We got green. The garden is growing well and everything is in bloom. The cucumbers have bright yellow flowers, the squash a yellow-orange bloom that should open in a few days. Today, Luci picked one radish, a few dragon beans and a big pile of Mustard greens. Normally I wouldn't touch mustard greens with a ten-foot pole, but the way she cooks them and the fact that they're fresh from the garden...I have to admit, they were pretty good.

As you can see from the photo we have tons growing in the garden, including a fair crop of weeds and grass. Since this area was covered in thick grass when we started, I am not surprised. When I tilled, I went back over and over the same area. Each time I would try to rake and pick out more big thick grass roots and leave the rest drying out in the hot sun to die. We removed tons, but I don't think we got nearly enough.

As Luci planted each row she gave the dirt a final picking over. Now we have a lot more growing from seed than from root. The grass growing from seed is small and easy to pull out. I think that if we make the garden constantly in the same spot we can reduce the amount of grass growing by tilling several times a year. I also plan on chucking the chickens into the garden right before and right after I till to munch on the weeds that are in there.Trying to weed the garden is probably the hardest part of the process. It is just so hot here. You step outside and are instantly covered in sweat. I will try again in the morning after I take the kids to school.

I posted a layout of our garden for this year. We think putting the sunflowers at the bottom of the slope was good idea because they get tons of water. Next year if we don't have a separate patch for corn, then the corn will go at the bottom next time.

No roots, no life

Came home to find that the roots of two of the pole beans have been munched away by some type of critter. Desperate to fix this--I can't watch as something eats my garden. We have invested way to much work in it to see it destroyed.

This seems to be one of the big problems for the beginning gardener: either not sure what's eating stuff, or just not sure what to do about it. We think it may be cutworms so I am going to look for a solution on-line.

The world needs ditch diggers too

Now I know why my father always said the world needs ditch diggers too. This would come up when ever my grades were bad (which was pretty much all four years of high school). I remember thinking "What the hell for?"

Well. Now I know. Probably people who grow up on dirt roads know the importance of a good drainage ditch, but personally I didn't realize that ditches were not a natural occurrence.

I have begun to see the need for good drainage. The last few rains in Tyler County have been like freakin' monsoons. During this last torrential flood, the branch that runs through parts of property was more flooded than I have ever seen it before. The water is normally three feet wide and six inches to maybe two feet deep. Two days ago, the water was up to twenty feet wide in some of the flatter places.

The massive amounts of water are taking a toll on the road. Sections of dirt are coming loose and washing down the road. The problem is that through the years, the ruts that we drive on have become lower and lower until they are little channels that the water can't get out of. Worse, the side that should be higher isn't, so the water is not running down the hill towards the branch anywhere except one spot right in front of the cattle guard at the house. The water has cut a hole right in the road that goes under and across. If left alone, that section of road may just turn into a huge sink hole.

I had to do a little maintenance.

Most people out here use a tractor to keep their roads going, but right now I am a pick-and-shovel guy. I can't emphasize enough to buy a good pick and shovel...spend the extra money, it will be worth it.

In order to get the water off the road I had to cut a small opening on the lower side so that the water can flow down the hill. In order to get the water from the other rut to flow the right direction, I made a small berm, kinda like a big speed bump or dam right before the ditch so the water will hit it and be forced to flow off the road. I made three of them, one at each spot where it starts to change height. I am hoping that I will have few days for it to dry up before it rains again. To make the berm I used big clumps of grassy dirt with thick roots to help bind it together, but without time to pack it down, it may just all wash away.

Someday we will re-cover the road with gravel or concrete wash, which is little hunks of concrete that they wash out of mixing trucks. Right now we're just hoping the road doesn't just turn into one big sloppy mud puddle.

The power of time

So after a bunch of digging and sweating we are starting to see a little progress. Everything in the garden is coming up really fast. We have only had to water every couple of days as the rain and sun have been taking turns.

Most of the tomato plants have small tomatoes starting to appear. Now that they have fruit we have to start supporting them. We have twelve tomato cages; for the rest we drove old PVC into the ground. Tomorrow we have to get out and tie the plants to the PVC to support them. We will use the bright pink flagging tape that we had left over from marking trees not to be cut during the logging.

Tomorrow, we are going to pick some mustard greens to eat with dinner. My youngest loves mustard greens with hot vinegar sauce. Yeah, I know its a weird thing for a four-year-old to eat, but when we go to the Pickett House to eat lunch she will eat at least one whole bowl, sometimes two. The kids will be so excited to eat from the garden. Plates are always emptied faster when they know they helped grow what's for dinner.

