When ranchers, farmers, feed store keepers and those of us in the garden talk about Hay and Straw we are talking about two very different commodities. When I say it is good to mulch with Straw I do mean straw, and not hay.
Hay and Straw come from the same plants. Hay is the top of the grass crop that is used for feeding livestock. It is the part that is most protein rich for livestock, and it is the part that is highest in nitrogen.
In the garden we use Alfalfa Hay (or Lucerne Hay as they say in Great Britain) which is a legume for a nitrogen boost in a new garden bed like in the No Dig Garden Box recipe.
Straw is the bottom lignin rich, woody part of the hay and cereal crop and it is the bi-product of those crops. It is sold as animal bedding, but never feed. Straw should have fewer seeds in it than Hay, although I have found the straw I get has more viable seed in it than the hay I buy, and I often get some sprigs of wheat or oat grass in my Straw mulches which makes great munchies for my bunny rabbits.
Straw is more carbonaceous than hay. It is not nutritious or nitrogen rich. Straw pieces are hollow like a straw, and Straw won’t compress or mat on top of your garden, and it is slow to break down so it won’t tie up nitrogen as a mulch on your beds. Straw makes a great airy mulch, and it is my number one choice for covering over beds that are resting for the summer. At one time people in this country used straw for their wall insulation in their houses. Straw is used for mattress stuffing, and to make biofuels, building materials and rope. It has many more uses than those I have listed.
Perhaps the wonders of straw will be a post on another day!
Eventually when I speak to people about their compost piles and bins the inquiry turns to earthworms, and whether they should *buy worms to add to their compost piles. I always say “Put your compost on the ground, and the earth worms will come.”. That, it seems, has always been true for me, or has it? The one compost additive I have always brought in to my yard is manure. Not bagged composted cow manure, but manure off of the pasture or from the stable. I wonder now if my gardens and my compost are well populated by worms because I have always added manure.
When I think about the development of my property I recall that my house was built in the only clearing there was on my property, and before any building was done that piece on which my house would stand was raised up quite a bit with some of the worst fill I have ever seen. It was basically orange and grey sand. There wouldn’t have been any worms in that. As prescribed by the laws governing builders a certain amount of seed grass sod was laid out on top of that fill. Could worms have come in with that sod? I think it is likely. Of course I began planting away the grass as soon as I came in. Many of the plants I put in the ground came from my neighbor across the field. She has great dirt and lots of worms on her property, and other plants came from my friendly neighborhood nursery. Their pots frequently have worms in the soil, and there the worms are regarded as a nuisance (they say that earthworms in potted plants make the soil more heavy and compact which crushes the roots.). This has been going on for the last 18 years, so I don’t know from where my first worms came.
My primary vegetable garden was built in 1992, and since then was given several inches of manure and brown leaves every summer to prepare it for the planting season. All of the gardens in the yard around my vegetable garden have crumbly worm casting tops and if I lift out a rock I can watch a big irredescent pink earthworm taking a quick dive to safety. I don’t recall when I began seeing worms on my property, but I do remember the first time I saw them in my vegetable garden. I felt certain they had come in with manure.
When I first began making compost outside of the garden in on the ground bins I put manure in the mix, and from the very start that compost was lousy with earthworms. I think therefore that if you are not seeing worms in your on the ground compost pile and it is otherwise working and full of all of the other invertebrates of the compost pile you should add manure from the field or stable. If you are in my town and would like to acquire a bucket of manure, or a bucket of compost complete with worms and other compost inhabitants from me please look to my consulting page to contact me.
If you have any experience with earthworms or no earthworms in your compost and soil I would like to hear about it. Please feel free to comment at the end of this article.
*As you may know I keep composting worms in closed bins for my vermi-composting project. These worms are best suited for the kitchen garbage bin environment. People should not buy this type of worm to put in their outdoor compost. These worms are not natives and I understand that they are not likely to survive where earthworms thrive. Conversely earthworms are not likely to survive in my vermi-composting bin, and should not be harvested from the earth for that purpose.
I met a conventional vegetable farmer at the Green Market where he sets up a booth every Saturday.
