CALICHE.
Food forests on the land nobody wants.
For my brothers, my family, and for Alice.
Why
Nine years ago I started planting the lot on King Street. Everybody knows what that ground is — caliche. The dirt that grows nothing.
I planted it anyway, and I kept planting it, through the ice storm that killed half the trees in town and through two years of drought that killed the other half. The lot is still alive. You can see it from space — it's all below.
I've spent most of my life working to keep the people around me okay. That work mattered, but it isn't a mark. This is the mark. I want to spend whatever I've got left building something that keeps feeding people after I'm gone — something that can't be sold off, can't be inherited away, can't be undone by anyone's bad year.
You already know who taught me this. I don't need to write his name here. What he handed me, I've spent nine years proving in the hardest dirt in Texas — and now I want to hand it forward, bigger.
You can see it from space
Twenty-one years from above
The same square of downtown Alice, 2004 to 2025 — every neighboring parcel is the control group. Tap any year for the full frame.
Sources: USDA NAIP aerial imagery via the Texas Geographic Information Office (public domain) and Esri World Imagery Wayback — verify it yourself.
How it works
This isn't gardening with extra steps. It's a method, proven for nine years on the worst dirt in town, built so the forest needs people less every year.
The topsoil is alive — we build with it, never over it
The thin native topsoil is the living record of everything that grows here. Cover it and it dies. Every planting starts by carefully setting it aside, building constructed soil beneath — biochar, rock dust, organic matter — then laying the living layer back on top under a thick mulch cap, where it wakes the whole system up within days.
Water goes down, so roots go down
Young plants get surface water while they're babies. Then the water starts going deep — injected below the roots so they chase it down, season after season, until they live where drought can't reach. Established trees here get watered a few times a year, and eventually that's optional. No sprinklers, no water bill, no mercy for shallow roots.
Only what survived gets planted
Nine years of freeze and drought decided the plant list, not a catalog. Pomegranate, fig, persimmon, anacua, anacahuita, hackberry, pecan, mulberry, loquat, grapes on structure. And an honest kill list: peaches, plums, and apples die here in a few years no matter who plants them — so we don't.
Some trees eat bad ground for us
Anacahuita drops flowers and fruit nearly year-round, and that steady rain of organic matter breaks caliche down until other species can live where nothing could. On the worst lots, we plant the soil eaters first and let nature run the site for a few years before the food species follow.
Built to run when nobody shows up
The South Texas standard: everything that lasts here — mesquite, ranch fence, old trucks — lasts because it tolerates being ignored. Every part of this project has to pass the same test. Species that forgive. Watering measured in visits per year. Care concentrated into a few simple, scheduled moments anyone can keep.
The loop
Nothing here runs on one person's willpower. It runs on loops that feed themselves.
The land loop
- Land nobody wants — tax lots, restricted parcels, flood buyouts
- Soil built, forest planted with proven species
- Food, shade, and habitat where there was a weed lot
- A community that wants the next one
The material loop
- Brush and clearing waste that would be burned or dumped
- Processed at one yard: mulch, biochar, planting blend — and mesquite and pecan wood milled or bagged instead of wasted
- Constructed soil at every new site
- More living ground making more organic matter
The goodwill loop
- A local business, church, or school adopts a site
- A few scheduled care visits a year — that's the whole job
- Their name on the sign, their story told, first pick at harvest
- Recognition that makes the next adopter step up
The long loop
- Slow, high-value trees planted early — mesquite, pecan, Texas ebony
- Decades of canopy, nitrogen, and habitat while they grow
- Selective harvest and pruning become lumber, smoking wood, and craft stock
- A living endowment that pays for the next generation of sites
Goodwill in, bounty out, nothing wasted in between. That's the whole machine.
Three chairs
A Texas nonprofit needs three directors. I want the other two chairs to be yours, Ruben and Adrian. It costs nothing to sit in them — no money, no quota, just judgment and dirt under your nails when you feel like it.
The paperwork is drafted. The domain is ours. The proof is nine years old and fruiting. All it needs now is the three of us at a table, one afternoon, and twenty-five dollars.
Questions people ask
- What is caliche?
- The calcium-carbonate hardpan common across South Texas — pale, concrete-like ground most plants can't root into. We named the project after it because that's the ground we turn into food forests.
- What is a food forest?
- A planted ecosystem of food-bearing trees, shrubs, vines, and groundcover arranged like a natural forest, designed to sustain itself with minimal care. We build them with native and locally proven species on constructed living soil.
- How does it survive drought without irrigation?
- Soil built with biochar and organic matter that holds water like a battery, deep watering that trains roots below where drought reaches, and a plant list chosen by nine years of real survival — not a catalog.
- Is it really visible from space?
- Yes — every frame above comes from public archives (USDA NAIP aerials and Esri World Imagery Wayback), and anyone can look up the same coordinates and check.