Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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----- Original Message ----- 
From: "TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>
To: <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Saturday, January 06, 2007 8:49 PM
Subject: [Livingontheland] Growing Security, by Richard Heinberg



Growing Security, by Richard Heinberg
http://www.survivingpeakoil.com/article.php?id=growing_security

Once one has grasped the implications of the imminent global oil production
peak, it makes sense to try to prepare as much as possible for the event
and its trail of consequences. Given the importance of petroleum for modern
industrial agriculture, as well as for our truck-based food distribution
system, producing more of one's own food would appear to be one of the
first priorities.

In this essay I aim to describe very cursorily my wife's and my attempts
to do this, in hopes that our experience will help shorten the learning
curve for others. Along the way, I will also discuss some broader issues
related to food production-from the social and political to the
philosophical.

* * *

There are lots of good reasons for gardening or becoming more
self-sufficient as regards food-probably enough reasons to fill a small
book. I'll mention just one that appeals to my peculiar mentality.
Anthropologists have found through long experience that knowing the way a
society gets its food enables one to predict fairly accurately how the
people in that society will be found to raise their children, and
conceptualize and approach the sacred, how large their social units will be
and how stratified, and so on. Hunter-gatherers never have kings and
queens; people in irrigation-based pre-industrial agricultural societies
almost always do. Most people in modern industrial societies get their food
(which has been grown with fossil fuels) from supermarkets and restaurants,
and this subtly and unconsciously shapes their entire worldview, sowing in
their souls an imperious aloofness from the natural world around them. And
this, in turn, enables them to turn a blind eye to the utter devastation of
the biosphere on which their own continued existence depends. If we are to
survive, we need to create a new culture to supplant ecocidal
mass-consumerism (the "American Way of Life"). But ultimately that
project cannot succeed on the basis of slogans and legislation; it must
involve a fundamental change in the way most people get their food.

Fine. Local, smaller-scale, less fuel- and chemical-intensive food
production is essential from the perspectives both of personal survivalism
and of societal transformation toward sustainability. So how does one go
about it?

It's simple: just grow your own food. Buy some seeds and some garden
tools, plant the former in ground loosened with the latter, apply water,
wait a few weeks, and eat.

But of course in reality it's not simple at all. Let's back up a step:
what about buying seeds at the store? That assumes that the seeds have
arrived at the store on fuel-fed trucks, having been produced and marketed
by some giant seed company hundreds of miles distant. This could be a
perilous assumption. Zoom in on any aspect of the home gardening project
(tools? water? land ownership? money with which to pay the rent or
mortgage?) and you'll find similar hidden dependencies. In fact,
circumventing the industrial food system is damned hard. Purists are in for
disappointment and frustration: all is compromise. Whatever disengagement
can be achieved must be won in stages.

* * *

Briefly, our personal experience: Four years ago my wife Janet and I bought
a suburban house on a quarter-acre lot. Before then, we had been renting a
tiny house further out of town, where we had even less garden space.
Neither of us was a novice gardener even then: Janet had worked as a
landscape manager and was schooled in herbalism, while I had done my own
share of gardening starting in childhood.

When Janet and I finally achieved the American dream of home ownership (the
suburban house with two cars, two parakeets, and a big mortgage), we went
to work. The house itself was small (1200 square feet) and pathetically run
down. We worked for eight weeks painting and remodeling until it was
habitable; then we installed photovoltaic solar panels.

The garden was the next immediate priority. Over the course of the first
year we planted two dozen fruit and nut trees and established a dozen
garden beds.

When we moved in, nearly the entire property was covered with weeds and
Bermuda grass. Rather than spraying herbicide or trying to dig all of the
weeds out, we sheet mulched-covering the grass with layers of cardboard
and inches of nitrogen-rich composted bedding from turkey pens. The actual
garden beds did require hand weeding, and so over the course of the first
year we removed many cubic yards of Bermuda grass and wild onions.

