permaculture

["Lawrence F. London, Jr." <lfl@intrex.net>]

Fred Gardner
CounterPunch.org

Oakland, CA May 14, 2005 -- Bob Cannard grows mixed fruits and 
vegetables on a 25-acre farm in Glen Ellen. He manages it so that 
something is always ready to harvest.

Bob Cannard: I'd say we're growing enough to generate a minimum of 
150 generous vegetable meals a day. Right now [in early May] we could 
pick at least 5,000 salads and 5,000 bowls of fava beans infused with 
various herbs. Those two crops are generous right at the moment. In a 
month we'll have around 80,000 pounds of potatoes. Every day between 
now and then there'll be some major crop that is passing through. It 
may be turnips that people don't like too much, but it'll be a food 
crop that's good for them.

Given one good worker -one man of the soil from Mexico who knows what 
his trade is and how to practice it energetically- we can take care 
of this 20 to 25 acres with its wide range of vegetables and fruits 
and berries and herbs and cover crops for the soil. Monday we'll 
plant 5,000 tomato plants, after we pick a load of vegetables in the 
morning. We'll plant them, we'll get the irrigation lines out, and 
we'll have the water on them before 4:30, when his day finishes.

The tomatoes were started 49 to the flat in flats filled with 
composty soils, All the nutrition that's available on the earth is in 
that media and available to the plant. They're strong and will resist 
the stress of transplant They're all about two inches apart. 
Everything they need is right in the soil and they don't have to set 
out these seeking roots that run to the outside and the bottom of the 
pot looking for stuff, and wrap around and around and around in 
pursuit of escape from the prison they're in. As long as I don't let 
them try to get too big and force spatial competition, until that 
point there's no stress. They root out, they don't intertangle, the 
root systems are easily separable, they have finely branched, divided 
root systems that indicate contentment where they are. Everything 
they need is there. We have more than 100 flats of them; we just 
crawl along and stick 'em in. And the ground is all prepared. I use 
tractors. I just spaded it this morning. I'll take the little tractor 
and mark out all the rows. I do most of the crawling and it takes 
Javier just about as much time to walk back to the truck and pick up 
a flat of plants and haul it out to me as it takes me to plant 50 of 
'em. Then he'll get a little bit ahead of me in laying out the flats, 
and then he'll dispatch himself down to pick up another truck load. 
If I get done before, I sit down and have a puff (of tobacco).

What's important is the work ethic. The two of us are taking care of 
hundreds of thousands, or millions of plants. And they're delicate, 
they've got to be perfect. Those plants go to famous professional 
chefs who are extremely demanding. Cleanliness, size, uniformity, are 
all important to those guys.

<.....>

What you need to grow good quality plants is good mineral 
nutrition, good digestion in the soil, and the appropriate cosmic 
wavelength that we call sunlight and a good quotient of old air in 
the soil to feed the digestion, which is compost, and a good clean 
air environment so that the plants can absorb non-polluted air to 
build on and function. I use rock dust and oyster shell and rock 
phosphates and crushed rock. I couldn't grow a garden without mineral 
supplementation. Every enzymatic process is built around a mineral 
element -a single element or a mineral compound. And enzymatic 
processes control all life. So, delete minerals, you got problems. 
Listen to the land-grant colleges and feed plants that old commercial 
NPK stuff and you're guaranteed to have imbalances. You can't force 
something to grow to completeness. You can only nurture it to grow to 
completeness. And it's so easy to do it right. And it's so hard to do 
it wrong.