The Chatelaine's Keys

Sharon February 12th, 2009

For most people with a medium sized yard, a little livestock will allow you to do a little more with your space than you can probably do without them.  It isn’t a perfect equation, of course, they take up space, cost money and consume food.  But often, the net return, the net pleasure of the experience, and the quality of the food, manure and environment means you get more than you put in.  One of the most important things you can do is keep records, so you know that you are getting more back than you put in.

When you get livestock, however, you need to ask yourself some questions.

 1. What do I really expect from them?  Am I being realistic?  – There usually is no perfect creature out there.  The perfect goat, the perfect chicken breed – maybe they exist, maybe not, but what really matters are your expectations.

2. Am I a livestock person? Animals require your attention every day.  When it is freezing out, the rabbits may need their water replaced 3 or 4 times a day. The chickens molt and stop laying.  Everything escapes occasionally and has to be chased around.  Even if you plan to eat an animal, that’s no excuse (in fact, IMHO, it is less excuse) for not keeping it warm, safe, healthy and well cared for during its life.  Don’t get animals you don’t plan to take real and proper care of.

3. Am I prepared to put it out of its misery?  Peter Bane, permaculturist extraordinaire once answered a question by saying “If you’ve got livestock, sooner or later you’ll have deadstock.”  And sooner or later, you are going to have an animal who is suffering, or that you want to eat, or that needs to be removed from your breeding, and you will have to kill it, or get someone to.  That is, even the most ardent vegetarian may have to kill an animal that is suffering.  If you aren’t able to do this, or find someone who is, think hard about whether it is a good idea.  IMHO, our animals deserve lives with as little pain as possible – and that means that relieving their pain when it gets to be too much is part of our job.

4. Am I ready to raise meat animals?  You don’t have to eat the animals you raise – hens, quail, angora rabbits… these animals can be productive pets.  But if you are going to raise a meat animal, you have to be ready to butcher them – or find a pro.  Learn how to do it before you need to, and make sure you will be able to do it humanely.

5. Think about how they will be fed if the supply lines get cut.  If you are planning on raising chickens for long term food self-sufficiency, great.  But ask yourself where their food will come from if the feed store closes near you.   Think about alternatives. Moreover, my feeling is that as much as possible, our meat should not compete with land planted to human food plants (grains, legumes) but act as a supplement to it – ethical meat eating begins, IMHO, from the point that says “I want to put a few grains and beans into my animals as possible, and make the best possible use of space and plants that people can’t eat or grow human food on.”  Your animals should be eating grass and scraps whenever possible.  But to do that, you  may need to do some real research on optimal and healthy diets with supplementation for your animals - make sure you know what you are doing. 

So let’s start with the little livestock, of the sort suitable to apartments, backyards, etc…  Basically, this post will only cover livestock not bigger than a breadbox .

- Worms.  Even urban dwellers can have worms – I know someone who made a bench out of his worm bin.  You’d never know you were sitting on top of 20,000 wigglers (this is the sort of thing that would have filled me with glee when I was a kid!).  Worm keeping basics here:  http://plantanswers.tamu.edu/publications/worm/worm.html

Pluses of worms: Great, great compost, those who can’t compost outside in winter or in apartments can make good use of their kitchen scraps, provides great liquid fertilizer (worm juice) and great solid fertilizers (castings), kinda cute.

Minuses: If you overfeed, you can get fruit flies, if you don’t like worms, you have worms in your house .

 - Rabbits. Rabbits are generally considered pets, so your local zoning is not likely to give you problems with them.  They are quiet, easy to raise and care for, and easy keepers – they can live mostly on marginal weeds and a little, quite cheap, supplemental feed.  They make great little lawn mowers if you tractor them.  You essentially can choose between (assuming you are keeping them for something other than the mowing and manure and cuteness factor) between angora rabbits for fiber or meat rabbits for meat.

Fiber info: http://mammals.suite101.com/article.cfm/angora_rabbit_wool

Meat Rabbit info: http://www.i4at.org/lib2/rabbits.htm

Pluses of Fiber rabbits: Friendly, adorable, you can make hats and socks out of their fiber, they aren’t as good diggers as most other rabbits, and can probably be kept in a bottomless bunny tractor, great manure, fiber is stunningly warm.

Minuses of Fiber rabbits: You really need to be willing to spend time once a week or so grooming them, they need more protein than meat rabbits, so you might need to feed more pellets, they can get wool block (they lick the wool and it blocks their intestines) or infected areas if you let them mat up, not quite as enthusiastic breeders (at least mine aren’t) as other rabbits, not good in hot climates where they overheat easily.

 Pluese of meat rabbits; One of the most productive converters of food people can’t eat to food people can in the world, delicious meat (yes, once I did not keep kosher), can provide a partial solution to the pet food dilemma for cats and dogs, quiet, easy to butcher.  Rabbit manure is great for the garden, they breed like rabbits.  The hides have value as well.

