This year I’m nearly two weeks late with my spring tomato seeds, having stuck them in the ground only on Saturday, along with some jalapeños, sweet peppers and Puerto Rican eggplants.

We took a quick trip to St. Croix, one of the U.S. Virgin Islands, which disrupted my usual spring seed plans. But it was worth it.

If money were no object and I could pick any own homesteading location, St. Croix might be at the top of the list. With about 51,000 people on 84 square miles of land, Crucians enjoy what I would call a semi-rural tropical paradise with enough room for some cattle ranches, yet they import 95% or so of their food, and they could clearly use some vegetable farming.

We enjoyed awesome seafood, including locally caught mahi-mahi, tuna, scallops and langostinos the size of lobsters (minus the claws). But even at the best restaurants, the vegetable accompaniments were hilariously minimalist. The most delicious scallop dish I’ve ever had was to have come spread over a “bed of vegetables,” for instance, which turned out to be three handfuls of lettuce slices. Most meals simply included no vegetable or salad. It’s not like we ever complained, because the seafood was so great you tended to forget everything else. However, I have to believe chefs and family cooks alike would pay good money for fresh vegetables – if they were available. And with maximum temperatures almost never reaching 90, and minimums never dropping below 70, you figure you could enjoy an extended harvest of tomatoes, peppers, beans, corn and squash given even average soil.

A couple of small farms were advertised on the two island maps we were able to obtain, and one day we drove our jeep up into the mountain rainforest to try to find them. Unfortunately, neither map was accurate, and road signs aren’t considered a necessity in STX. We never found the farms, but enjoyed some spectacular beaches and other scenery while briefly lost in the jungle.

So could you really buy land and make your living selling herbs, veggies and tropical fruit to restaurants, hotels and groceries in the Virgin Islands? Nah, probably not without hitting the lottery. But with luck these guys might have a shot.

Back at the mundane old One Acre Ranch, we learned we’d missed a brief foray into the 30s, but since then it’s been in the high 60s here in the daytime, and so far winter hasn’t quite shown up. This has allowed me to finally cut down the top half of a big loquat that died from drought and disease over the past blasted summer.

And now, still waiting for the winter that isn’t, I find it’s time to prepare for a sly spring that may or may not already have arrived.

Believe it or not, I’d never been butt-dialed before, although my wife has so I knew what it was.

Still, I was unprepared. When I answered my cell phone “This is Bob,” I heard a light, muffled almost-nothing in response. “Hello?” I asked, listening harder. It was faint, but unmistakable: I heard the gentle cluck-clucking of chickens, probably pecking for bugs in a field somewhere. “Hello? Anybody there?” I asked again. No one but us chickens, sunning ourselves in the January spring, thank you very much, buck-buck-buck.

Then it hit me. A woman down the street, from whom I bought eggs this year until the darker and colder weather caused her flock to stop laying, had called that morning. Her hens suddenly started laying again, perhaps concurrent to a spell of days in the 60s and 70s. So she wondered if I were in the market for eggs.

A few hours later, I was butt-dialed by the Chicken Lady.

You forget what real smash-mouth rain looks like after a spring, summer and fall full of heat and drought and dry.

This morning we had our memories jogged: It looks like angry gray on darker greenish-gray with a visibility of about 20 feet and sheets of water dumping down, alternated with horizontal rain and down-drafts so powerful they throttle 100-year-old pecan trees like rag dolls and make the ground shake. Or was it Zeus flinging sparking lightning bolts down, once every three seconds, literally, during one stretch of time that seemed to last 20 minutes? Big, gut-wrenching booms close enough you could smell the sulfur in the air.

This started in earnest around 8:15 a.m. By 11, we had been blessed with at least 5.5 inches of rain, although I must say God has a scary way of blessing you sometimes. I say at least 5.5 inches because that’s all the rain gauge holds, and it was overflowing. My guess is that by the time it all stops, we will probably have received 7 inches, in perhaps four hours’ time. Not unprecedented hereabouts, but for sure at the upper end of a good gully whomper and more rain in one episode then we had all last summer.

Hope springs eternal and this spring will be no exception.

While I certainly prefer that the animals I eat be raised on pasture instead of crammed into factory farms and inoculated with chemicals, the current realities of economics and availability dictate that I still buy most of the family’s meat in the grocery stores. That meat seems to have become noticeably more expensive, but yesterday I spied such a swell bargain in the corner of one of an H.E.B. store’s meat coolers that I wanted to share.

