Don't Just Do Something... Sit There! (Winter in a Myrtle Wonderland...)

When we tell people that we are still harvesting tomatoes and peppers in December, folk from other parts of the country (or even other parts of the planet) are not surprised, because there is this mistaken impression that Texans need suntan lotion and iced beverages 12 months out of the year.  Yes, we are hotter than y’all, more than likely, wherever you happen to be while you are reading this… but let’s not get carried away.  Our seasons are nothing at all compared to places like New England or the Pacific Northwest, or Prague, or Tokyo, but we do in fact have seasons, provided you don’t blink.

The first overnight freeze in the lower Brazos Valley takes place on average during the second week of December.  This is the point at which most local gardeners put away their shovels and hang it up until March.

We think this is a big mistake, and not just because it is possible to continue getting tomatoes and peppers – although it is, and it isn’t that hard.  No, it’s a mistake because gardening in this not-quite-temperate, not-quite-arid, not-quite-subtropical less-than-paradise is a year round sport, and what one does in winter affects the whole rest of the year.

This is the point in the diatribe when your usual suspects in the “I’m going to tell you how to garden” business start going on about turning over your soil, making it weed free, adding compost, and all that other stuff.  Well, some of that is useful, no doubt, but it is not really the direction we’re going with this.  We’re more interested in the psychological and philosophical questions which can only be answered by living in the dirt all twelve months of the year. 

We aren’t telling you to be perfect; we’re asking you to be aware.  Big difference.

To give you some idea of what we mean, let’s go back to those peppers and tomatoes.  The first frost of the year happened the last week of September.  This being Southeast Texas, we have only had a handful of other frosty mornings since then, and never more than two in a row.  Just because it got cool enough once or twice to dust the car windshield with a very thin patina of ice does not mean Old Man Winter is moving in – if you thought it meant that, you must not be from around these parts.

No, it simply hasn’t been that cold yet.  But how did our solenaceae survive even this small amount of frost?  An exposed tomato or pepper will burn with the tiniest amount of frost, and the jig is up.  Well… our tomatoes and peppers weren’t exposed.  We let them trail on the ground, not putting them in cages or trellises.  And we stopped weeding them after about two or three weeks last Spring, so not only are they crawling along the ground, they are under a rather tall stand of hay – what other folk call “weeds”. 

There are those who would call us lazy for not having weeded our gardens last Spring, Summer, or even earlier this Fall.  Those people are not eating garden fresh salsa this winter, is what we have to say in response.

There are other reasons to continue living in the garden during December-January-February, of course, which can be exercised regardless of how closely you adhere to the  “Do Nothing” farming methods of Masanobu Fukuoka.  Broccoli, kale, kohlrabi, carrots, spinach, chard, collards, mustard, garlic, wild lettuce, cabbage… the number of winter greens which go hog wild in a Brazos Valley garden in our so-called “colder” months is almost limitless.  And even if you are from the Neil Sperry school of straight row gardening in perfectly weed free, chemically fertilized plots, you can get them to grow.  We hope you forego the monotony and the chemicals, but at the very least, we’ll be happy to see you out and about, with dirty fingernails and happy salad plates.

This is also the time of year to be planting fruit trees and berry bushes, and plotting and planning for shifts in the Spring landscape.  For fruit in particular, it is important to spend time outside – yourself, physically, in the flesh, standing out in the garden – getting familiar with what your plants are going to be going through.  There is no bigger mistake made by prospective fruit gardeners than ignoring the extremes (both high and low) their new plants will be experiencing prior to putting them in the ground.  The wrong variety of peach or plum may grow and not produce fruit, or it may produce fruit in one season, and then die to the ground the very next Winter, or shrivel in the heat the next Summer.

The big chain hardware stores are in particular guilty of stocking the wrong varieties of tree for the regions where they will be planted.  A perfect case in point is avocadoes – the avocado tree you are most likely to get if you find one at “the big orange store” is a Haas… which is fine if you live in Southern California or Southern Florida.  Pretty much anywhere else in the country, though, that is one dead tree the minute temperatures dip below 30° Fahrenheit.  You need one of the varieties from the mountains of Guatemala – Fuerza, or Bacon, or any of about a half-dozen others which can withstand temperatures down to about 26° or so… and even then, you’ll need to find a protected warm microclimate within your yard where you can warm the tree up if necessary.

