Early crop second planting

Hedgehog (my six-year-old daughter) helped in the garden on Sunday, and we both learned a few things. One of my lessons for the day was "do your research". In my zeal to find exotic salad greens I had picked up a packet of "mesclun" seeds. Boy did I feel dumb when I dumped the packet into a bowl and found six different kinds of seeds all mixed together. It turns out that "mesclun" is a fancy name for the meatloaf of the gardening set. Still, I am determined to get my dollar's worth, so we planted a row anyway.

In addition to the whatchagot salad greens we planted five cabbages and three short rows of a heat-tolerant variety of spinach. Later in the season we will plant more of each, but that's enough for now.

Hedgehog also got a chance to plant seedling starters.

I pulled out the spice jars so she could smell each herb as she planted oregano, rosemary, dill, sage, Italian parsley, lavender, and three varieties of basil. We are also trying to grow lemons, grapefruit and kumquats. Collective wisdom is that citrus trees are best done through some kind of grafting process, but we'll give it a try anyway. I just cannot get behind growing one tree just to lop its top off and replace it with the top of another tree -- sounds like something from a horror movie.

Early crop first planting

Last week Tapper (my four-year-old son) and I sowed the first early crop planting in the garden and also started our first batch of seedlings. The early season is all about greens, root crops and spices. In the garden we planted three small rows of lettuce (Bibb, Romaine and Black Seeded Simpson) as well as a row of Arugula. If you plan to eat a lot of any particular vegetable it's a good idea to practice "succession planting", which is a fancy term for planting a little bit several times separated by a couple of weeks; that way you don't end up with a truck load of beets all at once. The usual practice for leaf vegetables is to sprinkle the seeds up and down the row, then thin them later, but I just cannot stand the thought of using all of that seed only to cut the plants off in their infancy. So, instead I get out my ruler and plant individual seeds spaced out for full-sized plants.

Spacing Seeds	Row Markers	Marked Rows

It's entirely possible that some of the seeds won't sprout, but I don't mind going back over the row later to fill in the gaps. At the same time, I don't like wasting garden space, so I ignore row-spacing guidelines and just separate rows by the space required for the largest plant. I mark my rows with numbered sticks and I keep a list of what number corresponds to which plant.

Some plants are easier to grow in seedling starter pots before transplanting to the garden. There are all sorts of seedling starter systems and kits you can purchase pretty much anywhere you can get potting soil. Last year I used the "Jiffy-7" pellets which worked out pretty well. However, when I turned the soil a few weeks ago I discovered that the mesh that holds the pellets together does not biodegrade (in a year's time, anyway). I'm also not entirely sure that the growing plants' roots can penetrate the mesh. So, this year I'm doing it all on my own.

Since one of my purposes in putting in a garden is to save money, I try to limit my costs as much as possible. So, instead of buying seedling trays made for the purpose, I just got some plastic cups (2.75" w. 4.5" h.) and poked a hole in the bottoms. To hold them I found a sale on plastic bins that are wide and short (designed for storing Christmas wrapping paper). Filling the cups with an organic potting soil blend gives me an easily transportable system that I should be able to use for years to come.

Planting the seeds was a lot of fun for Tapper. It was as simple as poking a hole in the soil, dropping in a seed and covering it up. Proper eye protection should be worn, of course.

Poke a hole	Plant a seed	Proper Eye Protection

The seedlings Tapper planted were leeks, celery, extra triple curled parsley, catnip, tarragon and thyme. The seedlings will stay inside for around a month before they start venturing outside during the warmer sunny days.

2011 garden planning

One of the great things about living in Central Texas is that food will grow pretty much all year long, if you are careful to cover the plants for the five or six freezing nights that winter brings. This year my approach is to plan for four distinct growing seasons because some vegetables can't take the heat and others thrive in it, but can't take cool weather. This simplistic approach is a direct result of my frustration with both broad generalization and false precision in forecasting. Let me explain.

