Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Milton Takei <miltont@EFN.ORG>]

Milton Takei <miltont@EFN.ORG>

        The following is part of a message that Nick Routledge posted on
the Eugene Permaculture Guild e-mail list.  In response to my suggestion
that he submit articles to magazines, he said, "I prefer to let it
float out there in cyberspace and if anybody wants to pick it up and use it,
in any way they wish, with or without credit, I'm perfectly fine with
that."
                                        --Milton Takei
                               __________________________________________

I found myself weeding across from a local farming couple last week. We
were laughing at the irony of pulling pigweed and lambsquarter from the
beds. Hang around local farms and it's not uncommon to find Latino or Asian
families turning up, asking if they can harvest one or both of these two
plants, usually growing taller, happier and far more prolifically than
anything else we've deliberately planted. Both plants are edible and
delicious. Lambsquarter, I'm told, is more nutritious than spinach. One
group of local Latinos refers to it as 'caliete' or 'the kind weed.' The
world's food cultures have so much common sense to gift one another.



This couple have been one of my key sources of indigenous food knowhow over
the years because they have a closer relationship with their own food than
anyone I've encountered in this bioregion - or anywhere else for that
matter. They raise almost everything that they and their animals eat. Their
reverence for life plays out in many ways. They are conservatives. They use
a watering regimen far, far more frugal than anything I've encountered in
my years of pottering about the local veggie growers scene - watering all
their crops, once a week, for a five hour stretch; whereas I'm used to
seeing some farmers overhead-water their lettuce for four hours every day
during the high heat of summer - eight hours for raspberries, and suchlike.



Necessity is the momma of revelation perhaps and, as you might expect,
going frugal with the water has pushed these farmers along a wisdom path
that holds useful lessons for all of us interested in growing food well.
Some of their insights are modest. Which lettuces are deeply
drought-tolerant? "What about celery?" (the great water hog) I ask them,
"Do you plant it somewhere different and water accordingly?" "No," they
say, "We grow it the same as the rest but don't harvest until after the
winter rains have arrived and the plant has had a chance to fatten up."
This small but revealing piece of intel is one you're unlikely to hear from
other growers, moi included, because we've never gone that route; coz the
general ag, and indeed horticultural tendency, is to bring the fattest crop
to table or market asap - which typically means throwing as much fertility
and water as we can profitably get away with, at our dirt - pushing our
harvest as far as the seasons, front and back, will allow. "Let's give our
plants the mostest!" we chant, mantralike, and so we slap on the goodies.
One consequence? We've been prisoners to our experience. We know little
about the strengths an alternative approach may be hiding.



Hmmm. What, then, if our current perspective on what makes for a healthy
harvest - raising the fattest, biggest, quickest greenest veggies we can,
this season - has been based on a limiting understanding of how to nurture
health at large, over the long term? Indeed, what happens once we begin
incorporating the saving and replanting of seed as a defining priority in
our relationship with our food - when we carry over  the "memory" of our
co-evolutionary relationship with our food, from year to year, and can
witness how our choices, each season, affect the quality of the germplasm
in our stewardship?



George Stevens, the farmer-seedsman Sage outta norcal (who says little, but
when he does...) observes: "From my experience of 12 years of growing food
and seed crops ...Imbalanced [high] fertilization results in an effect
referred to as "leveling the playing field," where natural selection is
defeated by pumping up plants to uniformity. With moderate fertility only
the strong will survive and make seed. A low-input approach may at first be
lower yielding ...but aspiring seed savers shouldn't be discouraged." In
other words, an 'immoderate' regimen produces lotsa fat crops to chomp on
now, but suppresses the intelligence which allows us to see and help usher
forth the germplasm possessing the deepest sense of health-in-this-place.
Currently, we 'suppress' the natural health and intelligence of the plants
that hold up our world. Simply put, the experiences of those who are
rediscovering what it is to embrace the Long View more fully, suggest that
a deeper understanding of our ecological context, and a shift in the
priorities associated with raising our food, are one and the same thing.
Seed-saving is about more than wrapping seed pods in a blankie and dancing
on 'em.



The increase in yields that accompanies an attentive localization dance
doesn't take very long at all. I see clear evidence in the seed I carry and
grow. Take Painted Mountain flour corn, for example, the result of Dave
Christiansen's remarkable 25-year corn breeding effort in the mountains of
Montana and a crop I see in many of the avant-gardens in our bioregion.
Painted Mountain Flour Corn is also a cornerstone of localized corn
breeding efforts - Alan Kapuler's Painted Mountain Sweetcorn, a cross
between it and Luther Hill (a couple of packets still on the shelves at
Down to Earth north), being one fine example. As I have moved around the
seedgeek crowd of late, being gifted this corn from friends who have been
growing it out locally over recent years, I've been holding it and looking
at it.



