Feed the World... One Porch, Balcony or Rooftop at a Time

The so-called “Green Revolution” of the latter half of the 20th century, in which yield-per-acre in industrial agriculture increased by orders of magnitude due to the use of improved technology and intensive fertilization, coupled with the use of herbicides to reduce weed competition and pesticides (including genetic modifications in crops to allow them to produce their own pesticides) to reduce insect depredation, all in the name of improving crop yields in order to “feed a starving world”… it’s all based on a lie.

There is a fundamental problem with the idea that we can increase food production to match population growth,

Most of the world's extreme food security issues are in Africa....

and it is an obvious problem, one which a simple look at two graphs can tell you is at the core of a whole host of global ills – first, a chart of who experiences the most food stress, and next a chart of who imports the most food.

Yes, the amount of food being produced is now greater than it ever has been before, that much is true.  But even before you begin to calculate the nearly incalculable damage that these methods have done (and are continuing to do) to our environment, we really ought to face the fundamental fact that all that extra food is going directly to wealthy people and making them fat.  Virtually none of that extra production is feeding the people who are actually dealing with food security issues.

Virtually none of the world's chief food importers overlap
with food security issues

Between 1961 and 1999, food exports globally increased by over 400%; much of that increase has come in the form of diets becoming westernized in most of Asia – the fastest growing businesses in the Pacific Rim are franchised fast food restaurants like Domino’s and McDonald’s, which to their credit do a fairly good job of localizing their menus in their new locations, but… an island nation like Indonesia is not exactly a great place to grow wheat.  As a consequence, all that flour for all those hamburger buns and pizza crusts comes from somewhere else.

The same dynamic is playing out in pretty much every country on earth where trends toward modernization and urbanization are drawing people out of the countryside and into cities that are increasingly homogenous in form and function.

There is a temptation to say, well, it’s working in Asia, and if you look at the map of underfed persons, Africa seems to be the only real problem child, so let’s just export Big Macs to Ethiopia and presto!  Problem solved!

Apart from the fact that Ethiopian Big Macs would need to be halāl (Arabic “حلال‎ “ or English “permissible”), and producing that much halāl meat is not really possible using modern factory-farming methods (animal cruelty is harām – “forbidden” – in Islam, so if the cow came from a slaughterhouse, a Muslim cannot eat it), there is also the very real problem that cattle production on the kind of scale necessary to let everyone in the world eat beef with the same wanton, hedonistic abandon as Americans do would require the use of more freshwater than the world has available.  Raising more cattle in Ethiopia than is done at present would leave no fresh water for other purposes.  It simply isn’t an option.

Even as an export… the only places in the world with sufficient freshwater for an increase in cattle production are not amenable to the industry – Lake Baikal in Siberia has 20% of the world’s freshwater.  It is also so remote and cold that unless you are either Siberian or Mongolian (or a geography geek), you’ve undoubtedly never heard of it.

The current model of feeding the world, in short, is haphazard and doesn’t work.  Numerous organizations recognize this problem and are leading efforts to reconceptualize how we approach issues of food security.  The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations has over the years evolved a framework for discussing food security, and their work has been adapted by many other organizations, including the World Health Organization (WHO), the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and numerous others.

In 2009, the World Summit on Food Security stated that the “four pillars of food security are availability, access, utilization, and stability.”  Which brings us back to our initial premise – the “Green Revolution” methodology of throwing technology at the problem of food security is actually counterproductive, and tends over time to limit the availability, access, utilization and stability of food, particularly in the most food-stressed parts of the world.  To take each pillar in turn:

Availability – Numerous complications make food unavailable under the current paradigm, most notably that technological advances tend not to make production cheaper, but rather only to make production more profitable.  That is, advances in production techniques (better tractors, more powerful fertilizers, etc.) do, in fact, lead to higher yields, but they also require greater capital outlays, and (more to the point) incentivize producing food crops which will lead to a greater return on investment (ROI), not necessarily the same thing as producing crops which will be available for low cost to those who do not have enough to eat.  Poor farmers can’t produce without technology, and rich farmers don’t produce for poor consumers.

