Heirloom Gardening, Food and Other Thoughts
I didn’t have my camera, but I noticed rust on my garlic plants yesterday.
Most years the rust tends to appear in one place, then spreads out from there. This year all my plants seem to have become infected at the same time.
It’s really hard to say if the milk I used made any difference.
Since I would normally begin harvesting in a week or two anyway, the rust is no real problem this year.
Roger of KGI recently made a post on a campaign he started to encourage people to celebrate the upcoming Independence day in the US by featuring local foods. As well as promoting the idea of eating locally, he also addresses the idea of food independence, or food sovereignty as it’s known outside of the US. It’s a really important concept, and it’s important for everyone living everywhere on the planet.
It’s the idea you are able to grow your own food without inputs or outputs of any kind, and without depending on anyone else for anything. Without needing to get into your SUV and drive to Walmart to buy lumber, large bales of peat, mulch, sacks of fertilizers and so on. Without needing to buy seeds from a single source because you grow hybrid varieties produced by a single company. Without needing to use tap water, because you collect rainwater from your roof. Without needing to use landfill space, because you recycle all of your own garden waste. Without using power tools that run on fossil fuels, pollute the air and generate greenhouse gasses. Without needing money to pay for it all.
Of course few people manage to achieve all of these things simultaneously, but by thinking about these things, doing the best you can given your personal circumstances and continuing to work on and improve the way you garden, you are taking an important first step.
A useful way to think about this is the way you spend money on your garden. Growing fruits and vegetables should be almost free. You will need some hand tools, if your ground is acidic some lime and maybe some potting soil from time to time, but everything else comes down to recycling things from your own garden and growing methods. In the short term other things may be needed, for example you may decide to purchase a greenhouse and a shed. You may have some specific problems in your garden that need to be addressed, one of the most common is soil lacking something that can be identified with a soil test or other methods. You may have drainage problems that need to be fixed, and so on. There aren’t many problems that require treatments or inputs beyond a year or two, and you should be thinking about garden sovereignty after that time.
When you buy food from the supermarket, you immediately find yourself in the middle of a complex tangle of commercial interests and politics. It begins because few people know how to grow their own food today, and in part it’s because food companies have invested tremendous effort into making modern foods convenient and cheap. It’s a vicious cycle that’s hard to break. Growing your own food is something that takes time to learn, and this lack of knowledge is really a serious problem.
Nearly all varieties of fruits and vegetables are patented and produced by one of five seed and chemical companies worldwide. Since these same companies also sell chemicals, and they make more money if they sell chemicals with their seeds, so they breed them specifically to need these chemicals. We are all familiar with GM Round Up ready varieties, and this is one very obvious example as Monsanto sells both Round Up and the Round Up ready varieties of seed. There are many, many much more insidious examples of this for example cucumbers susceptible to mildew diseases or insect pests that require chemicals.
When farmers buy commercial seeds to plant, they get a list of required chemicals and a schedule for applying them. Agriculture by numbers, if you like. If farmers don’t do this the seed companies won’t support them. It’s like doing something that invalidates a consumer warranty, even if it has nothing to do with some unrelated problem that needs to be fixed. Under these circumstances, you can be assured farmers will apply all the required chemicals even if they know they aren’t needed.
If you buy certified organic food, you are still buying these commercial varieties. In this case, you pay for the patents on the varieties and the work that went into them being designed to need chemicals, the extra trouble the farmer has to go through to grow them without chemicals, finally the very cumbersome associated paperwork and regulations intended to put small farmers and food producers at a disadvantage. It’s a silly way to buy your food.
If you buy meat, this tangle gets even more intense, because first the grains are grown like I described above, then the animals are raised following similar lines of logic.
This is what we call the Green Revolution.
It came about because during the depression of the 30s and the war years that followed, there were food shortages and they need to ensure food companies who invested in improved plant varieties and production methods could be assured of profits. They invested in plant varieties, chemicals and methods that made them as much money as possible and there were no other reasons for what they did. There’s no reason to believe, if they hadn’t instead invested in organic agriculture without chemical and energy inputs, productions yields would be any lower today than they are now.
When politicians talk about providing ‘high quality’ seeds to the developing world to fight hunger, they are lying. It’s as simple as that. Instead what they are talking about is forcing a system of debt, dependence and environmental damage on hungry people who are in desperate need of developing their own food sovereignty.
If you go to a garden center and buy a normal commercial packet of seeds, you immediately put yourself in the middle of this tangle of required chemicals and politics. It’s not that it’s impossible to grow nice things from commercial seed packets, but you’re starting off at a disadvantage.
If you think along the lines of food sovereignty, and avoid commercial seeds, you’re assured chemicals will not be needed to grow your plants. Otherwise the situation is less clear.
In order to be sure to avoid the usual commercial tangle, if you want to purchase non-commercial seeds, you should purchase them from a company that specialized in them. The best thing would be if you can find a local company, that hopefully produces seeds most suitable for your local climate. In any case, be sure to look specifically for a company that specializes in non-commercial seeds. The links page on this blog lists a number of these companies.
If you grow non-commercial seeds, another advantage is being able to save and replant seeds from these plants. Saving seeds is also a skill that’s been lost with our current generation and takes some time to learn. Many people start reading about how complicated it is and are quickly discouraged. It really doesn’t have to be difficult. Roger’s post that I linked to at the top, discusses growing garlic, something that doesn’t take any special skills to save and replant. Beans, peas and lettuce are nearly as easy. Just grow the plants and save the seeds — that’s it. Other plants can be more complicated but a little research is all that’s needed to learn how to do it. You must however start with non-commercial seeds, or the plants you get after saving your seeds will not be the same as the original parent plants.