It was a pile of smoked turkeys, vacuum-packed and fully cooked. These 12 and 13-pound birds, originally priced at $2.49 a pound (or about $30), were on sale for $5 apiece. At that rate, my first suspicion is, what’s wrong with them? I noticed the birds on top bore labels with an expiration date of Jan. 2 – and this was on Jan. 4. There was the answer to my question. But something made me dig down to the bottom row, where all the turkeys carried an expiration date of Jan. 25. Score.

Long, long ago in a faraway place up north, I might’ve returned as the triumphant tribal hunter with, say, two or three ruffed grouse or fat rabbits. These days, triumphant hunting means a $5 turkey.

I had never re-heated a smoked turkey, as up until now I have always done my own turkey smoking. I preheated the oven to 325 degrees, snipped off the netting and vacuum-wrapping, and placed the smoked turkey on a rack atop a roasting pan. The bird was nicely colored with grill marks, had a tight, intact skin and a cavity full of juice and congealed fat from its smoking. I poured the juice and about a cup and a half of water into the bottom of the pan, covered everything under a loose tent of aluminum foil and heated the 12.6-pound turkey in the oven for about two hours, until a meat thermometer sunk into one of the thighs registered 145 degrees. (During the last 15 minutes I took the foil off, in order to crisp up the skin a bit.)

I had my doubts, thinking that the turkey might come out pretty dry, best used for additions to other dishes. But no, whomever smoked all those birds for the grocery chain did a pretty good job. Nothing fancy such as sliding herbs and butter under the skin, but the meat was very moist and really tasty. I would bet, from the juiciness, that those birds were brined – soaked in a salt-based solution for several hours, a process I promise to detail sometime soon.

I made a nice flour-based gravy out of the pan drippings, and we dined like plutocrats on holiday last night.

This particular turkey was very stout and meaty for its size, and even had plentiful portions of meat running along the back. Between four of us, we probably ate no more than a third of the bird, if that, leaving enough for at least three more meals – say Turkey Tettrazinz, maybe a Turkey Pot Pie and certainly some hot turkey sandwiches made delicious on our panini grill.

Still, there remained an exceedingly meaty carcass, reminding me that there were yet more meals to coax from our once-feathered friend.

Home-made Turkey Broth
I filled a large pot with water, dumped the carcass, other turkey bones and skin into the water, added two stalks worth of sliced celery and a very large handful of fresh chopped oregano and Italian flat-leafed parsley, probably two to three tablespoons of kosher salt and one tablespoon of black pepper and, finally, about a teaspoon of Old Bay Seasoning, which consists mostly of celery salt and cayenne pepper.

I brought the pot to a boil, then let it simmer for between two and three hours. At bedtime, I turned the fire off. The pot still was very warm the next morning. After taking the kids to school, I strained the bits and bones out of the broth and had enough for three freezer bags with about 8 cups in each, and a fourth bag with probably 16 cups. As you might expect, I froze them.

These will become the basis of four or five meals. They will make some terrific sauces for rice or pasta dishes, and the large bag will form the foundation of some really good soup.

All told, we will have gotten perhaps eight meals out of that one turkey. At five bucks, that is a penny-pincher’s dream.

For the first time in, like, a year, we’ve enjoyed adequate rain. It’s cool but well above freezing (except maybe tonight), and small effort has been required on the gardening front other than to sprinkle a little supplemental water on the newest rows of beets and spinach, while coaxing yet another salad from the various lettuces.

Thus time has allowed me to turn my attention elsewhere.

In many respects, small-scale homesteading such as we practice is a defensive pursuit, in that one does not go on the attack to produce additional family income but rather undertakes activities designed to reduce the need for income. Usually this is associated with producing one’s own food, or using solar energy to heat one’s water, or capturing rainwater to avoid paying for as much city water.

But expense reduction takes many forms. I encountered yet another recently upon reviewing the effect of the new fee structure my (now almost former) bank imposed upon us three months ago or so. The effect was good for the bank, but not us; money was slowly draining out of our accounts in return for no discernible services.

I supposed the new and harsher fee structure might be deemed necessary by the bank’s parent company – a very large bank headquartered in one of those unfortunate southern European countries now saddled with the prospect of mounting national debt, an inability to borrow large amounts of money at an attractive rate, and a regional monetary system that’s probably going to unravel in a couple of months.