Minuses of meat rabbits: They are cute, and you may have trouble butchering them.  Rabbit meat is extremely lean, which means that you and your pets will need some other source of fat, they do need some extra attention in warm weather, must be kept in bottomed pens  if tractored.

Pigeons/Doves – Many city dwellers have pigeons anyway .  Others keep them for messaging or pleasure.  But you can eat them, or train them to carry message or even race them (although the latter seems outside the usefulness focus of this course) - and you can keep them in coops on rooftops and in backyards.  Most can be let out to forage and will require only a small amount of grain from you.  They don’t provide a lot of meat per bird, but they are prolific (duh ), and their manure is good for the garden.

Pros of pigeons – Pleasant cooing noises, suitable to highly urban settings, gentle, easily handled, easy to raise with minimum investment, provide meat, with extensive training some communications capacity and manure.  They can eat bread scraps and waste grain from

Cons of pigeons – Some people and municipalities don’t like pigeons and strongly discourage them, they can be messy, they are a prey of many other birds, so expect to lose some.

More about raising pigeons: http://www.bokhari.com/

Quail – Quail are very small, tasty game birds that can be raised in cages in urban spaces quite easily.  They are prolific egg producers – 20 tiny quail can keep a family in eggs using much less space than chickens and less feed.  Some people who can’t eat chicken eggs can eat quail eggs.  You can also eat the quail, although they are very small – and there are markets for them at upscale restaurants.

Pros of Quail: Very small, very adaptable to cage culture, great egg layers, kinda cute.

Cons of Quail – They are small – a fair bit of work to butcher for what you get.  They rarely hatch their own eggs, so you will either have to incubate them with an electric or gas incubator, or put them under a broody hen.  If you don’t have a broody hen, that means your flock depends on electricity.  Some areas are hostile to gamebirds in zoning.

Guinea Pigs/Cuy: While most of us associate these with childhood pets, in many parts of South America, Cuy is a commonly eaten meat.  Because they are traditional pets, you aren’t likely to have much trouble keeping them.  They are cheap, and mostly odorless even indoors, as long as you take decent care of them.  Their meat is said to be extremely sweet and tasty, and a UN FAO study found that raising guinea pigs for meat in South America provided more protein for less cost and effort than raising pigs or goats.  20 females and 2 males can keep a family in reasonable supplemental meat.  The major problem may be the freakout factor, since they are so associated with pet culture.  Do not get the long haired, fuzzy beatrix potter type, since these will not gain weight as well.

Pros – Very tasty meat, easy to keep, cheap to get started with, lovely pelts, high in protein, good manure, prolific breeders.

Cons – Vulnerable to disease, require good ventilation and housing, so cute they may be hard to butcher, associations with pets hard to break, low fat meat requiring supplementation, can be loud at night if kept indoors, more difficult to butcher than rabbits, but still not that hard.

 More on home guinea pig culture: http://www.echotech.org/network/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=589

Chickens: The uber-backyard livestock. Who doesn’t like chickens?  They are even trendy!  3 Good layers will give you an average of 2 eggs a day year round, heavily weighted to spring and summer.  They can forage about half their diet, if given the right one, and can live fairly well on urban restaurant scraps.  They come in many sizes, tolerance to heat and cold and appearances.  Good for vegetarians, since they can be kept for eggs only.  Banties have been known to be kept in apartments, but this isn’t ideal.

Pros: Familiar, eggs are nutritionally brilliant, hens are pleasant to be around, you don’t need a rooster since they can be acquired in most localities, tasty, familiar meat, friendly, easy to accomodate, great manure once composted, will eat plenty of bugs, do great in chicken tractors.

Cons: Not all breeds equally good at foraging, some localities prohibit them, if you aren’t feeding them mostly on scraps and forage, you’ll be feeding human food (grains) to critters, which isn’t that efficient, can be a garden pest, can scratch the ground down too far if kept on a small piece of land.

Lots of resources on backyard chicken keeping – here’s just one: http://www.backyardchickens.com/

 Fish: One of the most exciting ways of producing small scale protein in a backyard is aquaponics, which involves fish farming and using the nutrient rich water to then grow plants. Tilapia, the traditional fish, are delicious and have the best feed conversion ratio of any animal protein.  You can do a full scale indoor version info here: http://www.ehow.com/how_2087955_build-small-aquaponic-garden.html or you can do backyard fish farming, where fish are raised in stock tanks and the water is used to fertilize garden plants. 

Pros of fish culture: Makes superb use of resources, fish has powerful nutritional benefits, can bring fish to inland areas with contaminated fresh water, helps the garden enormously, fish are probably the easiest animal to slaughter.

Cons of fish culture: Indoor aquaponics is extremely energy and resource inefficient, most small fish operations will not be self-reproducing and depend on farmed spawn.

More here: http://journeytoforever.org/farm_pond.html

Bees: If there is one single kind of small livestock keeping that I’d love to see expand, it would be beekeeping.  The more small beekeepers using low input practices, the better off we are in the face of Colony Collapse Disorder and the destruction of native pollinators.  One study found that urban bees actually do better than rural ones, because they don’t face monocultures, nor come into contact with so much agricultural spraying.  We lose a lot from inadquate pollination – we really all need to play a part here.  Plus, there’s the honey, the wax… what’s not to love?

