Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

Really I had higher hopes for Part II, not too bad but nothing new. Most of 
the good stuff in it I've seen in dozens of garden books, just dressed up in 
academic-speak. Pay attention to where you grow things. Pay attention to the 
weather. Really?

YMMV.

paul tradingpost@lobo.net
-----------------------------------------

Resilient Gardening - Part II  by Christine Patton
 Published Jun 2 2010 by Peak Oil Hausfrau, Archived Jun 2 2010
http://www.energybulletin.net/node/52979

Growing your own food can be a way to increase the security and health of 
your family in a world facing the multiple challenges of peak energy and 
resources, unpredictable and more severe climate, and financial uncertainty. 
At the same time, gardening may become more difficult due to the strange and 
shifting weather and uncertain consequences of peak oil. You can increase the 
resiliency of your garden in order to help deal with rapid changes in the 
economy, environment, and energy landscape.

In the first installment of this Resilient Gardening two-part series, I 
discussed two ways to increase resiliency in your home gardens - diversity 
and localization. In this part, we'll cover feedback / knowledge and backup 
plans (redundancy).

Feedback / Knowledge

Knowledge of design systems like permaculture can help us create gardens to 
be resilient and less prone to failure, and knowledge of local gardening can 
help us create gardens that are well-adapted to our particular conditions. 
Tight feedback loops can help us respond quickly to changing conditions in 
our weather, economy, and environment.

A good start to resilient design is observation. Have you observed your 
property to find the best places to site trees, raised beds, the chicken 
house, pond, rainwater tanks, and the herb garden? Build resilience by 
choosing locations for these elements of food production where they are less 
likely to fail - out of the way of harsh winds or flooding or too much shade. 
You can also build resilience by arranging these elements so that they form 
relationships. Let nature do the work, reducing your level of effort so that 
any key maintenance is not neglected. (See Toby Hemenway's book Gaia's Garden 
for more).

Expand your information gathering to the wider community. Consult with the 
local long-term gardeners, and native/indigenous people in your area. What 
methods have they developed to bounce back from garden adversity? What 
weather extremes have they seen, and what were the results? What changes have 
they noticed recently compared to past conditions? Are there vegetable or 
fruit varieties they've noticed which do well under all kinds of conditions?

After your garden is designed and built, be sure to develop effective 
feedback between you and your garden / orchard. A gardening aphorism is "The 
best fertilizer is the gardener's footsteps." Your attention can help develop 
your understanding of the best way to improve / change your garden as time 
goes on as well as catching pest/disease problems early so that you can deal 
with them.

Information and feedback can assist in adapting to changing conditions. No 
one really knows what to expect as the effects of climate change become more 
apparent, but the Arbor Day foundation has shown that our traditional zones 
have already moved North; and more severe weather is expected as a result of 
climate change, hence the term "global weirding". This type of rapid change 
will be difficult to adapt to, as planting dates will change, some fruit 
trees won't get enough chill hours and will stop bearing, and plants will be 
subjected to new harsh conditions.

Noticing weather changes as early as possible will help you adapt your 
techniques to the new reality, instead of sticking by your tried-and-true 
methods. This means constant observation, along with monitoring and tracking 
data about your garden and the weather so that you can identify changes 
early. Start a garden journal, and record weather conditions, dates of 
planting, blooming, and harvesting, varieties planted, amounts of the 
harvest, pests and diseases. Record how you dealt with challenges and how 
well your strategies worked. This will help you identify changes as they 
occur, effective responses to change, and which varieties adapt well.

Another way to adapt to increasingly warm and weird weather is simply to 
learn about gardening in other, warmer zones. What do/did they grow there? 
What are their usual planting dates? What will you have to do to weather the 
harsher summer temperatures? How can you take advantage of the milder 
winters? This could help you adjust to gardening in a different zone.

Backup Plans / Redundancy

Redundancy is often seen as inefficiency in our efficiency-worshipping 
culture. In many cases, with cheap energy-dense oil easily available, the 
most efficient food option (although not the most tasty or healthy) is just 
to buy pre-packaged food from the grocery store or fast food outlet. With 
quickly changing conditions, peaking oil, decaying infrastructure, and 
bankrupt governments, it may not pay to rely on the system that provides 
high-fossil fuel density food that is grown, processed, packaged, and shipped 
from far away.

A backup plan is something which is not necessarily used all the time, or 
relied upon completely, but which we already have the infrastructure, tools, 
knowledge and experience to use - and hopefully, which has been practiced and 
tested. Backup plans can be both within and outside of your garden.

The idea (but not practice) of "having a garden" is a backup plan for some 
people - but keep in mind that gardens and fruit trees take time to grow. For 
a garden to function as a backup plan, the soil should be built up, the seeds 
and tools available, and the gardener should have a ready knowledge of 
planting dates, gardening techniques, and the rhythm of gardening. Ideally, a 
garden or edible landscape would be designed, planted and observed for 
several years before it was really needed as a food source.

A simple, but not necessarily easy, form of garden backup is to just plant 
extra. An old farmer saying goes something like this: "One for the birds, one 
for the bugs, and one for me." In a large garden, it requires work and seeds 
to plant extra, but in a small garden it also requires a lot of ingenuity to 
plant extra of this when you need space for that.

