2012 alt op #3 Cheap, easy food in your yard

            Been kind of on a downer the past two articles haven’t I. So let’s just suppose that I’m wrong. Those things I’ve been yapping about just won’t happen. I’m fairly sure they will, I just don’t know when, but I’m willing to admit that I could be wrong.

            So, how would you like to find out about way’s to grow nice healthy food in your own yard?  A place where you can control what goes on them or in them? I’ve mentioned this to a few folks around here and been told that it costs too much and is just too much work to keep a garden when all you have to do is drive to Wal-Mart to buy food. Yeah, it costs a bit but its still less than you’d have to pay for all the city water, the herbicides, the insecticides and don’t forget the tilling, the hoeing, the planting and all that hard work.

            So what if I said you could get together with a few neighbors and set up your front yard, back yard, heck maybe even one of your fields if you have several acres, so that after that initial hard work you almost didn’t have to do anything. Well, maybe walk around clipping a few limbs or bushes and such and just dropping them on the ground. No more tilling or plowing. No more herbicides or insecticides or even gasoline for the tiller or diesel for the tractor. Maybe you’d need a little oil and gas occasionally for the chain saw.

            Impossible! Nope. I’ve seen a video of how it can be done. Even in our drought prone area with only an initial input of city water. Yeah you will have to keep working it, but it shouldn’t be hard if you’ve planned it right. The cool part is you can tweak it as it grows.

            What the heck am I talking about?  I’m talking about a food forest. It doesn’t have to be big either. It can be your front yard, back yard or both. It can be out in the pasture behind your house or around your barns. It is complicated to explain. You start with a ditch and some weeds.

            This is a special kind of ditch called a swale. It’s dug along the contours of the land with the soil from it piled up on the downhill side. The bottom of this ditch is not compacted or covered with clay or water proofing and it is kept as level as possible. Yes it will catch all the rain runoff from uphill. That’s the whole idea, to catch that water and hold it there until it soaks into the ground. The “weeds”, the specially selected weeds, are planted on the mound of dirt below the ditch. These will be the fast growing, nitrogen fixing and soil building plants that also make food for you or your animals. There will be ground covers, bushes and even trees of a type you might normally rip out of your yard or pasture. Mesquite, clover, alfalfa, hairy vetch, even bluebonnets! You’d plant lots of those and among them you plant things like fruit and nut trees and trees for timber or firewood        

            One big trick is to mark the trees that will eventually be your food trees because all the others are going to be chopped on and their limbs dropped around the fruit or nut tree nearest them. Meanwhile down on the ground you’re also growing sweet potatoes, tomatoes or whatever, wherever. So all you need to do is go out and pick them. Sound good?

            “But what about the bugs and weeds!?” you may well be asking now. Simple answer: forget about it! If you design it right there will be so many different flowers, scents, colors and shapes that the bad guy bugs will be all confused. Meanwhile there will be lots of hiding places, nesting places and such for critters who like to eat bugs. That would be good guy bugs, and various kinds of birds, amphibians and lizards that won’t be killed by the poisons if you don’t use them.

            Yes, I remember the plague of grasshoppers we had this past summer. The answer to that is simple. More ground birds such as turkey’s and guinea fowl should solve the problem and they taste good to. I’ll say more on this later. Meanwhile you can go to Permies.com to have it explained better.

Burn Bans, droughts, and swales. Sixteenth Alt Op of the year.