The next year, with the help of a friend, we built a garden room/greenhouse
on the south-facing back of the main house. My idea at the time was that
the greenhouse would generate heat during the winter to warm our home, thus
cutting down on natural gas usage-as well as helping with food
production. The construction of the greenhouse ended up being a year-long
project, but it is better built than the house itself. However, it combines
too many functions to do all of them well. In order to keep it from heating
up too much in the summer, we gave it eaves and insulative ("high-e")
glass. The result: its interior stays within a comfortable range during
both winter and summer-which is great for starting seeds and
over-wintering plants during the chilly season, or providing shade for
potted plants in July and August-but we just don't get enough solar
gain in the winters to make much of temperature difference for the rest of
the house. (My advice: an attached greenhouse is an excellent idea;
however, if deriving heat for your house during winter is a priority,
design accordingly with lots of glass and heat sinks.)

Before we got started, we drew diagrams of the land and tried out several
possible garden designs. We used Permaculture principles to site pathways,
orchards, berry patches, the culinary herb garden, and the veggie garden
beds, taking into account existing off-property shade trees, drainage, and
other non-movable existing features.
The property was dominated by two large shade trees when we moved in (there
were also two plum trees and a loquat). We agonized over the decision, but
eventually chose to have the shade trees removed and ground into wood chips
(which now cover our garden pathways). As replacements we chose three apple
varieties, two pears, a French plum, a pomegranate, a fig, a peach, a
lemon, an almond, and a walnut (plus blueberry and currant bushes,
strawberries, and other perennials).

While it was inevitable that our main garden would be in the large back
yard, the property also had a small front lawn (of Bermuda grass, of
course). We sheet-mulched over it, built a swale for water catchment, and
installed two olive trees, another almond, and a persimmon-as well as a
couple of small vegetable beds (with perennial artichokes and a few
annuals), a medicinal herb garden, and some water-thrifty ornamental
perennials.

We feel that we've crammed nearly all of the productivity into a suburban
house lot that we can. There's no swimming pool here. However, we did
finally decide to include a lawn-30 square feet of it beneath a plum
tree, whereupon we rest our lawn chairs in the summer, the better to survey
our realm while sipping mint julips.

* * *

Our home library is well stocked with books on gardening, ranging from
philosophy to history to humor to practical advice. A few gems:
For the contemplative gardener, there is probably no better book than
Masanobu Fukuoka's classic, The One Straw Revolution: An Introduction to
Natural Farming (St. Martin's, 1978). Let's face it: agriculture is
war. We encourage the growth of the plants we want (those are called
"crops") and discourage the growth of plants we don't want (these we
term "weeds"), thus simplifying the ecosystem and reducing
biodiversity. Fukuoka calls a truce, asking whether there may be ways of
working more with nature and less against it.

Gary Nabhan's Enduring Seeds: Native American Agriculture and Wild Plant
Conservation (North Point, 1989) offers a clear glimpse into the food
production practices of the people who inhabited North America before the
Europeans invaded. This book is much more than a mere sentimental paean to
the noble savage as intuitively environmentalist food producer, discussing
(inter alia) Native societies that farmed themselves to extinction-such
as the Hohokam, whose very name means "the exhausted people." Few
people today appreciate the fact that many of our staple foods (maize,
potatoes, tomatoes, beans, peppers) came from the work of countless
generations of Native American plant domesticators. For American gardeners
in particular, some understanding of indigenous practices seems essential.

John Jeavons, author of How to Grow More Vegetables (10 Speed Press, 1974,
1991), is the maven of biointensive gardening-a method that relies on
double-digging garden beds and composting in order to achieve closer plant
spacing and maximum productivity. Jeavons has done the best scientific work
that I know of on the vital question of how to support the greatest number
of people on the minimum amount of productive land while conserving or even
building topsoil. Biointensive gardening is labor and knowledge intensive,
but it is also probably our best hope for feeding a post-petroleum world.
Jeavons has written other useful books and publishes (via his organization
Ecology Action) a wonderful seed catalog, featuring heirloom varieties
unavailable elsewhere. Janet and I are fortunate to live only an hour's
drive away from Jeavons's home base.

