I've been a bit of a food hoarder ever since the Great Recession. I always buy nonperishable food and toiletries in bulk at Costco. I have a chest freezer in my utility room that I keep full of frozen meat and extra vegetables from the garden. It's all stuff I use anyway (it's not like I'm buying buckets of freeze dried food or MRE's), so I figured it was a harmless habit, but one that I'd probably never really need anyway.
And then this pandemic happened, and suddenly it's all come in really handy. I still have plenty of toilet paper!
Seed saving is similar. Saving seeds is fun, but I figured I was kidding myself to think I'd ever really need it. I don't have any varieties that are unique or special. They are ones always available in seed catalogs or from other gardeners. I could always get more if I have to. I don't have any varieties that are relying on just me to save them or else they will go extinct.
And now since the pandemic, all the seed companies are shut down due to "high demand" that they can't keep up with. I guess suddenly everyone decided they are going to grow their own food.
Since I had the baby, I've scaled back my gardening, and have just been concentrating on my favorites that do really well for me. No experimenting with new things, at least not right now. So I don't really need the seed catalogs right now. I have jars full of all my favorite varieties in my freezer. I only use seed catalogs for trying out new varieties. I have all my old favorites in plentiful supply.
I have enough that I could share them with people. I'm listed on Seed Savers Exchange. I'm assuming, since with the Exchange you request seeds directly from other gardeners, that you can still do that right now while all the seed companies are closed.
I'm surprised I haven't gotten any requests for anything since the pandemic. Actually, I've gotten very few requests overall since I joined. Just one for tomato seeds and two for I'itois onions (I'm waiting for them to mature before I send out bulbs). Maybe not a lot of people know about Seed Savers Exchange.
But suddenly the online seed exchange seems a lot more useful than it did before. Before it just seemed like fun. Now it seems like one of the only safe ways to get seeds right now.
Monday, April 13, 2020
Friday, March 6, 2020
Irrigating with Ollas
My husband Daniel is addicted to Craigslist. This isn't always a bad thing. We've gotten some pretty nice pieces of furniture from there, including the entertainment center that's in our living room right now. I wouldn't advise getting mattresses or couches from there (ew, bed bugs!), but you really can get some good deals on things like entertainment centers, cabinets, bookshelves, tables, desks, etc. They might be free, or they might be a fraction of the price you would pay to get one new. The only problem is you usually need to haul them away yourself, so you need a pickup truck and people who are strong enough to load and unload the thing.
He also gets rocks off of Craigslist. Lots and lots of rocks. Also sometimes cut stone blocks and bricks. He's been using them for hardscaping in the yard and garden. The rocks are often free. In the Hill Country there's so much limestone that people will post things to Craigslist like, "Big rocks free to anyone who wants to haul them away. Otherwise I'm crushing them into gravel and using them as fill." The cut stone blocks and bricks are usually leftovers from people's building projects. Sometimes people give them away for free, and sometimes they charge a small amount of money for them, but again it's still usually a fraction of the price you'd pay buying them retail.
Daniel built us a nice new raised flower bed in the front yard using cut stone blocks entirely off of Craigslist, and almost all of them were free. I think he paid $50 for one load of them. It replaced a dinky flower bed lined with very rotten landscape timbers that was there when we moved in. This stone one he built will probably still be there after we're both dead.
The downside of his Craigslist addiction is that sometimes he'll get things that he's not even sure what we can use them for, but he had to get them because they were such a good deal. The back yard is becoming full of rocks and a big stack of bricks that we're going to use for something someday, and he just got this nice wooden cabinet that's in our storage unit because we're going to put it somewhere someday but we're just not sure where yet. But it was free, so he had to get it!
I try to stay away from Craigslist because I don't want to get addicted too, but a couple of years ago I lucked out and got a really great deal on something that's made a big difference in how I garden.
Daniel found a post where people were giving away cut limestone edging stones that would be nice to line garden beds with. It turns out they were dismantling a community garden at a trailer park, and I noticed that in the picture of the stones they posted, there were also ollas laying around, even though the post itself didn't mention the ollas. I had heard of ollas before and even seen them for sale in a few garden centers, but the two gallon ones cost something like $35 - $40 each. They didn't seem economical for a garden as big as mine. We emailed the guy asking if he was getting rid of the ollas too, and he agreed to throw in the ollas for an additional $200. When we got there to pick them up, a lot of the ollas were broken, but we managed to get 40 ollas that were either completely in tact, or only slightly damaged and able to be repaired. So that was $5 per olla. What a good deal!
What are Ollas?
Technically "olla" just means "pot" in Spanish. It can refer to pots used to cook beans in, for example. But the ollas I got off Craigslist are the kind used to water plants. They're made of porous terra cotta and are kind of gourd shaped with a lid on top. You bury them up to their necks and fill them with water, and the water slowly seeps out to water the plants around them.
Mine are the Dripping Springs Olla brand (which is why they say "DSO" on their lids), and hold about two gallons of water each. They're supposed to be big enough to water an area 4 feet in diameter. These ollas come from Dripping Springs, Texas, which is only about 30 miles from here, so that let me know that they can work in the clay and limestone soil of the Texas Hill Country.
Before I got the ollas I was using soaker hoses to water my vegetable garden. I had the hoses lying on the ground and covered with mulch, one winding around each bed, and would attach the garden hose to them, often leave them trickling overnight to water my plants. Forty ollas turned out to be enough to completely replace the soaker hoses in the vegetable garden, so now the soaker hoses have been relocated to the fruit trees.
Pros and Cons of Ollas
So far the pros have definitely outweighed the cons for me. They are much easier to use than soaker hoses. I just fill them up when they need it, and then I'm done. I don't have to worry about remembering to turn the hose on or off. It's also very easy to tell when I need to water the garden. It needs it when the water in the ollas dries up. When it's been raining, the ollas empty more slowly because the moist soil doesn't draw the water out as quickly, and when it's dry the ollas empty faster as the dry soil and thirsty plants wick out more water.
I do have to water newly planted seeds or transplants by hand or with a sprinkler because they need time to grow their roots deep enough to reach the olla water. But once the plants are established I switch to only watering them through the ollas.
I usually fill up my ollas with rainwater from the rain barrels, but if I run out (or just don't feel like lugging around heavy jugs of water from the rain barrel to the garden) I use tap water from the hose. The problem with using tap water is our water here is very hard, and I'm afraid the minerals will build up and clog the pores. That hasn't happened yet because I usually use rainwater, but if it ever does happen, I could probably unclog them with vinegar.
There are a few things I've discovered that you have to watch out for when using ollas. One is tree roots. You shouldn't use ollas to water fruit trees (which is why they are in the raised beds and not in the food forest) because tree roots can eventually wrap around them and break them. Every time I harvest a crop and am about to plant a new crop I dig up the ollas and pull mats of roots off of them before replacing them. Often they are vegetable roots, but sometimes a nearby tree will grow a root all the way over to the olla and encase the whole thing with branching roots. If given enough time they would break the olla (besides stealing water from the veggies), but ripping them off once or twice a year seems to be working so far.
