The Chatelaine's Keys

Sharon October 22nd, 2009

When I worry about climate change, I often think first about human consequences. But the line between human losses and nature’s losses is pretty fine – literally a tree falling in the forest question. That is, if the sugar maples that turn my region into a blaze of red, the hemlocks that overshadow my creek disappear, who loses me or nature? The only answer is “yes.”

The evidence that any prevention of the worst forms of climate change would require radical action is becoming firmer.  If it is not already too late to avoid many of the worst effects of climate change, it shortly will be, and if we do not act quickly, our losses will grow each year. I see no signs of quick action. I hope for them, of course, and work for them, but there comes a point at which we all need to turn to the problem of mitigation.

If climate change cannot be limited, if we will see our local ecologies change - perhaps quite rapidly.  In general we will get warmer - but that’s not all - many places will get dryer, while others may get wetter.  Or areas may see one sort of change in the short term, and another later.  What we do know is that we’ll see more violent weather, more extremes of wet and dry, more extremes of temperature, more instability and uncertainty.  This affects both our ability to feed ourselves and also to preserve what we value in our region.

We will need to find ways to feed ourselves in our new climates, and in many ways that’s project enough.  But the land we husband can do more than simply feed us – it can soften the blows of climate change, help bring new and valuable species into regions just becoming able to support them, or on the contrary, help breed and adapt new varieties of old residents of our areas, so that they not lost to us. They can provide wildlife habitat for new and old species, and even microclimates, in which things being chased to extinction can survive. To an extent, we can even hold back raging floods and deserts with our hands.

Does that sound too extreme? It is, nonetheless, true. That is, one of the most remarkable examples of what small scale husbandry can do is shown by Wangari Maathai’s Green Belt Movement in Kenya, which has planted more than 30 million trees in Kenya, a nation deforested by a combination of colonialism and poor management. As deserts encroached, Maathai demonstrated the only way to keep them back was to create oases of trees, producing food, drawing up water, cooling people and making areas livable. The trees were planted, almost all by poor women, most of them desperately poor, who carry water to their trees each day by hand, because they know that the way to fight the desert is trees. My friend Kate worked for a while with the Green Belt Activists, and she said that in Kenya, trees are powerful – they free up labor for women who no longer have to walk miles for firewood, and provide food and security. But most of all, the trees create life – it is possible to live in a place shaded and lush with green, in a way it is not for most of us in the desert.

How many of us live in places where topsoil washes away, where rising temperatures are reducing water? We need a worldwide Green Belt movement, bringing suitable, food and wood producing trees to the driest and hottest places. That is the beginning of our gardens – the planting of the trees that will make them possible, that carry water from the deepest places, repair and hold soil, and create places we can live. We will have to choose our trees carefully, especially in the hottest and driest places, but we must plant them – and if necessary, carry water the way the women of Kenya do.

One tree that more of us ought to consider is Moringa, a naturalized shrubby tree that has several highly drought tolerant strains, but will grow as a die-back perennial as far north as Atlanta. The leaves are enormously nutritious, a single tablespoon of dried moringa containing 100 % of the Vitamin A, 14% of the protein, 40% of the calcium and 23% of the iron needed by a small child. The fresh leaves are rich in Vitamin C as well. The seeds make a high quality cooking oil, and the pods can be cooked and eaten like green beans. Moringa can become invasive in disturbed soil areas in tropical places, but offers enormous potential even in cold climates, grown as an annual, because of its potential use as a human and livestock feed.

There are other equally important trees - many oaks in warmer places are suffering from diseases, but there are oaks that can tolerate wide climate ranges, and acorns are an important human and animal feed - my own property has a long swath of swamp white oaks being nurtured in the wetlands for their future value.

Water is likely to be a huge issue all over the world. One of the things we can do to deal with this crisis is grow our own – although that requires irrigation water, Gary Nabhan of Native Seed/Search, in his book _Coming Home to Eat_ documents that generally speaking, homegrown produce, even in drought regions, uses up less water than produce trucked in from distant places. In many cases, the sheer cost of refrigerating produce means that it uses more water even within the dry region than it does if you grow your own.

 We must see water shifted to home agriculture when possible. But we also must minimize water use wherever possible, choosing annual and perennial food crops that can handle heat and drought, and growing them in appropriate ways, using greywater, rainwater, and water-thrifty growing techniques.

As we choose our perennial species, we must make decisions. Do we push our zonal limits, moving north plants from southern places that are newly able to survive here? This can be important work, enabling us to replace species as they are lost, and also providing food and habitat for birds and wildlife that move northwards faster than trees and plants can. 

