About the Farm
Four String Farm offers pastured pork, pastured poultry, fresh eggs, and seasonal vegetables and herbs throughout the year. No hormones, steroids, or antibiotics are given to our animals. We never use chemical pesticides or fertilizers on our plants.
Our products are available at Coastal Bend Health Foods, in Rockport’s Heritage District, next door to Latitude. E-mail us at justinbutts@clearwire.net with questions or suggestions.
So nice to know this is available in Rockport.
Thank you Beth! It is nice to know YOU are there, to help keep us around! Have a wonderful day!
Hi Justin,
Donna Pazera has been so excited by your pioneer farm. I too have lightly stepped into this in the piney woods of east Tx. Down visiting, wonder of we could stop by this a.m.?
Andrea Hawk
It was so nice to meet you, Andrea. We wish you the very best in your farming adventure! Stay in touch, and let us know how things are growing! Justin and Kayla
Do you Folks accept visitors ? The Wife and I would like to visit Y’alls farm. We can be reached at baileytom78@yahoo.com Please let us know. We just live a couple of miles from you folks.
Hi Tom! Sorry we missed you at the planting party. Let’s have a do-over soon! I hope your garden is growing well! Thanks!
Hi there! Thanks for following my blog. Hope you continue to enjoy it. You’ve led an interesting life, and I appreciate what you’re doing now. I’m from Houston and graduated from UT Austin so I have many Aggie friends as well.
Thanks! What you are doing is pretty interesting!
Hi, my sister, Frances went to one of your seminars. She said she learned more from you than anyone in her gardening experience. Anyway, she thought you might have some suggestions for me on my cutter ant problem (I live in Port A on a sand dune…there are a ba-zillion cutters). They are truly my biggest problem (enemy) w/garden. Can you help? BTW…loved the narrative titled “Wee Wife”
Thank you so much Freda for your kind words! Cut ants are our biggest problem in the garden, as well. Pretty much every garden cycle, our gardens are damaged by cut ants. Sometimes, we have a lot of damage. Cut ants are reason I developed so many gardens separated by a long distance, so if I lost one garden, there would still be others in production. People can hardly believe how much damage these imported pests from South America can do, in such a short time. Cut ants are a devastating pest; they make it basically impossible to farm in our area. However, they are such a localized problem, there has not been a genuine scientific initiative to discover a reasonable treatment.
Here is what we do: First, I check every garden every day–or even better at night with a headlamp, when the cut ants are active. As soon as I see a trail of cut ants, or signs of a mound, I immediately treat it, no matter what else is going on. You can’t leave them and come back later, or you may have no garden to come back to. We treat the mound with molasses tea. To make molasses tea, fill a five gallon bucket one-quarter full with grade molasses from the local feed store. Then fill the remainder of the bucket with water, and let it sit for a week. That is molasses tea. (You can also use turpentine tea, made the same way. But please don’t use one of the chemical poisons, because the highly toxic poison will stay in the ground for years, maybe decades, and it still will not eliminate the cut ants.)
Find the hole where the trail of cut ants is going into the ground. Place a funnel (from an auto parts store) into the hole, then pour the five gallon bucket of molasses tea slowly into the funnel. The molasses will run down the mound and disrupt the bacteria that the cut ants in the mound are feeding on. As the water evaporates, the molasses residue will remain in the mound, and cut ants will not return for a long time.
This treatment will not kill the cut ants; it will only move their mound. But nothing ultimately kills a cut ant mound–that is the genius of cut ants. The reason is that only one queen feeds on a given mound, but there are 20 or more “ladies in waiting” in separate compartments away from the main mound. If you poison the mound, the ladies in waiting each go and form separate mounds with new workers, and this continues indefinitely. However, if you keep your molasses on hand and treat the new mounds every time they form, you can keep the under control, because they will always be building mounds, and not eating your gardens. By the way, cut ant are most active after a rain, so check your gardens carefully after every rain.
Good luck with the cut ants! I realize at this point that I should devote a post to this subject! Thank you so much for your kind words! Have a wonderful day!
Thank-you Justin…I will give it a try! I will keep you posted about the results.