing so?

Just this – we struggle constantly not to be trapped by ideology, particularly of our own creation. Far too often, people are trapped by strong-armed arguments about what ought to be, even when those visions fly in the face of what is. We have often said “You can be a fundamentalist anything,” and it is true. We would love to have the perfectly independent “off-the-grid” homestead, but we don’t live in a perfect world.

Compromises must be made which ensure that the larger vision is retained. Eventually, civilization as it is crosses the borders of our dream worlds as we think they ought to be. Ted Kaczynski faced this dilemma when loggers invaded the woods where he had built his survivalist shack; we think he picked the wrong solution to this intrusion on his dream world. If he’d just swallowed some pride and kept grading papers at Berkeley instead of trying to divide himself from the human race, he’d have a lot more garden space now than he currently enjoys. As Spinal Tap reminds us, “It’s a thin line between clever and stupid.”

In the case of the Greeks, in the grind of time and changing tides of civilization, we lost the poetry of Sappho, but we retained the recipe for baklava. You win some, you lose some. At Myrtle’s place, we have given up on quickly getting rid of all of our electrical appliances; it’s a mistake we have learned and moved on from. We’re still investing time, sweat, and money in other environmentally friendly ideas, though. We hope you do, too.

Happy farming!

Rest on Your Own Laurels, not Somebody Else's!

2011-03-01T16:34:00.002-06:00

Serendipity, synchronicity, coincidence, and self-organizing behavior are all human linguistic attempts to explain those weird little occurrences which make us all go, in a pre-verbal sort of way, “Whoa, dude, how did that happen?” Déjà vu, ESP, clairvoyance, clairaudience, and any number of other hokum-pokum, in which we don’t really believe, are nevertheless always on the menu, in spite of our innate skepticism, simply because every now and then, reality benefits us (and, yes, sometimes proves detrimental) in such a way that we take it personally.

“What are the odds?” someone might ask. The answer, of course, is “100%” because, after all, whatever the weird thing was, hey, it actually happened. Therefore it was quite probable. Quod erat demonstrandum, baby. (Cue the peanut gallery: “Ooh, you speak French!” and, yes, we stole that joke from Thomas Dolby…)

We had such an episode this past weekend, when our delicious Saturday began with a visit from a new Friend of Myrtle who works for an agricultural education organization we will probably talk about at greater length at some future date (once we have done our research, and gotten perfunctory permission to discuss them by name, though we can’t imagine they would turn down free publicity). This new Friend of Myrtle brought along a sample of their new educational product, an herb wheel, which is a circle of pictures of herbs, along with a description and a list of uses, both medicinal and culinary.

As it turns out, all of the herbs on the wheel are also in our garden. All, that is, except for one: bay leaf. Those are pretty good odds, really – out of 12 herbs, we had 11. Not bad, right? Except that it brought out our competitive streak. We resolved right then and there that the next opportunity we had, we would search high and low for a bay laurel tree.

It had to wait, however, as we had other visitors on Saturday for whom to prepare. Our good friends from Austin were coming to town, and we don’t get to see them nearly often enough, so gardening was put on the back burner.

As fate would have it, though, they came bearing a gift. A gift for the garden.

Yup.

A bay laurel tree, from The Natural Gardener in Austin. An heirloom variety, no less. It will have a place of prominence in our herb garden – in fact, it will hardly be able to avoid prominence.

In pots, these trees seldom grow above shoulder height; ours is not in a pot, however. It is right in amongst the rosemary and oregano, shaded on one side by the water oak and the house. Eventually, it will probably reach somewhere between 10-15 feet, although laurel trees are notoriously unpredictable in their growth habits in the wild; conceivably it could hit as much as 30 feet tall, though we really doubt that will happen in our yard – in its native Mediterranean climate, it has the luxury of sending down deep roots through sandy and rocky soils; here, it has to scratch and fight with East Texas clay; it will probably peter out after four or five years of vertical growth, and then settle for being part of the lower canopy.

Image via Wikipedia

Still, this will be the tree around which our other herbs circle. This will be advantageous in the middle of summer, as the laurel will add shade to our western exposure, and will shield our mint and basil plants from the afternoon sun.

Then, too, there are the numerous benefits beyond our self-indulgent (some might say petulently self-centered) desire to have a complete set of herbs. Laurus nobilis is an evergreen, which means that in the middle of winter, when the only tree in our front yard which still has its foliage is our young loblolly pine, our rosemary, oregano, lavender, and curry plants will no longer be lonely. The glossy leaves of the laurel will still proudly proclaim that herbalists live here.

And while most cooks are familiar with the dried bay leaves which adorn so many winter soups and stews, there is much to be said for fresh bay leaves, not only as a garnish, but also as a crushed (or even powdered) seasoning additive. The whole leaf is typically removed from the dish prior to being served, as it has jagged edges capable of causing some serious gastric distress; however, when crushed, the leaf is perfectly comestible, and adds a subtle depth to most meats and stews.

The berries, too, are nutritious, and create numerous culinary and medicinal possibilities. Massage and aromatherapists swear by bay laurel scents and poultices as a treatment for everything from rheumatoid arthritis to hypertension. The fortunate blend of essential and fatty acids make bay laurel a good addition to a health-conscious diet.

And, really, can anything be more symbolically fortuitous than adding the laurel, which first the Greeks and then the Romans decided was the fitting crown of champions, to the garden?

Except perhaps a giant stone with a sword stuck in the middle, or a totem pole, or a crystal pyramid, or a patch of four leaf clover, or a giant burning wicker man, or…. Well, you get the idea.

Happy farming!

Favor Curry When You Want to Curry Favor

2011-02-25T17:03:00.001-06:00

As part of the spirit of scientific inquiry, we believe strongly in inculcating an adventurous streak in the garden. Naturally, therefore, when we encounter a new or unusual plant in the nursery, we are apt to bring it home without asking too many impertinent questions.

Such was the case a couple of years ago when perusing the herbs at Farm Patch and we discovered something called a “curry plant”. We vaguely knew it couldn’t possibly have anything to do with curry seasoning, as curry seasoning is A) yellowish-brown, while the “curry plant” is a vibrant, icy blue, and B) made of a variety of herbs and seasonings, rather than just one, something we are familiar with from having listened to a learned discourse beyond our ability to follow on the part of competing cooks hailing from the Indian subcontinent. You think religious conflicts can be contentious? Just get two chefs together with a different idea about what constitutes good curry – make sure you have a good solid surface to hide behind, first, though.

Nevertheless, we brought home our plants, stuck them in the ground (with an admixture of chicken poop and neglect which is almost universally healthy for garden plants), and watched them grow.

Once we were certain that they would “make it” through the hot Texas sun and also through the freakish snow storms we have experienced the last four or five years, we decided to figure out what we actually had on our hands. Turns out, it’s an unusual plant for most gardens in the U.S., but it is not at all a “rare” plant. The proper name is Helichrysum italicum, and it is well known in Sicily, not as a culinary herb, but as a medicinal herb, and also (more commonly) as a cat deterrent.

The name “curry plant” probably got afixed due to the strong pungency of the herb; it does, in fact, smell a lot like a good curry – regardless of whose definition of “good curry” you happen to be using – and the flowers, which come out on wonderfully odd bulbous extensions, like a pair of eyes on stalks, are a bright, vivid yellow, adding to the impression that it just somehow has to be related to curry, in spite of all the accumulated logical evidence that it ain’t so.

The pungency is strongest in the floral extensions, although you can smell it year round. Historically, an oil was pressed from the petals of the florettes, and used as an anti-inflammatory, a fungicide, and as an astringent.

We have not made any of these uses of the plant, though we have enjoyed it as an interesting perennial, providing color even when most of the rest of the herbs have frozen to the ground. The color is more like a blue-spruce pine tree than anything else to which we might compare it; it provides a lovely contrast to the deeper olive tones of the rosemary bushes and the some-time vibrant oregano, which is also a perennial, though not as hardy. Our lavender plants also bear some resemblance to the curry plant, and between this cluster of perennials, our herb garden is never completely bare.

We have also observed that the pungency of the curry is exceptionally useful as an attractant for our local bee population, and, as the Sicilians have long known, as a repellant for feline garden intruders. This is particularly important in our garden, as we want as many bees as possible, but we also want as many hummingbirds as possible, and having cats lurking in the herb garden is less-than-optimal as far as the hummingbirds are concerned.

Then, too, we are growing catnip for a variety of reasons – it makes an excellent tea, it looks lovely in herbal bouquets, and it is part of an effective triumvirate of mosquito repellant plants – but obviously having a large bed of catnip would be like an open invitation to the copious feral feline population. By masking the catnip smell with the curry plant smell, we hope to minimize the unintended consequences of growing our more cat-friendly plants.

Depending on the size of your garden, you may not have room for an inedible herb; if you’ve got the space, though, let us highly recommend Helichrysum italicum. Curry plants are quirky, stinky, and hardy. Exactly the qualities likely to curry favor with Myrtle.

Happy farming!

Hot Enough For Ya? (Late Winter Edition)

2011-02-23T06:23:00.001-06:00

Birds do not have the mammalian form of the neurotransmitter receptor known as “vanilloid receptor subtype 1” (VR1). Mammals have this ion channel receptor, which is stimulated by heat and physical abrasion, in addition to exposure to chemicals from the vanilloid family.

Why do we care, you might be asking. As it turns out, one of the more common vanilloid chemicals, readily available in most home gardens (or at the very least, in virtually every farmer’s market or grocery store), is capsaicin, the chemical responsible for the “heat” of hot peppers.

Plants from the Capsicum genus have evolved a particularly handy means of protecting their seeds from the grinding molars of mammalian herbivores, whilst and at the same time allowing avian fruit foragers to consume the seeds whole, then distributing them far and wide in ready-made packets of fertilized seed pre-treatment (gross, but effective). The seeds of hot peppers (and related plants) do not contain any capsaicin, but the surrounding tissue – particularly the whitish placental tissue, though to a lesser extent all the rest of the fruit as well – is chock full of the stuff.

Birds feel no effects whatsoever when eating these fruits and seeds, which is why chili powder is considered a good squirrel deterrent in bird-feeders. The squirrels can’t stand the stuff (more on that in a second), but the birds are entirely unaffected. Provided you don’t scare them off with unusual scents or sights, you can get your birds to eat spicy versions of their current favorites, and they won’t even notice the difference.

So. Why are squirrels (and other mammals) affected by hot peppers?

Recall that the VR1 receptor is stimulated by heat and physical abrasion, in addition to the presence of these chemicals. Essentially, the vanilloid chemicals (in this case, capsaicin) overwhelm the neural pathways in tissues which have been exposed, resulting in altered heat and pain responses. A 1997 research team first found that capsaicin selectively binds the TRPV1 protein, which resides on the pain and heat sensing neurons. TRPV1 typically opens between 98.6° and 113° fahrenheit, but in the presence of capsaicin, it opens below 98.6°.

Obviously, this is body temperature. Under normal conditions, then, the nerves responsible for telling you that it is hotter than Hades outside – say, 114° or so – will start giving their “Danger, Will Robinson!” full body S.O.S. signals whenever you eat a sufficiently spicy pepper, regardless of what the actual temperature is. And since the heat-sensitive neural pathways may be overwhelmed, conceivably the pain network might get in on the act, too.

A little bit of the essence of pepper, say from a packet of hot sauce from your favorite taqueria, might make you notice: “Ooh, this is spicy!” A lot of the essence of pepper, say from a bhut jolokia “Ghost Pepper” on a hamburger, a la Man v. Food, might make you really notice: “Oh, my. Please douse my head in a bucket of frozen water, give me an intravenous morpheine solution, and maybe euthanize me for good measure. If, you know, you’ve got time. Otherwise, I’ll just crinkle up and die right here.” A little bit of capsaicin tells you the ambient temperature is extremely hot, even if it isn’t. A lot of capsaicin tells you you have just been impaled in an iron maiden, set on fire, and thrown off the Chrysler building.

We love the stuff.

There are all sorts of ironic medical uses being investigated which take advantage of these neurological effects of capsaicin, including pain medications, diabetes medications, and topical treatments for arthritis or fibromyalgia. Even lung cancer is on the radar for researchers trying to take advantage of the intense response of mammalian neurons to capsaicin.

We are not recommending anything so revolutionary in the home garden. We are instead intent on focusing on a new application for the use the plants themselves make of this chemical.

We have a critter problem in our chicken coop, you see. There is a creek which runs roughly parallel to our western property line, from which a long series of oppossum trespassers, for generations, has made the trek to our yard, first for the cover of the underbrush which we have painstakingly cleared, and then for the delicious goodies left in the chickens’ feed dish, and then for any eggs we may have missed on our evening collection run.

Mice, too, take advantage of our hens’ domestic arrangements. If our birds could be free-ranged, we might not have to worry so much, given that they would be gathering their daily nutritional needs from a wider range, but since they have to stay cooped up thanks to the zealousness of the College Station city council in protecting our neighbors from marauding hens, every rodent in the neighborhood has at some point decided to partake of the evening buffet.

Heretofore, our solution to these problems has been to do our best to regulate how much feed is left out, and to do our best to gather all the eggs before turning in for the night.

Now, however, a solution is at hand.

We just need to sprinkle copious quantities of hot chili powder on the chicken’s feed, and on their laying boxes; we will also feed table scraps with peppers to the chickens, instead of putting such items in the compost bin, as we have been doing until now, on the assumption that hot peppers would somehow disagree with the birds.

This will serve multiple functions, which as you know is something we at Myrtle’s place really like. First and foremost, capsaicin in everything edible in the chicken coop ought to provide all the deterrence we need for opossum and mice. This is what happens in the wild; it ought to happen in our little domestic slice of heaven, too.

Next, we already get significant numbers of volunteer tomato and basil plants growing from the numerous seeds which find their way into the garden compost which, as we have mentioned early and often, is basically just recycled deep-bedding from the chicken coop – leaves and chicken poop, a little water and a little neglect, that is the secret to happy plants.

Now, we are likely to also start getting volunteer pepper plants sprouting up all over the place. We can think of no happier design than a garden in which plants of all varieties randomly crop up in the healthiest, though unexpected, locations.

In the spirit of scientific inquiry, we have verified that our chickens do not, in fact, seem adversely affected by capsaicin, at least not in any visible way. We put out some jalapeños which had not only started to turn red, but had also started to shrivel. The hens naturally went for the rice and strawberry tops which were also in the slop bucket first, since they go for the familiar at all times. However, they did then start pecking at the peppers, and seemed to warm up to them, but only in the metaphorical, aesthetic, sense. Otherwise, they may as well have been munching on bell peppers or cucumbers. No jumping around screaming for water or anything. And trust us, our hens are not shy about jumping up and screaming, should they feel so inclined.

So, along with our “chicken processed” volunteer tomatoes and basil, we will now add another form of volunteer nightshade. And this will give us plenty of excuses to make even more salsa. This is a win-win all the way around. We defy you to produce a healthier or tastier form of mammalian pest control.

Happy farming!

The Alpha Egg and the Omega Chicken

2011-02-16T06:15:00.002-06:00

Casual observers of food marketing probably cannot get past the barrage of catch-phrases and keywords with which various advertising media are awash. Leaving aside for another day a discussion of the whole “corn sugar” propaganda campaign – a campaign which would make Leni Riefenstahl proud – there are some legitimate terms out there which get misconstrued and misapplied and just generally misused, which lead to even greater confusion for the average consumer.

Myrtle can’t hope to correct all such errors, not being trained in nutritional science beyond what we have been able to glean from various sources on our own, but we hope to shed a little light on one such misunderstood nutritional concept, and we hope to make some suggestions for the home garden which may help spread a little heart-love around.

“Omega-3 fatty acids are a family of unsaturated fatty acids that have in common a final carbon-carbon double bond in the n-3 position; that is, the third bond from the methyl end of the fatty acid.” Clear enough? So, we lifted a definition straight from Wikipedia. A definition from Webster’s wouldn’t really be much clearer.

But despite the fact that, for non-chemists and non-biologists, the nature of what an omega-3 fatty acid really is defies easy comprehension, the effects of these useful nutrients are far more easily understood.

A diet rich in Omega-3 can be directly correlated to lower LDL (low-density lipoprotein, or "bad cholesterol") and higher HDL (high-density lipoprotein or "good cholesterol") in the blood. A proper LDL/HDL ratio is directly correlated to a lower incidence of coronary heart disease, lower blood pressure, more likelihood of weight control, better immune function, better endocrine balance, and a more satisfying sex life.

Nutritionists refer to this as “a good thing”.

Omega-3 “essential” fatty acids are so-called because as early as the first part of the last century, nutritionists realized that several fatty acids were necessary for normal growth and development, first in laboratory animals, and later in children. Omega-6 fatty acids are also necessary in the human diet, but are not often found lacking, except in populations affected by famine. Omega-6 acids, in fact, are found in excess quantities in the typical American diet, being primarily found in meats and fried foods.

Omega-3 fatty acids, however, are frequently lacking in not only the American diet, but in the diets of many populations around the globe, particularly among landlocked peoples, especially in arid regions or areas far from a source of fish. Vegetarians are also especially prone to be deficient in Omega-3, although less so than omnivores who eat neither fish nor whole grains.

As it turns out, there are multiple potential sources of Omega-3, and no matter one’s food lifestyle, there are multiple options for correcting an imbalance.

