| By John Simpson
Freelance Writer |
Gardening in the high Chihuahua Desert deep in the Highlands of the Big Bend is certifiable masochism. I face critters from mice to mule deer, high summer temperatures abetted by desiccating wind and drought. We live upon the Marfa Plateau, or as I call it, the “Martian Plateau,” hence “MP.” This country kills green things mercilessly. However, I do not want us limited to commercial bagged lettuce and leprous squash. What to do?
As soon as we moved onto the ranch in September 2010, I borrowed a friend’s five-horse rear-tined tiller and attempted to till my 20 × 20 foot-high fenced garden. The too-large machine beat both me and the stony soil equally. Scraping aside most of the rocks, I planted late-season peas and lettuce. Even in a rain-blessed year, my modest crop struggled. A bumper crop of grasshoppers thrived. Worst of all, the hillside soil would not retain water. I planned for the 2011 gardening season.
Having had good luck with raised beds before, I built about 240 square feet of them. With much labor I scraped, loaded, hauled and unloaded silt from the edges of dirt tanks along with much cow manure. Weeks of steady work over the winter mostly filled the raised beds.
I added dried scrapings from water troughs, peat, more manure and commercial potting soil bought on sale. At least irrigation water was easy and plentiful from our windmill and storage tank uphill.
For the 2011 season, I chose to use black plastic for mulch, cutting it where I needed for transplants and direct seeding. Using cheap garden hose and fittings, I built a modestly efficient gravity-flow drip system. I planted greens, beans, melons, tomatoes, peppers and more. Some varieties did fairly well. I even canned pickled okra and made green tomato salsa spiked with my bountiful crop of peppers.
Problems became obvious. Bending low over the beds made my back ache. The corners and sides of the beds dried out too quickly in the wrenching drought and wasted space. The underlying native soil wicked away water. The brutal summer sun reduced the black plastic mulch to nasty rubble, which required a trip to a landfill — a 100 mile round trip. There just had to be a better way.
And there was. Just after we moved into our new house, my wife wanted to plant honeysuckles to shade our front porch. However, the propane line to the kitchen ran a foot below grade right there. No way would I attempt digging. Discussion followed. Then I noticed the line of 25 gallon tubs for our recycling storage salvaged from our lessee’s cattle operation. Made of heavy black plastic about 20 × 20 inches with close-fitting lids, why wouldn’t they work as planters for the honeysuckles, keeping both my wife and the propane line happy? Well, they worked just fine. I drilled the bottoms with about a dozen 3/4-inch holes for drainage, filled them with potting soil, planted infant honeysuckles and mulched heavily with shredded bark. The tubs maintained moisture very well, and the honeysuckles now cover their trellis and thrive. I had my answer to MP gardening: tubs.
When cattle empty the molasses- and mineral-filled tubs, there is no deposit or established recycling program. Obviously, burning was, and is, out. During the worst of the drought, emptied tubs cluttered pastures and the isolated refuse pit. Our lessee was delighted as I gathered dozens of the empties.
I drilled ample drainage holes in the bottoms of the tubs and filled them with salvaged soil mixture from the now obsolete raised beds, mixing potting soil the last couple of inches for a better seed bed. I set the filled tubs within the frames of the decommissioned raised beds. Within the original garden I placed 40 tubs. Crazed by the prospect of victory over the MP garden demons, I built another anti-critter fence five feet out from the original garden, giving myself room for about 25 more tubs. Obviously addled, I added a dozen more tubs inside our large dog-yard and elsewhere, including two for coddled blueberry plants and two for strawberries.
Inspired by seed catalog strawberry towers, I measured two tubs and drew with a Sharpie upward-facing flaps by tracing around a jig shaped like a crisp taco shell, which I cut from cardboard. I measured three rows horizontally around the tubs, spaced about five inches apart. At one corner of each marked flap, I drilled a 3/8-inch hole, fitted in a saber saw blade and cut around each flap. I then bent each flap down to form an upward-slanting shelf to provide support for a strawberry start.
To ensure thorough watering of the entire tubs, I inserted eight-inch lengths of PVC drilled with 1/8-inch holes in the center of each tub. Filling each tub with potting soil to the level of the bottom-most row of flaps, I inserted a start into each flap, spreading out the roots into a fan. I then filled the tubs to the next level of flaps, tamping the medium firmly. I repeated this procedure once more to fill the tubs.
