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  • From: Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Homestead] Yields
  • Date: Sun, 05 Dec 2004 10:43:24 -0700

It's nasty weather here in Phoenix, so I have some extra time, so I looked up my review of Jeavon's book, How To Raise More . . . . Here it is:

49 of 53 people found the following review helpful:

Double-digging, maybe. Double pages, no., May 31, 2000

This title grew from a 1971 experimental garden in Palo Alto, California instigated by Alan Chadwick and Stephen Kafka. That garden showed that using the biodynamic/French Intensive method produced four times more vegetables than conventional techniques.

Biodynamic techniques were developed by Austrian genius Rudolf Steiner. French Intensive methods were developed in the 1890s by market gardeners outside Paris, a time when horses provided more-than-ample fertilizer and the city provided a ready market for vegetables. Chadwick studied under Steiner and French gardeners.

The method requires double-digging garden beds and adding compost or aged manure. Double-digging to two feet in depth provides loose soil that roots easily penetrate. Plants are seeded or transplanted very close together and form a living mulch, shading roots, causing greater water retention, denying sunlight to weeds. Other aspects of the method are planting and transplanting by the phases of the moon and daily sprinkling rather than periodical flooding.

This material has been recycled four times since the 1974 typewritten edition. I regret to report it is no longer up-to-date gardening knowledge, it will intimidate beginning gardeners, and it will bore experienced gardeners. There is only one new chapter, titled Sustainability, which is mostly promotion of Ecology Action. In addition, Jeavons seems confused. In the first four editions he wrote that he was teaching us the "biodynamic/French intensive method" of Steiner and French gardeners as learned and taught by Chadwick. Now in a chapter titled A Perspective for the Future, he writes that his work is based on the "Chinese Biointensive way of farming." Yet nowhere does he advocate or tell how to use humanure, which is the basis of Chinese food production, as first shown by F.H. King in his book, Farmers of Forty Centuries. Only in the bibliography do we find book listings under the heading: Human Waste. The huge bibliography (36 pages, was 22 pages in the last edition) apparently lists every book and catalog in the Ecology Action library but there is NO INDEX! I find the lack of an index in a nonfiction book to be unforgivable. For instance, looking for crop rotation or mulching methods means scanning the entire 201 pages--and coming up empty.

There are pages and pages of drawings and technical charts that most readers will never use. We find listings of plants and information both barely usable--seeds per ounce, pounds consumed per average person per year--and important--bed spacing, yields--although there is no recognition or advice concerning the many soil types and growing zones. One is dismayed to find--in a book titled How to Grow More Vegetables--more pages of charts about grain, protein source, vegetable oil crops; cover, organic matter, fodder crops; energy, fiber paper and other crops; tree and cane crops--20 pages in all, than about vegetable crops--8 pages.
Promotion of Ecology Action uses a fourteen-page chapter in addition to six more pages of self-promotion in the Sustainability chapter. If you want to support Jeavons' work, send a check to Ecology Action, or buy his book, The Sustainable Vegetable Garden, adapted from this book by co-author Carol Cox, which is smaller and less expensive and has all his best stuff without the wasted pages of charts, drawings and promotion, and it has an index!

If you want current gardening information, read authors such as Eliot Coleman and Dick Raymond who are progressive and work with all garden designs, including the mulch method first popularized by Ruth Stout and now used by hundreds of my gardening friends across the country. Most of us have tried the double-dig method and have long since moved on. I recommend you not waste your time, except maybe once for new gardens, depending on soil conditions. Thereafter, use mulch, save your back and spend your time and energy on better pursuits."
From sgian AT planetc.com Sun Dec 5 12:57:55 2004
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Subject: [Homestead] Vegetable diaspora (Yields)
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Gene:
There are two distinct disadvantages to multiple crops in discrete beds and planting areas scattered around the homestead. The first is simply that the best gardens are maintained by frequent visits by the gardener, who quickly sees something happening and makes an adjustment, whether extra water or picking squash bugs before they become a full-blown invasion.

Yes, that's a disadvantage, but it carries with it it's own mitigation: Small beds and small plantings give one such a wonderful sense of closure. When I had 1/4 of the circle garden in potatoes all planted more or less at the same time, I'd go to the garden to do some hand mulching and two hours into the task look up and think "Man, this is an eternity ... I'll NEVER get finished!" But with small beds, even scattered to the cardinal directions, a trip to the mailbox or a trip to feeding the dogs and it's "Why don't I weed those cabbages and pick off the cabbage worms, after all there's only twenty of them!" One feels as if something has been done, completed. There might be twelve other cabbage beds that don't get tended that afternoon, but they will - maybe when picking the strawberries or after mowing the orchard.

Along those same lines: if you are around the woods and you see an old stump rotted into compost the temptation, if you have large monocrops, is to say "Ah, what good would that do on all those onions?" But if the onions are 2' x 4' beds the five gallon bucket of stump dirt will mulch them more than an inch thick for that one bed. "What will I do with this one bagger full of grass clippings?" It looks like flautulence in a hurricane compared to a 1/2 acre garden, but it will mulch that small knot of brocoli lavishly.

Another psychological thing at play is that if a large plot of something is failing, I had a tendency to nurse it beyond all reason hope against hope that I wouldn't have a crop failure. But with 'diaspora' beds, if something falls ill, likely I've ten more small plots of them and so I dig in under with no hesitation. "Why encumbereth it the ground?"


The second disadvantage is disruption of the rotation schedule. It's lots easier to have rotation follow a circular pattern around the garden, each bed having one crop, followed by the appropriate succession crop. In my experience, really high organic content can ameliorate incorrect pH, so if one has the wealth of immense mulch, rotation is less critical.

I've found that too. Monocropping is what sets up the conditions that necessitate stict rotation. PH is a bigger problem than pests and disease. You don't want potatoes where you've just limed heavily the year before. But because I try to move potatoes to the poorest spots each year for the in-situ compost piles, those spots are routinely acidic. Once the compost has been rotting on a spot, it is too rich to "waste" on potatoes for the next few years.


I do the same with carrots. Just put heavy mulch on the beds and leave the roots in place, where they are most happy. Climate dictates where this practise works. As does temperament. Some common people object to digging spuds in January.

Disadvantages to both. Not fun finding a whole barrel of stored carrots has molded, for example. As far as temperment, I like an excuse to go to the garden in January. Although even if the beds are deeply mulched, it's not really fun breaking throuh 10" of frozen mulch to get at the vegetables. I try to think ahead and dig enough for a week or two at a time.


My first thought is that you were lucky. Many predators eat a bite here and a bite there, ruining many more than they consume.

I know there's not a solution to that. It's their nature. But if they only destroyed what they are, they'd hardly be a problem. Maybe when they mow off bean vines even with the ground, but that rarely happens.


I believe a diligent person using intensive gardening can feed a family of four on a half acre or less, including vegetables, fruits, chickens and rabbits. I've not yet tried it with grain, so don't have a feel for that land requirement.

We've supplied our own kitchen corn for flour and meal for years. I grew wheat and rye a couple of times years ago just to see what the deal was (while I still had my grandfather who knew all about such things). It does take a lot more space and a lot more effort to supply oneself with grains than with vegetables. But then again, back then (for the wheat and rye) it was using conventional methods (but hand tools) and on old tobacco land. I've learned a lot since then. This next year's project along those lines is the beer patch, a small stand of barley. If it only makes a cover crop, fine. But who knows? Already have the hops growing.

James





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