by Dallas Baxter
Contributing Writer

Fresh food from the garden changes your life. The beauty of growing and harvesting and eating the produce is one like no other. Eating unpoisoned, seasonal food is essential to good health.
        – Sandra Hughes, Marfa

Soil preparation is probably the most important thing apart from adequate water.  Soil should be rich, lofty and well-drained. You will know if you have built good soil when you take a handful from under the surface and you think – heck, I could just eat this.     
        – Bob Schwab, Marfa

The Tri-counties has mind-boggling diversity in weather, soil, pests and moisture. But once you know the basics, it’s a matter of fine-tuning to get your vegetable garden just right.

The soil is the beginning. What’s in the soil will be in our food. So it is wise to know the soil, not only to be alert to any contamination but also because not every soil will support every type of plant.

How do you find out what you’ve got under foot? Texas A&M cooperative extension does a great soil test. Far surpassing garden center soil test kits, their testing equipment can determine not only the pH – acidity and alkalinity – of a soil sample but also micro-nutrients, minerals, salinity, and more. (To get a soil test kit, see the extension agent in your county – Logan Boswell in Brewster and Jeff Davis Counties, 432.837.6207, in the Brewster County Courthouse or Rafael Realivasquez in Presidio County, 432.729.4647, in the old jail in Marfa.)

The kit will show you how to take a soil sample and offers a range of tests from a quite comprehensive “routine” test for $10 to a very detailed test that costs $50. You collect the sample, complete the form, mail it to A&M with your check and in a few weeks, you’ll get an analysis mailed to you. Right now is a good time to do this so you’ll be ready for spring.

No matter what your soil is like, you will want to compost in order to add the “power” of the compost to your garden. Compost reinvigorates the soil, adds micro-organisms that make your soil a feast for plants, helps absorb and retain moisture and helps balance the acid/alkaline content.

Marfa gardener Bob Schwab spends much time and effort getting his soil just right – making soil that is rich with good composted matter from the kitchen, yard or barn and lofty from added compost as well as uncomposted leaves or straw. This helps soil retain moisture and allows air to circulate.

“If I’m starting a new garden or even with an existing one,” Schwab said, “I recommend digging down 18-24 inches, adding lots of sharp sand and aggregate, if the soil is dense or has lots of clay, and adding as much compost and loft material as you can find.  The soil will consume as much as you can put in it,” he said.

If you’ve ever composted in a moist climate, you have been amazed at how quickly all the leaves, grass clippings, food scraps (not meat!), etc. turn into glorious compost. Here in the high desert you can watch each part of the compost pile mummify if you don’t keep the pile watered. A good solution to the water issue is an enclosed compost bin.

Linda Hedges, who gardens in the mountains between Fort Davis and the McDonald Observatory, uses a commercially available black plastic composter that’s roughly a 3-foot cube. It is structured so that material is added at the top, and comes out a trap door at the bottom as finished compost. Hedges “stirs” the compost occasionally with a pitch fork.  She has added some red worms (earthworms dug from the garden will also work just fine), and she waters it periodically.

A word of caution: it’s best to keep seeds out of the compost pile as a pile must get very hot in order to “kill” the seed. Compost in our area may not get hot enough, causing the compost to be full of unwanted, viable seed.

Where to plant? A small garden can produce massive amounts of food. You can grow all you can consume and then some without plowing the back 40. So unless you’re adept at managing a big plot, stay small.

Small gardens also work best for those whose land is mostly rock or bentonite. So, if you’re just starting out, start small.

Area gardeners are ever-inventive!

On Terlingua Ranch, Judy Eron grows herbs and salad greens in containers, “those plastic window box things from the hardware store – about 3 feet long, and 6 inches deep and wide.” Since she travels a great deal, Eron creates her own garden soil using potting soil with vermiculite and peat moss and composted steer manure.

When she travels, the containers go to the neighbors for care. When she’s in Oregon for the summer, she loads the containers of rosemary and basil on her truck and takes them with her.

Eron’s growing season is November to May, and even then, she is careful with the sun, moving her containers in and out of the shade.  She waters daily.

More container gardening in Marathon, where Joan and Bill Carlisle use anything that will hold soil and has a hole in the bottom – old wash tubs, buckets, washing machine tumblers, stacked tires, foot lockers. The Carlisles also find that most summer crops do better with some shade.

Joan Carlisle has each of her containers on a drip system which she says is “the only way to go” since, in this fairly large garden, some containers need daily watering.

If you’re “out in the country,” city annoyers like grasshoppers and skunks are joined by deer, javelinas, rabbits, raccoons and all the other critters that live in the rocks and rills.

“To be a successful food grower, fencing of some type is a must,” said Hedges. The solution for her and husband Dave is a cage, 14 feet x 18 feet, made of drilling pipe anchored in concrete with ceiling supports of cedar posts. The framing on the sides and top is 1” metal c-channel with 4” cattle panel welded in place.

The cage top is also covered with cattle panel and bird netting to keep out feathered seedling-snackers, and there is poultry netting around the bottom to discourage rock squirrels and other creatures that can fit through the 4” openings.

“We hired a welder to put it together for us – labor and materials were $600 – not cheap, but we really wanted to grow our own vegetables.” Hedges said.

