Garden Klog

Please Visit Our New Blog

Friends and Followers: We're up and running again, but on a new WordPress site: Garden Smarts. This is an ongoing compilation of three of my garden books plus my collection of garden photos, including ID photos of heirloom and rare vegetables and flowers that I hope will serve as an-depth resource for home gardeners.

Blog entries can be found at this link.

Entries to released over the next few days include:

• The New Three Sisters Garden
• No-Till Cucumbers In The Home Garden
• Testing Tomato Trellises
• A Tale of Two Kales
• New Companion Planting Ideas
• Planting Peas: Single Row or Double?
• Transplanting Beets For Early Harvest

A number of these will be ongoing topics that will follow the progress of the experiments, so sign up for the RSS!

The whole site (including blog and reference section) is accessible from tablets and mobile devices as well as laptop and desktop computers. If you find it useful, please tell your friends, post a link on your social pages, and leave me a comment (Hint: it keeps me working on improving it).

Love Stinks

For those you don't know, one of the worst pests in the Mid-Atlantic is the Brown Marmorated Stink Bug (which we have written about many times before) that showed up in my garden here in Bakerton in 2010. It is an invasive species that feeds on more than 300 species of plants. It first showed up in a shipment from NE Asia, and has been spreading from the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania ever since.

I am not sure why it hasn't spread farther south than it has, but apparently its northern spread is controlled by low temperatures in winter...and this winter we have had plenty of that -- it has been the coldest winter in at least 20 years, though not the snowiest YET...

The Washington Post reported recently that there is a silver lining to the frigid snow-cloud that has overspread us the last two months (it is becoming harder and harder to remember the warm fall): the stink bugs are dying in record numbers and we may actually get some tomatoes and peppers and beans and cucumbers and grapes and raspberries (remember I said 300 different plants!).  I sure hope so. Though this is one of my favorite hats (thanks Stanton Gill) I'm not sure it's really about these little bio-Hummers...<G>)

Hand : Tool

My favorite tools are the two I was born with: my hands. One of the great things about hand work is that you don’t have to restrict yourself to a single task, as you are almost forced to with a manufactured tool. Your hand is adaptable.

Consider weeding: You can pull your fingers through the top inch or so of soil, breaking up the rain-compacted surface, and then, with the same movement of the wrist, but a slight realignment of the fingers, smooth it out again. If, in your haste, you bump a newly set transplant, your hand, unlike the fast-moving, sharp-edged hoe—which would shear off a tomato or pepper seedling as if it were merely another weed—recognizes it as a plant to be saved and passes it by.

Only your hand, when it meets a rock, can instantly transform itself from a cultivator into a grabber and toss the offender off into the puckerbrush. Only your hand, if it uncovers a grub, can quickly perform the best and only completely effective form of pest control: crushing it. Only your hand if it accidentally disturbs a young seedling, can immediately replace it and firm the soil around its roots. In contrast, the tool-bound gardener must put down his tool to do this.

If you want to really know and enjoy your garden, don’t neglect the intimacy that comes with hand work this coming spring. Get down on your hands and knees, run your hands through the soil, smell it; there are as many living things in one double handful of soil as there are people on earth! Check the undersides of plant leaves for insect eggs instead of just walking by and dousing them with spray, even an organic-approved spray. You might find that the time you spend taking care of your garden is a whole lot more satisfying, and a lot less like work.

Seven Reasons To Grow Your Own - # 7

Finally, the simple fact is that growing your own food frees you from both cultural and economic dependence on the corporate food system and gives you control over central parts of your life. Food security speaks to the economic aspect of independence, but cultural “food freedom” is just as important.

The Cultural Importance Of Food Crops

The USA is an immigrant culture, with a broad range of food traditions imported from around the world. This is no less true of Canada, as this article from the September 23rd issue of the Toronto Star shows. A quick visit to community gardens in first and second tier cities across the continent also shows this clearly as many plots are maintained by recent immigrants, and their plantings are full of crops many longer established Americans might not recognize. The eggplants to the left represent Thai, Turkish, Japanese, Indian, Laotian and Italian varieties. All of these varieties are from the eggplant trials in Burlington, VT's Intervale gardens in 2002. Here is a photo gallery from our 2002 plantings.

Seven Reasons To Grow Your Own - # 6

A lot of people these days seem to think that growing their own food is a difficult and specialized skill beyond their capability. This is especially true among those who have grown up in urban and suburban settings. Many may not even have a relative who has produced their own food. But the fact is that humans have been growing food for more than 10,000 years, and there is a broad cultural memory of how to do so that can be tapped if one just slows down a bit and listens.

Seven Reasons To Grow Your Own - # 5

The USA is an immigrant culture, with a broad range of food traditions imported from around the world. The artisanal and the cultural motivations are especially closely related, as there are many specialized food ingredients which are impossible, difficult or expensive to obtain in the market – especially in all but the most cosmopolitan areas. But if you grow them yourself, you can control the supply that you need to fulfill your personal or cultural desires. Recognition of this fact goes beyond just the maintenance of food cultures among new immigrants; the growth of the international Slow Food movement is also evidence.

Why I Hate Roto-Tillers

Statistically, one of the most dangerous kinds of work in this country is agriculture, and the reason (if you forget the pesticide exposure many farmers must endure) is the machinery. To work safely with power machinery requires that one’s attention be on safety—on the machine, that is—as much as on the work itself.

This is—no surprise—the same basic, humane argument I have against pesticides: When your thoughts have to dwell on protecting yourself and others (including the plants) from accidental injury rather than on the task at hand—on that task’s meaning and context, and on new ways that it could be done better—you have sold your human birthright and become merely an extension of the technology.

For me, that is a cosmic line in the sandy loam over which I do not wish to step; it is one fence which doesn’t have, for me,  greener grass beyond. Even if home-scale tillers, cultivators, mowers, trimmers, shredders, and chippers are not quite as dangerous as their farm-scale relatives, they are every bit as noisy, smelly, and unpleasant to work with.

So while we still use the tractor to do spring preparation of our test gardens, I’ve gone back to working by hand in our own family garden, which I want to be a place of quiet contemplation and discovery, a place where I—and my kids—can enjoy the pleasures of the garden itself, not just one more situation where the needs of a machine will determine the pace of my activities.

Machines allow us to do more, but let us experience less. And their apparent efficiency may be illusory, at least on a home scale. I can turn a 12x12-foot bed by hand in half an hour, or till it in fifteen minutes. But that fifteen minutes logged in the ledger book does not count the five minutes I need to start the tiller and drive it to the garden; the five minutes to drive it back to the shed; the occasional hour spent on maintenance or driving to the dealer to obtain some necessary part; or even the extra time I have to work to earn the money to buy the tiller in the first place.

This is a kind of blind efficiency: we have become so obsessed with quantity—the size of our garden, the number of our tools, the speed at which we can work—that we have unconsciously fallen into an industrial paradigm, even within the part of our lives we still call our own.

Seven Reasons To Grow Your Own - # 4

Growing food can be profoundly satisfying as a pasttime; this cultural aspect is highly developed in Europe and Great Britain, where the production and preparation of food is a core activity for a significant segment  of the population. This is especially true for those who enjoy cooking; growing crops for the kitchen is just one more element of the culinary passion.

Seven Reasons To Grow Your Own - # 3

The distance fresh foods travel from farm to table in an industrialized system also affects their flavor.  The chemical constituents of nutrition and flavor are similar (though genetics and growing conditions also contribute to both). Another factor is that the choice of variety also makes a difference the large growers have to choose varieties that ship well, while you can choose a variety for reasons, culinary or otherwise, important to you.