The San Antonio Garden

I've put my country garden on hold until I can figure out how to work around the grasshoppers. I've thought of a couple of new things to try. One is an automatic watering system. The soil at Tilmon is sandy, so even after a deep watering, the upper layers of soil dry out quickly. Until plants get their roots down deep, they suffer from lack of water when I'm not there during the hot part of the summer to water them every 2 or 3 days. The plants that were kept in containers through the summer last year survived with only minor grasshopper damage. This year, when they were planted in the ground, they didn't survive. I dug them up, planted them in containers, and brought them to San Antonio. Three have died -- a Fuji apple, a peach (lost the tag and don't remember what variety of peach), and a catalpa. The rest seem to be thriving. I've already planted two peach trees. two mulberries, a fig, and a pineapple guava in the garden here in San Antonio. Looking good in containers are an Anna apple, a Le Conte pear, and an Ein Shemer apple. Thes Israeli apple trees (Anna and Ein Shemer) can take the south Texas heat and need very few chilling hours. The grasshoppers have killed 4 peach trees, 3 pears, an apple, and a fig. (I'm making myself feel bad taking inventory in this way; I need to focus on the future instead)

Asking why the trees survived in containers but not in the ground, I came up with the following answers:

1. soil
2. location
3. frequency of watering

I've tried enriching the soil. This actually seemed to increase the grasshopper damage. I guess they were getting more nutrients from the plants grown in healthy soil. I tried planting in the ground where the containers had been. The grasshoppers still defoliated the trees.

The one variable left, unless I've overlooked something, is water. I had an automatic watring system set up to water the containers.

So this is the next thing I'll try in my attempts to make the land at Tilmon into an edible garden.

Meanwhile, the garden in San Antonio is taking shape. We have a small 1-story house (2200 sq ft) on half an acre, so there's a lot of garden space. The existing shrubs and small trees include anaqua, sophora (aka Texas mountain laurel), nandina, pomegranite, and loquat. There are three oak trees, which I have not precisely identified (this is a whole different biosphere from Altamira and Tilmon, and many of the trees are different), an elm (I think), a palm which I think is a Windmill Palm, but I'm not 100% sure, some china berries, and some trees I've never seen before that have very brittle branches. One recently fell across a part of the garden I'd been in only a couple of minutes earlier. It was a large tree, about 40 feet tall. There's another growing next to where it was and seedlings coming up all around. I think I'll keep the one that's still there as a nurse tree while the young fruit trees are getting started, then have it removed. The wood is so brittle, I think it's probably dangerous.

There were no shrubs defining the perimeters of any of the garden spaces. The place was mostly a jumble of weeds. I've let many of them grow back, just to hold down the soil and give the birds and lizards food and refuge. There are many sunflowers, which attract dozens of cardinals and doves. The hedges I've planted are growing so you can sort of see the outlines of the hedges; there are always dozens of tomatoes and peppers to eat and give away and many flowers blooming. I was pretty sad for a while, because of the grasshopper devastation in Timon. I felt like a failure as a gardener. But I'm beginning to feel better now, as the SA garden takes shape.

Here are some photos. Next year at this time, I'll look at these and say, "It looked so bare!" But it's a beginning. I've included a very quick and very rough sketch of the part of the garden directly behind the house. The yellow highlighted areas are raised beds. The Hever Castle Buddleia is planted along the drive way. There are cannas planted in front of the ugly wooden fence. they should grow tall enough to almost complete hide it. In front of the buddleia (looking from the direction of the house) are shrub roses. In front of the rose bushes are various perennial flowers including salvias and day lilies. The Pride of Barbados (what San Antonio garden would be complete without this flamboyant shrub?) is against the stucco wall of the back underpinning. The house is built on a slope. The floor is at ground level on the north side and high up off the gound on the south side. The south side was the front yard when the house was built. Later, the lot to the south was subdivided and sold, and another house was built on it. So the back of our house now faces the street. This all sounds very confusing as I read it. I apologize for that, but I don't have time to go back and make it clearer now, as the outdoor temperature is getting bearable. Time to go outside and play in the garden. It gets too hot here for gardening to be enjoyable except in the mornings and evenings. At those times of the day, it's rather pleasant.

Knapped Flint

While I was sitting in the garden day before yesterday digging a hole for a Fanick's phlox, I found a piece of flint. This is unusal, as flint does not seem to occur naturally in my yard.

It looks like a spear head someone threw away when it was only partly done, probably because it split in such a way that the finished head could not be shaped correctly. I wondered if I was just imaging this scenario. Was this a partially finished, or just a piece of flint?