This exercise does come with some risks – new species can naturalize more swiftly and aggressively than we would like them to. But human beings have perturbed the climate and transformed the world unwittingly, making mistake after mistake in our rearrangement of nature. We cannot wash our hands of the work and say “it is too complex for me – best not mess with it” – we’ve already messed with it, now our project is to use every power we have – mind, imagination, passion, strong backs – to do the imperfect best we can to shape our future.

We will undoubtedly make wrong choices and do harm – but better we try as wisely as we can to fix what is broken than we go on choosing without thought or care. And so we begin to push our limits. I have recently added the hardiest of the hardy bamboos to my yard, and we shall see whether it becomes a pest, or if it even survives. But the sheer usefulness of bamboo makes me think that the choice is worth the risk. And if it does not survive this time, perhaps in a year or two, it will. Although I hold little hope of it attracting pandas, it may yet serve other purposes for our native wildlife, and it certainly serves me.

 My Maypop has survived and fruited – as far as I know, it is the only maypop at my elevation in my region of rural upstate New York.   I know of no other quince trees up here, or of any medlars.  But perhaps, if they survive and fruits, someday the seeds will grow in someone else’s garden, and on again.

You see wild teasel growing all over the place here – its spiny heads are unmistakable. It is hard to imagine that this pesky weed was once a major crop in my area – used to brush down the nap of woven cloth in the cloth mills of Lowell, MA, farmers once grew acres of teasel – now it is a wild thing, unloved, untended. And it shows just how quickly crops can change – what will New Yorkers grow, for example, when olive oil is too expensive to import from California and Italy? My own guess is oilseed pumpkins that once filled fields in Germany. I plant them now, not because I think the days of oil pressing pumpkin seeds are coming quickly, but so that I will have seeds to share – and for their delicious pumpkin seeds.

We can also to a degree stem the tide of loss of beloved species. In my region, the two trees I first mentioned, the glorious Sugar Maple and the cooling hemlock, are both projected to disappear from my region this century. In the desert southwest, the pinion pines are disappearing, and one report suggests that someday, Redwood national forest will have no redwoods in it.

 But although species are lost, they rarely disappear entirely. Despite the depredations of Dutch elm disease, in my region you sometimes see that beautiful vase like shape in the middle of an old field, a tree that lived even though the rest did not. The American chestnut, that two centuries ago filled half the eastern forests, is gone – but there are a few left that grow up from stumps and even produce the occasional nut before dying back. It is these hardy, partially resistant specimens that offer hope to plant breeders that we might bring back the Chestnuts and the Elms. But that work isn’t the work of professional plant breeders alone. All of us who own even a tiny postage stamp of a yard can get to know our trees, watch them and the ones around them.

Perhaps your maples or pinion pines will show signs of withstanding warmer temperatures, or resistance to new diseases moving northwards. Perhaps if in the autumn, you take a garden bed and plant some seeds, you will give birth to the next generation of familiar plants.

Backyard plant breeding sounds hard, but it is as simple as this – when an annual or perennial crop is grown in your place, a host of information and slight adaptations are created to your conditions. The children of this plant will have a taste of those adaptations in their blood – study after study has found that the plant children of first generation transplants uniformly do better adapt more easily to a climate. That is, if you grow a heat loving squash like “Seminole” in your borderline too cool climate, and mature only one fruit, the next year the seeds of that fruit will be better able to handle your cool soil and nights, and perhaps you will get two, or three, and the next generation still better.

This works with both annual and perennial crops – seed saving is not just a way to save money or preserve genetic diversity, but a way of increasing yields, and often, increasing the nutritional value of a crop, for as plants respond to stress, they lose nutrients. A plant adapted to your region, soil, climate will have more energy to create beautiful, healthy, nutritious edible parts.

And it isn’t just the plants themselves that we can mitigate with.  Soil saving can mitigate the harm of climate change – rich soils, high in organic matter, over time can store as much carbon as a similarly sized forest, and pasture animals as well. If we were to transform the millions of acres of lawn to high humus pasture, or rich garden soil, we could soften the blow of climate change a great deal. The process of cover cropping, adding manures and nurturing a piece of land may not just help us adapt – it may limit the amount of adaptation we have to do.

 What about wildlife? We are destroying our species so thoroughly – a third or more by mid-century that we must give them a hand. Whether we manage 10 acres or a 20 x 20 yard, we can plant diverse species, and protect endangered wild plants at the margins of our gardens. We can work to attract wildlife, and to meet its needs for food, water, shelter, places to reproduce.

We can watch for new species, and changes in habit, and strive to adapt to them. One garden among a row of postage stamp lawns seems like it can do nothing to stem the loss of wildlife, but you’d be surprised. Thousands of insect and animal species can live in a single yard, and hundreds more may visit on their way somewhere else. Your milkweed may be the difference between monarchs next year and none at all; your wild places the one that the bumblebees rely upon.

