Soggysox Farm Welcomes You

Soggysox Farm is a 97 acre tract of hardwood bottomland in Southeast Texas. I found the property three years ago, but the idea was born some seven years back. Zach Weiss and Ben Shepard of Elemental Ecosystems finished a pond install in June 2019 and we're off and running. Sort of. I plan to spend this year establishing a dense canopy of plants that I want. Left to itself, this land will quickly become a tallow tree and greenbriar thicket.

Long term, I would like to produce crawfish and fried chickens and maybe a few hogs. There's enough surface water to do a crop and alley where the alleys are ponds for unruly herds of crawfish to graze. As for crops, I'm leaning toward trees which we can harvest in the cooler months from November to April. A short list of those includes citrus and avocados, early early peaches and kin, elderstuff, bananas, Japanese persimmons, Spanish olives, pecans, I dunno. I bet a dollar I won't pick anything in July or August because it gets hotter than all comfort.

Zach and Ben inoculated some logs with lions mane and I'm headed outdoors tomorrow morning to do the same. Southeast Texas is plenty hospitable to mushrooms. My dream would be to figure out how to cultivate the area's best and hitherto untamable boletes and others.

I could go on for thousands of words. This thread is where I'll park progress pics and infrequent updates. Be right back:)


Ben

Sounds like a great project Ben.

You might look into growing pioppino mushrooms Agrocybe aegerita? Black poplar mushrooms. They will grow better where you're at than up here.

John S
PDX OR

In this edition:

bananas

mushrooms

aquatic plants

bananas
I cut some pups from my yard last weekend and planted them at the farm. I've been watering them daily. I've also sewn a few different mixes from Native American Seed and several different nitrogen fixing trees. Southeast Texas has a fifth season from early July to Mid September called the inferno. It's like winter, in that everything dies, only longer and much hotter. Rather than nurse a bunch of trees through the inferno, I'm gonna wait and plant in the fall and spring. These five bananas were going to be culled last weekend, so I planted them. I could have potted them and nursed them along til September or October. If these die, I'll consider that in the future.

mushrooms
We inoculated some logs with lions mane from a couple different vendors. To hedge against total slug annihilation, I fashioned some shims from the only copper I could find. There's a set of logs with and a set of logs without copper stoppers, so we'll see if slugs are gonna be a problem.

aquatic plants
The coming months will be critical for establishing the plants that I want. For the water's edge, I want plants which will spread on their own and take care of the soil and feed crawfish really well. Any ideas?

Thanks in advance!
Ben

2 plants that are doing well in my pond is duck potato and watercress. I also added duckweed which is a floating vegetation. It is struggling as my pond is dropping a little. They end up at the shores edge from wind so when water drops they end up on the ground. As my water weed (its a real plant name) spreads,  then the duckweed rests against it rather than the shoreline.  That should help.

My experiment with duckweed has been great. This stuff can double every 2 days. I put a cattle trough in with my turkeys.  I put some floating duckweed in it.  It took a week, but they are eating it. I also saw youtubes of crawdads eating it. I have 4 5 gallon buckets currently holding some. I am trying to grow it while still giving it to the turkeys. I see this as a very good food source. I read that it is 20-40% protien when dry. Amazing plant. It could be a big part of a chicken operation.

December 2020

In this edition:

orchard trees

Christmas tree windbreaks

biomass

terraces

swimmies

orchard trees
We selected orchard varieties with an eye toward project management. This was inspired by the Gantt chart of a harvest calendar that Dave Wilson Nursery produces every year. With the overarching goal of limiting harvests to cool months, we planted the following:

late-producing pomegranates and Spanish olives which hopefully hang on til October

satsumas and maybe avocados for November

Christmas trees for December

crawfish from solstice through spring

early early peaches and late late mayhaws for May

Christmas tree windbreaks
We took a trip to a Cutyourselfa Tree Farm one year ago and we realized what a wonderful, multifunctional windbreak we could have in the various evergreens that pass for Christmas trees. Use 1: windbreaks. Use 2: Christmas tree revenue. Use 3: Marketing. People cut Christmas trees in November and December and very soon after that begins the crawfish harvest. This is an excellent opportunity to meet crawfish customers!

biomass
It was clear from the start that tallow trees would dominate the plant mix. I left the orchard for dead this past summer and returned in October during our first cool snap. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the things we planted seem to thrive alongside tallow trees. Early observations lead me to believe that all appreciated the tallow trees' shade across the hot, dry summer. I snapped foliage off the tallow trees and terraced it around the orchard trees.

terraces
We spent time this spring nailing tallow tree saplings to the hugelmounds and then piling hardwood mulch on the high sides. These terraces will hopefully ease erosion and sink water into the mounds.

swimmies
I introduced Gambusia a while ago. That's all. Nature added turtles, herons, crawfish, and a lazy water snake who reminds me of our favorite kitty.