First off, many many blessings to all of you who post and share and indulge here! Thank you immensely!
I have fond memories of garden-fresh tomatoes, juice dripping down my arm and loving it. I also remember we canned a bunch of tomatoes. and green beans and carrots also. In hindsight, this was actually only 2 years, but i am forever inpressed with this amazement. And I've been longing for thiatsensation for YEARS, but every garden I've had has failed. Last year was the most productive of them all, but the critters were relentless, poking holes in nearly every single tomato , swarming my zukes, scarfing my melons (they knew EXACTLY when they were ripe
enough, monsters!,) something chowed the leafy greens and peas before they could even get 8 leaves. even worse, the plentiful peppers, banana, anaheim-ish, wax, poblano and piquillos were rarely indulged by the fair lady who is the resident pepper conniseur (Hungarian, of
course.)
Long story made short, we are nearing the last potential frost date. I turned the larger part of my patch into a modest L-shaped
hugel (about 4' wide X 3' tall, maybe 20' long.) this is in a space very proximate a beloved cedar that sits just to the west and shades the entire bed by 3pm. This spot was chosen just for this because the east Texas (2hrs ESE of Dallas) sun is brutal and it stays very hot with some lengthy dry spells. The other hugel is 3'X3'X3' where I had my most thriving tomato-cucumber combo last year. Those cukes and 2 other locations grew yellow, bitter cukes, no matter how soon they were picked. There was one cucumber, which I had trellised to 6', directly under the cedar that was productive and yielded good, green cukes.
so here I am now, having come across Permies. can I just say OMG OVERWHELM!! Also, there is a lovely lady doling out FREE ebooks (high-polish, btw, very nicely done,) at plantonce.com, who has really inspired the
perennial bug for me. And there is so much more to this story that I don't want to get into, but it all plays a part in what I hope to build as a much-less-work-yet-highly-productive-in-harmony-with-nature garden.
My goal is to plant these 2 hugels with appropriate 1st year stuff that I can leave in the care of my sister and return to next spring when I get back to Texas and plant the 2nd year-and-likely-forever stuff. I am very interested in several of the collards, runner beans and maybe everglades tomatoes from plantonce.com, and I know there
should be plenty of biomass producers as well as pollinators and pest deterrents. My hugels got a bunch of
compost, fresh live sticks from the Texas holly and american beauty (not leafing yet, sadly,) and are based on oak, hickory, maybe a sweet gum/sycamore/sassafrass (really dont know, but likey only a couple chunks.) The added
native dirt is sandy loam, which is what the whole area seems to be.
I don't have the capacity to develop this as food forest, although if this were my property that is definitely what it would be. This is Pops garden, which has been rather sucky every time I see it for the past, well, forever. However, it does border a modest orchard, maybe 20 tree-ish things that are presumably fruit-bearing apricot, peach, plum, pear, 1 fig, 1 chestnut in the far corner and 1 struggling cherokee almond in the other far corner. Don't know if this helps the garden any, but it's there.
I tend to want to grow the things we can't source locally and what are the favorites and what consume bigger parts of the grocery budget. Yes, we are still in grocery store
land, but I, for one, am bucking this with all I've got. So our "must" haves are:
english cucumber
zucchini-fordhook is fave
cubanelle and red/orange/yellow bell pepper
piquillo pepper
butternut/acorn squash
TOMATOES!! (I lean towards san manzano/roma, wife likes beefsteaky/heirloom uglies)
potatoes would be awesome (have another ground-level patch i could use for this (and carrots maybe)
few scallion, dill, parsley, basil, cilantro, culantro, savory
green beans and english peas
other favs and woud-really-like:
kohlrabbi
chard
spinach
lettuces
canteloup/water melon
radish
soooooooo, where to start??!? i've been reading a lot about soil building, biomass/green manure, variety,
water and air flows, and way way too many different cultivars of everything and no single "go-to" "old-reliable" "ace-in-the-hole" "matches-my-known-description" of things I know i want. like just a simple "english cucumber that grows well in western-edge-of-east-texas," or "fordhook zucchini." on top of that, i feel i'm totally in between the benefits and style of more perennial foods and the familiar faves of the "till/amend/plant" annual style.
I am completely in the information overload zone, but I'm daring an invitation for more. specifically, what and how would anyone recommend these 2 hugels be planted?
specific cultivar recommendations for the tricky stuff like the english cukes and STRINGLESS green beans?
lastly, comfrey. i keep seeing it at the top of every list for green manure and the amazing things it's taproot does, and then also warnings about the seed producing variety and even the russian block version tending to kind of take over an area. do i just play it safe and plant it off to the side somewhere outside the veggies? maybe in between those fruit
trees with the wildly viney watermelons and canteloups?
oh, and one other little menacing monstrosity of a thing...
squash/stink bugs.
i waged war last year, religiously inspecting and incising eggs clusters, smooshing/neeming/soaping instars and adults, and when I could get Pops to back off the sprinklers, lots of
DE. i may have won a few tiny battles, likely when I abandoned neem and
soap in favor of gloves and smooshing. strange thing is that a lot of these seemed to arise from one lonely zuke in the far corner of the orchard. i prepared the bed a year prior with compost comprising ground leaves mostly and kitchen prep scraps. in spring i weeded and turned the compost in, laid
cardboard and 6" of mulch. the leaves and mulch came from our trees, mostly oak and hickory. the zuke went in just past where I laid the cardboard, kind of as an after-thought. the cardboard and mulch were for the fastly spreading canteloup and watermelon that i seeded directly into this compost bed. there have been more than a few stinkers in Pops side of the garden the year prior, but they seemed very keen on that particular zuke, almost like that's where they had been hiding over winter. i can't describe my disappointment when i found them everywhere, poking tiny holes in every single tomato and taunting me with every smoosh that there are 5 others right behind the squished one, just lurking and waiting for another fruit to set. funny thing is that these (vines) were all put in the orchard for weed mitigation and green manure with the hopes that something might also produce something edible.
I had hoped to attach a few images, cuz who doesn't like a story with pictures? Alas, my rig is being fussy. I'm running Ubuntu 20.04 on a RaspberryPi 4, 64 bit. I think it's the Mate desktop that gives me the most trouble, but Libre Office likes it's own format for things and I can't seem to copy and paste an image to this post. I'll keep trying, but for now I'll let it ride and keep offering up thanks and praise to and for the open source community and PERMIES!!! my new and favoritest galactic sized wormhole...
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