Final Update of My Texas Winter Garden

Spinach and Radishes in Greenhouse

With my time in Texas coming to an end it is time to wrap up my cool season growing experiment.  Over all my results are definitive with the Lettuce, Spinach, Radish and Beets growing much better than the Lettuce and Spinach that was exposed to the elements.  The picture on the left shows how well the spinach and radishes grew in the greenhouse right before I harvested for a meal.  The salad I enjoyed was a simple spinach and lettuce mix with sliced radishes on top.


Texas Salad

With these results and the quality I enjoyed I am really looking foreword to the upcoming growing season where I will be growing more leafy greens and root vegetables like these and also many other plants yet to be decided on.  I will be starting over in a brand new garden space that has most likely never seen a shovel and will 'hopefully' provide a good base on which to grow enough food to feed me and my friends for a entire year. 

Cover Crops
My cover crops of Winter Rye and Hairy Vetch are doing better since my last update.  They have both put on about 1-3 inches of growth above ground.  This extra growth is exciting since it will have added even more biomass both above and below ground and will have fixed more nitrogen into the soil.  This addition of biomass increases the organic matter content in the soil and will help provide nutrients for future plants.  The final step to complete the use of cover crops is terminating the crop and incorporating it into the soil.


Cover Crop Bed- Pre-Cultivating

 To the left you will see a picture showing my Winter Rye and Hairy Vetch Cover Crop just before I dug it up.  Below is a picture depicting the bed after I dug the cover crop in.  Digging a cover crop in helps terminate the plants and its aids in the decomposition and release of the organic nutrients contained in the plants. 




Cover Crop Pest- Post-Cultivation

This winter was a learning experience for me as I delved into greenhouse gardening and tried to grow crops over the cool season time of year.  In retrospect I can find plenty of choices I would have made differently given the opportunity.  I would have used a thicker plastic and made better efforts to seal up the greenhouse right off the bat.  I also would have planted at greater densities so I would have more produce to enjoy before I head back to the wintry north. 



This year I begin a great experiment of trying to produce enough food to feed myself and three of my friends.  We shall be doing it at a place I like to call Learning Curve Gardens because what we are doing will require a steep learning curve for all of us.  The gardens will be a intensively managed all natural vegetable, fruit, meat and egg operation with the goal of growing enough food to feed us over the year and maybe even share with others in our local neighborhood.

I will hopefully be making regular posts (as time allows) about the garden and my activities on it as the summer progresses and will be sharing what I find about the this lifestyle experiment as I go along.  Updates will be posted on the Learning Curves Garden page found at the top of the blog.

Until next time my fellow environmentalists.

Josh 

             



Planting a Seed

In my quest to live a more sustainable, simpler life sometimes I envy the past generations who have lived on this Earth.  Their lives were sometimes harder, shorter and generally less pleasant.  But one could argue that the struggle of there lives a essential part of being human and alive.

We have many benefits and labor saving devices that they could only dream of and most of us take them for granted to be sure.  We have known nothing else in our lives and we just accept that's the way it should be.  But with all these benefits available to us they bring us choices, both good and bad.  In order to make these choices we need to expand our minds to encompass whole new levels of information just to make sense of them. 

With spring time coming we are faced with the need to prepare our gardens and fields for the spring planting of crops.  What used to the simplest act in the world of placing a seed in the soil and watching it grow is no longer so simple.  Not only have the technologies for seeding grown exponentially from the simple shovel to a the massive tractors that roam the Midwest.  But the simple seed has grown in complexity with Hybrids, GMO's, Heirlooms, Organics and the list goes on.

What used to be quick stop to the local seed and field store is now a mind boggling array or choices and options not all of which are very clear.  Now I am all for having choices but I believe in educated choices and unless you are a full time farmer, gardener, or seed salesman most people (myself included)can not even to begin to comprehend the vast array of choices. 

Each type of seed will come with its own problems and benefits and choosing what fits best with your goals and beliefs can be tricky. 


I have found that all of these choices and be placed into two broad categories which will enable a average person to narrow down what you are looking for.  If you want to grow what you can find in the grocery store with it uniform size and color and flavor.  Or plants that have resistance to pesticides, herbicides and are designed to be exceptionally disease resistant and bear large crops then you are looking for GMO and Hybrid plants.  These types have been designed by either combining two different varieties of plants through interbreeding to produce a plant that is superior in some way to it parents.  Then you have GMO's which came on to the scene reletivly recently.  These GMO plants are created by altering the DNA of a plant by inserting features from other species into the plant DNA.  A example of this is BT corn which combines the genes of Bacillus thuringiensis with the genome of a corn plant.  This corn can them produce its own insect killing chemicals which reduce insect presence in corn fields.  For more information you can check out this page of the Colorado University Extension Service that gives more info about this particular GMO line. 

