Latest Dirt

Recent activities in the Charamon Garden:

• Planting onion sets
• Planting hard squash seeds (Blue Hubbard and Butternut)
• Mulching potatoes and tomatoes
• Replacing the filtering mechanism on the water well
• Placing drip irrigation lines and replacing broken emitters
• Installing weedblock in Bermuda grass infested beds

Garlic Harvest

Well, fellow-gardeners, this is what it’s all about! This is why we work to build the soil. This is why we pull the weeds: harvest!

For some unknown reason, my article, “The Garlic Lesson,” posted back in October has been the most popular of all my garden posts with some 868 on-site readers to date (big numbers for me) and growing in popularity. That lesson has served me well and produced a bountiful crop. This picture shows a small portion of it.

For the last two days, I have been digging up the garlic and man, is it beautiful! Of course there are some scrawny ones, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a healthier bunch of garlic heads. You know garlic is ready to harvest when the outer leaves turn yellow and some of it starts to lean over as you can see in this picture. Here in the wilds of West Texas, we begin harvest around the end of April.

I carefully dug up each bulb and placed it in a bucket of water for cleaning purposes. I have tried curing it both ways: unwashed and washed and I can’t tell any difference in quality or storage length. It just looks better washed and the wife likes it that way too.

Soon we will hang bunches of garlic in the storage shed for drying and curing. I have saved the biggest and best heads for seed. We hope to double our production in 2009.

In the meantime, eat your veggies…Nonnie and Pop said so!

The Fallacy of Fallow

Here in West Texas, we have some weeds that can be real enemies of the (es)state. In the Charamon Garden they are, in order of nuisance, Bermuda grass (great for lawns, terrible for gardens), Nut sedge, Bindweed, and a recent introduction I don’t know the name of…but it is a terrible little sticker. Some of these weeds have taken advantage of our absence and subsequent neglect in beds that were allowed to “lie fallow”…some of them for two years.

Six Lessons Learned from Gardening

All gardeners and potential gardeners need to read this great post by DoubleDanger.

Trickle, trickle, splash, splash

Here in the semi-desert of West Texas, we have to depend on irrigation.  The Charamon Garden is watered by infrequent rain and water from my well.  As I have mentioned in previous blogs, the water is not all that great.  It is full of minerals (gypsum mostly) and, at times, sand and clay.  The plants seem to thrive on it.  The major problem is not the water but the system used to deliver it: drip irrigation.

I never hook up my supply to the irrigation lines without having to clean one or more emitters.  This involves flushing the line by opening the end and then pulling the blue “flag” out of each clogged emitter, using the water that sprays out of the top to clean the emitter and replacing the flag.  A real pain in the…well, you know.   I plan to get my humongous filtration system up soon but, in the meantime, I am depending on the small filters at the head of each distribution manifold.  They filter out the sand easily enough, but the clay is finer than talcum powder and eventually clogs the emitters.

Today, I pulled the screens out of six filters, took them to the kitchen sink, plopped them in a bowl of warm water and detergent and rinsed them and scrubbed them with a brush resembling a test-tube brush.  It’s one of those chores that will be repeated over and over again during the dry season.  You might say it is one of those chores that screens out those who are not serious!

Filter screens and caps

Drip lines for eggplant sets.

In the meantime…eat your veggies!  Nonnie and Pop said so.

Is the Tomato a Fruit?

One of my sons (Number 2) was touring the Charamon Garden yesterday and I asked him what his favorite vegetable was.  Among those he mentioned was the tomato.  “But,” he added, “I guess tomatoes are technically a fruit.”  So what is a fruit and what is a vegetable?  Well, if you’ve played “20 Questions” on long trips you know that the first question is “Animal, vegetable or mineral?”  So a vegetable really is anything that uses photosynthesis to grow…plants.

When we say, at the end of most posts, “Eat your veggies…Nonnie and Pop say so!” we are talking about plants and fruits that you can eat.  Wickipedia agrees:

Normally, any herbaceous plant or plant part which is regularly eaten as food by humans would be considered to be a vegetable. Mushrooms, though belonging to the biological kingdom Fungi, are also generally considered vegetables in the retail industry.

Using that definition, all fruits are vegetables, but all vegetables are not necessarily fruits.

The term fruit has many different meanings depending on context. In botany, a fruit is the ripened ovary—together with seeds—of a flowering plant. In many species, the fruit incorporates the ripened ovary and the surrounding tissues. Fruits are the means by which flowering plants disseminate seeds (Wickipedia).

So, botanically speaking, the tomato is a fruit.  But, continuing to speak botanically, so are peppers, eggplants, okra pods, peas, beans, squash, cucumbers…to name a few we don’t generally consider fruit.  When we eat broccoli, cauliflower, and figs, we are eating the buds of blossoms.  Lettuce, collards, cabbage, spinach and chard are leaves.  Potatoes, carrots, parsnips, sun chokes and sweet potatoes are roots.  Garlic and onions are bulbs.  Asparagus, rhubarb and celery are stems.

So, eat your fruits, leaves, stems, bulbs and roots…Nonnie and Pop said so!

