Heirloom Gardening, Food and Other Thoughts
Only people over 18 and a UK resident or eligible to win prizes in this contest.
Do you have an Ethical Garden? Let the Observer Organic Allotment people know and maybe you can win a £500 gift voucher.
All environmental ideas recently published in gardening blogs from the UK and elsewhere eagerly considered! For more ideas, have a look at the 20 big green ideas linked to in the post above.
Entries have to be submitted before March 9, 2009.
98% of the worlds seeds come from one of six companies:
Monsanto
Syngenta
DuPont
Mitsui
Aventis
Dow
If you don’t make a conscious decision to buy your seed from somewhere else, they will almost certainly come one of these companies.
There are two kinds of seed retailers. The first kind simply resells seeds from these companies, a commercial seed retailer. While it’s not impossible that some of your seeds may come from somewhere else, these retailers enter into very restrictive marketing agreements and promise never to clearly label their seeds for what they are. Instead they use marketing terms like ‘old style’ or ‘like what your grand mother grew’ or even ‘heirloom’ (because this is not a legally defined term).
The second kind of seed retailer makes a clear public statement that all of their seeds are non-hybrid or ‘Open Pollinated’. With these type of seeds you can grow the plants and resave the seeds for yourself or to share with others. Have a look in the Links section in the front of this blog for ideas of seed retailers like this. Of course there are others around I don’t link to. If a seed company sells a single F1 variety, they are a commercial seed retailer, and you cannot trust anything you buy from them!
If you live in Europe you will have a much harder time finding a non-commercial seed retailer. This is because in Europe we have laws requiring seeds offered for sale have to be registered and on official lists. Since the big six seed companies control these lists, it makes sense of course their seeds are featured. There are a growing number of non-commercial seed companies operating in Europe, but they are technically illegal, and may not be around much longer. If you live in Europe you may need to buy your seeds from abroad, probably North America where there are no seed laws.
The Blogger Seed Network only has non-commercial seeds, and at least some of the members will ship seed anywhere in the world! You don’t need to have a blog to participate, and while offering some payment to cover the costs of sending the seeds is always appreciated, most people will send seeds for little or no payment. You don’t need to offer seeds yourself to request them.
Marc at Garden Desk made a couple of posts recently about his tomato growing plans for next year, and in the process some interesting points came up, not only in the posts themselves but in the discussion too.
In my last post I said if you asked 100 gardeners for advice, you would get 100 different answers. I think the same must be true if you asked 100 different gardeners what their gardening goals were.
Imagine how boring the world would be if we were all white males of European decent! By the same token, imagine what it would be like if all gardeners had exactly the same goals in mind. As a gardening community, and as a world, we are much stronger because of our differences and our different goals.
Some people make a living growing food and raising animals, and most of these people are committed to the idea they are providing an important service to the world. In this case they are concerned about finances, as well as producing usable food that people want to buy, in the largest quantities possible.
Some people are plant breeders, who are concerned with finding the perfect combination of genes, and discarding everything that’s not quite there yet, wherever ‘there’ is.
Still others are home gardeners like Marc who loves tomatoes, in particular loves to see the differences in strange heirloom varieties and seeks goals like the earliest fruit or the tallest plants.
If you ask any of these people for advice, they will offer it from their own perspectives, and it will all be a little different.
Zero Air Miles
If you buy food from the store or market, it comes from somewhere. It has to be transported, often from great distances. It will generally have been produced with chemical and energy inputs, as well as someone else’s labor. If you throw half of it away, this is really wasteful. Literally, you are wasting food that could be used to feed hungry people or just not produced in a wasteful way in the first place.
Assuming you’re an organic gardener, the only thing wasted if you throw something away you grew yourself is a bit of sunshine and your own time!
The most important goals for your garden have to be the ones you set for yourself. If it weren’t for your own goals, there wouldn’t be any point in having a garden in the first place. Whatever those goals are, feeding yourself or others, seed saving, plant breeding or just enjoying nature and biodiversity, this has to be your top priority in any garden.