We have had a few conversations about growing and farming. He tells me he is the fourth generation of sustainable farmers from Indiana, but he sold his land there and bought a piece here in Florida. He works as a farmer for an agrichemical company by day and then goes home in the evening and farms on his own land. I guess he can’t help himself, he is a farmer through and through. On Saturdays he comes to the Green Market with baskets full and I think sells his produce for less than it costs to produce. His farm is his after work hobby.
I am interested in this farmer because he comes from a long line of Indiana farmers he calls sustainable, but he uses methods that are unsustainable. When we talk about sustainability he says he believes that a farm can not produce new food without inputs, that soil gets depleted by fruiting plants, and manuring and returning just the husk or unused part of the plant back to the soil does not replace the energy taken from the soil for the production of fruit or flower leaf or root crop, for the next cropping season. Mostly he is wrong, but I know why he thinks he is right, but before I explain my ambiguous answer I need to explain a little about sustainable farming.
Sustainability has many facets, including a relationship with the community, stewardship of the land and local environment as well as humane treatment for livestock, profitability, and sustenance of the farm family as a cooperative unit. Sustainability as relates to inputs and falls under the very important sustainable facet or principle of profitability is more specific to what the Conventional Farmer and I were discussing, inputs being the costly things one must bring in to the farm to make it run like diesel or gasoline for equipment, feed for livestock, veterinary care, and anything else the farm needs and can not make on its own and so must buy.
A sustainable farm should have livestock, and land on which to grow feed for livestock, and land to grow food for the farm family and the community. Having livestock and crops means being able to reduce inputs for feed for livestock, reduce inputs for fertilizer for the farm since the livestock make all the fertilizer the farm will need, and bring inputs down to just fuel and veterinary care. Growing food for the livestock, and rotating them from pasture to pasture daily will further reduce inputs on veterinary care. Ranchers who rotate their pastures find they don’t need to worm their livestock, and their livestock are in general more healthy.
Now here is my answer concerning the Conventional Farmer’s assertion that plant wastes and manure won’t be enough input for the farm soil to continue to produce year after year without bringing either livestock feed or plant fertilizer in. Yeah that is an absolute truth for as long as you insist on plowing up your soil every season before you plant; and no that is not true for farmers who don’t plow, turn, or till the soil, and there goes another costly input, fuel.
Plants don’t deplete soil, plowing does. Plants are the gatherers of above ground nutrient for soil. They make nutrient exchanges above and below ground. By penetrating the soil with their roots water can fall deep into the soil, they photosynthesize to bring carbohydrates to their roots which they exchange with soil organisms for nutrients in a perfect symbiosis. Plants have a way of mobilizing the nutrients from undisturbed soil (only undisturbed soil contains the precursors necessary for this process) that they can’t synthesize themselves. Plants roots leak out up to 25% of the nutrients they make in photosynthesis. This leakage sets in motion a cycle called The Oxygen Ethylene Cycle which releases plant nutrients bound up in soil and otherwise unavailable for plants so that plants can get the NPK and trace elements and minerals they need from the soil. When mobilized by this process these nutrients if not taken up will re-crystalize becoming bound up by the soil once again and so are unable to leach out of the soil. This oxygen ethylene cycle also helps to reduce the incidence of soil-borne plant diseases by putting certain soil microbes into temporary states of dormancy. This is the most efficient, and ecologically sound way for plants to get the nutrients and protections they need from soil.
None of this is possible once soil has been plowed. Plowing causes a more immediate and wasteful release of NPK and minerals and trace elements which then leach out of the soil if not immediately taken up by plants. What plants take from healthy soil is less than 5% of their overall needs for nutrient. The over 95% of their needs are met by the sun, air, and rain. By living and dying in soil plants help to improve soil more and more each season. When soil is plowed its aggregates get smaller and are more likely to be taken away by wind and erosion. Plowing or turning soil over exposes the organic matter in soil to the air, and although this creates an initial speed up in organic digestion and soil nutrient release for plants overall it is a step backwards and takes a great deal away from soil and plant health by destroying the very organisms that populate soil to make a healthy relationship with plants. In the same way as the flora and fauna in our digestive tracts are not us, but are necessary for us to have to digest and utilize our food, so are plants and soil that dependent on one another for life. Soil is not just a lifeless anchor for plants it is a universe of life forms and systems which interact intimately with plants and their systems to form one ecosystem.
