The 'Farm-lette' Report

  Ethel the pineapple--before

Let's say it up front: backyard farmers are a bit wack.  If you accept that premise, here's the next:  organic backyard farmers should go ahead & sign themselves into a managed care...of hell with it--sanitarium--& save themselves & their loved ones angst, sweat, & a bleedin' fortune.

Ok,  now that's out there, here's what's sprouting,  what I'm harvesting, & what I'm doing with the loot.  

      Happily Ethel--after

(& FYI, I do garden organically, & if they want me at the sanitarium, they'd better bring several strong orderlies...& a big bottle of white vinegar. I use vinegar where others use Roundup. I also use vinegar in lieu of cleaning products like ammonia & bleach. I love vinegar & if that means I smell a bit like a Kosher dill, so be it.) 

First principle of organic back yard gardening (hereafter OBYG, which come to think of it looks like another topic entirely, & yet shares certain characteristics--patience, endurance, opting for healthy choices, more patience, a lot of nurturing, plotting & planning, conversion of spaces, still more patience, protection, pain, & finally fruition.  Hmmm)-- Adaptation. And I mean you, not the plants. 

Made in the shade-house (for sprouting)

First the adaptation in your planning.  I make a lot of useful out of useless, composting so much that I frequently skip putting out garbage for pickup once or twice out of every three times. I just don't amass as much MSW (municipal solid waste--such a romantic phrase), which wasn't really a conscious goal, rather a great side benefit. I'm not a Moonie-esque devotee of composting, just have a smallish covered barrel.  I won't go into composting detail since there are tons of available articles online. I use the simplest of methods, saving everything in a halfway house Rubbermaid tub by my sink & carting it to the bin when full--a couple times each week. I fill the emptied tub as I pass the hose, swish to rinse & dump that juice in the crown of pineapples growing by the kitchen door.  They thrive on it, & though I have friends who swear by the benefits of fish emulsion, my pineapples are amazingly heavy & sweet & live on an occasional misting with the hose & compost juice. No fertilizer, no smelly emulsion, nothing but water & yuck juice. 

Planning also involves placement & plant selection, & here a shout out to the great botanical beyond.  When we lost my dear friend David Hamada last year, I was comforted by the fact his vast horticultural knowledge lives on in lessons & guidance we were lucky enough to learn from him.  Xeriscaping was important to him & he wrote newspaper articles on the topic. Again there is a lot of online material if you want to delve deeper, but my shorthand version is 'plant what wants to live here, & plant it where it wants to be, whether or not that is exactly where you wanted it to be.'  It has to do with the considered allotment of available resources & the use of native species in your plan. It is also about what you don't do.  You don't go against nature by planting what you're nostalgic for from your stateside childhood, with no concern for the vast amount of effort, energy, & resources (water) you'll have to commit to the process. You will most likely fail in your efforts, making all that led there a true waste. Another good friend recently shifted her concentration from growing hibiscus to cultivating bromeliads. She had moved to a new home where the basis for her yard was caliche, rendering digging & drainage difficult to impossible.  Bromeliads are beautiful, come in myriad varieties & thrive here, requiring minimal drain to resources like water. She is having much more satisfying results.  

Bromeliads & the lizards who love them

I'm working on raised beds in the spirit of this consideration.  Maybe 'raised' is a bit of a stretch, & that is a planning adaptation as well.  I'm constructing them of half-faced concrete block (rough texture on the outside) instead of lumber or wood & metal because (like the first  two houses in 'Little Pig' fame) wood rots & invites termites & metal corrodes & crumbles here in the tropics, so to avoid redoubled efforts in the near future--block.  Raised is relative since I'm digging down a few inches, adding weed barrier & then only going up one or two blocks high. So...raised only if you're a munchkin?  8" high block edging still removes plantings from the path of the evil bush cutter, allows me to minimize weeds & maximize soil quality without investing a time/energy/$$ fortune building higher. The plan includes planting herbs & low annuals in the cells within each block too. Because I'm making smallish beds, I can minimize potential weed growth by leaving less space between plants. Before I swung the pick axe    even once, I spent time watching sun & shade patterns to determine what would have the best chance of success in a specific area. As much as possible, I read & studied seed varieties before purchase.