Don’t let anyone tell you you are doing something wrong in your own garden! At the same time, don’t be immune to input from others, because there’s lots of good information out there, especially for people just getting started. It can really save you a lot of time by not making the same mistakes others already have.
Inputs and Outputs
While you’re enjoying yourself and pursuing your goals, give some thought to what you’re doing. A garden really needs very few inputs.
If you set up a garden with new wood that comes from cleared land, is milled and transported, that’s really a huge resource you are using unnecessarily. It’s expensive too. Consider using used materials in your garden, like stones or bricks, or recycled wood. Stones and bricks will last longer than wood too, which can be very useful.
The same is true with peat products. While it’s true they are a renewable resource, they are generally not mined in a sustainable way and often have to be transported long distances. If you live next to a peat bog, this is one thing, but otherwise as an alternative to peat products consider getting compost made from municipal (council) waste which is available in many areas, or better yet making your own compost. Consider why you think you need peat in the first place, because it’s rarely necessary for use in the garden. Peat is useful for indoor plants or starting seeds, because it is weed free and sterile. It can also be useful for outdoor potted plants, because local soils are sometimes not well suited for this. Since your garden is neither sterile or weed free, there are usually better and cheaper alternatives to peat.
Don’t be fooled by peat free alternatives either, like coir, which also have to be milled and transported long distances! These are generally as wasteful as peat, and usually more expensive.
Consider most chemicals and fertilizers are also very wasteful as well as almost always unnecessary. Almost everyone’s garden will do fine if you rotate your crops, make and use your own compost, and grow nitrogen fixing plants from time to time.
Consider collecting rainwater from the roofs of structures near you garden, perhaps your own house. Perhaps collecting grey water from your house is an option. Perhaps you have other renewable sources of water nearby.
While tempting to the beginning gardener, power tools like tillers are not usually very useful. Consider getting one used, borrowing or renting one, until you are really sure it’s needed. Non-electric power tools use an astonishing amount of fuel, often as much as a car, and in some US cities cause 15% of the air pollution. Consider using something electric, or sticking to hand tools.
Finally, if you do end up with extra food that’s usable, consider ensuring it gets used. Process and store it for later use, or give it away. If you do throw it away, you aren’t hurting anyone or anything, but you can only do good by making sure it’s used somehow.
Kathy of Skippy’s Vegetable Garden recently made a post about starting a vegetable garden. After lots of great ideas, down at the bottom is a survey asking how many of her readers are starting a new vegetable garden this year. As of the time of my making this post, 58 people had responded to the survey, and 45% said they plan to start a new garden this year. Wow! That’s a huge percentage.
I know that Kathy and I have many of the same people reading our blogs, and to think so many of you may be starting new gardens is really amazing. I hope a lot of you also join the world of blogging and start your own blogs, it would be great to have the company!
This is always the time of year when the number of people reading this blog increases. The number of unique readers is now in excess of 10,000 per month, roughly double that of last year at this same time. This number includes people who visit via search engines and aggregation services like Bloglines and Google Blogs, and excludes most spammers and robots. It’s my own estimate, based on my own analysis, mostly counting by hand with the help of some computer programs. It’s just an estimate! For those of you who want to compare your traffic with mine, the number of visits from unique IP addresses is roughly twice this figure.
If you think about it, if there are 10,000 of you reading this and anything close to 45% of you are starting a new garden, that’s thousands of new gardens this year, possibly hundreds or thousands of new gardening blogs coming online in the next few months. This is nothing short of a revolution!