I've also found out that despite the lids, there are critters that can get into the ollas. Sometimes one gets infested with mosquito larvae. I'm not sure how that happens. Is it because the rainwater I put in had eggs in it? Are the mosquitoes quick enough to lay eggs in them during the short time I have the lid off to fill them up? Are they somehow squeezing underneath the lid? I don't know, but sometiems they somehow manage to get in there. During mosquito season I also let the ollas completely dry out before refilling them with completely fresh and clean water in the hopes that any mosquito eggs or larvae in there will die before I fill them up again. Sometimes I might have to resort to using mosquito dunks.
Other critters can get in there as well. Apparently slugs can easily squeeze under the lids. I guess that's what you can do when you have no skeleton. Sometimes I open one up and there must be at least half a dozen big slugs in there.
And you also have to watch out for beneficial creatures getting in there and drowning, because they're basically pitfall traps if the lid isn't on. Sadly, I once found a dead frog in one. I'm not sure how it got in there. Did it jump in when I left the lid off? Another time I found a frog that was still alive and swimming around in a half-filled olla, and I had a heck of a time trying to fish it out. It kept swimming away from me while I was trying to grab it, so I finally stuck the hose in there and let the water run over until the frog got washed out over the edge of the pot. And then there was the time I took the lid off one that had dried out, and I guess got distracted and forgot to fill it up and close the lid again. A day or two later I noticed it there with its lid off, and a toad was trapped in there. Luckily the toad was still alive and I was able to rescue it.
And finally there's the con that I was able to avoid, but most people probably won't. They are expensive if you have to buy them at retail and have a large garden. Like I said, the big two gallon ones I got retail at around $40 a piece, and each one covers an area 4 feet in diameter. I lucked out because I was able to get them used, and got enough used ones for my entire vegetable garden. It would have been very expensive to buy so many at retail prices. You can try making your own out of terra cotta flower pots, which may be somewhat cheaper, but those pots aren't as porous as real ollas and I'm not sure if they work as well. I had considered making some of them myself until I found the amazing Craigslist deal.
Overall I'm very happy with my ollas and feel very lucky that I was able to find such a good deal on them. They work well even in my clay soil. They seem to work with all different kinds of plants, especially larger ones like tomatoes and squash (sometimes small plants have trouble reaching the ollas if they are too far away). And I haven't actually done the math, but I would be really surprised if I wasn't saving water using this method.
If you can afford to get ollas for your garden, then I definitely recommend them.
He also gets rocks off of Craigslist. Lots and lots of rocks. Also sometimes cut stone blocks and bricks. He's been using them for hardscaping in the yard and garden. The rocks are often free. In the Hill Country there's so much limestone that people will post things to Craigslist like, "Big rocks free to anyone who wants to haul them away. Otherwise I'm crushing them into gravel and using them as fill." The cut stone blocks and bricks are usually leftovers from people's building projects. Sometimes people give them away for free, and sometimes they charge a small amount of money for them, but again it's still usually a fraction of the price you'd pay buying them retail.
Daniel built us a nice new raised flower bed in the front yard using cut stone blocks entirely off of Craigslist, and almost all of them were free. I think he paid $50 for one load of them. It replaced a dinky flower bed lined with very rotten landscape timbers that was there when we moved in. This stone one he built will probably still be there after we're both dead.
The downside of his Craigslist addiction is that sometimes he'll get things that he's not even sure what we can use them for, but he had to get them because they were such a good deal. The back yard is becoming full of rocks and a big stack of bricks that we're going to use for something someday, and he just got this nice wooden cabinet that's in our storage unit because we're going to put it somewhere someday but we're just not sure where yet. But it was free, so he had to get it!
I try to stay away from Craigslist because I don't want to get addicted too, but a couple of years ago I lucked out and got a really great deal on something that's made a big difference in how I garden.
Daniel found a post where people were giving away cut limestone edging stones that would be nice to line garden beds with. It turns out they were dismantling a community garden at a trailer park, and I noticed that in the picture of the stones they posted, there were also ollas laying around, even though the post itself didn't mention the ollas. I had heard of ollas before and even seen them for sale in a few garden centers, but the two gallon ones cost something like $35 - $40 each. They didn't seem economical for a garden as big as mine. We emailed the guy asking if he was getting rid of the ollas too, and he agreed to throw in the ollas for an additional $200. When we got there to pick them up, a lot of the ollas were broken, but we managed to get 40 ollas that were either completely in tact, or only slightly damaged and able to be repaired. So that was $5 per olla. What a good deal!
 |
| Ollas sitting against the side of my house. |
What are Ollas?
Technically "olla" just means "pot" in Spanish. It can refer to pots used to cook beans in, for example. But the ollas I got off Craigslist are the kind used to water plants. They're made of porous terra cotta and are kind of gourd shaped with a lid on top. You bury them up to their necks and fill them with water, and the water slowly seeps out to water the plants around them.
Mine are the Dripping Springs Olla brand (which is why they say "DSO" on their lids), and hold about two gallons of water each. They're supposed to be big enough to water an area 4 feet in diameter. These ollas come from Dripping Springs, Texas, which is only about 30 miles from here, so that let me know that they can work in the clay and limestone soil of the Texas Hill Country.
Before I got the ollas I was using soaker hoses to water my vegetable garden. I had the hoses lying on the ground and covered with mulch, one winding around each bed, and would attach the garden hose to them, often leave them trickling overnight to water my plants. Forty ollas turned out to be enough to completely replace the soaker hoses in the vegetable garden, so now the soaker hoses have been relocated to the fruit trees.
 |
| Ollas installed in the garden. |
Pros and Cons of Ollas
So far the pros have definitely outweighed the cons for me. They are much easier to use than soaker hoses. I just fill them up when they need it, and then I'm done. I don't have to worry about remembering to turn the hose on or off. It's also very easy to tell when I need to water the garden. It needs it when the water in the ollas dries up. When it's been raining, the ollas empty more slowly because the moist soil doesn't draw the water out as quickly, and when it's dry the ollas empty faster as the dry soil and thirsty plants wick out more water.
I do have to water newly planted seeds or transplants by hand or with a sprinkler because they need time to grow their roots deep enough to reach the olla water. But once the plants are established I switch to only watering them through the ollas.
I usually fill up my ollas with rainwater from the rain barrels, but if I run out (or just don't feel like lugging around heavy jugs of water from the rain barrel to the garden) I use tap water from the hose. The problem with using tap water is our water here is very hard, and I'm afraid the minerals will build up and clog the pores. That hasn't happened yet because I usually use rainwater, but if it ever does happen, I could probably unclog them with vinegar.
