The great irony is, we laid out the herb gardens as we did because we couldn’t think of anything else to do. They sort of follow the curve of the driveway on one side, and the curve of the path to our front door on the other side. And the only thing vaguely monoculturish about them is the fact that rosemary is the dominant feature of the curve; however, we actually have three different varieties of rosemary, and they are interspersed with thyme, cannas, and an italian variety of oregano.
The veggies, though, have been something of a thorn in our sides. We started with twelve raised beds, and they worked well enough at first, but there is something about intensive gardening approaches with which we just didn’t grok. Even though we were not using any artifical means of production beyond the inclusion of a lot of elbow grease, it didn’t feel natural at all. We had to add so much in the form of compost and chicken poop the second year to approximate the qualitative and quantitative success of the first year, that we began to wonder. In year three, in fact, we are abandoning our fall garden almost altogether as we retool the design.
In a stunning bit of serendipitous synchronicity, we recently read a blog posting by our good friend Hugh Stearns who was musing about fractal geometry in two-dimensional spaces, and reflecting on how patterns are not always visible to those who are refusing to see them. Depth is out there, but only if your eyes are open.
We suppose, given that this is all pretty much in line with what Hugh does for a living, we ought to have consulted him first before attempting to mould our garden to our foolish desires by means of sheer will. Two things stopped us however: first, we have an immense quantity of stubborn self-determination in our family which bodes ill for our ever accepting advice, even good advice. Second, there is no way on God’s green earth we could afford Hugh’s professional services. We’re cheapskates, and he is a top tier professional; that sort of combination does not work out. So, to the books we go.
Early in the 20th century, the agronomic forebears of the modern locavores, slow fooders, organic advocates, et al., were the progenitors of the paradigm known as “Permaculture”. This approach focuses on systems which mimic the relationships found in natural ecologies; in other words, taking the way each individual part of your garden interacts with every other part of your garden, your home, your nieghborhood, your city, your hardiness zone, etc., and making it function as closely as possible to the ways in which those individual parts most successfully interact when found in a state of nature. You would not, for example, want to emulate naturally occuring plants which die out in nature, you would want to find examples where they succeed, and copy them.
You would notice the difference if you walked out of a wildly overgrown meadow and into a corn field. It’s just… different.
Polyculture, it turns out, actually produces more and healthier plants than does monoculture, but modern farming practices are monocultural because, well, just because. Lev. 19:19 importunes against planting more than one type of crop in the same field, but if you are looking to the Torah for agricultural science, you've got deeper issues you need to deal with first. We suppose on large scale industrial plots, the need for individual attention and the lack of any way to mechanize processes like planting and harvesting would make polyculture difficult and prohibitively expensive, but on small scales, it really just comes down to tradition. And since we argue that all agriculture ought to be brought back down to small scales anyway... you can see where we're headed.
The earliest American farmers all worked with traditions learned from observation of nature; the “Three Sisters” or “Trinity” are almost as familiar to school children studying the pilgrims and their aboriginal benefactors as the use of fish when planting corn. “Guild” planting is a cornerstone of permaculture – “companion planting” is another name this concept goes by. The classic example of the “Three Sisters” references the symbiosis of corn, squash and tomatoes, which do especially well when planted in clusters. We have also noticed tomatoes, peppers, and basil do well in the same plot, a fact that makes for convenient dinnertime harvesting on nights when italian food strikes our fancy.
Applying this bit of wisdom to our problem will, we hope, provide the needed sledgehammer to the wall blocking our creative path vis-à-vis our veggie garden. A fractal extension of Big Myrtle’s place to a vegetable garden in the “big open space in the middle of the back yard” would look something like a wavy rhomboid plot with taller plants on the outside stepping down to flatter plants in the middle.
This actually answers another riddle we have been grappling with, too. We intend to plant a variety of trees, including avocados (In preparation for global warming, naturally! Thereby hangs another tale, for a future post…), plums, and peaches. The avocados will be a tier step down from our oak trees, the plums will be a tier step down from the avocados, and the peaches will be a tier step down from the plums. Voila! We will have the trellised look so valued by permaculturalists. And if we swirl these new trees around the perimeter of the vegetable plot, we will accomplish the fractal pattern look our design guru amigo suggests, as well.
We are going to procede cautiously, however. Taking a snapshot of the layout as it currently exists and then superimposing corrective changes certainly sounds like a good plan, but the very act of planning represents a recurrence of our original mistake. We do not believe that “Design” should preclude the flexibility of improvisation which is necessary for the ultimate “design”. The act of designing a patterned environment, in other words, should not be a replacement for the creation of designs in a patterened environment.
If you don’t see the distinction, don’t worry. All such intellectual abstractions are beside the point when you pick up a shovel and a hoe and actually get to work. Fukuoka would probably disapprove of all this moving of dirt and plants, but then, you can’t please everybody. He did his all-natural gardening in Japan, where 100+ degree days and fire ants were utterly inconceivable, so we take his serenity with a grain of salt.
One of Fukuoka’s contributions to which we will pay more attention, however, is the idea of “fairshare”. Even organic farming can fall prey to the trap of taking more out of the soil that it ought; in fact, there is an entire movement in agriculture called “biointensive” farming. This is a system in which maximum yields are engineered from minimum spaces. This is an attractive lure, particularly in urban areas, because it sounds like doing more with less. The problem is, as we have discovered after a mere three years growing food in the nutrient-deficient soils of the Brazos Valley, you have to work the topsoil so intensively that even organic methods are not “sustainable”.
It isn’t natural, and those things which do not emulate natural processes tend to break sooner than those things which do. To put it in the context of the Laws of Physics, entropy suggests that things move from states of lower likelihood to higher likelihood. To tell what system of growing things is more or less likely, just look around at what naturally occurs.
It isn’t rocket science; it’s simply observation. If something seems to work; do it. If it seems to be too hard to get it to work, maybe it is; maybe you should try something else. We’re off to try something else!
Happy farming!
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