Moreover, your influence doesn’t lie only on the ground, but on what you start in your neighborhood – the neighbor you persuade to leave a little space for the bumblebee, the native seeds you toss over the fence into the vacant lot. Farmers might consider bringing back their hedgerows, even using British style “laid” hedges as livestock fencing. In those hedgerows we can provide habitat, animal feed, and also wood and food for ourselves. Mixing traditional regional species with those who might adapt, we can create integrated plant colonies, or Permaculture style “guilds” that may adaptively work together, enabling the plants as whole to do better than any isolated specimen.

We can protect the most vulnerable creatures, at least a little.  In some places, the robins never leave at all for the winter, but here they still do, and every year I record the first time they return. This year it was January 27th, the first time I have ever seen them here in January. The first year it was mid-February. They lay earlier, too, and the ones that return each year to the nest in the old chicken house on our property sometimes lose their babies to cold. Last year, I started going out in the evening, once the parents were on their nests, and simply shutting the door to the chicken house, rising early in the morning and opening it. Last year, the first batch of babies survived.

It might be wisest to have our gardens do a little of each thing – bring in some new crops and push our regional limits, particularly when such crops might fill a void, such as pumpkin seeds in a vegetable fat poor region, or leguminous trees that can be interplanted with annual crops to feed the soil and respire moisture into the air. But also, we can protect and preserve what we have, watering a little, if we have it to spare, to enable the old crops to hang on a little longer, to find the ones that might survive.

As my own home gets warmer and wetter, it is a challenge to figure out what my new norms are. It is warming in the spring, but I’m not planting any earlier most years, because the rains are so heavy that it isn’t possible. In anticipation of a time when I might truly need the food I can produce in April here, I am building some beds, with gravel at their base, designed to dry out even in the wet times.  Many of us will have to adapt our gardens - or even move them.

 With a little protection, I hope that fresh greens and perhaps rhubarb will produce soon enough to bring the spring season home a little earlier, and to stretch the winter food reserves - we may as well take advantage of the small number of pluses of climate change - despite claims to the contrary, for food production, they are extremely few.

The changes in the spring flooding season also mean that it is more important than ever to keep topsoil from eroding and the banks of my creek stemmed with trees. My own security from flooding depends on not losing soil, and on keeping my ground intact. Near the ocean, this may mean finding salt tolerant marsh and reed plants to hold back soil, or in heavy wet soils, finding root crops, like cattails, that can take the place of less wet tolerant foods in our diets.

In hot, dry places, the whole system of agriculture may have to change to a vegeculture model. That is, field scale cultivation may not be possible as things get dryer and hotter – in many drought stricken parts of Kenya, the only places to grow gardens are under the shade of leafy oases. That means returning to traditional African models of agriculture, that integrated small, intermittent patches of root crops with perennial tree and vine crops (more on this here. 

When Europeans came to Africa, at first they could not understand how Africans fed themselves from their tiny gardens, but soon they realized that they cultivated the forest. We too will probably have to cultivate our forests, and change the shape of our food cultures and food production. That is, climate change won’t just change our gardens, but our diets as well. It may be necessary to give up the hope of summer salads in hotter places, and accept that summer is a time for other foods, or to give more priority to cool weather cultivation for staple crops.

Here in my garden, our growing seasons seems to lengthen on the autumn end – 4 out of the eight falls I’ve spent here, we’ve had a frost more than 10 days after our traditional frost date.   So I need to plant better fall gardens, and wait longer before taking out winter stores – if I can be growing cold hardy crops into early December, I should be.

There is no single process of adaptation – every region will have to deal with its own projections, and the specific ecology of a place and time. And as quickly as we determine what we should do, we will probably have to change it again – for climate change moves forward, whether we like it or not. But the preservation, sustenance and recreation of a piece of land is good work, and necessary work. The starting point is beginning to look hard at the realities of the problem, and anticipate what our landscapes may look like, and what our proper role in our new world is.

Sharon

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Sharon October 15th, 2009

Today marks the start of our Farm and Garden Design class, and I thought I’d start with the process before the process, if that makes any sense - with the dreaming that preceeds design. 

So close your eyes.  Or first, open them, and look at your property - or your friendly neighbor’s property, or your church’s lot, or your community garden plot.  Now that you’ve got it in your head, close your eyes.  And take what’s there and add on - what do you want to see?  Look at it closely.  Smell it. Taste it.  Listen to it.

What do you see?  A balcony that is covered with twining vines dripping grapes and hardy kiwis, with tomatoes and peppers, lettuce and herbs filling the corners, and scented flowers attracting butterflies and hummingbirds?  Do you see yourself on it, harvesting tomatoes and basil to go with that local mozzarella?

