My THREE YEAR PLAN to turn my hilltop back yard into a maze of continuous-growth food source is half done. The time, 3 years, is half done.....not the plan I have on paper.
My PLAN included the raising of rabbits for the freezer. We did this for while and the rabbits certainly did their part; they multiplied like....well, rabbits. Turns out the breeding & raising of the rabbits is the easy part. The 'harvesting' of the rabbits turned out to be our downfall. Neither of us being from a hunting background, the harvesting was quite stressful. After a while, we determined that we loved the rabbits and babies; just couldn't deal with the harvesting. Bye-bye, freezer rabbits.
The building of more raised beds is necessary. The PLAN calls for a minimum of five raised beds; this meant adding one or two a year. With just the one, I can put food on our table; the PLAN was to put food on all the tables of our six grown children and their families. The PLAN was optimistic! The reality of purchasing materials, building the beds, trucking in garden soil, buying/planting bedding plants and/or seed.....well, like i said, the PLAN was optimistic. My vision of the completed food bearing back yard still has a way to go.
I do have the beginnings of a second raised bed that is merely the left over landscaping timbers stacked in a triangle shape with the left over garden soil dumped in. I raised a few cantaloupe in that excuse of a bed last year. This year I have a few sunflowers that came up on their own. Didn't have the heart to dig them up; they did, after all survive when so many other things don't! Thought they deserved a chance to make their mark in the world.
The PLAN also included planting more fruit trees, one or two per season. To-date, I have one small fig tree I have been coaxing out of the ground for 2 1/2 years, one grapefruit tree that seems to attract every grasshopper in this area in spite of my nurturing, the dried remains of another fig and the corpse of a red maple I planted 5 years ago. For whatever reason, it just never put on leaves this year. My Honey says it is dead and we should cut it down. In my visionary way of thinking, I have not been able to give up on it. A neighbor on another hill informs me that it very well may be dead. She then went on to tell me of two different trees they had planted over the years in one particular spot. When the first one died after several years, they dug it up and found the roots just hanging in mid-air in a void under the tree! That's right, the ground had just disappeared under the root ball; roots dangling in the hole. They planted a second tree after filling the hole with soil, happened again! Apparently, they decided, constant watering eventually washed away the ground under the tree. Remember, we live in the Texas hill country and our hills are mostly rock, very little soil.
Were it not for our pioneering spirits that make us continue to dream and plant, we would be wise to just let nature take her course and be happy with the native vegetation. You don't see many vegetables growing in native vegetation, so we push on year after year in hopes of forging a veggie garden where once there was none.
For anyone unfamiliar with south Texas let me explain that we are fairly locked in by rocks and hot weather. By hot, I mean the hell kind of hot, the 90+ degrees at 10PM kind of hot. Soaring three digit temperatures during the day heat up all the rock quite nicely so we maintain heat well into the night. All that thermo-geological stuff may be desired in other parts of the world but here, not so much.
Add to that, there appears to be a large invisible umbrella over our particular area and, on the off chance any rain does pass through to this part of the state, we don't get it. It can rain all around us but not ON us. We are under the umbrella. From our hilltop vantage point I can watch the rain move across the hills north of us. I can see billowing dark clouds as they sweep in from the south east off the Gulf of Mexico teasing us with possibilities of rain. From the west, great storms are possible. In fact, one pulverized our home seven years ago with softball size hail but the rain seems to stop around Hondo, eight miles west of here. It's the darnest thing. So we water that which we want to grow. We don't have real grass lawns, just stuff, hill country vegetation. Lots of wilderness looking stuff. So we take great care to water our meager attempts at a garden.
We're a hardy lot, we gardeners in south Texas. Big dreamers, too. I have a PLAN & I'm sticking with it. Time is running out, say a little prayer for me and the PLAN, won't you? Rain dance wouldn't hurt, either!
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