January 26, 2017

Good morning, I had written a Avalanche column for several years. I really enjoyed doing it. For me talking about gardening is almost as much fun as gardening. Deb would disagree with me on this.

One thing that I had hoped to get while doing the column were questions and / or a regular discourse from readers of the column. There was some but not very much.

Recently Deb set up a Facebook page for Red Wagon Farm. I plan to post to this site on a regular basis. Monday Morning will be my Facebook posting along with the same post going to the Red Wagon Farm blog. I have been posting both the Avalanche column and my Thursday missive for several years now to the Red Wagon Farm Blog site and have well over 5000 hits but only three comments. I am hoping with the Facebook format it will be much easier to get feed back. It is with great hope that this will give folks ideas and then the Facebook page can become a forum for Far West Texas veggie gardening. Everybody looks at this stuff from their own perspective and this can be very enlightening for everyone. I personally have gardened in many different parts of the country and where we reside is very unique. The seasons here do not necessarily coincide with typical seasons elsewhere. For example in a typical year our wet season is July, August, and September. This is when the rest of Texas is scorching hot.

I used to be a landscaper in Oregon and I had to work with, as I like to call them “horticulture delights”. This is any plant that is not commonly used as a food. My perspective on this changed when I had a customer request a 24,000 square foot lawn! Where I lived in Oregon was even drier than here with an average rainfall of a little over 10 inches. Residing at the 45 parallel the sun was not near as intense as it is in West Texas but a desert like environment non the less. This lawn really disgusted me, but as they say the customer is always right?

So it has come to pass that I feel with ever more constricted amounts of water to be used, growing food is a very good use of this resource. If I were to still be a landscaper I would most likely promote edible landscapes. There is a fair amount of info on the internet along with seed houses and nursery's that cater to edible landscapes..

Like with everything I write about, it is just a passage of information. It might work for would be gardeners or it may not but maybe some of this info can be adapted to their use.

So I hope to see folks join me on Facebook!! This past Monday was my first post. It deals with veggie appearance. Come Join the conversation!!!!

Once again another cold front arrives mid week so Wednesday was harvest day. I wanted to get everything harvested before the cold arrived. I also wanted to see how the cauliflower is doing. I see some starting to develop curd and those are well covered by the wrapper leaves. I am hoping that this and the extra covers will get them through this bit of weather.

It is very good to see the bag sales on the rise. The garden is picking up momentum as well. I feel that I should be able to fill all orders but in case I can't I will bill only for the portion I do fill.