February 26, 2015

Good morning, Next Tuesday In Marfa I have been asked to give a presentation on spring garden preparation. Due to an unforeseen circumstance I have also been asked to do a garden bug presentation.

I believe today is the cutoff day if you would like to attend. Follows is a dated anounceement but the contact info is correct.

Far West Texas Tri-Community Horticulture Program slated  for March 3

AgriLife Extension Program set in Marfa’s Hotel Paisano Ballroom

 

Writer: Steve Byrns, 325-653-4576, s-byrns@tamu.edu  

Contacts: Jesse Lea Schneider, 432-729-4746, jlschneider@ag.tamu.edu   

Logan Boswell, 432-837-6207, l-boswell@tamu.edu   

 

MARFA– The Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service will conduct the Tri-Community Horticulture Program from 8:30 a.m.- 4 p.m. March 3 in the Hotel Paisano Ballroom, 207 N. Highland St. in Marfa.

“With the temperatures bouncing from the 70s one day then plunging into the 30s the next, even our landscape plants are having trouble deciding what season it is,” said Jesse Lea Schneider, AgriLife Extension agent in Presidio County. “But as crazy as this winter has been weather-wise, one thing’s for sure and that’s spring will be here before you know it. With that in mind, the goal of this program is to ready our gardeners to take full advantage of what’s shaping up to be a wonderful gardening year.”

The tri-county effort is being conducted by the AgriLife Extension offices in Presidio and Brewster/Jeff Davis counties. Individual registration is $10 due upon arrival. RSVP by Feb. 26 by calling either the AgriLife Extension office in Presidio County at 432-729-4746, or in Brewster/Jeff Davis counties call 432-837-6207. More information is also available by calling those numbers.   

Topics and their presenters will include:

– Garden Protection: Spring Frost, April Wind, and May Heat!, Mark Foster, the “Dirt Farmer,” professional gardener, Alpine.

– Common Garden Pests: Whiteflies, Flea Beetles, Aphids, Earworms, OH MY!, 

– Tomato 101, Selection and Type, and Earth-Kind Practices, Denise Rodriguez, AgriLife Extension horticulturist, El Paso County.

– Ice Storm Tree Damage and Repair and Trans Pecos Champion Trees, Oscar Mestas, Texas A&M Forest Service, regional urban forester, El Paso.

Marfa Rainfall Regime and Estimating Wetting Depth And Moisture For A Given Rainstorm, Dr. Alyson McDonald, AgriLife Extension range specialist, Fort Stockton.

“We’ll end the day with an evaluation of the day’s proceedings,” Schneider said. “But for those who are interested, Oscar Mestas will present a live demonstration on how the Texas A&M Forest Service measures a champion tree, a practice they use when adding a tree to their Big Tree Registry program. The program locates and recognizes the largest known species of its kind that grows in Texas.”  

 This week I would like to start off with a quote from W. Edward Deming. “It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory” He was a very interesting fellow. Check him out

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming

Since moving to Alpine in 2003 I have been on a steep learning curve with Southwest arid gardening. It has been very challenging. I thought I was an experienced gardener before moving here. Was I ever naïve!!

I have tried to adapt to the environment instead trying to adapt it to me. The latter would be a very laborious with few if any rewards.

When I first moved here I thought I had gardened in an ARID climate. Central Oregon was only a lower case kind of arid. I have been humbled here. Especially when we had the angry months of May and June in the Spring of 2011. It is really hard to comprehend how difficult it is to keep plants alive and growing with 0 percent humidity and 100 degree heat. This is a formidable foe. No compromise. It is “its way or no way” kind of weather.

Luckily I had some learning years from 2003 up until the 2011 drought, this was very important. It took a few years of watching the seasonal weather changes and adapting planting schedules to help me adapt to this area. The growing season here is very different from anywhere else that I have lived. I feel one of the biggest adaptions for myself was to define the seasons and at what times of year these occur. This helped me to determine the best veggie varieties to plant or sow for the best likely out come. I have been reasonably successful at gardening in our ARID climate, but I feel there is so much more to learn.