Advice for Starting a New Garden
If you ask 100 gardeners for advice on something, you will surely get 100 different answers. Here is my advice for starting a new garden:
Test your soil: If you live in the US or Canada this is probably easier than for most people living in other areas, but if you have access to a lab who can test your soil it’s a good idea to have it done. If you live in or near a city, the chances of ground contamination is high, and you should know this before you start. A soil test can also give you an idea of what problems exist in your ground. If you don’t have a lab that can test your soil, you can tell a lot by taking an inventory of your weeds and researching the conditions they do well in. I made a post about this before. There are a few books around on the subject, and a little information available on the Internet. You can also simply watch your plants as they grow, and look for signs of deficiencies as they grow. Once you understand what your soil may be lacking, then you can decide what to do about it. At the very least, I would suggest testing the pH of your garden, and many simple and cheap kits are available in garden centers for doing this.
Add lime as necessary: If after testing your soil, you discover it’s too acidic, then add lime to your garden according to the label instructions. Most plants prefer a pH between 5.5-6.0, but many have other needs. Fruit trees generally needs more alkaline ground, and blueberries like it more acidic for example. Do this in early spring.
Avoid unnecessary inputs: Just as important as what you do to prepare your garden, is what you don’t do. At best these can be a waste of money, at worst they can cause long term damage to the natural systems in your garden. We live in a world where places like garden centers make money by selling you things, and this promotion can carry over in the form of advice from friends or others on the Internet. In most cases your garden will need few, if any, inputs. You will have a healthier and more productive garden in the long run if you don’t get trapped into the mindset of needing a box of this or a bottle of that every time you suspect a potential problem with your garden. These are like feeding your plants vitamin pills. Importing unnecessary topsoil or peat moss products, generally doesn’t accomplish very much either, unless your own topsoil is unusually poor. Many cities around the world have compost available made from organic waste, and this is a much better alternative to peat products and is often available free for the taking or at low cost, although this can sometimes contain pieces of trash that have to be picked out by hand. Most gardeners don’t need to do anything but recycle their waste by making compost, and putting this back into the garden.
Avoid fresh manure: This is often a cultural thing, more common outside of North America. Fresh manure can cause a lot of problems. It contains a lot of soluble nitrogen, that is just too strong for most plants. It can kill small seedlings, and cause a wide range of diseases in others. It can also cause long term nutrient imbalances. Alliums (onion and garlic related) are particularly sensitive to manure. If you use manure at all, it needs to be well aged (2+ years) or properly composted. In order to compost properly, you need to mix it with a vast amount of high carbon material like straw, making it impractical for most people to do on a large scale. If your compost smells like ammonia, it has too much manure in it, and needs to be stirred and sit longer before using. Manure coming from industrial farmers is often highly contaminated with antibiotics, hormones and other chemicals and can contain E-Coli, salmonella and other dangerous diseases. There was a serious problem with contaminated manure last year in Northern Europe. If you use manure, know the animals it came from! If you must use manure, horse manure is usually considered a better choice over cow manure.
Use Only Organic Fertilizers: If you use fertilizer at all, and many people simply don’t need it, use only organic. The best fertilizers are those you make yourself, for example compost tea or tea made with green plants. These often work best when sprayed on the plants to be fertilized, as they can often be absorbed through the leaves. If you want to purchase a fertilizer, consider something like fish emulsion, kelp extracts or similar products made from natural sources. Products like blood/bone meal or chemical fertilizers are almost always products of industrial farming, too strong for a home garden, and can have many of the same problems as fresh manure. Home made fertilizers or those similar to fish emulsion or kelp extracts can simply be applied in moderation as needed, while others need to be carefully managed and applied during certain times of the year.
Over use of fertilizers can create a sort of dependence on them, because it creates an expectation that your plants should be big and green, and can cause long term nutrient imbalances in the ground leading to the perception that more fertilizer is needed. It’s better to play it safe, not use any at all, then only use small amounts when you are certain they are needed. Fertilizers are of no benefit, unless there is something missing from your garden soil in the first place.