Luci and I like to garden for different reasons. It appeals to her because of the whole "magic of nature" thing. It appeals to the "cheap bastard" side of me. Like, why would I want to pay 79 cents for a bell pepper when they grow right out the ground. Money doesn't grow on trees, but some of the crap we buy does, so let's get us some of those trees. That is what we are real goal is out here: to grow as much as we can for us to eat. Kinda like a 401k plan, the best time to invest is always now. Even if maybe you could find a better investment choice, the power of time can't be beat. Hopefully, next year we can get more fruit and nut trees planted. This year was figs and raspberries; Luci is talking about cherry and peach trees for next year.

There is a website about homesteading in Houston that I like, just click on this link--they live in the inner city: http://www.orchardchronicles.com/. I get the impression that they are doing the kind of thing we would like to do someday. The idea of having a high-density home orchard is interesting. I don't think we would ever want to make a living from agriculture, just to grow enough to supply us with fresh quality fruits and veggies with leftovers for family, friends and a little barter. The real plus for growing our own is that we know exactly what's going on and into it--we are in control of pesticides, organics, etc. Because face it, the end result is that it goes into the bellies of our daughters.

First wild berries of the Year

Living out here in the middle of nowhere can be a pain in the ass sometimes. The drive to town takes twenty minutes, rain means muddy sloppy roads, and don't even get me started on the unbelievable number of bugs.

There is an upside though. Today driving home from my kid's preschool, we took a long slow drive down the muddy sloppy dirt road. As we drove along, she was looking out the window. When she saw a wildflower she wanted, I would get out the car and pick it for her. She was making a bouquet for my wife. Along the way, she would keep an eye out for the bright red unripe dewberries that grow wild all over here. Somewhere among them I could find one or two that had become ripe and she could eat them straight off the vine.

If we still lived in Las Vegas, the ride home would be us sitting in traffic for a half-hour on West Sahara.

Our blueberry bushes have finally gotten a few berries. In between the rains, I water them with the rainwater I have been collecting. The owners of the blueberry farm we go to told me that what I needed was lots and lots of water, so I have been trying to keep them really wet this year.

We have had a lot of these moments, driving home from school or grandma's house.

Once we stopped right at the mailbox at the turnoff to our house--that's where we turn off the (dirt) county road and head down our own (dirt) road--and there was a big turtle in front of us. The kids and I got out and walked over to take a look. We see small turtles quite often, but this one's shell was about the size of a large dinner plate. When we walked up to the turtle, he didn't move or tuck his head inside. He didn't act scared at all. My older daughter hunkered down and got pretty close to it. She looked up and asked if she could feel its shell. I told her sure, just pet its back, away from its head. Well, as God as my witness, I was under the impression that turtles are slow. That thing whipped around and snapped at her so fast I couldn't believe it. I nearly kicked the thing into the ditch to keep her from getting bitten, but she pulled her hand away just in time. I guess that's why it wasn't scared. It knew something that I didn't know.

Just goes to show you that, here in the country, I always find that what I think I know is totally wrong. But don't tell my wife.

See the forest through the timber

When we moved in, most of the land around us was either pasture land for cows or unmanaged forest. We will never have a herd. I just don't see us having a the time or energy to fix all the fence, clear all the land, and take care of all the cattle. Besides, you can't really make money with cows anymore unless you have room for thousands and thousands of 'em.

We moved into our farm about four months before Hurricane Rita hit. That particular storm did a horrible number on our trees--we sustained major damage to a big percentage of our trees, both hardwoods and pines. What didn't fall over from the wind was snapped by the tornado spinoffs. So a few months after that, to prevent the damaged trees from getting infested with bugs in their weakened state, we had our place logged and replanted including planting over the pastures. Our place was done by a professional timber management company called Parker Forestry Consultants.

They start by logging the areas that have marketable timber. The land between our dirt road and the branch that runs along the edge of the property was heavily wooded and that is where most of the timber came from. This was tough for my wife because she grew up here and had played in those woods as a kid. They do let you mark any trees you wish to keep, but you can grow 15-20 pines in the area that one oak or beech tree might take.

The back ten acres of our place is covered with what they call "pasture pine". That's where pine trees have grown up in a field without being properly planted or thinned. They are close together and will grow slow and small, and won't get much bang for the buck. Although I recently put an ad on craigslist and it seems I might be able to get it cleared even if we can't get any money for the trees.

I had expected that the day they were going to start I would see a bunch of dudes with chainsaws, but that was not to be. The loggers came with a huge cutting machine that would grab the tree, cut it and then they could move a hundred-foot pine tree while it is still straight up in the air. It didn't take long.

Afterwards a couple of guys came out with small bulldozers and couple of gallons of gasoline. I remember driving out that morning and it was like driving through a forest fire. They cut fire breaks around everything with the dozers and torched everything: stumps, rotted logs, etc. They even knocked down an old camp house for us and torched it too.

