Homestead mailing list

[Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>]

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