Equinox

Happy first day of spring, everyone. Its drizzling here, which isn't as spectacular spring weather as we'd been getting last weekend--torrential rain and hail mixed with dazzling sunbreaks. I hear its snowing in New York, though. I plan to spend the day turning compost, and depending on how wet it is, doing a bit more groundbreaking, or perhaps starting my potato boxes.
Later today I'll post some photos of my starts, and my newly dug keyhole garden bed. My starts are doing wonderfully; I've got garbanzos, cucumbers, sunflowers, cilantro, basil, corn, bush beans, salad mix, several kinds of cabbage, chard and spinach up. No stirrings from the squash, or watermelon, or any of the nightshades.
Before I get going on that stuff though, I would like to share another bit of symbolic/political garden news. The Obamas are starting a kitchen garden. This is part of Michelle Obama's health campaign, though I'm sure someone is going to spin the economic advantages too--I haven't seen an overt crack about that awful "arugula" campaign line, but if they are growing it on their front lawn along with their other 55 fruits and veggies, at a materials cost of about $200, nobody can complain. But health is certainly the stated aim.

“My hope,” the first lady said in an interview in her East Wing office, “is that through children, they will begin to educate their families and that will, in turn, begin to educate our communities.”

Here's a map of their garden. It has some interesting features--check out the border plantings, for instance. Marigolds, nasturtiums and zinnias are frequently used in organic gardening to draw slugs away from your more valuable veggies. I personally have never tried this; won't it just mean that you'll have a bigger and healthier slug population? My strategy this year is going to be copper borders and early-and-often beer traps. Maybe I'll plant some nasties with beer moats for additional incentive?

Also note the mixed peas and alliums on the right side of the plot, and the lettuce with radishes. Those are good example of companion planting, which I am going to try this year pretty intensively. Corn, beans and squash, tomatoes and basil, strawberries and bush beans. Many people have many opinions on what grows well together. Most of those examples are recommended by How to Grow More Vegetables, but the first is an ancient Iroqois method. The Three Friends, or Three Sisters method, has a lot of interesting things to recommend it, and really makes you think about a lot of important aspects of sustainable agriculture.
First, there are some practical, physical considerations. Pole beans need something to climb on, corn is tall, squash is a groundcover that is excellent at keeping the ground moist in the summer, with is huge leaves. The plants use different spaces within the same plot of land and don't compete with each other (as long as you wait for the corn to get big enough that the beans wont pull it over). That's good for space conservation. Then there is plant nutrition. Corn is an extremely heavy nitrogen user, and nitrogen is kind of hard to come by in the soil. But! we have just planted nitrogen fixing beans. Squash blossoms are especially exciting to pollinators, so they will all set lots of seed. But perhaps the most interesting element of this system to me is that between them, corn, beans and squash have complete protein, meaning that all the different amino acids that your average carnivore-descended hominid needs to get by, something that only animal products can usually manage. How did the Iroqois hit upon this
convenient triad? Did the plants just happen to have complete proteins and also work so well together? Is there something about a plant community with different amino acid complexes that grows better together? Did american veggie varieties get bred for these traits over millenia by people who were just working with varieties that kept their kids healthiest? I have no idea. But its good to remember that we essentially evolved in tandem with these important agricultural plants, and people who practice all the various forms of traditional subsistence agriculture usually have a pretty damn good idea what they're doing, because all the ones who failed to figure it out died of starvation. Its the advent of cash crops that set us on the current road of energy-and-fertilizer intensive monocultures.

Okay, enough ranting. The sun has come out, and I'm going to go outside.

Now we're talking

People who know more about these things than I do were disappointed by Obama's appointment of Tom Vilsack as Secretary of Agriculture, because of his ties to Agribusiness. You might guess that I'm not a fan of agribusiness, but I do think it probably wouldn't be a good idea to pull the rug from under them all at once. Anyway, there was a piece about him this morning on NPR which sounded very promising to me. He wants to "remake American Agriculture," outlined a very broad plan to begin our changes in energy use, environmental impact, and reduce the deficit. Among other things, he wants to largely replace farm subsidies with cap and trade. Sweet!

But really, the thing that excited me most was the news that he took a jackhammer to his building's driveway, so the office can put a garden there this summer.

"Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack Operates a Jackhammer Breaking Ground for the People's Garden Project on the Bicentennial of Lincoln's Birth at the Department of Agriculture in Washington, DC. The Event Took Place 12 Feb 2009."

as wild as

It is March and snowing today. What a weird winter.