It is June now and I don’t see the Conventional Farmer’s booth at the market any more. I wonder what he is doing now. While he may never have had to build the soil in Indiana I can’t imagine how he will get along here year after year farming with synthetics on land (once a citrus grove) that was depleted when he acquired it, and never was fertile farm land. He has nematodes now, and reckons he will have to treat his soil for nematodes. He told me he plans to gas the soil. I hope he was joking. Maybe as I write this he is covering his fields with manures and carbonaceous wastes. Hey a girl can dream!
I suppose it is arrogant to imagine that The Conventional Farmer will make changes in his methods because I want him too or because I think it would be better, but it is not a stretch to imagine that this farmer could have an epiphany of his own. After all he came from sustainability. His soil has to be in crisis, and maybe like many others before him he will begin to sense this crisis on his farm. With his farming experience a turn to no till culture could make his produce at the market even more awesome. With no till farming he could make even more excellent food, while reducing his time plowing and his costs for tractor fuel and synthetic fertilizers and pesticides.
Here is a really great article about saving seeds and why we should all be doing it. It is written by Suzanne Richmond the Orlando Gardening Examiner from the Examiner .(dot) com.
Saving and swapping seeds: Creating your own hardy strains
Ever consider the magic that is inside of a little tomato seed? It is the potential to feed millions of people, literally. Yup, that little, tiny seed when germinated and grown to adulthood will produce more seed, thus more seedlings, and that idea grows exponentially into a forest of food from one tiny seed. Saving seeds is a very rewarding thing to become involved in and its fun too. All the varieties that are out there contribute to great diversity of foods that can be grown locally and in your backyard or growing area. And besides, Monsanto and Dupont have had their fingers in the genetically modified pie for way too long. Its time we took a stance against genetically modified food and the exorbitant cost to the entire life population of that ill fated endeavor. You can do that by growing heirlooms also known as ‘open pollinated’, and not hybrids which will never produce offspring just like the parent. Saving your own seed leads to greater self sufficiency and bartering power and it doesn’t cost anything.
When I was growing up, one of the mystical things I learned was how that little bean grew into a large bean plant. Most all of us have done it in grade school. What magic to behold in my little cup with some soil, water, and a bean seed. And it was MINE and was I proud of it! That sense of wonder and accomplishment is still with me, many years later, as a grown up with my own garden, and my wonder has increased with the many varieties of veggies that are available for me to try and to share. Sharing and swapping seeds with others has increased my seed bank account and I have varieties that are unusual, from other places around the world, old heirlooms that have been family grown for centuries, and some types of tomatoes whose taste cannot be beat. Now that is literally a mouth full!
Saving seeds is a pretty simple thing to do. To get seeds that breed true, use heirloom type seeds or seeds that are not hybrids. Some need to be cleaned such as tomato seeds. They need to be ‘fermented’ to remove the slimy coating. Squeeze those into a little bowl of water and leave them for about 4 days. A mold will form and the seeds will sink to the bottom. Pour off the water, rinse till clear, dry on paper towels and store in a paper envelope, label with variety and date it. Keep in a glass jar in the refrigerator or a cool and dark place that is low in humidity. Other seeds don’t need the extra fermenting and are very easy to save such as peppers. These seeds are easily separated and you can place them directly into an envelope. For lettuce or leafy crops like cabbages, let the plant mature to the point of having flowers. Allow the flowers to mature into seed pods and save those in a brown paper bag. The pods will pop open and seeds will be caught in the bag. The book that I most refer to is The New Seed Starters Handbook by Nancy Bubel and it contains everything you would want to know about caring for, saving, and starting seeds.
