Trees on My Land - Slippery Elm

Slippery Elm Tree

When I bought the Berry Farm, I got a living pharmacy in addition to a garden site.

I'll talk about the trees first, starting with Ulmus rubra, aka Slippery Elm. According to Trees, Shrubs and Woody Vines of the Southwest by Robert A. Vines,

elm bark ... contains a mucilaginous substance forming a jelly when mixed with water. A warm infusion was used as a treatment of coughs and diarrhea by early settlers. It was prepared by stirring an ounce of powdered bark in a pint of hot water. Somtimes the strips of elm bark prevented fat from becoming rancid, and settlers sometimes cooked bear fat with the bark.


I see lots of it for sale on the Internet. It seems to be an ingredient in many cough drops.

Sloan Kettering says,

Derived from the inner bark of the tree. Slippery elm has been used historically for gastrointestinal disorders, skin ulcers or abscesses, cancers, cough, fevers, and inflammation. The primary constituent is mucilage, which is thought to account for the demulcent effects. To date, no human or animal studies have been performed to evaluate the efficacy of any proposed claims. Toxicity of slippery elm is low based upon chemical components. No adverse reactions or drug interactions are reported in the literature. Slippery elm appears to be safe for coughs and minor gastrointestinal complaints, but it should not be used to treat severe conditions such as cancer or bronchitis.


I have never tried it, so I cannot say anything about it from personal experience. I will certainly keep the trees here.

A Quick & Dirty Gabion

The concept of the gabion has been around for a long time, I don't suppose anyone alive today knows for sure how long. I have read that they were used in some form by the ancient Egyptians to retain the banks of the Nile. The idea is to enclose rocks or rubble within a cage made of light-weight but strong material. Most of the gabions shown on the Internet have wire mesh cages, although I've found a few with fabric cages.

The most common use of gabions seems to be as retaining walls, such as this one, made by Gilbert Geosynthetics.

However, gabions can also be used as walls. There's an apartment building  in San Antonio a couple of blocks from where we live with a gabion garden wall.

And here's a decorative fountain-gabion one can buy for $5400 from Unica Home

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So this weekend I've been wondering what to use to build a small retaining wall in my garden. Most of the plants I have in the Berry Farm garden can tolerate dry soil, but I have a place next to the trailer that is shady, and I've planted moisture-loving plants there, such as hoja santa and spearmint and taro. The chickens love to scratch in moist soil, and they've scratched bare some of the taro roots. What to use to hold up the soil? There are no rocks around here.

So yesterday I was cleaning out my storage container (this is an on-going project) and when I reached up on top of a stack of boxes to move a plastic box down, the lid of the plastic box popped open, and hundreds of sea shells fell out. My father was a collector: stamps, coins, sea shells. His stamp and coin collections were very valuable, and my mother sold them after he died, for Big Bux. But no one was interested in the sea shells.  I kept them for sentimental reasons, although I have never shared my father's enthusiasm for learning about them. See, he didn't just save pretty shells; he found out who had lived in each shell, where the creature fit into the food web, and so forth. Each shell was in a box, with the creature's botanical name -- Anadana lienosa, Cardita floridana, Barnea truncata, and so forth. I inherited (or learned?) his insatiable curiosity about the way things fit together in the world, but I've always been more interested in plants.

Anyhow, I kept my father's sea shell collection, but yesterday when it fell, all the shells came out of their little boxes and mixed together. The results of my father's careful sorting and identifying were lying there in ruin. It was getting dark, so I left the mess there on the floor of the shipping container over night.

This morning, I had an idea. There was no way I was going to get those hundreds of shells sorted again, so ... I would use them as filler for a gabion retaining wall for the taro plant. The lovely shells will be preserved. If I ever develop an interest in sorting and identifying them, I can. Meanwhile, they are serving a useful purpose.

So I made a basket from poultry wire, put in a couple of layers of rubble first, then placed the shells at the top. It's not terribly unattractive, and I think it will work fine.

My Land

It occurs to me that I have never properly introduced my land. Partly this is because I am only just getting to know it myself. When I bought the land last year, it was suffering from the worst drought ever recorded for central Texas, so few of the trees produced seed. Many of the deciduous trees and shrubs dropped their leaves.

Altamira, where I lived with my daughter for 5 years in the 1990's, is only a couple of miles from here, all uphill. I bought this land after the house I built at Altamira burned down (a Bluebonnet Electric pole fell down on a neighbor's land, and the transformer started the fire -- it was a very dry time of year, and the fire spread to my land). I didn't have time to build another house with my own hands, because I'm working in the city now, and besides, I'm not a very good carpenter. Altamira is not easily accessible from the county road. When I had guests there, I had to meet them at the county road, because everyone who tried to drive up to the house ended up getting stuck in the sand. You had to know exactly where the deep spots were, and drive very fast so the car or truck would sort of float across the sand.

