April 21, 2016

Good morning, this coming Saturday will be the Earth Day celebration on Murphy Street.  The Alpine Earth Day Celebration was started by the Conservation Biology Club on Sul Ross Campus. Originally it was held at Kokernott Lodge. Several years back it was moved to Murphy Street. This seemed to be the catalyst to make this event grow and it has every year since it has been held on Murphy Street! This year the Conservation Biology Club was not going to be able to organize the Earth Day event. It looked like it might not happen. Through the efforts of many people and the Keep Alpine Beautiful folks (Patsy McWilliams), there will be a show this year. With the advent of Keep Alpine Beautiful taking over the organizing of Earth Day, this celebration could very easily become a city wide event. How cool could that be? I so look forward to Earth Day and I hope everyone can come out for the festivities. Earth Day will start with the Farmers Market and continue into the Afternoon. A GRAND time is expected to be had by all!!!

Since the gentleman that would bring me compost material on a regular basis retired, I have been a little more creative on the fertility thing. I have tried some of the brewery leavings but neglected to do a really good job of fencing out the chickens. Even more so than with greens chickens think grain is mana from heaven. They put a lot of effort into making access. I still think this has great potential that I will explore in the future.

Down the road from me going towards the recycle yard a gentleman has piled some horse stall manure. It is not fresh but is for the most part pulverized and blends with my chicken poop quite well. The pile heats up but not as hot as I would like so I may have to use more chicken manure than the 50 /50 blend that I used. What I am a little concerned about is the amount of seed that might germinate from the horse manure. This will be interesting.

When I had an almost unlimited supply of compost I would be able to incorporate 2 to 3 inches into the bed when crops finished and then I could use a couple inches to mulch the succession plantings with. I do not mulch much in the winter because I want the soil to get as warm as it can. Mulch would prevent this from happening.  

On the other hand as we advance through spring towards the angry months of May and June, mulching becomes mandatory.  This time of year provides extremely low humidity and some of the year’s hottest temperatures. Without mulch even with the covers over the beds, evaporation and transpiration can really draw down the available moisture that plants can use. Given the option of adding compost to the soil or having surface mulch for the plants, the mulch wins hands down. Besides at a later date it is incorporated into the bed. In this way it does double duty.

Ever since I started the garden I have turned the beds with a shovel. Besides aerating and loosening the soil I can remove rocks too. I still do this if I am going to use transplants. I have begun to experiment with swivel hoeing the top 2 to 3 inches so that a very nice seed bed can be raked out. Since I use a shovel to turn my beds this is a fairly quick alternative and I have not seen any problems doing this.

Something very interesting is happening with my sun choke bed. When I first planted this bed the soil depth was maybe 8 to 12 inches and the chokes remained in the top 4 to 6 inches. It remained this depth for the time that I hose end watered. I suspect this this is the depth that my watering penetrated. Since I started using the drip system the hard pan is being chipped away and chokes are now down to 18 inches. When I dug the sun chokes this year there were countless numbers that looked like they had been flattened by a freight train. What was happening is the tuber root sprouts would find a crack. As the tuber expanded the rook would be pried apart. If it wasn’t for the fact that I would be hard pressed to remove ALL of the sun chokes tubers, this would be such a great way to get more soil depth in my garden. There are areas in the garden that is shallower than 6 inches. Who knows someday I might be able to rip the beds. Cleaning all the rock out may be an appropriate use for enhanced vocabulary usage. Having the added soil depth would be real nice. I wonder what that would do for crop production. Last year these inadequacies were demonstrated when I planted okra in one of my beds. On one end there was 18 inches of soil and at the other end maybe 6. At the deep end the okra was 12 feet tall and at the shallow end maybe 5 feet. When I pulled the plants last fall the roots at the shallow end took on two forms: an “L” shape where the root followed the hard pan or an inverted mushroom look. The sun choke could help with this but I do not think I want that can of worms!!

I mentioned awhile back that my early plantings will make it to maturity as long as I do not do something stupid. I should know by now that the morning after a cold front clears can be a very cold morning.  I should also know about convection freezes when the night is clear and it is dead calm.

The precipitation from this past storm was extremely light so I uncovered some beds to take advantage of this moisture. Light rains wick off to the sides of the fabric and thus do not penetrate the fabric. The wind picked up in the evening. So I left them uncovered, after all the predicted temp was to be in the 40’s. I should have expected a chilling with clearing skies. The first thing I do when I get up is to check the temp. This can wake me up better than a cup of coffee. It was 39 and a perfect convection freeze zone! When I did get out in the garden, the flat on the ground fabric was covered with a light frost. I did not feel any ice on the leaves, but my plants were immediately covered. This was at 3 AM and it seemed like an eternity to sunrise. The damage will be quickly apparent as soon as the sun rises and the air warms so the covers can be removed.

Deb thinks I am a worry wort, she might be right. Who knows I may have covered everything just in time or maybe nothing would have happened. I still think it was prudent to cover. ALL is well!

It is so exciting in the garden: the tomatoes are sizing up (a couple 2 to 3 inchers)  and maybe the harvest will start the first of May, Beans are blooming crazy with some small beans, blossoms forming on the eggplants and chili’s, and last but not least the summer squash harvest has begun!!!! We are still a month or better for okra and cucumbers. The Garlic is bulbing so there will be some soon. Such a wonderful time in the garden!!! 

I anticipate harvesting: chard, kale, lettuce, green onions, carrots, beets, squash, and snow peas. Please email for availability.