Some of you are asking, “Why not hybrids?” A hybrid is created by cross fertilizing two different plant breeds. Often, the two breeds being crossed are inbred to create desired characteristics. By crossing, you will get seed that produces an outstanding ‘child’ plant that is better than the parents. This is called ‘hybrid vigor’ and seed produce are called F1 hybrids, meaning first generation. The problem is that plants grown from will revert back to having lackluster properties of the inbred parents, or they are sterile and won’t germinate at all. Did you know that Monsanto and other genetically modified seed producers are not required to tell you that your food or your seed has been genetically modified? And for these reasons, we don’t save seed from hybrids. It can waste a whole growing season for that variety if you were to plant those seeds. And we certainly don’t want to share that or spread that into others gardens.
If you are saving and growing the same seed varieties year after year, you will develop a strain that is hardy to your growing conditions. Chances are that these seeds will have improved yield and disease resistance which is very important in Florida as we have conditions that are hot and humid which tend to promote disease and fungus. Save seed from plants that are thriving. This will ensure that the desirable qualities get passed down to the next generations and it will create a strain that will be more tolerant to your set of growing conditions where it has been replanted over time. That strain will become invaluable to you. It will thrive when other strains won’t. So, saving seed from your thriving plants are more likely to create hardy plants for next growing season. For instance, cucumbers, squash, and watermelon seem to always have a problem with fungus and wilt due in part to their hairy leaves that attract moisture. Save seeds from plants that make it thru our humid and hot summer and actually produce fruit well. Grow these next year and repeat saving the seeds from the hardier plants. You are more likely to grow a ‘strain’ that will grow well under your growing conditions. It’s as simple as that.
What excitement there is when a group of like minded seed savers gets together to swap seeds. One is telling of great properties of a certain variety of tomatoes. Another tells of the incredible size or yields of this strain. And yet another brings unusual varieties that claim to grow well in your area. Wow. That is only a small part of what happens at a seed swap. By swapping your seed you are ensuring the life of those hardy strains and you are getting to know your plants better. There is strength and unity that occurs from saving and swapping seeds which leads to inspirational excitement for the next growing season.
A great sense of pride comes from saving your seeds. Besides, no matter what happens to the economy, or the price of gas, or postage, or whatever, your little stash of hardy seeds can feed you and a lot of others for a long time. After a few growing seasons to prove your strains, you can even give them a new name! I have always imagined a nice, big, purplish, disease resistant tomato that bears fruit even at 100 Fahrenheit, that I will name the Soozapalooza. I am on my way but I am not there yet!
It is June now and everything in my S. Florida organic garden is changing with our weather. The rainy season has commenced, and that means high temps and high humidity. Rain brings some wind and cooler temperatures and if the sun doesn’t come out again it will stay comfortable outdoors. If the sun comes out it will be a sauna. This is high breeding time for the mosquitos and we are walking prey.
In the garden pole beans are doing real well. The collard greens are still producing leaves and I planted basil in the ground nearby. Green peppers are in high gear production and I am still getting eggplant harvests. The oldest large tomato plants are finished and their remains have been removed from the garden. In the straw mulch that was beneath the tomato plants the pill bugs and sow bugs are as thick as ants in an ant hill. That makes me think the soil is in great condition, and so I may plant the sweet potato slips I am making in that bed, and mulch again. Tomatoes and sweet potatoes are not in the same family. It should work out just fine.
I have black eye peas I put in a month ago. They are giving me lots of peas now. They are covered with aphids, ants, lady bugs and lady bug larva. The plants seem to be oblivious of the ongoing war on their leaf tips. Behind the black eye peas a volunteer cherry tomato plant leaned out of its bed and found my compost leaf fence. It is a huge sprawling plant and the tomatoes it makes are the sweetest berries I ever had. I am enjoying the fruit very much, but I have hard feelings about it feeding off of next season’s compost. I find it interesting to watch what is going on with this huge and healthy tomato plant. When I reach in to harvest I reach past spiders and their webs, I also see many predatory stink bugs and wasps cruising around in there although I don’t see any pests or the damage they might be causing.
Nearby Okra in red and green are coming up out of the ground and a few beds over peanuts are coming up.