Access – Much as with availability, the economics of increasing production also limit access.  A prime example of this problem relates to rice production – the Asian economy has exploded over the past fifty years, with most of the world’s fastest growing local economies over that time period being in the region.  And rice is still, today, the most important foodstuff in every Asian city.  But because the economy has boomed for most, the price of rice has gone up for all.  And so, this simple food most Americans take for granted – and think of as cheap – has become increasingly difficult for poor families to put on their tables at dinnertime.  They have been priced out of the market – even when rice production is good (and that is not always a given thanks to pollution and global warming, both of which have wreaked havoc on rice crops in recent years), increasingly large percentages of the population simply have no access to this food staple.

Utilization –.Farmers down through history have almost never been concerned with whether or not the food they are producing is actually good for a human being to eat, and as a consequence, the marketplace is flooded with alleged food, things no one ought to ever put in their mouths, and including these poisonous calories right alongside nutritious items, and we pretend that this calculus is somehow healthy.  

Any urban space can replace a farm...
if enough of them are used

Increasingly all that improved agricultural production and all those food exports come in the form of high fructose corn syrup – that ridiculously sweet bottle of Coca-Cola started its life as somebody’s corn field.  Maize may have been one of the “three sisters” that allowed the aboriginal Amerindians to thrive, but it has turned into an addictive toxin.  It requires massive chemical intervention (in the form of fertilizer and pesticide) to grow, which poisons our waterways to the point of choking all the oxygen out of large parts of the Gulf of Mexico, and does nothing to feed malnourished children in the Sudan.  It sure has made a lot of folk exceptionally fat everywhere from Miami Beach to Seattle, Washington, though.

So, what’s the answer?  Advocates of the Green Revolution (notably Texas A&M’s own Nobel Prize winner Norman Borlaug) tend to discount advocates of organic farming:

"Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things"

The problem is, in advocating intensive monoculture factory farming, Borlaug and others threw the baby out with the bathwater.  Sustainable agriculture on the scale previously practiced could not, it is true, keep pace with population growth and urbanization.  But, long term, neither can a chemically oriented system of factory farming dependent upon ever increasing yields.  Eventually, soil which requires continual fertilizing, and tilling, and irrigation becomes played out.  Depending on increasing yields will eventually cause the whole system to break down catastrophically.

What is needed is a shift not just in production methods, but in production philosophy.

Which brings us to the fourth pillar…

Stability – Change is the only constant.  One of the strengths of a global economy, of course, is the idea that when there is a shortage in one region, it may be supplemented by imports from another region.  In practice, however, this kind of balancing of temporary shortages is not what the global food economy tends to implement.  Instead, food exports are planned in advance and tend to take advantage of the most profitable redistributions of agricultural goods, not the most needed redistributions.  That is, wheat or corn farmers will export their grain to the country that pays the most, not the one that is the hungriest.  As such, the increasing weather variability brought on by anthropogenic climate change will hit the poorest people in the world harder than it will hit anyone else – slight changes to crop conditions will lead to increasing starvation wherever people are depending on vulnerable supply chains.

The answer, then, is to decrease the vulnerability of supply chains.  And there are two ways to strengthen a chain:  1) increase the strength of the material being used to make the links – this is the “Green Revolution” approach, increasing yield-per-acre on the lands being used for agriculture; or 2) shorten the chain – this is the approach we recommend.

Potato sacks on an apartment balcony

“Not everyone can grow their own food,” goes the argument from the Green Revolutionists.  Poppycock, we say.  It is true that not everyone can put together a backyard microfarm, owing in great measure to the fact that not everyone has a backyard.  However, we have written before about the apartment porch hanging-potato-sack gardens of Nairobi, and spoken at great length about the guerilla gardeners throughout the world who will grow a stand of amaranth or a row of squash in any vacant lot, alleyway, or unused public right-of-way.