They spent a few days driving around on 4 wheelers making sure that the fire wasn't spreading outside the fire breaks, and in the end the land looked like there had been a war. They left two trees we had flagged, and they left about twenty feet of timber on each side of the creeks (I am not sure why but they weren't allowed to cut it), and they left the huge trees right around the house. The ones by the house they had to leave because their insurance doesn't cover the logging company if they are within 150 feet of the house.

All of that happened in October of 2005, and by February of the next year they were ready to plant. It went much quicker than expected. In a few days, eighty acres was freshly planted in neat rows about six feet apart. They had tried to use a machine to plant the pasture land, but the machine got stuck--three times--so they gave up on the machine and instead brought a crew of about five guys who walked around with big tree-backpacks planting their seedlings. It was like Johnny Appleseed, but with pines. Then they sprayed each sapling to keep all the other stuff from growing around it. The land looked polka-dotted. I wish I had an arial photo from those couple of weeks.

Now we are cooking with gas. A slow, long-burning gas that takes twenty years to cook up a crop a trees. Growing managed trees on places like ours gives timber companies a place to get trees besides public land and old-growth forests. This is how we got a goverment grant to cover some of the cost of replanting.

The U.S. goverment established this grant system to encourage rural landowners like us to replant their land with timber. They paid 75% of the cost replanting the previously forested areas and 50% of the cost of planting the pasture lands. The nice thing about this is they have an interest in making sure it grows well. For the first year or two a guy from the Natural Resource Conservation Service would come by out here once a month checking on the little fellows.

They have been growing for a few years and it will be long time before they are ready to cut again. In a few years they should be pretty again and, as the trees choke out the grass and weeds, it will make the property more enjoyable.

I spoke to a guy from the Forest Service a few days ago. They will be able to give us more ideas for use and conservation on our little plot o' dirt. I am interested in finding out more about the Carbon Credit program which is apparantly where you get paid for the trees breathing. This, I gotta hear.

I can almost taste 'em

The garden is growing well. I am not sure what is growing faster: the vegetables we planted or the weeds that were already there. Almost everything has survived the frost, the flooding rain and my inexperience. Only one row had nothing at all come up and I weeded that this afternoon so we can replant it on Sunday.

The tomatoes and pepper plants are at least twice the size that they were when we bought them. Maybe next year we will start some from seeds, but you have to start very early in the season in order to get them big enough to transplant on time.

I went up to the crumbling barn that lies along the edge of our property, and inside was a pile of sixteen-foot-long pieces of 3/4 inch pvc. This was a big score. I dragged a bunch out and now I can cut them into four-foot pieces to use as tomato stakes. Cages would be nice but there is no way we could fork out the cash. We might as well use whatever we can find around here. There is plenty of old junk we can use.

The sunflowers are at the very bottom of the garden in a mound along the fence. Being at the bottom, they get the most amount of water and have been growing fast. During the heavy rains that Tyler County got last weekend, they all got it hard. When it was over, we brushed the dirt off and stood each one up and tucked a leaf into the fence to support them. They have made a great comeback. These are extra special because our kids planted them and are very excited about them getting big. We will try to keep the seeds and dry them out for a tasty snack.

We're sticking to It

While some people get ideas from great literature or history, I got mine today from a stick.

Not uncommon for me.

Inside our garden we had originally laid out some soaker hoses. In order to get them to lay straight, we needed stakes to use as hose guides. I had taken my hatchet and cut off some branches from a a hurricane victim, a downed black walnut tree not far from the house.

Well, we had to give up on using the soaker hose because we couldn't afford to buy enough to cover all the rows. (That should give you an idea of how broke-ass we are.) We returned said hoses to Walmart, but left the stakes in place. Yesterday, we noticed that they were actually still growing. Not just one, but they all had little shoots of new growth. Weird, huh?


So today when I got home from work I went outside to water the garden. Of course I was outside for a while, because I found out that one of our ratcheting sprinklers doesn't ratchet any more. Itwas a few years old, so that loss was not too bad.

Anyway, I got my trusty hatchet. I love the hatchet. I just feel so woodsy when I am chopping stuff. I want a really nice one from Lee Valley tools, but they cost a ton. I hacked off a new branch from the walnut tree and trimed the bark off the bottom five or so inches. I filled a coffee container with a mix of regular dirt and potting soil and inserted said branch.

OK, I am well aware that this sounds ridiculous, but who knows, maybe it will actually grow. I know that for it to have any chance, it will need lots of water, maybe some fertilizer and probably a miracle.


Here's a picture of our lettuce from the container garden on the porch. Both of our girls ate it in their salad last night. They were balking at the prospect of a little rabbit food for dinner, but when we gave them the old "Hey, you helped grow this," their mouths were soon full of green stuff. If you're wondering, yes, that is a tub from an old washing machine.