True Grime... er, Grit... Oh, Never Mind. Just Garden!

"Truth-tellers are not always palatable. There is a preference for candy bars."
--Gwendolyn Brooks, 'Song for Winnie'

“If it comes from a plant, eat it.  If it’s made in a plant, don’t.”
--Michael Pollan

The amount of gloom-and-doom available in whatever may be your media of choice is almost limitless.  Likewise, the amount of doom-and-gloom conceivably constructed from one’s own observations of the world around them is limited only by one’s own imagination.

We try to avoid despair and negativity at all costs – not because we don’t want to know about what is wrong with the world, but because we would rather have problems presented to us as challenges instead of as insurmountable obstacles.  We may not be able to solve every global crisis by playing in our garden or spending a meditative morning watching our chickens be the bird-brains they are… but we like to entertain the notion that playing in our garden and musing with our chickens are helpful things, and that pleasant notion is never more at hand than it is with the coming of Spring.

We have begun our full-on assault on the lassitude of Winter in the last couple of weeks, and hope to completely reinvent our garden by the time tender vegetables go in the ground some time in the next couple of weeks (depending on the long-range forecast).  With this in mind, we would like to express our hope that the truth-telling Gwendolyn Brooks speaks about as a goad toward unhealthy self-medication can be somewhat assuaged by growing and eating healthy and tasty plants in our very own backyard.  The news (however acquired) is much less noisesome through this lens, even when it is entirely unpalatable.

As an example, January 2013 is officially the 2nd hottest January in the records dating back to the mid-19th century for the contiguous United States, and ninth highest for the planet as a whole.  Global warming is real, anthropogenic, unavoidable, and increasing.  While petrochemical robber barons choose to bury their heads in the tar-sand, the rest of us (who opt to be honest with ourselves) know that things will never again be the same, and that some of the consequences of this change will be devastating and catastrophic.

However….

On the bright side, “planting season” comes earlier and earlier each Spring.  Of course, we put quotes around this phrase for a reason – every season is time to plant something.  Still, Spring is the time people traditionally think about when discussing the first part of the cycle of life for garden vegetables.  Mention that you have a vegetable garden, and Texans immediately think of tomatoes, peppers, corn and squash.  Even carnivores and junk food addicts recognize these foods as basic staples, with perhaps a smattering of other favorites thrown in (cucumbers, melons, etc.), and know – more or less – that a Texas gardener should start think about putting these plants in the ground some time in March.

What they may not realize, if they do not themselves have their hands in the dirt every year, is that it isn’t really “March” which marks the beginning of the time to plant these crops.  Instead, it is the onset of warmer weather and in particular warmer soil which determines when these tender vegetables should be planted. 

There are various tables and charts available if you do enough research showing the warmth the soil needs to reach before certain crops can go out safely, and depending on what you want to plant you may wish to google this information.  It will certainly be more accurate than relying on the “When to plant” chart on the back of most commercially available seed packets. 

We have seen suggestions, as a “fer instance,” that Spinach ought to be planted in April in Texas, and we wonder what planet the seed company executive who signed off on that ridiculous suggestion might have been living on… We suppose if you want to harvest precooked spinach in May and June, you could plant it in April…  but for most of Texas, spinach is a Fall and Winter crop, which is harvested from November through April.  If it comes from Texas anywhere from May through October, you can be sure it was grown in an air-conditioned greenhouse.

Be that as it may, even when the timetable oriented charts are relatively accurate (meaning the actual temperature requirements of the plants really do coincide with the suggested planting dates), the dates are getting earlier and earlier.  Some plants have higher success rates than others outside of their comfort zones, and can be planted at earlier dates than other plants sharing the same optimal range – as a consequence, things like cucumbers and some kinds of squash can survive at slightly lower temperatures than other tender veggies like maize or nightshades, or even hot weather herbs like basil or lavender. 