Plan rotations: In order to avoid pests, diseases and maintain nutrient balances, you need to rotate your crops. In order to maintain nitrogen levels in your garden you need to grow peas/beans or similar nitrogen fixing plants from time to time, perhaps in the form of a cover crop.
Make a planting plan: Make a list of what you’re going to plant and when. Know what needs to be started indoors, and when it can go out into the garden. Baker Creek publishes a good guide with general gardening advice.
Grass and Soil Compaction
One of the most difficult problems for the beginning gardener is getting rid of grass! More than anything else, this can lead to long term discouragement and problems. The problem is often not the grass itself, but the weeds hiding in the grass. For the organic gardener, this just takes time.
Using mechanical methods for removing grass almost never work. Digging with a spade, will always leave pieces of roots that will simply regrow within a few months. Using a rototiller on fresh grass is simply a recipe for disaster, as all it will do is break the grass and weeds into tiny pieces which will regrow and thrive in the newly loosened ground you’ve just provided for them. So called ‘sod-cutters’ may be great if you own a business selling sod, but for the home gardener they won’t work. All sod cutters will do is strip the top of the grass off, and leave pieces of roots in the ground below.
If you prepare your garden with one of these mechanical methods, then put your plants in, the grass will come up with your plants and it will be much harder to deal with at that point. In this way, you can easily be left with a lingering problem that lasts for years and is a tremendous amount of work to deal with.
Building raised beds on top of grass won’t work either, unless they are at least 1 foot (30 cm) high. Grass and weeds will simply grow through the raised bed otherwise.
Getting rid of grass is never problem free, but the best way to approach the problem is by smothering the grass. The so-called lasagna or sheet mulching method, involves putting down a layer of cardboard or several layers of newspaper, then covering this with ordinary dirt or compost. Then seeds can be planted in the ground above, and the roots will penetrate the cardboard layer while the grass below dies. Beans are a good choice as a first crop, because they will help replenish the soil. If you use this method, you will still probably have problems with soil compaction.
Another good way to prepare your garden is to cover the grass with black plastic mulch or 1 foot (30 cm) of high carbon mulch like straw or wood chips for 6 months, preferably this will include the spring months. Then after you remove the plastic or mulch the grass and weeds will be mostly dead. At this point, you can dig or till the ground if it needs to be loosened or build a raised bed on top.
A last method of getting rid of grass is the ‘lazy-bed’ method of growing potatoes, which originated in Ireland. I described this in a previous post.
Raised Bed Tips
Many people prefer raised beds, but there are some important things to keep in mind if you are considering one:
Don’t use treated wood: Many garden centers don’t properly label their wood, and it’s easy to buy treated wood by mistake. While there is some debate over how dangerous treated wood really is, for sure if you are an organic gardener you won’t want to grow your vegetables with these chemicals. Special wood is available that is naturally rot resistant, or you can use ordinary wood but will need to replace it every few years. The usual advice is that if you are now using treated wood, don’t panic, but when you are ready to replace it use another kind of wood.
Consider alternatives to a wood border: Many materials can be used to build a raised be border. Consider using something recycled, like old paving stones. This is what I use for my raised beds. Another option is so called ‘borderless raised beds‘. In fact a raised bed doesn’t have to be raised at all and can simply be a spot in the garden. The important thing is you must never step on the ground, and it must be narrow enough so you can comfortably reach all spots from one side or the other.
Raised beds that are raised, do have the advantage that you don’t have to bend over so far to reach your plants. In fact, many handicapped accessible gardens are built with high beds for just this reason.
If you are going to build raised beds, with a constructed border and have the intention to allow them to truly sit off the ground, consider just building the frames at first, not adding anything, simply loosening the soil inside by digging it a bit and plant straight into this. Another possibility is to kill existing grass using the lasagna method explained above, directly into the bottom of the raised bed. Over the years you can add home made compost to bring the level up to the top of the frame. If you feel the need to fill the frames right away, consider using recycled waste compost from your city.
