We have landed

We arrived a couple of days ago in the Vancouver area after driving across Canada from Montreal. Chris has a nice place to stay in Vancouver, and has made contacts with some friendly folks who have offered to show him around. He is studying his options for how to spend the next little while. Gratefulness for webs of interconnection weaving links with friends of friends across the continent!

Rosemary is back in Oregon with her family, with many projects (including petitioning for Chris' papers).

More on our adventures soon.

Starting a Garden from Scratch

This year, like last year, we started a new garden where there had previously been grass. We have therefore had opportunities to try out various strategies. Here’s the outcome of these experiments.

Garden bed preparation

Last year, we tried turning over the sod so that the grass would die and the roots would be exposed and dry up. This doesn’t work: grass is feisty, and just grows up around the edges of the sod, even if the part beneath dies. The implications for fertility and soil life also seem mediocre with this process.

Both times, we tried removing the grass and shaking the earth off the roots. This also leaves a lot of roots and also weed seeds which have been lying dormant, and therefore it takes no time at all for a little jungle to spring up from the earth.

We tried sheet mulching, and this is probably the most successful method. The trouble is it takes a lot of compost and mulch to cover a large area, so this year we: a) removed the grass and superficial topsoil and composted it, b) removed the rest of the topsoil, c) loosened the subsoil, d) laid down the cardboard and replaced the topsoil on top of it, followed by dry mulch (bracken or hemp). This was a long and difficult process which we could have avoided if we had had masses of compost and just done the sheet mulching straight on top of the grass. The ground was very compacted (it had been a horse pasture), which was another reason we wanted to loosen the soil before sheet mulching.

The results were very good; we found that the soil stayed moist for a long time under the cardboard, and we had little trouble with weeds. I think the cardboard took care of any remaining grass roots, while the mulch on top took care of the seeds left in the soil. Sheet mulching was perfect for the nightshades and perennial cabbages. In the future, I think we'll try making it thicker, with more carbon mulch, mixed if necessary with blood meal or some other high nitrogen material, for additional on-site compost production and increased benefits from the sheet-mulching.

For beds in which we wanted to plant seeds (greens, beets, carrots, flowers), we decided not to sheet mulch as this didn’t seem compatible with starting seeds. The greens we planted early did alright because they grew fast and out-competed weeds anyway. Our kale and beet patch was very weedy, though the weeds were mostly very small. Presumably over the years there will be less weeds as the seeds that were present in the ground run out.

Start Small

We didn’t! We really wanted a big garden, something that would be challenging and full of food and lessons. The thing is, the bigger it is, the more dispersed your energy gets and the less effort you can spend on it per surface area. Therefore a larger garden will be less productive per unit of surface area. We definitely observed this as there were always, at any given time, parts that weren’t producing. This is the basic principle of square foot gardening. While in Montreal, I saw square foot gardening as a sort of punishment or affliction that city dwellers have to put up with due to space restrictions. Now I appreciate the underlying tenets: the smaller the garden, the easier it will be to take care of it, and the more productive it will be per unit of area.

The other thing is that we burned out a little after the mad rush to plant of the spring, and pulled back after that from the garden. I think that if we had started fewer plants of fewer varieties, we would have been less overwhelmed and more contented with our garden during the summer. We felt the pressure also to plant any successful seedlings as it was very hard to discard any, but in the end our garden was a bit too dense and unwieldy. So, when starting our own seedlings, we need to remember that some of them will need to be sacrificed for the others to grow optimally.

Also, a new garden usually takes a lot of raw materials: compost, mulch, sticks for trellises, maybe some garden furniture, stones or other landscaping stuff. Therefore starting small and really enhancing the fertility and beauty of the garden seems like a better course of action than spreading mulch too thin to be effective or running out of compost/manure half way through. After the first year, hopefully mulch plants will kick into action and the compost pile will be yielding, which will provide the resources for a successful expansion.

Plant Selection

I think that starting with lots of perennials and a few annuals would be a good balance. Perennials need time to get established, so I’d recommend putting them in first, so that in the second year there will already be a bunch of stuff growing and you can concentrate your energy on expanding on that. If you plant just annuals the first year, you will have to start all over again the next time. Annuals are not the best use of energy (or money), in the longer run.

On the other hand, it's good to make sure that some really reliable producers are included: I'm thinking about chard, beats, kale, herbs. Stuff that most likely you'll get more of than you want, unless you try very hard to mess things up. And also, I wish we'd used more earlier producers. We had very little before mid-July and the first tomatoes. Early producers like turnips, beats, greens, spinach, kohlrabi, while not the most exciting to eat (I think), are really nice to have around for their fast growth. They really help to extend the season both ways.

Planting patterns

We were a bit obsessed with companion planting this year. It must be said that in winter, when the garden is just a dream and we long to be outside with the sun warming our bones, thinking about plant combinations is like fantasizing! In the end though, companion planting is a nebulous pseudoscience which should be taken with a pinch of salt. It’s very hard to know what combinations are going to work (marginally) better than others, which you learn by observation rather than book/internet research anyway. So, no point sweating over that too much!