To begin with, Omega-3 has to compete in our diets with Omega-6. The more beef and deep-fried potatoes we consume (burger and fries, anyone?), the less Omega-3 our bodies will assimilate, even if we drown ourselves in fish oil supplements. Increasing Omega-3 therefore begins with decreasing Omega-6 – not to the point of elimination, just to a level more consistent with what our bodies evolved to digest. If you want to eat red meat or pork, two or three times a week ought to be your maximum. The typical American diet now begins with one or both of these meats and asks “what do we have to go with our steak/pork loin/bacon-wrapped steak/pork-and-beef sausage/etc.”?

This is just asking for trouble.

Chicken or other poultry can also cause Omega-6 problems, though less so than their fattier dinner counterparts.

Fish, on the other hand, in addition to being the best source of Omega-3 (particularly the fatty fishes such as salmon or tuna, and to a lesser degree catfish or tilapia), also frequently have a good balance with not too much Omega-6. Even fishes which do not contain all that much Omega-3 at least have the advantage of not being overloaded with Omega-6. Sturgeon, pike or trout are all better for you than mutton, pot roast, or ham.

Then, too, there are “Omega Eggs”. Although the number of studies available is somewhat small, there is good evidence that chickens fed on appropriate greens produce eggs which are high in a-Linolenic acid (ALA), the most common form of Omega-3 available from vegetable sources.

Which brings us to the main consideration when deciding how to get Omega-3 into your diet – there are many, many forms of this nutrient, and not all of them are readily available in your garden. In fact, the two most important forms of Omega-3, Eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and Docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) are not available in any terrestrial plants – that is, in any plants which grow on land. They are only available from plankton; they are also available from a form of algae known as “spirulina”, a nutritional supplement you can find at most health food stores. Fans of psyllium will have no problem ingesting yet another swirly, gritty beverage, but those who do not wish to consume their EPA and DHA in this less-than-appetizing form will have to settle for the next best thing: fatty fishes.

No animal is capable of manufacturing any of the Omega-3 fats on their own. All animals rely on consumption of vegetable matter in order to maintain these fats, and in turn those carnivores or omnivores who wish to get their Omega-3 from animal sources will have to make sure they are eating animals who have themselves eaten an Omega-3 vegetable diet.

Since EPA and DHA are only available from fish like salmon, tuna, cod, etc., we recommend strongly that these fish be included in your diet. Vegetarians would likewise do well to either bend their rules to include fish, or at the very least bend their rules far enough to include fish oil supplements. Those who are worried about toxic levels of heavy metals in fish meal can at least rest easy with fish oil supplementation, because mercury and other toxic metals bind with proteins in the meat rather than with the fatty acids – even fish from polluted waters will produce relatively safe oils, depending on how they are processed.

Vegans who for ethical or other reasons adamantly refuse to include fish can still be healthy, of course, because EPA and DHA are simply the most readily available Omega-3 fatty acids. The body requires a lot more work in order to process ALA and the other Omega-3’s, but it can be done. There are a wide variety of plants which can increase the natural Omega-3 levels in a vegan diet: black currant, flax, shiso, chia sage, lingonberry, purslane, black raspberry, butternut, walnuts, pecans, hazelnuts, and even cannibis sativa are high in ALA. In fact, the readily available ALA in the oil from marijuana seeds may be one of the strongest arguments available for why this herb ought to be legalized. Even without cannibis, though, there is clearly a large enough list of garden plants to choose from.

And for those of us who eat eggs, there are obviously enough choices here to provide feed for our backyard chickens to improve the quality and nutritional content of their eggs. Henbit, purslane, dandelions, sunflowers, rye grasses, etc. ad nauseum, find their way into the coop on a daily basis. The increase in ALA in the chickens’ diet has led directly to a decrease in LDL and an increase in HDL for Mr. Myrtle Maintenance which cannot be attributed to any other factor, as his diet has not really improved all that much between the last and most recent cholesterol tests he has taken – the single most important factor, in fact, is purely a decrease in red meat consumption and an increase in consumption of backyard eggs, from happy weed-fed chickens.

As soon as we can complete our fish pond project, we will toy with growing spirulina as well, on the assumption that our school of tilapia will be even higher in the best Omega-3 varieties; even if the algae experiment doesn’t work out, though, an increase in fish consumption can only bring more benefit. Plus, the chickens will certainly enjoy eating heads and offal, and their own health (and by extension, the healfulness of their eggs) will be improved, making it a winning idea all the way around. Having seen them attack salmon scraps before, we have little doubt how much they will enjoy fresh fish.

If you can’t increase your EPA and DHA from fish consumption, we urge you to at least increase your ALA – put some Alpha in your Omega. Gobble down those flax seeds and hazelnuts, and give some weeds to your chickens.

Happy farming!

Big Myrtle's Annual "Should we or shouldn't we" Post...

2011-02-11T17:38:00.002-06:00

The fastest way to irritate a grumpy person who wants to complain about the weather is to tell them that their presumptions about the weather are wrong.

While the last two weeks have seen some record low temperatures bringing bitter weather to places where it is not uncommon to see people in bermuda shorts in the middle of January and February, the urge to call this a “cold winter” is entirely misleading. On average, we have actually been well above normal temperatures for quite some time now. A couple of weeks of colder-than-usual temperatures doesn’t change that fact.

What has happened recently is that the patterns have altered slightly. There is still more heat in the atmosphere, overall, than has been true in the past; however, it has been distributed in a slightly different way, thanks to ridges of high pressure sitting over the Pacific Northwest, and off the coast of Greenland. Any low pressure at all in the middle of that mix – such as we have had twice in the last two weeks – will result in the jet stream looping way down the plains into Mexico.

Usually, the arctic stuff is swept left-to-right by the jet stream sitting high up in the contiguous 48 states, making North-and-South-Dakotacicles, but leaving Texans in our undershirts; instead, the arctic air mass pushed from up to down, leaving Texans huddled in our bedrooms, afraid to put our feet on the cold, cold floor.

We are about to return to a more typical pattern, though, which will see higher than usual temperatures for most of the country, for most of the Spring. So, for those who wish to slap us for saying, “It hasn’t really been that cold,” you can soon relax. Before too long, it really will be “that hot”.

This, of course, leads to our annual February conundrum. How soon do we start putting Spring plants in the ground?

Mrs. Myrtle Maintenance has begun deliveries of herbal bouquets ($10 per container of herbs, write to her for details about subscriptions for weekly deliveries), and is a little concerned because, at present, her bouquets consist almost entirely of rosemary and oregano.

Nothing else is growing, except the curry plant, and that is not a culinary herb, it is an aromatic, misnamed for a style of cooking. It is extremely good at repelling cats, but it is not particularly good as the basis for an aesthetically pleasing and useful kitchen herb bouquet.

So… we need more herbs, and soon. Warm weather is just about here…. Do we risk it?

The answer, like so many of our answers over time, is both yes and no.

Yes, it is time to plant some things. We are moving to a year long rotation of planting sunflowers on alternate weekends, for example, and next weekend is week one, since we are about six weeks out from the date of last frost. Our odds for this week’s sunflower planting of making it through without any more subfreezing temperatures will be maybe 50%, and if there is a frost, then the percentage of plants surviving subfreezing temperatures would be maybe 25%. So, this will be a boom-or-bust endeavor. Fortunately, the seeds are cheap (and getting cheaper by the year, as we save each successive harvest), and the reward is fairly high.

Sunflowers serve multiple purposes in our plots. They function first and foremost as an attractive flower, brightening the utilitarian greens and browns that dominate the landscape when you grow as many perennials and herbs as we do. We plant a wide variety of sunflowers, too, ranging from pale yellows with multiple heads, looking a lot like Jerusalem Artichoke, to bright oranges and starbursts on medium sized stalks with medium sized heads, to huge maroons and crimsons, towering overhead and giving our garden a third dimension.

Sunflowers make a delightful centerpiece to an herbal bouquet, providing color on a small scale, and bringing warmth and cheer to any room, and accentuating the vibrancy of the more useful additions, like the basil, mint, lavender, rosemary, etc., which form the aesthetic backdrop for the dramatic flower.

They are useful for our other plants still in the ground, as well. Sunflowers are a perfect trap crop, distracting the birds and insects from their more delicate neighbors. We will still lose some berries and tomatoes and herbs to sparrows and mockingbirds, of course, but not nearly as many as we would lose if we did not have the screen of sunflowers in front of the blackberries and nightshades.

Sunflowers also aide in maintaining proper soil tilth, breaking up hard clays, and providing good stubbly mulch when dead, balancing hard-to-erode lignins with all the easily assimilated organic matter we get from our oak leaves. The chickens also love to eat the leaves and attack the seed heads, so we get them in our compost either in situ, or else later, after having been processed as part of the chickens’ deep bedding.

Sunflowers also assist in water balance, as they draw water up, frequently being able to grow when the natural source of moisture is many, many feet below the surface. This means we can afford to soak our other plants in neighboring beds without running the risk of overwatering, since excess moisture will be mopped up by the sunflowers. Other Texas gardeners may be struggling for water, but with rainwater collection and a solar-powered pump dripping pond water on our herbs all day long (beneath the mulch, naturally!), we will be striving for moisture balance, rather than praying for any moisture at all, like we used to do.

However, because there is still a risk of that one final cold snap, we would be foolish to plant all of our sunflowers all at once. We will roll them out, a few seeds at a time, over the course of the next seven to nine months, depending on weather and available space. This gives us the advantage of being able to maintain something flowering in the garden virtually year round, with good balance, since we can see where we might be growing a bit thin, and where we might be a little overplanted. It also means Mrs. Myrtle Maintenance will, within six weeks from now, never be short on flowers or herbs ever again.

There are other items we will be planting soon, too, some indoors, some out. We will be starting our seed tomatoes and tomatillos indoors, not risking putting those precious commodities in until mid-March at the earliest. We learned that lesson the hard way. Same thing for our peppers – serranos, jalapeños, and bhut jolokia “ghost chili” (see “Man vs. Food” for information about that last one…)

We will be planting velvet beans and caigua directly in the garden, but again, not until the Ides of March.

Amaranth will not go in until late March or even the first week of April, depending on how long it takes the soil to warm up. We do not want to work these seeds until the soil has reached an agreeable 65° fahrenheit. We have several varieties, including some you will likely see in an herbal bouquet if you choose to order from Mrs. Myrtle Maintenance. “Love-Lies-Bleeding” and “Elephant Head” are actually frequently listed as flowers rather than as food crops, although we intend to make use of them as both.

We will be planting our new fruit trees as soon as we are able; Crandall black currant is the one variety of currant which has been bred to tolerate our summers, and that can go in as soon as we receive the root stock from the orchard. We intend to put in more grapes, more blackberries, some Dormand raspberries (again, the only variety available for Texas heat), some Rio Grande peaches, which have a fairly low chilling requirement (only 400 hours of temperatures below 45° F), and which produce later in the season – an important consideration, since we are aiming for year-round fruit production.

If we can find some inexpensive arbequina olives, we will put in a few more olive trees this year. Likewise, if we can find the Bacon and Fuerza varieties of avocado, we will try to plant a couple of those – Haas avocado trees would also be welcome, but those are much easier to find. These are low priority items, though; when your list is as long as ours is, you just work through it each year until you have to quit and wait for next year. Our perennial produce is just that way, and will be until we run out of space.

And then, there’s the herbs. Herbs, herbs, herbs. Catnip, borage, mint, purple coneflower, anise, thyme, probably some more rosemary and lavendar, chamomile, and gude ainly kens wha’ else will find its way into our garden, starting this weekend, when we take a gander at what is in the herb bin at Farm Patch. It’s time to plant some more herbs, and we are nowhere near satisfied – we’re just getting started.

The old saying is true, if you don’t like Texas’ weather, just wait five minutes, and it’ll change. The change has come, and it’s time to get your fingers back in the dirt.

Happy farming!

Aww, Nuts!

2011-01-25T19:24:00.001-06:00

If there is a more quintessentially Texan dessert than pecan pie, we at Myrtle’s place don’t know what it would be. Oh, sure, other places have pies which resemble a good old fashioned Texas pecan pie, but, sorry, it just isn’t the same.

Preferably served straight out of the cast-iron skillet it was cooked in (and, again, you can cook it in a glass pie dish, but why would you?), possibly served with a heaping scoop of cinnamon ice-cream – vanilla is acceptable, too, but don’t go monkeying around with flavors much more exotic than that – and maybe laced with bourbon, rum or brandy as a flavor additive, the essence of the nut has to shine through, or it isn’t really a Texas pecan pie.

We used to live in Austin, where towering pecan trees (often between 60 and 70 feet tall) provide shade to virtually every major park in the city, and where you can bake a pie made entirely from nuts you have collected on your morning walk. Sadly, while there are varieties which thrive in the eastern portions of the state, they are just not as prolific here.

Pecan country starts in Austin and spans through points west – the example shown here is in a park in the middle of Abilene. In fact, the mecca for this nut is any stream or tributary in the desert regions of our great state, and even (though many are loathe to admit it) up through the desert southwest – it may be sacrilige to say so, but one of our favorite pecan orchards is actually in New Mexico, along the banks of the Rio Grande. It may be 105° while you are driving down the highway, but it is a cool and pleasant 85° under the protection of the pecan grove.

So, what does this have to do with Big Myrtle’s place? Unfortunately, nothing. Nothing at all. We have chosen not to grow pecans. We have enough space for two trees, if we were to commit to growing them, and that would be more than enough for us to make all the pies we could ever hope to eat, but we just can’t do it. A mature pecan tree, you see, consumes roughly 100 gallons of water a day in the middle of a Texas summer. We have been hoping to get by using roughly 10,000 gallons of water for the entire garden in the course of a year – two pecan trees would take twice that much just to get through the hot part of the year, from May through October.

So, no go on the pecans. However, as part of a well-balanced diet, some sort of nut is essential; what on earth is a locavore to do when their favorite food is not practical? Naturally, under such circumstances, Myrtle recommends a heavy dose of research.

The nut we would actually prefer to grow, all other things being equal, would be almonds. Almonds are extremely high in monounsaturated fat, one of the prime movers-and-shakers in a diet to reduce LDL (low-density lipoprotein) cholesterol and raise HDL (high-density lipoprotein) cholesterol, a win-win nutrition conscious consumers everywhere ought not to ignore. A 2002 report from the American Heart Association (Jenkins, Kendall, Marchie et al.) described a controlled trial where 73g of almonds in the subjects’ daily diet reduced LDL cholesterol by as much as 9.4%, increased HDL cholesterol (remember, that’s the good cholesterol) by 4.6%, and reduced the LDL:HDL ratio by 12%.

So, almonds are a good thing.

Will they grow here?

No.

Or, rather, not as we currently know them. Both the sweet and bitter almond varieties are available at many nurseries, but they do not produce very well in any part of Texas, frequently not producing at all. Solid almond production in the United States is limited almost exclusively to California, where the orchard you see pictured here is a prime example of the kind of mild and temperate haven for this fruit-we-think-of-as-a-nut.

However… there is a native species in many parts of central Texas, currently spread out over relatively dry, sandy, calcareous soils sitting atop limestone bedrock, known as “smallflower peachbrush”. Prunus minutiflora, or ‘Texas Almond’ does not really look like the traditional almonds you find in every grocery store, with nuts that resemble acorns more than they do almonds, but it has two chief advantages as far as Myrtle is concerned: first, it is native to Texas, and so is more likely to thrive here than would any of the commercial varieties, and second, it is more of a shrub and less of a tree, making it more amenable to a backyard setting.

Is it edible? Is it tasty? Is it as healthy as its California cousins? We don’t know. Hardly any research along those lines has been done. We will unquestionably do some more digging around for information on this plant, because if it proves to be viable, we will want to put it in the ground as soon as possible. Every reputable nurseryman we have spoken with suggests that the commercially available almonds are probably a bad idea for southeast Texas, so prunus minutiflora is potentially our only alternative for almonds.

What about other nuts? Surely something else would work, right?

Actually, there are a few other choices, some more viable, others less so, and each presents challenges.

Hazelnuts are rich in nutrients (especially B vitamins), and numerous phytochemicals, in addition to being another source of unsaturated fats, but they are technically only viable as far south as the Ozark region of Missouri. We could potentially get them to grow in the lee of our oak trees… but… this is not an ideal option.

Walnuts are perfectly at home in the Brazos Valley… but they have a chemical self-defense mechanism which kills off virtually any other fruiting plant within fifty feet of their drip-line.

Peanuts are a possible crop for us, and we may yet consider planting them, but they lack the primary advantage of nut trees, which is their character of perennial production. Peanuts would be just another crop, like our vegetables, which we would have to tend on a regular rotation. Added to that, as a ground crop, peanuts would take up considerable space. We are hoping for a source of nuts which will take us vertical.

Bambara groundnuts are an exciting alternative crop for much of the developing world; these peanut-like plants come from central and western Africa, and have high nutritional content and low watering needs, but, like peanuts, they are space hogs when compared to nutting trees. In fact, bambara would take up more space than peanuts, since the yield per plant is somewhat lower. They are a great plant for subsistence farmers living in isolated areas, particularly since they are an extremely low maintenance crop, but for a half-acre in the middle of the city? Not so good.

Besides which, we are looking for an alternative to our favorite dessert here. Almonds and hazelnuts are known internationally for their ease of assimilation in desserts – peanuts are frequently found in fast-food desserts, but not so much in your finer confectioneries.

Are we willing to go slumming when it comes to the most important course of the meal?

Clearly, some experimentation is in order. We’ll keep you posted.

Happy farming!

Myrtle is Keen for Quinoa

2011-01-21T21:30:00.000-06:00

We harvested our meager quinoa crop this week. We say “meager” because we only had about fifteen plants total growing this winter, and we only got enough grain from them to justify saving as seed – we could have served one meal with what we threshed by hand, but we prefer to wait for next winter and a much bigger crop before we start consuming our own.