What do you see? A community garden plot that integrates flowers with food - borders of pot marigold and lavender around tall okra and sweet corn, pole bean tepees in front of a short hedge of blackberries, elder and honeyberries, and nasturtiums twining around the pumpkins.  Are you in it, watching the kids play with the children of other gardeners, while you make a salad of edible flowers and multicolored lettuces?

What do you see?  A patchwork of neighborhood gardens that you tend - a three sisters garden in your friend’s backyard, where her children help you twine the beans up the corn poles.  A perennial forest garden to be enjoyed by the neighborhood at your son’s school, where the kids devour blueberries and hide in the sunflowers?  A meadow of native prairie flowers in the front yard, attracting pollinators and wildlife.  A garden of roots and trees around in the back, and you invited everyone to a garden dinner, filling  your belly and your neighbors with sweet potatoe pie and plum tart.

What do you see?  A suburban backyard with a playset - and 10 raised beds, each filled with many meals worth of annual crops, and a chinese chestnut tree, that the children swing from and from which you harvest your winter’s nuts?  The birds nest in it, and the garden forms around its protective shape.  You see yourself planting seeds, while the little ones watch, and dig in their own patch, getting filthy and excited aboutt he possibilities of their earth.

What do you see?  An urban mini-farm on 1/10 acre - bees in their white boxes pollinate your dwarf apple trees, espaliered against the fence, chickens eat the weeds that poke up in the corners, rabbits feed the worms that feed your garden, and are fed in turn on stalks and scraps.  Meanwhile the lettuces wave like af flag and you walk with fragrant bundles to sell your herbs to the restaurant down the street.

What do you see?  A sunny half acre, filled with a medley of tropical plants - citrus, pomegranate, fig, banana, malinga.  Underneath the trees, grateful for their shade, run sweet potatoes and taro, while chile peppers and dryland corn fill a sunny corner.  Are you in it, watching the fish in your pond grow to dinner size, as the cat suns herself on a rock and dreams, just as you do, of a fish dinner.

What do you see?  A small farm of a few acres, with pigs that root out weeds and manure the ground and then feed your family, and chickens for eggs and a small woodlot, managed for mushrooms, coppiced wood and acorns for feed.  Every year you plant more trees, grow more crops, and new garden beds sprout like weeds.  There’s a sign at the end of the driveway reading “fresh eggs, raspberries” and the neighbors stop by to pick up your extras and trade neighborly gossip.

What do you see?  The family farm brought to life again - the land made productive again, the weeds cut back, the family brought back, swales built to catch precious water, with new crops and new techniques for making fertile space out of what seemed like a lost cause.  New hope, and the chance to work together again?  Do you see yourself, slowly, patiently planting new trees, repairing the tractor, laughing with your sister again?

What do you see?  Draft horses, pulling logs from the shady woodland, and a barn full of animals.  A business plan and a market for your lamb, your wool and your vegetables.  A diversity of plants and animals - life without monocultures.  A pond.  A quiet spot to rest, a kitchen full of peaches ready to can.  And you see yourself, at work, at rest, in the kitchen, on the land, but there, and present, and ready.

I don’t claim these dreams are easy to enact, or that they will always come to fulfillment - I have dreams myself I haven’t finished - for terracing and beds, for plants and animals I’ve never yet gotten to.  But without a vision, without a dream, without asking that question “what do you see” we can’t begin to make it into something real.

Sharon

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Sharon February 26th, 2009

Ok, the planning phase is now over.  Time to get dirty.

 Oh, it isn’t really - as I wrote in my last post, planning never ends.  But planning also can’t immobilize us.  There’s no “but my farm plan isn’t done” when the seeds need planting or the chicks are waiting at the post office.  Life goes on, man plans, G-d laughs, we try again.  If you are lucky, you take 3 steps forward and only one back - and not that every time.  But the net gains get bigger once you get dirty.

A lot of the answers to questions in my class are “well, it depends…” or “well, you could try…” or “I personally think but some people disagree…” - growing plants is like that.  Things that are right in one place are wrong in yours, the answer one person swears by is a miserable failure for another.  Some things you can only figure out by experimentation, maybe even a little screwing up.

You’ll never recognize your seedlings from the weeds until you grow some, and probably not until you accidentally pull something up that you intentionally planted.  You’ll never know when to harvest until you grow something and take a bite - and perhaps not until you bite into something way over or under ripe.  You’ll never know if you can germinate peppers in your cold house or if jasmine will overwinter for you until you’ve tried it.  You can guess, you can collect all the information you’ve got, and then, you try.