I decided that if I wanted to use Altamira as a weekend home, I would have to make a real road and install some large tanks for storing rainwater. The Wilcox-Carrizo Aquifer is under Altamira, but it's 1100+ feet deep, so it's very expensive to drill a well. Also, the City of San Antonio will soon be piping water from the aquifer. I wouldn't be surprised to see metering of water taken from the aquifer by landowners who, supposedly, purchased water rights along with surface rights. When my daughter and I lived at Altamira, our sole source of water was this pond:

I made a small water treatment plant to flocculate and clarify the silty water. It made decent water for household use, but in drought years the pond would get terrifyingly low. In the drought of 1996, it became a big mud puddle. A Great Blue Heron would stop by every day to eat fish. It could wade all the way across the pond. We had to haul water from our neighbor's well in 55 gallon drums that year.

To build a road and rainwater tanks would cost about the same as buying a smaller tract of land with better access. So I decided to keep Altamira wild and build a house downhill, but close enough to Altamira that it would only take a few minutes to go from one place to the other. There's still a small cabin at Altamira that was upwind from the fire, so the place still feels a bit like home.

The highest land at Altamira is the second highest point in the area, perhaps in the county, being at the top of a sandstone ridge that runs from the Rio Grande (Rio Bravo) north of Laredo, northeast to Northern Louisiana, roughly parallel to the Texas coast of the Gulf of Mexico. The land there is classified as Post Oak Savannah, though when you are on the land it feels more like a forest because of the dense thickets of yaupon holly (Ilex vomitoria). The canopy consists of post oak (Quercus stellata), blackjack oak (Quercus marilandica), shellbark hickory (Carya laciniosa), loblolly pine (Pinus taeda), and eastern red cedar (Juniperus virginiana). I can walk down the hill from Altamira and encounter 3 distinct bioregions within less than a mile. Midway down the hill are trees such as mesquite and hackberry; at the bottom are pecan and live oak.

The Berry Farm consists of 15 acres. It was subdivided from a 54 acre tract, and since the western half of the 54 acre tract was in the flood plain, the owner subdivided the land into long, narrow strips, so every new tract would have some high ground. At the eastern edge of the Berry Farm, the soil is loamy sand, similar to the soil halfway down the hill from Altamira. The floodplain portion of the land is black clay, and there are live oaks and pecans growing there. Altamira is 160 acres, more than ten times the size of the Berry Farm, yet the Berry Farm has an amazingly greater diversity of plant species.

An old-timer who grew up around here told me that the 54 acre tract of land was used for growing cotton. I assume the cotton would have been rotated with milo (grain sorghum) or corn, which is a typical crop rotation in this area. I don't know what grew here before the land was cleared for farming.

Altamira was considered trash land, because of the nutrient-poor sandy soil, and was never used much by humans. There is evidence that people passed through -- stone spear heads from a long time ago, a mound of stones and assorted stuff that I found with a metal detector (barrel hoop, tip of a plow, leg of a metal stove) that mark the location of a small house -- from the piles of clay mixed with the stone, I assume it was an adobe house with a stone fireplace. Old timers told me that the house sat beside a Spanish road from the colonial period. The Spanish mined silver in the sand hills -- Kenny Mitchell, who's probably about my age and grew up here (in fact, he was good friends with the man who owned the 54 acre tract that the Berry Farm was carved out of), told me that when he was a kid, he and his friends found one of the mines and went down into it. Supposedly there was a mine on Altamira, but I never found one. It's possible it was hidden within a very dense thicket that I didn't penetrate.

The silver mining operations must not have amounted to much, because the land appears to have been pretty much undisturbed by people, unlike the Berry Farm land. I'd guess that the up-hill eastern part was probably Post Oak Savannah, with the flood plain part being Blackland Prairie creek bottom land. However, the banks of Tenney Creek, at the western end of the land, are sandy.

Tenney Creek begins near McMahan, about 5 miles from here, and flows generally south until it reaches, and becomes part of,  Plum Creek. Here are a couple of photos of Plum Creek flowing through blackland prairie, about 3 miles from here.  Tenney Creek is intermittent, depending on the amount of rainfall. It's flowing at the moment, but it was quite dry last summer.

More on Gophers

Here is another article about people studying the ecological benefits of gophers:
http://www.nature.org/wherewework/northamerica/states/washington/misc/art24950.html'

The Nature Conservancy in Washington State is studying Mazama pocket gophers by catching them and inserting electronic tags under the critters' skin (similar to the chips used for pets). This will allow them to learn more about the range of individual gophers.