The shortest farm-to-table food supply chain is the one that requires nothing more than opening your back door and picking your salad.

Rather than trying to expand industrial farming techniques to all corners of the Earth in an attempt to turn every developing country into Kansas (which, by the way, is going to increasingly be unfarmable in coming decades, thanks to the depletion of the Ogallala aquifer, so Kansas will itself be “food poor” under the current model before too terribly long), we ought to be figuring out the best possible way to turn every porch, kitchen window, alleyway, rooftop and vacant lot in the world into a community garden.  

As for the argument that we ought to focus on crop yields… well, fine.  It is easier, though, to fertilize a container garden than it is to fertilize a 100 acre farm.  And there’s no runoff to worry about. 

Potato sacks on a patio wall

 
Ultimately, food security is only one small part of an overall feeling of security which impoverished persons will never find satisfactorily addressed by anything other than economic self-sufficiency.  Relying on an international economy which not only does not put their faces or names to the issues at hand, but does not care one way or the other, is not an approach we ought to ask the people of Botswana, or Turkmenistan, or East Saint Louis, to just trust us on.

There is a strong impulse to call access to food, shelter, clothing, employment and health care and the like a “right” – we don’t quite go that far, but neither do we dismiss such arguments out of hand.  Regardless of how such fundamental human needs are categorized, the simple truth is that no one can be considered “free” who is, through no fault of their own, unable to meet those needs.  And the fastest route, the surest means, of personal security is having the means of meeting those needs for oneself and one’s family in one’s own control.

Subsistence agriculture has, for as long as the field of economics has existed, been an epithet, the marker of uncivilized humans.  It is time for that to change.  Not only should we be teaching people suffering from extreme food security crises how to be the best subsistence farmers they can be… we in the developed world ought to be doing the same thing.  The less we rely on that incredibly long (and incredibly vulnerable) international food chain, the more truly free we shall become.

Something to think about?  We hope so.

Happy farming!

A Fool and His Garden... Or Something Like That...

“Fools ignore complexity.  Pragmatists suffer it.  Some can avoid it.  Geniuses remove it.”
--Alan Perlis, Epigrams in Programming

Gardening in the 21st century is an exercise in programming rather touchy liveware.  We misdoubt much that Alan Perlis, the first winner of the Touring award for advances in computer programming, would know one end of a shovel from the other, but his advice to programmers rings true for gardeners, as well.  Simplify, simplify!

The size and scope of practically any book on the market regarding urban homesteading, urban farming, backyard vegetable raising, square-foot gardening, or any other system or nomenclature you care to use, suggests that there are an infinity of issues involved in growing one’s own food.  This is an inescapable truth, made only more mind-boggling by things like climate change, land degradation, water, air and light pollution, urban heat sinks, and whatever the Kardashians may be up to these days. 

“Keeping it simple” has seemingly never been harder.

However, there are a few guidelines we have come to live by over the past five years of attempting to recreate our grandparents’ idyllic country homes here in the middle of the city.  We hope you find them either useful or at least mildly entertaining:

Don’t bother experimenting.  Just dive in to full production, and adapt on the fly.  We have noticed that those projects where we just dabbled, like our first attempt at water collection, were too timid by half, and have had to be redone entirely.  100 gallons of water in barrels is nowhere near enough to maintain a full scale half-acre garden, and we are totally redesigning the gutters on the roof and the outlets from which they drain accordingly. 

We would have been better off just going for broke and hooking the whole thing up to our pond from the get go.  The pond, meanwhile, is not an experiment, it is a completely nutty idea that we just said “What the heck, let’s do it” about, and it is fast becoming one of the better decisions we made – it will provide all the water for our garden this year, and will keep our bees cool througout our brutal Texas summers.

The amaranth which is the pride of our garden from May to November is another example of our having skipped any empirical research and gone straight into production – we just dove in and planted it everywhere, and the results speak for themselves.  We have tasty greens for the six months out of the year when our neighbors are paying the most outrageous prices for greenhouse greens or, worse yet, trucked in greens from cooler climates.