Still, we feel very encouraged by the results. We planted one small packet of fifty seeds – without weatherizing the seeds first, which was a pretty substantial mistake, automatically reducing our yield by over fifty percent before anything had even sprouted – and yet we got enough seed out of that initially disappointing result to densely plant roughly an eighth of an acre of quinoa next fall. We should get enough next winter to supply ourselves with enough of this wonder grain to last our family most of the year – particularly when coupled with our summer harvest of amaranth, which will serve us in roughly the same dietary capacity.

We were surprised after planting quinoa last fall to discover just exactly how popular it has become while we weren’t looking. We didn’t mean to be trendy – it just sort of happened. We knew we had hit something big when one of our favorite competitors on Bravo Network’s “Top Chef” (Carla, the vegetarian chef) cooked a stuffing dish with black quinoa which she referred to as “undone-te”, since it was woefully undercooked (manfully admitted, Carla!), and which the celebrity judge stated would make a good breakfast cereal, even if in its uncooked form it was an awful stuffing.

In fact, a quick search for quinoa recipes yields an almost limitless variety of possibilities for everything from aforementioned breakfast cereal, and Thanksgiving stuffing substitutes, to a substitute for rice, polenta or hummus, to soups, salads, breads, breading for meats, and gude kens what.

Preparing quinoa has become a more interesting process than we initially appreciated. We probably harvested some of our crop a little too soon, since some of it was dry on the stalk, but other plants were still damp from recent rains. It could hardly be expected that we would get it right our first time out, since this is the first grain crop we have ever planted, and it is not a native plant to Texas, and nobody we know has ever grown it before, so we didn’t really have anybody to ask about it.

Native Americans did frequently gather a similar plant, chenopodium berlandieri, otherwise known as lambsquarters, or pigweed. However, even though this plant has a nearly 4,000 year culinary history, it is new to Myrtle. We have had to reinvent the wheel, coming up with a means of drying the too-green seed heads we collected, and then threshing by hand to remove the actual seeds from the seed-heads, storing them in a paper bag with a steady breeze from a fan turned on low to dehydrate them, hopefully without destroying their ability to germinate next fall.

For those who wish to prepare quinoa without actually going through the trouble of growing it and harvesting it themselves, the steps are usually a little simpler. Quinoa sold in bulk at your local grocer probably needs to be soaked before cooking, because the seeds are coated fairly heavily with saponins, which are the plant’s natural defense against predation by birds. Saponins give foods a fairly intense bitter taste, so most commercially available quinoa in this country – that is, the kind you can buy in a box – has been presoaked to remove the saponins.

In South America, the removal of the mildly toxic glycoside saponin actually serves multiple purposes. In addition to making the quinoa more palatable, the bitter quinoa residue makes an excellent detergent for clothing or handwashing, and also a good antiseptic for skin injuries. The chemical content is similar to that of the root of the soapwart plant, historically used an alternative to lye-based soaps.

Once you have a quantity of well-rinsed and clean quinoa to cook with, you have almost limitless possibilities. It would be difficult to imagine a more nutritious grain with which to form the basis for a meal; as one might expect from any whole-grain food source, quinoa is, of course, high in fiber, and is also a starchy energy source. However, it is also high enough in protein to rival many legumes and even some meats; additionally, quinoa provides a host of B-vitamins, vitamin E, iron, calcium, magnesium, phosphorous and zinc. A list of the phytochemical components of quinoa would take far more space than Myrtle is willing to devote, and more studies are being done every day.

All told, quinoa gets two thumbs up (or would, if chickens had thumbs). Here is just a handful of some of the better recipes we have found for this wonder grain:

Quinoa, Shiitake Mushrooms and Adzuki Beans

Ingredients:
½ cup sliced carrots
3 thinly sliced scallions
¼ cup shiitake mushrooms sliced (can substitute slightly crushed oyster mushrooms)
2 cups cooked adzuki beans, drained
1 cup washed quinoa
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 cups chicken broth (vegetable broth works just fine for a vegan alternative)
salt, pepper

Directions:
1. Sauté vegetables until tender.
2. Add broth, beans and quinoa. Bring to a boil.
3. Reduce heat to low and simmer for about 20 minutes, until liquid evaporates.
4. Add salt and pepper and mix with a fork or wooden spoon.

Quinoa Sunshine Salad with Asian Dressing

Ingredients:
Salad Ingredients
4 cups baby spinach
1 cup quinoa

1 cup red bell pepper, diced
1 cup yellow bell pepper, diced
1 cup mango, diced
½ cup green onion, chopped
Asian Dressing Ingredients
1/3 cup rice vinegar
¼ cup low-sodium soy sauce
1 tablespoon orange juice, freshly squeezed
2 teaspoons fresh garlic, minced
1 teaspoon fresh ginger, minced
1 teaspoon sesame oil
1 teaspoon sugar
¼ teaspoon orange zest

Directions:
1. Rinse quinoa thoroughly, place one cup quinoa in a sauce pan with two cups of cold water. Bring the mixture to a boil, cover and turn down the heat to a low simmer.
2. Let cook for about 15 minutes, or until all water is absorbed. Remove from heat. Fluff quinoa with a fork and set aside to cool.
3. In a small bowl combine all dressing ingredients and mix thoroughly.
4. In a large bowl combine quinoa, red bell pepper, yellow bell pepper and mango.
5. Pour dressing over salad and mix.
6. Let the salad sit for 15 minutes to allow the flavors to combine.
7. Serve salad on top of a bed of baby spinach and garnish with green onions.

Roasted Poblanos Stuffed with Cranberries, Pecans, and Quinoa

Ingredients:
8 poblano peppers
3 cups cooked quinoa
1/2 cup chopped pecans, toasted
1/2 cup dried cranberries
1/2 red onion, minced
1/2 cup cilantro, chopped
1 pound butternut or kabocha squash
2 Tablespoons maple syrup
1/4 cup nonfat sour cream
1-2 cups vegetable stock
1/2 teaspoon olive oil
Salt and freshly ground pepper

Directions:
1. Preheat boiler. Broil poblanos, turning once, until charred, about 10 minutes. Place them in a paper shopping bag or a bowl covered with plastic wrap to let them steam for about 10 minutes. Remove the charred skin when cool enough to handle. Slit lengthwise on one side, and remove the seeds.
2. Reduce the oven temperature to 400 degrees. Cut squash in half. Remove seeds. Brush the cut side with the olive oil. Roast it cut side down until tender, about 30 – 40 minutes.
3. Scoop the squash out of the skin. Puree in blender with maple syrup, sour cream, and vegetable stock. Add additional stock as necessary to reach a sauce-like consistency.
4. In a mixing bowl, combine quinoa, cranberries, pecans, onion, cilantro, and 1/2 cup of the sauce. Season to taste with salt and freshly ground pepper.
5. Stuff each pepper with a generous half cup of the mixture. Place in a baking dish, seam side down. Cover with aluminum foil and bake for 20 minutes.
6. Serve with the warm sauce.

Quinoa with Currants

Ingredients:
1/4 cup rinsed quinoa
1/8 tsp ground ginger
1/4 cup water
dash tumeric (optional)
Dash of salt
1/8 tsp pepper
1/3 red onion, finely diced
2 Tbs chopped fresh cilantro (or parsley)
1/8 tsp ground cumin
2 Tbs currants (or chopped raisins)
Dash ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp grated orange or lemon zest
Dash ground coriander

Directions:
1. Rinse quinoa with warm water and drain through a fine strainer.
2. Bring water and salt to a boil. Add the quinoa. Cover and reduce heat. Simmer for 10-15 min.
3. Meanwhile, heat a nonstick skillet. Add the onion, spices, and black pepper. Cook gently (low temp) until softened, about 5-10 minutes. Add a bit of water if needed to prevent burning.
4. Drain the quinoa when it's done and toss with the onion mixture along with the cilantro, currants, and orange or lemon zest. Serve hot or at room temperature.

Hitting Gray Matter.... Hard...

2011-01-18T21:29:00.000-06:00

There is no known “safe” level of exposure to lead. Obviously, a child sucking down lead-based paint chips like they were Oreos will suffer greater health impacts than would someone whose exposure is limited to occasional inhalation of industrially polluted air from a plant three hundred miles away; still, the point is, we have been poisoning ourselves for the three-thousand plus known years of lead mining, and there does not appear to be any sign of stopping any time soon.

The littany of dread associated with lead poisoning has always included symptoms usually associated with higher-dose exposures, although chronic lead exposure has also gained notoriety lately. Those suffering headache, abdominal pain, memory loss, kidney failure, erectile dysfunction, pain or tingling in extremeties, loss of apetite, vomiting, weight loss, constipation, anemia, irritability, or learning disabilities are likely to be more obvious sufferers from lead toxicity than those with lower-key symptoms from chronic exposure.

Added to the above maladies is a newly discovered result of lead exposure, which may have farther-reaching consequences for our society – even for our species as a whole.

Recent research suggests that the development of the anterior cingulate is adversely affected by exposure to lead.

The anterior cingluate cortex is the front portion of the cingulate cortex; it forms a ‘U’ shaped covering of the corpus callosum, the “middle” part of the brain, which connects the left and right hemispheres. In addition to playing a significant role in a wide variety of autonomic functions such as regulating blood pressure and heart rate, the anterior cingulate also appears to have an important part to play in complex rational cognitive functions, such as reward anticipation, decision-making, empathy and emotion.

A smaller anterior cingulate cortex, as occurs in persons with more exposure to chronic sources of lead, such as air pollution (especially historically, prior to the removal of lead from petroleum), places more emphasis on stimulus processing in the amygdalla, frequently referred to as the “reptilian brain” because it is the portion of our brain responsible for more primitive responses, particularly fearful responses.

Fight or flight responses come from the amygdalla; subtle, nuanced responses come only from the cingulate. This makes a lot of sense, because a subtle, nuanced response typically involves cross-chatter between the logos and mythos – between what “is”, determined rationally and mathmatically (ie, “left brain”) and what “ought to be”, determined emotionally, aesthetically, and morally (ie, “right brain”). Knee-jerk reactions are reptillian; thoughtful responses which take some time to formulate, and also some time to explain, are more complicated.

Obviously, by reducing the size of the anterior cingulate, and emphasizing the amygdalla, we have created a problem which goes far beyond the scope of the individual patient. We have collectively increased the likelihood of paranoid responses on the part of large segments of our population, and virtually no one is immune.

Lead is everywhere. The best-known culprit for lead poisoning is paint, found particularly in homes built prior to 1978; lead-based paint is not isolated to any particular region – it may be found in the city, country, or suburbs, in apartments, single-family homes, and both private and public housing, both on the interior and the exterior.

Soil may be contaminated in neighborhoods where lead based paint was once used; it may stay in the soil indefinitely, and may actually be made worse by the removal of lead-based paint from homes, depending on the removal method. Tracking of soil into and out of contaminated spaces make it likely that dust in many places also contains lead.

Lead pipes and lead solder mean that frequently concentrations of lead may be found in drinking water. On occasion, municipal water supplies will be contaminated without notice because in between tests for lead, chlorine or chlordate concentrations will be changed, and the new chemical combinations will not be first tested for impact on lead pipes or lead solder – by the time changes in lead concentrations are noticed, it is too late to stop the exposure.

Lead-based batteries are slowly being replaced by other technologies, but they are still the cheapest and most efficient sources of battery power for most applications; lead pollution comes from each phase of their lives – production, use, and disposal of lead batteries all give ample opportunity for exposure to lead.

Foods and liquids may be contaminated by storage in lead crystal or lead-glazed pottery or porcelin. Lead smelters and other industries release lead into the air. Hobbyists using lead may not even be aware that pottery, stained glass, or furniture refinishing may contribute to lead poisoning.

Lead is, quite literally, everywhere. Nor is it likely to go away any time soon – it is simply too important economically for us to practically advocate its eradication.

However, there are several steps we can take to minimize the collective damage we are doing to ourselves.

Check for lead-based paints in and around your home; a specialized inspector can tell you whether you have lead accumulations in your house. The National Lead Information Center (NLIC) can provide a list of contacts where you live.
Distill your drinking water. Filtering is good, but distilling is even better.
Keep as many plants in your home as you are capable of keeping alive; several varieties are especially good at filtering the air of heavy metals, but make sure you emphasize keeping varieties which will survive your environment and skill level – we recommend pothos ivy as a hardy and hard-to-kill indoor favorite.
Clean floors, window frames, window sills and other surfaces weekly. Use a mop, sponge or paper towel with warm water and a general all-purpose cleaner.
Thoroughly rinse sponges and mop heads after cleaning dirty or dusty areas.
Wash children’s hands often, especially before they eat and before they go to sleep.
Keep play areas clean.
Eat right and exercise; a good diet, particularly one high in fiber, prevents the absorption of lead. A healthy liver can expunge more lead, as well, so eating right is critical, especially for those who cannot limit exposure.
Look for alternatives to lead-based products. If you can choose batteries, for example, which do not use lead-acid technology, do so. If you can avoid using lead-based solder, do so. If you can avoid using lead pipes, do so.

There is a political subtext to all of this, with irony which does not escape Myrtle’s notice. Conservatives notoriously oppose virtually all government initiatives designed to protect the environment at the expense of business, and lead abatement would certainly fill the bill. Recently, studies have suggested that the smaller one’s anterior cingulate, the more conservative one is likely to be in one’s voting behavior. A vicious circle, no doubt – lead poisoning causes a person to be less concerned about lead poisoning.

In any event, Myrtle is less concerned with whether or not her state is red or blue, just so long as it avoids a dull pewter color.

Happy farming!

When less is more, do more with less

2011-01-16T19:50:00.001-06:00

Versatility is king for small operators. “It slices, it dices, it juliennes!” Every tool on a half-acre homestead has to do more than one thing, including the plants. Our grape vines, for example, produce grapes, but they also provide shade in summer, cutting our cooling costs by soaking up the sun before it has a chance to hit our western exposures. Our blackberry vines provide copious quantities of fruit, and also provide a thorny border demarcating our property line – an important consideration in a neighborhood which used to treat our property as a pedestrian highway.

There are all sorts of other multi-functional plants, many of which we have in our garden. Legumes (beans and peas) provided tasty meals, but also bind nitrogen to the soil for following crops in future seasons; amaranth provides grain, but it also chokes out the grass which is the natural enemy of our anti-turf family. Sunflowers provide seeds, and they also feed our native bee population; we are putting in bees this year, which will provide us with honey, and will also pollinate many of our plants.

January means seed-catalog time, and we have spent our fair share of time going over heirloom seed catalogs with a fine-toothed comb, looking for just the right combination of productivity, versatility, health and vitality on the part of those things we are going to add to our garden this year.

The major addition, of course, will be several varieties of amaranth, which we have spoken about at length for many months now. A couple of other interesting new crops, however, we have only mentioned in passing, and we did not find either in our catalogs. We have had to special order mucuna pruriens, better known as velvet beans, or cow itch. We are also planting cyclanthera pedata, better known as caigua in Peru, or lady’s slipper in Britain.

Neither of these delectable veggies is a mainstream crop in this country yet, but we hope to change that one seed at a time.

Velvet beans will serve several important functions in our garden. First and foremost, this plant has historically been a significant ground-cover in the Florida tomato industry, only having lost favor in the last several decades as a caterpillar specifically attracted to the mucuna vine gained prominence, and then began attacking several other cash crops in Florida. Having reviewed the literature, we believe the risk of pests was overstated, exaggerated by the tendency to monocrop, rely on pesticides, and just generally mess with Mother Nature.

On the other hand, using a vigorous leguminous vine like mucuna not only adds nitrogen to the soil, it chokes out unwanted weeds, provides groundcover to hold topsoil in place, regulates soil temperature, nourishes beneficial soil microbes, chokes out harmful soil microbes, and gives shade to tender leafy vegetables during the harshest times of day during the hottest parts of the growing season.

In addition to all of these agricultural benefits, mucuna has the advantage of being a tasty source of protein and several essential nutrients, in addition to being useful as a medicinal herb. Mucuna seeds contain from 20-35% crude protein. The ‘itch’ from ‘cow itch’ comes from the hairy seedpods (which are also where the ‘velvet’ in ‘velvet bean’ comes from). These hairy seedpods are high in serotonin and mucanain, which, in addition to being neurologically significant, also cause a mild allergic reaction – in fact, itching powder used to be manufactured with velvet bean seed pods.

The beans themselves also contain high concentrations of levodopa (L-DOPA), a direct precursor of the neurotransmitter dopamine. This makes velvet beans a potentially important part of the diet for anyone battling depression, parkinson’s disease, erectile dysfunction, low libido, or anxiety disorders. Lucid dreamers have also recently taken a fancy to mucuna, which complicated our search for seeds greatly – most of the mucuna for sale on the market is not in seed form, it is in herbal supplement form, which does a gardener no good whatsoever.

Caigua is another vine we will be growing this year, and it has a lot to offer, as well. Curcurbits do very well in southeast Texas, and Caigua is essentially just another cucumber, so we expect it to flourish. What makes caigua special, however, is its potent blend of phytochemicals – peptin, galacturonic acid, dihydroxitriptamine, pierine, resins, phosphorous, thiamine, ascorbic acid, lipoproteins, systosterol and 3 beta D glucoside, low density lipoproteins, and God only knows what all else.

Inca-period pottery and artwork often depicts caigua; it has been an important vegetable for a long, long time. Taken in conjunction with the herbal supplement Hercampuri, caigua reduces blood cholesterol levels, rejuvenates skin, and reduces cellulite.

