Green Beans In Paradise

by bdunn on January 24, 2012

in Uncategorized

This year I’m nearly two weeks late with my spring tomato seeds, having stuck them in the ground only on Saturday, along with some jalapeños, sweet peppers and Puerto Rican eggplants.

We took a quick trip to St. Croix, one of the U.S. Virgin Islands, which disrupted my usual spring seed plans. But it was worth it. Christiansted harbor at sunrise

If money were no object and I could pick any own homesteading location, St. Croix might be at the top of the list. With about 51,000 people on 84 square miles of land, Crucians enjoy what I would call a semi-rural tropical paradise with enough room for some cattle ranches, yet they import 95% or so of their food, and they could clearly use some vegetable farming.

We enjoyed awesome seafood, including locally caught mahi-mahi, tuna, scallops and langostinos the size of lobsters (minus the claws). But even at the best restaurants, the vegetable accompaniments were hilariously minimalist. The most delicious scallop dish I’ve ever had was to have come spread over a “bed of vegetables,” for instance, which turned out to be three handfuls of lettuce slices. St. Croix ExpresswayMost meals simply included no vegetable or salad. It’s not like we ever complained, because the seafood was so great you tended to forget everything else. However, I have to believe chefs and family cooks alike would pay good money for fresh vegetables – if they were available. And with maximum temperatures almost never reaching 90, and minimums never dropping below 70, you figure you could enjoy an extended harvest of tomatoes, peppers, beans, corn and squash given even average soil.

A couple of small farms were advertised on the two island maps we were able to obtain, and one day we drove our jeep up into the mountain rainforest to try to find them. Unfortunately, neither map was accurate, and road signs aren’t considered a necessity in STX. We never found the farms, but enjoyed some spectacular beaches and other scenery while briefly lost in the jungle.

Typical beach scene even on a Saturday afternoonSo could you really buy land and make your living selling herbs, veggies and tropical fruit to restaurants, hotels and groceries in the Virgin Islands? Nah, probably not without hitting the lottery. But with luck these guys might have a shot.

Back at the mundane old One Acre Ranch, we learned we’d missed a brief foray into the 30s, but since then it’s been in the high 60s here in the daytime, and so far winter hasn’t quite shown up. This has allowed me to finally cut down the top half of a big loquat that died from drought and disease over the past blasted summer.

And now, still waiting for the winter that isn’t, I find it’s time to prepare for a sly spring that may or may not already have arrived.

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Cluck-Cluck Henhouse Calling

by bdunn on January 18, 2012

in Critters, Farm, Texas

Believe it or not, I’d never been butt-dialed before, although my wife has so I knew what it was.Collect call from Foghorn Leghorn. Will you accept the charges?

Still, I was unprepared. When I answered my cell phone “This is Bob,” I heard a light, muffled almost-nothing in response. “Hello?” I asked, listening harder. It was faint, but unmistakable: I heard the gentle cluck-clucking of chickens, probably pecking for bugs in a field somewhere. “Hello? Anybody there?” I asked again. No one but us chickens, sunning ourselves in the January spring, thank you very much, buck-buck-buck.

Then it hit me. A woman down the street, from whom I bought eggs this year until the darker and colder weather caused her flock to stop laying, had called that morning. Her hens suddenly started laying again, perhaps concurrent to a spell of days in the 60s and 70s. So she wondered if I were in the market for eggs.

A few hours later, I was butt-dialed by the Chicken Lady.

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Whomped Hard Right In The Gully

by bdunn on January 9, 2012

in Nature

You forget what real smash-mouth rain looks like after a spring, summer and fall full of heat and drought and dry.

This morning we had our memories jogged: It looks like angry gray on darker greenish-gray with a visibility of about 20 feet and sheets of water dumping down, alternated with horizontal rain and down-drafts so powerful they throttle 100-year-old pecan trees like rag dolls and make the ground shake. Or was it Zeus flinging sparking lightning bolts down, once every three seconds, literally, during one stretch of time that seemed to last 20 minutes? Big, gut-wrenching booms close enough you could smell the sulfur in the air.

This started in earnest around 8:15 a.m. By 11, we had been blessed with at least 5.5 inches of rain, although I must say God has a scary way of blessing you sometimes. I say at least 5.5 inches because that’s all the rain gauge holds, and it was overflowing. My guess is that by the time it all stops, we will probably have received 7 inches, in perhaps four hours’ time. Not unprecedented hereabouts, but for sure at the upper end of a good gully whomper and more rain in one episode then we had all last summer.

Hope springs eternal and this spring will be no exception.

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Five Buck Banquet

January 5, 2012 Meat

While I certainly prefer that the animals I eat be raised on pasture instead of crammed into factory farms and inoculated with chemicals, the current realities of economics and availability dictate that I still buy most of the family’s meat in the grocery stores. That meat seems to have become noticeably more expensive, but yesterday [...]

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New Year, New Bank

January 2, 2012 Economics

For the first time in, like, a year, we’ve enjoyed adequate rain. It’s cool but well above freezing (except maybe tonight), and small effort has been required on the gardening front other than to sprinkle a little supplemental water on the newest rows of beets and spinach, while coaxing yet another salad from the various [...]

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The Luxury Of No Harvest

December 17, 2011 Fruit

Late-fall demands of nature have kept us busy down here on the One Acre Ranch, what with freezes and thaws and exposed water pipes and still probably a couple hundred tender tropical plants complaining of too much cold and then too hot and damp and then cold again. Yet I still find myself actually sitting [...]

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Snatching Supper From The Jaws Of Winter

December 7, 2011 Garden

Our first freeze of the year arrived last night, one night earlier than predicted by the weather guys but still anticipated well enough in advance that we harvested some good stuff from the garden before they got zapped. This included a couple dozen Jamaican Hot Chocolate habanero peppers, most showing plenty of green instead of [...]

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