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

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

So, mosquitoes bad, no mosquitoes good, right?

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

So… what to do about them?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy farming!

Tastefully Vegetarian

"Our culture runs on coffee and gasoline, the first often tasting like the second."
--Edward Abbey

Taste is everything in modern life.  It is also missing, from practically all our food and beverages.  This is our rule and measure, and our curse.  Prepackaged foods are heated in microwaves with perhaps a dash of processed salt and pre-ground black pepper for seasoning, and this passes for food preparation.  And it is usually bland and tasteless.

We at Myrtle’s place have gone as close to vegan in our daily fare as we can reasonably do, and while there is a long history of veganism from which to draw inspiration, and a large swath of literature describing much of what anyone could desire in terms of tastiness, it has nevertheless not been easy.  In the modern context, most people are frankly incapable of being vegan for one simple reason – prepackaged vegan foods prepared using the aforementioned convenient methodology taste even worse than prepackaged fatty meats.

Trying to be vegan under such circumstances would inevitably be counterproductive, given the high incidence of bisphenol-A (BPA) in the packaging, and the chemical alteration of food cooked in microwave ovens, and the lack of flavor, leading to a lack of satisfaction.  No satisfaction?  Higher sugar and fat intake.  Higher sugar and fat intake, even in vegan households, means weight gain and health problems.

The solution – and thankfully there is one – is to think about the coffee/gasoline conundrum described by Edward Abbey.  Obviously, coffee is good for a body, and gasoline is bad.  Why is the gasoline getting into the coffee?  Solve that simple problem, and you go a long way towards solving the more general problem of why vegetables and fruits and whole grains don’t taste as good as cheeseburgers and milkshakes.

The reason coffee tastes like gasoline is because it is all too often in close proximity to petrochemical inputs.  Either it is brewed in a gas station, or drive-through restaurant, or it is pre-ground, packaged in plastic, and brewed in a plastic container, or (worse still) turned into dehydrated flakes to be reconstituted in a microwave oven, where it comes out as something almost like coffee, but just slightly off, as you could tell either by examining it under an electron microscope, or (if you absolutely must) by tasting it. 

And in all these scenarios, we haven’t even touched on the fact that the coffee is likely made with municipal tap water which is rife with chemical additives – yes, the chlorine and fluoride kill off most of the bacteria, but… what about all the unnecessary chlordates, and all those bizarre salts your body is simply not designed to ingest?  Not to mention all the beneficial bacteria in your body which the chlorine and fluoride will kill off once you actually drink the noxious stuff!  It is, quite frankly, amazing that anyone anywhere has ever had a good cup of coffee.  (We’ll share the secrets of how to make a good cup of joe some other time…)

Likewise, it can only be expected that it would be difficult to get children to eat their vegetables. 

Take a good look inside the can from which all too often our peas, beans or tomato paste have come.  At first glance, one thinks, “Big deal, a tin can.”  Only, it’s not tin or aluminum; it’s also not stainless steel, or any of a dozen other metals you can readily name.  No, it’s a proprietary blend of metals formulated by one of a handful of chemical companies who have learned how to maximize the tensile strength of the material while minimizing its weight and cost; the interior surface of the can has been lined with – wait for it – a plastic film containing our old enemy bisphenol-A, which leaches out in the presence of many of the amino acids found in foods which (prior to being exposed to this BPA can lining) were putatively healthy.

Someone who eats food stored in this manner on a regular basis will develop a dullness to their taste buds which matches almost exactly the taste insensitivity of a heavy cigarette smoker.  However, take a culinary purist who lives on fresh fruits and vegetables and give them a sample of canned peas, and they will likely spit them out, complaining of the metallic patina.  There is a similar taste sensitivity difference in the meat-eating world, too; organic, grass fed beef is vastly superior in taste to the factory-farmed variety, fed a slurry of god-only-knows-what.  We prefer to have no meat at all, but clearly the difference between home-grown and factory grown supports our overall theme.

What makes us even bring all this up?  The answer is revealing as a study in the dietary habits of the modern American.  When we decided to cut butter and other sources of animal fat from our already veggie-centric diet, we talked to as many vegan friends as we could about strategies for making complete and healthy meals. 

One such friend is a failed vegan – that is, she tried going vegan, and then a few months later went the entirely opposite direction and is now on the heavy-meat, low-carb Atkins diet.  When we informed her of  our new direction, she immediately gave us her old vegan notebook, including much material we already possessed, and some new items, including a recipe for vegan pumpkin muffins.

Pumpkin muffins?  Sounds good, right?  Especially entering this time of year, when pumpkin is everywhere.  The only problem is that on this list of ingredients, we weren’t advised how much pumpkin to use in terms of cups or ½ cups.  No, the recipe called for a can of pumpkin pie filling.

We are not surprised our friend is now a meat eater again.  The taste was not there for her in her vegan days, so she never really stood a chance of staying on such a diet.  We evolved with a craving for fat, the hardest nutrient to acquire on the African Savannah a million years ago, and that craving has never gone away.  In the absence of satisfaction, we revert to our cravings.  And there is nothing satisfying about canned fruits and vegetables.  No, to satisfy one’s hunger, one has to eat food that tastes good.