Australian authors Bill Mollison and John Holmgren are the originators of
Permaculture-a design system for "permanent agriculture" on a small
scale (Mollison and Holmgren began their work in the mid-1970s but parted
ways many years ago). Permaculture has become an international movement
with its own magazine (Permaculture Activist), and with certified
instructors offering consultations and classes worldwide. Janet and I have
Holmgren's new book, Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond
Sustainability (2002, distributed by Chelsea Green), as well as a basic
Permaculture how-to book, Rosemary Morrow's Earth User's Guide to
Permaculture (Kangaroo Press, 1993); we have also taken a short course with
Mollison himself. In addition, we have a copy of J. Russell Smith's 1950
book, Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture (republished by Harper in 1978),
which served as an early inspiration to Mollison and Holmgren. Annual
gardens are necessary for vegetables, but they're a lot of work compared
to food-producing trees-hence our mini-orchard.

British author John Seymour has written many books on rural life and
self-sufficiency, and maintains a school for self-sufficiency in Wales. We
had seen Seymour's books while visiting friends in France; recently,
while browsing a local used bookstore we were fortunate to find a copy of
his The Guide to Self-Sufficiency (Popular Mechanics Books, 1976), a
lavishly illustrated step-by-step walk-through of the processes of
obtaining food from the wild, food from animals, and food from the garden.
The author also shows the essence of various crafts and skills (making
bricks and tiles, thatching, spinning flax), and discusses ways of
harnessing natural energy sources. This sort of practical information about
how pre-industrial people supported themselves is becoming ever harder to
find, and could be invaluable in the future. Seymour's books are more
widely available in Britain than in North America, but they are well worth
searching out.

Urban gardeners would be smart to seek out a used copy of The City
People's Book of Raising Food by Helga and William Olkowski (Rodale,
1975), which offers advice on vegetable varieties for small areas,
succession planting, food storage in limited spaces, and intensive
interplanting, as well as raising food from small animals (chickens and
rabbits), beekeeping, and composting-all in a densely populated urban
setting. There is also an important chapter on "neighbor relations."
For those with a larger rural property, an essential book is Malcolm
Margolin's, The Earth Manual: How to Work on Wild Land Without Taming It
(Heyday, 1975)-a wonderful, practical guide to caring for soil, trees,
and wildlife.

Surveying the stack of books I've selected from our shelves, I'm
impressed by how many of the best were published in the 1970s. The
sustainability pioneers of that recent era (a period of energy, financial,
and political crises, let us not forget) have left us a rich legacy.

* * *

I don't want to give the impression that Janet and I get all, or even
most, of our food from our garden. In a couple of more years, when our
trees are mature and all of our beds are productive, and when we have a
couple of chickens, as we plan to, we might realistically hope to eat
mostly from the garden for half the year. But we are still primarily
dependent, especially for grain-based foods, on the local store (we're
lucky to have easy access to Community Market-a worker-owned natural
foods outlet that buys from local farmers whenever possible).

Growing all of one's own food is certainly possible: I recall my father,
who was raised on a farm in northeast Missouri, telling me that his family
was self-sufficient in nearly everything but salt and sugar. But that kind
of lifestyle takes time and hard work, and assumes the need for only a
small cash flow (and therefore also assumes the availability of cheap land
with low property taxes). The modern suburban American gardener needs a
career to support the habit, and it is unrealistic to expect to have a
career (or, in our case, six jobs or careers split between two people)
while becoming entirely food self-sufficient in one's spare time.