And wouldn't ya know, the palm of my hand tells a story. As I weeded with
my farming friends last week, I was able to alert them to the fact that the
Painted Mountain seed they gifted me with this winter was noticeably fatter
than the seed I've picked up from any other grower in our bioregion.
Because they're not a barking English sheepdog nipping at the heels of
southern Willamette seed geeks and their stashes, they had no idea how
their seed compared [Eugene is located in the Willamette Valley].
Remember, their corn ain't fatter coz they've been throwing steroids, even
organic steroids, at it. Wherever I find a deepening tendency toward
conscious stewardship of the foundations of our world, I witness a story
of marked increase in health and yield, with less in the way of management
and input, over time.



I'm noticing a sudden surge in grassroots seed-saving efforts, locally.
People iz waking to the truth and beauty that even the smallest-scale,
highly localized seed-saving efforts are whupping the dictats of the
market. That's because nature's truths support a deepening sense of place -
plant stewardship in _ecological_context_, through season after season
after season. This localized thread-of-return to health is an inherently
uneconomic trend for big ticket seed savers, who find the direction of the
evolutionary impulse smacking them up the back of the head. And the pace is
quickening. We're seeing revolutionary discoveries flowing into the hands
of the local, small-scale seed saving tribe, all the time. Take the
following insight, with 'ooge implications for the future of small-scale,
bioregional food stewardship, wherever it finds its home.



...I tend to let intelligence find me, so when Peace Seeds' Alan Kapuler
(former research director for Seeds of Change, and one hip dude) thrust a
three page photocopy in my face and said, "Here, this just came in. You
definitely ought to read it," the klaxons woz fairly tootin'.



Turns out that Chinese agronomists have been putting their peoplepower to
good use and, by painstakingly planting out seed saved from different
locations on individual plants, they've discovered that _where_ seeds on
plants are harvested, has one humdinger of an impact on genetics. Difficult
to synthesize the wherefores into a couple of paras, but the tactic was
born out of the newly emerging science of ECIWO biology (Embryo Containing
the Information of the Whole Organism) which, innanutshell, looks at plants
as holographic archetypes. Goethe ("a flower is a leaf in love") and the
biodynamics tribe have been hip to this trip for years, of course, but the
Chinese are the first, to my knowledge, to make a concerted effort to note
what happens when we apply this insight empirically to seedsaving across
many plant crops. How does it work? Old timers know that if you want to
birth, for example, a rosemary plant with a spreading habit, then take a
mature plant and select a cutting growing horizontally offa the side of the
plant. Then stick it in the ground, and water. Likewise, if you're looking
for progeny with an upright habit, then take a vertical cutting growing at
the top of the plant. Similarly, with ECIWO seedsaving, we're basically
looking at correlations between seed location and the habit we're trying to
encourage in progeny. So, for example, corn ears grow not on the top of the
plant, or on the roots, but on the middle of the stalk. Studies show that
seed selected from the middle of the ear yield anywhere from 6% to 35% more
than seed taken from the lower or upper thirds of the ear.  Potatoes? The
lower part of the plant is what we wish to emphasize. The Chinese have have
found that by planting only the lower half of a seed potato (the distal
end, the end where the umbilical was attached) yields can be upped by 20%.
Wheat? Seed from the mid-spike ups yields by 14% (the awns on the spike are
modified leaves which explains why seed is chosen from the middle instead
of the top of the spike). Sorghum and millet? Seeds from the top of the
seed head increase yield by 6.5% to 26%. I've seen similar stats for cukes,
beans and turnips among others. Yup, raaaather interesting, innit?



The applications are revolutionary, simple, and, here's the clincher, any
backyard gardener can grok 'em, and use them to improve old varieties, and
develop new ones. Could it be that ECIWO seedsaving is a critical key we've
all been looking for our own backyard seed saving efforts? Wanna enhance
the morphological traits of the brassica aoleracea family, for example -
cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, kohlrabi, brussel sprouts and
collards? Give it a go. These days, when I wander among mah broccoli, I'm
wearing reading glasses. Perhaps some of us have ideas about how we might
develop new crops from wild plants using these principles, calling forth
the characteristics we wish to encourage.  I keep coming back to the words
of one of the pillars of our local farming community, "The future of
farming," he says, "is in the hands of the gardeners."


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