      The second planting for 2016

I paid attention to successful (& unsuccessful since you frequently learn more from failures) choices in friends'gardens. I cleaned used pots with vinegar & water to remove whatever cooties they still held.  

Then I planted my seeds in pots, misted them morning & evening, & covered all with a suspended bamboo shade until they sprouted & required more direct sun.  They are happily growing away. There are cukes, green & black beans, heirloom tomatoes, all varieties of sunflowers, zinnias, cosmos, portulacca, cilantro, basils, dill & thyme.

               Mu inspecting sprouts

The other adaptation is to your expectations.  Aside from not expecting to grow a typical English cottage garden here in the tropics, home gardening here (& especially OBYG) produces unexpected results. The lessons learned won't all be fun, but they're not all bad, either. Tomatoes are my best examples of this.  One year I tried Beefsteak tomatoes. I did it because a local farmer was selling seedlings in his farm stand & they were familiar from my stateside gardening.  Lessons learned:  1.  Just because someone here is trying it doesn't mean it is a good idea & 2.  Abandon your precepts about growing what worked in WV & MD. We're not there, anymore than Dorothy was still in Kansas. The results were abysmal--pest- & blight-ridden, tortured plants producing very few small, sad, gnarled fruit after sucking up a veritable reservoir of water. 

Memory being what it is, a few years later I tried cherry tomatoes, with mixed success.  Again the plants looked stricken, again they drank too deeply from valued water reserves, but the harvest was more plentiful & tastier. 

And then a few years ago I found heirloom tomato seeds at a local hardware store.  Grandpa was a seed saver, with envelopes of saved seeds tucked everywhere in his house. An unwitting follower of Darwin, in saving seed he was selecting for desirable characteristics he wanted to appear in future generations.  This was promising. That year was my tomato personal best.  The plants still looked less than hardy & the resulting tomatoes were smaller & had more ridges & convolutions, but the flavor? The taste of those funny little green/purple striped babies was concentrated heaven, full of peppery undernotes, as if a bold tomato had mated with arugula.  A definite party in your mouth. For months I mostly lived on sandwiches of tomato slices on wheat toast with a bit of horseradish sauce.  This year my seedlings of 'black karim' & 'Cherokee purple' heirloom tomatoes are sprouting nicely. By the time they produce I should be past the most brutally strict part of this dietary revolution & be able to slip in a slice of wheat bread for a tomato sandwich now & then.  

A 'weed mango,' i.e. one that sprouted from a random seed & not from careful grafting like the others in my yard is the first to produce this year, having adapted successfully to the spot it chose.  Still too young to produce the ridiculous bevy of fruit characteristic of its planned brethren, I'm still carrying bags of mangos to give to my coworkers every day. 

The other major harvest is pineapples, & despite the time required to produce a fruit & the fact the plant produces one & dies, they are the best example of xeriscaping in my yard.

Fourteen pineapples in various stages are in the works, and after them their younger sibs will do the same.  All but 2 of the 60+ pineapple plants growing in this yard are the product of the four that were growing here when I bought the house in 2008.  In all, hundreds of offspring have been producing for the last eight years.  They flourish in a grass-covered rock curbing at the foot of my sloping yard. It was designed to keep my yard from visiting the neighbors below, but provides perfect pineapple conditions--support, sun with a bit of shade, & above all, great drainage (to combat rot).  The pineapples are good sized fruit one friend described as tasting like pineapple candy.  Though the parent plant dies after fruiting, it leaves several babies behind on the way out--suckers growing around the fruit, slips growing from the bottom of the plant, & of course the pineapple top to root.

The suckers, slips & tops, ready to plant

All the initial planning & strategy are simply meant to stack the deck toward future success. Lots of stuff can & no doubt will happen between the initial idea & the eventual eating.  It helps to enjoy the process. Every time a seed knocks soil off its head & surfaces, I'm still a kid with radish seeds sprouting in blotter paper, my third grade teacher Mrs. Cubby talking & gesturing excitedly & using metaphors for the potential within the process.