On Myrtle's Preparations for the Coming Koala Invasion Apocalypse

Modern life – meaning life in the context we think of as modern, a distinction we are less and less certain has any significant meaning, really – allows very little time for reflection. As such, when we catch a hint of outside perspectives, a word or two from strangers about the impact our work has on them, it can tell us some very basic things about ourselves which, frankly, we should have already known.

A recent example at Myrtle’s place – a neighbor (probably a transplant from California) complimented us on our young eucalyptus tree. This having been the second such compliment received in a week… maybe we should pay attention, and stop to consider what the presence of this one individual plant amongst so many in our front yard herb garden might be trying to tell us about ourselves.

A bit of back story – we planted a couple of seedlings found in the discount bin at Farm Patch a few years ago, with faded tags reading only “Lemon – Corymbia citriodora”. And, yes, they smelled faintly of lemons, and we are always game for trying new things, so into the ground they went. It being a fall garden, and us not knowing what they were (though fully intending to eventually getting around to finding out), we mulched them, watered them, and then promptly forgot about them.

Chores, kids, day job, presidential elections, missing cat, found cat, oil changes on the Toyota… think of a distraction that came before looking up what the heck it was we had just planted, and said distraction surely took place. And over the winter, one of our nascent corymbia citriodora plants froze to the ground. The other didn’t look happy… but then, winter here is just harsh enough to kill lots of things that are tropical or semi-tropical, and just mild enough that a handful of such plants occasionally make it through. African basil, for example, will come back from its sturdy roots every spring.

So, we left well enough alone. We mulched it on a balmy January interlude between cold fronts, right along with our hardier perennial herbs (notably rosemary and oregano), and hoped for the best.

The best became apparent that March, when “Lemon – Corymbia citriodora” demanded to be upgraded to its more common nomenclature, owing to the fact that it sprouted up to a 3 ½’ height, towering above its neighbors in the herb garden, and threatening (if we were any judge of what the pinkish-green shoots at the top of each of its branches might mean) to keep right on growing. So, that’s when we finally gave in, and looked up what turned out to be our lemon eucalyptus tree.

Native to Australia, and not typically hardy below 30° fahrenheit (which explains why its sister snuffed it), there are nevertheless plenty of anectdotal examples of trees surviving frosts and freezes once they reach maturity. There are several examples scattered throughout Northern California, for example, where other varieties of eucalyptus thrive – which is, presumably, where our complimentary passersby became familiar with them.

And now, another winter has passed, and another spring and summer, and it now stands at 8’ tall, and is unmistakably a young eucalyptus tree.

We have no idea whether it will continue to thrive in the balmy Brazos Valley climate, though we are hopeful. The long range forecast is for the El Niño Southern Oscillation effect (ENSO) to remain stuck in “neutral” through at least Spring 2014, and the seasonal outlook forecast maps from the National Weather Service all show expected above average temperatures until at least then, so the odds of prolonged exposure to temperatures below 30° fahrenheit are somewhat low.

Assuming it survives to adulthood, this tree (which, remember, we thought was going to be a modest bushy variety like basil or sage) could conceivably be 30-40’ high by the time our daughter graduates college. It would, if this happens, tower over our driveway. Only a deep freeze, or an invasion of koala bears, could keep this from happening.

And as we reflect on the coming wave of unschedulable changes related to global warming, our lemon eucalyptus serves as something of a bellwether. Happy accidents of this sort will occur whenever and wherever folk are prepared to experiment – not blindly, but definitely wildly – with a wanton disregard for preconceived ideas about what must be put where, and what grows, and what does not.

There are some rules, of course, that will continue to be functional in the scary new world to come – mulch, for example, is always a good idea, as it helps plants retain moisture and self-regulate their tolerance to extreme temperatures – but not every rule handed down from master gardeners is going to continue to be valid, regardless of how “tried and true” that rule might be.

And not every experiment will end well. We are quite prepared for the possibility that we will have a freak snowstorm this winter (it happens every few years here in Bryan-College
Station, after all), and we will walk out to find an eight-foot-tall freeze-dried twig collection in our front yard, instead of a eucalyptus tree. We can’t count how many “fails” we have accumulated, in the form of plants that didn’t do well where we put them, or of arrangements that maximized thorns and fire ants and minimized fruit production and enjoyment.

We have also noticed, thanks to a competitive spirit, that when we compare our own garden to someone else’s, we are likely to notice only the flaws in our own, and only the advantages in theirs. Self-deprecation aside, we have met very few “proud” gardeners; they are generally sincere in their worries about problems of which they may be the only persons alive with even the slightest awareness. Yet, taken as a whole, there will inevitably be people in the community whose tomatoes are ripe when no one else can even get blooms, or who have pole beans so verdant they make they make the ivy covered outfield fence at Wrigley Field seem naked, or who in the midst of a valley-wide squash borer invasion, can grow pumpkins to make Linus and Snoopy blush.

Our hope is that people continue talking to each other, and listening to their plants – and the animals who live in, on, and around those plants – and continue adjusting as everything in that cluster of different entities continues changing.

Our own conversations with the admirers of the eucalyptus tree were short; they were, however, representative of at least part of who we like to think of ourselves as being. We are often out in the garden (though not as often as we’d like), and we often have time to stop and chat with those who are passing by. Our human neighbors know us, and some of them even approve of us. We hope we can say the same of our non-human neighbors.

It is the time of year when the planting calendar approach to gardening has most folk in the Brazos Valley scrambling to put in peas, and spinach, and broccoli, and cabbage and the like… and we will undoubtedly be doing some of that ourselves. Fava beans in particular are one of our favorites, as they overwinter well, and if planted now can conceivably become a forest of 4-5 foot tall heavy food producers (in addition to providing plenty of winter forage for our bees).

But the thing about which we want to be most aware is not anything marked on a calendar. We want to keep our eyes peeled for that next weird discount-bin type find – what is the next unexpected gem going to be? You can’t plan for it… you can only be patient and open to it.

Here’s hoping you find your own unexpected treasure this fall.

Happy farming!

Time, as it relates to everything Myrtlish...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy farming!

Happenings in February....

Okay, so, this is Texas, which means that we've either already had our last freeze, or else we're a month away from having our last freeze.

Makes planting something of a mystery.

Anyway, we've put tons and tons of compost (or at least wheelbarrows and wheelbarrows of it) on our 10 raised beds; we've mulched the blackberries, which are beginning to sprout, and we've got plans to buy a cistern for rainwater collection.

And... we started a blog.

More pictures to come soon. I want y'all to be impressed, but without getting the wrong idea. We're amateurs. Ambitious amateurs, but amateurs nonetheless.