Below I've pasted in part of an article from http://www.belchalwell.org.uk/artifacts-flint.asp. This is about knapped flint from the eastern hemispere, but I would think it should also apply to flints worked in Texas. My spear head (if that's what is was going to be) has ripples, bulbs of precussion, secondary working (see right edge of upper photo), fissures. Hard to see how it could be anything other than knapped flint.

I've been told that there was once a spring in our back yard. This is not difficult to believe. San Pedro Springs park with its spring-fed swimming pool is less than half a mile from here. It's easy to imagine a group of people spending time here, toward the top of the hill overlooking the San Antonio River bottom. To imagine that someone sat in the same place as I was sitting when I planted the phlox, making spear heads, talking. I wonder if he cursed when the flint cracked and ruined his spear head. Of if he just shrugged, "Meh," tossed it away and pulled another piece of flint from his bag. I say "he" and "his" because I'm pretty sure men made the spear and (later) arrow heads and did the hunting and fighting.

How to Identify Knapped Flint Tools.

Whilst the use of some flint tools is obvious from their shape and size, many are not, and it requires an expert to ascertain their exact use and age. But perhaps more importantly, how do you tell if a piece of flint is a tool, or just a piece of flint?

Knapped flint has several characteristics, and while none are fully diagnostic of a knapped flint, virtually all knapped flints will display one or more of the following, as displayed in the picture.

• Ripples (ripple marks on the flat surfaces radiating away from th point of percussion)
• Bulb of Percussion (a small lump left in the flint immediately below the point it was struck)
• Secondary working or 'nibbling' (fine working on the edge of a tool to sharpen or resharpen it)
• Point of Percussion (sometimes shows as a small area of damaged or crumbled flint where it was struck, above the bulb of percussion)
• Percussion Platform (the flat 'edge' remaining where the flint was struck from the edge of a flat face of a core)
• Fissures (fractures produced by the shock of the knapping)
• Percussion Scar (a scar of less cleanly cleaved flint below the point of percussion)
• Polishing (occasionally scrapers and similar tools will show signs of a high polish from much use, though the fully polished tools, ie. stone axes, sometimes seen in museums, are very rare finds, and would have had more to do with wealth and ceremony than 'working' tools)

Saving Green Lives

I have given up trying to grow fruit trees at Tilmon, or anything else other than mesquite, juniper, prickly ash, and bull nettles. The grasshoppers have beat me, at least for now.

I tried everything I could think of, short of toxins that would kill birds, amphibians, and mammals along with the hoppers: NoLo Bait  horticultural kaolin, low-dose Sevin bait (Eco-Bran), putting black plastic on the ground around the trees, putting screen cages around the trees, coating the leaves, branches and trunks with pepper spray. Nothing seemed even to put a dent in the number of grasshoppers knawing at my trees. I had one particularly healthy peach tree that survived last year's grasshopper defolitation. I even hoped it might be large enough and strong enough to survive this year and maybe produce fruit next summer. When I left one Sunday, it had a fine big canopy, higher than the top of my head. The following Friday when I returned, it had been completely defoliated and the branches eaten down to nubs.

The fuckers are even eating the needles off my 2-year-old pine trees. (please forgive my rude choice of words, but I can't think of anything more appropriate).

I couldn't bear to just let everything die. I started digging up the trees and shrubs and moving them to San Antonio. There was no point in trying to move the pines -- they crave acidic soil, and the soil and water in San Antonio are toward the alkaline end of the pH scale. So I left them. I also left two rose bushes that, for reasons I cannot yet grasp, the grasshoppers are not molesting, and one rose bush that is being eaten but is too large to comfortably move. If they completely defoliate it, I will cut it back and dig it up. The turk's caps seem to be holding their own, and one pear tree that's planted among some prickly ash trees. This is my most promising clue: the plants that have not been destroyed by the hoppers are the ones planted in close proxmity to prickly ash trees.  Two of the pines are next to prickly ash trees, and so far these pines are OK. I will certainly follow up on this clue, especially if the plants close to prickly ash trees continue to survive mostly intact.

I have brought to SA in containers fig, apple, pear, and peach trees, rose bushes, day lillies, cassava, blue berry. The blueberry is risky, since blueberries like acidic soil -- I'll add some sulfur to the container and hope for the best. This fall after the weather cools, I'll take the blueberry back to Tilmon and plant it next to a prickly ash tree.

Here's the way the trees looked after the'y been worked over by the hoppers. This is a Le Conte pear. the trunk and baby limbs are white from the kaolin coating I put on the to try to keep the hoppers from girdling them and killing them. That much, at least, did work.