While GMO's and Hybrids can produce some very good crop returns in terms of yields and consistency many people find that they are lacking in flavor and in some tests in nutritional value as well.  On the other side of the spectrum are the Heirloom and Organic seeds.  A simple definition of Heirloom means that it is open pollinated and will breed true to the next generation.  Heirloom seeds allow a gardener to save seeds from plants that will grow the same plants next year with comparable traits.  Organic seeds are produced by plants that had no pesticide, herbicide, artificial fertilizers or fungicides.  Theses seeds offer many benefits when compared to hybrids or GMO's.  You can save seed from year to year and not worry about stepping on any legal toes.  They also reduce many of the fears associated with GMO and hybrid crops.  If handled correctly they can produce a sustainable nutritious crop from year to year.

For me personally I have found that Heirlooms seeds that give me what I am looking for in a seed.  They will enable me to produce my own food and save seed from the best of what i produce to give me even more food the next year.  They can also be raised organically and sustainably by individuals who wish so. 

Heirlooms can be found in many places both locally and on the Internet for those who wish.  A good source of seed that I like is the Burpee seed company.  They have a long tradition of producing high quality seed and there website provides many planning tool and information on how to raise the seeds they sell. 

Burpee seeds stands are fairly common throughout the country though the catalog or online selection is greater.  They carry many types of seeds including Hybrids, Heirlooms and Organics and as such they are my go to seed store. 

Below are links to the type of seeds that Burpee sells on there website. 

Burpee Heirloom Seeds

Burpee Hybrid Seeds

Burpee Organic Seeds


Until next time my fellow environmentalists.

Josh

Lets Get Digging

This post is one that I have been looking forward to writing for a long time.  I have touched on quite a few subjects on this blog ranging from the trash crisis we have in this country to my last post about invasive plants in our ecosystems.  What I want to talk to you today is about food.  Not the food you get at the local cafe or what you purchase in a store but something I call Real Food.  What is Real Food you might be asking.  Real Food is the most nutritious, healthy, sustainably produced food you will ever eat.  This food, is food that you have gone on a journey with, food that you have stories with, food you can be proudly and lovingly eat. 

As a species Real Food used to be the only food we ate and it meant the difference between whether we were here from one year to the next.  This food has seen us at our worst when we are tired, sore and frustrated beyond all belief and it will be there at our best when we triumphantly lift to our lips and enjoy it throughout the year.

Real Food is food that we planted, and raised from the smallest seedling or animal until it reaches the pinnacle of eating perfection.  So Real Food is food that you grow yourself, to feed you, your family and any one else who wishes to partake of this food.  The food that contains the very sweat and tears you have put into making it. 

Think back to another time maybe last week maybe thirty years ago.  All of us at one time have enjoyed the pleasure of Real Food.  To eat Real Food is part of my strategy to build myself a sustainable, balanced life.  When you grow food yourself you take out many of the factors that make modern food so distasteful that I'm surprised food companies haven't tried to outlaw it.  You can grow and raised enough food to support you, your family and your neighbors if you wanted to.  With today's knowledge and techniques learned over the past millennium through countless trial and error we have reached a point where no one needs to starve, to eat crap that kills us a little bit on the inside every time we take a bite. 

I firmly believe that to live sustainable is to take food production out of the hand of faceless remorseless companies and put it back in the hands of you and me.  To grow your own food is to be in touch with a planet that is screaming to be heard.  It will help everyone to understand where life really comes from.  Make no mistake food it life and you can bet that many citizens of this world think that food comes from the grocery story. 

Food comes from the earth; food grows from the soil, rain and sun and through food life is passed on to us.  Unless we can reacquaint ourselves with this essential fact we will be lost as a species.

So with spring already here for some of us now is the time to act.  Place a seed in the ground and grow some food.  Reconnect yourself with the seasons and the world and you will understand what it means to truly live on this planet.   

This spring I start on a grand experiment with my friends to see if we can provide for ourselves.  To see if we can grow Real Food.  It will be a journey full of sweat, sore muscles and probably some blood but it is one I must take for my sake if nothing else. 

Until next time my fellow environmentalists.

Josh