Gimme, Gimme, Gimme! We Want More!

We always feel a little uncomfortable when we make statements like, "Couldn't we get more out of this if we just...?"

Why should this make us uncomfortable?  Because, at its heart, every vice is really just an excess of virtue.  Even the clownish modern industrial society diet (which can no longer be claimed as exclusively "American", since McDonald's is now on every major city street corner in the world) is really just an excess of an evolutionarily sound principle:  fatty protein is harder to come by than other nutrients.  We are programmed by millions of years of hard living on the savanna to cram fatty meats down our throats as often as we can get them.  He who super-sizes most, wins.  That is, until the saber-toothed tiger catches them napping.  Oh, well.

It wasn't until modern industrial farming techniques, coupled with the massive expansion of wealth during the industrial revolution, that we as a species became capable of eating way too much of "the good stuff".  More is no longer better when it comes to meat.

However, it must be noted that "more is better" is not always a bad philosophy; like everything else, it just needs a proper context.  In the home garden, particularly the home garden which is attempting to aspire to the hopeful possibility of someday wishing to be possibly considered, if you suspend your disbelief just a little, a miniature farm, "more is better" is an apt description of the notion of yield-per-square-foot.

The leap from back porch container gardening to full-fledged farming is not so large as imagination has made it.  Indeed, just a couple of generations ago, American families were being encouraged to live as much as possible off of "Victory Gardens", which reduced the strain on the industrial complex of providing both for the needs of a domestic population and for the needs of an army in Europe and a navy in the Pacific.  Everybody grew as much as they could back then; they also had chickens, but that's a subject for another time.

Right now, we're talking about how to make the modern "Victory Garden" possible in a very limited urban space.  The answer, we are ashamed to say, escaped us until a couple of weeks ago.  Our garden this spring is planted in a traditional way in raised beds, with narrow rows which we can reach from all four sides of each bed.  Oh, it's good, in its way, but this method has a yield limit which we are not satisfied in accepting.

We have committed the classical production error:  we have maximized our individual parts.

We are getting as much yield as possible from each individual seed.  The problem is, the yield for our garden needs to be maximized, not the yield for each plant.

The solution is something called wide row gardening.  We have seen several good articles on this subject this past week, and this fall we are going to give it a go.  Basically, you plant in a "wide row"; rather than a line of plants single-file, you cluster your plants in a wide stripe rather than a line.  The plants are closer together, and as a consequence, the yield per individual plant will be lower.  However, the yield per square foot will be significantly higher.

This project will involve some considerable architectural changes to the garden; the "dead period" in College Station is July 1st-15th; we'll have to be careful with the peppers, which are the only plants which stay in the ground in the vegetable garden during that time; there will be some other interesting problems to come up as well, we are sure, but we hope to more than double our corn harvest this fall, and we may even find enough space to reinstitute melon farming this fall, too.

Next posting, we'll update you on the progress of our latest batch of baby chicks.

Until then,

Happy farming!