What makes caigua less popular outside of Latin America is uncertain, although it is a little unusual as a cucumber – the closer it gets to being ripe, the more “hollowed-out” the fruit becomes. The seeds end up clinging to an internal membrane that looks suspiciously like that of a bell pepper. And by a remarkable coincidence, that is basically what caigua tastes like. In fact, one of the more popular ways of serving this vegetable is in the form of a caigua rellena – similar to the tex-mex dish chili rellenos.

We think there will probably be a lot of other things we can do with it, however, limited only by our imaginations. After all, vegetable gardeners in England have recently fallen all over themselves acquiring cyclanthera pedata seeds, and if an English cook can think of something to do with it, surely anyone can do so. Finding seed, in fact, was fairly easy because even though caigua has not yet hit the market in the U.S. in any major way, enough growers worldwide are interested in this vegetable that we found a variety of sources to order from.

We will be curious how it grows, though, because scouring the web for samples, we encountered several distinct varieties. Some look benign enough, like small squash leaves on a trellised vine. Some, however, have sharp multi-folate leaves that look… um…. well… a little ‘irie’, if Jah know what we mean…

Which brings us to the plant we will not be growing in our garden any time soon, though it has many multifunctional qualities which leave every other plant we have ever heard about completely in the dust. In our collective shortsightedness, our society has demonized this plant, which has the potential to singlehandedly resolve our national debt crisis, close the trade deficit, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, sequester many tons of carbon, improve nutrition, save forests by providing a cheap new source of paper, give new life to the domestic textile industry, and a whole host of other beneficial things.

We are talking, of course, about cannabis. There are actually three different species of plants which could be called ‘marijuana’ – cannabis sativa, cannabis indica, and cannabis ruderalis. All three contain some amount of the psychoactive substance tetrahydrocannabinol, or “THC”. However, while this has become the focal point for how this plant is utilized by humans, it is really the tip of the iceberg.

By attempting to legislate the plant out of existence, though, most nations of the world have instead merely incentivized the breeding of plants with higher and higher concentrations of the very substance which they were attempting to outlaw. Even so, as the graph you see here shows, there are plenty of substances both more addictive and more dangerous than marijuana – many of them are legal. Can you say “hypocrisy”?

In colonial America, virtually every significant farming operation involved the production of massive quantities of cannabis, typically just called “hemp”, for industrial use. Highly adaptable as a material to make rope, cloth, and even bricks, pressboard, and other construction materials, cannabis was in part quite literally responsible for the making of our nation. Thomas Jefferson’s plantation owed much of its profitability to this plant, as did the farms of many of our other founding fathers.

We wonder, in addition to the many industrial and pharmacological uses of this plant, what might be done with it in the kitchen, if only it weren’t illegal and therefore too expensive to use.

Cannabis sativa has both sweet and savory overtones which, we think, would make it great in salads, in addition to being a pretty good seasoning. It would unquestionably provide good silage for livestock. It grows densely, but without being too demanding on the soil. It is not a water hog; it provides plenty of shade, and is an excellent groundcover.

And legalizing it would turn a lot of criminals into gardeners. We can’t think of any single measure that would be more beneficial to our society than removing pot from the category of ‘gateway to violent criminal school’ into ‘introduction to the wonderful world of backyard farming’.

Ah, well.

We’ll stick to the weird plants you don’t get in trouble for growing.

Happy farming!

Two Washtubs, a Hand-cranked Wringer, and the Truth...

2011-01-05T19:50:00.002-06:00

"Fortunately for those doing the laundry, during the 1930s people didn't have as many changes of clothing as they do now. The boys had one pair of 'good' overalls or 'Levis' which they wore to school every day. When washday came, usually on Saturday, they put on the 'old' pair used for work and chores while the new ones were washed. Nor did they wear a different shirt every day...And you used fewer changes of underwear when you bathed only on Saturday night.
Although the girls undoubtedly had more variety, and may have changed oftener, still they had limited wardrobes. As the thirties began, chances are that most of their dresses were home-sewn. They usually had a new dress for Christmas...and perhaps for their birthday. The point is that nobody required the large volume of clothes that each person feeds to the washer [today]. If that were not so, no one could have stayed even with the laundry.”

Miriam B. Murphy, History Blazer May 1996

There are any number of reasons why laundry is an important consideration when it comes to conservation. First and foremost, it can get expensive. Depending on where you live, the water alone can get pricey; the electricity involved, however, is a whole other order of magnitude costly.

We discovered with pleasure that we can do without an electric dryer; line drying our clothes has proven to be far more efficient than we originally feared when we started doing it six months ago. Necessity, we admit, drove us: our dryer broke down just when we had no money with which to replace it.

So, we began hanging our wet laundry on the grape trellis just outside our back door. The grapes, being only a year old, had not yet reached the top of the trellis, so we had all this empty space not being used; laundry seemed like a perfect fit.

Unlike Ms. Murphy’s 1930’s Utah pioneers, however, our family has considerably more in the way of daily changes of clothes. This means that laundry has become a daily routine, involving plenty of heavy lifting on the part of Mrs. Myrtle Maintenance, though not excluding a lot of input on the part of everyone else in the family, folding and putting things in their respective closets, drawers, etc.

Still, with a little organization and teamwork, we have discovered that we can make this process run like clockwork, and, more to the point, we have cut into our electric bill to the tune of double-digit percentages.

Mrs. Myrtle Maintenance announced recently, as a consequence of this success, that she believes our enterprise ought to consider eliminating the washing machine in similar fashion, so that we may recoup even more energy savings by eliminating that expense as well.

Now, ordinarily, when embarking on a crazy venture, we find ourselves in the company of a legion of others who have considered our alternative solutions long before we, ourselves, take lunatic measures.

Not so this time.

There are, it turns out, only a handful of brave souls who hand-agitate their laundry and then run it through a wringer prior to hanging it on a line to dry.

There are several reasons why this obviously much greener alternative is viewed less favorably than motorized washing machines by all but the hardiest of green-adventurers:

Handling wet laundry can be cumbersome. Wet laundry weighs considerably more than does dry laundry; even when it has been run through a washing machine, and wrung out through the spin cycle, anyone who has ever simply moved laundry from the washing machine to the dryer can attest to the fact that any water at all causes cloth to become much, much heavier.
Trust in cleanliness is lacking. The same paranoia (fed by companies selling us power, water, washing machines, detergents, and speciality fabric treatments) which causes us irrationally to use hot water when cleaning laundry also causes us to distrust the ability of our own hands to get cloth clean. People view the washing machine as a sort of ‘magic box’ where dirty things go in, and clean things come out.
Wringing out wet laundry takes skill. If you’ve ever toured an old mansion, if the scullery is properly equipped you will see an old wringer sitting against one wall – it is a specialty piece of equipment, and running through a load of laundry is not something any old fool can do; it takes a fool who has practiced many times, and gotten stuck on many buttons, hooks, lapels, etc. before acquiring the talent of running things through quickly and efficiently.
Architecture is against the old ways – modern laundry rooms and bathrooms are simply not designed with anything in mind other than the modern washer and dryer arrangement.

All of these objections, of course, have the weight of inertia on their side.

We hate inertia.

We already had a pretty long list of things to do this year, not the least of which is our intention to finally get some bee hives, as well as to start making blackberry port this summer, not to mention growing our own grain… well, you get the idea. Our “to do” list is no small affair.

Still, we have just about decided ourselves on a new course altogether when it comes to laundry. And we think we have the answers to each objection:

Handling wet laundry can be cumbersome, but less so if you handle less of it at a time. This means wearing the same pair of pants more often. We may still need to do a lot more unmentionables than did the rural folk of the 1930’s, but unmentionables don’t actually weigh all that much. And our day jobs (software support for money, childcare and homemaking for moral value) are not really all that dirty – we are fairly sure we can tolerate getting an extra day or two out of our daily wear.
Trust in cleanliness is not a problem for us. Myrtle Maintenance personell have plenty of elbow grease we are willing to apply as solvent. And if there’s a stain we can’t get out, well, we’ll just shred the garment and add it to the attic as insulation. As for whether this process really works or not, hey, think about all those period-piece romances you’ve ever watched like a vicarious lord or lady of the era… all those frilly laces and frocks spent some time in the basement being scourged by a scullery maid prior to being worn by the high and mighty.
Wringing out wet laundry takes skill; we like learning new skills. The list of things we’ve never done before is getting shorter all the time.
Architecture is against the old ways, but we’ve proven ourselves willing to knock down walls no one else would have knocked down plenty of times before. Heck, we may be able to work around the city’s graywater reuse rules without even having to get a permit – research will be required, of course, but the point is, just because no one else does it has nothing to do with whether or not we will do it.

There are plenty of details to be worked out, of course. Lehman’s, for example, sells a couple of different varieties of hand-wringing washers, but we aren’t willing to shell out the kind of money they charge. We’ll probably be rigging up a chassis to hold a couple of old-fashioned wash tubs waist high or so, and buying a hand-cranked wringer, and devising some kind of agitating post to manually crunch and grind all the clothes in the hopper.

Of all our crazy schemes, this one actually sounds far crazier, but in some ways is more practical than others. There will be some initial investment in equipment, and a fairly significant learning curve. There will need to be some procedural adjustments to our daily routines. But overall, there looks to be nothing but upside, at least for us. The utility company will probably lose out in a big way. Boo-hoo.

Happy farming!

In Praise of Good Eggs

2010-12-08T17:39:00.001-06:00

“Value of all egg production in 2009 was $6.16 billion, down 25 percent from the $8.22 billion in 2008. Egg production totaled 90.4 million eggs, up slightly percent from the 90.0 million eggs produced in 2008. In 2009, all eggs averaged 81.7 cents per dozen, compared with $1.09 in 2008.”
–Poultry Production and Value, 2009 Summary USDA April 2010

Pulletpalooza was a rip-roaring success, considering that we did everything in our power to keep people from showing up, and about 30 intrepid chicken fans showed up anyway. Part of the reason, we suspect, is that even though prices for factory farmed eggs have been coming down of late, dissatisfaction with factory farmed eggs (or, indeed, with any factory farmed foods at all) is driving a larger number of folks to consider backyard birds.

One of the most common questions we received related to production costs and return on investment. This was a practical question, indeed, given that it was asked while small children were gleefully tossing popcorn at our hens and squealing “Chickie like popcorn!” Clearly, backyard chicken ownership comprises both a practical and an emotional component.

Practically speaking, the biggest investment vis-à-vis backyard flocks relates to housing. Areas that allow free-ranging your birds give a tremendous advantage in this respect, since in such places, the only coop you need is a small cabinet-like space where you can lock them up at night. This is traditionally what a chicken coop looked like, many years ago when practically every home had chickens; you’d let the birds out in the morning, and at night, your children would be responsible for searching your yard for eggs, and then just before dark, you’d put the birds back in the coop and lock it.

At Myrtle’s place, however, we have to keep the birds caged all day long, so we needed a bigger coop. our structure is 10’ x 12’, with a large nesting box elevated on one end, and a 10’ x 2’ ‘run’ on top, giving our birds a total of 140 square feet in which to roam. Our roosting poles are about 6’ each, and our birds have a choice of two on which to sleep at night.

All told, we have about $200 in materials invested in our coop. We initially believed that this cost would be dwarfed by feed expenditures, and in fact, when we first started our little venture, that seemed like a reasonable assumption, since we would go through three to four $7 bags of lay pellets each month; throw in the gas we burned driving to Producer’s Coop ever week, and they seemed awfully expensive right out of the gate.

However, these costs were grossly exaggerated due to our inexperience. We were totally unaware of how much we could save by feeding our birds table scraps and weeds. Toss in the occasional grubworm, caterpillar, dragonfly, or (saints preserve us!) cockroach, and Myrtle and the girls are down to only a bag of lay pellets every month or so. Given that an hour of sitting, sipping coffee, and watching the birds scratching in the leaves replaces a month of psychotherapy, and the $70 or $80 a year we spend on feed really seems pretty paltry. I’m sure the American Association of Liscensced Professional Counselors would agree.

The flip side of the cost question is the question of return on investment (ROI). This is harder for us to measure, of course, given how many benefits we get from the chickens apart from their primary output, eggs. As alluded to, our chickens are also our primary means of composting kitchen leftovers, in addition to being excellent disposers of yard waste.

Still, the simplest means of evaluating ROI is to calculate expenses per egg. This, of course, leads to another common question – “How many eggs do you get?”

The rate per bird varies wildly, as does the rate in each given season. We have noticed numerous trends worth mentioning – first off, our chickens lay larger, healthier, tastier and more numerous eggs the more we ply them with weeds. Lay pellets are fine, they seem to be telling us, but weeds are much, much better. They also like stalks of sunflowers, broccoli, tomatoes, and the like, but even these tasty consumables pale in comparison to good old fashioned weeds.

We get, on average, 200 eggs per year, per bird. Some parts of the year, every bird is laying virtually every day; some parts of the year, each bird only lays every other day or so. On the whole, though, we are getting 0.55 eggs per day, per bird.

This comes to 1,400 eggs per year total for our flock of 7 birds. Given that we are paying at most $84 per year on lay pellets, that comes to $0.06 per egg at a maximum, not counting initial capital outlay. This puts one dozen low cholesterol, high Omega-3, hormone free eggs at $0.72 in production costs.

This is cheaper than the nasty chemical laced factory farmed eggs with their potential salmonella infections and god only knows what other health hazards. We are paying far less for our eggs than for the equivalent healthy eggs from a natural foods store, where you might expect to pay anywhere from $3 to $5 per dozen for eggs as healthy as those we get from Myrtle and the girls.

If you want to throw in the capital outlay for the coop, then we would be paying $284 in the first year, bringing the cost of each egg to $0.20, or about $2.43 per dozen. This, obviously, is less than $3 to $5, and it is only capitalizing for one year. Our coop will more likely last for at least ten years, and hopefully more like twenty, which would drop our cost-per-egg back down to anywhere from $0.08 to $0.10.

On the whole, then, we would argue that there is a fairly significant ROI on backyard chickens just from measuring their primary output – eggs. We don’t really have the analytical tools to calculate the ROI on their secondary output, but we are fairly confident that the value of chicken-poop compost is at least as profitable as the eggs. Given how much every plant in our yard loves the stuff, we suspect it is probably actually much greater.

And then there is the tertiary benefit of avian psychoanalysis. Maybe we should replace our lawn chairs with outdoor couches. “Myrtle will see you now…”

Happy farming!

"Here we go, a-wassailing, whatever that might mean!"

2010-12-01T18:33:00.001-06:00

December is a strange month for chickens and for gardens. Virtually every Texas gardener has abandoned fruits and veggies this month in favor of pansies. Weeds for the chickens are as hard to come by as are peaches or plums for the people.

Yet, it is the time of year when every table is topped with delectable goodies, and every kitchen smells of ginger and cinnamon.

We are hosting our share of festivities at Myrtle’s place this year, and will be serving our share of sugar. In lieu of gardening advice, or pontifications about poultry, let us offer you a serving suggestion. Wassail is not just a word in a Christmas carol. It is also a tasty beverage. And it explains why, even in warm climates like ours, Santa is so jolly in spite of his heavy suit, and his nose is still a bright cherry red!

Traditionally, wassail was a hard cider warmed in a turreen full of sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger and topped with pieces of toasted bread to serve as ‘sops’. If you live somewhere with a copious quantity of sweet and tart apples, and have access to good hard cider, may we suggest you go traditional – there is absolutely nothing in the world as tasty as home grown cider spiced and warmed over a fire and drunk with a host of friends in a cozy room with windows overlooking a frozen garden.

Many of those ingredients are not available at Myrtle’s place – we would have to import the hard apple cider, we don’t have an indoor fireplace, and our garden is far from frozen.

Modern recipes for wassail, however, are somewhat forgiving, and so long as your group of friends doesn’t contain any picky purists, you can get away with calling a good old-fashioned mulled wine “wassail”. It’ll do in a pinch, anyway. Take a large quantity of any good sweet red wine (the cheaper, the better, in our book), toss in sugar, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, apples, oranges, raisins, etc. to taste, maybe a splash or two of cinnamon schnapps if the mood strikes you, and heat the whole thing up.

A cauldron over a fire is a nice touch, of course, but barring that, a crock pot will suffice. If you don’t have a crock pot, try a stew pot and your kitchen stove.

This year, we may experiment with putting in some pomegranate arils, since in future years we hope to be celebrating a fruit harvest in late fall. We also hope to have a field of flowering quinoa as a backdrop to future wassail parties. For this year, though, we’ll settle for a firebowl, a few flowers, and a good sit.

Winter festivals mean many different things to different folk, but one thing they all have in common is the theme of lights in the darkness, and of warmth in the midsts of cold. We hope you can find your own island of warmth and light in the coming month.

Happy farming!

Old Man... Winter? Sorta...

2010-11-28T09:09:00.001-06:00

We told you last week about the changing needs of winter gardeners in our little corner of the world. Since that time, we have eaten too much turkey, and had a borderline frost/freeze.

It is an exceedingly bittersweet time of year when we finally have a drop in temperature sufficient to keep the tomatoes from ripening on the vine, and worse still, when we get a freeze deep enough (which is to say, any sort of freeze at all) to kill off many of our producing vines.

Some varieties of tomato are hardy enough to take our little snippet of cold air, of course. We allow volunteers to go crazy in our garden, so we can't tell you for sure which varieties they are -- we just know they aren't the Brandywines you see here all nice and green.

Still, we had some vines make it through, including some volunteers in the potting soil we were using in our little black current experiment. With a little bit of luck, we might actually manage to get a few more ripe tomatoes later this season.