There are a few things I've discovered that you have to watch out for when using ollas. One is tree roots. You shouldn't use ollas to water fruit trees (which is why they are in the raised beds and not in the food forest) because tree roots can eventually wrap around them and break them. Every time I harvest a crop and am about to plant a new crop I dig up the ollas and pull mats of roots off of them before replacing them. Often they are vegetable roots, but sometimes a nearby tree will grow a root all the way over to the olla and encase the whole thing with branching roots. If given enough time they would break the olla (besides stealing water from the veggies), but ripping them off once or twice a year seems to be working so far.
I've also found out that despite the lids, there are critters that can get into the ollas. Sometimes one gets infested with mosquito larvae. I'm not sure how that happens. Is it because the rainwater I put in had eggs in it? Are the mosquitoes quick enough to lay eggs in them during the short time I have the lid off to fill them up? Are they somehow squeezing underneath the lid? I don't know, but sometiems they somehow manage to get in there. During mosquito season I also let the ollas completely dry out before refilling them with completely fresh and clean water in the hopes that any mosquito eggs or larvae in there will die before I fill them up again. Sometimes I might have to resort to using mosquito dunks.
Other critters can get in there as well. Apparently slugs can easily squeeze under the lids. I guess that's what you can do when you have no skeleton. Sometimes I open one up and there must be at least half a dozen big slugs in there.
And you also have to watch out for beneficial creatures getting in there and drowning, because they're basically pitfall traps if the lid isn't on. Sadly, I once found a dead frog in one. I'm not sure how it got in there. Did it jump in when I left the lid off? Another time I found a frog that was still alive and swimming around in a half-filled olla, and I had a heck of a time trying to fish it out. It kept swimming away from me while I was trying to grab it, so I finally stuck the hose in there and let the water run over until the frog got washed out over the edge of the pot. And then there was the time I took the lid off one that had dried out, and I guess got distracted and forgot to fill it up and close the lid again. A day or two later I noticed it there with its lid off, and a toad was trapped in there. Luckily the toad was still alive and I was able to rescue it.
And finally there's the con that I was able to avoid, but most people probably won't. They are expensive if you have to buy them at retail and have a large garden. Like I said, the big two gallon ones I got retail at around $40 a piece, and each one covers an area 4 feet in diameter. I lucked out because I was able to get them used, and got enough used ones for my entire vegetable garden. It would have been very expensive to buy so many at retail prices. You can try making your own out of terra cotta flower pots, which may be somewhat cheaper, but those pots aren't as porous as real ollas and I'm not sure if they work as well. I had considered making some of them myself until I found the amazing Craigslist deal.
Overall I'm very happy with my ollas and feel very lucky that I was able to find such a good deal on them. They work well even in my clay soil. They seem to work with all different kinds of plants, especially larger ones like tomatoes and squash (sometimes small plants have trouble reaching the ollas if they are too far away). And I haven't actually done the math, but I would be really surprised if I wasn't saving water using this method.
If you can afford to get ollas for your garden, then I definitely recommend them.
Friday, February 7, 2020
My Attempt at a Permaculture Food Forest
Remember those fruit trees I planted in my front yard? In the last couple of years I've been trying to turn them into a "food forest." At the very least, I don't want them to continue to be fruit trees sticking out of a lawn of Bermuda and St. Augustine grass, and instead be a garden with fruit trees in it. The "food forest" method seemed like a good way to chip away at the lawn and replace it with a different understory for the fruit trees that doesn't have to be mowed, and might be useful in itself.
Permaculture seems to be a kind of trendy thing right now, so I thought I'd give it a go. What is permaculture? It's hard for me to explain, actually. The definition seems to be fuzzy. To simplify it as much as I can, it seems to be an attempt to make agriculture mimic natural ecosystems more closely. For example, using polycultures instead of monocultures, using organic methods of fertilization and pest control, and so on. However, when you start reading about permaculture, it can start getting very philosophical and Utopian. Its most enthusiastic supporters seem to think we can Save the World with this technique. It actually reminds me of the Grow Biointensive method in that way, even though they're kind of opposites. Grow Biointensive is actually very unnatural, with all the double-digging and intensive planting to maximize yields. Permaculture seems to be less concerned with maximizing yields on limited space, and more concerned with minimizing inputs of labor, water, fertilizer, etc. The similarity is in their promises to Save the World by growing food for humanity in a more environmentally sustainable way.
Obviously I'm going into this skeptical that it will be quite as awesome as people say it will be, but I have this area in my front yard with fruit trees, so I thought I might give it a shot. Gardening is my hobby. I'm not trying to completely feed my family with this, so if it doesn't work out, it's not a big deal.
OK, so what I started out with was a suburban front yard in Central Texas in a neighborhood that thankfully doesn't have an HOA, so I can plant whatever I want in the front yard. The fruit trees went in the front yard because the back yard is too shady. In the front yard we have a cluster of live oak trees that shades the house nicely, with non-native St. Augustine grass underneath them, and then a sunny strip between the oak trees and the street with non-native Bermuda grass. The fruit trees were planted in this sunny area.
My house is in the Texas Hill Country (also known as the Edwards Plateau), which means we have a thin layer of black clay soil on top of limestone bedrock. It's Texas, so the summers are scorching hot, the winters are mild (we get freezes, but it seldom stays below freezing for more than one night at a time), and spring and fall are our rainy seasons. The natural ecosystem here would be a Plateau Live Oak and Ashe Juniper woodland. Permaculture enthusiasts claim that you can make a food forest anywhere, in any type of climate, on any type of soil. OK then.
The Fruit Trees
The first fruit trees we planted, soon after we moved into this house in 2012, were a Wonderful Pomegranate, Meyer Lemon, Satsuma Orange, Key Lime, Gold Nugget Loquat, and an unknown fig variety I got as a cutting from my in-laws.
Pretty soon we found out that Key Limes cannot survive in the ground in our area, at least not until global warming takes away what little winter we have. Apparently Key Limes cannot deal with freezes at all. The first freeze we had killed the entire top of the little tree. I was afraid it was dead, but in spring shoots grew back up from the roots, so we dug it up and put it in a large pot, and that's where it's lived ever since. When it freezes, we take it inside, which be dangerous because it has some nasty thorns. I get a nice crop of golfball-sized limes from it every year.
The Meyer Lemon is only slightly hardier. It might be better off in a pot as well, but it's still in the ground at this point. I try covering it with frost blanket when we have a hard freeze, but it still gets damaged often. Last winter despite getting covered, all of its leaves were killed again. It hasn't yielded fruit in a long time because it has to keep recovering from freeze damage again and again. The main reason why I'm reluctant to put it in another big pot is because we have limited space in this house, and already have a key lime, rubber tree plant, and Norfolk Island pine in big pots that we have to find room in the house for each winter. One of these days I guess I'll have to get a greenhouse, but we have so many other household projects going on, I'm not sure when that will happen.
When we removed the Key Lime, I planted a Kumquat in its place. Now that's a good fruit tree to have in the ground in Texas! Even though the tree is still only about 3-4 feet tall, I get a nice crop of fruit off of it every year, and freezes hardly bother it. We do cover it if it gets into the 20's, but I'm not sure if it even needs that.