Here's the way they look after being in their containers in San Antonio for a couple of weeks, with much TLC from me in the form of fish emulsion fertilizer and solutions of micronutrients:

There is one peach tree, the one that was especially beautiful and healthy just a month ago, that may not make it. It's a very sad sight, indeed. Yet I did notice a tiny green tip emerging a couple of days ago, and there are now two small leaves. It's too early to tell for sure, but I think it may survive. The rose bushes are leafing out as though to shout, "What doesn't kill us makes us stronger!"

My husband commented that he can now see why people resort to using strong poisons on insects. The problem is that the poisons are only short-term fixes. Better, in my opinion, and certainly more elegant, to figure out how to discourage the hoppers without wiping out a large % of the other animals in the region as well.

In addition to having an Idea (prickly ash as nurse trees), I am also raising some guinea keets.  Now that I've saved many of the trees and shrubs, I'm no longer as sad about the situation. I'm able to take an interest in it as an interesting experiment. I'm glad I wasn't depending on those fruit trees as a major source of food. I guess if I had been, there would have only one thing for it: I would have had to master the art of grasshopper cookery.

It's Been a While

Blush Noisette in Drought Apr 2011

I didn't feel like writing anything in the blog for the longest time. I even thought of trying to sell this place or sticking a mobile home on it and renting it out and never coming here again. The weather and soil here are challenging enough without toxic neighbors. The situation with the oil well got even worse, as the opertor began venting large quantities of "sour" gas into the air. In mid-March, I sent the following to the operator, with a copy to his attorney (names left out to protect privacy):

Dear WWW

You are not properly disposing of the toxic gas coming from XXX #1 on the YYY lease. Instead, you are venting the gas directly into the air. The level of hydrogen sulfide in the air is high enough to cause burning eyes and throats on my land. I suspect there are also high levels of hydrogen cyanide and sulfur dioxide. I became dizzy and sick to my stomach after breathing the air for four hours last week, and my neighbor ZZZ told me he and his family have suffered similar symptoms. ZZZ has emphysema, and he says the gas from the well makes his cough worse. ZZZ's grandson's wife, who also lives on the land next to mine, is pregnant. Hydrogen sulfide can cause birth defects if a pregnant woman is exposed to it.

Because of the gases you are venting from your well, I am unable to spend more than two or three hours on my land when the wind is blowing from the north. Besides violating state rules on on H2S safety, your venting H2S into the air is denying me the use of my surface rights.

Please correct the situation immediately. 

The situation was altered within the next couple of days. Now the operator is piping the gas half a mile away and releasing it on someone else's land. So the air at the Berry Farm smells sweet and fresh, but someone else has to breathe H2S.

Here's the thing that makes me feel especially sad: I am not an innocent party. I use gasoline and oil in my car. I use methane and propane. I buy goods that have been transported across long distances, using fuel that comes from wells like the one next to my land. Even the photovoltaic system I used at Altamira required fossil fuel to make the equipment and ship it. At this very moment, I am consuming electricity created by generators running on methane (natural gas).

I've tried living without electricity, and I didn't like it. Even before I put in the electrical system at Altamira, I used kerosene and propane lanterns. Even when I heated my house with a wood burning stove, I used a gasoline powered chain saw to cut up the wood. I loved my chain saw. I love machines. I don't have any desire to return to life as it was in the 18th century.  What I'd like to have happen, if I were writing the script, is small-scale photovoltaic and wind systems that wouldn't require huge power lines, and more efficient energy storage systems, and perhaps a completely new energy source.

The weather and land here at the Berry Farm continue to be vicious. Hard to believe, but there was a frost here this past week. The low temperature for the week at the Austin airport was something like 46, but it got down to 32 here, just 40 miles away (and to the south!). Killed the new growth on the catalpa tree and grape vines and even one of the sophora trees, which is a tough central Texas native. Made the fava bean blossoms shrivel up and turn black. There was frost damage to the new leaves on the pear trees.  It's all very discouraging. The gardening mentors of my youth told me: "Plant your corn when the mesquite trees start to leaf out." The mesquite trees were wrong this year. Then, of course, there's the lack of rain. Pity I don't have the contact info for the person to whom to write a cease and desist letter concerning the weather.

I've been reading a book about relatively abrupt climate change (that appears to have been global in scope) in the 16th century -- the beginning of what's known at the Little Ice Age. There's something to be learned from those times. In particular, the Dutch people provided an example of a good response, which was to change the way they grew food, adopting a more diverse range of food crops and changing their methods of farming. The French, on the other hand, provided an example of how NOT to respond. They insisted on keeping their traditional ways of farming, even if it meant death by starvation to thousands.

Speaking of thousands, there are thousands of baby grasshoppers hopping around the Berry Farm. I'm trying Surround kaolin spray on the fruit trees, putting a thin layer on the leaves. I think I'll try painting the trunks with a thick layer. The most horrible thing the grasshoppers did last year was eat the bark on the young fruit trees, girdling them, which caused them to die.