Upon conducting some quick research I concluded healthy banks with much more reasonable fee-to-service ratios existed nearby, and were in fact headquartered right here in Texas instead of Spain. So I opened up new personal and business accounts, and then moved the rest of our money over to the “new” institution. (Here’s a little step-by-step bank-shopping guide I wrote up a few months ago that conceivably could prove handy if you’re in the market to do the same.)

I’d like to be able to say I closed out the old accounts and couldn’t be happier with the outcome. However, thanks to a series of incredible mistakes on the part of our old bank, my accounts there still aren’t officially closed despite zero balances all around, as they apparently are required to attempt to milk us for more fees to send off to Madrid.

I shall not bore you with the myriad details of the shortcomings of this bank, made the more apparent in these past few weeks as we attempt to extricate ourselves from the relationship. Lets just say that if your bank handed you cashiers checks for $20,000 more than what actually existed in your accounts, and you discovered the mistake and returned the extra money before they realized their incompetence, you’d expect perhaps some modest expression of thanks. But in this case, you’d be severely disappointed.

Nonetheless, I remain optimistic that (for us personally if not for Spain) this new year may prove better than the last, due in some small part to our having replaced an inadequate bank with an improvement.

If there’s a point to today’s ramblings, it may be that you can help yourself and your family by periodically comparing your current service providers with their competitors, and making a switch if the people you’re doing business with come up short.

Late-fall demands of nature have kept us busy down here on the One Acre Ranch, what with freezes and thaws and exposed water pipes and still probably a couple hundred tender tropical plants complaining of too much cold and then too hot and damp and then cold again.

Yet I still find myself actually sitting on occasion, listening to a little Internet radio New Orleans blues with some visitors out back while smoking a batch of chicken thighs, perhaps. Today I realized I’ve rarely if ever had time for such idle luxury over the past nine years or so, and I realized why, too:

No giant crush of the pecan harvest. No harvest at all, really. Don’t get me wrong – native pecans are delicious, nutritious and versatile as far as food goes. But they are also lots of work if you just have a hand-tool operation such as ours. Picking them off the ground, sorting out the bad ones, cracking them one by one, then painstakingly shelling them, THEN processing for eats, such as roasting them, or baking them into pies.

No fresh pies or roasted wonder nuts for us this year, but also none of the forced calisthenics, either. The only things I’m harvesting from the pecan trees this year are a few big fallen branches to use for smoking meat. This is not unexpected; we just suffered through the worst summer of drought I’ve experienced, and it took a toll on all the trees, plus last year’s harvest was a big one, and these native trees tend to produce big one year and smaller the next. Not ever this small, but there were the aforementioned extenuating circumstances.

Bottom line, we still are only playing at this homesteading thing, derive income from other pursuits, and thus have the luxury of taking a failed crop in stride, as an excuse for rest and relaxation. For the critters that made it through the recent horrid heat, and I imagine for the ancestral caretakers of this riverbottom, a failed pecan harvest might mean (or have meant) serious suffering.

In the grand scheme of things, it might be one end of a cycle, where excessive or less hardy insects, vermin, plants and people give out. Then plants rejuvenate, survivors breed and repopulate and, for a good while, the woods are full of plenty.

In the smaller scheme of our personal things, it’s the place in the cycle where you deck the underside of your house with Christmas lights to ring in the season and warm the water pipes, eat more meat and less fresh fruit and wait for one of those wet springs of yesteryear.

Our first freeze of the year arrived last night, one night earlier than predicted by the weather guys but still anticipated well enough in advance that we harvested some good stuff from the garden before they got zapped.

This included a couple dozen Jamaican Hot Chocolate habanero peppers, most showing plenty of green instead of the dark brown exterior of a fully ripened hot bomb, but packing plenty of heat nonetheless. I’d harvested a dozen completely ripe ones a week earlier, and made them into an expanded batch of Tropical Bob’s Habanero Sauce – very hot, but extremely tasty a few drops at a time.

Also packed away into the fridge are several big bags of sweet peppers, many suitable for stuffing.

We also picked a large colander full of packed down basil leaves, since basil really doesn’t handle the cold well. (I noted that the one plant from which I did not harvest leaves now looks like spinach due to last night’s light freeze, while the large plant from which I harvested still is mostly alive. Figures.) The basil went into a quadrupole batch of my wife’s terrific pesto sauce, which can be frozen I am told, and also will last a long while in the refrigerator as it is largely olive oil. Even using the same recipe, though, mine doesn’t come out as good as when she makes it.

