Heirloom Gardening, Food and Other Thoughts
Luigi over at the Biodiversity Weblog posted the text of a new EU directive on seeds.
It’s far from the end of EU Seed Laws we are all hoping for, but it’s kind of interesting because it seems to be vaguely worded and could let individual countries significantly relax their seed laws if they choose to.
The proof is in the pudding as they say, and we just have to wait and see what happens.
I’m growing these in a pot on my roof. Emma gave me tubers for these last year. The plants look sort of like grass, but the shape the leaves grow in is very precise.
The tubers of this plant are used to make Horchata de Chufas, a Spanish drink similar to rice, almond or soy milk.
This can be an invasive plant, so it’s usually best to grow it in a container. It’s not frost hardy, so in places with a hard winter it can also be grown outside.
This plant is similar to water chestnuts, and can tolerate very wet soil.
I’ve been meaning to do a post about the hedge in our garden for a while now, and it seemed like it would go along with the discussion on my post Wednesday about the dead ground and the cultural issues that go along with it.
Our garden complex includes four rows of gardens separated by canals like you see in this picture. All of the gardens are surrounded by a hedge. We are all responsible for maintaining the hedge that goes along the outside of our gardens, and I’m personally a bit screwed in this regard. Because I have a double garden on the end of a row, I have hedge on three sides totalling about 50 linear meters! Most gardens only have about 15 linear meters.
Since there is no electricity in the gardens, you certainly see a few gardeners starting up their gas (petrol) generators so they can plug in their electric hedge trimmers and trim their 15 meters of hedge (something that needs to be done every few weeks). Some of the more environmentally minded gardeners use battery operated trimmer they charge at home. Considering the maintenance and expense of the equipment involved, I don’t find there is much benefit to powered trimmers, so I just use a hand shears. This is a bit time consuming, but not really a huge deal once it comes down to it.
The hedge is a constant source of irritation for most gardeners. There are rules governing exactly how high the hedge must be, and the state it has to be kept in. The management of the garden comes along regularly inspecting and enforcing these rules. If you don’t take care of your hedge, they can fine you or bill you for the cost of taking care of it for you, and eventually you will lose your garden. For gardens on the south side it means a shadow is cast on that part of their garden. For all of us, the size of our gardens is calculated including the hedge and we pay for that space every year. The hedge is nitrogen fixing, meaning it grows quickly and is a major source of weeds. We all have to spend considerable effort fighting these weeds and maintaining barriers on the ground. It’s also sometimes home to birds and other wildlife that are often garden pests.
You can see when it comes down to it some of us are better at taking care of it than others, like the bit in the middle of the picture above which is just growing wild. Really it just never looks good, if you stand back and look at it as a whole.
One of the issues I personally have with the hedge is I needed to do a rather major cutting back when I first got my garden, and the space it needed in my compost pile was almost more than I had available.
The grass on the outside is also a similar issue, as we all need to take turns mowing it.
So the obvious question is if everyone hates it so much why don’t we get rid of it? The answer is we can’t.
The garden complex was built on a piece of land which probably used to be used for grazing animals, so it was just open space. Some overpaid civil servant, who has probably never had a garden and probably no idea how much of an irritation it would be to many of the people using the space, set about to do some urban planning. With pencil and paper, and lots of committee meetings and associated paperwork, decided exactly how our garden complex would look. They laid out the grass on the side, and choose the kind of plants used to make the hedge. They laid out the size and shape of all our gardens.
These civil servants who do this kind of work in this country are held in very high esteem. Often their names go along with their work, and sometimes they get to choose the names for the neighborhoods. Often for generations after this work is done, and consideration is being given to building something else in the spot, there are emotional public meetings where people express how painful it is to undo the work of the genius who created the spot in the first place.
I think even if all of us gardeners rioted on city hall, we would be unable to change the urban planning that went into that hedge or the grassy areas around our gardens. After all, what would really be the harm of putting up a row of trees to block the view from the street, then doing what we wanted with our gardens? Well this would be violating the idea here of not allowing individual expression.
We also have a similar problem with the security fence that surrounds our garden complex. There is a precise definition of a security fence in the Netherlands. It’s a little less than 2 meters high and strong enough to keep it from just being kicked down. It has to have a legally prescribed notice on it identifying it as a security fence, and if it is kept locked and someone breaches it, we can call the police and complain. The city planning forbids us from building a fence that is any higher than this, and we regularly have people that jump the fence and vandalize gardens. Realistically there is little the police can do, and we are not allowed to build a bigger fence to prevent the problem in the first place.
The situation is very straight forward. The city owns the garden complex and is letting us use it. If we don’t follow the rules, we will be fined and kicked out. If we don’t like the rules, we are welcome to go to another garden complex in another city, but similar rules exist everywhere. It’s not a matter of just going to a private garden complex and paying more, because there is probably no city in the Netherlands that would issue a zoning or use permit for someone to build and operate something like this.
In many neighborhoods the situation is similar if you own an apartment in a large building. While you might own your apartment, the city controls the appearance of the outside of the building and surrounding area, so there is nothing the occupants can do to change this. Even as a home owner in Amsterdam, there are rules about the color of paint I can use on the outside of my house, in particular plain white paint is absolutely forbidden.
I understand there are rules like this everywhere in the world, but I think they are really taken to an extreme here.
I have the same tomato plants growing in two different parts of my garden. Both Matt’s Wild Cherry. The first picture you can see beans growing at the base of the plant:
Here in a different spot, on the three poles to the right, Matt’s Wild Cherry growing without beans:
In the background here you see my wind beaten Jerusalem artichokes, which by the way don’t seem to mind a shortage of nitrogen.