Pros of bees: Improve your garden crop production, provide a supply of sweets, can be a source of income even with a few hives, suited to urban life, can provide beeswax for candles, we desperately need more bees.

Cons of bees: Vulnerable to disease, bears and agricultural spraying, can be expensive to get started, tough on the allergic, some places limit zoning, some people are scared of them.

Beekeeping basics: http://www.gobeekeeping.com/lesson_one.htm

Frogs and Turtles: All over asia, wherever paddy rice is cultivated, people eat frogs, and they really do taste like chicken.  If you have wetlands or a pond, you could consider raising frogs for meat.    The edible part is the legs.  Turtles are also quite edible, and can be raised in backyard ponds.  The problem I see is this – all the information I was able to find on the web involves starting from native species you harvest from your pond, but many frogs and turtles are endangered, and I don’t want people taking them out of the wild. So until/unless someone here can find a reliable source for farmed turtle and frog starts or eggs, I’m staying out this one.  Anyone want to help out?

Ducks: A couple of ducks are incredibly endearing.  Many ducks are extremely disgusting .  Generally speaking, my suggestion for backyard producers would be to raise a couple of khaki campbell ducks for eggs, rather than any large number of meat ducks, because they are messy and trash the ground under them.  A few ducks, however, are charming, funny, great garden buddies (they love slugs) and can live mostly on your scraps.  They can produce as many eggs as chickens, and are far friendlier.  The eggs are amazing for baking. 

Pros of Ducks: Cuteness and amusement factor, eggs, delicious dark meat, good fat quantity (could be useful), superb slug eaters, will not do as much damage to garden cros as chickens, can be used to till up ground.

Cons of Ducks: Even as animals go, they poop everywhere.  They will trash a small pond rapidly, so make sure they have a dedicated duck water source, they do need a pond or at least reliable water source, can fly, will till up ground that you don’t want tilled.

More about Ducks: http://www.pathtofreedom.com/pathproject/simpleliving/ducks.shtml

 Remember, whatever animals (if any) you choose to have, you need to design them into your life and landscape – the happiest combinations of creatures are a creature that fills an ecological niche and a person who really thinks that critter is cool and wonderful.  Think about how these animals can be integrated into your life. 

Your design strategies should include manure management, plenty of space to give the animal a good life, and a plan for its whole lifecycle.  There are lots of ways to use animals to get the most possible return – for example, chicken runs along the edge of the garden will keep grass and weeds from penetrating, rabbit housing can be put over worm composting, animals can be used to clean up garden wastes, till ground, fertilize it.  And, they can bring happiness.

Ok, next time: Critters bigger than a breadbox.

 Sharon

• garden design , livestock
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Sharon February 11th, 2009

“It was much pleasanter at home, when one wasn’t always growing larger and smaller, and being ordered about by mice and rabbits.” – Alice in Wonderland

Rod Dreher has a fascinating observation over at his blog.  He talks about watching an interview on CNBC with Taleb and Roubini:

“Both men are notorious bears, and called the current crash long in advance. Both, CNBC tells us, were the hottest tickets at the recent Davos gathering. CNBC called them in to discuss the crisis. Roubini and Taleb were both trying to make their case for why what’s wrong with the economy is radical, is fundamental, goes to the very base of all our economic assumptions.

The CNBC twits just wanted stock tips and investing advice.”

The more I think about his point, the more I think that it epitomizes something fundamental about the intellectual shift we have to make – and about how hard it is to make it.  Moreover, it caused me to think about how hard it will be to unmake that shift.  I commented on the piece at Rod’s blog, and said,

 ”I think the biggest problem is that people have been told that investing is a form of saving – *the* form of saving, in fact. And they believe it – even when their “savings” are being ripped out of their hands. So the problem, through that lens, must be investing in the wrong things, rather than the whole fact that what you put into the markets should be what you can afford to lose, not what you depend on for basic things.

Add to that the fact that the society has transformed basic things like security in old age and education into things that can only be achieved through fake saving (investing) in a market that goes up, rather than things ordinary people could have, and it is no wonder that people who live in this never-never land can’t grasp that it is a world of myth. That is, they know they are not going to be able to eat during retirement or send their kids to college on their income or on regular savings. But they haven’t yet grasped that the situation has changed radically and the choices are now – change the system or accept that a college education and independent retirement are no longer choices for most of us.”

I wanted to say more about this, though, because I think that while this does show where we’re not yet, it also gives us a glimpse of where we are a going, a change as radical as falling into Wonderland or Through the Looking Glass. 

Here is what Taleb and Roubini are telling us with their answer that they keep their money in cash – roughly translated this means “We expect the markets to decline still more.  We expect to lose anything we put into the markets.  We believe that money is safer in holes in the backyard than in the stock market.”