The Satsuma is also doing fine in the ground. We covered it with frost blanket while it was little, but eventually it got too tall for that. Every now and then it freezes enough to kill a few leaves, but it grows news ones back in the spring. A couple of years ago we got a bumper crop of about 40 fruits. The fruits are like a large tangerine or navel orange, with thick skin that's very easy to peel. I've heard that in Britain, Satsumas are known as "Christmas oranges," and that is around the time when they ripen. I've also been told that a light frost actually makes them sweeter. While the kumquat consistently bears fruit every year, it seems like the Satsuma is doing that thing some fruit trees do where it has a heavy crop one year that wears out the tree, and then doesn't do much the next year. The year after we had the 40 fruits, it only made two fruits, and then this last year we had a weird late freeze in March that killed a lot of its blossoms, but even after that I harvested 11 fruits in early December.
For the non-citrus trees, the best one is probably the fig. Nobody knows what variety it is, but it gives us a good crop of small figs each year. The figs are light purple and only about 1-2 inches long, so they are smaller than figs from the grocery store, but they are very sweet and tasty. The tree sheds its leaves in the fall and grows them back in the spring, and our freezes don't seem to bother it at all. It's been growing very fast, and it's amazing that it started out as just a little cutting.
The Gold Nugget Loquat has also been growing fast, and has become the largest fruit tree in the food forest. However last spring was the first year we actually got a good crop of fruit off of it. Loquats are a little weird because the tree is cold-hardy, but the flowers are not. They flower in November, grow fruit through the winter, and then the fruit ripens in spring. Every single year we've had freezes that killed the flowers before they could make fruit until last year.
Perhaps the most disappointing tree so far is the Wonderful Pomegranate. The tree itself is beautiful. It's grown really big. It gets large orange flowers on it that the hummingbirds love, and then they fall off and that's it. Last year 3 or 4 of them tried to make fruits, but then when they were about tennis ball sized they split open and rotted. I could tell that happened before they were ripe because the insides were still white. I don't know what it's problem is.
A couple of years ago I added three more fruit trees in a second row behind the first row. They are a Houston peach, an Anna apple, and an Ein Shemer apple. This might be pushing things a bit because they are getting pretty close to the oak trees, and might be in too much shade. We did trim some of the limbs off the oak trees, but I've still noticed that they are starting to lean away from the oak trees to get more sun. But maybe a little shade will help them survive the Texas heat? We'll see I guess.
None of them have produced fruit so far, but last year the peach had some blossoms, got 2 or 3 small green fruits on it, and then they fell off. The Ein Shemer apple has gotten a few blossoms each year that just end up falling off, and the Anna apple hasn't even blossomed. Maybe they just need more time. Apple trees aren't self-fertile, which is why I planted two, so Ein Shemer won't make fruit until Anna blossoms anyway.
The Hügelkultur Beds
A food forest is supposed to have an understory of other plants below the fruit trees. My fruit trees started out stuck in lawn grass. I needed to figure out a way to remove the lawn grass and replace it with something else without disturbing the roots of the established fruit trees. That's when I stumbled upon something called Hügelkultur. This is another thing where I'm not sure if it will work as well as they say it will work, but might as well give it a shot. I decided to start by making a bed between each of my fruit trees and then eventually I'll expand out from there. If nothing else, this will mean I won't have to mow between the fruit trees, which has always been a pain.
I modified the technique somewhat from what I read about it. I didn't dig a trench or even removed the grass because that seemed like too much work and also might damage the fruit trees' roots. Instead, I covered the grass with a couple of layers of flattened cardboard boxes. We always have plenty of boxes from Amazon or Costco, so this was a way to recycle them.
On top of that is where I put the wood, which is the main distinguishing feature of this kind of raised bed. In our wooded back yard, we have two big brush piles and some logs. I didn't want to use our oak, mesquite, or juniper logs because I prefer those for firewood, but we did have logs from a big Chinaberry tree that fell down. Chinaberry is such a lightweight wood that it doesn't make very good firewood (it burns up too quickly), so I used those logs to line the outsides of the bed, and then in the middle I put all kinds of stuff from the brush piles that I chopped up with loppers or just broke up by hand if they were really rotten.
Then on top of that you need something nitrogen-rich to balance all the carbon in the wood. I used grass clippings from mowing the lawn.
Then on top of that goes some kind of soil-like substance that you can plant things in. I ended up using store-bought topsoil and cow manure. That is probably not ideal because I had to spend money on that part and buy a bunch of individual 40 pound plastic bags of the stuff and spread them on top. But at the time I didn't have a lot of homemade compost ready for something like that, and since I didn't dig a trench, I didn't have soil that I removed from the trench to put on top.
Then I immediately plant them with vegetables. I've found that I should plant them immediately because the roots of the vegetables are needed to hold everything together. So far the best thing to plant in them seems to be winter squash or melons with long vines. The vines also help hold everything together.
How have they done so far? I started them last summer, so they're over a year old now. For one thing, they DO need to be watered. Some people claim that the rotting wood in the beds soaks up so much water like a sponge that you never have to water them. That is not true in Texas, at least not in the summer. The wood I used ranged from very rotten to very fresh, so the fresh wood may not soak up as much water as the rotten wood, but the important thing is I've still had to water them. So far I can't tell if they need to be watered more or less than a traditional raised bed.
I haven't noticed any problems with the plants having nutrient deficiencies. I've seen some people write online about how the wood draws up too much nitrogen as it decomposes. I do occasionally sprinkle fertilizer on mine, but they don't seem to require any more fertilizer than a traditional raised bed.
One thing that ends up happening is as things decompose, the mound starts to collapse and gets big holes in it. Part of that may be because I used a tangle of sticks in them middle instead of logs, and they were sticks of various species of wood at varying stages of decomposition, so they aren't decomposing evenly. When I plant a new crop of something, I stomp around on it a bit to break up the sticks further and compact it a bit, and sometimes fill in the holes with more compost. I figure they'll eventually settle down into something more solid.
At least some of the vegetable plants seem to enjoy the partial shade they get from the fruit trees during the hottest part of the summer, and the fruit trees have essentially gotten a thick mulch between them that probably helps them in the summer as well.
The Biggest Problem with my Food Forest
I'm trying to grow a fruit and vegetable garden in the front yard with no fence around it in the Texas Hill Country. Nobody else in my neighborhood are bothering to do that, and maybe I'm just in denial about how nuts this is, because maybe I'm just going to all this work to feed the local deer herd. Aaarrrgh! DEER! Yes, I know they are cute. I'm also having to constantly battle them to keep them from eating everything.
I use a combination of various techniques, so I haven't done any kind of controlled experiments to see which techniques are the most effective. I put wire cages around some things (which are ugly, I admit). I spray deer repellent that smells like rotten eggs (gross!). When my husband cuts his hair, I sprinkle that around. I have even hung up socks with Irish Spring soap in them from the fruit trees.