Try it and see what you think:

Aunt Sissy’s Pesto Sauce

Ingredients:
24 large basil leaves
2 Tablespoons walnuts or toasted pine nuts
1/2 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese
2 large (or 3 small) garlic cloves
Juice of half a lemon
3/4 cup of extra virgin olive oil
Fresh-ground pepper, to taste

Method:
Mix the olive oil, lemon juice and cheese together in a food processor or blender. Add the rest of the ingredients a handful at a time, blending until somewhat thin and oily.

Heat, add some cooked chicken to the pan if you like, then serve over linguine, topped with more Parmesan cheese.

Giant Eagle Inc. hoisted the food safety bar to new depths today when the company warned people not to eat any among an unspecified number of cases of Valu Time and Food Club canned pumpkins because, um, well, they didn’t really want to say, nor did pumpkin vendor Topco Associates LLC. But our brave guardians over at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration apparently didn’t bother to ask, either.

However, unspecified sources we’d rather not identify probably tell us the culprit could be a malfunctioning injection mechanism that inadvertently squirted a quarter-cup of emulsified goat feces into each of some 14,348,005 cans of what would otherwise have been pure pumpkin. While the U.S. Centers for Disease Information Control has reported no fatalities in the past three years from ingestion of goat droppings, Giant Eagle and Topco decided out of an abundance of cagey legal advice to withdraw the cans in the unlikely event the odoriferous orange pulp might not meet the quality standards to which the American peasantry is accustomed and deserves.

Wait, haha! We just made that up! But chances are probably about even that whatever is in those cans is actually worse than goat poop, so if the press ever gets around to pressuring the companies involved for some actual information about the mess, we’ll pass that right along to you.

In the meantime, as they say, don’t crush that squash, hand me the pliers.

Whatever’s left after flood, fire, famine or freeze, nature picks up the pieces and carries on.

Like this loquat tree, the central crown of which died in the summer drought (and I still haven’t gotten around to cutting it out and hauling it off). Yet the half-tree that remained alive has burst forth with clusters of fall blossoms, the same as ever, to the current delight of the bazillion honey bees living in a decades-old hive high in one of the pecan trees in the front yard. Barring a poorly timed freeze, we’ll have loquats for pies again in the very early spring.

As for the pecans, only a handful of our trees are producing nuts worthy of mention, and they’re smaller than usual, also a testament to the drought. However, the persimmon harvest is pretty good, and the fall garden has yielded several terrific salads, with enough lettuce leftovers to sustain at least one rabbit and several beetle grubs, which in turn sustain at least one large and predictably stupid armadillo. Plus, a plethora of peppers hot and sweet and the best fall weather one could order (OK, maybe a little more rain on the side when You get a chance).

As for me, clearly I haven’t been writing much, so I must be pretty busy with one new venture or another.

After some persistence, I finally received Official Word the other day that our city, county and federal governments have joined forces in an effort that will, in a couple of months, cause most of the value of the One Acre Ranch to vanish as if by magic.

There is a long version of this story, replete with sordid details tracing this travesty back to its various origins, digressions chronicling many months of various government and private enterprise wrangling, and dark commentary assigning blame and motive. Here I present the abbreviated version:

We live scrunched up against the Brazos River, a 950-mile semi-untamed waterway that drains most of Central Texas through the subtropics here and on for another 70 miles or so into the Gulf of Mexico. Sometimes the river is up, mostly, given an extended period of drought and increasing use as a source of drinking water, it is down. Flood level in Richmond is 48 feet above the riverbed.

Our 96-year-old house is perched atop the highest point of the east river bank within Richmond proper, which our survey shows to be at 80 or 81 feet above the riverbed. The elevation of one’s abode takes on special meaning and significance when dealing with entities that include one’s mortgage holder, one’s insurance company, and one’s federal government, in the person of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

As of this moment, the fact that the bulk of our land lies at 80 feet allows us to exist in wonderful bliss with the above-mentioned entities, mostly because of a thing known as the flood way, where engineers with magic wands imagine that water would rush by in an extreme manner during the sort of Noah’s Ark flooding that they suspect might occur once every 100 or 150 years or so. As of this moment, the imaginary height of the theoretical flood way is said to exist at 80 feet. Since our home perches on pier and beam above the actual ground, the actual home elevation has been calculated at 83.7 feet. This has been considered high enough above the alleged flood way as to create harmony with insurance companies, bankers and even the government.

However, all that is expected to change shortly after the first of the coming year, when FEMA puts its stamp of final approval on new flood maps whose incantations, negotiations and engineering wizardry will show the alleged flood way is existing at 82 feet above the riverbed instead of 80 feet.