Anything worth doing is only worth doing as well as you have to.  Put another way, don’t try to make anything in your garden perfect – the best garden, like the best manufacturing process, or the best sports team, or the best computer network, train system, school of fish, etc. – is not the one with the best individual parts, it is the one with the best relationships between the parts. 

In other words, a crooked row here or there, a few more weeds, a few extra bugs in your tomatoes, or a few more dried branches on your perennial herbs – really, any little blemish – is not nearly so important as the overall theme of “how does the whole thing look and feel?” 

The best example of this is weeding – getting all the “non-edible” plants out of your vegetable beds sounds like a good idea when an expert tells you to do it, and they put all sorts of justifications for it in their big hardcover books which sell for $29.99 at Barnes and Noble, but… they’re wrong.  Leave the weeds.  If you do anything to them, cover them up with dead leaves and such.  At worst, pull them and feed them to your livestock.

The healthiest soil is soil that is allowed to be a living, breathing system, and so-called weeds are part of that system.

Don’t give up too soon.  About the time you feel so hot and dry in the middle of a Texas drought that you say, “The heck with this!  I’m not even bothering with a fall garden!” is abou the time that you need to be putting in a fall garden, because you’ll invariably end up with the sweetest, most nutritious fall veggies you’ve ever had, right when your neighbors are paying through the nose for bland, flavorless imports from parts unknown.

Yes, it can be frustrating, but slogging through is just about always worth it.  We discovered this last fall when we were ready to pull up our tomato plants, which had somehow survived the brutal summer, but were not putting out any fruit… we were too lazy to get around to actually pulling them up out of the ground, though, and the end result was some rather tasty tomatoes around Christmas time.

We currently have a wide variety of winter goodies growing – fava beans, several kinds of spinach, kale, lettuce, chard, kohlrabi, broccoli, carrots – but we also have some other things growing, too.  Sunflowers.  Sunflowers?  Yes, sunflowers.  Who knows whether they’ll actually bloom, or if winter weather will intrude sometime in the next few weeks to kill them off, but either way, they have been a fun trap crop to watch as our tender winter greens have struggled to get going, and other than the initial effort of scattering the seed, the sunflowers haven’t actually cost us anything.

In a similar vein, we intend to scatter “lazy” crops throughout the garden this spring.  None lazier than amaranth, we might add, which will probably grow all over the yard whether we do anything about it or not, since the seed was scattered far and wide, willy-nilly, this last summer/fall.  That’s as it should be.  Masanobu Fukuoka would be proud, even if messrs. Perlis and Touring would be utterly befuddled.  And we are 100% certain they would not want to hear our theories about “debugging” either.  But to each his own, we suppose.

Happy farming!

Nostalgia for the Mud

The desire to dig in the dirt sometimes garners the pejorative description of “nostalgia for the mud” among those whose tastes run to the more comfortable and refined.  “Nostalgia for the mud” has a different connotation, though, for Texans.  We get a little more literal about the phrase, since we don’t get enough moisture on a regular basis to have much in the way of mud.

It may be a somewhat arbitrary way to track things, but if you start from last November, the Brazos Valley is now at the tail end of the driest 8-month period in recorded history, and there is simply no end in sight to our current drought.

The good news, though, is that La Niña is now over, so any dryness we experience from here on out will be because we are normally dry at this time of year, not because of any abnormal atmospheric events.  Small comfort, true, particularly since droughts can be self-perpetuating – dry ground warms up fairly quickly, and has already caused all kinds of temperature records to be broken all over East Texas this Spring.  In addition, since the ground lacks moisture, the phenomenon of afternoon thunderstorms springing up as a result of daytime heating building huge local cumulonimbus clouds can’t take place – no moisture, no storm clouds.

What’s a microfarmer to do?