The good thing, is that things mostly want to live.  For every Himalayan Blue Poppy you have to nurture along and coax into bloom, mulch with a foot of straw and feed manure tea with a straw, there’s a big pot of gold nasturtiums that says “pooh!” to crappy soil, bad weather and everything you throw at it and tries to take over the next pot, the deck and your yard.  Despite the degradation of our world, the world is full of vital life that wants nothing more than burst forth in life.  You don’t have to fight it, you can just let it go and marvel at its energy. 

So the next step is to get dirty. If you haven’t seen your dirt under cover of snow since November, take heart and start some onions or peppers indoors.  If you are in full spring swing, well, you know where to go.  Get the stuff under your fingernails - I have it on good authority that it penetrates straight from there to your brain, and grows new ideas, peace and joy.

Happy gardening!

 Sharon

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Sharon February 26th, 2009

In June, we’ll have lived here at Gleanings Farm for eight years.  As the garden design class winds up, I thought it might be useful to think about how our planning and design goals have changed over the years. What we want and are working towards now is somewhat different than what we began working towards - for us, as for everyone, design is an ongoing process.  Each year, we begin planning again in the spring, and each year, we find in our planning that what we don’t do, or how our plans have changed is as revealing as what we intend.

If you’ve ever seen the farm designs from John Seymour’s excellent _The Self-Sufficient Life and How to Live It_, you can probably imagine what I was planning when I moved to 27 acres in rural, upstate NY.  The cow would go here, the sheep (for the yarn I would hand spin) would go here, we’d have every kind of poultry and every creature under the sun.  The garden would be at least an acre, the orchard 2 or 3….  I had it laid out on paper, and boy, was it beautiful .

But reality kicked in.  We added three more kids in the first five years we were here.  Our first gardens were so successful that in a moment of delirium, we started a CSA, which ran for four years, so most of that time was spent with me pregnant and/or recovering from pregnancy, while building up and expanding our CSA, which eventually got to 20 members.    Oh, and while I was having babies and we were doing our CSA, we also built the addition onto the house, had Eric’s grandparents moved in, and cared for them at the end of their lives.  We held our breaths and ran, with time only for the essentials.

We put in a very small orchard’s worth of fruit trees the first two years - and lost a lot of them due to not understanding our property.  We moved in at the end of a drought, and so we didn’t realize that the area where we planted many of our trees would flood, and kill them during the spring.  Another was taken out by a plow when we underestimated the snow load here up in the hills.  A few had to be removed when the original plan for Eric’s grandparents (a small cottage of their own) got changed over to building onto the house, and we needed land for the addition.  Some of them survived, but it didn’t look like an orchard.  We started again, knowing our place better.

The garden started out small, got big with the CSA, and shrunk again when I became a writer and ended the CSA for lack of time.  I eventually became tired of the design errors we made at the beginning, and after a while of being just tired of them, finally got  excited about starting anew. We started selling eggs, expanded to keep our CSA customers in eggs, and are now considering going back to egg sales.  The kids got big enough to have opinions about what we should grow, I got more interested in grain and tree crops and subsistence agriculture.  I decided I really didn’t want to spin all my own yarn, although I like my wheel just fine.  I met Elaine, she of the sheep, and bartered our pasture for meat and wool, and met Jamey and Carol, they of the teeny weeny goats, and got seduced from my cow dreams (which still linger). 

Inge and Cyril (Eric’s grandparents) passed away, and we found ourselves with a huge house, and more space than we needed.  We mourned them and then we began again, redesigning how our home works.  Now we look for housemates to share our land and space and imagine trying again.

After the loss of Eric’s grandparents, their garage was now ours for storing tools and such, and we saw in the old one a solution to our dislike for hauling 50lb sacks of feed up a steep, icy hillside to the old stable.  The garage became a barn, and we discovered the need to fence the chickens and goats (who were now nice and close to the house, and would like to come visit) out of the garden beds on the lawn. 

Inge and Cyril’s garden became my courtyard garden, the ornamentals replaced with fruit trees and tender plants that otherwise couldn’t grow here, mixed with the flowers they loved.  The landscape bloomed with apricots and quinces, too tender for this place, now warmed by the addition walls and flourishing.

The front yard acquired a fence when it became clear that our autistic eldest would roam otherwise, and now vines twine the fence I never dreamed of until it was necessary.  The kids demanded more strawberries and more raspberries.  Nature provided the latter, growing wild raspberries abundantly undr the front yard spruce trees without my intervention - and I planted more strawberries.  The forest encroached, and got pushed back in some places and let it grow in others, the lawn evolved from a grassy monoculture to a weedy mess that we rather like. 