We had mixed results with basil, as well -- for some reason, our sweet basil did better than many of our exotics -- the thai, for example, and the apple basil both froze to the ground. Our purple curly-leafed basil plants had some leaves crimple, and others keep going strong.

Evidently, we were just exactly at the threshold temperature for winter mischief.

Still, we know what to do now. First, we hoe down all the frozen plants (or, better still, get our daughter to do it!); next, we cover the bed with a fresh layer of leaves.

In mid-February, we will add a layer of compost from the chicken coop, and work it in with a pitchfork. Then, in late February or early March, we will start seeding this bed with new plants.

Sometime next spring, after volunteer basil has started cropping up all over the yard, we will transfer a few of those plants to this bed, and any volunteer tomatoes which choose to join our newly seeded tomatoes will happily join forces to turn this plot into a wild tangle of solanaceous goodness. We'll probably mulch it, as well, sometime next April or May or so. And undoubtedly we'll put some sunflowers and nasturtiums on the borders as trap crops.

Much the same treatment will meet our other garden beds, in their own times, and with their own particular combinations of plants.

We could put more seed in the ground now, of course. Our cabbage, spinach, kale and broccoli all acted as if this week's dip in temperature was manna from heaven, and kale and cabbage can both go into the ground all the way up to the end of December according to the planting calendar available at Producer's Co-op.

And next year at this time, we will be planting more quinoa seeds, as part of a rolling quinoa planting season.

But for now, we are getting ready for the First Annual Brazos Valley Pulletpalooza, and we really feel fairly satisfied with how the garden is growing. In future years, we have plans to install rebar reinforced PVC hoops over the top of our tender veggies, and cover the contraption with greenhouse plastic prior to our first frost, so as to extend our season. Today, though, we'll be enjoying the fruits of our present labors, and cleaning up Myrtle's place for next weekend's show-and-tell.

Happy farming!

Thanksgiving in Texas... Climate is Changing and So are We

2010-11-23T17:55:00.001-06:00

Vernalization, stratification, weatherization, whatever you want to call it, the concept is one we hadn’t really bothered ourselves with much until this fall at Myrtle’s.

However, several events have conspired to make us pay even as much attention to climate as we do to weather. This is a subtle distinction, but one which will become increasingly more important as as climate change takes fuller hold over the course of the next several decades.

The Brazos Valley is not quite in the wettest region of Texas, roughly defined as the greater Houston area eastward. We joke in our family that if there is a 40% chance of rain, “Sure hope they enjoy it over in Huntsville.” Houston gets over 50 inches of rain a year; College Station gets just under 30 inches a year, for now. This makes us wetter than most of the state, even if not quite putting us in the rice-growing marshes of the eastern sliver of Texas.

We are likely to get less rain in coming years, though. A wide variety of climate change models suggest that we will increasingly look less like a sub-tropical climate, and more and more like a semi-arid climate, with some suggesting that in as few as ten years, we may see our precipitation averages drop by 1/3rd. That would mean that instead of getting around 30 inches per year, we will likely get roughly 20 inches per year.

Our normal precipitation pattern is changing, too. Not only will rain be less abundant in the Brazos Valley, it will also come at different times. Normally, we have a wet season in May and June, followed by a dry summer, with mild fall and winter months. In future years, however, winter will be our wettest time of year; May and June will only see significant rain when we get moisture from tropical storms.

And then there will be fluctuations such as those caused by El Niño and La Niña. This year is a strong La Niña year, so our fall and winter are proving to be excessively dry. In fact, some models show that tropical moisture during El Niño years will be so prevalent that we may actually on average get more rain, even as soil moisture disappears during our rain-free months – we’ll be both wetter and drier, like some sort of crazy climatic performance art piece.

So what does this have to do with seeds, and planting, and Myrtle’s place?

As it turns out, quite a lot.

We have spoken before of our strong preference for collecting rainwater; we have spent the last several months working on our collection system. Roughly 80% of the rain running off our roof will now be collected – first, into two 50 gallon barrels, and next, after the barrels are full, into our fish pond. These preparations are vital – the fact that our pond is currently sitting dry really stands as the only evidence you need that we just don’t get enough rain here to grow crops without supplemental watering. We are now prepared to do supplemental watering without relying on the city’s untrustworthy water.

There are other elements of our little experiment in self-sufficiency which are also heavily affected by climate change. Not only how we are watering, but what we are watering. Traditionally, the Brazos Valley has two basic growing seasons, spring and fall. There are winter gardens with greens, but typically very few local gardeners even bother with these tender plants – usually broccoli, kale, spinach and maybe radishes or potatoes, but very little else. No, for the most part, gardens in Bryan/College Station run from March through June, and August/September through November.

However, while the July/August heat will continue to make that the one time of year when nothing gets planted, and what little is still growing must be tended very carefully to keep it alive, the rest of the year is changing ever so slightly to make our climate a year-round growing season. The traditional spring and fall veggies won’t change – corn, squash, cucumbers, beans, tomatoes, peppers – these are timeless and are likely to be grown here as long as there are people with garden hoes to grow them.

But there is now more than ever a need to diversify, and our changing climate has provided not only a greater need, but also a greater opportunity. We have spoken before of our desire to branch out into grains. We started our experiment in grains this fall, with a small planting of quinoa. While our planting was somewhat small (only about fifty seeds total), our crop will prove even smaller, as only a handful of the seeds actually germinated.

Concerned that perhaps we overestimated the ability of this crop from the colder climates and higher elveations of the Andes mountains to thrive in the still-subtropical Brazos Valley, we did a little research. What we discovered made us slap our heads in self-accusation, yet also gave us tremendous hope.

As it turns out, in Colorado, several farmers have been experimenting with quinoa for years. This makes a lot of sense, as they are farming in a mountainous region with much more in common climatologically to the Andes than our own garden can boast. The planting season in Colorado starts in late May, when the ground has warmed enough, with a harvest in September and October, just before the freezing precipitation begins.

The limiting factor which has prevented quinoa from becoming a major cash crop for this region is the fact that sometimes the summer heat is too much. When the temperature is in the 80s or 90s for an extended period of time, the quinoa doesn’t go to seed – the heat stress doesn’t always kill the plant, but for all practical purposes, at that point it is not a grain crop any more, it is a greens crop, and in a nation of carnivores, that really isn’t a great sales pitch.

However, several elements of this story stand out to us as hopeful – first, we need a stronger period of vernalization. We planted our quinoa in late september, when ambient temperatures were still in the mid 80s in the Brazos Valley, and goodness only knows how hot the ground still was. Next fall, we will wait until early October, and we will have had our seeds in the refrigerator for a week before we put them in the ground.

Second, we are hopeful that our growing season for quinoa may be, in most years, a full six months long – from October to March, there is a risk of temperatures above 90 degrees, but in most years, it will not happen. Thus, we can stagger planting from October through December, and guarantee ourselves that in most years, we will get grain from our quinoa. There is also a slight risk of killing frost early in the season, but not much. Once it gets to flowering – typically somewhere between 45-60 days – quinoa will survive temperatures into the low 20s, which are already extremely rare in the Brazos Valley, and are becoming even more rare as each year passes.

This means that we will be able to rotate several of our newfound favorite crops from a variety of places of origin in such way that we will always – spring, summer, autumn, winter – have a green, a legume, or a grain, and in many cases a combination of the three, growing in one patch or another. Amaranth will sometimes have delayed germination if the ground has not sufficiently warmed, but even so, a staggered planting from March through May will overlap nicely with the staggered quinoa plantings. Interspersing velvet beans, cow peas, and maize in these plots will give us a colorful and tasty year round edible landscape.

The coming era of permanent drought in the greater part of the State of Texas will cause hardship for many, and will lead to social and economic unheaval unprecedented in this part of the country, but it needn’t be the end of the story for us. The time to adapt is upon us. Ironically, as winter warms up, it is the time of year we need to start leaning on. We have some heretofore unavailable opportunities coming our way. Quinoa is just the tip of the iceberg.

When approached calmly and rationally, the problems presented by climate change on a microeconomic level do not represent any particularly terrifying difficulties – finding climates which currently have limits roughly approximating those projected to be likely in the future gives a pretty good indicator of what needs to be done.

In future years, the Brazos Valley will get roughly the same amount of rain as is experienced in a good portion of southwest Texas today, on a line from roughly Kerrville to Uvalde. This is excellent territory in which to raise crops only slightly different from what we currently grow.

Rio Grande peaches have low chilling requirements and thrive with hot and dry summers. Pomegranates produce exceptionally sweet fruit under these circumstances. Blackberries and plums also excel in this semi-arid climate. One particular species of wild black cherry does exceptionally well in this region, even thriving southward into the arid reaches of northern Mexico. The most prolific olive orchard in Texas sits in the middle of this region. Corn and okra are ubiquitous here; imported grains like amaranth and millet could (and if we have anything to say about it, will) grow like weeds in our new climate. And in our mild, wet winters, we will be growing short-day cool weather vegetables that elsewhere only grow at altitude on the shaded slopes of mountainsides in summer.

If the world is going to evolve as a result of humanity’s collective bad behavior, it is only right that our behavior and culture, including agriculture, should evolve right back. This means things like making the kinds of good friends who will help you replace a burned out stove at a moments notice (thank you Browns!) to collecting all the rainwater that falls on your little tin roof, to planting crops you've never heard of before if that's all that will grow in your new climate. This ain’t your grandaddy’s farm. With a little forethought, though, and a for us, a newfound attention to winter gardening, it could belong to our grandchildren. As long as we can still work a garden hoe, we can adapt... for which we give thanks.

Happy farming!

Ideas for Good

2010-11-22T20:09:00.000-06:00

We won't go into all the details, because, frankly, Toyota is a giant multinational corporation and, in general, that means they are the epitome of evil. Still, we think they got a bum rap on the supposed "unintended acceleration" controversy about a year ago.

User error, that's all that turned out to be.

We believe that Toyota has found a way out of the morass of bad publicity, though, with their latest promotion, "Ideas for Good".

Myrtle has submitted her ideas; we recommend you submit yours, too.

We'll be back soon with "real" Myrtle postings, but for now, check out what an evil megaconglomerate is doing that might actually be "For Good".

Happy farming!

The Year Democracy Died in America

2010-10-18T21:12:00.000-05:00

"The twentieth century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.”

–Alex Carey, “Taking the Risk out of Democracy: Propaganda in the U.S. and Australia”

The decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission will go down in history as the decision which killed the possibility of real democracy in the United States. Assuming, of course, that at some future date, it is still possible to write history books, rather than tomes of propaganda supporting the corporatist-statist idolatry which will be left, should a cultural and social revolt fail to materialize, and soon.

Basically, the Supreme Court held in a 5-4 decision that electioneering communications may be paid for by corporate entities without any oversight whatsoever. Conservatives claim that this is an evenhanded application of existing law, and that labor unions are also allowed to spend unlimited amounts of money, so what’s the big deal?

The big deal, of course, is that a) corporate entities – including labor unions – are not people, and ought not be granted personal rights, such as free speech; b) corporate entities are uniquely capable of cooption by unknown and unknowable economic and social forces, including forces outside this country, and with ill-intent for our Constitution and its associated freedoms, and c) unlimited access to electioneering media means that only the very rich will be able to afford to influence election outcomes.

“That’s just class warfare!” cry the conservatives, conveniently sidestepping the first two objections through a sleight-of-hand whose demogoguery is just a harbinger of things to come.

Hmmm….. One class cleanly and neatly defines itself into permanent political power… and its opponents are guilty of class warfare?

Let there be no delusions of corporatist “good intentions”. The entirety of the political debate, under Citizens United, will now be framed by institutions with no motivation whatsoever other than corporate profits. What does this mean?

Weakened enforcement of the Clean Air Act. Smog, air pollution, sudden infant death syndrome, and lung cancer? Deal with it – government intervention to prevent air pollution “Creates deficits and costs American jobs!” That’s the new conventional wisdom, as bought and paid for by the Coal Powered Electrical Plants of America.
Weakened enforcement of the Clean Water Act. Infertility, diabetes, metabolic disorder, liver diseases and hepatic disorders? Deal with it – government enforcement of limitations on pesticide and herbicide runoff “Creates deficits and costs American jobs!” That’s the new conventional wisdom, as bought and paid for by Archer-Daniels-Midland, Monsanto, and Dow Chemical.
No action whatsoever on climate change. Famine, water shortages, third world hunger, disease? Deal with it – “Global warming is a myth.” That’s the new conventional wisdom, as bought and paid for by Exxon-Mobil, Halliburton, Sonic Automotive, and a host of others.
Infant mortality? Inner city crime? Lower standard of living – especially for marginal populations such as migrant workers, children of single mothers or from broken homes, or from historically impoverished communities? The solution to all these problems is tax cuts for the wealthy. That’s the new conventional wisdom as bought and paid for by AIG, CitiCorp, Goldman Sachs, and a host of others.

The ability to manipulate public opinion on the part of a small corporatocracy – less than one tenth of 1% of the American public is part of the influential decision-making class responsible for the management of publicly held corporations – ought not to be underestimated. As Noam Chomsky pointed out in “Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media”, the filter of corporate ownership of the media is virtually impossible to overcome.

ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN really are biased, just as the right-wing zealots of Fox News would have you believe. But they are not biased in favor of Liberalism. They are biased in favor of Disney, General Electric, and God-only-knows what other corporate entities. They are biased in favor of profits and in favor of stable advertising revenue. They are no more interested in genuine investigative journalism than they are in taking vows of celibacy and poverty. They are not “news” organizations, they are “sales” organizations.

Even “oppositional” media is typically vulnerable to cooption by corporate sponsorship. One of our personal favorite bloggers is Nate Silver, whose fivethirtyeight.com often comprises a lonely objective outlet of political reporting; however, Mr. Silver’s pet project has been subsumed by the New York Times in the past few months; thus far, there have been no obvious or evident changes in the way the site operates… but the very nature of corporate sponsorship means it is inevitable that eventually some form of substantive lack will appear in fivethirtyeight.com (or rather, not appear), which will be a direct result of being a subset of corporate culture.

There are some limited reasons for optimism, in spite of the overwhelming strength of the forces arrayed for self-interested exploitation of everything and everyone. There is very little reason to believe that anything will be accomplished in the federal government for the foreseeable future, of course. Democrats had fairly overwhelming control of the legislative and executive branches for the past two years, and only managed to worsen the corporate stranglehold on government. Republicans are about to wrest at least one house of the legislature from the Democrats, and not only do Republicans not have a solution to this problem, they actively seek to make the problem worse. Tea Party slogans about “taking back our country” are rife with Orwellian irony, as the “typical American” who purportedly comprises the Tea Party will have less, not more, power in a Tea Party political universe.

Nevertheless, there are means to lessen the stranglehold of corporatism, and those means lay squarely in the provence of creative individuals – corporations may emulate, but may never fully coopt the creativity of human beings. Keeping truth alive in the public conversation, even when it may not be heard by everyone over the din of propaganda, will eventually lead to acceptance – too late, in some cases, to be sure, but it will eventually be heard. In the case of global warming, for example, the State of Texas will have to accept, in spite of the oil industry’s opposition, that in 2035, with higher temperatures and not enough water for businesses or residences, let alone agricultural users, maybe, just maybe, there was something to all those scientists’ warnings way back when…

Corporate ownership of media ought not be confused with the notion of corporate control of media – the pervasiveness of internet usage, as an example, means that even where corporations coopt outlets which were once free, such as youtube.com, or nominally independent sites, such as drudgereport.com (on the right) or dailykos.com (on the left), there will be someone somewhere who catches them in the middle of their shenanigans, and the truth will out.

The number of times FoxNews.com has posted an embarrassingly revelatory bit of propaganda, only to have it taken down minutes later, and yet have the damage done by some clever blogger somewhere with MWSnap and a free minute or two to post the evidence, is now beyond count. Pervasiveness of a medium may overwhelm the perverseness of that medium. There is just too much interactive media out there for even the most diligent censor to excise it all.

The danger is that it is fairly easy to drown out a single voice. It doesn’t take a secret police force to silence a voice of reason – another of Chomsky’s favorite sayings is that “propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.” The ability of corporatist media to generate a mob slobbering and salivating with the bloviations of a demagogue like Rush Limbaugh can only be countered by the creation of an equal and opposite mob of bespectacled intellectuals, dripping with witticisms and understanding, and maybe the sweat of their brows, particularly if they have been gardening, and harvesting, and gossiping with their fellow farmers’ market attendees.

We would much prefer to be members of a community whose convictions are formed over tea, or barbecue, or mutual fence repairs. That may not be the vision of Justices Roberts, and Scalia, and Thomas, but we can’t help but feel contempt for them as being modern day incarnations of Justice Taney. Only, instead of sending Dred Scott back to slavery, Roberts et al. have opted to have their judicial robes sized for corporate logos.

One logo they will not be wearing is that of Big Myrtle’s Tea Shoppe and Egg Emporium.

Happy farming!

Onward Through the Fog (or, hopefully, lack thereof...)

2010-10-14T20:42:00.001-05:00

As a preliminary step to putting solar panels on our house, we have received an energy audit from the City of College Station. The city has a wonderful program whereby they pay a considerable portion of the cost of installing solar panels and the necessary equipment to connect the photovoltaic system to the current electrical grid. Naturally, to guarantee that this investment is properly assured of success, they want to confirm we are not wasting energy anywhere else in the house.

