Agricrafty.com--Grow Stuff! Build Stuff! Learn Stuff!

ERay Gard, creator of Agricrafty

There’s great gardening going on in Austin, Texas. If you need to improve your gardening skill set, agricrafty.com is a valuable resource.

First created as a WordPress blog, developer ERay Gard is an expert in establishing permaculture gardens. 

ERay grew up on a New Mexico ranch and received his undergraduate degree in Agricultural Development from Texas A&M. He joined the Peace Corps and served in Ecuador where he trained community leaders and volunteers on the set-up and management of school gardens. 

After the Peace Corps, ERay volunteered with the Sustainable Food Center in Austin before earning his master’s degree in Sustainable International Development at Brandeis University’s Heller School in Boston. As part of his MA requirements he worked in several development and advisory positions in Damascus, Syria, and in Copan Ruinas, Honduras. 

ERay is back in Austin now where he has worked with Skillshare in the development of online gardening classes and has served as educator for Farmshare Austin where he taught their “Farmer Starter” program for beginning organic farmers. 

How to test your soil.

One topic of ERay’s scrutiny is the importance of soil. In central Texas we must deal with heavy clay, alkaline soil, and limestone. Agricrafty stresses the importance of good, fertile soil and offers a tutorial on how to test it. 

Sheet mulch tutorial

ERay follows his soil tutorial with helpful information about cultivation, soil preparation, and mulch. He recommends using sheet mulch, a combination of cardboard and hay. His primer includes photos which are a big help in understanding how to engineer the mulch. 

ERay has posted helpful You Tube videos on Hardening off and Transplanting Tips and Demo, What it means to "Water In" a plant or seeds, Tomato Seed Planting in Starter Tray, Hybrid v Heirloom Seeds, and several others.

In addition to the website and blog, you can find Agricrafty on Facebook and Instagram. 

Crazy Beans!

On March 27, 2013, I planted two rows of “French Filet” beans and two rows of pinto beans separated by a row of tomatoes. I had never planted pintos before, and the package stated that they were “Indeterminate large bush type pinto.” The green bean seed packet prominently states “Bush, A Favorite of Chefs.”

We had the luxury this year of a cool, rainy spring—not a normal phenomenon in the Texas hill country. All of the beans quickly sprouted and produced beautiful, full plants. The problem is that they have not stopped growing. The four-foot by eight-foot raised bed in which these beans are planted has no fence or trellis for them to run so we placed several tall tomato cages in the bed. They covered the cages is just a week.  Next, we tied string from a neighboring lima bean bed that has a trellis and let the beans grow from one bed to another. The problem is that their prolific growth is blocking the lima beans’ sunlight. Next, we clipped the ends of the runners in hopes that they would stop their vining behavior. They are still growing. In fact, many of the runners are more than twenty-five feet long.

I contacted both seed companies and their respective customer service representatives were gracious and polite and immediately offered to replace the seeds. Neither offered an explanation of why these seeds produced vining plants.

We don’t use chemical fertilizers--our soil is amended with compost. In addition, we spread a mulch of used chicken litter under the plants. We have sprayed the plants with liquid seaweed and both of the bean varieties are producing. The green beans’ production has slowed somewhat with our hot, dry climate, but it has been rainy lately

and there are plenty of blossoms on both the pintos and the green beans. The pintos are producing clusters of large pods.

If any of you have experienced a similar problem with your beans, please let us know. We are completely befuddled.

Catch of the Day

It seems that every week or so our TV weatherman tells us that there is "chance" for rain. Most of the time that chance passes us by. After only an inch-and-a-half total for the first three months of this year, mother nature brought us a bountiful inch-and-a-half today. We sat on our deck and watched a fabulous light show with lots of thunder and a drenching rain. Our rain barrels caught about seventy gallons of pure hill country gold--enough to last for a while. Earlier in the day, in anticipation of the wet stuff, I finished planting corn and Mitla black bean seeds as well as a few pintos and haricot verts. Which leads me to the topic of when to plant. I inherited my appreciation of gardening from my grandfather who planted his seeds according to phases of the moon. Our full moon for March occurred on the twenty-seventh of the month--the worm moon. It was an uncommonly cold, windy, drab day and after planting about half of my corn and bean seeds, I quit. So which batch will grow up to be the hardiest plants--seeds planted on the day of the full moon or put in the ground just prior to a good rain? We'll see.

Gardening on the edge--the lure of the Texas hill country

One week ago, on March 20, we transplanted our tomato seedlings into the garden. It had been an unusually warm February and long-range weather forecasts indicated no frosts in sight. Every year I plant seeds in flats in the greenhouse on the day after Christmas. After first being transplanted into four inch pots, then into one gallon nursery containers in February, by mid-March they are large and healthy and ready to thrive in the great outdoors. We usually use tomato cages to shelter them from the strong hill country winds, but this year my husband constructed a sturdy cattle panel fence down the center of the eight-by-four foot raised tomato bed.

We pulled up the carrots that were in the way, dug a trench, and amended the soil with layers of shrimp shells, compost, pulverized egg shells, and a liberal sprinkling of epsom salts. We removed the bottom leaves of the plants (two Roma, four Oaxaca Pink heirlooms, four Sweetie, and four Brandywine heirlooms--I saved San Marzanos and persimmon tomato seedlings for our second crop) and burried the bottom two-thirds of the plants in the soil. We used old pantyhose to gently tie the plants to the fence. Pantyhose are stretchy and they don't "bite" into the stalks of the plants--and they're free!

Our tomato plants certainly seemed to be very happy--that is until Sunday night when we were surprised by a forecast for a light freeze. We gently covered our tomato fence with sheets covering the plants and felt pretty confident that they could easily withstand the sudden, cold temperatures. But the weather man was wrong! I woke up at three o'clock that morning and checked the temperature--twenty-seven degrees. 

I panicked, of course and was delighted to find that other than a little frostbite,our tomato plants looked alive and well. Tuesday night (also a freeze warning) we added a blanket over the sheets. The tomato plants survived, thank goodness. Serious gardeners here in the Texas hill country plant their tomatoes in the ground as early as possible because we all know that by the first of July, temperatures will likely register at the one hundred mark and the tomatoes will collapse from the unrelenting heat. 

The Texas hill country has been likened to Tuscany and the south of France. It's virtues are so extolled that city and county governments cannot possibly keep up with the rapid growth by city-dwellers seeking a peaceful, country life. This is a beautiful place to live with its quaint, picturesque German villages, numerous wineries that dot the countryside, and breathtaking views of rolling hills with wide expanses of lavender and bluebonnet fields. There is a culinary aesthetic here that satisfies the pickiest foodie and the music that swings through these hills rivals Nashville. But, as newcomers soon find out after they settle here, the Texas hill country is a lure and a trap--as Robert Caro wrote in his first award-winning biography of President Lyndon Johnson, The Path to Power. Only a thin layer of heavy, caliche clay soil covers an almost-solid limestone foundation, thwarting efforts to successfully raise all but native vegetation. But new arrivals to the hill country are shocked when they discover that THERE IS NO WATER.