I learned where the hawkweed and yarrow grow, and when the wild strawberries bloomed.  We found the perfect place for watching tadpoles and the climbing trees. I found the old apple orchard back in the woods, across the creek, that went with the property of old, and where the burn piles had begun.  I found where the yellow warbler made her nest, where the barn swallows lived in the rafters and where the owls nested in the spruce.  We now have spots where beloved pets are buried, and spots we know will be home to wild things, if we don’t brush against them too hard, try too hard to bend our space to our will.

The boys grew bigger and ate more, the parents embarked on occasional attempts to eat less, we lost Eric’s grandparents, we got older, the boys stopped eating dirt and started digging in it.  Our life cycled - and it will cycle more.  Will we adopt more children?  Finally find the perfect homestead housemates and reshape the landscape around their needs?  Need to work smarter as we age?  Perhaps all of the above - we do not know. 

Will we need to survive on our garden and farm produce alone?  Will we need to find new employment and make more money from what we produce?  Will I write more or grow more?  In what season?  In what time?  What will our boys want to do on the farm, as they grow to manhood, if anything?  These things we cannot know - and even when we do know them, when we have a moment of transient certainty, things may change yet again.  One thing we can all promise ourselves in the coming years is change, sometimes wild and startling.

Our dreams have changed too - after a few years of CSA farming, writing books seemed exciting and new. Now I’m wondering if I’d rather go back to the CSA - and thinking of a whole new model, a winter only CSA that might go well with the books.  At first, we thought we’d never butcher our own livestock - now we are accustomed to the cycle of life and death on our farm.   I dream of bees for the first time, and geese again.  I wonder if I want my own sheep, or simply to keep the fruitful partnership we’ve begun with a friend.  I wonder…and wonder. 

Planning is a constant process.  Design is eternal.  The dreams that one has one day are not the dreams of tomorrow, the realities we face shift over time. Today our gardens are our hobbies or pleasures, hedges against perhaps coming disaster, tomorrow they may be real hedges - or something different.  The meaning shifts as much as our intent - what was “home” once stops being home when the children grow and it becomes a burden, or when the bank forecloses.  What was once temporary becomes permanent when the times change and the realities shift.  We may never move from a spot, but what that spot means to us may change and shift a dozen times - and so our dreams for it.

One morning, I rise up and I see only the weeds, the projects left undone, the things I have no yet accomplished stand out - I wonder what I was doing all these eight years, that I’ve still let the drainage and the cistern go.  On the next morning, I rise up and the weeds are still there, getting taller, and the failures still evident in the unfinished projects, but what I see is different - I see how much we have accomplished in eight short years, the new barn, the addition, the growing boys, the fruiting trees.  I see abundance and insufficiency alternately in the same landscape, depending on who I am that morning, and what I choose. Sometimes design is about redesigning myself, and who I choose I will be - the optimist who appreciates what I have done, the dark pessimist who deplores my failures and laxities.  Perhaps the first place to redesign is myself.

Neither my husband nor I come from a family that has roots in one place - oh, in regions, yes, but not in houses.  We moved and moved. It made me a person who always wonders whether somewhere else might be better, and Eric into someone who takes root hard, and fights any attempt to dig him out of his place.  I am mint, opportunistically travelling into new spaces whenever they appear, he is burdock, so deep rooted you can never dig him out.   I dream of starting anew - whether in my place or in another, he dreams of continuity and consistency.  Both dreams transform our landscape - his certainty that this is the place for us and our posterity, my occasional uncertainty and dreamy reading of real estate listings.

But there is no stability in this life - even generations in the same place do not see or experience it the same way. The woods that your great-grandfather cut back to make a farm, that surrounded him in endless miles of forest, are now interstate and suburb, and your woodlot is to be nurtured into life, protected by its difference from the surrounding landscape.

Because there is no stability does not mean there is no reason to plan, nor moments of completion.  The plans will change - but each set of plans teaches us something, something about what who we are now, and something about what we dream of.  And in the summer, when the garden is at its fullest and the cherries fall ripe from the trees, at the moment of harvest when all your combined work and dreams are embodied in the perfect, dripping tomato, when the first hen lays or the first babies of spring are born, when the tree leafs out anew or the wild birds fledge, when the bumblebees mumble their summer song or when the snow covers your plantings, tucked in for winter, and only the spinach in the cold frame survives, these moments are fullnesses, times when the design is complete.  The garden in these moments is done - it is here, it is realized, it is perfect.  Its imperfections are its perfections, because you have taken life, transcribed a dream to paper and back again, and made it bear fruit.

Sharon

• agriculture , garden design
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Sharon February 24th, 2009

Gardeners like to compete with each other over who has the worst soil to start.  One will argue for his hard clay, baked in the sun, another for her sand, without a trace of organic matter.  I’ve got my own candidate for the worst soil ever - the stuff in the beds around my house.