Maybe because this is the first place where I have had a year round garden, but I have been acutely aware that no two years have been the same. This has been a real challenge in and of itself. I always have been a weather forecast watcher but even more so now. I have come to rely on two different weather sites that tend to be more accurate than others that I have followed. But probably just paying attention to what is actually happening on the “farm” is the most useful.

The use of agriculture fabric has really helped level this playing field. The use of this fabric, a drip irrigation system along with mulching the beds has helped with moisture retention.

The fabric has also been invaluable with pest control as an exclusion barrier. Yes I do remember my first years down here and discovering that there is a huge hoard of insects ready to help themselves to my offerings. I was clueless! A horn worm outbreak up in Central Oregon was one worm for the entire year! Oh what a rude awakening.

After 12 years of around the calendar growing I have been reasonably successful. I dare not get too cocky because Mother Nature could ever so easily pummel me with no remorse. Sooo the learning curve continues but maybe not as steep as it once was.

Mother Nature continues to have hissy fits. One week the weather is warm enough and garden gets ready to boogy and the next week is an ice water shower. I am getting succession plantings in. I hope that maturing will coincide with crops finishing. The transition months are always dicey. Nothing like a little spice for life. Sadly the cauliflower parsnips, asian greens, broccoli raab and broccoli are finished. Peas are blooming, beets are fattening up, can't keep the chard or kale down. Cabbage just might make, although I do not think the heads are very solid but still tasty. And the kohlrabi continues to enlarge. There still is 9 ft of sun chokes to go. Bags should have variety but if push comes to shove there may be duplicates.

February 19, 2015

Good morning, I hope this doesn't sound like a complaint but I do wish we would get a little bit of a dry spell. There is getting to be things I need to do in the garden but it is just too wet. I also realize that it will be dry soon and I will be eating my words. It was the neglect in January that allowed a caterpillar (species, there were thousands of them) to wreak havoc on some seedlings. I know that I have said that I do not do sowing s in December, but I was lulled into it by the wonderful weather clean up to Christmas, welll it was at that time it got real damp and cool. I must say I had a pretty good germination or at least until the critters hatched and got a tad bit hungry. Oh well, such is agriculture, live and learn!

Anyway when all else fails watch the fowl. Last year I mentioned that we had two guinea fowl just show up. One was purple and the other was the more traditional black with white dots. This has turned out to be a very interesting experience.

The drive for guineas to flock is quite strong but there are limits. They seemed to have joined right in with our 3 males, and the new birds were males too. A real stag party. I suspect different things would have happened if the new birds were females. Any way they all seemed to be quite happy to be a bird flock of five, but who knows why but four of the birds started picking on the purple bird.. It was an obvious ostracizing of this bird. It was chased , pecked and just plane picked on.

This went on for awhile when it finally decided to roost out side (this was a bad move) in one of our mulberry trees. It wasn't long before all five birds were roosting out side. After this happened it wasn't long before a great horned owl started cruising the property. It did scare the tar out of the birds. Nothing like a guinea alarm call in the middle of the night. Well I managed to heard them all to coop at 3 AM. Silly me, I am thinking “ that fixed the outside roosting thingy!” Not!! Well they all continued to roost outside when first the purple bird disappeared (must have been tasty) and then one of the white birds too. Being the Einsteins that they are they thought (? ) twice about this outside roosting thing and decided that they would join the chickens in the coop once again.

For what ever reason the two white birds started harassing the black and white bird and eventually this bird stopped hanging with the white birds. Now for something that is very interesting The black and white bird paired up with a barred rock chicken. These guys are inseparable. They are totally different species so no young can become of this relationship. What I see is they just like to hang with each other. The barred rock seems to have the better part of the deal because at the feeder, water “trough”,or at scratch time, the guinea chases all the other birds away so it can eat and drink to its heart content. This guinea has totally abandoned even thinking of cruising with the white birds. As far as I know these two birds roost side by side in the coop.

