I live on a 5-acre country lot in West Texas. I'm in USDA zone 8a where temperatures can get down into the teens in the winter. In the summer, we can have 100 straight days of 100+ degree heat with little to no rain. It's a challenge to keep anything alive in those conditions. About the only plants that thrive here are mesquite trees & cactus - both of which are thick on my property. I also have to contend with families of deer destroying my garden. My purpose of creating this channel is to document my journey as I transform this prickly landscape into a food forest oasis. The channel helps to keep me motivated and accountable to always move forward with my garden improvements. You will find me trying things on this channel that others have had success with in their regions of the world such as Hugelkultur, permaculture, Back to Eden, & various composting methods. I hope to learn from my mistakes and from viewer comments along the way.
How's your prickly pear compost pile holding up? I'm staring at a jungle of prickly pear and mesquite. Reckon a chipper and some compost action could be the answer. Thoughts?
Interesting! We planted some mammoth sunflowers from a store-bought packet of seeds this year. They are all normal-looking except for one that has a single flower at the very top, plus nine smaller buds of varying sizes. The main stalk was never damaged in any way. I searched the Internet for answers, and the consensus seems to be that a mammoth seed packet will occasionally contain a cross-pollinated seed. I am pleasantly surprised. These little buds aren't going to become enormous flowers, but it will be fun to watch them grow and bloom, one at a time. In fact, the smaller they are, the cuter they'll be.
I think the heads droop when they are heavy with seed. This tall sunflower didn’t droop much because the head was smaller. That’d be my guess anyways 🤷🏼♂️
Just ran across one, in the river behind my house, just south of Olympia Washington. No stripes, just black and white checkered pattern. Just a baby, about 10” long. Wish I couldve gotten a picture.
😮 I'll be doing this! I used to think I was going overboard by having my own trail, but now I'm inspired. My family is going to hate me soon because they'll be put to work here 😊
Best tool for hardwood wood chips with some leaves is the 5 tine. Softwood chips the 10 tine is better. I try to get hardwood chips whenever possible for faster soil building. Great video!
Gorgeous! And congrats on the peaches. I garden in town in San Angelo, and the West TX wind ain't nothing to mess with! Good idea about the wind break screen.
Do you have updates on how this worked for you? We have a ton of prickly pear cactus on our property and looking to see how wood chips can impact them if we covered them with wood chips.
Problem with using commercially sourced grass clippings (not so much tree leaves) is the 🤮lawn "treatments" it's likely contaminated with. Maybe keep that compost separate from all your food plants.
2:43 for the rode you could look up there is a the nice of making like a speed bum of digging some soil and making a small berm to direct the water from the rode to the swale, making it diagonal to the rode uper part the oposit side of the swale up the hill. There should be information and examples of this
Thanks! The outer swales aren’t doing much. There hasn’t been anything growing on them, so every rain kind of washes the berm soil back into the ditch. I don’t have an easy way to get water out there, which has made it difficult to get anything established on the berms in the summers when we aren’t getting enough rain.
@@WestTexasGardenExperiment the last 3 years here have seen some amazing rain. It caused a lot of flooding and heartbreak for a lot of people, so far I’ve been lucky and been on the edge of the storms, although thanks to a couple of storms I was without phone or internet for all of January and the first week of February. My land has loved all the rain and the swales though small and far from perfect, worked well. I have never seen my patch so green this far into summer. I’ve been able to harvest, apples and quinces for the first time as the birds left them alone, probably because the was just so much food around for them. However the crows did take all my plums as usual, and the wet weather killed one of my peach trees.
@grannysgarden8225 good to hear you are getting a good amount of rain, and reaping the benefits. Glad those swales are paying off! Wow, that’s a long time without phone or internet in this day and age.
Glad you're still at it, man. Hope you enjoy your year! I had a number of apple trees die (prospects I was hoping I could trick into working in Texas) but most of the rest survived. To note, all almond varieties seemed to love the heat/drought and variety of neglect I offered them.
Yeah. Ive got a big hole one and small hole wire that inserts into frame. Using fine sifted for grow medium. And then will dump bigger into compost. I been just letting woodchip piles sit. Got multiple things going on@WestTexasGardenExperiment
Looking forward to giving a shot at some of the techniques here in Spain. I think I’ll try a hole and a shovel to break them up. I wonder if black solider fly larvae will eat them?