Oh, texturally, it is among the best I’ve got - sandy loam, warms up nicely, isn’t too wet like much of the rest of my soil.  It had some nice enough foundation plantings, and I mostly ignored it for the first few years I was here.  But a couple of years ago, I decided that I wanted to make use of this growing space, and then I discovered that my soil, was, well…dead.

By dead, I mean there wasn’t a living thing in it.  Not a beetle or a spider, and especially not an earthworm.  It was weird.  I knew that some previous owners of our house were umm… shiny green lawn people, and I don’t know if that has something to do with it, but this stuff was “Its dead, Jim” dead. 

So we embarked on a campaign of soil improvement.  Any kind of soil improvement has two parts.  First, there’s getting your soil up to speed.  In some cases, this might not be much - maybe some ashes from your stove or a little lime to even out some acidity, or maybe a little rock powder for trace minerals, or a light dressing of the rabbit poop your rabbits make sure you get anyway.  If your soil is basically in good shape - you’ve had a soil test and you know that it is high in organic matter and sufficient in macro and micronutrients (check out Aaron’s soil fertility basics if these concepts aren’t familiar).

But what if it isn’t?  What if you’ve got dead soil, like mine, or rock hard clay, or soil (also like mine) that has been leached and has too much water in it?  Again, there are two projects here - the first is the short term building of soil so that you can get to gardening.  The second is the long term maintenence of soil health, and the addition of more organic matter, so that eventually, your soil can hold enough organic matter to save the world - or at least sequester as much carbon as possible.  Plus, things will grow better.  Win-win.

My favorite way to build soil on something that is completely unworkable is the lasagna method, which is pretty much sheet mulching with some dirt or compost on it.   This makes raised beds, which is good if what you have is either wet or rock hard, or if you are, say putting your dirt on gravel or something toxic.  It might be tough in a dry, hot climate though - raised beds dry out and warm up in the spring earlier, and keeping them wet might be tough.  In that case, you might consider digging into the ground, creating sunken beds with the same mixture.

If you need to amend soil, you’ll have the choice of synthetic or natural soil amendments.  Generally speaking, you’ll want the natural ones.  I’m not a complete organic purist - I think there are times when artificial fertilizer use is justified.  But there’s a price to be paid for its use, and care is needed - otherwise you can end up contaminating your water supply, wasting your money and depleting your soil overall.  I don’t generally use synthetic fertilizers, and if I were to use them, I’d use them only on untilled soil with plenty of organic matter added, in small and precise quantities. 

You can buy an organic fertilizer mix, or you can make your own.  I generally use a mix of alfalfa or soybean meal, rock phosphate, and wood ashes, along with greensand and kelp, as well as occasionally special additions to deal with soil types or plant special needs.  But I don’t know about you, but I can’t mine rock phosphate from my property, nor do I produce enough alfalfa to fertilize my garden.  So this is not a long-term sustainable project.  I use these amendments sparingly, where they are needed to bring soils up to basic fertility. 

Then, we try to keep it there.  That means cover cropping a portion of our garden every year, integrating dynamic accumulator plants into our plantings (these are plants that bring up nutrients from the subsoil), undercropping with nitrogen fixers (these plants fix nitrogen from the air), mulching (we try to grow as much of our own mulch as possible in place - another good use for undercropping - a nice planting of buckwheat under tomatoes, or white clover under garlic can provide a living mulch and then the next planting cycle’s mulching materials), and the heavy application of organic material - that is, compost and composted animal manures.

Every time we take something off of the soil, we are removing nutrients from our soil, and depleting, to some degree, the organic material available to them.  High levels of organic material are essential for soil life and health - so faced with dead soil, the first thing I did was put my turkey poults in a chicken tractor on top of the border for a few days.  The easiest way to move the poop to the garden beds is sometimes to move the poop makers there .  Now since this was raw manure, I made sure there was plenty of bedding, and I wasn’t planting food plants there right away.  Had I needed to use it immediately, I would have switched to already composted manure, and gotten out the wheelbarrow.

Next, I planted the foundation plantings to annual alfalfa, since it was already summer, and warm.  Cover crops generally have a couple of seasons - they are spring, summer or fall sown.  You sow the fall crops to overwinter - to hold soil in place, and add organic material.  Winter rye, hairy vetch, fava beans (in some climates) are all common winter sown cover crops.  Spring sown crops are generally cut down in summer, and either stay in place all season (things like red clover), providing multiple doses of fertility and green material, or they are cut down (oats, say) to provide organic material for the fall garden.  Summer crops (buckwheat, annual alfalfa) can go in after the peas or the early lettuce, and grow fast and fill the space until fall.  For a site you don’t plan to get to for a year or two, perennial crops can do a lot to regenerate soil.