Plan for the future, that’s what.  We have taken note of the weather, naturally, because it dictates much of what we can and cannot do in our garden, but we reject wholesale the bellyaching of people who refuse to accept that this is the new normal.  Even in the middle of a drought, we have still received more rain year-to-date than plenty of folk who farm in the middle of deserts all over the world, who manage to produce beuatiful fruits and vegetables.

We recently harvested our meager sweet corn crop, for example, and were grateful for the few ears we managed to salvage.  All over the Brazos Valley, folk who make their living from the monocrop monstrosity known as modern farming fall into one of two categories:  those who planted cotton instead of corn this year, and those who are in danger of going broke.  Corn was a terrible investment this spring for anyone who spent money on seed (we didn’t – we used old seed from a couple of seasons ago).

Tomatoes, on the other hand, are growing profligately, in utter defiance of the drought, and are producing some of the sweetest, juiciest fruit we ever remember tasting.  Same thing for jalapeños, which are currently keeping us in some of the best homegrown salsa anyone anywhere has ever tasted.

We have started cutting and drying amaranth seed-heads, and will be threshing them over the next several weeks.  This is especially important as Myrtle’s place recently became gluten free; homegrown grains are becoming a prominent part of our garden.  As fate would have it, this dovetails nicely with our need to grow crops which don’t particularly care two figs about whether it rains much or not.  Amaranth, sorghum, millet, buckwheat, quinoa, these are all crops which, once established, can thrive without a whole lot of attention.  And the summer trifecta of amaranth, sorghum and millet also doesn’t particularly object to the stress of 100°+ temperatures – each of these crops is perfect for a climate which is semi-temperate two or three months out of the year, semi-tropical two or three months out of the year, and flat out arid six or eight months out of the year.

We have mentioned before the three distinct growing seasons in the Brazos Valley, but we are starting to appreciate that there are “microseasons” as well.  For example, bush and pole beans of all sorts do okay from March through June, but require different treatment depending on when you put them in the ground.  Velvet beans, being tropical, require tons of sun and water, and can take anywhere from three to six months to come to harvest.

And then there's grain.  Amaranth, which we are harvesting now, can go all summer.  We'll have a “mini-season” for buckwheat, which will go in the ground in early to mid September, to be harvested in late October.  We'll start putting quinoa in the ground in October, and stagger plantings until January, so that we'll be harvesting some kind of grain from now until next March, when we plant more amaranth, sorgum, and millet, and start the whole cycle all over again.

We'll be planting avocados, raspberries, and evergreen huckleberries next winter in hopes of making our fruit and veggie harvest become year round, too.  And while strawberries have been the bane of our existance for four years now, we're going to try again this fall, in hopes that if they take off prior to next year's heat wave (May or June, depending), maybe, just maybe, we can harvest more than just a couple of berries from them.

Under no circumstances, however, will we assent to the presence of mopers.  Yes, it is hot enough for us, thank you very much.  Next question!

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!

Ares and Aphrodite in the Garden

We believe fervently that the Greek gods and goddesses really need to hire some new publicists.  All their best lines have been stolen, and all their worst foibles have become all-encompassing moral warts.

It's just not fair, really, but what is an immortal Olympian supposed to do about it, put down their goblet and intervene?  Please.  That whole deus ex machina thing is so first century Levant.  It just isn't done anymore.

 For divine image reconditioning, the Gods need to look to modern metaphor merchants, like Myrtle, for instance, who has already rendered the opinion that Apollo and Dionysus symbolize the conflict between domestic and wild horticulture.   Nor are the poet and the vintner the only members of the pantheon to get Myrtle's attention.  Demeter and Persephone have each had some part of their stories told, as might be expected.  What little appreciation remains in our culture of these ancient myths is often associated with plants, farms, and gardens.  Demeter and Persephone have gotten less publicity, perhaps, than some others of their kin, but at least what publicity they have received has been mostly positive.

Not so for Ares and Aphrodite.  This pair has been relegated to the celestial tabloids for all eternity, and the rendering of their identities and stories has only gotten worse with the passing of time.

But is our modern dismissal of these archtypal figures reasonable, let alone fair?