In the garden box with the pole beans are bitter gourd plants. They are climbing on the pole beans to reach the fence, and two sweet banana pepper plants are still making peppers. I recently learned that pepper plants are perenials, so I may try leaving them in the ground even when the rest of the bed is fallow and covered over. Late lettuce I put there is actually making palatable lettuce. I wasn’t expecting that to work out. Lettuce is really out of season now. I think it is just shady enough there. A volunteer tomato plant in that bed is sporting some plum tomatoes in green. I can afford to wait and see if those will make it. Nearby a couple of late season tomato plants are also holding large green tomatoes. If the plants begin to fail I will make pickled green tomatoes.
In the next bed over all crops have finished and that bed has been manured and covered over for the fallow season. The fourth bed in that yard, a mound finished out with bush beans after a great potato harvest is covered over with rabbit cage cleanings and manure with straw on top.
I have more beds to cover over I am using the Direct to Garden Compost method for the gardens I am covering over now. I won’t plant crops in them again until the fall comes.
On a fence line my blue Passion Fruit vine I planted last summer has begun to drop its fruit. They are delicious. Pineapples are taking on some size now that the rain has started. They will be ready soon. Pidgeon pea plants are coming up, and my young avocado tree is loaded with new leaves. The mango trees are loaded with fruit and I am getting ready for huge harvests. I hope to dehydrate as much as my machine will handle and freeze the rest. Every day or so my husband and I eat a ripe black berry from our new plants. They are young plants and I am growing them in pots up off of the ground for ease of harvesting.
Blueberries in the ground beneath an old pine tree are still surviving. They have good leaves and make a few berries. They are very new and although I hope they make it I don’t have a lot of faith in their ability to survive here. They will be a year old in my garden later this summer.
Two of my compost bins have compost in the curing stages now. When I get a chance I will combine them and start a new compost in the empty bin. Down at the shed in an opening I created three cow manure compost piles and an on the ground lasagna garden bed that will sit fallow until fall.
I was expecting the winter garden vegetables to be done now, but many that were recently planted are still feeding us including a volunteer mustard green plant we ate from last night.
This is a great time to be planning next season’s gardens, and making lots of compost, but this is also a time when you can eat many tropical fruits and summer vegetables from your organic garden. Happy Gardening
I have written about many different types of compost piles in the garden and I wanted to take some time to write about the way I made compost for my garden when my job kept me from home most of the days of the week.
Your preparations for the organic garden do not have to cost you a lot of time. One excellent way to save time and build great soil for your garden is to compost directly into the vegetable garden. This requires that you expect to have a fallow season for at least some part of your garden. Many South Florida gardeners do put their beds to rest when the rainy season starts, so this will probably work great for you. The beauty of this backwards planting season (growing in the winter, fallow in the summer) for us is that while our summer is so extremely hot and wet that our bedding plants will rot it is perfect weather for the fastest compost possible. Here’s what you do.
It is June, and it rains everyday here now, and when the rain stops and the sun comes out it is sauna hot and humid. This is the ultimate time to prepare your garden for the next growing season.
Cut down what’s left of your garden vegetables. I move their carcasses out of the garden to another compost pile for weeds and finished garden vegetables. Some people will cut them down and drop them where they fall in the garden. I think that’s ok if they were healthy, and nematode free, and if you are willing to cut the stems as small as one inch long pieces. Remember, this is going to be a fast compost pile and we are expecting it to consume pathogens and weed seeds present in the things we drop there. Pull any weeds that have started there and begin covering the garden up with vegetable kitchen scraps, including coffee, tea, and most anything but meat, bones and grease. Make layers of greens and browns just like we do for other types of compost piles.
Continue covering with shredded brown leaves, manures, grass clippings, sawdust, bedding materials from your pets (hamster, guinea pig, rabbits, horse), shredded newspaper, and when you have a big pile up cover it all over with straw which should be loosened from its compressed bale state. If it isn’t raining already hose it down. This should look like a huge mound maybe as much as 18″ to 20″ high. It is going to shrink as it breaks down, and in a few months when it is time to plant you shouldn’t be able to find much more than dark soil there beneath the straw, and it will have shrunk to nearly half it’s size. At planting time you should be able to plant right into what’s left of the mound without even moving the straw which will act as garden mulch for the new crops.
