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

“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!

Grass: Illegalize it!

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!

The Alpha Egg and the Omega Chicken

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!

Wherein Myrtle is Full of Pith (and Vinegar!)

Herbicides in our drinking water have caused Myrtle Maintenance Personnel no shortage of conniption fits; we either write about them or reference them seemingly incessantly.  “So, Mssr’s Smartypants, what is the alternative?”  Until very recently, the only documented alternative herbicide a dedicated organic gardener had to dreaded chemical herbicides was a garden hoe and a strong back.

We’re afraid you are still going to have to keep the hoe handy, as well as the strong back, but help is on the way.

The USDA has made note of a strong body of anecdotal evidence and has, within the past half-decade or so, begun some intensive studies of a potentially effective and surprisingly cheap organic alternative to commercial herbicides.  More than likely, you even have a diluted version of this wonder substance in your kitchen right now.  A 20% acetic acid concentration of plain ol’ vinegar has been proven in several clinical trials to be quite effective as a weed killer.

There are several caveats, of course.  For one thing, vinegar affects some weed species more adversely than others.  An application of between 80 and 160 gallons per acre proved to have 96% overall effectiveness in killing weeds, but the solution proved more effective against broadleaf weeds than against grasses.  For overall effectiveness including against grassy weeds, the concentration has to be high enough (in the 80 to 160 gallons per acre range) that broadcast applications during the growing season are contraindicated.

Lower concentrations, as little as 20 gallons per acre, would still be effective against broadleaf weeds, but not against grassy weeds.  In short, if you have crops in the ground, and you don’t want to use a nasty, disgusting, not-enough-reviled herbicide, your only alternative for removing weeds is still to get down on your hands and knees and yank the things out by the roots.

As you may recall, too, at Myrtle’s place we have all along been less concerned with weeds than have other gardeners.  We call weeds “hay” because they are as good as cash when it comes to the production of healthy chickens.  However, the fact remains that weeds in your fruit and vegetable garden reduce the yield of produce.  The chief advantage of vinegar is that it is a very targeted herbicide which can be applied with pinpoint accuracy and without damaging, or even altering, the pH or any other characteristic of the surrounding topsoil. 

By nature, if it runs off, it will be more dilute and therefore less impactful.  It is a natural substance which you can find (especially in our yard) wherever there are naturally occuring sources of decay.  Wild grapes, for example, are an excellent source of naturally occuring vinegar, and sure enough, if you look beneath a tree which hosts a mustang grape vine, you will find fewer weeds if you search through the purplish muck where the wild birds have feasted on fallen grapes.

A couple of other interesting notes from the studies (there have been several, and more are on the way):

• Adjuvants have been studied, and there are several which agricultural scientists thought were likely to be helpful, but the most promising additive is orange oil.
  
• No studies have yet been done with lower concentration vinegars such as one might find in your local grocery store; most are in the 5% acetic acid concentration range.  Simple math suggests that using four times as much vinegar at this lower concentration would be the equivalent of using 20% concentration vinegar; however, proceed at your own caution because they do studies for a reason.  Sometimes unpredictable things happen.
  
• Application to weeds on top of an active onion crop proved successful at weed control, but at higher concentrations of vinegar, crop damage and loss was significant.
  
• Crop yield studies are still underway; the most promising scenario so far seems to be the use of cover crops for winter weed management followed by vinegar application prior to spring planting with a “dead period” prior to seeding in order to allow the concentration to be naturally mitigated.

We at Myrtle’s will soon be undertaking our own trials, though we will be limited by several factors.  For starters our measurements will be undertaken with several limitations, not the least of which will be having to take the manufacturer’s word for it on acidity levels – we’ll report on usage with what’s on the bottle.  We could go out and buy some litmus paper, we suppose, but hey, we’re cheap.

We are going to start with an application to the weeds growing in our gravel driveway.   We will report on the approximate coverage of this space by weeds, give a rough breakdown of types, and an analysis of how thoroughly and how quickly they are reduced by the application of ordinary household vinegar.

Once we have dismantled the raised beds where this spring’s crops were planted, we will dig a wide-row/furrow system in our back yard, with a raised clay berm demarcating the border where our fence will eventually go.  This is the ever-exciting Phase I of a multi-phase project we will tell you more about as we get into it; the important thing to note here is that much of the space is currently covered by both grassy and broadleafed weeds, and this area will require a much more significant application of vinegar in order to kill off the existing foliage before fall planting, which starts in about three weeks.

Since this fall’s planting will be heavy on seeded rather than transplanted crops, the potency of the application will be a fascinating concern – are we dooming ourselves from the start this fall, or are we guaranteeing success?

Only time will tell.  Either way, we’re so excited we could pinch ourselves!

Happy farming!