Here is what people who kept asking questions about college and retirement savings were saying, in translation: “We’re terrified to take our money out of the markets, and we’re terrified to leave it in.  We depend on the “fake saving” message of investment for basic things like food, housing, health care and education.  We know we have no way of insuring food in the pantry when we are old, or that our children will get an education without it, and we’re not yet ready to admit that our hope of those things is already lost, and thus, cut our losses.  We desperately need the market to go up, so we are in profound denial about what you are saying.  We have no alternate plan, and our government has no alternate plan.  If what you say is true, we face utter disaster.  Please tell me that there’s a way to make that not happen.”

And they are right.  Both sides of the discussion are right.  Without infinite growth, the hopes of an independent retirement were doomed – everyone was told they’d need half a million dollars or more to live on in retirement?  What was the likelihood of that money being saved over the course of 35 working years out a 50K per year salary?  Hmmm….

Four years at a State University costs $50,000 – a young family with two kids, who began saving at birth – what was the odds they were going to be able to pay for college without the markets?  None.

That is, it isn’t just that people bought the mantra of fake saving, it was that they knew that this mantra was their only hope and clung to it as people being swept away in a current cling to anything in reach.  And thus, most of us got into the stock market somehow.  In fact, we often didn’t have any choice – our pensions, our health insurance funds, our mortgages were invested without our consent.  Our companies matched not our savings, but our 401K contributions.  And all of this meant that the markets had an enormous amount of the average person’s money to play with.  This enforced participation meant that the growth cycle had a feedback loop going – more people had to play, which meant more pay.  Now we’re into negative loops.

We were lied to, and we were betrayed, and most of us will never see our money again.  And that leads to an even more important corrollary point – it will be a very long time before our society sees this level of investment again. 

Think about it.  I’m 35, and my friends in their 40s and early 50s are often already caring for or concerned about aging parents that depend heavily on their investments.  Many have lost nearly half of their money already, but haven’t pulled out of the markets because they have been told that this would hurt them, that it is a bad idea, and because they desperately need to believe that they someday will be able to retire.  They can’t bring themselves to accept that the money they have now may well be as well as they can do, because it will not support the future they’ve envisioned for themselves.  So they leave it in.

Many economists have estimated the bottom – quite a few have estimated it at Dow 4000 or so, while others are optimistic.  But let’s assume that the most optimistic estimates are wrong, and that much more of the money is going to disappear.  It took *30* years for the Dow to reach the same levels that it hit in 1929 – the recovery was not quick, and there’s really no certainty that we’d recover quickly either.

 So millions of baby boomers are facing disaster – either extra years of work, or poverty in old age.  And they are going to be angry and betrayed – none of them imagined their later years to be straitened and struggling.  They did what they were told.  And eventually, they will take what is left of their money out of the markets and salvage what they can – and they won’t put it back.  They won’t be able to afford to risk what little they have.

Shift down half a generation or a whole one, to my peers, and those slightly older and younger.  As we watch our parents struggle, how many of us are going to trust in the stock market for our own retirement?  As we explain to our kids why they may not get to go to college, are we going to put our limited funds there?  Universal investmen tis over – and we will remember our whole lives what the dangers of speculation are.  I’ve never met a peer of mine who expected to collect social security, and I don’t think that in 10 years, I’ll meet one who expects to derive money from a 401K.

The 20 and 30 year olds buried under massive student loans, the 19 year olds who will have to drop out because the college fund isn’t there – they will remember, inscribed on their chests where their vision of their future lay, that investment is not safe, it is not secure, it is not a way to ensure the future, but a way to betray it.

It took 30 years for the stock market levels to rise back up to the adjusted equivalents of the Dow in 1929 – in part, because it took 30 years for the people who were children in the Depression, and on whom the fear of banks and markets did not imprint, to grow up and tentatively step back into them.

It took 50 years, until the 1980s, to get levels of participation in the markets up to approximate the 1920s – until a generation of children who could not remember the Depression, and had only known growth had grown up.

 It was only after that that ideas like giving people their safety nets and letting the gamble in the markets with them came up – and anyone want to bet how long before the next time Social Security privatization comes to the table?

Let’s assume that peak oil and climate change simply aren’t that big a deal (for the record, I assume y’all know that they are).  Even without these ecological limits, the idea that the markets will rebound in the long term is probably dubious – because market participation depends on people who believe the “investing is savings” mantra.  And people who have seen it shown to be false will not believe it – you have to wait until a new generation of people, more gullible because they have not seen, arises.

And that means that even if we don’t face energy constraints (we do) and ecological constraints (we definitely do), we face capital restraints – much of our current infrastructure, the way of our way of life, was built with other people’s money, invested in the stock market.  Who will choose to give their money to corporations to spend?  Who will choose to see their health care, housing and education dollars gambled? And that means that our long term recovery prospects  must include the reality that the “investing is savings” mantra has been proved to be a lie, and it will be 20 years or more before anyone will come buying that lie again.