Remember your ratios for nitrogen to carbon. To make it simple I say you should have about 4 or 5 times more carbonaceous material than nitrogen heavy materials. It can be more complicated than that, but it need not be, and the more often you do this the simpler it will seem to get the balance down right.
Two things I do not do with the Direct to Garden Composting method are: Turn the compost. I suppose you can if you want to, but I never have, and although I used to turn it once into the soil right before planting I don’t even do that anymore. The compost piles I do turn are many feet deep. This mound will be 12 to 18″ high when you finish putting the straw on top. When you water it down its height will diminish an inch or two more. The other thing I don’t do is step into these garden beds. I want them tall and fluffy and uncompressed. You will too.
This method is nearly the same as making the no dig garden box that I wrote about last summer. You can even use the no dig garden box recipe on top of your fallow on the ground vegetable garden. Forget about tilling or turning the soil, you won’t need to do it, and the worms will thank you for not disturbing their tunnels by adding tilth and vigor to your vegetable garden soil.
The pictures below are of my on the ground garden getting the lasagne layers treatment just before the winter planting season started last fall. Using the no dig box garden lasagna recipe allowed me to plant right into the layers a week after putting them down, and that was just a couple weeks after removing a pumpkin vine that had grown there all summer. The trick is the 4″ of compost on the top. The straw layer below the compost brings lots of air to the manure layers, and the alfalfa on the bottom breaks down quickly adding a nitrogen boost at the bottom for full season vigor. With a long wet summer coming you can forgo the compost on the top. You will find the compost below the straw when you push your fingers in there in the fall.
One more thing about the the direct garden compost method. I covered over some garden beds in October of 2005 a few days before category 2 hurricane Wilma came ashore. That storm took trees down, on my property (and that was a year after 2 hurricanes had already pruned my property), but didn’t move my mound or the straw I laid on top of it. This is a good fast, non eroding, and effective way to fix your garden soil. Happy Gardening Preps.
Everything you need to create a good and fruitful organic garden is readily available to you when you need it, and it doesn’t cost you anything but some time and some effort.
All organic gardens start with great soil. Great soil is easy to make, but it needs some time, so start now. Gather vegetable food scraps from your kitchen including bread, tea, coffee and even newspapers. Rake up some leaves or get permission to take them from your neighbor’s yard. Some of your neighbors are even raking them up and putting them at the end of the driveway in bags or trash cans for waste pickup. Grab that stuff it is gold for your compost pile. The last ingredient is manure. Manure for your compost can come from chickens, rabbits, horse, cow, alpaca, sheep or goats, or any other vegetarian livestock. If you don’t have a manure hook up call your county extension office and see if there is someone there who can introduce you to a livestock farmer who needs to get rid of his manure pile. Chances are the manure will be mixed with feed hay and or chip bedding which is a good thing for us composters. Some ranchers will have equipment with which to move piles of manure to the back of your truck or cart. In other cases you may need to bring your own shovel, rake and wheel barrow to move manure to your truck. It is good to find out what tools to bring ahead of time.
If you are unable to get your own manure and you are in Saint Lucie County Florida you can call me. I am your friendly neighborhood purveyor of poo, and I will deliver manure to your home for a fee. Please see the Consulting page on this site to find me.
Make a coral for your compost. This can be from old fence sections, or wire fencing or hardware cloth, or shipping pallets. Make sure it is at least 3′x3′x3′ or 1meter.x 1meter x 1meter. It would be better to make it a little larger, but for sure no smaller. This coral should be in the shade if you have some. Shade keeps the compost from drying out too fast.
No matter how much compost you think you are making I can almost guarantee that you will end up needing more. Make several piles, or one long fence line pile. Composting materials shrink as they break down. Your 4×4x4 pile will be less than two feet square when it is garden ready soil.
Layer in brown (or carbonaceous) things like brown leaves, straw or old hay, shredded newspapers, and sawdust, with green (or nitrogen rich) things like manures, vegetable kitchen scraps, and grass clippings wetting each layer as you put it down. Each brown layer can be several inches thick. Green layers should be thinner. The pile should get at least 3 feet high. Big piles like what I am describing will begin working efficiently right away unlike small piles.