When I water the strawberry tubs, I first fill these reservoirs to the brim. I then spray the surface thoroughly. This technique has worked so well with the strawberry tubs that next season all my tubs will have these PVC reservoirs.
The height of the tubs offers a particularly valuable advantage. My favorite gardening tool is a five-gallon bucket with a rotating seat affixed. I store my gardening journal, seeds and simple tools in it, and sit on it to till, weed, transplant, harvest or whatever else I need to do. It spares my troubled back. Because there is never any soil packed down by tromping and stomping, simple hand tools are plenty for tilling. I will never again need a powered tiller.
Another advantage of tub gardening is that it keeps my hands two feet above ground level, hopefully above scorpions and rattlers. In the two years we have lived here, I have killed four rattlers in the yard, two of them Mojaves. Early on I installed three-foot-high, half-inch hardware cloth around the base of the garden fence and gate to enhance protection against dangerous pests, but, being Texas-born and bred, I am always watchful and never fully satisfied with such security measures.
Another advantage of tub gardening is that it protects my hard-won soil. In July 2012, we had about 2 inches of rain in about an hour. The debris line from the onrush of rainwater flowing down our hill was up to four inches high on obstacles. One of our ranch roads was washed completely out, but I lost not an ounce of garden soil.
An especially neat advantage of tub gardening is that by using a medium weight hand truck I can rather easily move tubs about. Since I utilize the garden fence as a support for indeterminate tomatoes, beans, peas and squashes, I can take full advantage of the fence and, by shifting tubs about, never worry about over-planting any variety where it grew the previous season.
It will be easy to “sterilize” my tubs after the season. After cleaning up plant debris, I will thoroughly saturate the tubs and fit a top to each. By time to plant my 2013 veggies, the enclosed, humid, solar-warmed environment within the black tubs will germinate weed seeds and unwanted volunteers. Sowing on clean seed beds will then be easy, all from a comfortable seated position.
Generally, my tale of the tubs is quite positive. As I write, my garden is in full production. Daily production of green beans and asparagus “beans,” more akin to black-eyed peas, is beginning to fill the freezer. We are enjoying carrots, kale, okra, summer and winter squash, cantaloupe, egg plant, beets, tomatoes and my best crop of peppers ever.
I have also learned from several mistakes. The worst has been to plant many tubs too heavily. I am a real sissy during thinning time. Container gardening, akin to square-foot gardening, demands ruthless discipline. Judging from this season’s successes and failures, about ten bean or pea seedlings per tub are sufficient. Two squash plants work well in one tub, but only one would likely work better. My most productive pepper tub hosts four plants. Although tubs with two indeterminate tomato plants are productive, next season I will limit myself to one plant per tub to avoid overly dense vegetation and resultant disease and pest problems. Lots of info on density of planting in container gardening is available on the Internet.
Some varieties strike me as too much for any reasonable container, one which I can move. I will not plant winter squash or melons next season. Mine have grown well in tubs, perhaps too well. I will harvest perhaps a dozen large winter squash, but the density of their vines has proved a trial. Indeterminate tomatoes include my personal favorites, but they, too, are a challenge. I have been growing mine against the fence, but next season I may use 1/2-inch re-bar tomato teepees to provide better access for pest control and harvest.
Container gardening even in my 25-gallon tubs is no way to attempt “self-sufficiency” in the garden. Over the course of this season, my thinking has evolved to this point: my container gardening has been a lot of work; so, to make it worthwhile, it has to be more fun and less work. To facilitate fun, next season will see my expanding tub “farm” reduced to 48 tubs, all contained within my original 20 × 20 foot-high fenced garden. The outer fence will remain to dissuade cattle and deer from browsing on any green tendril that ventures outside of the inner fence. There will be no outer collection of tubs. I found that later in the season, the heavy growth of tomatoes and winter squash made it difficult to water the outer rows efficiently.
The 2013 season will see a new gravity drip irrigation system with low-pressure battery timer installed in the garden. During this dry summer, the MP has really flexed its muscles. I have enjoyed all I can stand of dragging hoses around and hand-watering daily.
Despite the excesses driven by zeal, has my experiment with tub gardening been worth the work? Yes, absolutely. Having a ready supply of supplement tubs has made it all possible, but there are many other large containers which would also work well, and no one need become borderline obsessive as I did. Did I whup the formidable gardening demons of the Marfa Plateau? No. The best I can claim is a draw. I am planning for the 2013 season with a compact layout of tubs, a drip system and a reduced, more carefully chosen palette of varieties. MP, bring it on.