This is all very interesting to me. I look forward to the next chapter.

Yes the Bt I used to control the little brown caterpillars has worked quite well. I am seeing some of the spinach that was grazed back to the ground making a comeback. Time will tell if this was too little too late, because it is just about time for things to start warming up and it has just gotten to 12 hours of light . These two things could force the spinach to bolt.

It has been a real challenge with several crops this year from these little pesky root caterpillars to the harvester ants “harvesting” my cabbage, kohlrabi and kale seeds, the ice.....even with all that the garden is doing reasonably well. Things are being harvested faster than new veggies coming on line so we may be needing to duplicate veggies to fill bags. Hope this is not so, but it could happen.

February 12, 2015

Good morning, it has been several years now that we first got our “starter fowl”, the guinea's. The sole purpose for getting them was to control our grasshoppers. The year that we got them there was a huge grasshopper infestation. Once the guinea's were big enough to fend for themselves they quickly brought the hopper problem under control. At that time we also had female guineas. When we were lucky to find their nests, we would collect their eggs. Because of their food source these eggs had incredibly yellow yolks. We kinda liked having our own eggs.

Shortly on swapcycle there was a flock of bantams that came up for grabs. We made a chicken tractor with nest boxes for the hens. There were 7 birds and 2 were roosters. They were in a large enclosed area. We thought that the hens would prefer the nest boxes. Nope! they would lay anywhere but the tractor nest boxes. Fortunately the enclosure was several hundred square feet as opposed to 28 acres. This was the beginning of the “chicken channel”. What fun to watch them and there never were any reruns. It was nice having regular eggs. Unlike the guineas the chickens lay most of the year except when they are molting or it is the dead of winter. Not every one of the hens would stop egging so there was a reduced but constant supply..

So we thought “what the hay”, why not get some full sized chickens. Because we did not want to put the chickens in with the guineas, we built them a separate hen house. The separation of the fowl worked pretty good until we went free range and several of the hens wanted to roost in the guinea coop. I am not too sure what the guineas thought of this. The guineas were still pretty young birds and spent most of the day foraging and were not hanging in the barnyard. So not too much intermingling except at roost time. Well these hens laid eggs for a little over a year until their first molt, when egg production plummeted. This lasted until after they finished molting and the daylight increased. By this time we had 8 guineas, 6 bantams (one rooster was rehomed, we hoped) and 18 Rhode Island Reds. A total of 32 birds.

Later a friend's daughter was moving out of state and gave us her 16 hens and 3 ducks. Well we needed to add onto the hen house to make room. Over the course of time neighbors dogs killed all of the guinea hens. Some of the chicken hens would go missing or just wake up dead. Such is the life of agriculture.

Then this last year, some friends were moving away and asked if we would take their hens. We said sure and so became our full hen houses. I have not tallied lately but we have around 50 hens 3 roosters, 6 ducks and 3 guineas. In the peak of egging season we harvest 16 dozen a week. Even though we have a aging flock, egg production should pick up in the spring but over all quantities may diminish. Time will tell.

Well If we were real farmers we would cull the older birds during the winter slow down and have spring raised pullets egging through the winter. We are not real farmers!

The summer feed bill is somewhat less because there are greens and bugs to forage. Winter time the hens get all the culled greens from the garden and the occasional bug, but most of the feed is store bought. If we were to put a straight dollar value on the hens with only the egg perspective, our business model would not be a very good one. We might break even over the year. We could boost egg production by putting lights in the hen houses during the winter. I have always thought this move to be a nonstarter. Egg laying has to be a drain on the ladies. It is just not right to force them into production. I wonder how this act would age the birds along with what health consequences would come about. No, I think allowing the seasons to be what they are is just fine. Besides there are several side benefits other than just the egg thingy. They do create a wonderful firebreak, control bugs outside the garden, great source of entertainment, and of course manure for the garden. So when you put everything into perspective the fowl are a net gain.