Choose the Right Seeds!
If you intend at some point to save your own seeds, make sure you don’t start your garden with commercial varieties, or you won’t be able to save seeds from these plants. If you must buy your seeds from a store, have a look at the links in the link section of this blog off the front page. Better yet, have a look at the Blogger Seed Network!
Over the last few months I’ve been coming across little bits of information that really point to agriculture as the most important aspect to climate change, and I thought I would put some of them together here in a post.
The Numbers
Just where are all the greenhouse gases coming from is not as easy a question to answer as you might think. The working diagram seems to be this from the World Resources Institute. Looking at the diagram one can see that the agriculture sector accounts for 13.5% of greenhouse gases, but at the same time deforestation accounts for 18.3%. It’s clear some portion of deforestation is connected to agriculture, but how much? Where do biofuels fit in here? Other sectors like transportation and industrial processes also clearly play an important role in agriculture. Even though it’s not possible to clearly see agriculture’s role in this diagram, some interesting comparisons with other sectors can still be made.
According to Dr R. K. Pachauri’s presentation notes, on the website linked to below in the meat section of this post: Green house gas emissions from livestock production are 80% of emissions from agriculture and 18% of all green house gas emissions from human activities. For these he sites an FAO report from 2006 I haven’t been able to locate.
From these figures it’s possible to deduce that green house gas emissions from agriculture are 22.5% of all those related to human activities. Many of these gases are not just CO2, but other more environmentally damaging gases like N2O and CH4.
Emissions Are Only Part of the Story
Beyond the actual emissions from agriculture, there’s another important factor to consider. Agricultural land is one of the most important sources of carbon sequestration on the planet, and our current system of chemical intensive agriculture destroys the soil’s ability to store carbon. This is because the soil contains an enormous number of microorganisms and is an ecosystem within itself, but one fungus in particular is largely responsible for sequestering the carbon, which can’t grow in soil damaged by agricultural chemicals.
Reforming our current system of agriculture to one that uses organic methods would likely turn an industry that’s a net producer of 22.5% of the worlds man made greenhouse gases to one that’s a net consumer of green house gases. This change is unlikely to reduce agricultural output.
How can it be that if we got rid of all the agricultural chemicals there would be no reduction in yields? It’s the simple fact that most modern crop varieties were bred to need chemicals, for no reason except corporate profits. When a company like Monsanto or Dow sells both chemicals and seeds, it’s natural when they create a new variety they would want to promote their own chemical products too. Therefore they breed their new varieties specially to not be able to grow without these chemicals. This is one of the reasons the same company who sells Round-Up sells Round-Up ready seeds, and so on. There’s no credible evidence to suggest commercial varieties are any more productive as a whole than properly maintained non-commercial varieties which don’t need the chemicals in the first place.
Anne of Agrarian Grrl’s Muse made a great post on this and the associated Rodale Institute report. Be sure to check out the video.
According to the report if the US switched it’s corn and soy bean acreage to organic production, this alone would meet 73% of it’s Kyoto Protocol obligations. And again, there’s likely to be no significant loss of crop yields in the long run.
When carbon is sequestered into the ground one of the results is higher quality soil, and associated higher yields. Many gardeners know sequestered carbon in the form of compost, and even non-gardeners know the term topsoil. As well as reducing global warming, this would be a very good thing for agriculture in the long run, building up our topsoils and putting carbon into the ground. There would be other benefits. Carbon would significantly improve the soil’s ability to retain water, meaning greater tolerance to drought. This would also significantly reduce N2O emissions (from livestock), because nitrogen binds to carbon when it’s in the ground.
Perennial vs Annual
One of the characteristics of modern agriculture are large swaths of farmland planted with mono-cultures, then plowed under at the end of each year and replanted the next. These are called annual crops.