And the only way to know for sure what category things really fall in is to experiment, which we at Myrtle’s place are far more than happy to do.

We have discovered, for example, that amaranth (one of our favorite all time crops) will not thrive unless the soil is at least 70° when the seed sprouts.  As it turns out, in the Brazos Valley, that can happen as early as the middle of March, or as late as the middle of April.  We have also discovered, much to our pleasure, that if we put the seed out in early March, most of it won’t actually sprout until nighttime air temperatures are in the low 60°s… and looking at the long-range forecast this February, we have decided we can go ahead and seed our amaranth beds now. 

We have better-than-even odds of not having any more freezing weather, and better-than-even odds of having soil temperatures in the 70°s as soon as mid-March, a full month earlier than the suggestions in planting guides written back in the dawn of time by experts who thought the climate was less variable.

This means there’s nothing wrong with pushing up the planting dates for a whole host of different veggies – cucumbers, summer squash, amaranth, etc.  One doesn’t usually find these crops going in alongside things like leeks, onions, garlic, spinach or broccoli, but that is exactly what is happening this year, and is likely to happen on a more regular basis as the years go by and the planet heats up.

We don’t pretend that putting in raised beds for our vegetables to give us more control over drainage and soil temperature, and planting crops earlier and earlier each year thanks to warmer soil and air, and a host of other adaptations we are making in our garden to environmental changes we observe through the cycle of each season, are in any way “solutions” to the crises presented by global climate change.

What we are suggesting, however, is that our individual adaptations can and should be part of a global chain of cumulative adaptations, none of them individually making much of a splash, but all of them together making a tidal wave of evolutionary change in the fate of our species (and hopefully the fate of some of our fellow species, as well).

Ultimately, this approach is simply an equal and opposite reaction to the initial chain of unhealthy actions which got us into this mess in the first place.

The heating up of the global climate, after all, is not due to a few isolated decisions made in the course of human history – or even just a few decisions made since the onset of the industrial revolution.  Reading the daily headlines it would be easy to demonize the petrochemical industry and the internal combustion engine, for example, since those are the two greatest contributors to greenhouse emissions over the past 150 years.  But the story actually goes back much further than that.

The Anthropocene (the geologic era demarcated by the time when human inhabitants of planet Earth first started changing our climate) is generally granted to have started at the end of the last great glacial ice age, some 10,000 years ago.  Truth be told, the invention of agriculture, which began shortly after the ice retreated, was in and of itself humanity’s most invasive and consequential attack on the natural world; Gaia has been on the ropes ever since we first started tilling the ground.

Learning to be more gentle and cooperative in our attempts to coax nutrition from the soil is the choice we need to now make, one backyard, porch, windowsill and vacant lot at a time.  We will undoubtedly assault the agribusiness paradigm more fully in the future, dear reader, as we believe the large scale farm to be the cause of hunger and malnutrition throughout the world, not a potential cure for those maladies, but for now we wish to extol the local virtue, not the global vice. 

No one individual family in Bryan/College Station, Texas, nor in Macon, Georgia, nor in Baden-Baden, Germany, nor in the Faroe Islands or in Sri Lanka, can by themselves reverse the harm we have done to the environment over the last ten millennia, but then, we can’t collectively solve our global problems without the contributions of each of those individual families, either.

Only by each of us as individuals deciding to take care of that part of the environment within reach of our own arms can we collectively hope to one day say “Insurmountable problem – mounted!”  As such, we invite all those who find themselves overwhelmed by stories about rising oceans, and dropping water tables, and e-coli infestations on the produce in markets worldwide, and all the other ills inundating our senses every day, to turn off the television, step away from the computer, put the cellphone on idle, and go get dirty.  Put your hands in the soil, smell it, sift it, get to know it.  Listen to and watch all the critters, whether no-, two-, four-, six- or eight-legged who call it home.  Do your own experiments.

And, a little less stressed and a little more hopeful, eat the results.

Happy farming!