Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

livingontheland - [Livingontheland] Food in Uncertain Times

livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Food in Uncertain Times
  • Date: Tue, 26 Oct 2010 09:11:15 -0600


Five days ago I passed on an excerpt from Food in Uncertain Times at
http://www.alternet.org/food/148562/food_in_uncertain_times:_how_to_grow_and_store_the_5_crops_you_need_to_survive?page=entire

Rereading it prompted me to say more. What got my attention all over again is
how deep she gets into the details of practical growing and storing, and
planning for the unpredictable in her local climate. It's like, working smart
instead of working hard.

Carol Deppe's book, The Resilient Gardener: Food Production and Self-Reliance
in Uncertain Times, is available from http://www.bookfinder.com/ as low as
$20.

paul tradingpost@lobo.net
~~~~~~~~~

More excerpts:

Lots of times, it is storing and using that is more of the missing link than
gardening. Most gardeners know how to grow field corn. But most don't have
the knowledge to turn corn into gourmet-quality fast-cooking polenta or
savory corn gravy or even cornbread (without using wheat or other things they
can't grow), let alone fine-textured cakes. Most gardeners can grow potatoes.
But most don't know how to store their potatoes optimally.

I delight in all the knowledge about plants, ecology, and gardening we have
today. But I take peasants as my basic model. I aim to be a modern peasant. I
focus primarily upon growing food, especially upon staple crops and crops of
special nutritional value. And I want lots of delicious food for the least
possible work.

Gardeners who know how to grow food can be reservoirs of knowledge, skills,
and seeds for their communities. For this, though, the gardeners need to know
how to grow staple crops, that is, calories and protein, not just fruits and
vegetables. In good times, gardeners don't necessarily need to grow all their
staple crops. But in good times, resilient gardeners learn to grow and use
some of their staple crops so that they at least know how.

The resilient garden is designed and managed so that when things go wrong,
they have less impact. Most gardens are good-time gardens. They self-destruct
rapidly if deprived of our labor. They depend upon constant imports of
fertilizer and seeds. They need relatively stable weather. The resilient
gardener has learned to operate with minimal external inputs, and in a world
where climate is changing and weather is more erratic. The resilient gardener
knows how to save seeds.

Potatoes are a great source of both carbohydrates and protein. They have
protein levels comparable to the most protein-rich grains by the time you
adjust for water. They yield more carbohydrate per square foot than anything
we can grow in temperate climates. They yield more protein per square foot
than anything we can grow except beans. They have good levels of vitamin C
and significant amounts of calcium and other minerals. They are the easiest
of all staple crops to grow. They yield much more carbohydrate and protein
than anything else per unit labor. Small grains take fine seed beds, meaning
tillers, tractors, or draft animals.

This helps give us disease resilience. We grow one pole bean (common bean),
one fava, one garb, one tepary, and one cowpea. Each is selected for
spectacular flavor as well as resilience for its particular growing niche.
This gives us five different species, which greatly facilitates saving pure
seed; so we never have to buy seed. In addition, with winter, spring, and
summer growing niches, a severe weather event is likely to wipe out only
some, not all our beans.

About one acre is tilled. It's divided into six sections. One section we're
turning into permanent garden beds to grow a big variety of garden crops,
everything from amaranth greens and garlic to lettuce and strawberries. The
rest is field crops that get rotated around each year. The field crops are
all in rows spaced at 3'. (Or 7' for the big squash.) The basic 3' spacing is
what is needed to get our rototiller between the rows, that is, when the
rototiller works. Which it doesn't always. The acre of crops is as much as we
want to tend by hand when the rototiller is uncooperative. In addition, it's
as much as we want to water. This kind of spacing means we need to water the
most water needy crops only once per week in August, the most water-short
month, and less the rest of the time. And with this spacing, the potatoes
don't have to be watered at all. And everything could at least survive a good
while if it didn't get watered at all, even in August.

The permanent beds are 4' across, the biggest we can reach across
comfortably, with aisles between them that are alternating 3' and 1'. That
space is a compromise. Nate, being 32, can tend and harvest a garden by
bending over or squatting. So if the garden was just his, he would space the
beds with aisles 1' wide. That way, he would have the most possible planting
area for the total area that needs to be watered. And there would be as
little aisle space that needs to be weeded as possible. I'm 64. My back and
knees rebel against squatting or bending over for very long. I can hoe
comfortably using the right kinds of tools that permit me to work standing
upright with my back straight. I can also tend and harvest comfortably on my
hands and knees, but that takes aisles 3' across.

About 1/6 of the garden is in legumes, but not in one section because we
plant different species that are grown at different times of year, a common
trick for spreading many kinds of risks and enhancing resilience. In
addition, overwintering cool-season legumes don't require watering. Staple
crops that don't require watering (or electricity) cuts the labor in good
times and might be essential in bad times.

Ideally, we would like to have a small farm with some sheep and maybe water
buffalo for milk, meat, and draft, and a full orchard, and of course, a pond
for the ducks in addition to land for our garden and seed crops. But
resilience is about just doing something now, making a start, doing what you
can with what you have. And what we can do at the moment is lease some good
gardening land that isn't too far from our home, and grow lots of food, and
breed new varieties selected specifically for flavor and resilience. And we
can just play around and try things and have fun.

The issue of how to get a garden as perfect as possible -- that isn't my
issue. My issue is, how can I get the highest yield of the most delicious
food for the least possible time and effort? I'm lazy. I want to garden
efficiently. Perfectionism really gets in the way of gardening efficiently. I
don't talk about very much about perfectionism. Instead, I talk about what I
call "selective sloppiness." I have spent a lot of time figuring out what I
can get away with not doing. I even have a section in The Resilient Gardener
that lists lots of things gardeners are frequently told to do that are
unnecessary or even counterproductive.











Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page