On the brighter side, the roses and phlox are beautiful, and the collards taste better after a frost.

USDA Deregulates GM Alfalfa

http://blog.wholefoodsmarket.com/2011/01/urgent-action-needed-to-support-organics-and-non-ge-crops/

The USDA is considering only two options:

1) fully deregulate GM alfalfa OR
2) conditionally deregulate it by placing certain rules and restrictions on growing GM alfalfa that would minimize or limit contamination of non-GM crops (including organic).

Far as I can tell from what available online, the only advantage of growing the GM alfalfa is that one can eliminate all non-GM plant life on the field by spraying the herbicide Roundup.  According to Gurain-Sherman* using Roundup does not increase yields significantly, even over the short term. In the long run, weeds will become resistant to Roundup, either through naturally occurring mutations or through borrowing the Roundup Ready gene from GM crops. Herbicide resistance has already become a large problem in some locations (http://huerto-de-altamira.blogspot.com/2010/09/herbicide-resistant-pigweed-jobs-for.html)


*Gurain-Sherman,D. 2009. Failure to yield: evaluating the performance of genetically engineered crops. Cambridge (MA): Union of Concerned Scientists.

Dangers of Consuming Genetically Modified Organisms

American Academy of Environmental Medicine:

http://www.aaemonline.org/gmopost.html

Excerpt:

There is more than a casual association between GM foods and adverse health effects. There is causation as defined by Hill's Criteria in the areas of strength of association, consistency, specificity, biological gradient, and biological plausibility.⁵ The strength of association and consistency between GM foods and disease is confirmed in several animal studies.^{2,6,7,8,9,10,11} 

Specificity of the association of GM foods and specific disease processes is also supported. Multiple animal studies show significant immune dysregulation, including upregulation of cytokines associated with asthma, allergy, and inflammation. ^6,11 Animal studies also show altered structure and function of the liver, including altered lipid and carbohydrate metabolism as well as cellular changes that could lead to accelerated aging and possibly lead to the accumulation of reactive oxygen species (ROS). ^7,8,10 Changes in the kidney, pancreas and spleen have also been documented. ^6,8,10 A recent 2008 study links GM corn with infertility, showing a significant decrease in offspring over time and significantly lower litter weight in mice fed GM corn.⁸ This study also found that over 400 genes were found to be expressed differently in the mice fed GM corn. These are genes known to control protein synthesis and modification, cell signaling, cholesterol synthesis, and insulin regulation. Studies also show intestinal damage in animals fed GM foods, including proliferative cell growth9 and disruption of the intestinal immune system.⁶ 

Regarding biological gradient, one study, done by Kroghsbo, et al., has shown that rats fed transgenic Bt rice trended to a dose related response for Bt specific IgA. ¹¹ 

Also, because of the mounting data, it is biologically plausible for Genetically Modified Foods to cause adverse health effects in humans. 

In spite of this risk, the biotechnology industry claims that GM foods can feed the world through production of higher crop yields. However, a recent report by the Union of Concerned Scientists reviewed 12 academic studies and indicates otherwise: "The several thousand field trials over the last 20 years for genes aimed at increasing operational or intrinsic yield (of crops) indicate a significant undertaking. Yet none of these field trials have resulted in increased yield in commercialized major food/feed crops, with the exception of Bt corn."¹²However, it was further stated that this increase is largely due to traditional breeding improvements. 

Therefore, because GM foods pose a serious health risk in the areas of toxicology, allergy and immune function, reproductive health, and metabolic, physiologic and genetic health and are without benefit, the AAEM believes that it is imperative to adopt the precautionary principle, which is one of the main regulatory tools of the European Union environmental and health policy and serves as a foundation for several international agreements.¹³ The most commonly used definition is from the 1992 Rio Declaration that states: "In order to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied by States according to their capabilities. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation."¹³ 

Cost of Homemade vs Canned Soup

I've been eating Tasty Classics soups for $0.25 per serving, but this is because it was on sale for $0.50 per can. There was a recall of some of the Tasty Classics soup because of possible botulism contamination. I don't know if they'e now stopped making the soup, or if my local grocery store got hold of a large lot of it for almost nothing.

Most canned soup costs $0.50 per serving or more.

I found this interesting post on the Julie At Home blog. It compares the cost of homemade with canned soups.
http://juliemcm.blogspot.com/2010/11/canned-soup-vs-homemade-cost-comparison.html

Based on Julie's comparison, the cost of homemade soup is significantly lower than the cost of canned soup, and the homemade version tastes better as well.

Here is another of Julie's comparisons of homemade vs purchased prepared foods: http://juliemcm.blogspot.com/2010/11/7-foods-you-waste-your-money-on.html