Still the deer sometimes munch my plants. I found out that their favorite fruit tree to browse is the peach tree, but the apple trees are also tasty. Any leaves that aren't protected by a wire cage or aren't too high up are eaten. They eat a few leaves off the pomegranate tree too, but don't like the citrus or the fig leaves. They will also rub their antlers on the trunks of young trees of any kind, so they have to be protected with wire cages.
As for the vegetables in the Hügelkultur beds, I pretty much gave up on legumes of any kind. Despite their value for nitrogen-fixing ability, they're also extremely tasty to deer. They also seem to really like cucumber leaves, but aren't as much into the squash leaves (I guess because they're spiny?). They will eat squash leaves, but it's not the first thing they eat. In the winter, greens like lettuce MUST be under wire cages or they all get eaten.
Maybe one day I'll have to give up on growing anything other than citrus trees, or build a fence around the whole thing, but for now I'm making do.
General Thoughts So Far
I'm not expecting my food forest to be like the Garden of Eden, where I can just pick abundant fruits and vegetables with no labor, no watering, no pests, and no need for added fertilizers. That doesn't sound realistic to me at all. I would think that shouldn't sound realistic to most other people either, but that's how some permaculture websites make it sound. The natural ecosystem in my area is an oak-juniper woodland, not an apple-peach woodland or even a citrus-fig woodland, and there are good reasons for that. You can't get something for nothing, and if you want sweet, juicy peaches here instead of acorns and juniper berries then you have to put work into it. Fruit trees are domesticated trees, so they need human help to grow. Just like I couldn't abandon my house cat in the wood and expect her to survive in the wild like a bobcat, you can't expect to be able to plant a peach tree and then let it fend for itself and expect it to survive like a juniper tree.
A fairer comparison would be between a food forest and other methods of fruit and vegetable gardening, such as my raised bed vegetable garden on the other side of the driveway, where I do more of a Square Foot/Biointensive technique. Is the food forest less work, about the same amount of work, or more work? If it's either of the first two, it might still be worth it.
I expect it might depend on the exact species of plants too. I've already gone over how some of my fruit trees are doing much better than others, the fig and kumquat being the best trees with the biggest yields with the least amount of help from me. For the annual vegetables, I prefer growing vining squash in the food forest because it has more room to roam and spread out. On the other hand, I do potatoes in the raised beds because of all the deep digging required to plant and harvest them. I really don't want to be trying to dig potatoes out of a hügelkultur beds with all the sticks in the way, and I don't want anything that requires digging too deeply because that might hurt the fruit tree roots.
Of course gardens are always a work in progress. There are some plants like tomatoes that seem to do OK in both places, though to be fair I've only grown cherry tomatoes in the food forest so far, and cherry tomatoes are tougher than large-fruited tomatoes. I haven't tried peppers in the hügelkultur beds so far, but peppers are almost perennials in this climate (I've had some live for as long as three years before an especially hard frost killed them), so they might be a great candidate for the permaculture garden, which is supposed to be skewed more towards perennials. And I'm still not giving up on figuring out how to coax my pomegranate, peach, and apple trees to set fruit. I've also started planting I'itois onions, multiplier leeks, and ginger here and there in the hügelkultur beds. At least the deer don't like to eat those.
The important thing is it's been fun so far figuring some of this stuff out.
Permaculture seems to be a kind of trendy thing right now, so I thought I'd give it a go. What is permaculture? It's hard for me to explain, actually. The definition seems to be fuzzy. To simplify it as much as I can, it seems to be an attempt to make agriculture mimic natural ecosystems more closely. For example, using polycultures instead of monocultures, using organic methods of fertilization and pest control, and so on. However, when you start reading about permaculture, it can start getting very philosophical and Utopian. Its most enthusiastic supporters seem to think we can Save the World with this technique. It actually reminds me of the Grow Biointensive method in that way, even though they're kind of opposites. Grow Biointensive is actually very unnatural, with all the double-digging and intensive planting to maximize yields. Permaculture seems to be less concerned with maximizing yields on limited space, and more concerned with minimizing inputs of labor, water, fertilizer, etc. The similarity is in their promises to Save the World by growing food for humanity in a more environmentally sustainable way.
Obviously I'm going into this skeptical that it will be quite as awesome as people say it will be, but I have this area in my front yard with fruit trees, so I thought I might give it a shot. Gardening is my hobby. I'm not trying to completely feed my family with this, so if it doesn't work out, it's not a big deal.
OK, so what I started out with was a suburban front yard in Central Texas in a neighborhood that thankfully doesn't have an HOA, so I can plant whatever I want in the front yard. The fruit trees went in the front yard because the back yard is too shady. In the front yard we have a cluster of live oak trees that shades the house nicely, with non-native St. Augustine grass underneath them, and then a sunny strip between the oak trees and the street with non-native Bermuda grass. The fruit trees were planted in this sunny area.
My house is in the Texas Hill Country (also known as the Edwards Plateau), which means we have a thin layer of black clay soil on top of limestone bedrock. It's Texas, so the summers are scorching hot, the winters are mild (we get freezes, but it seldom stays below freezing for more than one night at a time), and spring and fall are our rainy seasons. The natural ecosystem here would be a Plateau Live Oak and Ashe Juniper woodland. Permaculture enthusiasts claim that you can make a food forest anywhere, in any type of climate, on any type of soil. OK then.
The Fruit Trees
The first fruit trees we planted, soon after we moved into this house in 2012, were a Wonderful Pomegranate, Meyer Lemon, Satsuma Orange, Key Lime, Gold Nugget Loquat, and an unknown fig variety I got as a cutting from my in-laws.
Pretty soon we found out that Key Limes cannot survive in the ground in our area, at least not until global warming takes away what little winter we have. Apparently Key Limes cannot deal with freezes at all. The first freeze we had killed the entire top of the little tree. I was afraid it was dead, but in spring shoots grew back up from the roots, so we dug it up and put it in a large pot, and that's where it's lived ever since. When it freezes, we take it inside, which be dangerous because it has some nasty thorns. I get a nice crop of golfball-sized limes from it every year.
The Meyer Lemon is only slightly hardier. It might be better off in a pot as well, but it's still in the ground at this point. I try covering it with frost blanket when we have a hard freeze, but it still gets damaged often. Last winter despite getting covered, all of its leaves were killed again. It hasn't yielded fruit in a long time because it has to keep recovering from freeze damage again and again. The main reason why I'm reluctant to put it in another big pot is because we have limited space in this house, and already have a key lime, rubber tree plant, and Norfolk Island pine in big pots that we have to find room in the house for each winter. One of these days I guess I'll have to get a greenhouse, but we have so many other household projects going on, I'm not sure when that will happen.
When we removed the Key Lime, I planted a Kumquat in its place. Now that's a good fruit tree to have in the ground in Texas! Even though the tree is still only about 3-4 feet tall, I get a nice crop of fruit off of it every year, and freezes hardly bother it. We do cover it if it gets into the 20's, but I'm not sure if it even needs that.