We expected a huge laundry list of things we would have to change; in fact, we don’t expect to go solar until next year at this time at the earliest. We wanted to give ourselves plenty of time to fix not only the ‘low hanging fruit’ (things like weatherstripping, etc., which we have been slowly but surely handling on a weekly basis), but also any major structural problems.

We were pleasantly surprised by how short this list of necessary fixes really is.

Our air-conditioner, perhaps the most important piece of equipment in a Texas home, is in good shape. We need to repair the ceiling of the A/C closet, because it is basically open air to the attic, which the inspector estimated is costing us roughly 150 kilowatts a month. That’s the sum total of major repairs necessary, though. Everything else falls under the category of tweaks.

Some of the more interesting suggestions:

Heat the chicken coop in winter with a passive solar water heater. This actually could be part of our rainwater collection system, although we are going to have to think long and hard about how to make this work correctly. Basically, the principle would be to place a large black water tank alongside the chicken coop; the sun will warm the water (even in the middle of February), and this in turn will keep the coop warm.
Solid barriers for walls of the chicken coop. This is actually something we were thinking about for summer cooling, as well – we are thinking along the lines of some kind of open-and-close contraption like the lean-to closing of a roadside kiosk, where we could provide additional shade for the ladies in summer, and perhaps make the coop more critter-proof at night.
Digital monitor for the Air Conditioner. At a cost of roughly $25, the estimated savings are significant, because we have a less-than-reliable analog monitor at present.
A new grape arbor for the western exposure. We actually intended to do this already, but our intrepid inspector assured us that there will be a significant energy savings from having vines (like our trusty muscadines!) soak up the sun’s energy before it ever reaches the house. In winter, the deciduous vines will actually allow sunlight through, so there will not be any problem in terms of extra heating costs – it’s an all-season arrangement!

Between these small changes and the institution of our rainwater collection system, we figure we have plenty to accomplish between now and next October (when we hope to go solar). That’s not even taking into account the gardening, or the organizing of Pulletpalooza, or the rearing of two junior Myrtle Maintenance personell. We’ll keep you posted.

Happy farming!

The Spice of Life

2010-10-04T18:50:00.001-05:00

There are two related aphorisms by which we check our overexuberance from time to time. First, ‘You can be a fundamentalist anything,’ a reminder that a tendency to extremism is possible regardless of what philosophy you espouse. And second, ‘Just because something is indigenous does not necessarily mean it is healthy,’ a reminder that going for the novel and recreating the past ought not replace doing solid research and making appropriate choices.

We recently got very excited by the discovery of a series of books about “The Lost Crops of Africa”, not least because one of the first vegetables mentioned in volume 2 was Amaranth, which is one of the plants we are experimenting with this year. “Lost Crops” goes on at great length in rather excitable prose about the benefits of Amaranth as a nutritious potherb, about how it grows in sun or shade, elevation or the plains, humid or arid climates, how easy it is to grow… by the time we were done reading the glowing evaluation of Amaranth, we were ready to sell the stuff door-to-door.

Then we read an equally glowing account of Marama, and the adrenaline came back to proportionally healthier levels; that stuff ain’t growin’ in our yard. Sorry. We are exceptionally happy for the Khoisan peoples of the Kalahari Desert that there is a plant like this to provide seeds and tubers with high protein and moisture content, but honestly, there is just no way we could possibly grow every exciting new thing to come along, especially when it isn’t being actively cultivated anywhere in the world. Myrtle likes experimentation, but sometimes somebody somewhere has to be even-tempered enough to say “Whoa, Bessie!”

Ultimately, every gardener has to make some fairly basic choices regarding what to plant. We like variety, and this is well represented on our “to do” board. We have categories for “Planning”, “On Order”, “Germinating”, “In Production”, and “Dormant”, covering the gamut of things we’d like to plant but have not found sources for, things we have already purchased and will soon plant, things we have planted, things currently fruiting, and perennials and fruit which are currently out of season.

We only have a half-acre lot, but even so, we are at 60 varieties and counting on the big board in all categories. Part of this is by design – we wish to avoid the perils of mono-cropping at all costs, to the point of trying to not plant even two tomato plants of the same variety next to each other whenever possible, although that degree of pickiness may not be practicable on the macro level.

Part of this cornucopia of variety, however, is due purely to enthusiasm. We see something new or different, and we want it. Like everything else in life, this has its ups and downs. The advantages to giving in to such impulses are obvious – if you are excited about a plant, you are more likely to be careful in tending it. We just planted currants, for example, and even though they are just seedlings, they are getting far more attention than our native muscadine grapes receive. Every advantage these out-of-region specialty plants can get, we intend to give.

The flip side, however, is serious and important. Because excitement can lead to the procurement of plants which are unique, it often means getting plants which are not well adapted. The aforementioned currants, in our case, are a dicey proposition. They may do well because our yard represents a microclimate they would not encounter elsewhere in Texas – we have sufficient moisture available from collected rainwater to offset the drought which would shrivel them even fifty feet away from their new home, and plenty of shade to protect them from the noonday sun of August and September – but then again, they may do very poorly due to the undeniable fact that they are Zone 5 plants and we are Zone 8, verging on 9.

To counterbalance our enthusiasm, we remember some general principles learned from a lifetime of overcoming obstacles. The first principle in avoiding catastrophe while doing something risky is to counterbalance your risk with something equally safe. This is part of why we have so many fruit vines around the place, particularly the native Muscadines. We couldn’t kill those off if we wanted to. Between blackberries (which grow wild in the Brazos Valley on every fence bordering every borrow ditch) and wild grapes, we will always have success with something, even if our crazy new ideas don’t go over so well.

Then, too, there is the basic fact that old standby crops like tomatoes, peppers, cowpeas and broccoli all thrive in chicken poop compost. We can afford to take a chance on a few harebrained schemes like currants, given that the success rate with the staples will remain fairly steady, so long as we are willing to muck out the chicken coop.

So, we won’t be planting all of the “Lost Crops of Africa”, nor will we plant every exotic from the Arctic Circle, nor every colorful plant we hear about from the Amazon basin, but we will occasionally take a stab at something out of the ordinary. We tend to think of cayenne as the spice of life, but variety comes in a close second.

Happy farming!

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Is that a cover crop in your garden, or are you just happy to see me?

2010-09-21T17:58:00.001-05:00

We have written before about the importance of soil quality. We are of an accord with a local horticulture personality who recently argued that Texas gardeners deserve some kind of medal for their heroic battles with nutrient poor soils; we are equally certain that if we are ever famous for anything, it will be for our advocacy of the universal benefit to be derived from spreading chicken-poop compost on anything you want to grow in the ground.

However, chicken poop and rotting leaves are not the only means of enriching one’s topsoil. As part of our never ending quest to maximize our efficiency, we have begun researching the most effective possible cover crops for our little patch of heaven, and several candidates display the kinds of qualities we are looking for.

A good cover crop is like anything else – it is only “good” if it does what you want it to do. We want cover crops to be a lot like everything else we put effort into. They should do more than one thing.

A cover crop should be a “green manure”. A good cover crop ought to affix nutrients, particularly nitrogen, to the soil both to enhance the following crop, and also to prevent nitrate runoff, which is one of the more egregious forms of water pollution from agriculture and home lawn care.
A cover crop ought to be aesthetically pleasing; a hay field may look attractive to the farmer who knows what he is looking at, but it may look like nothing but tall weeds to his neighbors, or more importantly in an urban setting, to the city code enforcement office.
A cover crop ought to have some sort of production value – either as food, as herb or supplement, or even as animal feed.
A cover crop ought to be a “companion plant”, adding proven value to other crops in your garden much like in the “3 Sisters” farming method.
A cover crop ought to choke out the kinds of weeds which tend to persist from season to season so that, even if they reemerge later to compete with your follow crop, their success rate will be greatly diminished.
A cover crop ought to blend with the general theme of your garden, providing a kind of segue from one area to the next. Permaculturalists frequently talk about production values being highest “at the edges”; a cover crop is a way to transition from one edge to the next – from pasture to vineyard or orchard, for example.

We have found several potential covers which we will be testing over the next several planting seasons which fit these criteria to a Texas ‘T’. Some are commonly used throughout Texas already; others, we hope to be part of making popular, if only for novelty’s sake.

Red clover is something we have been interested in growing for quite some time. This is actually a fairly common cover crop throughout the northern tier of states, because it is not especially adapted to our hotter climate. In fact, it is only advisable to grow in Texas in the fall and winter months. Most cooperatives will stock crimson clover, but not the red, which we believe is a shame.

Red clover is not all that different from crimson or other clovers in terms of its ability to affix nitrogen – pretty much any clover you plant will be excellent in this regard – however, the red variety has a tremendous advantage over many of its counterparts in its multifunctionality. As an herbal supplement, red clover is used in the treatment of cancer, showing tremendous potential as a complementary tool in making traditional cancer protocols more effective. Drinking an effusion of red clover tea has also been shown to be effective in a number of gynecological regimens, not only for breast cancer treatment, but also for cramping and as an aid in reducing the severity of symptoms resulting from uterine fibroids. While the best evidence is anecdotal, there is reason to believe red clover even has benefit for some women with fertility problems, as well.

A summer crop we will be experimenting with next year is buckwheat. Since we have decided to experiment with quinoa and amaranth, we are planning to call this the "year of going grainy"; buckwheat is perhaps most famous as a pancake ingredient, but it is also a useful cover crop. It has a short growing season, is relatively drought and heat tolerant, and has a propensity to choke out the nutsedges and other noxious weeds which have free reign in most Texas gardens from late June through the end of the summer growing season – a season, we might point out, in which precious little is usually actually growing in a Texas garden.

In fact, in late July, it is a rare thing to find a Texas garden with much more than a few brave pepper plants, maybe a pumpkin vine or two, and a patch of okra. For a gardener trying to maximize yields, a lot of the spring planting results in dead vines or stalks by the early part of July, and by then it is just too hot to plant anything else. Buckwheat, however, is our hopeful answer. If it works, it will solve a serious riddle for us – namely, what to do while waiting for the blast furnace to cool off enough to put our fall salsa plants back into production.

Winter rye is a fairly common cover, particularly for cattle ranchers, because it makes a pretty decent hay crop. It is also fairly common for cotton or other cash crop farmers in Texas because, especially in areas where winter wheat is not a possibility, winter rye is the best fast-growing plant to choke out competitive weeds between the fall harvest and an early spring planting of a crop like corn or sorghum.

In our garden, we are not going to use rye very often, but when we do, it will be partly with an eye to weed and pest control, and partly with an eye to having greens available for our chickens in the middle of the winter. Kale, spinach and cabbage are all in production in the middle of January, but frankly we’d like to save that for ourselves – we appreciate all our hens do for us, but there just isn’t much to be harvested in the dark of winter, and we’d like to put as much of it on our own plates as we can. Giving rye to the girls is one way to accomplish that.

Finally, we come to a novelty cover crop which we only recently discovered. During the northern hemisphere winter, an inordinate percentage of our national tomato consumption comes from Florida; this has presented some interesting soil quality challenges in the Sunshine State, which have lately been answered by the use of a unique cover crop native to South America that goes by a variety of names: “Cow Itch”, “Velvet Bean” or Mucuna pruriens. The plant is a trailing bean vine, and like most beans, is enormously successful at affixing nitrogen in the soil; it is for this reason that Florida tomato farmers make extensive use of Mucuna pruriens in their year-round production schemes.

The seed-pods are unusual for beans, basically looking like small fuzzy pouches; the fuzz consists of fairly long, wiry hairs which poke fairly sharply, and cause extreme irritation. Joke shop afficionados will recognize this irritation – the hairs are actually used as a key ingredient in manufactured itching powder formulations.

The beans are relatively small and look for all the world like black beans – turtle beans, as some folk know them. We have not yet sampled them to see what they taste like, but we are fairly hopeful that, if the taste is not too overwhelming (and no anecdotal evidence so far uncovered has suggested that it will be) we will be able to use them in similar fashion.

Black beans, for the uninitiated, form the basis for most bean-based recipes in the form of Tex-Mex associated with Austin, our de facto home. We may be refugees living in College Station, but a corner table at Kerbey Lane or Mother’s Café is really where we would prefer to be, and if you order nachos in either location, they will come with black beans.

A more traditional use for Mucuna pruriens in its native habitat is as a hot beverage; several tribes in the Amazon basin roast the beans much like we roast either coffee or yaupon, and then brew a hot beverage with the ground up beans.

There is no caffeine in Mucuna pruriens, however. The beverage is imbibed for an entirely different reason. Mucuna pruriens is shockingly high in L-Dopa; consumption of velvet beans results in a dopamine “high” which elevates mood, as dopamine is the essential building block of that neurotransmitter miracle known as “happiness”, and it also has, um, other elevating effects. We’ve never really been fans of raw oysters, and now we’ve discovered that we don’t need to be. Of all purported aphrodisiacs in the literature, Mucuna pruriens is one of the few which has documented clinical studies to back it up; oysters won’t grow in the yard, but velvet beans will.

Of course, rest assured that we will only be growing it to keep the tomatoes happy. Myrtle’s place is a family establishment, after all.

Happy farming!

There's a Certain Freedom in Being Completely Screwed...

2010-09-20T08:38:00.001-05:00

Public debt is a hot button these days. Most people have the impression that they personally have to balance their budgets, and are mystified that our government does not. This of course is a gross oversimplification and, frankly, an expression of economic illiteracy, but it is fairly universal. And it is understandable, given that debt this large cannot be paid back without serious pain. However, it needs to be placed in context.

The United States ranks 47th in the world in terms of size of our public debt as a percentage of our gross domestic product (GDP), with our national debt standing at 52.9% of what we produce as a nation every year. Our debt is large, but our production is monumentally huge, globally speaking, so we do okay – there is room for improvement, certainly, but we are not in the same ballpark as some other countries noted as fiscal basketcases.

Greece is the example most often noted lately, because they have undertaken extreme austerity measures to get their debt under control – their national debt currently amounts to 113.4% of their GDP. This is high enough to rank them as the 7th most debt-laden economy in the world, and their austerity measures to correct this debt have led to riots and full-scale social upheaval.

The worst debt-offender is Zimbabwe, a nation which has struggled under the radar with a quasi-socialist dictatorship (emphasis on dictator, as philosophy really has nothing to do with Mr. Mugabe’s stranglehold on power -- he plays "Robin Hood" as a sometimes brilliant advertising campaign), and is now paying – or not paying, as the case may be – for their fiscal mismanagement to the tune of a debt equalling 282.6% of their GDP.

Numbers 2 and 6 on the list might surprise most observers, however, whose economic news comes from the front page of USA Today. The 2nd biggest share of debt belongs to Japan, a nation most Americans think of as an economic powerhouse. Number 6 is Italy, a nation in constant turmoil economically and politically, though not in our consciousness as a “troubled” nation in any real sense. They have enormous personal savings in place, which offsets their national debt; personal responsibility, in other words, stabilizes their nationally irresponsible spending habits.

In fact, most of the list of debtor standouts are not countries undergoing any kind of major upheaval: Iceland at number 9, Belgium 11, France 15, Portugal 17, Canada 18, Austria 21, England/Great Britain 22, Netherlands 27, Norway 29, Brazil 30, Ireland 36, United Arab Emirates 42, and Spain 45 are all nations with significantly more debt than the United States, none of which are under any kind of eminent collapse threat, at least as compared to their fellow nations. They are all feeling the pinch, but not in danger of going under.

Interestingly, having mentioned Zimbabwe and post-Soviet communism, China is number 109; Venezuela is number 106; Cuba is number 75. There are not a lot of communist or even communist leaning countries left in the world, but there are enough to spot a trend – although it is counterintuitive, they do not have large public debt burdens. They all have better debt/GDP ratios than the United States. They are also not nations where we would wish to live. We would like to emphasize that we only included Venezuela in this list for the sake of argument; Hugo Chavez is belligerent, but he's no philosopher.

Maybe the size of a nation’s public debt vis-à-vis their GDP is not all that significant a measurement. Fiscal conservatives rule the roost in nations which are mostly stagnant and bland, with no real growth, little standard of living, and no leadership on the important environmental or social issues of the coming century. Maybe, just maybe, we ought to focus more on what that money is being spent on, and less and less on whether it is being spent at all.

The same is true for individual families. We at Big Myrtle’s place are too cheap to spend a lot of money on frills and thrills, so we don’t own iPhones or drive a Prius, nor have we been to Disneyworld or even out of state for that matter in recent memory, but we conversely don’t believe that not going into debt is of itself a legitimate business plan. Some time in the next couple of years we intend to borrow money, for example, to put up solar panels and convert our house from a grid drain to a grid provider.

This weekend we are going to track down cheap alternatives to new gutters for the roof, so as to collect water in the “gently used” rain barrels we recently had donated by friendly neighbors (Thanks, Brooke and Kathleen!), and while we would dearly love to get the gutters for free also, we recognize that we will probably have to pay for them.

It turns out the strongest measure of the strength of an economy may well be how much collectively the households in a nation spend. The United States is measured as the world’s largest economy by GDP, and that is equalled by our rank in terms of household consumption. At $10,010,111,000,000 in 2008, we spent a little more than three times as much as Japan who came in number two with $2,838,964,000,000. For those of you trying to count the zeroes, U.S. Americans spend roughly $10 trillion a year; the Japanese spend roughly $3 trillion a year.

Equally telling, we spend as households roughly 71% of GDP; #2 Japan spends 58% of GDP; #3 Germany spends 56% of GDP; #4 Great Britain spends 64% of GDP; #5 France spends 57% of GDP.

Our economy, in other words, is driven by the sale of items, and items are only sold when there are people buying them.