So we aren’t under a burn ban . . . Yet! We are, despite the recent storms, terribly short on rain. No rain equals drought. Drought equals a darn good chance that burn barrel, trash pile or brush pile you plan to light up can get away from you, and get away real fast if it happens to also be windy. But y’all aren’t that foolish, now are ya? Y’all aren’t gonna burn anything during drought conditions while it’s windy! Are you? I hope that opinion isn’t proved wrong, folks. We don’t need a situation here like those poor folks in West Texas have. Especially as I think we may have more houses per square mile than they do out there. Think about that.
That reminds me. Don’t forget about the Easter Bunny coming to town this coming Easter Sunday. The local volunteer fire department will be showing him around town before the Easter Egg Hunt at the high school stadium at one p.m. There will be lots of candy and prize eggs for each age group. So come on down at one for the fun.
Back to the weather. We do need some rain and we need it bad. What we don’t need is the high winds and tornado's. What I think we need is a couple of days of slow steady rain that will soak in and fill up all our stock tanks as well as the lake.
This is also a good time to preach about rain harvesting. Yes. I’m talking about harvesting the rain. It’s something I’ve read about on line and it sounds good to me.
There are several ways to do this. The easiest and most straight forward is with rain gutters on your house or barns leading to "rain barrels." These rain barrels can be anything from the old fashioned wooden barrels to a cleaned out 55 gallon industrial drum or even one of those big white plastic tank like things used to haul liquids. It can be even bigger and become a cistern. Cisterns can be built underground, at ground level or above ground. Those barrels I mentioned earlier can be above ground too. In fact it’s usually better if they are because then you can use gravity to feed that water to a small metal or plastic stock tank, a drip irrigation system or even to a tank to use to flush your toilet (thus saving the water you have to pay for, for drinking, cooking and bathing).
A lot of folks out here are already harvesting rain with the stock tanks that we see in just about every pasture. The stock tank catches the water that would normally flow off of the land and saves it for the cattle, horses, or goats to drink. These man made ponds have a base layer of clay or something else waterproof to keep the water from soaking in and disappearing.
There is another kind of rain harvesting land form called a swale. The idea behind a swale is not to keep the water in one place but to slow it down so it can soak in. Swales, from what I’ve read, come in all sizes, shapes and forms. They can resemble ditches or even just a terraced field. With a swale the water is captured and held in place so that it can soak down into the ground and add to the all important ground water of the whole area. Thus they shouldn’t pose a mosquito problem.
The bottoms of the swales can be anything from sand, gravel, broken up soil, or even grass that can survive the occasional flood. Down hill from the swale is also a good place to plant things like trees or bushes. What ever will shade the swale to keep the water from evaporating and also hold the berm that makes up part of the swale in place with their roots. Oh, yeah. Those plants will benefit from the collected rain water but that’s all to the good. You will not only add to the local aquifer but also get some pears, peaches, blueberries, black berries, corn or what ever. Sound good? Sounds good.

From the 2011 Seventh issue of the Lone Oak Newsletter

Well, there are finely no extra horses in my pasture. I hope to keep the number down to one or less for the foreseeable future. Why? Because for the past couple of years it seems that I have been talked into helping folks out by letting them keep critters on my land. In some instances it worked out. In at least one it did not.
Once folks had animals here they started bringing in more “just for a while!” and “We’ll pay you!” Some did pay. Others did not. In any event because of my foolish inability to say no, my poor pasture is grazed down to darn near nothing. I know. I finely got up the courage to try walking out there. I paid for it that night and the day after but I got a good look at the damage.

If the land is let alone it might recover on it’s own. I dearly wish I had the money to start digging swales and building berms to hold water on the land instead of letting the soil wash away into Lake Tawakoni. No. Plowing it up and planting seed will not do. The land slopes too much. Plowing it up will only help erosion. Broad casting seed and then mowing down the weeds to cover and protect them might work, but I find I can’t convince anyone else of that. Most who do offer to help suggest chemicals of various stripes. Poisons for weeds, fake chemical fertilizers, and possibly even poisons for bugs and snakes.

They think I’m nuts you know. Probably because I don’t think a few weeds are a bad thing, though I do admit I have far too many. My idea for weed control is less sexy, and slower than a big ol’ dose of herbicide.

My idea is to just keep the place mowed. Mow down the weeds before they make seeds. Then mow them down again when they sprout back up, and before they can make seeds again. Then keep doing it until only the low growing grasses that will hold the soil in place are thriving.

Why do I not think weeds are all that bad? Think about the weed. It grows anywhere, in any kind of soil, under drought conditions and flood. The weed sends down roots deeper than most of the other plants around it so that it can tap into water and nutrients the civilized plants can’t reach. . . And it brings those nutrients up to the surface. Knock down the weed. Let it compost in place and it will give those nutrients to the grasses you want to grow.

Besides, a patch or two of nice healthy weeds forms a haven for bugs. All kinds of bugs. Bad guys and the good guys that like to eat them. So the bad guy bugs get into your garden. If there’s a patch of weeds harboring bugs nearby then there will be good guy bugs handy to come eat the bad ones up. Besides some weeds produce seeds that birds like to eat as much as they do bad guy bugs.

The thing is though, it is a balancing act. You have to get the right balance of good and bad bugs, and of weeds and forage for these things to work together as they should. One way to do it is to just walk away and let nature take its course. The problem there is that it takes time. Time, during which, that much more valuable top soil washes into the local lake with the run off that could have stayed on your land, and watered your crops and animals.

That’s where people come in. Humans, the great manipulators of the environment. We’ve done a wonderful job of trashing the planet, the soil, the very air we breath. But there are simple, low tech, admittedly high labor, methods out there that can be used to save the air, the soil; and yes, even the planet.

No one likes these low tech ways to save the planet much though because they aren't quick, easy or even sexy. These low tech methods take thinking, planing, foresight, hard work and patience. All of which are, sadly in short supply nowadays.