The Satsuma is also doing fine in the ground. We covered it with frost blanket while it was little, but eventually it got too tall for that. Every now and then it freezes enough to kill a few leaves, but it grows news ones back in the spring. A couple of years ago we got a bumper crop of about 40 fruits. The fruits are like a large tangerine or navel orange, with thick skin that's very easy to peel. I've heard that in Britain, Satsumas are known as "Christmas oranges," and that is around the time when they ripen. I've also been told that a light frost actually makes them sweeter. While the kumquat consistently bears fruit every year, it seems like the Satsuma is doing that thing some fruit trees do where it has a heavy crop one year that wears out the tree, and then doesn't do much the next year. The year after we had the 40 fruits, it only made two fruits, and then this last year we had a weird late freeze in March that killed a lot of its blossoms, but even after that I harvested 11 fruits in early December.
For the non-citrus trees, the best one is probably the fig. Nobody knows what variety it is, but it gives us a good crop of small figs each year. The figs are light purple and only about 1-2 inches long, so they are smaller than figs from the grocery store, but they are very sweet and tasty. The tree sheds its leaves in the fall and grows them back in the spring, and our freezes don't seem to bother it at all. It's been growing very fast, and it's amazing that it started out as just a little cutting.
The Gold Nugget Loquat has also been growing fast, and has become the largest fruit tree in the food forest. However last spring was the first year we actually got a good crop of fruit off of it. Loquats are a little weird because the tree is cold-hardy, but the flowers are not. They flower in November, grow fruit through the winter, and then the fruit ripens in spring. Every single year we've had freezes that killed the flowers before they could make fruit until last year.
Perhaps the most disappointing tree so far is the Wonderful Pomegranate. The tree itself is beautiful. It's grown really big. It gets large orange flowers on it that the hummingbirds love, and then they fall off and that's it. Last year 3 or 4 of them tried to make fruits, but then when they were about tennis ball sized they split open and rotted. I could tell that happened before they were ripe because the insides were still white. I don't know what it's problem is.
A couple of years ago I added three more fruit trees in a second row behind the first row. They are a Houston peach, an Anna apple, and an Ein Shemer apple. This might be pushing things a bit because they are getting pretty close to the oak trees, and might be in too much shade. We did trim some of the limbs off the oak trees, but I've still noticed that they are starting to lean away from the oak trees to get more sun. But maybe a little shade will help them survive the Texas heat? We'll see I guess.
None of them have produced fruit so far, but last year the peach had some blossoms, got 2 or 3 small green fruits on it, and then they fell off. The Ein Shemer apple has gotten a few blossoms each year that just end up falling off, and the Anna apple hasn't even blossomed. Maybe they just need more time. Apple trees aren't self-fertile, which is why I planted two, so Ein Shemer won't make fruit until Anna blossoms anyway.
The Hügelkultur Beds
A food forest is supposed to have an understory of other plants below the fruit trees. My fruit trees started out stuck in lawn grass. I needed to figure out a way to remove the lawn grass and replace it with something else without disturbing the roots of the established fruit trees. That's when I stumbled upon something called Hügelkultur. This is another thing where I'm not sure if it will work as well as they say it will work, but might as well give it a shot. I decided to start by making a bed between each of my fruit trees and then eventually I'll expand out from there. If nothing else, this will mean I won't have to mow between the fruit trees, which has always been a pain.
 |
| Melons in a hugelkultur bed last year. |
I modified the technique somewhat from what I read about it. I didn't dig a trench or even removed the grass because that seemed like too much work and also might damage the fruit trees' roots. Instead, I covered the grass with a couple of layers of flattened cardboard boxes. We always have plenty of boxes from Amazon or Costco, so this was a way to recycle them.
On top of that is where I put the wood, which is the main distinguishing feature of this kind of raised bed. In our wooded back yard, we have two big brush piles and some logs. I didn't want to use our oak, mesquite, or juniper logs because I prefer those for firewood, but we did have logs from a big Chinaberry tree that fell down. Chinaberry is such a lightweight wood that it doesn't make very good firewood (it burns up too quickly), so I used those logs to line the outsides of the bed, and then in the middle I put all kinds of stuff from the brush piles that I chopped up with loppers or just broke up by hand if they were really rotten.
Then on top of that you need something nitrogen-rich to balance all the carbon in the wood. I used grass clippings from mowing the lawn.
Then on top of that goes some kind of soil-like substance that you can plant things in. I ended up using store-bought topsoil and cow manure. That is probably not ideal because I had to spend money on that part and buy a bunch of individual 40 pound plastic bags of the stuff and spread them on top. But at the time I didn't have a lot of homemade compost ready for something like that, and since I didn't dig a trench, I didn't have soil that I removed from the trench to put on top.
Then I immediately plant them with vegetables. I've found that I should plant them immediately because the roots of the vegetables are needed to hold everything together. So far the best thing to plant in them seems to be winter squash or melons with long vines. The vines also help hold everything together.
How have they done so far? I started them last summer, so they're over a year old now. For one thing, they DO need to be watered. Some people claim that the rotting wood in the beds soaks up so much water like a sponge that you never have to water them. That is not true in Texas, at least not in the summer. The wood I used ranged from very rotten to very fresh, so the fresh wood may not soak up as much water as the rotten wood, but the important thing is I've still had to water them. So far I can't tell if they need to be watered more or less than a traditional raised bed.
I haven't noticed any problems with the plants having nutrient deficiencies. I've seen some people write online about how the wood draws up too much nitrogen as it decomposes. I do occasionally sprinkle fertilizer on mine, but they don't seem to require any more fertilizer than a traditional raised bed.
One thing that ends up happening is as things decompose, the mound starts to collapse and gets big holes in it. Part of that may be because I used a tangle of sticks in them middle instead of logs, and they were sticks of various species of wood at varying stages of decomposition, so they aren't decomposing evenly. When I plant a new crop of something, I stomp around on it a bit to break up the sticks further and compact it a bit, and sometimes fill in the holes with more compost. I figure they'll eventually settle down into something more solid.
At least some of the vegetable plants seem to enjoy the partial shade they get from the fruit trees during the hottest part of the summer, and the fruit trees have essentially gotten a thick mulch between them that probably helps them in the summer as well.
The Biggest Problem with my Food Forest
I'm trying to grow a fruit and vegetable garden in the front yard with no fence around it in the Texas Hill Country. Nobody else in my neighborhood are bothering to do that, and maybe I'm just in denial about how nuts this is, because maybe I'm just going to all this work to feed the local deer herd. Aaarrrgh! DEER! Yes, I know they are cute. I'm also having to constantly battle them to keep them from eating everything.
I use a combination of various techniques, so I haven't done any kind of controlled experiments to see which techniques are the most effective. I put wire cages around some things (which are ugly, I admit). I spray deer repellent that smells like rotten eggs (gross!). When my husband cuts his hair, I sprinkle that around. I have even hung up socks with Irish Spring soap in them from the fruit trees.