Once you make the decision to start saving your seeds, you have access to the wonderful world of seed exchanges. These are fellow gardeners who also save their own seeds, and often have very special varieties of plants on offer. While some of these gardeners are happy to provide their seeds to anyone and everyone, most really expect you to have the intention of saving and regrowing them, so it’s best to at least have the intention of doing this before getting involved in trading this way. If you’re interested in offering or receiving non-commercial seeds, have a look at the Bloggers Seed Netork page.
Aim for food sovereignty. Don’t add anything unnecessarily to your garden. Get away from the mindset of being a farmer, and needing a box of this and a bottle of that. Don’t give your money to the wrong companies. Grow the right varieties. Take care of our planet and your health, at the same time you grow fresh fruits and vegetables in your own garden.
Garlic rust is very much on my mind at the moment. Last year around this time it appeared on my garlic, and it just appeared on Gintoino’s garlic in Portugal.
Søren had a good suggestion last year, spraying his garlic with diluted milk, and I’ve decided to try it this year. I’m mixing it about 1:5 with water, only because it’s most convenient to buy milk by the liter here and that’s what works well to fill my spray bottle and cover the plants. I understand nonfat milk is the best to use, but this is a special purchase here and hard to find reasonably priced, so I’m using lowfat instead. I’ve been doing this once a week for the last two weeks, and will keep doing it about this often or after it rains, until it seems pointless to continue.
There isn’t a practical way for me to do anything close to a scientific study here, with a control section of my garden, because once I have garlic rust anywhere it will spread quickly.
What I understand is garlic rust occurs at a time of high humidity, but not when the plants are wet. In my own experience, I see it break out in my garden most often when the days are warm, the nights cool and the humidity is high. Because it seems to be so tied to weather conditions, it doesn’t seem like comparing the date I got it last year with the date I get it this year is a good comparison.
Anyway, to help me figure out if the milk is helping, I would appreciate if anyone reading this who has garlic in their garden will tell me if and when they get rust this year.
Rust is primarily a European plant disease, so those of you in North America probably won’t see it.
Rust is not usually a deadly disease for garlic, but it does reduce the harvest and causes the plants to die prematurely. Delaying the appearence is what’s really important, because an infection two weeks earlier or later can mean the difference between a more or less normal harvest or one that has to be made early.
If you came here expecting a recipe, you’ve come to the wrong place.
Do you see it there in the middle?
Here’s a closer look…
Here’s the whole thing.
It the past I’ve had hedgehogs, birds nests, wasps even ants, but I’ve never before had a duck’s nest in my garden. Snuggled comfortably between the Red Toch and the Russian Softneck, with it’s home in the straw. Three eggs are waiting with the next generation inside.
I discovered her a few days ago, after being in the garden for a few hours. Completely unaware of her, I got a little too close causing her to fly away in a panic. I don’t know who was more frightened, her or me as a duck suddenly took off almost vertically from my garden about a meter from where I was standing.
I have not seen any slugs or snails this year! It could just be luck, but I think I’ve already encountered the first benefit of having a resident garden duck. I’ve seen other garden bloggers joke about a slug or snail problem really only being a matter of a duck deficiency. Well I can assure you, I have no such problem!
According to what I’ve read on the Internet, duck eggs take about a month to hatch, so for the next several weeks she and I will both have to share the garden space. Fortunately she picked a part of the garden I don’t need to go into often these days.
So I started asparagus last year from seed. There’s not a lot of information about this on the Internet, and what’s there is often conflicting. I thought I would do a post here about some of the things I’ve learned.
I decided to start my asparagus from seed, because crowns here tend to be overpriced and of unnamed varieties. I wanted to grow OP varieties, so getting seeds seemed the best way to get started. When you start asparagus from crowns, you need to wait 2 years before you get a normal harvest, and with seeds you have to wait an additional year. I was prepared to wait 3 years for a normal harvest.
Asparagus likes rich ground, and I discovered last year I had problems with not enough nitrogen in my garden. I decided to address this by planting beans as companion plants with the asparagus. This may not have been the best decision, because in the first year the asparagus plants were very small and weak, and the beans grew over and crowded them. Many of the asparagus plants didn’t survive, and this may have been part of the problem.
When I started this I was under the impression most of my asparagus plants would survive, and in any case I was expecting it to be black and white, either they would survive or not. I planted 2 beds with 12 plants each, expecting to perhaps lose a couple of plants in each bed. This is certainly not what happened.
What happened was different asparagus plants grew with different degrees of success, and quite a few simply died after the first year. It’s not completely clear how many survived, but it’s certainly less than 50% and many that are still around don’t look healthy and strong. A few of the plants are doing fine, like the one in the picture above.
Another one of the issues I’m aware of is there are male and female plants. I’m quite happy to have a few female plants in my garden, because I would like to have seeds for future planting, but most people only want male plants as they produce better asparagus spears. I’m under the impression when you buy crowns, they’ve usually been sexed and are always male.
I also started my seeds indoors. I’m under the impression this wasn’t necessary and I didn’t really gain anything by doing it.
Lessons
Starting asparagus from seed is certainly possible, but it’s a little bit more trouble.
I suggest planting seeds with about 6in (15cm) spacing in rows 1ft (30cm) apart. For the first year plan on growing crowns for transplant, so don’t worry too much about providing the perfect spot for the plants. Plant at least 4-5 times as many plants as you expect to need crowns for. You will want to be able to pick the best and strongest plants for transplanting, and will probably want to discard female plants. You can direct seed in the garden, about 2 weeks before the last frost date in your area. Germination rates can be low, so consider sowing more thickly and thinning out the plants later.
The following spring, transplant the crowns. Soilman recently did a great video on this.
