My name is Frank. I live and work in Dallas, but I spend all my spare time 75 miles west of town on my father's acreage on the banks of the Brazos River in Parker County. Dad is 85 and lives alone aside from my daily company. He got the place in 1985, and it's been my sandbox ever since.
I began
gardening in earnest and planting
trees back in December 2003, and every year has been something of a learning
experience. I initially started just to give myself something to do while I kept dad company. However, one year - 2008, I think - I planted no garden and felt completely at a loss for anything to do with myself around the farm. My garden plot is about an acre in size, though the only thing that limits it, really, is my time and inclination. This is my sandbox, and I have a pretty free hand to do as I wish with it.
A year or so ago I became acquainted with the writings of
Fukuoka and began to read and learn about
Sepp Holzer and the other permies well known to folks here on this forum. In some ways it has been as though scales fell from my eyes and a whole new world opened up. In another sense I have felt like I am trying to break several bad habits. I can do without tractor-plowing, but I have always loved to till. And right before I got The One
Straw Revolution I spent $700 on a new rear-tine tiller from a big box store. Not using it has been something of an adjustment. However, I figure I can still use it to help me create mounded rows and small swales for now.
I've planted over 100 trees of one stripe or another around the place since 2003. In January 2010 a fire swept through and killed off most of the fruit trees but left most of the shade trees largely unaffected. Additionally, there are 35 or so large pecans that were originally grafted in 1927, the year dad was born. This year there is a bumper crop of pecans, and it's all I can do to collect them in the short time I have every evening before the sun goes down. So far I have six large sacks of nuts back at my apartment in Dallas, and certainly hundreds of pounds of them still not harvested out on the river. I've ordered some trees recently that
should arrive in the next couple of weeks.
12 paw paw - I've never tasted one, but they were my great-grandmother's favorite, and I want to be the paw-paw king of north Texas someday.
6 red globe peach - Dad ordered these, but I'm a fan anyway. There's currently only one peach tree left on the place that produced anything this year.
6 blackberry plants - I don't know why he ordered these. We have a lot of blackberries already. I'm not complaining, mind you, but I have other priorities at the moment.
6 grape vines - I have no idea what kind he ordered, but I'm game.
4 apricot trees - Don't know the variety, but the only apricot tree we had that was producing fell over last year. We've had some really dry years lately. Go figure.
3 American persimmon - I love these. I ordered these myself from a Texas nursery that has a lot of
native fruit trees for sale.
3 Mayhaw - more natives and another favorite of my great-grandmother. I've never tasted one.
3 Chinese chestnut - I've never eaten a chestnut, but I want a few of these around.
3 Chickasaw plum - These are the best plums I've ever tasted. The variety is Guthrie, and I made a ton of jam out of these that is phenomenally good.
3 Wild pear - I've got several older pear trees that sometimes produce incredible amounts of fruit, and I wanted to plant some wild pears as well.
3 Almond - If we're going to get hotter and
dryer in our area, I figure these might do well
enough. I'd like to make my own almond
milk anyway.
4 Fig - I love figs, and they produce very quickly with a little southern exposure.
I've started a couple of projects this year that were cut short by an injury to my wrist and the intrusion of outside circumstance beyond my control. But I'll finish them eventually. One is a large keyhole garden that is almost complete, really. I have always had these
compost cages I create in the middle of my garden using tomato cages I make out of remesh with some hardware cloth wrapped around them. I figure it leaches compost tea directly into the garden, and it gives me some place to put all my kitchen waste. So I took a bunch of limestone blocks that were laying around a barbecue pit dad never finished back in 87, and I hauled them out into the garden and built them around one of my cages. I only lack a couple more courses of stone to complete it, but my wrist is really fubar at the moment. I laid a few logs in the bottom to create a
hugelkultur effect, and I'll see how that works. I can always knock the thing down and start again if it doesn't work out well enough.
The other is a Hugelkultur that will run the length of the west side of my garden plot along a low lying area where I use to always finish my
tractor plowing. It is barely started. All I've done so far is haul some fallen pecan limbs over to it and shoveled up some dirt from one end that I was trying to throw into the keyhole garden before I gave out. Still, I have a lot of want to, even if my can do is off its
feed at the moment.
I want to order
bees for delivery in the spring. I'm stoked about it, and I don't know the first thing about them. Currently the only stock at the farm are a dozen hens and two roosters and a donkey I got for free of Craigslist in order to give my dad something to look at. I named him Greg. He and my dog Otis hate each other. They actually love each other, but I suspect that each would still like the other to die a slow, horrible death at one another's fang or hoof.
I have a lot of big ideas and daydreams. They occupy my mind and my idle moments. I make my own kimchi and kambucha and
sourdough. I can, I pickle, I dehydrate, etc. These are all things that used to intimidate me, but which I now look to as an integral part of my routine and a necessary part of the structure and routine of my daily life.
Masanobu Fukuoka, Sepp Holzer and
Derrick Jensen are my heroes. I think they're rock stars. I believe that there are no consumer choices any of us can make that will save our landbase from destruction. I believe that the only real hope lies in the collapse of our society, of civilization in general. But I'll hold on to the notion that anything is possible. In the meantime I'll try to minimize my impact while acknowledging that driving 150 miles each day is insane for many reasons. I don't want to be one of those rich, white women greenwashing their lives and feeling smug. I want some integrity in my life.
I think the most unappetizing thing you can put on food is a package, a label or a price tag.
I think there is a special place in hell for lawyers and real estate developers. When I was a child my mother used to take me to
city council meetings in Irving, Texas where I grew up. She would put me outside the auditorium with little oak seedlings in Dixie cups to hand out to folks. Whenever we would pass a former wooded lot that had been bulldozed for development, she would invariably pull over to the side of the road and break down in tears. I thought she was a real weirdo. Now I see her as something of a
gift and a saint, even if she is half a bubble off. She still lives in that big house on an acre in Irving surrounded by her snake goddesses and bird churches, and I take her fresh eggs and pecans every couple of weeks.
I believe we were engineered to be the best runners on the planet, though I've never felt so inclined unless someone was behind me with a gun. I recently have developed this image in my mind. It is powerful for me. I see myself in my seventies living in the vast fifteen-acre food forest I've helped create, running barefoot along the trail that meanders around and throughout it and down to the river's edge. Anyone who knows me already would recognize the comedy of that image, but I want to see it realized.
I'm sitting here on the clock goofing off at the
soap mines where I work in Dallas. I watch food forest vids constantly and call it "permaculture porn".
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Nice radishes!
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