Big Bend Gazette :: A Labor of Love Towards a Different Sort of Wealth: Dispatches from a Prolific Organic Garden in Alpine

So sayeth organic gardening champions Mark Foster and Deborah Tout, who have gardened year-round since they moved to Alpine, in the summer of 2003. Foster, 55, who has gardened “on both coasts and a lot of places in between,” since he was ten years old, thinks this area is “absolutely the easiest climate I’ve grown in.”

Right now, they tell me, is a good time to plant carrots, green and bulb onions, radishes, snow peas, parsnips, beets, broccoli, cauliflower, lettuce, spinach, chard, kale, parsley, cilantro, leeks and garlic. While several of these crops may not come to fruition this year, you’ll be getting set up for harvest in spring or summer. And it’s a good time to reclaim and prepare some beds that already produced fruits and vegetables this summer.

In fact, Foster consoles, “I highly recommend to the novice gardener here, forget spring….” He insists that planting in July or later is a better plan, since, as he points out, the intense heat of the summer has passed yet the soil is still warm and, and during the monsoon season (typically from July through September), the humidity is up. “Usually speaking, fall gardening is the easiest, around here.”

They make it look and sound simple. Not easy, mind you, but simple. Foster spends more than 40 hours a week in their 5,200+ square foot garden on the southeast edge of town, tilling and watering by hand, sowing seeds, composting, transplanting, and harvesting. He admits it’s a “labor of love,” though he is emphatic that anyone can do it.

“It’s a just a matter of priorities,” he says, smiling. “You start small,” suggests Foster, “get the bug, and build on your successes.”

“With just a 4’ by 4’ plot,” adds Tout, “you could at least keep yourself in salad for the year.”

Their garden, still full of a huge variety of hearty crops in late September, certainly inspires me.

It’s particularly enticing to realize they elicited such bounty right here, and without any chemical fertilizers or pesticides.

Debbie cites a statistic she read recently that for a head of lettuce shipped from California (where the majority of commercial produce is grown in this country) to, say, Washington, D.C., for every 1 calorie of food value, some 10 calories of fossil fuels have been used. “That’s crazy,” says Tout. “You’re just shipping water!”

(In an open letter to the President -Elect published last October in the New York Times, writer Michael Pollan illuminated several problems with the current mainstream food supply model: “Chemical fertilizers (made from natural gas), pesticides (made from petroleum), farm machinery, modern food processing and packaging and transportation have together transformed a system that in 1940 produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used into one that now takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food. Put another way, when we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gases.”)

“It’s really kind of neat to go out in mid January and to pick vegetables that haven’t traveled 1000 miles,” says Foster.

“This is the most political thing we do,” notes Tout, nodding at the garden.

Now, thanks to a writing jag this August (inspired/imposed by Tout’s broken ankle which kept her relatively sedentary for a few weeks – plenty of time to sit at the computer), the couple has made it even easier for the rest of us to grow some food, by putting their key practices in writing. They have produced a little gem of a book: Organic Gardening West of the Pecos.

The booklet, now on sale locally, offers what appears to be lifetime’s worth of gardening tips in just 31 pages, plus appendices — including an easy-to-follow yearly chart of when to grow seedlings; when to plant in the garden; and when to harvest, crop-by-crop; plus recommendations for further reading.

Foster & Tout’s occasional informal gardening lectures at the Front Street Books Annex have drawn standing-room only crowds and their garden tours have been attended by 50 or more people eager to see how it’s done. The publication of Organic Gardening now makes their expertise easily accessible. (Holding the booklet, I have to confess to the excitement of suspecting that I now have in my hands something that just might change my life.)

Still, as is typical for any truly good practitioner of any art or science, these author-gardeners are careful to point out to prospective reader-gardeners that “your own situation will differ from ours, either a little or a lot.” With that caveat, they admonish, “It is important that you understand your climate, soils, and personal preferences so that you can evaluate the usefulness of our suggestions. Apply the information in this book that makes sense for your situation, and feel free to ignore the rest.”

Foster and Tout moved to West Texas from the high desert of central Oregon, as much for the gardening possibilities, as to be near Foster’s mom, Eleanor Foster, who lives on Terlingua Ranch. Employing strategies they used to in Oregon, they have learned to extend the growing season here to year-round. “Because of the weather in Alpine, it’s an incredibly easy season to extend,” claims Foster.

For one, as Foster told the audience his January talk at Front Street Books, in the six years they have been gardening here, they have only had to cope with a little over twenty “mean freeze days” in which the temperatures stayed below freezing for the whole day. “If you can get enough solar gain in the soil,” said Foster, “your plants aren’t even going to recognize that freeze.”

Also, we never get fewer than ten hours of daylight, apparently a key element in successful gardening.