Now mixed in with energy and ecological constraints, I think the constraints in investment capital do mean that we must – I don’t mean should, but must, make our plans for the future very carefully, that we must choose now where to put our limited resources and energies, because they may well turn out to be more limited than we thought.  Down the rabbit hole we go – and it isn’t very clear what size we’ll be when we stop growing.

 Sharon

• economy
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Sharon February 10th, 2009

http://poweringdown.blogspot.com/2009/02/water-water-everywhere.html

 Aaron has a terrific post up about water issues and water harvesting at his blog, and he devotes an entire paragraph to the other end of the water issue – flooding, and drainage.  Me, I thought that I can’t be the only person in the world who thinks it is worth more attention than that .  While I know that water shortages are the big issue worldwide, where I live, too much water is far more often the problem.

My area gets more than 50 inches of precipitation a year, a mix of snow and rain – and usually pretty evenly spread out.  Our summers have warm days, cool nights and plenty of rain – now the summer 3 years ago when I barely had to water even my *container* plants because it rained so much is pretty unusual, but except for establishing seedlings occasionally, I have *NEVER* watered most of my garden.  The hose doesn’t even reach it.  The first two years we lived here were drought years, and even then, we did not water and things grew fine.

Part of this is because I live between two steep hills – most of the water runs down those hills, and eventually runs to the creek that borders the north side of my property.  Before it gets to the creek, it runs across most of the rest of my property.  During spring melt-off, we have several days of mild-to-moderate flooding.  And once in a while, we get serious flooding, usually in early spring. 

But even ignoring the flooding (and Aaron’s prescription to put your garden where it doesn’t flood is good), our soil tends to hold water.  Waiting for things to dry out is the real limiting factor in gardening – it isn’t warmth we need (although that helps the drying) but enough dry out to be able to go forward.  It really isn’t worth planting seeds into the muck – they simply rot.  Transplants can sometimes tolerate it, but honestly, everything sits in the muddy wet soil (with the exception of a few plants that like it) and waits for dryer days – I’ve learned the hard way not to rush it, that plants transplanted a week later when conditions are better grow faster than the ones that sulk because their early conditions weren’t better.

One thing that I’ve discovered is indispensible to wet gardening is mulch – now much is made of the capacity of mulch to retain water.  This is not exactly my issue.  Instead, I use sheet mulch to protect my soil from flooding and heavy rains – the mulched areas shrug off some of the water, and the organic material helps absorb some more of it, so my mulched garden areas tend to look better after spring thaw, and to be ready to plant earlier.  I rake away the mulch on warm day to let the soil warm a bit more, but I can be out on the mulched patches planting days ahead of any unmulched areas.  I’ve never read any other garden writer’s discussions of the value of mulch in wet climates.

 Generally speaking, as long as you have decent drainage and plenty of organic material, most garden crops tolerate the wetness pretty well – in fact, many of them like it.  We do have problems with tomato cracking, and with getting hot peppers hot enough for me, but container growing helps with the peppers, and harvesting regularly before the rains with the tomatoes.

If you don’t have decent drainage, you may have to get some.  At its simplest, you can dig a swale or trench and redirect water by hand.  If you get fancy, and go for tile and backhoes, you are looking at money.  We have areas still awaiting sufficient funds to justify the drainage work that is needed.  Still, we do save on irrigation hoses .  And we try, as much as we can, to work with what we’ve got, to see our wetness as an advantage, that brings other species and possibilities.

Perennial plantings that aren’t wetland tolerant get the dryest spots, and they generally do fine.  It is worth watching nature to see what does well – I have a thicket of cultivated plum trees in the back field that gets very wet in springtime – I was reluctant to plant much of anything but alders and elderberries there, because of the wet land, but native plum trees kept springing up, and I decided to take that as meaning I could get away with the cultivated type – and so I can, apparently.

Actual wet spots have their uses as well – I’m in the process of transforming the end of the side yard, which was uninspiredly planted to reed grass,  into a wetland garden – swamp white oaks have edible acorns, beautiful wood and are great fungal hosts, buttonbush is a nectary plant that blooms at a helpful time for wild pollinators, primroses and irises add beauty, alders fix nitrogen and are a coppicing and mushroom hosting species, elders, blueberries and cranberrybush viburnums provide food for me and for wildlife – what’s not to love about wet spots!  Not to mention the fact that the world is desperate for diversified wetlands – so not draining your land to get every single inch of cultivable space has some real merits.

The biggest problem, besides occasional flooding, of wet spots is leaching – the nutrients you place get washed away quickly, so fast you can’t keep up.  This is another good argument for mulched soil in my climate, for lots of organic matter and humus in your soil, for terra preta practices, and for emphasizing slow release fertility rather than quick. 

In the end, I personally like my wet spot – I’m grateful for the rains, and the snow.  But living on the damp edges of the world requires, as all spots to, becoming native to that place and its conditions.