The question, then, is not “should we spend” but rather “what should we spend on”? Our vote at Myrtle’s place is for sustainable infrastructure, like solar panels, clotheslines, water collection systems, alternative fuel vehicles like an EV or a high-mileage hybrid, gardening equipment, insulation for your attic, etc. And maybe some books. Anything but a Snuggie. Because lets face it, we should all really prefer a recession to collective materialistic dweebitude. However, we assure you that personal spending can attain sufficiently impressive numbers to bolster our global standing while spending purely on goods and services which will make our planet a better place to live.

Our own purchasing decisions will be based largely on the production system we have placed on our “big board”. We have a category for “On Order” items which must be either purchased or otherwise acquired, “Germinating” for things we have planted or started working on, “In Production” for currently fruiting plants and/or projects currently providing payoff, and “Dormant” for perennial plants or projects which are currently not “In Production” but which will be again. While our board is not limited to just plants or chickens, we find gardening to be a good metaphor for everything else in our inventory of projects. And our motto is to “Water what will grow,” a slogan we stole shamelessly from Rev. Dan De Leon from Friends Congregational Church, whose wit and wisdom make him a valuable Friend of Myrtle.

We do track our debts, including mortgage, car payments, student loans, and a couple of other bills, and we do everything we can to avoid adding to this list. Credit cards are an absolute no-no at our house, for example. But our conversations about money are not debt-oriented – our focus is on productivity. We suggest that this ought to be part of the larger sphere discussions about money, as well. It will be all well and good if we get our national spending problems under control only to discover that we lack the requisite will to spend money on those things which will do the most good for our future sustainability in the coming decades of climate change and global workforce greying. We’ll be doing our part; we hope you join us.

Happy farming!

No Coffee, No Cry

2010-09-04T23:02:00.001-05:00

Coffee won’t grow in the Brazos Valley. In spite of the fact that this is self-evident, we checked. We had to do so – life without coffee is inconceivable, yet once we came to the conclusion that locally produced foods are superior in every possible way to foods shipped in from parts unknown, we felt obligated to see what we could replace on our grocery list with, as one of our more colorful friends puts it, “food shot in the yard”.

Coffee grows at high altitudes. College Station may be high attitude, but it is severely lacking in altitude. So, locally produced coffee is, sadly, an impossibility. What might replace our morning cuppa joe, were we ever to make the environmentally responsible switch?

We moved on to investigate the possibility of growing tea in College Station, less enthusiastically on Mr. Myrtle Maintenance’s part, as Mrs. Myrtle Maintenance is perfectly happy with tea, but her partner in this enterprise is somewhat grumpier without the higher doses of caffeine.

No good on tea, either. The climate is actually very good for growing the Carmella sinensis plant, in terms of soil quality, temperature, and quantity of sunlight. However, it requires about 50 inches of rain a year. So, if we were willing to utilize every drop of our irrigation systems on growing a few tea shrubs, we could do it; everything else would fall by the wayside, though. We have Oxford aspirations for our children, but we lack the fanaticism necessary for this degree of anglophilia; tea is a non-starter. We may grow black currants, and we definitely still love biscuits and preserves, but ix-nay on the ea-tay.

What in the world is an aspiring locavore to do? Stimulating beverages are something we are used to thinking of as simply growing on trees, but our national heritage is fraught with tales of woe related to the dependency we have formed on imported caffeine. The Boston Tea Party is perhaps the most famous example of Americans gone mad over our enslavement to “the good stuff” and the economic power wielded by those who control its importation.

The blockade of the South during the Civil War led to trials and tribulations in the Confederacy, as well. Numerous diarists wrote home from the front lines of the insufficiency of coffee; soldiers brewed a mish-mash of acorns and chicory, hoping that a hot and bitter beverage would fool their taste buds, even if it couldn’t fool their central nervous systems. Americans lacking coffee or tea have despaired many times over the course of our nation’s history.

At Myrtle’s place, though, we don’t know the meaning of the word ‘quit’. (That may have something to do with the fact that we burned the ‘Q’ section of the dictionary during last winter’s freak snowstorm, but we digress…)

Given the near universal acclaim for caffeinated beverages like coffee, tea, cola, and “energy drinks” like Red Bull, etc., we started with the assumption that other cultures must surely have encountered some caffeine-rich plant which could then be converted to potable form via brewing, distilling, or some other means, which we would be able to duplicate in our back yard.

This turned out to be a perfectly reasonable assumption. Many plants produce caffeine, not just the coffee or tea trees. We knew, for example, that cacao, which produces the bean from which chocolate is manufactured, also has smaller amounts of caffeine. Other plants also make use of this chemical, because it is a natural pesticide, and even slightly herbicidal. The presence of caffeine protects, particularly young plants but also fruiting plants, from insects and from the encroachment of other trees. It repels bugs and retards the growth of neighboring plants.

Two South American plants besides coffee and cacao which produce caffeine are Guarana (Paullinia cupana), which is a climbing plant in the maple family, native to the Amazon basin and especially common in Brazil, and also Yerba maté (Ilex paraguariensis), a species of holly native to Argentina, Bolivia, Uruguay, Paraguay, and southern Brazil.

Both of these plants are used by locals to make strong beverages; Guarana, in particular, is used in a variety of commercially available beverages, and is even the basis of numerous soft drinks which take considerable market share away from Coca-Cola and Pepsi in Brazil.

However, it was the Yerba which caught our attention. Ilex paraguariensis? We are much more familiar with another Ilex species, Ilex vomitoria, also known as Yaupon Holly. Our land was overrun with the stuff when we bought it – the yaupon grew so thickly here that you couldn’t even tell there was a house on our property until we had cut it back.

Yaupon grows to about 10-12 feet tall, and for four or five months a year has bright red berries on it. We had heard a rumor that Native American tribes had long ago made a beverage from yaupon which caused them to vomit. In fact, that is how the latin name for the plant originated – Ilex vomitoria.

Juxtaposing the yerba story with the yaupon story, we decided maybe the yaupon related beverage required a little more investigation.

It turns out that a concoction known in English as “Black Drink” was, in fact, brewed from Ilex vomitoria in early America by a variety of peoples. The leaves and twigs were harvested just prior to preparation – freshness evidently being vital – and then roasted, prior to grinding and brewing. Colonists imitated the Native Americans and brewed this beverage as a replacement for coffee or tea, and called it “cassine” or “cassina”.

Caddo, Creek, Cherokee, Choctaw, and other tribes consumed this beverage in the belief that it purged the drinker of anger and deceit. This made it a particularly attractive social beverage, as these qualities would obviously be detrimental in group environments – for evidence, try running a modern committee meeting without coffee or tea.

Because the consumption of the beverage was so often a social event, it naturally led to drinking vast quantities of the beverage, often in ritual manner, with special songs being sung as the large tureen was passed from person to person. As part of these rituals, many tribes included a final act of purging themselves by vomiting. This was not a biochemical necessity, it was a religious act, and not every tribe shared in this unfortunate ritual. The Ais peoples of Florida, in fact, were often observed by European settlers to drink the stuff on a regular basis without ever suffering gastric distress. To further illustrate the significance of the beverage, the ritual name Asi Yahola or Black Drink Singer is corrupted into English as Osceola.

Armed with all of these clues as to the potability of this beverage, sans the risk of (ahem!) unwanted emissions, the next question becomes whether this might be an acceptable substitute for coffee. Clearly, early European settlers were willing to settle for Black Drink in the absense of coffee or tea, but just as clearly, they preferred to go back to the imported stuff as quickly as possible.

Chemically, we know yaupon has roughly six times as much caffeine as coffee. This goes a long way to explaining the lack of groundcover underneath our yaupon stands; there are plenty of young tree shoots, but no grasses – not even very many weeds – underneath the Ilex vomitoria. Naturally, this means the drink will be fairly bitter. Too bitter to drink? And could the bitterness be cut by the inclusion of some sweet herb or other?

There’s only one way to find out. We made it ourselves.

The traditional way for at least the last 10,000 years in the Gulf Coast region has been to parch the leaves and twigs of yaupon in a ceramic container, so we did the same thing. We then boiled the crushed leaves and twigs in our coffee pot, and strained them in our french press to make sure no extraneous leaves or twigs made it to the cup.

The resulting beverage had roughly the consistency of a very dark tea -- it even smelled a lot like a good orange pekoe, though the color was closer to that of a dark roasted arabica coffee bean.

The telling question, though, is naturally the question of taste. What did it taste like? It tasted like raisin-flavored tea. There is no other way to describe it; it tasted like sweet raisins squeezed into a nice hot cup of tea. The caffeine buzz was fairly intense, so much so that when our daughter asked to try it, we only gave her a small portion, which she drank with a heavy dose of sugar, and a qualified thumbs up. She still prefers Earl Grey, but our parched yaupon tea will do in a pinch, she says.

We still prefer coffee, we must admit. But we are mystified why this beverage is not at least as popular as many of the other forms of caffeine currently available on the market. It actually tastes quite good, and it comes from a tree which grows like a weed throughout most of the Gulf region. We chopped down a lot of yaupon to make room for vegetables and herbs; we aren't cutting down any more, though. They put the "tea" in "Tea Shoppe".

Happy farming!

Small Farm Good, Big Farm Bad (Have we mentioned this before...?)

2010-09-01T19:57:00.002-05:00

Non-renewable resources are, by definition, irreplaceable. Once you have used them, they are not renewed. The logical conclusion, therefore, is that you should not use them, but should instead opt for other resources.

In some cases, such as with fossil fuels, this is self-evident, and the solutions, though taking some effort, are obvious. We need to take advantage of natural processes which will last as long as the planet does -- put solar panels on every home in the country, for example, and set up wind turbines, geothermal heating and cooling systems, and so on, instead of relying on oil and coal, the supplies of which are finite.

However, there are some other non-renewable resources we don’t usually think about as being non-renewable, and the solution to their overuse is not so obvious. The best example is groundwater.

Agricultural water usage accounts for 80% of the fresh water consumption in the United States; 60% of that consumption comes from groundwater sources, with the other 40% coming from well water pumped out of aquifers. The Ogallala Aquifer, for instance, which supports a good portion of the central and southwestern U.S., is being depleted at an annual rate anywhere from 130-160% of the rate of replenishment, meaning only about 2/3rd of what is taken out in a given year is returned via rainfall.

As industrial agricultural production becomes more intense due to population concerns, there is little reason to believe this rate of depletion will do anything but increase. The models are not clear on how much longer the Ogallala will be able to provide water, but obviously you cannot take out more than is put in indefinitely – at some point, it will be empty. When it is empty, the environment in which it sits dry and idle has a name: “desert”. That is a dry and dusty sounding moniker to hang on the breadbasket of the country.

This raises a serious question: what do you use instead of water to water your crops? What renewable alternative is there?

Even in areas where the primary water source is not a limited resource such as an aquifer, water use – and increasingly, water reuse – is a life-or-death question, because degradation of our water supplies due to chemical leaching from pesticide, herbicide and fertilizer runoff, in addition to runoff from industrial sites, stormwater pollution from urban centers, and phosphate pollution from untreated greywater make what water is available less attractive as an agricultural resource.

The solution to these and other tricky problems lay in rephrasing the question.

Rather than assuming we have to find ways to support the industrial agricultural model in a scenario in which resources are limited and collateral damage is unavoidable, a dramatic change in paradigm will make the whole class of worries disappear. Rather than attempting large scale watering of industrial monoculture – ie, miles and miles of corn fields, wheat fields, etc. – we ought to decentralize, and instead focus on renewable and reusable water supplies for polycultural small plots.

Places like small backyard gardens, for starters, are easier to supply with clean agricultural water. But not just extensive backyard gardens – microfarms like Millican Farms, which require more water than does Myrtle’s place can almost as easily be watered in a renewable fashion. It just takes a little planning and a little will and a lot of elbow grease. At Millican Farms, they use a pond to irrigate greenhouses; the tomatoes are delicious, year round.

One of the chief criticisms of the permaculture movement and its related sustainable agriculture movements is that systems of no-till polyculture make industrial agricultural methods impossible and obviate mechanization. We argue that this is not a weakness, but is, instead, one of the principle advantages of permaculture. The chief disadvantage lay not in the inability of permaculture to generate yields sufficient to feed the world, but rather in the lack of will to provide consumers worldwide with the resources necessary to feed themselves. Instead of using a tractor and a combine in Nebraska to feed a peasant in Thailand, why not use a shovel and a hoe in Thailand to help that peasant grow his own food?

The “Green Revolution” of the last half-century has, in fact, produced massive gains in crop yields, but far from eliminating starvation, as is often claimed as the brass ring to be grabbed by agritechnology, these incredible – one might even say ridiculous – increases in productivity as measured by quantity have been matched by stunning and monumental declines in quality, such that people whose primary problem used to be getting enough calories are now faced with an overabundance of empty calories. By some estimates, the typical decline in nutritional value of produce over the last 50 years is on the order of 25-50 percent.

We are draining our water supplies in order to produce food no one should be forced to eat, and we are supporting a global economy in which people who should be given start-up loans to go to work are instead forced to sit idly accepting handouts of food whose quality could be surpassed by a hunter-gatherer’s diet.

Industrial agriculture is an evolutionary dead-end.

Small scale, local, organic production, on the other hand, produces crops generally acknowledged to be more flavorful, healthier, and easier on the environment. And – more to the point – there is nowhere in the world where this type of production cannot be implemented. There is no need for industrial agriculture; subsidized exports of wheat and other foodstuffs are an albatross around our necks, doing no good for the rest of the world, lining the pockets of a few corporate big wigs, and depleting our natural resources in the process.

The “starving peasants of Bangladesh” would be better served by the establishment of local cooperatives in Bengali communities, learning to grow sustainable crops there, than they are by the massive exploitation of lands in Kansas and Iowa to produce foods lacking the nutritional value of “home grown”, and contributing nothing to the Bengali economy.

Critics might argue that watering a hundred small farms would deplete just as much water as the process of watering one very large farm, but that is because the critics know nothing about the methods of permaculture, nor about the innovations inherent in small-scale sustainable production. No-till practices by their very nature require heavy use of mulches which are almost always a form of “compost in place”, and which increase the moisture-retention abilities of topsoil by orders of magnitude.

Further, small-scale productions are much better adapted to water conservation methods like rainwater collection or greywater reclamation, and they have greater incentive to invest in these alternative procedures, given their relative size.

Then, too, small farms are more likely to practice polyculture, rather than monocropping. As the coffee farmers of Central and South America have rediscovered in the last decade or so, “shade-grown” coffee, which is part of a multi-species ecosystem, rather than a single-crop field, requires far less water. Yes, polyculture eliminates the ability to use mechanical harvesting methods, making it more labor intensive and therefore more expensive at market, but the reduction in water costs, fertilizer costs, pesticide and herbicide costs, transportation and fossil fuel costs, and improved quality and nutritional value and the associated reduction in future health care costs more than offset the labor costs.

Ultimately, the accretion of risks involved in taking essentially natural processes and attempting to manufacture “improvements” is simply too great to bear. The misuse of water resources by industrial agriculture is only one of its many malfeasances.

Engineered solutions to biological problems are rife with unknown and unknowable risks. The best possible example lay in supplemental nutrition for cattle – some time in the late 1970s, the practice of feeding meat and bone meal to cattle resulted in the evolution of a strain of protein molecules – not even an actual organism, just protein strands – into a prion capable of causing a new variant of Creutzfeld-Jakobs disease (nvCJD) known as Bovine Spongeiform Encephalopathy (BSE), aka “Mad Cow Disease”.

The assurances given to ranchers, and passed along to the general public, that bone meal was perfectly fine for cattle, were based on the best available scientific data, which was actually fairly considerable. These were not careless scientists and bureaucrats who made the horribly tragic mistake of feeding animal products to herbivores – this was a well thought out plan, backed up by considerable data.

It was also completely wrong.

This particular tragedy probably could not have been predicted; however, the fact of some sort of tragic consequences definitely could have been predicted. A diet for a whole class of animals which evolved for very specific reasons cannot and could not be engineered, no matter how clever the researchers, to be so thoroughly and completely different from the diet naturally preferred by those animals without there being a swath of unforeseen consequences.

Feed lot biochemistry is just one area where we have been thumbing our noses at Mother Nature. As Masanobu Fukuoka put it, “When we throw Mother Nature out the window, she comes back in the front door with a pitchfork.” For many thousands of years now we have been planting fields with just one crop, depleting the nutrients in the soil and then moving on to new fields. We have been taking water out of natural reservoirs, drying them up, and then moving on. We have been burning down, bulldozing, turning under, planting something alien for a few years, and then moving on.

Maybe we shouldn’t keep moving on. The original farmers were just tribes who found a place where what they wanted to eat seemed to be growing fairly well, and they stayed and protected those naturally occurring stands of wheat and figs, until they learned all they could about tending them and caring for them and propagating them.

We joke that we never want to move again – we want to be buried in the yard. We haven't done the research, but if the product of the cremation process is at all compatible with the making of biochar, why the heck not? We'll reside at Myrtle's forever.

Happy farming!

Cry Me a (Dry) River

2010-08-30T20:56:00.001-05:00

“’tis an ill bird what fouls its ain nest.”
--Scottish proverb

The recent announcement by a group of intrepid researchers that they have created a substance they call “dry water” serves as a remarkable case study in unintended consequences, and it hasn’t even been used yet.

The stuff is not really “dry”, and in many ways, it is also not really “water”, but without getting too technical, we’ll let the contradiction stand, because we rather like contradictions – they are whimsical, and get one’s linguistic creativity flowing.