Still the deer sometimes munch my plants. I found out that their favorite fruit tree to browse is the peach tree, but the apple trees are also tasty. Any leaves that aren't protected by a wire cage or aren't too high up are eaten. They eat a few leaves off the pomegranate tree too, but don't like the citrus or the fig leaves. They will also rub their antlers on the trunks of young trees of any kind, so they have to be protected with wire cages.
As for the vegetables in the Hügelkultur beds, I pretty much gave up on legumes of any kind. Despite their value for nitrogen-fixing ability, they're also extremely tasty to deer. They also seem to really like cucumber leaves, but aren't as much into the squash leaves (I guess because they're spiny?). They will eat squash leaves, but it's not the first thing they eat. In the winter, greens like lettuce MUST be under wire cages or they all get eaten.
Maybe one day I'll have to give up on growing anything other than citrus trees, or build a fence around the whole thing, but for now I'm making do.
General Thoughts So Far
I'm not expecting my food forest to be like the Garden of Eden, where I can just pick abundant fruits and vegetables with no labor, no watering, no pests, and no need for added fertilizers. That doesn't sound realistic to me at all. I would think that shouldn't sound realistic to most other people either, but that's how some permaculture websites make it sound. The natural ecosystem in my area is an oak-juniper woodland, not an apple-peach woodland or even a citrus-fig woodland, and there are good reasons for that. You can't get something for nothing, and if you want sweet, juicy peaches here instead of acorns and juniper berries then you have to put work into it. Fruit trees are domesticated trees, so they need human help to grow. Just like I couldn't abandon my house cat in the wood and expect her to survive in the wild like a bobcat, you can't expect to be able to plant a peach tree and then let it fend for itself and expect it to survive like a juniper tree.
A fairer comparison would be between a food forest and other methods of fruit and vegetable gardening, such as my raised bed vegetable garden on the other side of the driveway, where I do more of a Square Foot/Biointensive technique. Is the food forest less work, about the same amount of work, or more work? If it's either of the first two, it might still be worth it.
I expect it might depend on the exact species of plants too. I've already gone over how some of my fruit trees are doing much better than others, the fig and kumquat being the best trees with the biggest yields with the least amount of help from me. For the annual vegetables, I prefer growing vining squash in the food forest because it has more room to roam and spread out. On the other hand, I do potatoes in the raised beds because of all the deep digging required to plant and harvest them. I really don't want to be trying to dig potatoes out of a hügelkultur beds with all the sticks in the way, and I don't want anything that requires digging too deeply because that might hurt the fruit tree roots.
Of course gardens are always a work in progress. There are some plants like tomatoes that seem to do OK in both places, though to be fair I've only grown cherry tomatoes in the food forest so far, and cherry tomatoes are tougher than large-fruited tomatoes. I haven't tried peppers in the hügelkultur beds so far, but peppers are almost perennials in this climate (I've had some live for as long as three years before an especially hard frost killed them), so they might be a great candidate for the permaculture garden, which is supposed to be skewed more towards perennials. And I'm still not giving up on figuring out how to coax my pomegranate, peach, and apple trees to set fruit. I've also started planting I'itois onions, multiplier leeks, and ginger here and there in the hügelkultur beds. At least the deer don't like to eat those.
The important thing is it's been fun so far figuring some of this stuff out.
Thursday, January 9, 2020
My Favorite Seed Catalogs
It's seed catalog season, so I thought I'd let you know about some of my favorite companies to get seeds and why. Where you get your seeds from does matter. You want to get varieties that are well adapted to your climate, and a seed catalog that's based in a climate similar to yours will have more of those varieties.
When I first started gardening, I was surprised about how many seed companies are in New England or the Pacific Northwest. They advertised varieties that were quick maturing for short growing seasons, tolerant of cold, etc. Not very helpful for me here in Texas. What I need is heat tolerance and drought tolerance. After a while I finally found some catalogs based in the South that had more of what I was looking for.
Here are my favorites:
Southern Exposure Seed Exchange
More of my seeds come from here than any other company. They are based in Virginia, so most of their varieties are adapted to the Southeast. That's a little bit wetter than my climate, but many of them still do well, and I hedge my bets by also getting seeds from the next company on my list. Their website also has lots of useful information on it, and I like the cute gnome pictures on the front of their printed catalog.
Besides the usual things like squash, beans, and tomatoes, they have a great selection of heirloom collard varieties, many of which I haven't seen anywhere else. Their potato varieties have also been serving me very well, especially since potatoes are considered to be difficult to grow in Texas.
Overall, this is my go-to seed catalog that I check first if I feel like trying a new variety.
Native Seeds/SEARCH
This my second-biggest source of seeds. They are based in Arizona, which is a drier climate than mine, so combining their varieties with Southern Exposure's varieties works out great. This is actually a nonprofit organization whose main mission is to preserve crop varieties that have been grown by Native Americans in the Southwest, so I'm happy to fork over money to them to help support their mission. You can get varieties here you can't find anywhere else, plus some more common varieties that do well in hot, dry conditions.
This is where I bought 10 bulbs of I'itois onions that have continued to thrive and multiply in my garden ever since. My favorite okra, Beck's Gardenville, also came from here (and it's a local San Antonio variety). They also have a good variety of melons, but of course their biggest selection is of the three sisters: beans, corn, and squash.
There's also this really neat ADAPTS tool on their website where you can type in your address, and it will find varieties of plants that came from climates similar to yours. I've used this to help me decide which varieties to try next.
Those two seed catalogs above are where I get the vast majority of my seeds from, but here are some honorable mentions that I shop at occasionally, or get some specialty things from.
Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds
This company is famous for their "vegetable porn" catalog and huge selection. Yet I've found that over the years I get fewer and fewer seeds from them. Most of the varieties I did get from Baker Creek that did well for me are also carried by Southern Exposure. I've also gotten a lot of varieties from Baker Creek that did not do well. I think it's because they don't concentrate on one specific region, so I got sucked in by the beautiful pictures and bought varieties that were not adapted to my climate.
Baker Creek's strategy seems to be to try to accumulate as many varieties as possible from all over the world. That means you can get some really interesting stuff that's not found anywhere else, but you also have to be careful to pay attention to where the variety is from. Here in Texas, varieties from the Mediterranean, or the Middle East, or India will probably be OK. But not things from Northern Europe or Japan, no matter how pretty they look.
So basically, I don't actually buy a lot of things from Baker Creek, but it's still fun to browse their catalog and order a thing or two just to experiment with something unusual. They also have huge seed packets with generous amounts of seeds in them, which may be advantageous with certain crops.
Filaree Garlic Farm
This is where I go for garlic. They have the best selection I've found, including the very hard to find Creole varieties. The bulbs they send are always in very good shape, and their website has tons of information about growing garlic. They specify which of their varieties do well in warm climates, and which need cold climates, and also which ones harvest earlier or later, and which ones keep longer.