Placed in the context of a garden, Myrtle's answer is "no", with some important caveats.

For starters, it is important to recognize that the Ares and Aphrodite we think we know are really just romanized bastardizations of themselves.  Pop psychology may be comfortable saying men are from Mars and women are from Venus, but this is puerile poppycock.  The Roman versions of these immortals are the inspirations for monster truck rallies and junior high girls dressed in practically nothing and dancing wildly to  "Brick House", respectively.  We'll leave you to be the judge of which is the more corrosive influence.

But Mars and Venus lack the moral depth of Ares and Aphrodite -- Aphrodite in particular.  There are some martial elements to gardening, particularly in the initial stages, where a wild copse is beaten into submission with plow and shears, so Ares has some place in the creation of a green, growing place, but it is Aphrodite who in particular has not received proper recognition in the agricultural arts.  Ginette Paris gives credit where it is due in her fascinating tome Pagan Meditations: The Worlds of Aphrodite, Artemis, and Hestia; indeed, she points out that there are a variety of myths about Aphrodite, who probably served the Greeks as the replacement for a series of earlier goddesses, running from Isis in Egypt through the various Ishtar cults which cropped up as far afield as the Indus river.

Paris also writes of "the interplay between fire and water, between Ares and Aphrodite."  The sexual ecstasy central to the National Enquirer version of these star-crossed lovers' tales is important in their metaphorical realm, as well, but it is not the only element, nor is it even the most important characteristic of the union of Ares and Aphrodite.

One wonders at what point in their history this union  became a chronicle of infidelity; why did some ancient poet or bard ever decide to marry off Aphrodite to Haephestus in the first place?  One suspects it is because, crippled though he is, Haephestus (Vulcan, to the Romans) has a potent maleness, a fertile virility, all his own.  But he is really just a metaphor for more of the same qualities Ares brings to the table -- he is rugged, dry summer to Ares' wet, sensual spring, when his fire melts the snows of winter, and he is overcome by passion for the dewy earth.

And both are central to the growth of life-giving vegetables.  That's right -- the gods of war and of the anvil are basically steroid-laden ploughboys.

As for Aphrodite, Demeter and Persephone have stolen all her laurels.  A sachet of lavender is an homage to sexy, slinky Aphrodite, not frumpy Demeter.

Think about this seriously, for a moment, please.  What is a flower?  It is the in-your-face sensuality of a plant that is letting its hair down and telling its neighbor, "Hey, baby, wanna buy me a drink?"  And it wouldn't smell nearly so sweet if it was imbued with the essence of "I'm really wholesome!  Don't I remind you of June Cleaver?"

No, a garden is basically one giant metaphor for sex.  There is no getting around it.  There is only proper placement of context, and appropriate balancing of one need against the other.  Venus and Mars were both too narcissistic to be anything other than lousy lovers, but if you listen to your garden closely, you can hear the ancient echoes of Ares and Aphrodite, whom we think probably had a far better thing than the modern storytellers would have you believe.

In other news, our corn is almost ready for harvest!  We'll update you soon!

Until then...

Happy farming!

It's a Jungle Out There

We have in the past ruminated on wide-row planting, and the dangers of 'sub-optimization', wherein overall production is limited due to a desire to maximize the production of an individual plant.

Upon further review of our current practices, we have realized that, while it is true that in some parts of the garden we have been guilty of sub-optimization (our cucumbers, for example, are growing in solitary stands against our western fence), it is also true that in other parts of our garden, particularly the well companion-planted portions, it is quite literally a jungle out there.  We have successfully crammed as much vibrant, active growth as possible into a few square feet in some instances, like the zucchini/corn/nasturtium combination you see pictured here to the left.

The contrast between the high-density beds and the low-density beds is really pretty remarkable; we will get a higher percentage of fruit from the cucumber shown to the right here than we will from any individual zucchini or corn plant in the first picture.  This cucumber plant will, on its own merits, be a champion.