In the interest of doing something enjoyable today (I've been at school since 9 am and will be here til 8:30), here is the post I've been meaning to write about this blog title. "We once did grow wild as apples" is a quote from the Veda Hille song, appropriately enough called "Plants."
Veda Hille is not for everyone, but for those among us with a hippy dippy animist bent, she's amazing. Much of her music describes the way I feel about my relationship to nature. My very favorite song of all time is "Greenery." I've never been able to find the lyrics to this on line, so here is the chorus from memory

Woods you are very sly
reveal yourselves to us
sway the rythm of spaces
woods you are very sly

for all that you stand so firmly rooted
there are comings and goings
there is sunlight and shadows

The more I learn about plants and their constant, silent activities, their warfare, making and breaking of alliances, their precarious, dynamic balance, the more insightful that seems.

"Plants" is a song about our relationship with poisonous/medicinal plants and domestication. The line "we once did grow wild as apples" didn't make any sense to me in this context until I learned from Michael Pollan's excellent Botany of Desire. Pollan spends a chapter discussing the apple's history and it's essentially wild nature.

Apples come from Central Asia, like many of our most common food plants. In Armenia there are huge forests full of apple trees, as big as oaks, or shrublike, with fruit as sour and small as olives or huge and soft and red, or anything in between. The tasty ones were propagated by travelers who took the sweetest apples. Apples are heterozygotes, and sweetness must be recessive because they pretty much always cross back to the crabapple--breeding the sweet apples we eat today was the result of thousands of cider-apple orchards and probably yet more thousands of hours of labwork. Since cider has gone out of fashion, the genetic stock of the domesticated apple has become dangerously homogeneous, requiring ever more chemical assistance as its predators evolve but we hold it in stasis by our need for the perfect apple.

I won't push the analogy to far, but Hille and Pollan make me think about our relationship to plants, especially as food and medicine, and the way we shape them, illustrates how we have been shaping ourselves.

Outside, the sun has come out, and I am watching a man walk slowly around the park, touching every tree, grinning. He might be crazy, but I think it's more likely that he is some kind of hippy dippy animist.

Starts

These are my flats of starts for this year. They are sitting in my south-facing sun porch. It would be better if I had a place to put them inside, but we don't have many sunny windows in this house, and all of them are taken up by my absurd number of house plants.


Nothing has sprouted yet, except the garbanzo beans that I put in a little water a few days ago.
They are beans from the local co-op, and about 3/4 of them sprouted. I planted about a dozen. I also tried to sprout black beans from another grocery, which just swelled up and started smelling funky. I bet most beans from co-ops will have a least some level of germination. It's just as well, because a little internet research told me that I almost certainly can't grow black beans in the PNW. Garbanzos will be a stretch, but I think it can be done. The guide to shell beans I found on Mother Earth News seems incredibly comprehensive.

I'm excited that my garbanzos sprouted, though! Tomorrow I will go to the co-op and get more varieties to try. For way cheap, compared to buying seed packets. Even hippie beans are less than $2 a pound, and seed packs with twenty or thirty beans are at least a dollar and a half.

The first day

In the last few days, I've run around all over the place to find seeds I want to try, getting some new compost, and going through left-over seeds from last year. This morning, after waking up restless and early, I finally got my hands in the dirt. I mixed some potting soil, compost and water, sorted out my seeds, made labels out of old chopsticks and masking tape, and filled three flats with seeds.

This garden is not going to be a work of art. This is a rental propert, I will probably not be living here for more than another year or two. Over the last couple of years we've reclaimed more and more of it from lawn and weeds, but they keep creeping back over the property line. This garden is more experimental in nature, an education in what I can grow, how, where, how cheaply. I'm in many cases riffing off of How to Grow More Vegetables by John Jeavons, and getting advice from every other source I can mine. I made a spreadsheet today, to keep track of my varieties and their productivity. I cannot express how unlike me this is.

Last year I went to a lady's permaculture farm, and she gave us all some of her seeds. Multicolored corn, painted beans, and what I have started calling the Tuscan Wonder Bean. I planted three beans last August, to propigate seeds. They took about three days to sprout and were still making more beans in late October. I have since given some of them away, and one girl grew them at her apartment's one window, in the winter--she's gotten beans too. These are the spiritual core of my garden.

Along with ordinary garden beds, I'm going to be experimenting with community planting, growing potatoes in bags, planting a bean curtain to shade the outside of my bedroom, growing ginger indoors. I have grand plans.

I'm starting this blog for a few reasons. I want to keep myself accountable to recording my progress. I hope I can provide a bit of education or vicarious pleasure for those of you who can't or haven't started serious gardens. There will be pictures very soon, and perhaps later there will be sketches or paintings. Along with the progress of the garden, be assured that later in the season there will be recipes and pictures of food, and probably pictures and information from other community and conservation projects I am involved in.

Happy spring,

Acer