Sand Hill Preservation Center
This is where to go for sweet potatoes, though Duck Creek Farms is also good. Sand Hill has the largest variety of sweet potatoes anywhere, many varieties you can't find anywhere else. My only problem with them is sometimes they arrive a little late since they are in Iowa, and I am in Texas, so I can plant much earlier here. If you are in a hurry, try Duck Creek Farms instead, since they are in Oklahoma and ship earlier in the year.
I've never ordered any seeds from Sand Hill yet, but they do have some interesting things listed that I might like to try some day. They do have the problem of being based in Iowa, so I'd have to be careful not to order something that's not suitable for my climate.
Seed Savers Exchange
Another one in Iowa, but this gets an honorable mention because it's such an important organization. This is where the whole "heirloom vegetable" trend probably got started, and they also got me into heirloom vegetables. I used to order more stuff from them before I discovered my two favorites listed there at the top. Their retail catalog is OK. It has a lot of the more famous heirlooms, but many that either are also found in lots of other catalogs (like Southern Exposure), or wouldn't do well in my climate anyway (sorry Pink Brandywine tomato).
If you are into seed saving though, you need to get on the Exchange. I started listing some of my seeds last year. It took a while for them to finally get into the 21st century and make an online Exchange (before that it was just in print), but now that they do have it up and running, it is very easy to list your seeds. Online seed swapping is lots of fun, you get to share the excess seeds that you have saved, and you might find something really interesting listed by another member. Seed catalogs are great, but you never know when they are going to run out of or discontinue a favorite variety, so it's always good to have a network of home seed savers as a backup.
So there are my favorite places to get seeds (and other planting materials) for my garden. If you also live in the South, consider giving them a try if you haven't already. Even if you don't live in the South, maybe I've given you some ideas on what to look for when searching for your own favorite seed company.
Happy seed ordering!
When I first started gardening, I was surprised about how many seed companies are in New England or the Pacific Northwest. They advertised varieties that were quick maturing for short growing seasons, tolerant of cold, etc. Not very helpful for me here in Texas. What I need is heat tolerance and drought tolerance. After a while I finally found some catalogs based in the South that had more of what I was looking for.
Here are my favorites:
Southern Exposure Seed Exchange
More of my seeds come from here than any other company. They are based in Virginia, so most of their varieties are adapted to the Southeast. That's a little bit wetter than my climate, but many of them still do well, and I hedge my bets by also getting seeds from the next company on my list. Their website also has lots of useful information on it, and I like the cute gnome pictures on the front of their printed catalog.
Besides the usual things like squash, beans, and tomatoes, they have a great selection of heirloom collard varieties, many of which I haven't seen anywhere else. Their potato varieties have also been serving me very well, especially since potatoes are considered to be difficult to grow in Texas.
Overall, this is my go-to seed catalog that I check first if I feel like trying a new variety.
Native Seeds/SEARCH
This my second-biggest source of seeds. They are based in Arizona, which is a drier climate than mine, so combining their varieties with Southern Exposure's varieties works out great. This is actually a nonprofit organization whose main mission is to preserve crop varieties that have been grown by Native Americans in the Southwest, so I'm happy to fork over money to them to help support their mission. You can get varieties here you can't find anywhere else, plus some more common varieties that do well in hot, dry conditions.
This is where I bought 10 bulbs of I'itois onions that have continued to thrive and multiply in my garden ever since. My favorite okra, Beck's Gardenville, also came from here (and it's a local San Antonio variety). They also have a good variety of melons, but of course their biggest selection is of the three sisters: beans, corn, and squash.
There's also this really neat ADAPTS tool on their website where you can type in your address, and it will find varieties of plants that came from climates similar to yours. I've used this to help me decide which varieties to try next.
Those two seed catalogs above are where I get the vast majority of my seeds from, but here are some honorable mentions that I shop at occasionally, or get some specialty things from.
Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds
This company is famous for their "vegetable porn" catalog and huge selection. Yet I've found that over the years I get fewer and fewer seeds from them. Most of the varieties I did get from Baker Creek that did well for me are also carried by Southern Exposure. I've also gotten a lot of varieties from Baker Creek that did not do well. I think it's because they don't concentrate on one specific region, so I got sucked in by the beautiful pictures and bought varieties that were not adapted to my climate.
Baker Creek's strategy seems to be to try to accumulate as many varieties as possible from all over the world. That means you can get some really interesting stuff that's not found anywhere else, but you also have to be careful to pay attention to where the variety is from. Here in Texas, varieties from the Mediterranean, or the Middle East, or India will probably be OK. But not things from Northern Europe or Japan, no matter how pretty they look.
So basically, I don't actually buy a lot of things from Baker Creek, but it's still fun to browse their catalog and order a thing or two just to experiment with something unusual. They also have huge seed packets with generous amounts of seeds in them, which may be advantageous with certain crops.
Filaree Garlic Farm
This is where I go for garlic. They have the best selection I've found, including the very hard to find Creole varieties. The bulbs they send are always in very good shape, and their website has tons of information about growing garlic. They specify which of their varieties do well in warm climates, and which need cold climates, and also which ones harvest earlier or later, and which ones keep longer.
Sand Hill Preservation Center
This is where to go for sweet potatoes, though Duck Creek Farms is also good. Sand Hill has the largest variety of sweet potatoes anywhere, many varieties you can't find anywhere else. My only problem with them is sometimes they arrive a little late since they are in Iowa, and I am in Texas, so I can plant much earlier here. If you are in a hurry, try Duck Creek Farms instead, since they are in Oklahoma and ship earlier in the year.
I've never ordered any seeds from Sand Hill yet, but they do have some interesting things listed that I might like to try some day. They do have the problem of being based in Iowa, so I'd have to be careful not to order something that's not suitable for my climate.
Seed Savers Exchange
Another one in Iowa, but this gets an honorable mention because it's such an important organization. This is where the whole "heirloom vegetable" trend probably got started, and they also got me into heirloom vegetables. I used to order more stuff from them before I discovered my two favorites listed there at the top. Their retail catalog is OK. It has a lot of the more famous heirlooms, but many that either are also found in lots of other catalogs (like Southern Exposure), or wouldn't do well in my climate anyway (sorry Pink Brandywine tomato).
If you are into seed saving though, you need to get on the Exchange. I started listing some of my seeds last year. It took a while for them to finally get into the 21st century and make an online Exchange (before that it was just in print), but now that they do have it up and running, it is very easy to list your seeds. Online seed swapping is lots of fun, you get to share the excess seeds that you have saved, and you might find something really interesting listed by another member. Seed catalogs are great, but you never know when they are going to run out of or discontinue a favorite variety, so it's always good to have a network of home seed savers as a backup.
So there are my favorite places to get seeds (and other planting materials) for my garden. If you also live in the South, consider giving them a try if you haven't already. Even if you don't live in the South, maybe I've given you some ideas on what to look for when searching for your own favorite seed company.
Happy seed ordering!
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