We live in US Hardiness Zone 8. Hardiness zones are based on the expected last frost date as predicted by some sort of historical averages. Seed companies compare the frost dates for each zone with the cold-handling properties of their plants and give us gardeners a general idea of when to plant. Usually the range is two to six months, which is really not that helpful. In contrast, Texas Gardener Magazine, having an independent streak about it, has its own zone map which is more specific and gives more precise planting dates for each type of vegetable. According to the magazine's schedule, spinach should be planted starting Jan. 4, but the date for radishes is Jan. 18. I find it difficult to believe that there is any noticeable difference in the weather between those two weeks. Hence my frustration with false precision.

So, I choose to cast off the chains of the prognosticators and make up my own rules. After all, I'm doing this for fun as much as anything, and getting stressed out over missing deadlines is what I do at work. If anyone feels the need to grill me on my methods I'll work up some kind of spreadsheet that will appear to support my gut decisions; people who wear ties do that all the time.

Using the Austin Organic Gardeners' planting calendar as a guide I've worked up plans for an early crop of stuff that grows between January and April, a mid-year crop from May to July, a late crop from August to October, and a winter crop for stuff that likes cold.

I have not yet worked out what I want to do for the middle and late crops, but here is my plan for the early crop:

Growing Paleo Vegetables

I am an avid vegetable gardener, not an especially successful or experienced one, mind you, but I sure like it a lot. Since the Paleo diet is all about eating the best food possible for one's body, I figure it makes sense to grow as much of our food as is practical in as natural a way as possible -- and blog about it, of course. My posts on gardening are not intended to impress anyone. I simply want to share the techniques I use and the lessons I learn along the way. I promise that some of these lessons will be as funny as cultivating non-intelligent life forms can be.

If you have done much reading about gardening, you'll find there are all sorts of different approaches with fancy names. Asking which method is the best invites debate as intense and as pointless as the Browser Wars. No method promises your patio will surpass the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. I've never been much for adhering to any kind of "ism," so I take pieces from lots of methods and mix them as I see fit.

Here's how I started.

In February 2008 I decided that I needed yet another hobby and vegetable gardening would fill the bill. After weeks of planning, measuring and discussion with Crystal and the kids, I settled on an L-shaped raised bed in the southeast corner of our back yard. Here's a diagram of the plot:

I'll do a separate post later giving the details on how I went about putting it in, but I will share one little tip right now: allow enough space between the raised bed and the fence to get a lawn mower between them. I sure wish I had. Even with the proper equipment, a 120 square foot raised bed is a lot of work to put in:



Five years ago, the soil in my area was a cotton field. Today it is a sandy black clay as hard as concrete when it is dry -- not ideal for most vegetables -- so I have been working on improving it. The first year I mixed it with sandy loam which I ordered from a local dirt merchant. That year's garden was unexciting. Last year I mixed in a whole bunch of peat moss and my favorite natural fertilizer with pretty good results, at least for the tomatoes.


This year I've added a tremendous amount of home-made compost. I have high hopes for the rest of our Paleo feast!

Reasons of my own

I'll admit that I was initially skeptical about the Paleo diet when Crystal started talking about it. I remember thinking, "How is throwing away thousands of years of agricultural advances going to make me healthy?" Still, I try to support Crystal in whatever she does, so I opened my ears and closed my mouth. (Ok, I snickered a little bit too, but I blame the Y chromosome for that.) I had always taken for granted that the purpose of cooking food is to make it more nutritious and easier to digest. Never did it occur to me that the reason some foods are more nutritious and digestible is because they're poisonous in raw form! As I read more about the theory and science behind the diet I became more convinced that it might be just the thing for our health. Now, I am lucky not to suffer from any sort of autoimmune disease, but I do have a family history of diabetes, heart disease and cancer, all of which I would prefer to avoid contracting.

Avoiding the negative is a powerful motivation in itself, but going Paleo seems likely to give me a boost in one of my most passionate pursuits: practicing martial arts. I study Kung Fu under the Shaolin Do system and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu under the Carlson Gracie system, and I am always trying to improve my abilities. I wasn't always a good steward of my body, and I've spent the last two years making up for it. No matter what I do, though, I cannot get rid of this band of belly fat that prevents me from doing the more acrobatic moves gracefully. Also, it doesn't help that conditioning workouts often cause me to go into hypoglycemic shock. I'm hoping that the proponents of the diet are right when they say that it helps to reduce belly fat and regulate blood sugar.