In addition to lack of time, we face other challenges. Northern California
has an agreeable climate: it is virtually impossible to freeze to death
here; however, there is typically almost no rain from May till November.
Luther Burbank declared Santa Rosa the most favored place in all the Earth
for gardening, but here irrigation is the basis for survival. So where does
the water come from? The Russian River, the primary local waterway and a
source of fresh water for much of the region, is already being supplemented
by a diversion of the Eel River, further north. And yet even this is not
enough to supply the needs for anticipated future development (the
population of northern California is growing rapidly, mostly due to
immigration). Janet and I are fortunate to have a well on our property (we
haven't yet gotten around to supplying it with a pump), but the water
table in our valley is falling. We have installed water-conserving drip
irrigation systems for most of our garden beds, but even so we find
ourselves using 5,000 to 12,000 gallons during a typical month in the dry
growing season (versus 2,000 during the rainy winter). Currently water
costs us $2.65 per 1,000 gallons-but how long can this precious resource
remain so cheap?

Another challenge to the gardener in a temperate climate is planning for a
year's production. It is surprisingly easy to grow too much of one crop
and not enough of another-to be overwhelmed with tomatoes and zucchinis
in August but to have almost nothing coming from the garden in January. Of
course, it is difficult to know ahead of time whether this year will turn
out to be a good or bad one for a particular crop, but it is still
essential to try as best one can to avoid surfeit while ensuring
sufficiency. This requires experience and research.

Temporary abundances are not to be entirely avoided: many foods can be
stored relatively easily, and food storage is essential if one is to even
attempt self-sufficiency. In our arid Mediterranean climate, we have found
sun drying to be the simplest and least energy-intensive method (we dry
tomatoes and fruit.) Canning is better for putting aside large quantities,
but requires more equipment and the dedication of an afternoon now and then
to an intensive operation. Dry beans need no processing for storage other
than shelling, and some apple varieties will keep throughout much of the
winter if they're in a cool place.

We make some attempts to save seed from year to year, but still find
ourselves buying most of our seeds from several excellent organic
suppliers. Seed saving is an art in itself, and requires knowledge, among
other things, of how various plant varieties are pollinated.

Maintaining soil fertility is one of the most important aspects of
gardening. Without attention to this, one sees a very noticeable drop-off
in garden productivity within only two or three years. We have compost
piles and a worm bin (building and maintaining these is an art in itself,
about which books have been written). But our food system is not a closed
cycle: plants take up nutrients from the soil, we eat parts of the plants,
and we compost the rest-but then our human wastes get flushed into the
city sewer system. Eventually we would like to have a composting toilet,
but currently these are illegal in Sonoma County. Consequently we have to
buy manures, composts, and other amendments to supplement the soil-building
process.

* * *

Even if Janet and I were to become spectacularly successful at growing all
of our own food sustainably, we would still face a serious problem. As
energy resources become scarce and the life-support infrastructure of
modern suburbia breaks down, people who haven't had the same forethought
that we have will endeavor to survive in any way possible-and some of
these people will be violence-prone folks with nothing to lose. Under such
circumstances, individualist survivalism will be pointless; the best
insurance against crop theft and general chaos will be community
solidarity. Entire neighborhoods will need to be organized for collective
security and for cooperative food-growing efforts. To be effective, efforts
along these lines will need to start before the breakdown.

Fortunately, there are precedents for the widespread adoption of backyard
and community gardening. As David M. Tucker has documented in his
fascinating book Kitchen Gardening in America: A History (Iowa State
University Press, 1993), during previous periods of economic and political
turmoil city and suburban dwellers have responded by turning lawns and golf
courses into potato beds. I had previously heard of the Victory Gardens of
World War II; I didn't realize that the phenomenon was even more
widespread during World War I, and that in both instances it began not with
a government program, but, according to Tucker, with spontaneous citizen
action:

   The war gardening of 1917 emerged from consumer fear of rising prices
and actual food shortages. Threatened railroad labor strikes and the
anticipated American entry into the European War created speculative food
hoarding in the inter of 1916-17, leading to an inflationary price spiral
that quickly doubled the cost of most food staples in New York City while
onions soared 700 percent in cost and cabbages 2,000 percent.

