The Pie of a Thousand Grapes Begins With a Single Vine

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

We are looking at a bumper crop of muscadine grapes this year. Every bit of literature you will ever find on the wild grape of Texas will tell you that they do not bunch – the fruit hang singly, not in clusters. Well, judge for yourself from the photo evidence; these may not be traditional clusters like you will see from table grapes or champagne grapes… but that, my friends, is a boatload of “singly” hanging grapes.

These grapes are on a trellis on our back porch; they come from a vine which volunteered from a huge cluster of vines in the part of our yard we have historically referred to as “The Faerie Ring”, though it is now known as “The Bee Yard” (more on bees in a future installment, we promise!)

For the first three years in which we got serious about the business of growing grapes, our harvests have consisted of a few fistfuls of fruit – delicious, to be sure, but not particularly prodigious. We blamed drought and birds, but the truth was something far more mundane – impatience. We simply hadn’t allowed for the necessity of the two key ingredients to a long-term project: the amount of utterly mind-numbing maintenance necessary for success, and the passing of time.

We have not trained our vines the way vintners do; rather than limiting ourselves to two branches on a T-shaped vine with a limited height, we have “limited” ourselves to a more fantastical assortment of four or five branches, some of which go overhead to form a living roof over our pseudo-porch. Instead of the wooden deck we had originally envisioned, we have opted for a living, breathing space where wooden benches define the area as “useful”, but green grass at our feet, and wild tangles of grapes above our heads and all around us serve as walls.

Decorative, yes. But we did it this way because it’s less work. And because the vines absorb summer sunlight which would otherwise hit our windows, and since it’s a southern exposure, and this is Texas… that is kind of a big deal.

Meanwhile, this is the fourth year in which we’ve been scratching and clawing to get a grape harvest. And it looks like the first time we will be able to brag about having done so. This leads to our favorite pastime – self-reflection. Philosophical navel-lint-picking would be another way to describe it. However one chooses to characterize our musings, though, this whole journey-of-a-thousand-grapes-starting-with-a-single-vine thing is right up our alley.

There are all sorts of other projects at Big Myrtle’s place which either have taken a long time to come to fruition, or are taking a long time. Our rainwater collection pond took three years to reach its current depth of 8 feet; our second such pond will probably take two more years to get there.

We have been building our privacy fencing in piecemeal fashion, and it will be six more months before we are done. Our raised bed vegetable garden is only about half installed, with ten beds at present; we will probably take another year to get the rest put in. Our pomegranates may produce fruit this year; our olives might produce fruit in another year or two. We are going to plant a good 15-20 more fruit trees (plums, apricots, almonds, huckleberries), all of which will take a good 2-3 years minimum to start giving us a return on our investment.

And then there’s the bees. We installed a package of buckfast bees from R. Weaver apiaries this past weekend. Mr. Myrtle Maintenance may have messed up the queen cage by damaging the bottom cork – we won’t know for sure for another week or so – but even if he blew the curve and completely messed up the installation, it won’t really matter, long term. Our decision is firm: we are going to build more top bar hives, and buy more bees, and we are going to produce honey. This year? Probably. Next year? Definitely!

Successes are welcome; mistakes? They are nothing more than another squashed grape in the must. And you can’t make muscadine pie without squashing a lot of grapes. Whatever mistakes we make with the bees will fall into the same category as all the mistakes we have made with the grapes… the veggies… the herbs… the chickens… And we will keep right on keeping on, because we can’t think of anything else we’d rather be doing.

Happy farming!

It's a Jungle Out There

We have in the past ruminated on wide-row planting, and the dangers of 'sub-optimization', wherein overall production is limited due to a desire to maximize the production of an individual plant.

Upon further review of our current practices, we have realized that, while it is true that in some parts of the garden we have been guilty of sub-optimization (our cucumbers, for example, are growing in solitary stands against our western fence), it is also true that in other parts of our garden, particularly the well companion-planted portions, it is quite literally a jungle out there.  We have successfully crammed as much vibrant, active growth as possible into a few square feet in some instances, like the zucchini/corn/nasturtium combination you see pictured here to the left.

The contrast between the high-density beds and the low-density beds is really pretty remarkable; we will get a higher percentage of fruit from the cucumber shown to the right here than we will from any individual zucchini or corn plant in the first picture.  This cucumber plant will, on its own merits, be a champion.

But from the bed?  There will be no contest -- we will have far higher yield from the high density bed than from the cukes.  T'ain't fair, but them's the facts.

In light of this overwhelming evidence of the superiority of the high-density bed method of gardening, we are faced with some interesting decisions this summer, most notably, how exactly do we carve up our existing space in such way as to maximize how many plants can be successfully grown in small spaces?

There are a lot of different methods people use to solve this particular conundrum, and we are currently employing one of the more popular.  We have numerous raised beds throughout the yard, each about 6 to 7 feet long/wide, and each is essentially its own independent garden.

We also have a rather serpentine bed with some additional corn and sunflowers growing on one side of the yard, where next year we will plant additional olive trees, and then we have the grape arbors and the blackberry fences, not to mention the pomegranates, plums, the pecan tree, and all the shade trees we planted earlier this spring.


But is this method really sufficient?  We don't think so.  You'll notice, with a fairly cursory glance at our garden, that there is an appalling lack of climbing legumes.  No beans.  No snap peas.  What kind of a southern garden monstrosity is this?  We are facing a decision in one of two directions:

Take out the planters and put in a series of serpentine beds in parallel running the width of the yard from the olive trees to the pond area, two or three of which would have large trellises installed in order to handle vining plants like pole beans, etc.

Or...

Take out the planters and put in a series of three large fenced in areas, each of which will essentially be a giant raised bed. 

The advantage of the first method would be ease of working the rows; you simply walk between them and weed, plant, harvest, mulch, and so on.

The advantage of the second is maximum geometric effect -- there will be more surface area on the fence line for climbing plants, and the wide-row planting method can still be used internally in each fenced-in area.  This method would also have the advantage of discouraging rabbits, although we would still have to worry about other critters who are somewhat more mobile (raccoons, possums, etc.).

As with all else, Myrtle will keep you posted on what we end up deciding to do.

Meanwhile....  spring harvest is berry, berry soon!  Those berries may look red, but don't let that fool you.  These are blackberries.  If we picked them right now, they would be very, very bitter blackberries.  We'll let them ripen to their nice dark purplish-black before we pick them, and then we will most likely use them strictly for cooking... this year.  In the future, we have designs on making wine, mead, and goodness only knows what all else.  But you can only master so many skills at a time; we at Myrtle's place have our hands full at present.

Until next time,

Happy farming!