If you’ve ever had fresh baked pumpkin straight out of the garden, you know what we are talking about.  Fresh pumpkin is orders of magnitude better than canned pumpkin.  You can eat a roasted or broiled pumpkin off the shell with a fork or spoon, and hardly need it to be baked into anything else.  It is a meal by itself, without any other accoutrement.

The same is true of every other veggie you can name – kids everywhere tremble at the thought of eating bland, stringy, soggy spinach from a can.  Fresh spinach, cut from a plot right outside your kitchen window?  It tastes divine. 

Mushy, coppery, fibrous-but-not-in-a-good-way asparagus from a can?  Blech.  Fresh asparagus, sautéed in olive oil with fresh onions, garlic, lemon and peppers, or maybe with freshly picked oregano or basil or rosemary?  Yummm!

And if you’ve never had a peach straight off the tree, particularly in the Texas Hill Country, you don’t know what you’re missing.  Fresh peaches are as different from peaches canned in syrup as Tony Bennett’s I Left My Heart in San Francisco is from Justin Bieber’s Baby, Baby, Baby.

We have not been able to utterly eradicate the presence of plastic packaging in our pantry, but we have gone a long way.  Grains and legumes come home from bulk bins in plastic bags, and are then immediately transferred to glass jars.  We do occasionally indulge in things like frozen veggie-crumbles, which also come in plastic packaging.  And frequently pasta will come from a bag rather than a box.

However, as much as possible, we prefer fruits and vegetables which either come straight from the garden, or come straight from a local vendor – either a farmer’s market, or a market with a history of being friendly to the locavore community.

This also applies to another aspect of improving the tastiness of meals – the copious use of herbs.  Prepackaged herbs are not a source of evil in our time, but they are an inefficient tool in the fight against boredom on our plates.  The difference between fresh basil and dried basil flakes is like the difference between a performance of La Boheme at the Met, and a performance of My Ding-a-Ling on a kazoo on a kindergarten playground.

And the smell of bread baked with fresh rosemary is truly one of life’s great pleasures.  But you can’t have fresh rosemary without having rosemary plants nearby.  And if you’ve planted rosemary, you may as well go ahead and plant a full herb garden, right?  And once you’ve got a full herb garden, you may as well use it to improve the flavor of practically everything you make, because if you’re not going to take the time to make your food as delicious as possible, then what on Earth are you eating it for?

Which brings us back to pumpkins.  Yes, they are traditional for this time of year.  For the most part, though, what you’ll see in stores will be the carving varieties, which make great jack-o-lanterns, and even as uncarved doorstops they are attractive enough all Autumn long.  They do not, however, make for the best pies, or pumpkin bread, or pumpkin soup.  For that, you want the smaller varieties, and for that, you will more than likely want to think about devoting some more garden space next Spring and Summer.  Because taste matters.

 Happy farming!

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

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!

Little Italy in the Sticks

Research at Indiana University in Bloomington, reported in the American Heart Association journal Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes, confirms what many foodies have believed for years – a Mediterranean-style diet is not only tastier, it is also healthier.

A diet characterized by low saturated fats and high consumption of fish, fruit, vegetables, legumes, nuts, olive oil, whole-grain cereals, and moderate alcohol consumption reduces the risk of developing heart disease.

An intensive study of identical and fraternal male twins, the key findings showed that the Mediterranean diet is strongly correlated to a higher heart rate variability (HRV), which is a key measure of the health of autonomic system control of heart function.

As luck would have it, many of the foods eaten throughout the Mediterranean region are relatively easy to grow in the Brazos Valley.  We don’t have anchovies or sardines locally, but we do have ready access to most of the same fruits and vegetables, beans, nuts, and olive oil as our counterparts from Gibraltar and points East.

We have even painted our little homestead in a Morrocan style, so as to heighten the similarities.  While culturally, Bryan/College Station often seems like the sociological equivalent of mayonnaise, there are plenty of reasons to think of it agriculturally as “Little Sicily”.  We at Myrtle’s place would like to play up some of these similarities in hopes that this meme is infectious.

For starters, if you can’t grow Mediterranean herbs in Brazos County, you are hopeless as a gardener.  We have six different kinds of basil, some of which is gone to seed and growing willy-nilly wherever it chooses.  Our rosemary is equally prolific, and provides year-round greenery everywhere it is planted.  Oregano, thyme, lavender, mint, coriander and chamomile round out the essential Old World herbs in our garden; everything necessary for the spices of Spain and Portugal, Morrocco and Algeria, Italy and Greece, Turkey and the Levant, they all grow here, though some require a little more care than others.  We would bore you with our English herbs, but they are, frankly, as boring as English food.