It turns out annual crops are significant green house gas producers. In the process of plowing, the ground is damaged and sequestered carbon is released. In addition more work needs to be done by tractors which also emit CO2. The plants are weaker, with shallower roots, and more prone to diseases and drought.
Perennial crops on the other hand, those which stay in the ground for more than one year, are more disease and drought resistant, and generally stronger plants. They stand up better to weeds, because they maintain their ground cover and more firmly establish themselves into the ground. Their deeper root systems tend to sequester more carbon, in addition they need less tractor work and chemicals.
The Seed Ambassadors recently posted a paper discussing perennial grains.
Biochar
This is something that’s been in the news lately, and a number of blog posts have appeared on the topic.
Basically biochar is made with a process called pyrolysis which involves burning farm waste at low temperature with reduced oxygen. The result is something similar to charcoal, and when buried in the ground decomposes into soil with a very high carbon content. While a lot is still unknown about it at this point, it’s believed this is a system that can be used to sequester large amounts of carbon quickly into the ground, building up fertility rapidly in the process.
Alan of Bishop’s Homegrown, as well as publishing several posts on the topic, is making his own. He refers to the ground made with biochar as Terra Pretta, the name given to the fertile ground created by an ancient civilization with this technique in the Amazon rainforest.
Biochar is already attracting the attention of big business. Anne recently posted about trojan efforts at producing Terra Pretta, requiring fossil fuel inputs!
It’s clear there’s a lot of potential for turning organic farm waste into sequestered carbon and rich agricultural land using this technique, and a lot more work needs to be done on it.
Meat
I posted on this controversial subject before, and I noticed a tense silence amongst my readers, resulting in only a few polite comments.
18% of greenhouse gases related to human activity comes from producing meat, the largest single source. In addition, the gases like N2O and CH4 that come from livestock, are some of the most significant contributors to global warming. While it’s certainly possible for people to eat meat if they want to, the rate it’s being produced and the production methods used are seriously damaging the planet. It seems pretty far-fetched to think we can continue as we are, even increase production to meet demand in emerging economies like China, while at the same time addressing global warming. People who eat meat need to eat a lot less of it.
If you’re interested, the person who recently made this statement and attracted attention to this issue is the chair of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Dr. R. K. Pachauri. He has a blog! He also made a post about his statement and the controversy it caused, and for those of you who showed restraint here and didn’t say anything negative, you can go there and blast him with a comment personally! In fact, you can be the first, because at the time of my writing this post there were 34 comments on his post, none of them negative. Now we just need to convince him to set up an RSS feed…
Agriculture Opted Out
In Europe both the automotive and airline industries tried to opt out of the Kyoto Protocol green house gas emission limits, and there was an outcry. They have since been brought back into the carbon credits trading scheme.
On the other hand the agriculture ministers announced they were opting out of these same limits, and it seems like there wasn’t a single voice of opposition. For some reason it seems the most natural thing in the world that something sacred like our food production should not have to change, even though reform of the agriculture sector would probably by itself meet almost all of Europe’s obligations under the Kyoto Protocol.
In fact Europe is very unlikely to be able to meet it’s obligation under the Kyoto Protocol without significant participation from the agricultural sector.
What Can You Do?
Eat less meat.
Grow your own organic vegetables, or buy them locally from someone you trust.
Grow heritage/heirloom plant varieties in your vegetable garden, save your own seeds and learn basic plant breeding. The resulting skills and plants are going to be needed in the next century.
Compost your household and garden waste when possible.
Use common sense when driving a car, travelling by plane and heating your house.
Tell your politicians it’s not our position as consumers to have something trivial like low energy light bulbs forced upon us, rather it’s their responsibility to save the planet by reforming agriculture in a meaningful way!
While you’re at it, tell your politicians we don’t want biofuels made in a way that results in net CO2 production, reduces available land for food based agriculture, results in environmental pollution, results in deforestation or involves any new technologies like GMOs, synbio or nanotechnologies without proper regulation and long term testing.