But from the bed?  There will be no contest -- we will have far higher yield from the high density bed than from the cukes.  T'ain't fair, but them's the facts.

In light of this overwhelming evidence of the superiority of the high-density bed method of gardening, we are faced with some interesting decisions this summer, most notably, how exactly do we carve up our existing space in such way as to maximize how many plants can be successfully grown in small spaces?

There are a lot of different methods people use to solve this particular conundrum, and we are currently employing one of the more popular.  We have numerous raised beds throughout the yard, each about 6 to 7 feet long/wide, and each is essentially its own independent garden.

We also have a rather serpentine bed with some additional corn and sunflowers growing on one side of the yard, where next year we will plant additional olive trees, and then we have the grape arbors and the blackberry fences, not to mention the pomegranates, plums, the pecan tree, and all the shade trees we planted earlier this spring.


But is this method really sufficient?  We don't think so.  You'll notice, with a fairly cursory glance at our garden, that there is an appalling lack of climbing legumes.  No beans.  No snap peas.  What kind of a southern garden monstrosity is this?  We are facing a decision in one of two directions:

Take out the planters and put in a series of serpentine beds in parallel running the width of the yard from the olive trees to the pond area, two or three of which would have large trellises installed in order to handle vining plants like pole beans, etc.

Or...

Take out the planters and put in a series of three large fenced in areas, each of which will essentially be a giant raised bed. 

The advantage of the first method would be ease of working the rows; you simply walk between them and weed, plant, harvest, mulch, and so on.

The advantage of the second is maximum geometric effect -- there will be more surface area on the fence line for climbing plants, and the wide-row planting method can still be used internally in each fenced-in area.  This method would also have the advantage of discouraging rabbits, although we would still have to worry about other critters who are somewhat more mobile (raccoons, possums, etc.).

As with all else, Myrtle will keep you posted on what we end up deciding to do.

Meanwhile....  spring harvest is berry, berry soon!  Those berries may look red, but don't let that fool you.  These are blackberries.  If we picked them right now, they would be very, very bitter blackberries.  We'll let them ripen to their nice dark purplish-black before we pick them, and then we will most likely use them strictly for cooking... this year.  In the future, we have designs on making wine, mead, and goodness only knows what all else.  But you can only master so many skills at a time; we at Myrtle's place have our hands full at present.

Until next time,

Happy farming!

A Rock and a Hard Place...

We're stuck in waiting mode.  As we've mentioned before, the end of Winter and the beginning of Spring is a difficult thing to gauge in Texas.  There are so many plants which should not go in the ground until "the danger of frost is past".  The problem, of course, is that some years, the final frost is at the end of January, and other years, it isn't until sometime in April.  Average final frost is the first week of March here in College Station, but we take that with a grain of salt.

We do have some indicators that it might be okay to plant our tomatoes and peppers this week; the Weather.com forecast for the next ten days shows us not getting below 40° anytime soon.  There is a lot to be said for this forecast's likelihood to be accurate, and it dovetails pretty nicely with the historical records around these parts -- a little chillier than usual, but not by a whole lot.

Of course, it did snow just a week or so ago, so there may be some justifiable concern that perhaps... just maybe... it is too optimistically sunshiney and warm.  Maybe?

The climate pages over at NOAA.gov tell a somewhat different story, even if not necessarily mutually exclusive.

Basically, for the next month, we will be "blue for 'Brrrr!!!'" cooler than usual.  That does not necessarily mean that we will have any freezing temperatures... but one never knows.  The latest forecast for El Niño shows that the actual ENSO (El Niño Souther Oscillation) event will be subsiding within the next 30-45 days... but that the effects of the event will linger past the actual "end" date.

So.  We are not going to plant peppers and tomatoes this weekend.  We are going to weed, turn over garden plots, and have guests over to sip wine, munch on cheese and crackers, and talk about religion and politics.  You've got to fertilize your garden at every available opportunity, you know, and nothing can do that better than heated discussion of religion and politics.

Until the weather breaks...

Happy farming!