Cover cropping is very place specific - the best crops are specific to your climate, seasons and locality, so talk to your cooperative extension.  They are a powerful tool for building fertility, adding organic matter and improving soil, and one that is worth getting to know. 

My goal in the long term is for these beds to provide a warm, dry, moderately fertile site for mediterranean herbs and a few flowering perennials.  That is, I wasn’t trying to produce fertility for growing heavy feeders, like greens or corn.  So after the alfalfa, I added some greensand and kelp, a light layer of compost, and planted into the mulch I’d already established.  In went lavender, oregano, several marjorams and thymes, a rosemary that probably didn’t survive the winter this year, and some plants that like or tolerate similar conditions of slightly dry soil, lots of sun and only moderate fertility - catmint, echinops and malva.  And they’ve thrived. 

Many perennial plants make wonderful fertility enhancers to annual gardens - whether perennial nitrogen fixing shrubs, whose leaf litter and root nodes enhance the trees and perennial plantings around them, comfrey and stinging nettle which can be cut for mulch or compost, small trees integrated into garden sites to provide leaf mulch, or perennial living mulches.  This is one of those things that has potentially enormous long term yields, and has really only begun to be explored in a deep way.

The best soils for sequestering organic matter will be those that are in perennial plantings, that have constant inputs of organic matter - these include forests that are enriched yearly by leaf drops, permanent pastures which are manured by grazing animals (Peter Bane, editor in chief of Permaculture Activist magazine found that Joel Salatin’s grazed pastures sequester as much carbon as a similarly sized forest after decades of grazing), and perennial gardens that are carefully managed to provide their own needs.

I maintain fertility in the perennial planting I established in these beds by the occasional dumping of animal bedding on the ground, permanent mulch, wood ashes from our stove, and a strewing of kelp.  I’ve also grown an annual crop of chamomile, a good dynamic accumulator, and left everything but the flowerheads in place.  I give the whole thing an occasional boost of nitrogen by dumping dilute urine over it - urine is safe and diluted 1-7 (1-10 if you don’t drink enough), it provides a real boost to plants. 

More demanding annual feeders get composted chicken or goat manure, plant compost, weed and manure teas.  Other plants might also get living mulches, and I rotate plants as wisely and carefully as I can, following the heavy feeders with nitrogen fixers or light feeders undersown with nitrogen fixing cover crops.  My whole garden gets rotating quantities of worm casting to supplement the soil and improve its texture. 

Meanwhile, in maintaining, we try to put back what we take off.  Crop residues are left in place, either chopped down and incorporated into the permanent mulch or they are burned in our woodstove (for heavy, dense stalks) and returned as ash.  Some of the nitrogen is returned in the form of urine.  We mulch as much as possible with our own mulches - grass clippings, leaves and plants grown for compost or as mulch plants.  We try not to steal too much from any one other place - but we gratefuly take things people discard, like leaves from yards when we venture into suburbia, or horse manure from our horse-keeping neighbors.

Animal manures have a very powerful role in gardening - in a perfect world, we’d compost all human manures until they were thoroughly pathogen free, and restore the soil with what we take off.  But whether this is safe is debatable, and anyone who shares food will not want to risk a lawsuit.  So composted animals manures are a powerful tool for maintaining fertility - one of the reasons that polycultures of animals and plants are generally more effective than either alone.  We use composted human manures only on decorative and tree plantings.

Two particular ways of maintaining fertility deserve mention here - fungal soil support, by mycorrhizae (tiny fungus  that colonize the soil) and terra preta.  Mycorrhizae have a symbiotic relationship with the roots of many plants, and can enhance the ability to plants to uptake nutrients and deal with water stress among other things.  Many soils are fungi deficient, and an application of mycorrhizae can improve your plants ability to absorb the nutrients in your soil.

Terra Preta is a fascinating subject - and one still uncertain.  Terra Preta involves adding plant based charcoal (ie, not the briquets at the grocery store) to your soil.  What this does is still a matter of speculation - it isn’t clear, for example, whether the charcoal itself or the organic processes it enables are actually what creates the rich soil involved.  Nor is it clear that all soils respond equally well to terra preta inputs - for example a study found that boreal forest soils did not seem to respond to biochar applications.  That said, however, there have been some fascinating results - biochar supplemented soils seem to stimulate nitrogen fixing in legumes, for example, and while charcoal supplemented soils enable plants to take up more minerals, the soils deplete more slowly.  I’d encourage everyone to consider experimenting with biochar as a way of improving your soils. 

We’re not a closed circle by any means - we still take advantage, as long as they are available and we can afford them, of valuable amendments.  But the idea is to lose as little as possible, while getting the best possible balance between improved soil, the health of the world, and a system in which you need to bring in a little less from offsite each year.

 Sharon

• agriculture , garden design
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