Better still?  Plant a tree that is native to your area.  Not too many folk in the Brazos Valley have the native persimmon variety, but it would be a solid choice of fruit tree.  So would a wild black cherry, though you may need to plant four or five to guarantee you have one which ends up producing fruit.  Many people are unaware of this southern variety of cherry, which was once common as far south as Monterrey, Mexico, though it has been driven from its native habitat by environmental changes brought on by development over the last 150 years.  Much the same can be said for the evergreen huckleberry (a wild blueberry indistinguishable from the cultivated variety once it’s in your pancake batter), native to Oregon and lowland Northern California, though once found in wild stands in East Texas alongside the more familiar dewberry.

Some non-native plants are nice, too, on the condition that they are compatible with your particular microenvironment.  If it grows in Sicily, it ought to do quite nicely in the Brazos Valley – hence the presence in Myrtle’s garden of pomegranates and Arbequina olives.  We have met several folk with citron plants that fruit out well; there are some other hardy citrus varieties useful for cooking and juicing which will provide a nice back porch decoration in addition adding flavor to your cooking, and a lovely citrus scent to your outdoor living spaces.  If you want comestible oranges, either use a greenhouse, or move to Brownsville, that’s our advice.

The more soil amendments a plant needs – we’re talking about you, blueberry – the less worthwhile it is.  That may be our “do nothing” prejudice at work again, but it is our firm belief that what folk really ought to be putting in their garden is not things that they can grow well, but rather things that they have a hard time killing.  That is not just because of a persistent preference for inactivity on our part – we intentionally don’t weed much, after all – but rather because life in the 21st century is very, very hard for plant life.  No matter how attentive we are as gardeners, climate change and variable availability of sun, nutrients, and water mean that plants more than ever have to be adaptable, or they will perish.

We have interfered enough as a species – we are, after all, responsible for much of the difficulty plants are now in – so asking what we can do to help out is somewhat too little, too late.  The best thing we can do at this point is get out of their way.  The secret to a happy garden, we frequently tell people, is chicken poop and neglect.  We have to do more work to get the chicken poop out there than Fukuoka suggests… but we believe strongly in an active sort of neglect, of which we think he would have approved.  It’s not enough just to plant your fruits and veggies and herbs, you have to sit and watch them grow, too.  And Winter is a great time to pull up a chair and just be with them.

Happy farming!

Vegetables, Fractals and Herbs, Oh My!

We have been thinking about patterns a lot lately.  Reading about Masanobu Fukuoka got us interested in some other early permaculture literature, which in turn lead us to think about design and layout in urban garden spaces, and how frustrated we have been up to this point in getting our vegetable garden to fit into our schematic as easily as the herb gardens have done.

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.

Having read all we could get our hands on about microenvironmental design, we have come to realize that we have been forcing the land to move to realize our vision, instead of the other way around.  The idiomatic expression sounds quaint, but we are fairly sure the mountain never actually goes to meet Mohammed (peace be upon him).  Mere mortals have to adjust ourselves to our surroundings, lest we end up with gardens more reminescent of slag heaps than of Eden.

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.

One of the first things the permaculturalists noticed was that monoculture – the exclusive prominence of one variety of plant – is almost non-existant in nature.  You may encounter areas where a particular species or variety is the predominant feature of an area, but you almost never find a place where it is the only feature.  As a thought experiment, imagine yourself in a wild copse where the plants are all familiar domestic garden plants, but grown randomly and with no friendly farmer about.  Compare this vision with a farm, and the most noticeable difference is likely to be that you picture the farm having row after row of corn stalks and cabbages, neatly divided, with little placards telling you what is planted where.

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.

Another thing the early permaculturalists noticed was that the symbiosis of different plant species reflected a similar symbiosis between types of terrain – the “edges” of systems, as it were.  A good example would be the places where ponds meet grassy slopes, or where grassy slopes meet forests.  Beans provide nitrogen needed by corn, which provides an excellent climbing surface for beans; in the same way, water feeds microbes and rhizomes which aerate soil, and vegetation falling from surrounding terrain decays in water and provides nutrition for phytoplankton, which feed the fish who are then eaten by land creatures and re-deposited in the soil to nourish the plant life there.  Polyculturalists emphasize maximizing your transitional spaces in order to recreate these kinds of cycles.

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!