by Higgenbotham ยป Sun Jul 06, 2025 1:43 pm
Higgenbotham wrote: Tue May 06, 2025 5:00 pm
Higgenbotham wrote: Sat Mar 29, 2025 9:24 pm
But what I can say is that there seem to be indications, despite the natural tendency of people affected by the weather to complain about it, that growing food has become more difficult. There's been news that that is happening with tomatoes, coffee and cocoa on a worldwide basis now. I'm working hard to make adaptations to that, to become resilient to weather extremes in both temperature and precipitation. My goal in designing these pits was to be able to handle a 4 inch or so 12 hour or so rain without flooding them and to hold that water for the dry periods. Also to be able to carry a heat resistant tomato variety through 95 degree heat and still produce. We should see some tests of that in the next 4 months and I'll talk about it once these extremes are seen.
There was a test of precipitation extremes over about a 16 hour period ending this morning. While there was flooding in the yard, the pits were able to absorb about 3 inches of rain without showing any standing water after the downpour ended. There's no rain in the 10 day forecast so this could be the heaviest downpour this year. Some future years will probably be worse but, now that this test has passed, it seems OK to expand the garden in the same way it has been done so far.

Regarding the Texas flooding of the past few days. Since July is typically the driest month of the year (averaging about 2 inches of rain), I had set things up so the garden had adequate moisture to withstand the supposedly coming dry period while still leaving a buffer for (some) unexpected rain. When 5 inches of rain fell here, that was more than planned for and there was about half an inch of standing water in 2 areas yesterday. I had some dry grass on hand and put it in those areas to absorb the water. That didn't do much, though, because it was still saturated underneath (at the time it was too wet to dig down and find out to what extent in the areas that had no standing water). As of now, 24 hours later, water can still be seen when digging down to a depth of 9-12 inches. That might be OK if there is no more heavy rain; seems borderline to me.
The photos up above are from May 6.
The plants look good except one in the area that had standing water. As the soil improves, it will be better able to withstand heavy rain.
I've been harvesting about 3 pounds of tomatoes per day the past few weeks.

[quote=Higgenbotham post_id=91105 time=1746565233 user_id=100]
[quote=Higgenbotham post_id=90836 time=1743297876 user_id=100]
But what I can say is that there seem to be indications, despite the natural tendency of people affected by the weather to complain about it, that growing food has become more difficult. There's been news that that is happening with tomatoes, coffee and cocoa on a worldwide basis now. I'm working hard to make adaptations to that, to become resilient to weather extremes in both temperature and precipitation. My goal in designing these pits was to be able to handle a 4 inch or so 12 hour or so rain without flooding them and to hold that water for the dry periods. Also to be able to carry a heat resistant tomato variety through 95 degree heat and still produce. We should see some tests of that in the next 4 months and I'll talk about it once these extremes are seen.[/quote]
There was a test of precipitation extremes over about a 16 hour period ending this morning. While there was flooding in the yard, the pits were able to absorb about 3 inches of rain without showing any standing water after the downpour ended. There's no rain in the 10 day forecast so this could be the heaviest downpour this year. Some future years will probably be worse but, now that this test has passed, it seems OK to expand the garden in the same way it has been done so far.
[img]https://i.postimg.cc/J0HzsKjB/20250506-113916.jpg[/img]
[img]https://i.postimg.cc/5N7q8tc5/20250506-120550.jpg[/img][/quote]
Regarding the Texas flooding of the past few days. Since July is typically the driest month of the year (averaging about 2 inches of rain), I had set things up so the garden had adequate moisture to withstand the supposedly coming dry period while still leaving a buffer for (some) unexpected rain. When 5 inches of rain fell here, that was more than planned for and there was about half an inch of standing water in 2 areas yesterday. I had some dry grass on hand and put it in those areas to absorb the water. That didn't do much, though, because it was still saturated underneath (at the time it was too wet to dig down and find out to what extent in the areas that had no standing water). As of now, 24 hours later, water can still be seen when digging down to a depth of 9-12 inches. That might be OK if there is no more heavy rain; seems borderline to me.
The photos up above are from May 6.
The plants look good except one in the area that had standing water. As the soil improves, it will be better able to withstand heavy rain.
[img]https://i.postimg.cc/5yL9QPgL/20250706-124939.jpg[/img]
I've been harvesting about 3 pounds of tomatoes per day the past few weeks.
[img]https://i.postimg.cc/DZ8wnrNk/20250626-184402.jpg[/img]