Subject: Re: [Homestead] Ripping up Asphalt and Planting Gardens
Date: Tue, 25 Oct 2005 19:27:35 -0500
There has never been a sustainable city anywhere on the planet.
Sustainable villages, yes. Sustainable camps, yes. But not cities.
Civilization is going to crash, whether or not we help bring this about.
That's as far as I can read. I presume the writer makes his money with this
kind of stuff.
Suspect he has not bothered to read the history of cities, which have been
around much longer than oil-powered anything. Suspect he has not read how
Paris had a wonderful loop of horse manure to intensive gardens and veggies
to Parisians. Yes, that is where we get the term: French Intensive Gardening.
For those interested in the latter, here is a negative review I wrote in
Amazon.com that gives the history:
How to Grow More Vegetables: Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains, and Other Crops
by John Jeavons
Edition: Paperback
Price: $17.95
Availability: This item is currently unavailable.
13 used & new from $6.75
53 of 57 people found the following review helpful:
Double-digging, maybe. Double pages, no., May 31, 2000
This title grew from a 1971 experimental garden in Palo Alto, California
instigated by Alan Chadwick and Stephen Kafka. That garden showed that
using the biodynamic/French Intensive method produced four times more
vegetables than conventional techniques.
Biodynamic techniques were developed by Austrian genius Rudolf Steiner.
French Intensive methods were developed in the 1890s by market gardeners
outside Paris, a time when horses provided more-than-ample fertilizer and
the city provided a ready market for vegetables. Chadwick studied under
Steiner and French gardeners.
The method requires double-digging garden beds and adding compost or aged
manure. Double-digging to two feet in depth provides loose soil that roots
easily penetrate. Plants are seeded or transplanted very close together and
form a living mulch, shading roots, causing greater water retention,
denying sunlight to weeds. Other aspects of the method are planting and
transplanting by the phases of the moon and daily sprinkling rather than
periodical flooding.
This material has been recycled four times since the 1974 typewritten
edition. I regret to report it is no longer up-to-date gardening knowledge,
it will intimidate beginning gardeners, and it will bore experienced
gardeners. There is only one new chapter, titled Sustainability, which is
mostly promotion of Ecology Action. In addition, Jeavons seems confused. In
the first four editions he wrote that he was teaching us the
"biodynamic/French intensive method" of Steiner and French gardeners as
learned and taught by Chadwick. Now in a chapter titled A Perspective for
the Future, he writes that his work is based on the "Chinese Biointensive
way of farming." Yet nowhere does he advocate or tell how to use humanure,
which is the basis of Chinese food production, as first shown by F.H. King
in his book, Farmers of Forty Centuries. Only in the bibliography do we
find book listings under the heading: Human Waste. The huge bibliography
(36 pages, was 22 pages in the last edition) apparently lists every book
and catalog in the Ecology Action library but there is NO INDEX! I find the
lack of an index in a nonfiction book to be unforgivable. For instance,
looking for crop rotation or mulching methods means scanning the entire 201
pages--and coming up empty.
There are pages and pages of drawings and technical charts that most
readers will never use. We find listings of plants and information both
barely usable--seeds per ounce, pounds consumed per average person per
year--and important--bed spacing, yields--although there is no recognition
or advice concerning the many soil types and growing zones. One is dismayed
to find--in a book titled How to Grow More Vegetables--more pages of charts
about grain, protein source, vegetable oil crops; cover, organic matter,
fodder crops; energy, fiber paper and other crops; tree and cane crops--20
pages in all, than about vegetable crops--8 pages.
Promotion of Ecology Action uses a fourteen-page chapter in addition to six
more pages of self-promotion in the Sustainability chapter. If you want to
support Jeavons' work, send a check to Ecology Action, or buy his book, The
Sustainable Vegetable Garden, adapted from this book by co-author Carol
Cox, which is smaller and less expensive and has all his best stuff without
the wasted pages of charts, drawings and promotion, and it has an index! If
you want current gardening information, read authors such as Eliot Coleman
and Dick Raymond who are progressive and work with all garden designs,
including the mulch method first popularized by Ruth Stout and now used by
hundreds of my gardening friends across the country. Most of us have tried
the double-dig method and have long since moved on. I recommend you not
waste your time, except maybe once for new gardens, depending on soil
conditions. Thereafter, use mulch, save your back and spend your time and
energy on better pursuits.