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My vegetable plot a few years ago
I presently manage the web site Cyber-Help for Organic Farmers - filled with useful information, including Who Owns What?, a chart showing corporate ownership of organic companies. |
ORGANIC GARDENING
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My vegetable plot a few years ago
I presently manage the web site Cyber-Help for Organic Farmers - filled with useful information, including Who Owns What?, a chart showing corporate ownership of organic companies. |
Today in Canada all our food, be it organic or conventionally grown, travels an average of 2500 km to reach our plates.
- Proximity and Petroleum by Derek Masselink.
Lessons from the Soil
It's hard to learn much or do much about sustainability without getting your hands dirty.
True, global problems of resource depletion and climate change entail some high-level thinking. We need to understand some important numbers - 350 parts per million of CO2 (the target necessary to avert catastrophic climate change), 5% production decline rate in existing oilfields (what must be overcome each year to forestall the inevitable peak of global oil output). We need skills in analysis and persuasion. Inevitably, all of this requires much time spent in front of computer screens.
However, while we attend to these technologies and abstractions, we are much more likely to succeed in our ultimate goal of building sustainable culture if we are also grounded in the most basic of activities - obtaining food directly from the Earth.
Reading has taught me a lot. Gardening has taught me as much or more. Often, these lessons tend to be ones that sound trite when put in words: stay humble; don't demand too much too fast; notice the interconnections; go slow, but always pay attention and be prepared for rapid-onset opportunities and problems. However, when you garden, you don't just learn these lessons verbally and mentally. You learn them with your whole body.
Leaving food production entirely to others is the essence of full-time division of labor, the origin and vulnerable taproot of civilization. Only in agricultural civilizations has a rigid class system arisen in which the most important decisions are made by people who don't need to spend any of their time directly contemplating our human dependence on nature. Instead, the managers, accountants, soldiers, and religious functionaries of state societies tend to enclose themselves ever more completely in the language-based solipsistic social matrix that is the source of their power. They pay ever more attention to words, money, and technology; ever less to weather, birds, and insects. And this, ultimately, is why civilizations collapse: the people in charge simply don't notice that the ecological basis of their society is being undermined.
Sound familiar?
There are lots of good reasons to garden these days - given that food prices are soaring and the nutritional quality of supermarket food diminishes by the year. Those of us who are working on sustainability issues have even more reasons to plant and hoe. We must teach our neighbors the survival skills they will need as fossil fuels dribble away; we must set an example, and help create the gardening networks that will provide food for our communities during the hard times ahead.
But perhaps the best of all reasons to garden is simply our need to stay sane. I mean this in two ways. Yes, the garden is a refuge from a world that often seems to be flying apart. Turn off the television and pick up a trowel: you'll feel better. But more importantly, if we garden we are more likely to be psychologically balanced people capable of making sane choices. And the world needs people like that at the moment.
- From MuseLetter 198, October 2008 by Richard Heinberg
NOW GROWING
"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe if full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (U.S. essayist and poet, 1803-1882)
When we moved in, our house had no vegetable garden (in fact, no garden at all) and the South Cariboo has virtually no loamy top soil, so I got on the phone and soon a truck arrived and left twelve yards of top-soil. I've turned this into a vegetable garden, using available rocks to border the beds. It's worked quite well, taking advantage of the southern exposure of the front of the house.
"Beware of revolutionaries who do not garden" - Bill Mollison
Heart-leaved ArnicaI've been getting to know the wild plants growing on our lot. Here's a beginning list:
Annual Hawksbeard, Early Violet, Flixweed (mustard), Foxtail Barley, Heart-leaved Arnica, Kinnikinnick, False Solomon's Seal, wild onion, Meadow Buttercup, Northern Geranium, Nuttal's Alkali Grass, Pearly Everlasting, Pineapple Weed, Red Clover, Saskatoonberry, Showy Aster, Showy Daisy, Blue Clematis, Timothy, Wild Raspberry, Wild Rose, Yarrow, Douglas Fir, Quivering Aspen, Wild Strawberry, Dandelion, Bull Thistle, Plantain, Shepherd's Purse, Wild Blue Flax, Wild Mustard, Strawberry Blite and many more . . .
Someone who really knows the plants of this area: meet Chris Czajkowski.
With a little watering and weeding, my small patch of wildcrafted strawberries keeps producing a larger crop.
CELEBRATING SOIL
Excerpts from Whole Earth, Spring 1999.
A BASIC SOIL QUIZ (Peter Warshall, Editor):1. What names do you give the soils you live on? What texture and colors do they have?
2. What soils grow your food and fiber? Which soils filtered and purified the water you drink?
3. Do any virgin soils remain in your bioregion? Who - if anyone - cares about protecting them?
4. What makes your soil landscape particular?
5. Do special layers of soils nurture singular flowers or grasses?
6. Do you need phosphates to grow your garden?
7. What's your soil's history? How have humans changed your watershed's soils?
8. What soils cause problems to your community? ...house foundations? Silt? Quicksand?
9. Are the soils healthy? Do you know of leakage from old industries or landfills?
10. Could parts of parking lots be unearthed to make room for trees between the car slots? [and better drainage too. Ed.]
SOIL POINTS - from Evan Eisenberg:
Darwin's last book was not on natural selection, but on worms and earth.
- Let the soil work for us
- Terra preta: fertile soil created many years ago by indigenous Amazon cultures.
. . . and a soil thought from Jack Handey:
Somebody told me how frightening it was how much topsoil we are losing each year, but I told that story around the campfire and nobody got scared.
RELEVANT/RECOMMENDED BOOKS - Reviews and order information:
NOTEWORTHY WEB SITES
The Permaculture Concept with Bill Mollison:
MORE: Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6
and a video, outlining how the Codex Alimentarius is being used to control and restrict what food and nutrients we have access to: Nutricide - Criminalizing Natural Health, Vitamins, and Herbs.
A nod to the little wild mammals and reptiles that live on or visit this ¾ acre. The ones we know about are: squirrel, chipmunk, field mouse, toad, marmot, black bear, snowshoe hare, mule deer, salamander and garter snake.
Site © 
It was part of a larger (three-acre) garden that I ran for a few years. During that time I took it through the organic certification process. The land remains certified. It is now being used as a community garden.