One strategy for planting extra is to use the permaculture principle of 
valuing the margins. Is there a 2x2 sunny spot where you could fit a 
container on your patio, or could you fit two tomato plants up against a 
fence? Could you espalier a fruit tree against the wall? You can fit a lot of 
additional plants by tucking them in here and there. Gardening books about 
using small spaces help with this principle - even if you already have a 
fairly large garden, it can help you optimize your growing area.

What's your backup plan for total plant destruction? Some people grow extra 
vegetable transplants just for this purpose - to replace plants that have 
been killed by pests, weather, etc. You can also keep some seeds in reserve, 
instead of planting all of them. In many years, the effort of growing extra 
transplants may be "wasted" - although you could give or sell the plants to 
neighbors - but in other years, you will be glad you bothered. If a fruit 
tree is severely damaged by the weather and appears to be dying, you might 
try to preserve the variety by grafting branches onto another tree (for 
example, to ensure healthy pollination for your other fruit trees).

Having several months of food storage creates resilience - not only to crop 
failures, but also many other kinds of disasters (job loss, illness or 
disability, supply chain breakdowns, hyperinflation, etc.). When all else 
fails, the fruits and veggies from last year have been dried, fermented, 
canned, frozen, and stored in the root cellar, and the bags of wheat, beans, 
and rice are still there. Which brings up a related topic - resilience in 
cooking and food preservation - which I won't get into here, but which you 
can investigate through Sharon Astyk's extensive website.

Another form of backup plan is having a way to get cheap food if your garden 
is doing poorly and you have few funds. Freeganism - urban foraging from 
dumpsters - has gained attention in recent years, with some people 
pronouncing it to be disgusting, while others think it's simply good sense to 
use perfectly good food that will otherwise be wasted. Novella Carpenter, in 
her book Farm City, describes how she uses dumped food from restaurants to 
feed her urban pigs. Other people arrange to pick up the vegetable waste from 
restaurants, or used grains from breweries, to feed it to their livestock or 
turn it into compost.

There are plentiful books, videos, and classes available to help you learn 
how to hunt, fish, and find edible "weeds." There are even online resources 
in some cities that point out the locations of fruit and nut trees. A lot of 
nutrition (if not calories) can be had from lambs quarters and dandelions, 
and bamboo is both a food and a great trellis system.

Outside of your personal garden, what does your neighborhood "foodshed" look 
like? You could benefit from having more people in your neighborhood who are 
growing food and who can share seeds with you, and who have the ability to 
ramp up their own production if needed. Gardeners often naturally exchange 
produce - butternuts for watermelons, peaches for plums - helping gardeners 
with little space. Starting or supporting community gardens, school gardens, 
church gardens, and hyper-local food production like CSA's can all be ways to 
develop the foodshed in your area.

It may be worth your while to develop resilience outside of your nuclear 
family and personal property and in your community. How are your relations 
with your neighbors, friends and family, a church? Have you helped them start 
a garden, or given them some excess produce? Are you on good terms with them? 
Have you established a foundation of trust and reciprocity? Community help 
can be invaluable in helping a family deal with hard times or disaster, 
especially if that family is seen as a valuable asset to the community. (See 
Dan Chiras and Dave Wann's book Superbia! for ways to create sustainable 
neighborhoods.)

Relocation is another, more final, backup plan, and is worth thinking about 
for many reasons. If you realize that food production in your area is 
ridiculously difficult, or even outright unworkable, you may want to have a 
secondary home in mind. This may seem extreme, and there are definite 
downsides to relocation, but knowing when to hold 'em - and when to fold 'em 
- will be a key skill in a rapidly changing environment.

Summary

A resilient garden would not be complete without a resilient gardener. In 
order to recover after a catastrophe, you need the will to go on - to 
replant, to rebuild, to try again after poor results or failures. But a 
resilient attitude is one in which you not only have the tenacity to 
persevere, but also have the ability to notice and discard what is no longer 
working, and start experimenting instead.

So notice what may be prone to failure as peak energy occurs - our 
oil-dependent, industrialized food system and our growth-based economy. 
Prepare for change as our climate gets weirder. Re-localize your food 
production into your garden and local foodshed, use diversity and redundancy 
in your gardening, pay attention to conditions as they change, adapt and 
adjust your techniques, and have a backup plan (or two or three).

I hope these ideas to increase your garden resilience will help you weather 
the storms that are coming. Please contribute to the effort by adding ideas 
and thoughts from your own experience, and may your garden bounty become 
legendary!

Sources:

Special thanks to the authors whose ideas inspired these posts.

Rob Hopkins - The Transition Handbook
David Holmgren - Permaculture Principles
Richard Heinberg - Food and Farming Transition
Sharon Astyk - Casaubon's Book, The Chatelaine's Keys, A Nation of Farmers
Toby Hemenway - Gaia's Garden
Eliot Coleman - The Winter Harvest Handbook and Four Season Harvest
Sally Cunningham - Great Garden Companions
Novella Carpenter - Farm City

Ben Sherwood - The Survivors Club

Dan Chiras & Dave Wann - Superbia! 31 ways to create sustainable neighborhoods