Imagine my surprise when I woke up this morning to let the cat out. I can only look at the surprise of the cat as she did a “U” turn and headed back into the house. There was at least an inch of snow and it still was falling. I was expecting rain. It is interesting how Underground and NOAA seem to trade off getting the forecast right. Kudos to Underground this time.

I still have some harvesting to do, I suspect ther will a bit of a delay. If I can't there could be duplicates in the bag orders. This may have to happen soon anyway. I am finishing beds fairly quickly and new crops are being a bit slow to mature. This seems to happen every year but it is worth a heads up.

Peas are starting to bloom quite nicely so peas are not far behind. Lettuce is 3 to 4 inches wide. I suspect there are some beets. The boc choi is looking pretty good.

My first planting of toms this weekend is delayed but by the first of March they should be ready to out plant along with my other Solanaceae friends to be followed with all the other summer veggies. Gotta love fabric!!!

February 5, 2015

Good morning, Sorry for the delayed post. Our internet just came back around 12 noon..

Wellll what with all the moisture in January the garden has not really seen much of me. Some times it is good to cool ones “jets” and let gravity, breezes, and sunshine do their soil drying charm. Harvesting has been a bit of a challenge of late. At least Deb hasn't found me stuck up to my neck in mud......yet. This is the desert ...right? This too will change soon enough , so I embrace it with as much patience that I can muster.

Well any way I decided to right down how many vendors that we have at the market and list what items are sold. It really is an impressive list. I broke this master list into two lists. The regular as rain (by the way has been a bit so of late too) vendors and the ones I expect to see shortly as there is more warmth.

On the regular list there are usually around 20 vendors. The memory of just 3 or 4 vendors is still firmly in my memory. For the soon to return vendors there are an additional 9 vendors. Now for all the things we sell, it is an impressive list too. There are 30 different items with only a few items being repeated by vendors.

The thing that really surprised me, was the number of folks selling agriculture products. We are very close to where we could become a Texas Certified Farmers Market. This golden number is 51%.

Out of these 29 vendors there are 12 vendors selling agriculture products.. That puts us at 41%. Ten more points to go.

It would be nice to be a Farmers' Market in more than just name. This is not something that I am hung up about. If we did become certified as a Texas Farmers' Market, we would be placed on a list on the State farmers market web site. This is cool because someone wanting to come vacation in the Big Bend could find out about us before even getting here. Any advertising is good. I still dream of filling the courtyard with vendors and the spilling out on Murphy Street with eventually filling both east and west sides of 5^th street. This could happen!!

Becoming certified is on the wish list but growing the market is of greater importance. We welcome anyone to sell at market we like to keep it to items that are produced by yourself or a family member. There continues to be the rumor that everyone must pay a table fee. There is not. What we do request is that if you make $100 or more that you give a $10 donation to the market. This money goes toward, advertising, market improvements (like our wonderful shade structure), and monthly rent of the courtyard. So if you know of anyone that would like to join the market family have them call Mark or Deb at 432-837-0118.

And yes the garden is doing really nice, especially if we continue to get more sunshine and warmth. The cauliflower is starting to head along with the cabbages. The kohlrabi continues to bulb, they have been fairly irregular on sizing up. I am out of lettuce but a new transplants are looking good. Maybe a month out unless it warms a lot. New planting of carrots may be ready. Some green onions are looking pretty good and all of the newly transplanted onions have survived.

Because I have not been able to look under the fabric on a daily basis, I have found that under the covers some adversaries have been having a bit of a party. There were some caterpillars that devoured 70% of my spinach seedlings. Hand picking, cold pressed neem did not make a dent in them. I could not make a positive ID on them. To me they looked like they were caterpillars instead of grubs or maggots so out of a last resort I used some Bt. I am not seeing them anymore. Not the approach I like to take but it was the best info I had to work with. I will have spinach, just not as much as I would like. Saddly my second crop of broccoli rabb was hit by what I believe to be cut worms. I searched trough the soil and plants to no avail but it looks like the raab are too compromised. Such is organic agriculture. It has been a difficult year for several crops. I continue to evaluate what I did so that I can correct things for next year.