Faux Farming the Texas Gulf Coast
(Garden • )
I still draw a paycheck for local news reporting during the week, so sometimes my only opportunity to pretend to be a farmer is on Saturday morning. I find the hard physical labor amongst nature to be enjoyable, and I have said many times that I’d like to find a way to become a real farmer instead of just playing at one.
But then, being a real farmer isn’t just gardening on a large scale. Real farmers wrap up a significant portion of their net worth in this year’s crops. They are entrepreneurs taking big gambles on a regular basis that the weather will hold, the pestilences can be kept in check and the market demand will pay off for them at season’s end. Sometimes it works out. More than occasionally it does not.
As a play farmer, when one of my tiny home fruit crops fails to materialize, all it means is I have to buy something of inferior quality from the grocery store. Therefore I guess you could say fantasy has its advantages.
To see what this past Saturday’s faux farming involved, click the little photos for the full picture.
This Saturday I closed the books on the great maters-in-a-can experiment of 2006, when an onset of nematodes drove me to try to grow tomatoes in plastic garbage cans. It didn’t go well, but I think it might’ve, had I not failed to drill such tiny drainage holes in the bottoms of the cans.
I’ve been thinking about how much it’s costing me for water, and how much I use on the tropical plants and the vegetables. Rain barrels won’t provide a great solution for capturing the free water nature rains down on our roofs – but it’s a start.
So I glued those garbage can holes shut and repurposed the plastic containers.
Next, I checked on our two new pomegranate bushes, and found that out of at least a couple dozen flowers apiece, only two or three were making the conversion to fruit – but then, these plants have only been in the ground since last fall. The rear ends of the strangely shaped flowers begin swelling, if they’ve been pollinated and intend to become a fruit.
Meanwhile, several standard plumeria varieties are setting inflorescences (inflos) – more of them, and more quickly, than in years past. The one in the photo is called White Starfish.
Next year, with luck, some of the more difficult to find Thai varieties I’ve been growing from seed should be getting old enough that some will bloom. Plumerias require patience; seedlings often take three years or more of growing out before they can be coaxed to bloom
The blackberries are easier than that. Keep the old canes cut back, provide a little moisture now and then and they provide you with heavy crops for a good six years or more. Mine are trying to invade the main garden, and I’m thinking of transplanting the intruders onto the riverbanks below are yard. Their wild brethren grow there despite the occasional floods.
In the main garden, several of the tomato plants are nearly hoe-high – up to my chin, or probably 5 feet or more tall. I used to have good home-made tomato cages converted from what they call cattle panels around here, or what we called pig wire in Arkansas.
Even they wouldn’t be tall enough for some of these bad boys, which I estimate will easily grow to 8 or 10 feet if I can provide pole and twine sufficient for them to climb on.
The cherry tomatoes are beginning to ripen, but the big heirlooms look to need another two weeks before they start coloring up. We’ve been lucky so far and not been cursed with any particular insect plague, although judging from the number of tiny grasshoppers I’m already starting to find, that luck may not hold.
The purple flowers belong to a Mexican oregano bush, and the leaves taste as good as the flowers look. It’s not related to the “real” oregano herb, but tastes remarkably similar – except that it has extra zip, almost like Greek oregano sprinkled with black pepper.
The big job Saturday didn’t lend itself to photos, but involved a mulch experiment. With the temps hitting near 90 all week, it was apparent that it’s time to get mulch on the tomatoes, peppers and egg plants in order to retain moisture and keep the plants fruiting for a few weeks longer.
At the same time, several gargantuan ginger plants have been spreading across the back yard, eatting up valuable space that I’d rather use for something edible.
So I decided to kill two birds with one mulch, and have been cutting the ginger canes, stripping their big, long leaves and using them to mulch the vegetables. I reasoned (perhaps falsely, Lord knows I do that all the time) that since there are never bug bites in the ginger leaves, using them as mulch may discourage insects. Already I’ve seen one drawback: The ginger leaves are broad, and cover a lot of ground when fresh, but as they dry, they tend to curl. This means I’m probably going to have to recover the beds with another load of ginger. Live and learn.
→ B.Dunn, May 10, 2009, 09 28 am