Rows

We’ve been resisting planting in rows, which we saw as an unnatural imposition of puritanical will upon the naturally flowing patterns of the plant world. The fact is, I think that some things benefit from being planted in rows, especially root vegetables (our broadcasted carrot seeds didn't come to any good, and we were mostly powerless to effectively care for them, spread all over the place as they were) and some alliums that need to be fairly weed free and thinned correctly. It’s virtually impossible to effectively weed young plants that aren’t in rows! Rows make is easier to identify young seedlings, and to thin them when the time comes, and then also to harvest them. Ease of harvesting was something we totally didn’t consider at the end of a rugged winter, when it was unimaginable that harvesting, that holy sacred grail, could ever be anything but pure bliss! It's really something that needs to be planned for in order to make the best use of the garden's gifts!

On the other hand, bigger plants that grow for the whole season, like tomatoes or peppers, don’t seem to need to be planted in lines as much (except maybe for ease of trellising, and, again, harvesting). Plant guilds, which are something we are just beginning to explore, also brings an end to the need for rows, but this is sort of beyond the scope of a veggie garden.

Conclusion

My biggest take home messages from this year are: we must make sure to manage our energy for our own pleasure and for the benefit of the garden (start small, don't waste energy on marginally beneficial plants, use perennials rather than annuals when possible), and relax about the theory: stuff like companion planting, soil fertility, etc., which you learn as you go along anyway, rather than sweating over volumes of gardening books that usually don't agree anyway. A creative balance of experimentation and sure shots will ensure learning and satisfaction will both flow from the garden.

Three Sisters Musings

So now I’m sitting in the back of the motor home, and we’ve just passed Ottawa. This is a good time to spend reading and writing blog posts! Reading through Toby Hemenway’s “Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture” (what an awesome book!), I came across a discussion of the Three Sisters. Since returning to Turtle Island (aka North America), I’ve also had conversations about this guild with other gardeners. One of our friends even has a tattoo of the Three Sisters on his calf! So here are some more thoughts that came out of all this. It seems to me that the main benefit of this guild over separate patches is to the corn, which, according to one Jane Mt. Pleasant of Cornell University, yields about 20% more (measured in calories) than corn grown alone. Plus you get some squash and some beans in the deal, but I think that if you want a serious amount of beans, you need a separate bean patch (which is easy enough to do).

I’ve been puzzled by the mound pattern of planting for the corn and beans that I have seen in several instructions. They describe mounds about 20 inches across and 12 inches high, or some variation of these dimensions. I never quite understood the point, except maybe so that the ground would heat up sooner in the spring. The method described in Gaia’s Garden seems to make more sense in this respect: corn is planted 3 or 4 kernels per hole, about 3 feet apart. No thinning is done as you want 2 or 3 stalks per hole, which explains the planting distance. It’s only when the corn sprouts that you mound it, which helps warm the ground and speed up the growth of the corn. Beyond this, bean and squash planting occurs in the same way, about two weeks after the corn has sprouted. The author recommends inoculating the beans to ensure the presence of nitrogen-fixing bacteria.

Another thing that could really help boost squash and bean production is adding some pollinator attractors, just like the Anasazi of the Southwest added the Rocky Mountain bee plant (Cleome serulata), thereby bringing in the experience and blessings of the insect nation. We noticed that our squashes were aborting from lack of pollination, and to be fair with the bees, who are undoubtedly doing their best as it is, the squash flowers were fairly few and far between at any given moment, and they were hidden beneath a dense canopy of leaves. In addition, pollination would require pollinators to visit a male flower first, and then a female flower, of the same squash species! So, some early blooming flowers would be a small compensation for the efforts of insect visitors.

In the future I’d try the method described in Gaia’s Garden. I think a lot of people get discouraged after trying the Three Sisters once, especially if they are used to another method that worked pretty well for them, but considering the variations in the planting instructions it is only to be expected that results will vary.

Our changing plans

So, we still have a few posts in the works to conclude about our garden this year, but first, something entirely different.

We have both flown back to North America, and our plan was to go from Montreal to Oregon, to live there (where Rosemary's family comes from). We talked to a US immigration officer who said that we could just go there and apply for me to adjust status then (it was a bit complicated applying from France).

Unfortunately, we were informed at the border that this was not true, and I was denied entry (this was a few hours ago). Since we don't have a home in Montreal anymore for me to stay at, we decided the best would be for us to drive through Canada instead of through the US, and to drop me off in BC, where I could wait for my papers. Rosemary has to go back to the US to petition for me, but if I'm in BC we would be able to see each other during this process that could take 1 to 6 months.

So we're happy to have a plan again. The thing is, we don't know anyone in BC, so we've been appealing to our friends to try and make some connections. Do you know of anyone in BC whom I could stay with for a bit? A farm that takes workers?