Inside, raised beds with 12-inch paths between them are packed with crops that utilize all the vertical surfaces as trellises – Hedges boasts of 8-foot tall vines of Sweet 100’s cherry tomatoes this year.

She has added 5-foot cedar stays spaced about 6 inches apart along the south and west sides to provide a little shade; the covering on top provides some shade as well.

When creating beds, whether raised or not, knowing your soil is again, an essential ingredient. Karen Little, who lives just south of Fort Davis off Hwy. 118, lives on “a former cow pasture, and it’s hard as concrete.” Little said that using the native soil, which is highly alkaline, and compost and manure has not created soil good enough in two years’ time to produce the kind of vegetables she would like.

“My peppers look like they are from outer space with weird foliage and little fruiting,” Little said. Even though her soil will support tomatoes and lettuce, the beds dry out fast in the heat and wind.

Little also advocates fencing the garden plot, having lost whole crops to cotton rats and her tomato-eating dog. She uses shade cloth on everything but also likes to provide organic shade – a wall of sunflowers to shade the vegetables and help block the spring wind. Although the sunflowers take a bit of water, Little feels the benefits of shade, wind block and bird feed outweigh the water use.

In-town Marfa gardeners Bob Schwab and his wife Leslie Wilkes also use organic shade, planting taller plants so they shade more vulnerable plants, pole beans south of a row of carrots, for example.

Schwab suggests factoring in the afternoon shade of existing trees if there are such. He and Wilkes use old aluminum window screens bent like tents for young plants.

“We plant in early spring or late fall for cold tolerant or heat sensitive plants,” Schwab said. “Most plants when established will do fine if watered adequately.”

Sandra Hughes has recently planted her first Marfa garden on a 30 foot by 40 foot in-town Marfa plot. Hughes has been gardening fro many years in New York’s Hudson Valley and is focusing on lengthening the growing season here by planting cold hardy seeds and using floating row covers.

The polyester row covers are supported by the plants they protect, “floating,” without necessarily using additional support, though they can be fastened to the ground. The fabric admits sunlight, water and air but keeps out insects. Two layers of row covers will protect plants when temperatures dip to the mid-20’s.

The row covers have kept the grasshoppers off Hughes’ garden this fall – good news for all Tri-county gardeners since grasshoppers are a perennial plague.

Compost guru Malcolm Beck has long preached that by composting to enrich the soil and gardening organically, little or no insect control is necessary. The local gardeners interviewed, almost all of whom grow organically, would agree.

Organic sprays, beneficial insects, hand-picking and companion planting are favorite ways they deal with insects.

“Most healthy plants have few pests,” said Joan Carlisle. “We use compost, fish emulsion, humate, and we encourage ladybugs and praying mantises.”

“I steer clear of conventional pest sprays,” Linda Hedges said. “My favorite organic spray is Neem, and I have also made and used garlic, pepper and orange sprays – and I use No-Lo Bait for grasshoppers.”

Hedges said she always plants extra dill or parsley plants for black swallowtail caterpillars and hand-picks them from one set of plants to the other.

Schwab also uses some homemade garlic/cayenne spray. Because his garden is organic, pests are not too bad. “Bad bugs are put between a rock and a hard place, literally, or squished by hand,” Schwab said.

Companion planting is based on the idea that certain plants can benefit others when planted in near proximity so that some cultural benefit (pest control, higher yield, etc.) is derived, and many local gardeners plant marigolds to control nematodes in the soil.

It’s not surprising that the words humus, human and humility all come from the same root – earthy.  The Earth is abundant, and when we listen and work with nature, that abundance is shared with us boundlessly.

Sarah Hughes reflects: “Sharing the produce from the garden is another benefit of home gardening. Sharing meals, exchanging information about planting and cooking over dinner is thrilling. I am happy digging and planting and watching the seeds grow. At dusk, I walk the dogs over to Bob and Leslie’s garden, and we look at their garden and talk about each plant as if it were a child growing. What could be better?”

With a BFA Design, UT-Austin & M. Div., New York Theological Seminary, Dallas Baxter finds her garden is the natural place for design and theology to coincide. She has been a student of the Big Bend since arriving here six years ago.

Alpine gardeners Patty Manning and Cyndi Wimberly grew several varieties of tomatoes and peppers in their garden this summer (above). Manning describes this display going clockwise from high noon:
12:00 to 4:00 at edge of plate are Anaheim long green chilis. Not too hot, good for roasting, eating green, or ripening, drying and making chili powder.
4:00 to 6:30 are jalapeños (both green and red/ripe). Best eaten green.  Can be eaten fresh, pickled, canned both red and green.
3:00 and 7:00 are the small, very red Calabash tomatoes, slightly acidic, very prolific.
8:00 are two round red Thesoliniki tomatoes.  Nice “slicers”  balanced sugar/acid.  Good hot weather tomato.
Center of clock are the pinkish red pleated Zapotec tomatoes. Not very acidic.  Produces later in summer.  Can crack in heat.  Good slicer.  Doesn’t store very long.
6:00, 9:00 and 11:00 are Roma paste tomatoes. Good all around tomato, not as much pulp as “slicers”.  Good for eating fresh, drying, canning, freezing.  Stores well
10:00 is the other paste tomato, San Marzano. Less pulp than Roma.  Thick flesh.  Good for dying (or whatever- but especially drying, making paste). (Dallas Baxter)