I will save most of the back story of how government officials and land developers have been privy to these new flood maps for more than two years, and how this gave them time to, among other things, pile an 8-foot-high levy directly across the river from our neighborhood, protecting new county buildings they chose to erect in the flood way and, as a coincidental side benefit, protecting a few thousand acres of cow pasture from the possibility of flood, thereby increasing its value immensely should anyone ever choose to turn it into giant suburbs.

Instead, I will relate that, come January or February, we shall be prevented from increasing the footprint of our home or outbuildings in any way under the theory that we are in the flood way now, and cannot contribute an increase in the alleged water drag created by additional mass added to said alleged flood way. We can’t add a double-deck back porch, for example, which we once thought we might enjoy and which, we thought, might add value to the house in the event we decided to retire further out in the country.

The silver lining, I guess, is that we no longer have to worry about what we could do to further renovate our old place in order to increase its value. That’s because we essentially will be prevented from ever selling it, because no bank will loan money allowing someone to buy a house officially located in an alleged flood way, especially now that all the banks are dragging around giant portfolios of foreclosed residential property, and the last thing they want to do in any event is loan money on residential property.

The kicker is that in the event that some catastrophe such as a major fire or hurricane destroyed more than 50% of our house, the swell officials down at the City of Richmond, Texas, would prevent us by ordinance from rebuilding said house. That’s because FEMA won’t allow anything new to be built within an alleged flood way, even if it’s just to replace something that has stood in the same spot for several decades. And FEMA provides enough to cities such as Richmond in the form of grant money, that city officials will do FEMA’s every bidding in order not to lose out on any of that swell federal grant money.

There is a lot more wonderful irony in the long version of this story, but we’ll skip that for now, except maybe for the part about how we have reached this unfortunate moment in time through a series of government events paid for with our own tax dollars, like paying for the rope with which they’re going to hang you.

So, in wrapping our heads around this turn of fate, we find that we’ll never be able to sell our place and we are prevented from improving the exteriors of our house, garage/workshop or shed. I suppose we could rent it out some day, but we’d have to find non-smoking tenants who don’t play with matches, because if it goes up in smoke, the old homesite can’t be used for anything but a big garden with maybe a bocce court. All our neighbors are in the same boat, even worse, because their elevations are lower than ours.

So in 100 years, it is possible this whole side of the river will be forced to revert to agricultural use (sans barns) or just a giant pecan forest, which is pretty much the way it was back in 1820 before Stephen Austin and Jane Long and the other white pioneers hiked out here with their land grant from Mexico and got the whole thing started.

Yet, slings and arrows of misfortune notwithstanding, we like it here and plan on doing very little any differently than we’ve always done. OK, maybe not barbecue so close to the house.

It’s just funny how things work out sometimes, is all.

Now is the summer of our discontent supplanted by an honest Fall, complete with fog and mist and even genuine rain, enough to soak our grounds and command the grasses to grow once more. (Not enough, though, to fill empty Texas reservoirs, many of which are below 40% capacity in evidence the dreaded drought continues apace.)

As long as I’ve been here, I’ve never really grown a full-on fall garden. Given our continuing horrid economic outlook, this seemed like a good year to get started.

A fledgling fall garden takes shape

None of these plants do so well in the spring as they will through what passes for fall and winter here, and all are chock full of both taste and vitamins, and as a bonus, when you bring winter vegetables from garden to table with a detour for proper rinsing, you can skip worrying about bacterial infections that increasingly plague the factory food supply on your grocery’s shelves.

This is no minor benefit. From August through last week, for instance, 116 people had become sick and 23 of them died (including two here in Texas) from one of four strains of Listeria traced to Rocky Ford brand cantaloupes from Colorado’s Jensen Farms.

And just over two weeks ago, at least 2,500 cartons of lettuce tainted with listeria was recalled by Salinas, Calif.-based True Leaf Farms. Then, about three days ago, River Ranch Fresh Foods LLC, also coincidentally based in Salinas, also recalled more than 2,500 cases of lettuce possibly contaminated with Listeria – but not before Pittsburgh-based grocer Giant Eagle added it to a lot of deli sandwiches, which also have been recalled. Much of the recalled lettuce was shipped to restaurants and institutions.

Back on the One-Acre Ranch, we enjoyed our first garden lettuce salad of the fall, along with some grilled salmon last night. It was delicious, very inexpensive and completely safe to eat.

If you want something done right, do it yourself.