 Sharon

• garden design , water
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Sharon February 10th, 2009

There are a million gardening books out there to tell you how to grow perfect tomatoes and lettuces. And that’s important – in my house, salsa is a food group. But the reality is that for those of us attempting to produce a large portion of our calories, tomatoes and lettuce are not sufficient – we need to get either the most calories or the best possible nutrition out of our kitchen gardens and landscaping. So I’ve compiled a list of plants that I think are an important addition to many home gardens – both annual and perennial.

1. Buckwheat. Buckwheat is the perfect multipurpose plant. Many of you have probably used it as a green manure, taking advantage of its remarkable capacity to shade out weeds and produce lots of green material. But it is also one of the easiest grains to grow in the garden – simply let it mature and harvest the seed, and it makes a delicious and highly nutritious salad and cooking green. Although it won’t be quite as good at soil building if you do it this way, buckwheat can be used as a triple-purpose crop – plant a few beds with it, harvest the greens steadily (but lightly) for salad (it is particularly good during the heat of summer since it has a lightly nutty taste not too far off lettuce and will grow in hot weather), cook some of the mature greens, harvest seed, cut the plants back to about an inch leaving the plant material on the ground. The buckwheat will then grow back up again, and you can harvest young salad greens and cut it back again for green manure.

2. Sweet potatoes. Think this is a southern crop? Not for me. I grow “Porto Rico” sweet potatoes in upstate New York. Garden writer Laura Simon grows them on cool, windy Nantucket. I’ve met people who grow them in Ontario and North Dakota. Sweet potatoes have quite a range if started indoors, and more northerners should grow them. They are enormously nutritious, store extremely well (some of my sweets last more than a year), and unutterably delicious. They do need light, sandy soil and good drainage, so I grow them mostly in raised beds with heavily amended soil – my own heavy wet clay won’t do.

3. Blueberries. If there was ever an ornamental edible, this is it. A prettier shrub than privet or most common privacy hedge plants, it produces berries and turns as flaming red as any burning bush in the autumn. I have no idea why more people don’t landscape with blueberries. Add to that the fact that blueberries constitute a “super food.” They have more antioxidants than any single food, and are nutritional powerhouses. They do need acidic soil, but there are blueberries for all climates. Definitely worth replacing your shrubs with.

4. Amaranth – I’ve grown amaranth before, but my first year growing “Golden Giant” and “Orange” was fascinating. In two 5′x4′ beds I harvested 11.2 and 13.9 lbs of amaranth seed respectively. The plants are stunningly beautiful – 9′ tall, bright honey gold or deep orange, with green variegated leaves. The leaves are also a good vegetable cooked with garlic and sauteed, or cooked southern style. Amaranth is an easy grain crop to harvest and make use of, is delicious, can be popped like popcorn, and makes wonderful cereal. Despite its adaptation to the Southwest (where it routinely yields extremely well with minimal water), it tolerated my wet, humid climate just fine.  My chickens love it too.

5. Chick peas. Unlike most beans, which must be planted after the last frost, chick peas are highly nutritious and extremely frost tolerant. Plant breeder Carol Deppe has had them overwinter in the pacific northwest, and they can be planted as early as April here, or as late as July and still mature a crop. Unlike peas and favas that don’t like hot weather, and most dry beans that don’t like cold, chick peas seem happy no matter what. If you’ve only ever eaten store chick peas, you’ll be fascinated to experience home grown ones – it is, in many ways, as big a revelation as homegrown tomatoes.

6. Beets. I know, I know, there’ s no vegetable anyone hates as much as the beet. Poor beets – they are so maligned. We should all be eating more beets – especially pregnant women, women in their childbearing years who may become pregnant, and those at risk of heart disease and stomach and colon cancer. Beets are rich in folate (which prevents birth defects) and in studies have shown enormous capacity to reduce cholesterol and blood pressure, and fight colon and stomach cancer. Beets store well, yield heavily, provide highly nutritious greens for salad and cooking and are the sweetest food in nature. If you hate beets, give them another try – consider roasting beets with salt and pepper, or steaming them and pureeing them with apples and ginger. Laurie Colwin used to swear that her recipe for beets with angel hair pasta could convert anyone into a beet lover, whereas a recipe for beets with tahini has converted many of my friends. Really, try them again!

7. Flax. You can grow this one in your flower beds, mixed in with your marigolds. Flax is usually a glorious blue – the kind of blue all flower gardeners covet. But the real reason to grow it is the seeds. Flaxseed oils are almost half omega-three fatty acids. A recent article claimed that we have no choice but to turn to GMO crops to provide essential omega threes without stripping the ocean – ignoring the fact that we can and should be growing flax everywhere, and enjoying flaxseed in our baked goods and our meals. Flax has particular value in nothern intensive gardening, which tends to be low in fats. If you grow more than you need, flaxseed is an excellent chicken feed – my poultry adore it.