The poles are all the same size, about 180cm in total with about 1.5m sticking out above the ground.
You can see the tomato plants next to the beans are about 1 meter tall, and without the beans about 30cm. To be honest, I did put the 30cm plants out in the garden a few weeks later, but that still doesn’t account for the entire difference in size.
I posted before about the ground test I did, which showed my nitrogen levels were ‘medium-low to low’, at least in the one spot I did the test. It’s really becoming obvious just how low the overall nitrogen in my garden really is. I did the soil test first, then added compost, so I assumed that would help a little bit. I’ve also planted beans in several places.
What I’m seeing is anywhere a plant is not growing right next to a bean, it’s not doing very well.
I think because the nitrogen levels in the ground are so low, it’s contributing to the problem I mentioned in the last post about having ‘dead ground’, because all life needs nitrogen, and this in turn means the nutrients in the compost I added are becoming available to the plants only very slowly because there are no worms or insects to metabolize the compost.
Interestingly, my garlic is not showing signs of problems along these lines, but it’s hard to be completely sure.
With increasing urgency as I’ve been understanding what was going on I’ve been sowing beans through the garden, and most are germinating and growing by now. Bush beans mature in about 90 days, so there’s still plenty of season left for them. It’s clear as they begin to fix nitrogen, they are making a big difference to the neighboring plants. I’ve used up nearly my entire stock of bean seeds! The other problem I’ve been having is a minor water shortage, which I need to get the seeds to germinate, but fortunately we’ve been getting a little rain.
I don’t think there’s any real damage to the garden as a result, but a few things may not grow as large or produce as much in the end. The row of tiny tomatoes probably won’t produce much, but they aren’t very important. They are three different types of currant tomatoes that I was growing next to each other in order to compare them. I’ll be just as happy getting fruits a month late, and I don’t need very many.
It’s always hard to take pictures of my garlic plants, because I have so many of them growing close together, but in the middle of this picture (the plants with their base at the bottom center) are some of my rustiest plants. This is Kransnodar White garlic. Kransnodar is a city in Siberia, and I think it was famous for it’s garlic in Soviet days. In a few days these plants will be dead for sure, but I may still be able to harvest something from them.
I remember from last year this variety got rust badly too, and the bulbs I harvested were on the small side.
Another variety getting bad rust is Tuscan, an Italian variety:
These pictures don’t have enough resolution to see it clearly, but it looks like these plants have pox or something. They are covered in lots of small brown spots.
I would say in general the rust seems worse than last year, but it’s still too early to say how bad it really is. I’m so close to harvest, that every week the plants stay alive is very important. These two pictures represent the worst, and most of my garlic really seems to be doing okay for the moment. The severity of the rust seems to depend on the location in the garden, as well as the variety. I’m learning the quality of soil in my garden varies greatly from spot to spot, and it’s clear that has an impact on the severity of the rust. Exactly what the factors are behind this is less than clear however.
It’s been my intention to reduce the number of varieties I have, so any that get particularly bad rust which are not otherwise interesting, will probably get discarded.
Now I’m waiting for the potato blight to arrive. It’s getting to be about time for that too!
Dry and Windy Weather
It’s been very dry recently. Not particularly hot, but the wind is really drying out the ground. Established plants in my garden don’t need a lot of watering, because while the water table is going down a bit in this weather, it’s not too far down and anything with deep roots can reach it. I’ve recently planted some beans and a few other seeds, and it’s been a challenge to keep them wet enough to germinate, because the ground is so sandy every time I add water it just drains through. Parts of my garden are even rich with seashells!
So far the only victim of the wind were a few of my Jerusalem artichoke plants, but I guess these will grow back.
This dry weather has really given me a different perspective on the soil of my garden. Beside noticing how sandy it is, I’ve been noticing anything that’s not growing next to beans has not been doing very well, which seems to go along with my soil test of a few months ago that showed a general lack of nitrogen. It’s also just increasingly clear the ground is very lacking in organic material. I have really added a lot of compost in recent months brought from my previous garden, but it has not really had a lot of time to become incorporated and more would probably help.
I’ve noticed the ground in my garden is mostly ‘dead’. There are very few worms or insects living in it, with the exception of a lot of ants.
If you are a commercial farmer (at least in this part of the world), the ideal situation is ‘dead’ ground. Organic material is usually not desirable, and is best avoided when possible. Pure clay, silt or sand, or some mixture of these three is the best. The reason for this is farmers have a system of growing crops with chemicals that works very well for them, and if the ground is ‘dead’ there are simply fewer variables for them to deal with. The nutrient balance of the ground (or perhaps the complete lack of nutrients) is generally known in advance so a preset amount of fertilizer can be added. Most chemical fertilizers don’t remain in the ground for more than a growing season, because they are water soluble, so every year you are starting fresh. All of the pests and diseases are mostly known quantities, and there are chemicals available to deal with these.
It’s part of the culture here that individual thinking is not encouraged, and there is often a social price to be paid if you think and act differently than others. Perhaps in part for this reason, most people here seem to take the same approach with gardening that farmers take, and prefer ‘dead’ ground with chemicals added. It’s certainly an issue that divides people mostly according to nationality in my garden complex, with compost being made and used mostly by non-Dutch born gardeners, and the point of some contention. Since the previous gardener was Dutch-born, it’s logical to think the approach he took was to promote dead ground, but I don’t know for sure.
It’ll be interesting to see how my garden changes as I add more organic material, and try to promote more life processes in the soil. I’m curious how long it will take before I notice real changes.