O.J. Reichman and Eric W. Seabloom have also published an article on the pocket gopher in Ecology and Evolution. (January, 2002) in which they too noted the soil-moving effects of the gopher. They observed that the gopher burrows accelerated erosion on shallow slopes and slowed erosion on steep slopes. I have not noticed increased erosion on my gently sloping land. In fact, the gopher borrows encourage the water to penetrate the soil, rather than running off. The run-off causes erosion. When the water soaks into the soil instead of running off, none of the soil is washed away.

Another article Lisa F. Cantor and Thomas G. Whitham in Ecology discusses the gopher's role in preventing aspen invasion of mountain meadows.

Grasses, incidentally, tend to benefit from root pruning by gophers (I have read this and observed it first-hand), so gopher activity would encourage prairie landscapes in regions that do not provide ideal growing conditions for trees.

This article by Jake Weltzin, Steve Archer, and Rod K. Heitschmidt looks really interesting: "Small Mammal Regulation of Vegetation Structure in a Temperate Savannah," Ecology: Vol. 78, No. 3, pp. 751-763. This article focuses on the prairie dog rather than gophers. Since prairie dogs don't live here, I don't have any first-hand knowledge of them, but they apparently eat roots and seeds and live in burrows, so their ecological niche would be similar to that of the gophers.

I think I may have to buy a few of these articles so I can read the entire articles rather than just the abstracts. Here is an excerpt from the abstract of the Weltzin, Archer, and Heitschmidt article:

These data illustrate how transitions from grassland to woodland vegetation can be mediated by a rodent herbivore. They further demonstrate how purposeful or inadvertent removal of native herbivores can have unforeseen effects on plant species composition and landscape physiognomy. Investigations of environmental constraints on vegetation distribution and abundance should take into account the historical role of herbivores in shaping the present system. Inconsistencies among historic accounts of woody plant distribution and abundance in semiarid western North America may be resolved by considering population dynamics of prairie dogs. Widespread eradication of this formerly abundant rodent has eliminated a significant constraint to woody plant establishment on many semiarid grassland and savanna landscapes and has thereby facilitated transitions to shrubland and woodland states. Past land management designed to remove one perceived impediment to livestock production appears to have contributed significantly to development of another management problem that is now a major detriment to sustainable livestock production.

Pocket Gophers

The tops of the fruit trees are not the only parts of the trees that are in cages. I have to plant the trees in wire cages to keep the gopher from eating the roots of young trees down to a nub. By the time the root system is large enough to outgrow the cage, the tree is usually big and strong enough to withstand gopher nibbling.

Some people use traps or poison to kill gophers. For various reasons, I don't want to use poison, and traps seem pointless. If you kill one, another will move in. I find it's best to incorporate gophers into the landscape. Let them aerate and fertilize the soil, and prune the roots; keep them out of places where I really don't want them, such as around the roots of young trees and shrubs.

I found a dead one in the orchard today. It's too far decomposed for me to guess how it died. You can see from the photo that it was a cute, furry little thing with delicate hind feet like a rat, but it has large front feet with huge claws. Edward Scissorhands.


Most gopher discussions I've found online focus on killing by one means or another, without even trying to understand how gophers fit into the life cycle of the land as a whole. I found a couple of articles whose authors seek a more elegant and intelligent way of living with gophers.

Ecological Benefits of Pocket Gophers (from Living With Wildlife - Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife)

A typical pocket gopher can move approximately a ton of soil to the surface each year. This enormous achievement reflects the gopher’s important ecological function.

Their tunnels are built and extended, then gradually fill up with soil as they are abandoned. The old nests, toilets, and partially filled pantries are buried well below the surface where the buried vegetation and droppings become deep fertilization. The soil thus becomes mellow and porous after being penetrated with burrows. Soil that has been compacted by trampling, grazing, and machinery is particularly benefited by the tunneling process.

In mountainous areas, snowmelt and rainfall are temporarily held in gopher burrows instead of running over the surface, where they are likely to cause soil erosion.  [my note: even in non-mountainous areas, gopher burrows help to hold water in the soil and prevent water run-off]

Surface mounds created by gophers also bury vegetation deeper and deeper, increasing soil quality over time. In addition, fresh soil in the mounds provides a fresh seedbed for new plants, which may help to increase the variety of plants on a site.

Many mammals, large birds, and snakes eat gophers and depend on their activities to create suitable living conditions. Salamanders, toads, and other creatures seeking cool, moist conditions take refuge in unoccupied gopher burrows.[my note: I have found a couple of toads lately living in abandoned gopher burrows]  Lizards use abandoned gopher burrows for quick escape cover.


