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Farm Homestead Revival

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Our latest client’s garden is in a somewhat unlikely location – Wimberly and the rugged Texas Hill County. Known for its abundant limestone rock, Anne picked her location with gardening in mind and the century-plus homestead is along the banks of Pierce Creek near the Blanco River. It has beautiful alluvial soil just right for growing lots of vegetables, fruit trees and berries.

When Anne bought the place she knew she some day wanted to have her own personal mini-farm. What she didn’t know was Hurricane Ike was going to punch a great big hole in her house in downtown Houston and hasten her move to Wimberly. While Anne still misses her house in Houston she’s bringing her green thumb and whatever plants she can salvage to central Texas.

However, the growing conditions here are very different than the humid Gulf Coast and after going it alone last year Anne knew she wanted some help with her garden planning and bed preparation. While she had some luck last year with tomatoes, basil and watermelon other crops just didn’t take off. In December Bohemian Bounty visited with Anne and toured her amazing garden plot. She’s already had a seven foot fence installed to keep out what is her number one pest – deer. The area covers about an acre and is partially shaded by a massive pecan tree and a small orchard of fig, mulberry, apple and peach trees.

With Anne’s desire for a mini-farm in mind Jen designed a plan that incorporates 2 main garden areas composed of multiple narrow 4-foot wide linear beds, accessible by 2-foot wide foot paths throughout. In total, when fully planted out this personal farm encompass 1,440 square feet of bedding space! And that’s not including the 10-foot x 6-foot raised box built to hold Anne’s raspberry brambles. Yes, Anne is determined to grow raspberries which she grew up enjoying in Ohio. Jen included a 3 year suggestion for plant rotation emphasizing companion planting and cover crops to capture some nitrogen which is low in the soil.

Anne was thrilled with the plan and took Jen’s advice to start with only one large bed and the raspberry box. Anne wanted to be hands-on and do all the planting and we are all for everyone getting dirty so in one day we prepared the first of four bedding areas. The bed prep work included measuring, flagging, tilling, rock and weed removal, incorporation of compost and cottonseed meal, mulching and the building of raised cedar box. Anne was planting vegetable seeds, transplants from Houston and her raspberry brambles by the end of the day!

It was a long, hard day of work at the mini-farm but Anne’s neighbors were already stopping by making requests for her first summer tomatoes. What a great new addition to Wimberly! – James

The Real Dirt on Farmer John – Movie Review

The Real Dirt on Farmer John
The Real Dirt on Farmer John

We recently viewed the movie, The Real Dirt on Farmer John. All we knew before watching it was it was supposed to be the inspirational, true-life story of a successful, independent farmer. Excellent – a movie about the farm that doesn’t involve a talking pig!

However, the beginning of the movie made us wonder if we had been duped – what did this man wearing a pink boa riding a tractor, talking about being “different” have to teach us? We seriously pondered grabbing the remote and watching a talking pig movie instead. Fortunately, we didn’t. By the second half of the movie our connection to Farmer John began to flourish.

Personally, coming from a family who filmed my life in 8mm and super 8mm, I appreciated the use of John’s family film footage. The downfalls and realizations that brought the story full circle – from the farm chores of a child to the successes as a young farmer to the loss of the family farm to foreclosure auctions and, finally, to a successful CSA farm birth – was the most magical part of the story. We are grateful for Farmer John’s mother’s foresight and his own for documenting the whole story and sharing it. It takes courage to show the world your eccentricities and failures.

We highly recommend this film to everyone – whether you are an old scandanavian farming family or a city farmer wannabe, you’ll appreciate it. As odd as the beginning of this movie is – the lessons of tolerance, sustainable living and environmental awareness are well played out in this docudrama. 4 Pea Pods out of 5! 🙂

-Jen

Greenhouse and Garden Work

We took advantage of this warm weekend to complete some greenhouse and garden work. Our greenhouse could be called a hobby greenhouse due to its small size – 16′ by 10′. And while that does sound small, you can grow a lot of plants in it. It’s an aluminum frame with fiberglass panels. They don’t really make them of this material any more due to much better products on the market, but it works fine for us.

One downside of rigid fiberglass panel greenhouses is the fiberglass loses its transparency over time (becomes opaque) and become brittle. As this one has some years on it it has a number of holes and developed a couple of cracks this last summer. So, handy me bought a fibeglass repair kit, cut a number of supporting patches out of an unused panel and went to work. Let me tell you, working with fiberglass cloth and resin is messy business. Fortunately, I followed directions and had all of my supports and cloth patches cut before I mixed the resin. It was a sticky, stinky mess but all of the patches worked like a charm. After a couple of hours the greenhouse is leaking a lot less air.

I also added a new bench for plants at the back of the greenhouse in an area we were using for storing tools. On Sunday I added a system to keep the hose out of the way suspended on shower curtain hooks and installed a peg board for Jen’s drip irrigation supplies.

Jen installed a new bed in the garden for onions. I love onions and this year we have two beds of them! We also have a great crop of garlic coming up. The bulbs are from my grandmother at the Naivar Farm in Granger, TX. She also put some protection around a very nice head of cauliflower to keep the sun from marring it. We’ll post pictures soon.

Here’s a fun time-lapse video of me building the greenhouse:

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