Volunteer community gardens appeared throughout the country, including
school gardens and gardens for the poor. Only later did the government
decide that this was a good idea and begin a propaganda campaign to
encourage the effort.

After the War, the garden craze subsided for a decade; however, "the hard
times of the Great Depression turned both the middle class and the
unemployed back to the land." As World War II approached, Agriculture
Department Secretary Claude Wickard "called a special National Defense
Gardening Conference in Washington . . . to both seize control of the
victory gardens leadership and kill any war garden enthusiasm." Wickard
went so far as to label garden enthusiasm "unpatriotic." But despite
initial official discouragement, victory gardens sprang up
everywhere-"parking lots, playgrounds, college campuses, vacant lots,
and backyards." Twenty million victory gardens were planted in 1943,
including one on the White House lawn (by now Secretary Wickard was at the
head of a pro-garden propaganda campaign).

During the oil shocks, war, and economic recessions of the 1970s still
another wave of gardening mania swept the country-and in some ways we are
still in the trailing end of that most recent wave (biointensive gardening
and Permaculture are perhaps its greatest ongoing contributions).

With rising fuel prices, we will no doubt see yet another spontaneous
explosion of interest in backyard food production. However, this time the
added productive capacity will be required long-term, and the need itself
will be greater. Urban and suburban families who know nothing about
composting or saving seed, and who lack even basic garden tools, will need
information and supplies. Local coordination will be essential.

A few communities have already made helpful steps in this general
direction. Berkeley, Calif., has instituted a Food Policy Council, whose
mission is "To build a local food system based on sustainable regional
agriculture that fosters the local economy and assures all people of
Berkeley have access to healthy, affordable and culturally appropriate food
from non-emergency sources." The Council works to "improve linkages
between local organic farms and means of distribution throughout urban
areas, and expand opportunities and support for urban gardening and
farming."

Such local councils are especially needed given the intractable reality of
national policies: the US Department of Agriculture lends nearly all of its
considerable institutional support to giant agribusiness cartels,
monopolistic seed companies, and the agricultural biotechnology industry.
Many state agriculture departments do the same.

* * *

At New College of California in Santa Rosa, we have started an Ecological
Agriculture program, which teaches students exactly the skills that will be
needed. We hold many of our classes at the Occidental Arts and Ecology
Center , which maintains decades-old gardens of thousands of rare heirloom
vegetable varieties and offers public classes on seed saving, composting,
and food activism. I am proud of the intelligence and quality of what we at
New College, and the folks at OAEC, are offering. Still, these efforts
barely scratch the surface in terms of what is needed in order to make our
county self-sufficient and sustainable in terms of food. I can only hope
that, as economic conditions deteriorate as a result of the inevitable rise
in energy prices, many more people in this area will become interested in
food security issues.

Meanwhile, as I walk down our suburban street and peer at my neighbors'
lawns and ornamental plantings, I can't help but be worried by the
magnitude of the challenge ahead.

It is mid-June as I'm writing this-the end of spring and the very
beginning of summer. Our garden is burgeoning, but we have to water some
beds almost daily. The snails are eating our greens. Birds gobble our bean
seedlings before they can establish themselves. The artichokes, fava beans,
and loquats are done for the year. The apples, pears, peaches, and tomatoes
have yet to start coming in. Most of Janet's and my meals are still based
on food from the market, with our garden supplying peripheral supplements
like onions, chard, parsnips, a few early potatoes, beets, peas, scallions,
lettuce, Napa cabbage, a few berries, and herbs.

If we could assume that the world will go on as it is indefinitely, our
garden would constitute a satisfying hobby. Given what we know about the
coming energy famine, it is the basis of our future security. One of our
neighbors (also an avid gardener) understands the oil-peak dilemma, and has
asked me to give a lecture on it for other employees at the corporation for
which he works. Cultivating relationships with all of our other neighbors
to this degree would be a full-time job, yet we know we must start
somewhere. The sooner more gardens are planted, the better off we all will
be.



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