Gabriel J. Miller, Steve A. Johnson, and Lora L. Smith, University of Florida, have published an article titled Ecological Engineers: Southeastern Pocket Gophers Are One of Natures Architects 
The authors discuss the soil mixing benefits of gophers then move on to discuss the effects of the gophers' diet:


Root Herbivory  By feeding on plant roots, Pocket Gophers can drastically affect the local plant community. Some plants can tolerate root herbivory and even flourish, but others are adversely affected. For example, grasses are known for responding favorably to root herbivory, which may be why gophers and grasses coexist together. Little is known about the effects of root herbivory on most plants, but it is likely that the root herbivory of gophers influences plant communities.http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/uw285

It's disheartening to realize that the only advice being given to farmers and gardeners by government supported agricultural extension services, and agricultural universities is grounded in ignorance.  It's true that most people who grow plants in regions where gophers live are very well aware of the effects of gophers on specific plants in the garden. But most people farm and garden in ways that make their plants vulnerable, instead of establishing communities of plants and animals that support and protect each other. I'm close to 100% sure that some things I did with my fruit trees made them attractive to the grasshoppers. I'll write more about that later.  

Caging the Fruit Trees - Update July 16

The Anna apple tree in the garden just south of my trailer, which is also where the chickens spend most of their time, is looking good. After two weeks in the protective cage, it has more leaves than I can easily count. I believe it will make a full recovery, as the fig tree has.

The fig tree has now had its cage removed, and after two weeks, it's untouched by the hoppers. It too is in the garden just south of the house. I don't dare let Anna out of the cage yet, but the hopper population in this area has declined so that I only see one now and then.

Even in the orchard where the chickens don't go often, there are fewer hoppers now. I think the frequent rains we've had have helped to clear them out. They tend to get fungal infections when the weather is damp. I applied Tangle Foot to two of the cages in the orchard, and they are hopper-free this morning. There were no hoppers caught in the Tangle Foot. It looks as though it discourages them from even trying to get in.

I believe I'll lose at least two of the fruit trees, but they were sickly little things to begin with, purchased from Lowe's. It was a mistake to buy trees there. I should have known better. I ordered the other fruit trees from Bay Laurel Nursery http://baylaurelnursery.com/ . They were in excellent condition when I planted them, and although the grasshopper event certainly has not been good for them, I'm pretty sure they will recover and grow into big, healthy trees. I highly recommend Bay Laurel Nursery.

The photo was shot from the top, looking down on the new leaves.

Walking By Starlight

I just got back from a night walk; though I am back in my little travel trailer, the most passionate part of my mind is still out there on the road that curves through the woods.

I have to walk south, downhill from my place, to get away from urban life. I have neighbors here, who have installed pinkish sodium vapor lights high up on poles. These people moved here from the city and tried to bring the city with them. I hate those lights.

I walk about a quarter of a mile, to where the gravel road curves west, and the dense trees obscure all traces of electric light of any kind. It's 12:30 a.m. The moon has already disappeared below the horizon. The only light I can see is starlight.

My husband wrote a book called Reading By Starlight, a scholarly work about postmodern science fiction. I love the title of that book and think about it now, walking down the pale gravel road. Even though I know how bright starlight is, and expect it, I am always surprised at how well I can see. There's my shadow, surrounding my feet like a small puddle.

I stop, listen, sniff the air. I smell water and animal-scent that is not mine or my dog's -- deer maybe? I'm not sure. The night is far from quiet -- I think of when I was a little kid and my dad and I would listen to music together, and he would say: "Listen. Can you hear the violins? Can you hear the oboe?" Now, in the woods, I try to pay attention to each sound in turn. There's the constant pulse of crickets and six other insects I don't know. I wonder if anyone knows. Since they only perform their concerts at night, and since, from the sound of it, they are high up in the trees, it would be difficult to catch them at it. Two kinds of owl calls -- a great horned owl and, I think, a screech owl. And then the frogs start up. I am filled with joy. If I were a child again, I would fling out my arms and run, as I used to do. But I'm old, and my knees are shot, so I do the next best thing. So help me, I can't resist - I howl. A fairly soft, polite little howl that sets off my dog. I've trained him to do duets with me. When we pause, I find, to my delight, that a coyote has joined in. Or maybe two or three. It's hard to tell with coyotes. One of them can sing several parts and fool you into thinking there's a whole pack. Then someone else howls, a longer, deeper howl than the coyote's -- a dog? A wolf? A coyote wolf hybrid? I feel a little prickle of fear, just a tiny jolt of adrenaline like a refreshing drink of cold water.

I wish I could sleep directly under the stars tonight, in a hammock strung between two trees. But I have to work tomorrow, so I head back to my den.