On the flip side, there are distinct challenges to gardening here, notes Foster. One is the low humidity, which is especially hard on seedlings, which need to be kept moist.

Then there’s The Wind [my capitalization: Who here can forget The Winds?] “It’s hard to harvest much when your foliage is being beaten up on,” notes Foster.

Also, the very thing that is a boon for gardening here can also be a bane: the sun. Sunscald is another big challenge.

Finally, there are the pests, which most of us have come to see traces of, in even our most half-hearted attempts at gardens: deer, javelina, grasshoppers, and about a gazillion other chewing and virus-spreading insects, who ravage everything from pansies to apricot trees to tomatoes.

Yet Foster and Tout use many “low-tech” methods for mitigating such potentially ruinous elements. For starters, “floating fabric covers” are the holy grail of gardening here, it seems. These inventions are comprised of simple wire hoops with Agribon fabric draped over them, and rocks to hold down the fabric edges. The covers insulate plants, and protect from drying winds and most pests. Plus, you can water right through the fabric.

The book also details ways to enhance your soil’s fertility through home composting, the importance of choosing your garden site carefully, and the necessity of rotating crops.

In keeping with the spirit of the book’s introduction, which stresses that the authors will “continue to refine [our techniques] as long as we garden,” Foster and Tout have already noticed some issues they neglected to mention in this first edition – and they’ve already revised some techniques in the few weeks since the book was published. The electricity to their two-strand deerproof fence went out one night, which is all it took for the deer to invade. Foster has already built a new fence, constructed of plastic fencing and stakes.

Going on their seventh year of growing vegetables in Alpine “all year long, for ourselves, for our friends, and to sell at the local farmer’s market,” the couple also strives continually to find new solutions to old problems (like mulching the garlic plants with straw, which houses fox spiders which eat the cutworm pests), and to move towards even more sustainable agricultural practices. Foster cites the increasing cost of gasoline as part of his motivation to continue to till by hand, rather relying on a gasoline-powered rototiller.

And while they think of perhaps installing some irrigation systems, even something as rudimentary as soaker hoses, Foster seems almost wistful about replacing his current method. “I have a lot of my brainstorms while watering…. I absolutely love watering at night by full moon.”

As I ride away from Mark Foster & Deborah Tout’s garden, my bike bag stuffed with a head of lettuce, several sweet potatoes and greens, and a Valencia melon, which Mark and Deb picked in my presence and insisted I take home, I have to think that maybe they should stick with the watering by hand, after all. Whatever they’re doing, it’s working really well.

To buy fresh produce from Mark & Deborah, visit them at the Alpine Farmer’s Market, held every Saturday morning from 9 until noon, at the Big Bend Thrift Store, on the corner of N. 5th St/HWY 118 and W. Avenue A., in Alpine. Their new book Organic Gardening West of the Pecos is available at Agave Natural Foods, The Big Bend Thrift Store, Front Street Books, and One Way Plant Nursery, all in Alpine.

“Mark was put on this earth to grow things,” says Deborah. As pictured here, Mark pulls back the magic Agribon floating row covers to reveal a lush crop of beans growing in late September. The Myth of Mark, as Deb tells me, as it has been told to her by Mark’s mother Eleanor Foster, is that at age ten, Mark spontaneously started gardening. Then, seeing how much produce cost in the supermarket, he procured a wagon and went door to door, peddling his produce to neighbors. “That story is the key to understanding Mark,” says Deb. “It’s very descriptive. He’s very self-motivated, always busy.” The couple met in Oregon in the mid-70’s and have been gardening together ever since, though Deb holds a full-time job at Sul Ross while Mark works more than full-time in the garden.

“The [floating row] covers capture heat, allowing us to plant earlier and harvest later,” Mark Foster & Deborah Tout (above) write in their new book Organic Gardening West of the Pecos. “They conserve water by reducing evaporation and protecting the plants from drying winds. Because they allow 85% light transmittance, they do provide some relief from our harsh summer sun.” While the covers also provide a lot of protection from “most insects and birds,” the authors note that “quail have crawled beneath our covers for an early spring pea feast,” so the gardeners have also resorted to ladybug infusions to cut down on the still-persistent aphids.

Their pet Guinea fowl (below) take up the rest of the charge, consuming copious amounts of grasshoppers while providing great entertainment.

Mark Foster (below, center) spoke to a rapt crowd on a tour of his & Deb Tout’s organic garden on the edge of Alpine, with over 50 people in attendance, eager to learn how to grow their own food in their own yards. While these lifelong gardeners cite numerous challenges to gardening here, such as little rain, rocky & alkaline soil, high salt content, sustained high winds, “occasional hailstorms, frosts, and temperatures over 100˚F “ as well as a variety of pests, they also assert that “we consider this a wonderful place to garden, and we produce almost all of the vegetables we eat.”