Powdered liquids have the ability to “store” a variety of substances, most notably carbon dioxide, in ways that prevent their escape into the atmosphere. The producers of “dry water” are touting this ability as a potential boon to production methods which have run into conflicts over the quantity of carbon dioxide they produce – having a way to trap the greenhouse gas means these industries can manufacture to their hearts content, without worrying about contributing to global climate change.

Or can they?

Touting the storage properties of “dry water” is all well and good, but where, pray tell, will the “dry water” be stored once it is super-carbonated?

This is the classic problem with nuclear energy, as well. Per kilowatt, assuming nothing goes wrong at the power plant (an assumption the residents of Three Mile Island or of Chernobyl are not likely to be prepared to make), the typical output of a nuclear power plant is more environmnetally friendly than that of practically any other production method available. Solar and wind power have fewer outputs, but per kilowatt, they have more costly inputs in the form of manufactured materials.

The problem with nuclear power, of course, is that unlike solar or wind or geothermal (or a host of other renewable production methods), nuclear power has a residual element in its production – nuclear waste. The detritus of a nuclear power plant is, similar to the carbon dioxide suspended in “dry water”, contained in lead lined barrels which do not allow any of the toxic radiation to leak into the environment.

But that’s not the end of the story. Those barrels store the nuclear waste… but where do we store those barrels? In 1957, the National Academy of Sciences first recommended that the best means of protecting the environment from spent nuclear materials would be to bury the waste in rock deep underground. The site selected by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was Yucca Mountain in Nevada, a geological feature located about 80 miles from Las Vegas.

Residents were not amused, and said so, so loudly that the project was put on hold. And now, 53 years later, this bad idea is still being pushed by those who want the government to change its mind, those who do not want to admit that hiding the problem does not make it disappear.

The phenomenon of “Not in my backyard!” (aka “NIMBY”) is as old as politics, and is especially poignant in the realm of waste disposal. Nuclear waste disposal in particular carries with it the specter of silent invisible “stuff” that could prove lethal should anything leak. It is small wonder that no one wants this stuff in their neighborhood, even with assurances that it is containerized, and nothing could go wrong. Particularly since there are so many readily available proofs that something can always go wrong.

The evidence that nuclear waste is not safe is so incontrovertible that no one disputes it. Rather, proponents of nuclear energy argue that it is not persistent, because it eventually becomes stable non-radioactive waste, and that putting it deep in a rocky hole means we can forget about it. It is “safe” there, and so we are “safe” out here.

The problem with this point of view is that it ignores what we know about how the universe really works. Unforeseen forces can – and do – always alter our present circumstances. Assurances that Yucca Mountain is not geologically active – meaning that there are no fault lines which have generated measurable earthquake activity in the past several millenia there – are utterly meaningless.

There are no places on Earth which are truly not geologically active. Everywhere there is surface, there is geologically active Earth; we live on a solid crust, which floats on a gooey liquid center; predicting what the Earth’s mantle will do next week is not always possible for the best geologists. Predicting what it will do fifty years from now is preposterous. It will probably continue to do nothing at Yucca Mountain. Given that if it does something improbable, it could kill everyone living within a several hundred mile radius, is it worth the risk?

And putting waste in a hole is quite literally just kicking the can down the road; how long until the hole fills up? Where will new waste go at that point? How many new holes in the ground will we have to find? How many new “geologically inert” locations will we need? There are currently 121 nuclear waste facilities throughout the country; it would be nice to reduce that number to just one, but wouldn’t it be better to not have any at all?

The sad history of landfills in this country ought to be an indicator of how infantile is the thinking that we can just bury anything in a hole and it will be alright. The death and destruction of cancer and malnutrition and slow environmental poisining caused by the leaching of toxic chemicals from every landfill in the country is not as sexy a news story as potential nuclear radiation poisining, but it is every bit as real.

Further, we have the sad story of persistent organic pollutants (POPs), most notably the “Dirty Dozen” chemicals proscribed by the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, to which the United States is not a party. These are chemicals – like chlordane, or DDT, pesticides which, though now banned in this country, are persistent – they will not “go away” because they simply don’t break down. They will stay in our environment indefinitely, poisoning every plant or animal which comes into contact with them.

Several of the “Dirty Dozen” show up – in small quantities, naturally – in your city tap water. But don’t worry, there are standards, it’s “perfectly safe” to drink…. Oh, and Myrtle has this great investment opportunity, but you have to act now, before the regulators catch wind of the offer…

The fact that these chemicals cause endocrine damage and contribute to obesity, of course, is the least of your worries. Sterility? Cancer? ADHD? Autism? Hypothyroidism? Hypertension? Any of these things get your attention? All these conditions and more have been made much, much worse in recent decades by the accumulation of poisons in our air, our food, and our drinking water as a result of the type of thinking that says it is okay to use “just a little bit” of a given chemical, or to develop just a few acres of wetland, or to burn just a little bit of trash… or to bury our waste in a hole, whether we’re talking about home refuse in plastic sacks, or nuclear detritus in lead coffins.

So excuse us at Myrtle’s if we are a little suspicious of the notion of carbon capture, no matter how high-tech the material in which it is being captured.

Better than holding carbon dioxide in a powdery version of an emulsion, why not try a truly revolutionary approach to waste management – why not avoid creating the waste in the first place? And if you can't come up with a production method sans carbon outputs, maybe you can... do without?

In the great list of manufactured items which produce carbon dioxide, which items on that menu are things we really need? There are not that many. Breathing is the only one that comes to mind which there’s just no way around – everything else, we ought to be looking at alternatives.

There is a thin line between clever and stupid. Bokonon would argue that “dry water” has obviously crossed that line. It may not be Ice-9, but if we all choke to death on our own waste, will it really matter how precise our literary analogies were?

We recommend a shift in perspective. The quest for sources of energy and resources “out there” drives the quest to make our processes for extraction, production, and consumption less noxious. We certainly applaud the desire to make things less noxious, but we recommend an end to the cynical assumption that we need things “out there” in order to achieve this end. Sustainability is more than just a buzzword; it is a valid description of systems which can perpetuate themselves with the pre-existing resources which form the starting point of your inquiry.

In the case of planet Earth, the only input we get is from the sun. There are a variety of inputs on a micro level – for example, wind flows across practically every patch of land on the planet; temperature differences between the surface and subsurface layers almost everywhere on Earth are also sufficient to provide energy; numerous other examples exist of resources which may be used without being diminished. Making use of these natural features does not require us to come up with any magical substances straight out of science fiction. A dry martini makes sense; dry water just doesn’t.

In fact, in the traditional schema of Carbon Storage and Sequestration (CSS) systems, increasingly, the push by proponents is for biochar systems. Biochar is the material left at the end of the pyrolysis process – the decomposition of organic material by heat in the absence of oxygen. This is typically non-toxic “stuff” which stores carbon dioxide and other gasses in such a way that as the materials decompose over time, the carbon dioxide reuptake process is much easier – biochar acts as a kind of replacement for the processes that take place naturally in rainforests, for example.

There are literally hundreds of different CSS schemes out there; unless someone demonstrates, however, that “dry water” fits the description of a sustainable variant – that is, that it processes carbon dioxide in a way that reduces the impact of production, use, and disposal of goods without increasing production and consumption of any other variables beyond their replenishable limits – we aren’t convinced. We’d rather avoid the pool-pah if we can at all help it.

Happy farming!

Theseus' Ship... Wherein Myrtle Wheedles Some Crazy Anarchists

2010-08-24T16:38:00.001-05:00

“The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned [from Crete] had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.”

--Plutarch, Theseus

The Paradox of Theseus’ Ship is a timeless exemplar of the French notion “plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose” – the more that things change, the more they stay the same. However, in spite of finding reminders in every culture and during every epoch of history that change is the only real constant in human endeavors, people still have difficulty accepting it.

Worse still for many people is the uncomfortable implication in the theme of this paradox -- that identity is not so simple a question as we reducibly wish it to be. “Who am I?” “Why am I here?” Practical minded folk don’t ask themselves these questions, in part because they do not want these questions to be asked at all, by anyone.

However, as rapidly as the world is changing, as we are overcome by events such as climate change, economic globalization, peak oil consumption, peak minerals consumption, genetically modified crops propagation, we may have reached a point at which not asking deeply philosophical questions may be less practical than emulating the ivory-tower eggheads who are unafraid of asking such questions. It may be time to put down the hoe for just a second and put our heads in the clouds long enough to decide which way is up and which way is down.

Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma is an excellent example of an attempt to conceptualize modern food consumption. Pollan’s request is that we attempt a new degree of intentionality in our eating habits by stopping to consider how four different meals make their way to our plates. This model is an intriguing starting point, but perhaps the most impressive part of this journey is that Pollan started at all. He represents a practical point of view which is too rare; all too often, even those who recognize that something must be done simply inject a prefabricated answer and go merrily about their lives having assured themselves that prejudice is an adquate replacement for investigation.

Socrates’ injunction that “the unexamined life is not worth living” has never been so apropos as it is now, not only for those frustrated by increasing workloads rewarded by diminishing returns, but also by those who would throw out the baby of technical innovation with the bathwater of post-industrial dehumanization and oppression. A claim that we have become “something less” is easily enough made; just scrawl a few angry lines and get printed in The Fifth Estate. Substantiating such claims and then doing something productive as a consequence is an entirely different proposition.

As a point of reference, modern Anarcho-Primitivists like John Zerzan and Theodore Kaczynski (yes, that Theodore Kaczynski) take an unfounded assumption that hunter-gatherers have/had idyllic lives (supposedly having more leisure time than their civilized peers) and turn it into a philosophy/political agenda wherein anything humans have managed to accomplish since the advent of the bone scraper or flaked hand axe is the natural cause of all suffering, war, oppression, sexism, and possibly even flatulence.

Noam Chomsky and Murray Bookchin have been noted critics of this perspective, with Bookchin even penning a book entitled Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism, which caused the so-called primitivists, ironically, to organize a remarkably complex social circling of the wagons. Ranting and raving about how evil agriculture, language, and digital watches are and idealizing Homo habilis (while conveniently ignoring the fact that prior to technological advances, humanity might be better described as Purina Saber-Tooth Chow) doesn’t accomplish anything other than inspiring pathetic serial killers like Kaczynski, and selling a few books for hygeine-deficient narcissists like Zerzan.

The fundamental problem, of course, is that a rejection of all society or social institutions in response to the current slew of human crises, many if not most of which are self-inflicted, fails to recognize that whether maladaptive or not, our behaviors as a species have all evolved for a variety of reasons which will not simply go away just because we wish them to, or if we all go to live in shacks in the wood, or drink enough shots of wheatgrass juice while babbling back and forth at each other in highly technical jargon that has nothing to do with real survival, either of our species, or of our fellow species, or even of individuals, except perhaps individual proprietors of organic wheatgrass juice distributorships.

We have, in short, become something because we chose to respond to circumstances long ago. Those choices led to other choices until our collective behavior, much like that of the caretakers of Theseus’ ship, has led to a complete replacement of our group persona. Our identity is subsumed by the same paradox – are we still “human” in the same way that the people living in the Fertile Crescent just prior to the domestication of the fig and rye some 11,000 years ago were “human”?

Some cultures do not even view this as a paradox. Taoists and Buddhists consider the idea of a thing to be its formal identity; this is very much in keeping with Aristotle’s division of four separate qualities of identity – the “is”ness of a thing differs with the slightest change in emphasis. Getting bogged down in particulars misses the point, precisely because the particulars will never stay the same. Theseus’ ship has different planks than it did when it was first built, but no matter.

The very cells in Theseus’ body were different by the time he died than they were when he built the ship – did that make him no longer Theseus? Of course not! Western materialists and substantialists may not be able to make that philosophical leap, but there is really nothing mystical about it. If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it isn’t a Kaczynski.

And being social creatures living in an unsustainable economy does not make us less human, either. Instead, we are still very much human, but we have large problems with difficult solutions. Whining that the solutions are impossible accomplishes nothing other than to make the solutions appear even more intractable than they really are.

Rather than chucking the whole enterprise, we ought to emulate those like Pollan or Barbara Kingsolver or a host of their contemporaries who, instead of asking “When does the Revolution start?” have chosen to ask “What’s for dinner?” Theseus’ ship was not replaced by an exact duplicate; it was retrofitted a single plank at a time until every plank was new. In a similar vein, humanity did not come to our current pass via one colossal social, economic or political decision. We got here one decision at a time – how to get to work, what to wear, and what to eat.

All we can do is stop and think about what we are doing, and be a little more intentional about everything from getting dressed in the morning, to choosing how we entertain ourselves, to choosing what we eat. After all, some ancient ancestral hominid risked his neck testing out that brand new spear he’d invented to scare off a saber-tooth, which gave us, his lucky descendants, some time to think and act. Don’t we owe him our best efforts at getting it right? And getting it right means replacing the ship one plank at a time.

Happy farming!

Grey Waters Run Deep

2010-08-23T19:31:00.000-05:00

We have not done a comprehensive survey of municipal water regulations, but we suspect that most cities in the good ol’ U.S. of A. have a somewhat more progressive position vis-à-vis greywater reuse than Myrtle’s home, College Station, Texas. College Station does not allow the reuse or recycling of greywater. At all. Period.

This places our fair city in direct opposition to the State of Texas, which allows residential greywater recycling, without a permit, provided less than 400 gallons a day are being used. HB 2661, enacted in September 2003, was an amendment to the Texas State Water Code, and established the following paramaters for reusing water from sinks, bathtubs and washing machines:

Graywater can be used in agricultural, domestic, commercial, and industrial situations, in accordance with applicable Health and Safety codes.
A permit is not required for the domestic use of up to 400 gallons of graywater daily if the following criteria are met:

Graywater originates from a private residence,
Graywater is used by the occupants of that residence for gardening, composting, or landscaping at the residence,
Graywater is collected with a system that overflows into a sewage or on-site waste treatment and disposal system,
Graywater is stored in tanks that are clearly labeled as non-potable water, restrict access (especially to children), and eliminate habitat for mosquitoes and other pests,
Graywater system uses piping that is clearly identified as non-potable water conduit,
Collection of graywater does not generate ponds or pools,
Collection system does not create runoff across property lines or onto impervious surfaces,
Graywater is distributed by a surface or subsurface system that does not spray into the air.

Builders are encouraged to install plumbing in all new houses in a manner that allows graywater collection and reuse.
The installation of subsurface graywater systems around the foundations of new houses is encouraged so as to minimize foundation movement and cracking.

Some of these rules make more sense to us than others, though all are necessary to a greater or lesser degree. The marking of water as ‘non-potable’ seems a little silly, given that, if the tanks and hoses are located near a garden, and the hoses are, in fact, soaker hoses, it should be obvious to any onlooker that the water is intended for the plants, not for human consumption. Still, in a society where even toothpicks come with instructions, we suppose this is to be expected.

The use of collection systems probably deserves some attention. We remember our grandfather (who lived just outside the extraterritorial jurisdiction of Llano, Texas, many years ago; if you aren’t familiar with Llano, it’s near Art and Casteel) running a line from his kitchen sink to the St. Augustine lawn growing under the huge oak trees in his back yard. While we ordinarily despise lawns at Myrtle’s place, Grandaddy Mints’ lawn took up a small portion of his acreage, and in our memory, he never used well water to keep it green, opting instead for either greywater from the kitchen, or occasionally diverting water pumped from his stock pond, which was the primary source of water for his half-acre garden, as well.

Grandaddy Mints did not filter or treat his water before running it out to the grass; we know now that this was not right, given that the dishes in the kitchen sink were washed with commercially available soaps all of which were high in phosphates, a lot of nasty chemicals were getting leached into the groundwater when he let the water run straight into the ground.

There are two alternative solutions to this problem, now that we know what phosphates can do to the environment. The institutional mindset, reflected in the State of Texas’ rules regarding greywater reuse, assumes that phosphates, nitrates, chlordates, and other nasty chemicals are necessarily going to be components of greywater, and therefore any use of greywater requires that the water first be run through a filtration system of some kind.

There are many such systems, some of which involve manufactured tubs full of artificially created filters a lot like what you get with those “reverse osmosis” water filtration systems at which we distillers scoff, and we at Myrtle’s place obviously do not recommend these systems. The use of plastics, alone, suggests that these systems are not environmentally friendly. Other systems make use of filtration through a planter with algal and other biological remediation systems – ie, plants which soak up the offending materials but not all of the water – before dripping out into final use.

We are intrigued by the bioremediation systems, but not enough to advocate them on a small-scale facility like, say, a backyard microfarm. No, we think a paradigm shift is in order which makes filtration systems unnecessary.

The reason greywater systems require filtration, according to the government, is that they contain phosphates, etc. So… why not remove the offending chemicals at the source? There are plenty of soaps and cleansers available which do not pose any environmental dangers, some available as homemade solutions, others available at your local grocers. Castile soaps (that is, soaps made with a vegetable oil base) pose virtually no risk of groundwater contamination. Clean white sand as an abrasive works at least as well as chlorine based abrasives, and is what has been used from time immemorial until, oh, the 1950s anyway. Organic toothpastes, shampoos, conditioners, etc. are all readily available.

In short, nothing noxious to your plants has to go in your sink, bathtub or washing machine. While you will still want to review your local ordinances, we recommend a small stainless steel collection tank for greywater overflow, with a screen to filter out largish particles like the aforementioned scrubbing sand, with output running to soaker hoses running underneath loose mulch in your vegetable, herb, or flower beds, or around your fruit trees.

But don’t forget to print out a label for the overflow tank stating “Non-Potable Water”. Wouldn’t want any innocent passersby to get the wrong impression!

Happy farming!