Rains came at 5 a.m. yesterday and again late in the morning, the second time lasting hours, interspersed with gentle thunder. Real rain, two and a half inches worth, filling every dry crevice, even pooling a bit in the back yard as if these were normal times again. Big enough rain to knock the devil’s ragweed pollen out of the air for a few hours and suck the heat our of the air.

The system pulled slowly across Texas from San Antonio and Austin on down to the Gulf, and this morning it’s still pulling across East Texas. The likes of this we haven’t seen in eight months, and for this fire-drenching respite, we thank You.

The weather has cooled here somewhat, beginning Oct. 1, not enough to call it fall yet, more like Summer Jr., with highs still reaching close to 90. However, the evenings have been pleasant enough that the hibiscus have begun blooming again, and I’ve finally started the fall garden.

In a usual semi-South Texas year, you wait for the September cooling off, say around the 20th of the month, and you plant your tomato seedlings then. It was so damn hot for so long this year that I didn’t grow any tomato seedlings for fear I wouldn’t have the time and water to coax them to maturity. The whole month of September still was at or near 100-degree highs, so it wasn’t until a few days ago that I went to the local nurseries to try to score tomato plants. Alas, I was too late and they were all sold out. Probably just as well, because at this point the first frosts will hit before any ‘maters could have ripened.

So instead I’ve turned my attention to greener things: Four varieties of leaf lettuce and two of Swiss chard. I haven’t grown lettuce for decades, since I lived in the North, and I’ve never tried Swiss chard at all. But I know that all of these plants like moisture and air that is cooler than we’re having in the afternoons. That’s the challenge – providing enough water and mulch to get the plants through the heat of the day, until real fall weather arrives, assuming it actually does. So far so good.

Later today I’ll add to the herb garden: Another variety of oregano, some peppermint, Italian parsley and some cilantro. As this year’s bonus, I have three pepper varieties that made it through the drought and now are healthy and bush-sized. One is the Jamaican Hot Chocolate habanero chili, a very hot pepper with tremendous taste if you use it in small enough doses that it doesn’t overwhelm your mouth in fire. The other two are sweet peppers, much to my amazement. The more “standard” sweet red peppers have always faded on me when the summer gets hot; these two came through the summer like champs.

The best one of them is Aconcagua, a large, long heirloom pepper from Argentina, which starts out a bright yellow, then gradually turns first orange and finally a bright red. Even in its yellow stage it is delicious. When red, it’s very sweet. In the spring these fruits were longer than my hand. They look like Italian frying-type peppers, but are great to eat sliced raw, like a bell-type red pepper. Now they’re producing new fruit and will obviously put out a second crop.

The other is Pritavit, a hybrid Italian pepper of what I would call the paprika type – squat and smallish, with fruit ripening from bright green to an almost black color before turning bright red. They are juicy and sweet, with a taste distinctly different from the Aconcagua. Being hybrids, however, I cannot save the seed and expect plants of like quality. I may save the seeds anyway just to see what comes up next year.

Elsewhere, the Hachiya persimmons have begun turning orange, and a few even have ripened. They will provide a good crop this year, not a great one, but good considering the drought.

Later, when the weather really does cool down, I’m going to plant spinach from the seeds I saved from the spring crop, maybe some beets, and snow peas of some sort. Also, if I can find time, I intend to grow sweet potatoes in the back garden, to try to counteract any remaining nematodes, not to mention provide more good eats.

If you live far enough south to grow a second vegetable crop, you should try it. Better and cheaper food for the family can never be a bad thing. Around here, plants such as spinach and beets, carrots and so-called English peas, onions and garlic can (absent a severe winter) all grow right through the winter and into next spring. Call it your recession hedge fund.

Finally a big farmers market in central Fort Bend County – coming your way tomorrow and every Saturday through Dec. 10.

I love farmers markets, but I hate having to spend an hour each way driving to the big ones in Houston. With close to 550,000 people in Fort Bend County, it has amazed me no one has put together a market in one of our central cities.

Now they have. Congratulations to the Fort Bend Chamber of Commerce, Imperial Sugar Land developer Johnson Development and the market’s sponsors for pulling this off. The list of vendors is pretty impressive, and the venue promises to be a great one.

The chamber apparently has agreed to help operate this market for 10 weeks. I hope the public gets out and supports our local farmers so that this market takes off and continues in the spring.

Tomorrow is the first market day – from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at U.S. 90A and Brooks Street in Sugar Land. Check it out, huh?