Spring in the Hill Country This is the height of spring in the Hill Country of Texas.  Everything is in bloom, from fields of bluebonnets to fruit trees.  Even our pecan tree is dangling its pollen clusters.  In the garden, our herb and wildflower corner is in full swing.  We have daisies, poppies, irises, the mint is spreading, our thyme is nearly three times the size it was last year and covered in tiny purple flowers.  Our grapevines are blooming, the pears and peaches are starting to form fruit, and the figs are leafing out.   The back hillside is covered in purple verbena. Of course, all of this amazing growth means that all the weeds and grasses are growing fast too.  Paths are disappearing under a sea of green which encroaches on the garden from all directions.  The last of the winter crops are quickly going to seed.  (Funny that phrase, ‘gone to seed.’  One might use it to mean, ‘not looking one’s best’,  ‘Past one’s prime’  The thing is, when a plant actually goes to seed, that is being pregnant, bringing new life.  That’s not ‘past one’s prime, its a glorious and amazing miracle.  Yet our fear of death and worship of youth leads us to denigrate the whole idea and turn it into an insult.  Too bad we can’t praise the whole cycle of life). With the winter garden providing a fruitful harvest, it is now time to start planting the seeds of spring.  We will have a garden full of cowpeas, okra, peppers, tomatoes and sweet potatoes.  Its going to be a tasty season! In the meantime, here are some images of the garden and ranch from this beautiful...

Bed Solarization for Root Knot Nematodes I harvested a second bed of beets this week.  The harvest, weighing in at 15 pounds of beets, was much better than the last, but I did see considerable evidence of root not nematodes.  This bed, which we call the Blood Bed (we have every bed named for ease of reference) is on the other side of the garden from the last beet bed, and so I have decided to use a different method to manage the nematodes here than I am on the other side.  While I am planting french marigolds over there, I have decided to try bed solarization on this side. Bed solarization might be an extreme method (although well short of chemical soil saturation, a method sometimes used on non-organic commercial farms).  In this method, the bed will be fallow for several months.  In addition, the bed is soaked with water before being covered in a sheet of plastic to trap in moisture and increase soil temperatures.  I have basically created a wet hot sauna out of the bed.  This essentially pasteurizes the top layer of the soil and is a recommended by Texas A&M.  Now, they recommend that I do this in the heat of summer, but I want to have this bed available for sweet potatoes in June, so I am going to give it a try over the spring/early summer months here in Central Texas.  We already have temperatures in the eighties, and this bed is in full sun all day.  I think it will do the trick. I look forward to seeing how the future sweet potato crops do in the two differently treated beds. To treat this bed, I first removed all vegetation, harvesting the beet crop and clearing any weeds that had made it through the season.  I then cultivated the soil down to about 6 inches with a wide toothed rack, and applied blood meal (a nitrogen only fertilizer, our last soil test revealed that we have extremely high levels of phosphorous in the soil probably due to over application of cow and turkey manure compost, so we can use a regular fertilizer without exacerbating the problem). Then I racked this all in with a thin toothed rack, and finally swept the bed (yes I to a broom to the earth) to make the bed flat and clean off the edges.  Then I used the hose from our well (I didn’t want to use the yummy rainwater in our barrels for this) and soaked the bed.  Finally, I spread a 3 mil transparent plastic (painter’s supply) over the bed and secured it. The bed will stay this way, slowly stewing in the...

Carrot Harvest I am pretty happy with the first major carrot harvest of this season.  I am taking out one bed at a time so that I have the time to clean and process all of the food before it ages and wilts too much.  We took a total of 14 pounds of carrots from our stone bed. There was a bit of difference in size on many of the carrots, but that was to be expected.  This year I had planted the bed once, and then I came back in several weeks later to reseed any place that had not filled in from the first planting.  With a major harvest like this where I am clearing the whole bed, I ended up clearing out both generations of plantings, so I had some quite full large carrots and some little wee ones. There did not seem to be too much evidence of root knot nematodes in this bed, as there had been with the one next door where we had grown beets.  I am still concerned about the bed, however, and since I plan to plant sweet potatoes in there which don’t go into the ground until June, I am going to clear the bed and seed it with French marigolds.  Apparently growing french marigolds can help control root knot nematode populations because the little buggers cannot grow in the roots of this plant.  (The Marigold roots actually produce a chemical poisonous to them)  If I keep the bed weed free while the marigolds bloom, that should cover the lifespan of a couple of generations and do a serious dent to their populations.  (dare I hope, eliminate it?) If you are interested in more reading on the critters, this is a pretty good scientific article by The American Phytopathology Society. In the Studio I am also gearing up for my first ever art festival.  I will be taking my work to the Wimberley Valley Arts Festival in April, along with some 86 other artists in all genres from around the country.  I am busy figuring out how to set up my little 10′ x 10′ tent and how to run a successful festival shop.  Of course, I am also working on the art itself, and here is a preview of one of my current works. You can see more of my art on my artist...