The Day After

The predicted freeze didn’t materialize. All the tomatoes are safe and sound. I have another eight in pots that we had considered selling but now will probably plant somewhere and try to sell the excess fruit. These are heirloom tomatoes so they are much more tasty, juicy and thin-skinned than the store-bought varieties. They’re even better than those produced by the plants you buy from the nursery. Number 1 and I will be working all day in Charamon Garden getting additional beds ready for eggplant, okra, beans, etc. First we will make a journey to Jackson Bros. Feed Store to get some Texas Greensand and cottonseed meal to bump up the fertility of the soil we began building ten years ago. Then it was what I call “proto-brick.” Now it is much more loose, filled with worms and other soil life. Building soil is a lifetime process here in West Texas. We never have enough compost or mulch…the soil rapidly consumes it all but increases in fertility in the process.

Later…Two beds cleaned and ready for planting, eggplant plants are in and a row of onions planted. Mission accomplished.

Freeze Predicted!

Dad told me so. He said, “If you hear thunder in February, there’ll be a freeze in April.”   Well, he may be  right. We did hear thunder in February and a frost is predicted for Friday night.  We thought we were safe down here in zone 7b. The tomatoes have been set out and caged. The potatoes are sprouting. Fruit has set on the peach and plum trees. Tiny little figs have appeared on both trees (more like bushes). It’s been a rather coolish spring but another freeze? Egads!

Another piece of fiction is the “Mesquite Tree” theory.  Local wisdom has it that when the mesquite trees begin to leaf out, the danger of frost is past.  I have seen this one fail also.

That’s West Texas for you. We are far enough south to have some balmy spring days but subject to cold fronts roaring out of Canada and down the plains. That’s because it’s all land between here and the Arctic Circle. If we had an ocean between us and the arctic, it would moderate the weather and we’d be growing citrus and relaxing under palm trees.

Thankfully, we have tomato plants in pots should our worst fears be realized. We will move them inside right before the scheduled freeze. It remains to be seen, however, (1) if the forecasters are right and (2) what will survive the frost.

In the meantime, eat your veggies (if they survive the frost)…Nonnie and Pop said so.

Well, well, well…what a bore!

The Charamon garden is watered from a well (or “bore”) we had drilled about nine years ago. I think I have mentioned in previous blogs that we suspect it was not cased all the way down and consequently get a lot of sand pumped up with the water. We hope someday this process will slow to a more acceptable level.

In the meantime, the grit plus the corrosive nature of our water causes a lot of wear and tear on the equipment. A couple of years ago we replaced the impellers on the submersible pump and it looks to be needing it again soon – or, in the worst case, a replacement of the whole pump. In the meantime, I’ve been getting a lot of air in the lines which causes another set of problems when you’re using drip irrigation as I am.

Add to this the fact that my PSI gauge is kaput. So, today I am making my usual Saturday trips to the hardware store first to buy a new check valve to stop air getting in the line and a new gauge to see what kind of pressure I’m getting from my tank.

If it is the usual kind of day, this will be the first trip of several as I discover additional problems.

All this has to be done rather urgently as we are getting close to the hot, dry summertime and irrigation is a must. The well is a blessing but it can be an expensive one.

In the meantime, eat your veggies…Nonnie and Pop said so!

We are thinking about selling our overflow veggies…especially winter ones. If you are in the Abilene, Texas area and would like to get on our mailing list so we can notify you about availability, send your name and email address to: dwight.whitsett@gmail.com

Slowly but Surely

I finally got all our potatoes in the ground yesterday. With so much going on in my work, I have had to steal time to do it. We have four varieties planted not only for the fun of it, but to see which ones we like best and grow the best.

We also got the tomato seedlings planted and caged. You could hardly call them seedlings…they were long and lanky and nearing two feet tall! We have nine set out and another back up group of eight in pots in case we get a late freeze.

Wow! There is so much more to be done! Bermuda grass infestation (you’ve heard of the Bermuda Triangle, have you not?) is slowing everything down. We are dealing with that monstrous weed as we go. Since we are not even trying for organic certification, we use one chemical, glysophate, to control the Bermuda. All the rest of our practices are strictly organic. I have nothing but sympathy for those who must control this introduced monster by hand in order to remain strictly and purely organic.

We still have many beds to prepare which involves cutting down the winter grass, amending the soil (cottonseed meal and Texas Greensand) and getting the seeds and sets in the ground. Vegetables and herbs yet to be planted are, squash (soft and hard), southern peas, okra, onions, leeks, corn, green beans, eggplant, basil, thyme, cilantro (coriander in Australia) and cucumbers. The broccoli, collards, kale and mustard greens are finished. The garlic is nearing harvest. The swiss chard (silverbeet in Australia) is going crazy. We are cutting increasing amounts of asparagus shoots as Spring progresses.

Fortunately, my son and daughter-in-law are able to help occasionally. Can we “git ‘er done?” Stay tuned.

In the meantime, eat your veggies…Nonnie and Pop said so!

We are thinking about selling our overflow veggies…especially winter ones. If you are in the Abilene, Texas area and would like to get on our mailing list so we can notify you about availability, send your name and email address to: dwight.whitsett@gmail.com