Fruit trees are a little trickier, but we still have plenty of variety to choose from.  Pomegranates will grow anywhere you could grow yaupon; since yaupon grows like a weed in almost all of South/East Texas, that means pomegranates can also grow like a weed around here.  Several species of plum tree do quite well here, and we have noticed some successful peach plantings around town, although we typically think of peaches as a Hill Country fruit.  Pears are not quite so successful, and apples, although they will grow here, are nowhere near as tasty as one would like.

Dwarf citrus specimens do extremely well here, too, although you really have to plant the dwarf variety and keep them in pots, because even though we don’t get below freezing on a regular basis, we do occasionally get well below freezing, making it absolutely essential to get citrus trees indoors.

Grapes perhaps demonstrate the greatest similarity between our climate and that of the mediterranean.  There are several species of wild grape in the Americas, and all of them are native Texas plants.  In addition, several domesticated varieties of wine grape do well here.  In fact, the Messina Hof winery produces some of the best wines, particularly dessert wines, that we have ever tasted.  It is no accident that the Texas Reds festival held in downtown Bryan every year is a fast-growing event.  Global warming is putting California wines on the endangered species list; this is certainly a shame, but it appears that California’s loss will be the Brazos Valley’s gain, because the area’s climate is hospitable to vintners already, and is likely to only become more so over the next several decades.

Most Mediterranean vintners would cringe at the suggestion, but we will be making wine with other berries, as well.  We have written before about our bounteous blackberries; this year, we will be adding raspberries to the mix.  Throw in honey from our own bees, and we will be producing organic wines soon with very, very few ingredients not produced on our own property.  It will be less Bordeaux and more paisan, of course, but we don’t really mind; it’s the peasants in the Mediterranean who cook the most interesting food, so we will be more than happy to drink the same wine, too.

As for vegetables, if it grows in Sicily, it will grow here.  The smaller varieties of tomato do best – Roma, cherry, grape.  You can grow bigger tomatoes if you so choose, but for spring plantings, the quality will not be quite what you desire, and the quantity will be exceedingly limited.  In the fall garden it is possible to get away with a little more ambition, because the limiting factor for tomatoes is the heat – they do not set fruit well when temperatures are over 90°.

Eggplant, squash, spinach, peppers, zucchini, cucumbers, these are the “low hanging fruit” of vegetable crops for Brazos Valley gardeners.  We also do melons quite well.  Again, if you can picture it being eaten by a large family on a beautiful rustic table set up on a terra cotta paved veranda overlooking an azure sea, and being washed down by a sweet red wine with anisette or lavender overtones, accompanied by fresh-baked bread and maybe a little goat cheese, then you can grow it in southeast Texas.

Olives, too, grow here.  At Myrtle’s place we were rather excited this year to get our olive trees in the ground; that puts us a good four years out from actual production, but that’s closer than we were this time last year.  Patience is a virtue, particularly when the payoff is so incredibly delicious.  For those who can’t wait that long, there are several olive groves in Texas which have started olive oil production, and the critical reviews thus far are stellar.  We suspect that this will soon become a staple crop for the state, limited only by the imaginations of potential growers.  Our own grove will probably top out somewhere around 12-15 trees, so we will not be considered “major” producers by any stretch, but that is more than enough to press our own oil and still have enough fruit left over for table servings.

The bad news in all of this Mediterranean-mania is that pigging out on foods drenched in alfredo sauces and smothered with shredded romano and chased by tiramisu, cheesecake, and pannetone continues to be unhealthy, regardless of any study praising other Mediterranean foods.

But if you’re going to have to exercise moderation, shouldn’t you couple that exercise with a touch of decadent taste?  Eating healthy, let us be frank, sucks.  Eating tasty, on the other hand, absolutely rocks, in spite of the fact that in the case of Mediterranean foods, it is also healthy.

Myrtle is willing to ignore the manipulative qualities of such word games if it means she gets fresh eggplant parmegian and a nice salad with a raspberry-pomegranate vinagrette followed by a plum parfait.

Agricoltura felice!

Lots of changes on the way!

We're changing the layout of the blog, which is only appropriate, given that we've changed the layout of the land (and house!) a lot over the course of the last few months.

The pond is a work in progress, but we've fenced it in, and will be planting mustang grapes and raspberries back there.

The privacy fence which turned into another grape fence is now backed up by a *real* fence built by our neighbors who were worried about their dogs getting loose.  Good for them!

We've cleared out a bunch more yaupon holly in the front yard, which has left room for more herbs; we're expanding our use of african basil next year; we've got lavender, curry icicle, sweet basil, thyme, oregano, and three different kinds of rosemary taking off in front, in addition to the grape tomatoes, cayenne peppers, banana peppers, pimiento peppers, and jalapeños.  And that's not even counting the blackberries, the loblolly pine tree, or the honesuckle we've planted up there in the past year!

So... lots of pictures to come.  We've also decided that since we were able to build rooms for our 10 year old daughter and our 6 month old son (converting a 1 bedroom house into a 3 bedroom house in the process!) we can jolly well build a roof for the chicken coop worthy of our prize hens.  Their current roof survived a hurricane, but let's face it, these ladies deserve better!