A Week Away So this week I took an opportunity to get away from the ranch for a while.  I headed down to Florida to spend some time with my parents and generally pretend to be retired with them.  There were games of putt-putt and scrabble, although sadly shuffle board did not make the list this year!  Spring breakers and alligators where both observed in their natural habitats.  Many wonderful stories from the past were exchanged, and it was all in all a great escape from the usual. Back at the ranch now, its time to kick it into gear for the transition from the winter to the spring garden.  I am putting together a succession schedule, so that each bed will be harvested and replanted over the course of the next several weeks.    I have also re-grouped on several more major projects, recognizing that they must now go on hold, as the transition will demand most of my time for about a solid month. Back to news of the ranch next week.  Meanwhile, here are some highlights from my...

The Harvest Begins Buds are starting to show on the trees and spring is exploding at us here on the ranch.  Its still cold at night, and we may not yet be done with the freezing weather, but the change from the winter garden to the spring garden has begun in earnest.  Over the next several weeks we will be focusing on harvesting each bed, preserving the harvest, and planting the new season of plants. This week we started with a bed of beets.  The harvest was actually pretty disappointing.   We took out only three pounds of  beets from a bed with about 40 linear feet of planting.  We did can an additional 4 pints of greens, but the return was still quite small.  The problem appears to have been root knot nematodes, as many of the full beet tops revealed stringing under-roots knotted and bulby from their action. We are starting to treat the bed by planting french marigolds (nematodes can’t live in their roots)  and then we will also solarize the bed once it warms up a bit. Cat in the Wild I know that my obsession with my wild cats is probably a bit annoying to non-cat lovers, but when they look like this I simply can’t resist it.  Our two cats were raised to be outdoor cats, and I find observing their behavior to be absolutely fascinating.   It always makes me wonder what humans might be like without all the domestication.  These cats run up the hill to greet me, climb trees, burrow into piles of fallen branches tracking unknown animals in the brambles.  What would we do as humans in the wild.  How are our bodies meant to move in the wild?  How would our senses alter? There is a whole movement developing these days to look at this idea.  Natural Movement Fitness encourages and trains people to reclaim their nature.  They have a lot of fascinating ideas, and I really enjoy reading their newsletters.  Check them out. Planting Begins We started the spring season off by planting potatoes.  We will be trying to do a pair of potato towers this year, adding mulch, compost, and soil as the potatoes grow so that the spuds rise up a vertical tower.  The desired result is that we can get more potatoes out of the harvest with less space.  We shall see in a few months.  Fingers...

The Closet I am only two weeks over schedule, but finally the closet is complete and I have been able to move my stuff back in.  We have not yet put the doors on, as we are having them specially ordered to fit the space.  They will be double swinging doors so the whole closet can be opened and accessed at once. The process of building the closet was pretty challenging for me.  This was my first construction project, and I learned to use the mitar saw, and how to do a wood glue and screw combination, but the real learning came from the challenge to have confidence, to trust myself and my instincts, as the plans I created for the closet collided with reality. It is an interesting and powerful skill to have the confidence, perception, and flexibility to allow the plan to change when it needs to.  We often set paths for ourselves, declare some far off destination, and set off on our journey.  But the journey is never exactly what we anticipate. If we continue to drive forward on our intended path, and not work with the realities that present themselves to us, we encounter frustration and even failure.  If we can have the presence and the flexibility to change our plans, however, that can lead to great insight and inspiration. I had a teacher, Daniel Stien, who taught this lesson as a part of a creating new work class.  He would talk about pushing really hard against a locked door trying to find a way out of a room.  We can pound and beat on the door, but it will remain locked.  As long as we are rigid with ourselves, we never relax and step back and get perspective and see the hallway just beside it. So, I set a plan for this closet, but the realities of three dimensional space differ from the fantastical images in my head (and on the paper).  It took some struggle for me to shift from trying to force my plan into the space to improvising with what the space actually presented me with.  In the end, I think that I ended with a final product that is much better than my...