Europe vs. North America: Sustainable Agriculture

I'm often asked if I miss the country I grew up in, France, or how living in Europe compares to living in North America. I invariably say that I prefer life in the "New World", though the reasons I give tend to vary. I'm not totally sure what the reasons are really, but they seem to center around an increased feeling of freedom, freedom from the conformity and rigidity that has had centuries to settle over every aspect of the life of a European, a sense of the future being still something to be written, something to fight for, to dream, rather than a looming and inevitable social order already determined by the deep ruts set by a bloated, crushing history.

Pondering the difference between these two related, Western societies is a common pattern for me, and so it was when I watched two films on sustainable agriculture these past few months. One film was French, Colinne Serreau's "Solutions Locales à un Désordre Global", and the other was a US/Canadian documentary about permaculture by our friend Donna Read and Starhawk, "Permaculture: The Growing Edge", which we saw at Donna's house when we were there in September.

Both films are based on a similar observation: modern industrial agriculture, like our modern capitalist society in general, is radically unsustainable. Both films then go on to show how restructuring our agriculture (and therefore our society), are necessary steps if we are to develop a sustainable culture.

What struck me though were the different paradigms that emanated from the way the subject was approached. The approach taken by the permaculture crowd and presented in the North-American documentary is that self-reliance on an individual level, or maybe family or household level is the necessary basic condition to build a plentiful, sustainable society. Community is a theme that pervades the film also, but as is explained by one of the interviewees, community is something that the individual needs. In this way, community is seen as an assortment of individuals coming together to seek fulfillment of their basic, individual social needs. Permaculture, sustainability, and community are therefore seen as lifestyle processes undertaken by individuals, and that grow, through the grassroots, into a sustainable society.

In contrast, "Solutions locales..." focusses on the ills caused to society by our deficient and destructive mode of agriculture, and seeks solutions at the level of farms and broad organizations seeking to reclaim a sane way of sustaining society. Instead of seeking an empowering, sustainable lifestyle for individuals, the film seeks to determine how ecological farms can be developed to feed a large number of people in society, or how organizations such as Vandana Shiva's Navdanya seed saving organization can help a whole class of farmers. Much more attention is paid to yield and efficiency, while no mention is made of individual scale matters such as homesteading and the emotional well-being resulting from living a life ostensibly in harmony with the Earth.

I loved both films, and gained different insights from each. From "Growing Edge", I felt inspired and empowered about how individual lifestyles choices can be made in a way that impacts other people; from "Solution Locales..." I gained a deeper scientific knowledge of the problems surrounding industrial agriculture, and a clearer view of a sustainable, societal level of organization. Both films conveyed the priceless humor and good nature of people dedicated to this movement, even amidst the depressing reality that agriculture has a long way to go yet.

Garden conclusion 2010

Our garden adventure has drawn to an end this year, somewhat prematurely as we left France to return across the pond, to continue our North American adventures. I will leave here some impressions and lessons we learnt from this experience, may it help or at least amuse any gardeners reading this!

• The Three Sisters are a lot of fun to play with! (See multiple other posts in this topic)

• Perennial cabbages are amazing!

• 10 varieties of cherry tomatoes makes your plate pretty and your mouth water!

• Chickens are amazing garden companions, I wouldn’t like to be without them!

• Sheet mulching is great; top mulching is key!

• Many things can be started as seedlings, for the better: beets, legumes, cabbages, squash…

• Many weeds are delicious! Few are a serious pain!

Overall when I think of the lessons learned in the garden this year, I think of a lot of things I want to do differently next time:

• Plant lots of early ripening vegetables, even if they are not the usual favourites: beets, turnips, radishes, kohlrabi are great for an early harvest, are really are much better when they come from your very own garden. I don’t want to be waiting for my first tomatoes in mid-July for a first harvest again!

• Greens need to be planted regularly. I know it, but I forget it. We only got greens for a short period this year because we made only one planting.

• More perennials! I want perennial alliums, cabbages, groundcherries (for real! Physalis heterophylla), sunflowers, lovage, watercress, Good King Henry, New Zealand Spinach, etc.

• More guilds! Using nitrogen fixing trees in the garden, creating perennial guilds with walnuts, goumis, paw-paws, wolfberries, currants, maypop, hazelnuts, mulberries, Saskatoon berries, etc.

• Back to more conventional plants though, I want to grow at least a few totally reliable veggies, like chard and cabbage. Things that can be counted on. I’ll be more selective and ignore the dodgy-sounding plants like garden huckleberry or snake gourds. I mean, experimenting is good, but selecting experiments that seem promising beats being indiscriminate and buying anything I don’t know for the sake of novelty!

• There’s no rush to plant early. Plants that are seeded or transplanted into a cold ground will not do well, whereas plants that might be started later will easily catch up. Plant growth isn’t linear in that way, it depends on the weather conditions. Maybe with a good greenhouse or coldframe set up it can still be beneficial to plant early, but otherwise it can be a waste of time.

Looking forward to more gardening, farming, permaculturing wildly in the future!