Loquats Gone Wild

Excerpt from original article in the Austin Post:

Two of our loquat trees yielded more fruit than we knew what to do with. So we looked up a recipe for chutney and canned as much of it as possible. Turns out, loquats were going wild all over Austin this year. I tried giving away loquats, but I discovered that many people didn’t know what they were. Those who seemed most interested in our fruit were Mexican neighbors who knew loquats as “nísperos.”

Taking Farmers Markets to a New Level – The Rise of the CSA

Ever since the fall of 2010, I’ve been shopping down the food chain – buying my food closer and closer to the source. Like most Americans, I started out buying meat and produce from grocery stores like H-E-B (whatever happened to be on sale) and supplementing it with bulk packaged food from Costco or Sam’s Club.

Then I decided I wanted to eat healthier, regardless of the price tag. So I started shopping at Central Market and Whole Foods. I bought all USDA organic meat, fruit and vegetables, and instead of buying twin-packaged giant cereal boxes of Special K, I bought smaller-sized single boxes of Kashi cereal (also owned by the Kellogg Company). Much of my fruit still came from faraway places such as Chile and New Zealand, and although my meat was labeled "organic," that term is loosely and complexly defined by the U.S Department of Agriculture.

Read the rest of this article in the Austin Post.

Greetings from 5-Mile Farms, a hyper-local CSA in Austin, Texas

Lessons from the Dirt

After buying most of our food at the Sustainable Food Center’s Farmers’ Market in Sunset Valley every Saturday morning since October 2010, we were inspired to take “eating local” one step further. Why not eat right from our own backyard? Last spring, we started our first full-blown vegetable garden. In the past, I had grown herbs and native perennials, most of which had the inherent capacity to grow wild with very little water and tending. We had big plans for this next one.

Start of overly ambitious vegetable garden, Spring 2011

We built a 2 x 7 raised garden bed with square foot plots, and we dusted off the six terra cotta pots we’d been storing in the garage. We hauled in sacks of pure organic dirt and compost from The Natural Gardener. By reading their info sheet on effective planting combinations and asking a ton of questions, we decided to get the following seeds: two kinds of carrot, potato, two kinds of chard, corn, melon, two kinds of radish, and bush bean. We also bought various seedlings: two kinds of lettuce, two kinds of pepper, four kinds of tomato, two kinds of lettuce, and two kinds of strawberry.

After reading the directions on the back of the seed packets, we determined that the instructions were meant for much larger plots of land and that we had been too ambitious, both in the quantity and variety of seed. We did the math in our head, liberally scattered the seeds, and wished for good things to grow. Even though one of the experienced vegetable farmers at The Natural Gardener warned us that we “weren’t doing a good job unless we killed a few things,” we were resolved to grow bountiful crops of everything that would not only feed us, but maybe even feed our neighbors and friends, should the end of the world (or the demise of the American dollar) happen upon us.

One of five strawberries harvested, Spring 2011

We built a frame over the garden bed and the pots, and we covered them all with bird netting to keep the cardinals and blue jays away. We carefully sheltered them under a sheet during the recent freezes that snuck back when we were absolutely sure spring was in full season. We watered them once, sometimes twice a day, and hand-picked the bugs off the leaves to avoid using any harmful chemicals. We propped up the lazy plants and spoke kindly to them to give them encouragement.

But we forgot one thing. That life is not perfect, even if you do all the right things and follow all the rules. Learning to garden successfully, just like playing a concerto or running a marathon, takes a lot of time and patience. And as we’d been cautioned, we needed to be willing to fail and make notes from our mistakes.

Measly, stringy carrots, Spring 2011

Because we had planted so many carrot and radish seeds too close together, they resulted in a bunch of scrawny roots when we harvested them. We were too eager to try our potatoes because the instructions said they’d be ready after 60 days, so we dug out one of the plants only to get pecan-sized tubers. The tomatoes and peppers did well because each plant had its own giant pot with plenty of space to take root. The chards didn’t do so badly either – we’d been more frugal with scattering their seed so the plants did not crowd each other out. And close to 90 days after planting them, we dug up another crop of potatoes with much better results since we’d given them more time to grow.

Last fall, we decided to be less ambitious. We narrowed down our crops to chard, kale, cabbage, spinach, broccoli, and carrots. And we waited, and waited, and waited. Maybe the dirt was thirsty and couldn't do much for us, after the historical 10-month drought. But then the rains came early this year, and it rained, and rained, and rained more than we'd seen in a long time.

Carrots, chard, and the "accidental" lettuce, Spring 2012

A bit late in the season, all our fall vegetables have finally come to fruition. Although we lost the kale to the aphids, the cabbage to the caterpillars, and the spinach just never grew, we have more chards than we can eat ourselves, and they're fleshy and savory. Our carrots and broccoli didn't yield much, but they were the most delicious I've ever had, crispy, juicy and sweet. And then, as a complete surprise, we got a massive crop of what we call the "accidental lettuce" - butter head and red sail lettuce from last spring that had re-seeded itself.

From our second attempt at a vegetable garden, we've had enough lettuce to share entire bags of pickings with friends and neighbors. We still can't feed the world, but we're one step closer. And imagine if we all had backyard gardens - just imagine how many people we could feed. All it takes is dirt, water, sun, and a lot of patience, dedication, and love.