8. Popcorn. If I could grow only one kind of corn, it would be popcorn, and popcorn is particularly suited to home scale gardening. There are many dwarf varieties, and many that yield well. And popcorn can be ground for flour (it is a bit of work, though, since popcorn is very hard), or popped for food. My kids like popcorn as breakfast cereal, or, of course, as a snack. Popcorn yields quite well for me in raised beds, and is always a treat at my house. It has all the merits of a whole grain, but is “accessible” to people not accustomed to eating brown rice or whole wheat – a great way to transition to a whole foods diet.

9. Kidney beans. While kidneys have lower protein levels than soy beans, they are very close to soy in total protein, and have the advantage of yielding more per acre. There are a number of pole variety kidney beans that are suitable to “three sisters” polyculture as well, so you can grow the two together. If I could grow only one dry bean (I usually grow 10 or more) it would probably be a kidney variety.

10. Rhubarb. Why rhubarb? Because it will tolerate almost any growing conditions, including part shade (most vegetables won’t), wet soil, and you jumping up and down on it and trying to get it out.  Once it is established, rhubarb is tireless. It is also delicious – it does require a fair bit of sweetener (stevia, applejuice or pureed cooked beets will do if you are avoiding sugar). We like it cooked to tart-sweet for a few minutes with just a little almond extract. But its great value is that it provides fresh, nutritious, “fruity” tasting food as early as April here, and goes on as late as July, happily producing spear after spear of calcium rich, tasty food, right when you are desperate for something, anything but dandilions and lettuce. I’m in the process of converting the north side of my house to a vast rhubarb plantation (ok, not that vast), because we can never get enough of it here.

11. Turnips. Let’s say you live in an apartment, and want greens all winter, but don’t have even a south facing windowsill available. What can you do? Well, you can buy a bag of turnips from your farmer’s market. Eat some of them raw, enjoying the delicious sweet crispness of them. Shredded, they are a wonderful salad vegetable. Cook some, and mash them or roast them crisp. And take a few of the smaller turnips, and put them in a pot with some dirt on it, and stick them in a corner – east or west facing is best, but even north will work. And miraculously, using only its stored energy, the pots will go on producing delicious, nutritious turnip greens even in insufficient light. It is magic. If you do have a south facing windowsill, save it for the herbs, and put your potted turnips in the others.

12. Maximillian sunflowers. These are the perennials. They are ornamental, tall and stunning in the back of a border. They will tolerate any soil you can offer them, as long as they get full sun. They also produce oil seeds and edible roots, prevent erosion and can tolerate steep slopes, minimal water and complete and utter neglect. Don’t forget to eat them!

13. Hopi Orange Winter Squash. We all have our favorite winter squash, and perhaps you know one that I’ll like even better. But this variety has the advantage of keeping up to 18 months without softening, delicious flavor that improves in storage, and high nutritional value.  

14. Annual Alfalfa. Most alfalfa is grown for forage, and it has to be grown on comparatively good, limed soil. But alfalfa is good people food too, and even a garden bed’s worth can be enormously valuable. First, of course, it is a nitrogen fixer. While you can grow perennial varieties, the annual fixes more available nitrogen, faster. It can be cut back several times as green manure during the course of a season, or you can harvest it for hay to feed your bunnies or chickens. Don’t forget to dehydrate some for tea – alfalfa is a nutritional powerhouse. And if you permit it to go to seed, the seeds make delicious sprouts and have the virtue of lasting for years. I’ve found that the annual version will make seed at the end of the season for harvest.

15. Potatoes. A few years ago I did an experiment – I threw a bit of compost on top of a section of my gravel driveway (and by “a bit” I do mean a little bit – not a garden bed’s worth but a light coating), added a sprinking of bone meal, dropped some pieces of potatoes on the ground, and covered them with mulch hay. Periodically I added a bit more and replaced the sign that said “please don’t drive on my potatoes” and in September, I harvested a reasonably good yield, given the conditions (about 30lbs from a 4′x4′ square). I did it just to confirm what people have always known – potatoes grow in places on rocky, poor soil (or no soil) that no other staple crop can handle. Don’t get me wrong – potatoes will be happier in better conditions, but potatoes can tolerate all sorts of bad situations, and come back strong. And potatoes respond better to hand cultivation than any other grain – until the 1960s hand grown, manured potatoes routinely outyielded green revolution varlieties of grains grown with chemical fertilizers. If there’s hope to feed the world, it probably lies in potatoes.

16. Sumac. No, not the poison stuff, but yes, I mean the weedy tree that grows along the roadsides here. That weedy tree, you may not realize, has many virtues. Besides its flaming fall color and value for wildlife habitat and food, sumac makes a lovely beverage. If you harvest the red fruits in July or August and soak them, you’ll get a lemony tasting beverage, as high in vitamin C as lemonjuice. Since sumac grows essentially over the entire US area that won’t support lemons, this is enormously valuable. You can can freeze or can sumac lemonade for seasoning and drinking all year round. Poison sumac has white or greenish white berries, so they are easy to tell apart. Sumac’s other value is as a restorative to damaged soil – densely planted sumac returns bare sand to fertility fairly quickly, as a University of Tennesee study shows.