One reason of many

I was knee-deep in cold water near Granger, Texas. The day was hot, a typical mid-afternoon in August. Donald and I were fishing in the San Gabriel River; our kids were with their grand-dad for the day, giving us a chance to escape into one of our favorite pastimes. The fish weren't biting although we could see gar, channel cats and trout grouped in the shady spots. I reeled my line in a few clicks to keep the tension and direct my lure toward a particular area under a large, overhanging tree.

My right hand felt like it was on fire. All day I had been plagued with a strange itch along the insides of my index and middle fingers. My first reaction was typical: scratch it and make a wry comment about my body rebelling because I hadn't used my favorite hand gesture all day. I glanced downstream to see if Donald was busy fighting anything on his line. He smiled and waved, looking as happily bored as I felt. I motioned that I was going back up to the sandbar. Our time was almost up and the fish weren't cooperating.

Just then I felt what can only be described as a painful tear of the skin on my hand, right where it had itched. I looked down at it and gasped. There was! What I had thought was a callous from weeks of dragging fishing line through my fingers had ripped open. It was a short tear, but very, very deep. It didn't bleed, but it felt like I'd been stabbed. I finished my retreat to the scattered tackle boxes and gear we'd left on the bar of sand and washed rock, grabbed a bottle of water we'd brought down, and rinsed the wound.

After eight years of remission I realized that once again I was up against one of the most frustrating conditions I've ever had. Psoriasis. What I had believed were callouses were actually plaque, a thickening and scaling of the skin. I'd never had an attack on my hands before, so I didn't recognize the condition. I'd been letting it go untreated for nearly eight weeks instead of running for my bottles and tubes of corticosteroids. I had three or four kinds, all of them in differing strengths, that I kept the prescriptions up on. Tears welled in my eyes and dripped down my face. I wasn't sure I could go through all of this again. I had thought I had it beaten.

The following months were filled with my old routine: soak the affected area to soften the skin, abrade whatever I could from the surface, then coat with medicine. The problem this time is that the outbreak was on my hands. How could  I keep from smearing steroids on everything I touched? I had to wear a surgical glove on my right hand for at least four hours a day. I did this when Donald and the children weren't home. The rest of the time, I rubbed medicine on the outbreak and washed it off within 30 minutes. I spent a lot of time leaning against my bathroom counter, playing word games on my phone and waiting for the alarm to go off so I could wash my hands again and wipe my phone down.

The good news was that things healed relatively quickly. Within three months, the outbreak was controlled and I'd regained function of my right hand. The bad news was that every joint in my right hand ached. Arthritis  often goes, pardon this, hand-in-hand with psoriasis. I had been proud that in over 15 years I had only needed Donald to open four jars or bottles for me. I had a strong grip in the past, but with the latest outbreak that grip was weakened. My usual 95 WPM typing speed slowed, and my error rate went from non-existent to 5%. My fingers could no longer bend quickly enough to keep up with my mind as I wrote.

I began once again to do research on auto-immune diseases. I didn't want this to happen again. I didn't want anything worse to happen to me, either. I'm not generally a fatalist, but I had a very strong belief that if I didn't find a way to stop the deterioration of my body from psoriasis, I was leaving myself open to future various, crippling diseases such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes (over and above what my weight would cause).

In December, Jen Wojcik (@thejenATX on Twitter) posted a tweet about something she called the Paleo diet. I was intrigued because I'm chubby, the foods she posted about sounded interesting, and I knew "paleo" meant "ancient." I began reading websites about the diet, and the more I read the more excited about it I got.

And then I hit the material that starts talking about how a modern, non-Paleo diet can lead to severe inflammation of joints and auto-immune diseases. It could help control pre-diabetic issues. It could help with cardiovascular issues.

Say what? And I'll probably lose weight?

I bought Robb Wolf's book The Paleo Solution on Kindle because the excerpts challenged me and I liked his sense of humor. I told Donald that I was considering giving this a try. He had been searching for a way to increase his health, as he's now involved in kung fu and Brazilian jiu jitsu at least five times a week. He was interested in the Paleo diet as well, so we bought a hardcopy of Loren Cordain's The Paleo Diet Cookbook to help us get started on meal preparation.

And that's when things got really weird.