Plenty of lettuce to share with friends and neighbors, Spring 2012

Fighting Aphids the Natural Way

Aphids on Kale

After the 10-month drought and 100-degree heat finally ended in Central Texas, and a very measly spring vegetable harvest, we were excited to plant our fall garden in early October in our Austin home. This time, instead of trying to plant every kind of vegetable that can possibly be grown during the corresponding season, we decided to go with a more limited variety of hearty plants. We received a great tip from Resolution Gardens on planting vegetables that are not only seasonal, but also appropriate for the local climate and soil. Here is their recommended list of vegetables for October:

• Vegetable seeds – Beets, Carrot, Mustard, Onion, Garden Pea, Radishes, Spinach, Turnip (early October: Chinese Cabbage, Collards, Garlic, Lettuce) 
• Vegetable plants – Chinese Cabbage, Collards (and other Greens), Lettuce, Spinach, Turnip, Broccoli, Cabbage, Cauliflower, Chinese Greens (Lettuce and Spinach can be planted throughout the fall if they are given frost protection). 

We ended up planting carrot, chard and radish seeds, along with Chinese cabbage, broccoli, spinach, and kale seedling transplants from the The Natural Gardener. The first few weeks, everything was sprouting beautifully, until some of our plants – particularly the cabbage and kale – started developing holes and looking pale and withered. Upon looking closely and inspecting underneath the leaves, we saw mounds of these little dark green insects shaped like sesame seeds. I snipped off a kale leaf, dropped it in a plastic baggie, and we returned to The Natural Gardener to identify these bugs.

Once there, at first glance, one of the staff identified the problem as a combination of munching caterpillars (causing holes) and juice-sucking aphids (causing leaves to grow pale and withered). But just to be sure, they placed my specimen beneath their ultra-high-powered-digital-microscope. Who knew these little things had such life and personality! The one we saw in the microscope happened to be a loner hanging out on a remote section of the leaf, but normally aphids tend to gather and pile up in tiny areas by the dozens. And if that weren’t bad enough, they are born already pregnant. (Sort of alien-like, if you ask me.) These little buggers can multiply faster than rabbits!

Homemade Organic Pest Control for Aphids

At any rate, we didn’t want to use chemical pesticides, in an effort to maintain our garden completely organic and sustainable. So the folks at The Natural Gardener prescribed 1 quart of water mixed with 1 to 2 teaspoons of soft liquid (non-detergent) soap. They instructed us to apply the mixture right onto the leaf – it has to get on the aphids in order to suffocate and kill them. But those little suckers are stubborn. Even post-mortem, they cling to the leaf, so unless you want them their rotting carcasses on your vegetables, you still have to spray-wash them away after they die. (But don’t spray so hard that you pummel and drown your poor plants with cascades of water.)

Unfortunately, the soap and water mixture did not really help at first. As an alternative to Seventh Generation liquid soap, we tried Dr. Bronner’s lavender liquid soap. The aphids simply kept reappearing. (Fortunately, the caterpillars never came back after we applied one treatment of certified organic Thuricide.) The good news is that eventually, the aphids did finally disappear, but only after we lost both of our cabbage plants and one of our four kale plants, and left a slight bit of damage on the remaining plants.

I can’t say we did our best, though. There are many things we didn’t try. We didn’t try ladybugs. We didn’t try luke warm water (we had used room-temperature water). We didn’t try Neem oil. We didn’t try other liquid recipes recommended on various sites. We didn’t inspect as religiously as we should have. Some of our gardener friends from the farmers market have told us that if you go the organic route, you have to be out there every day and be persistent in fending off the pests. Sometimes, you have to resort to hand-plucking off the bugs if you want to get down and dirty, in order to win the battle.

Hand Spraying Aphids with Soap and Water (and then you still have to pluck off the dead ones)

Let me know if you try the soap and water solution we used from The Natural Gardener and whether it was effective in getting rid of your aphids. Or try some of these other natural aphid control solutions:

• How to Get Rid of Aphids 
• The Nerdy Gardener’s Organic Aphid Control Methods 
• Homemade Aphid Control – A Natural Way to Kill Aphids

Happy aphid killing!

Spring 2011 Garden - First Attempt at Growing Vegetables

Spring 2011 Garden, a set on Flickr.

We'd been going to the farmers market since October of 2010, so we finally gathered the courage to try our own hand at organic gardening this past spring of 2011. We purchased all the supplies at the Natural Gardener - the soil, fertilizer, mulch, seeds, and seedlings. Shand built the garden bed (2 x 8 feet) at home with his tools, using natural cedar wood. We spent about $200 by the time we got everything installed and planted.

Not too long after we put the garden in, we added a structure with netting to keep birds and larger animals away. We also built another contained area for the potted plants. Without any training or classes, we gave our best attempt at growing our own food, not realizing we'd be heading into the hottest and driest summer in recent Texas history. 


We did yield some crops, but the output was minimal. We definitely didn't get our money back, if you're doing a strict financial analysis - penny in vs. penny out. But if you look at the value of being able to eat home-grown produce, consumed within minutes of being picked, the value was priceless. Stay tuned for a recap of our attempt at fall gardening.