17. Parsnips. If you don’t live in the northeast, or do biointensive gardening, you probably don’t eat parsnips. Me, I’m a New Englander, and the sweet, fragrant flavor of parsnips is a childhood joy. But even I hadn’t ever had a real parsnip – one left in the garden after the ground freezes for its starches to convert to sugars. Parsnips are one of the most delicious things in nature, nutritionally dense, and just about the only food you can harvest in upstate New York in February (you do have to mulch them deeply if you don’t want them frozen in the ground.

18. Potato onions. Onion seed doesn’t last very long – and that’s a worrisome thing. The truth is that if we can’t get seed easily, and we can’t grow out plants for seed easily because of some personal or environmental crisis, we might find ourselves without onions, and what a tragedy that would be. Who can cook without onions? No, we need to have onions. Which is why the perennial potato onions, that simply stay in the ground and are pulled and replanted are so enormously valuable – good tasting, put them where you want them, pull up what you need and ignore the rest. They’ll give you scallions before you could get them any other way, and will provide a decent supply of small, but storable and delicious onions.

19. King Stropharia Mushrooms  (aka winecaps) – Mushrooms have complex nutritional values, and offer soil improving benefits.  The King Stropharia has the advantage of growing well in wood chip mulch in your garden, having few poisonous cognates (ie, you are unlikely to kill yourself harvesting it, tastes great, and is a natural nematodacidal.  They give you something meaty and tasty from your garden and can actually improve total yields in a given space.  If you fear fungi, this is an easy one to start with.

20. Filberts/Hazelnuts – The best small space nuts, it has an astounding range and and various varities tolerate quite a number of soils.  The nuts are delicious, it is fairly easy to grow and the yields are generally high.  In cold climates, oil rich plants can be hard to come by – this is a useful exception Oh, and if you have chocolate, you can make that basic food staple, nutella .

21. Elderberries.  Got a wet spot?  What doesn’t care if it has wet feet, has virocidal qualities, incredible vitamin C value, delicious and nutritious flowers, grows like a weed, is ornamental and will feed the birds anything you don’t want.  Yup, the remarkable elder.  What’s not to love?

 22. Sunflowers – Our local dairy farmers sometimes alternate cow corn with sunflowers as a winter feed.  There is truly no more beautiful edible crop in the world than a field full of glowing sunflowers in late summer.  They would be valuable enough if they didn’t produce delicious food, high in vitamin E and a host of trace minerals, food for the birds, and stalks that when dry burn extremely well and hot in your woodstove. 

23. Rice.  In India, nearly half of all rice comes from the gardens of those who farm less than 5 acres – often from home plots of much less than that.  This is true over much of Asia – the staple food of their population is often grown in what we’d consider garden sized plots – and the aggregate feeds a population.  While the far northermost growers may struggle with this, rice is one of the few staple grains totally amenable to home scale cultivation, and if you can grow rice, you might want to consider it.  It is a nearly univeral staple – studies have found that rice allergy essentially does not exist.  While growing and harvesting rice on a home scale is some work (some cultures call it “the tyrant with a soul”), rice is worth the time and energy for many of us.

24.  Jerusalem artichokes – I know, duh.  Sweet and tasty, crisp and nutty, perennials who will take over your house if you let them – what’s not to love?  Those who worry that the bad guys are coming to take their food can plant these in their flower beds without fear that most people will recognize them as anything other than something pretty.  When first harvested, the carbohydrates are in the form of inulin so that diabetics can eat pretty freely of these. 

25. Kale/Collards.  They don’t mind heat – 100 degree days don’t phase them once they are mature.  They grow all summer, north or south.  They don’t mind cold – some strains will overwinter uncovered here in icy upstate NY, while almost all will overwinter covered.  They are nutritionally dense, great cooked, or raw in the baby stage.  In the cold, their starches turn to sugar.  Stir fry them with oyster sauce, steam them and toss them in vinagrette, cook them with bacon dressing – it doesn’t really matter, they are universally good. 

Sharon

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Sharon February 10th, 2009

Yours truly is having a media blitz this week (ok, a very, very small blitz).  First, there’s a Christian Science Monitor piece on the “Slow Fashion/Slow Clothing” movement, which apparently, I invented.  I never invented anything before, so that seems cool to me.  It was one of my very first published pieces.  I’ve been meaning to write something revisiting the question of how to dress ethically, so maybe this will be the kick in the behind that I need.  My family just thinks it is funny that my name is associated with the word “fashion” in any way, given that my motto for dressing is the same as the late, great Molly Ivins, who said that your clothes say something about you, and hers said “Woman who wears clothes so she won’t be nekkid.” 

Also, the Dallas Morning News ran a revised version of my essay about being a Jewish Farmer this week on their Sunday Commentary Pages.  I was very pleased and flattered that they wanted it, and am hoping that it will generate some discussion of Jewish and minority group agriculture.  A big thanks to Rod Dreher, who pointed the piece out to the relevant editor, and who almost certainly has done more to promote my career than I ever have!

Cheers,

 Sharon

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