Many people tell me that when they buy commercial compost bins the instructions advise they put the bin in the sun. This they believe is the source of the heat that a compost pile needs to achieve to properly break down weed seeds and certain detrimental bacteria. This is an incorrect notion. The heat stage or thermophilic stage of a compost pile comes from within. When mesophilic bacteria begin to work on the wastes in your pile they creat heat. They create so much heat that they die or go into dormancy and different types of bacteria come to life to work the pile at about 113 degrees Fahrenheit and up to about 140 degrees. These are thermophilic bacteria and they consume proteins, carbohydrates and fats which make up seeds. Proteins are present in living organisms like ecoli. Those are destroyed in this thermophilic stage as well. Worms and other invertebrates move away from the heat of the compost pile and will come back when the pile cools to begin working there again. While it is desirable for your compost pile to heat itself up there some composting experts who will stop their compost from heating past 150 degrees f. That is they will monitor the temperature of the pile during the thermophilic stage and turn the pile if it gets to 150 degrees. That is because while it is beneficial to have high temperatures in the compost process temperatures that are too high will begin to destroy beneficial organisms and their spores, and slow the work progression in the compost pile. I think therefore that it is not a good idea to put your black plastic composting bin in the sun. It is not going to heat up the right way or for the right reasons, and it will never be cool enough for the compost to move into the very important cooler curing stages.
Curing compost begins to develop huge numbers of microbial and invertebrate life that makes up the healthiest soil for plants. Well cured compost brings nutrition, water holding capacity, and disease resistance to your garden vegetables. I want to mention this for the people who want to cook or sterilize their compost before putting it into the garden. Don’t do that. Please stop regarding all bacteria fungi yeasts molds and insects as enemies. Most of these organisms are benign, and those which populate your composted garden soil are absolutely the most desirable organisms in the world!
Turning the compost brings air to the pile. When it is raining every day you will need to turn the pile more often to help it to breath and dry out some. When the weather turns dry you will turn the pile less often, once a week works for me in the dry season, and you will have to water it. If your compost lacks air or the proper moisture it will slow or stop working all together. An unpleasant odor coming from the pile means it is in need of oxygen, it may be too wet, or be too green, and often it can be both. Even unfinished compost should be relatively light, it gets it’s lightness from the carbonaceous or brown materials. Work will start in the green or nitrogen areas of the pile, but once that green starts working the work spreads to the carbon materials as well. This is where turning comes in very handy. Bringing the dark moist working areas up and over top of the carbonaceous materials forces work to speed up (and down).
You may have noticed that I am writing a great deal about composting. As I meet more people who are interested in what I am doing I find out that composting is the weak link in their understanding of organic gardening. I would estimate that 80% of my success in my organic garden comes from soil. You can be sure that I spend 80% of my effort in preparing soil for my growing season, and then in growing season I spend most of my time harvesting. My plants take care of themselves. Long ago I was reading an article in an organic gardening magazine and from that article these are the words that stuck with me: “Feed the soil and let the plants feed themselves.” This has been a great and guiding principle for me in my garden. Great amazing nutritious black and fluffy chocolate cake like soil is I am sure the main reason I can grow here so successfully. Now get to work, and make some great soil!
Oh gee, It is May now and I haven’t been posting pics from all the lovely food I have been growing. This is the season for changing from cool weather vegetables to warm season vegetables. These pics are from the beginning harvests of beans and the end of lettuce radishes, mustards, beats and large tomatoes. I have been selling some of my surplus vegetables to a handful of people who are eating better on account of my garden. It has been a blast learning how to plant successively, and plan for the next crops season. Right now Black Eye Peas are coming up next to Okra, Collard Greens are hanging in, bush beans are still producing, and pole beans are beginning to kick in. Biter gourd is coming up now, and the garden is mad with small native cherry tomatoes. They don’t seem to mind the heat one bit. It is summer crop season and time for building and planning next fall’s gardens. I am psyched!
Photos in this post have been taken from the internet. If I have taken a photo that belongs to you and that you do not care to share for this article please send me an email about it and I will take your picture down immediately. adina@manuredepot.com
I know that my paradigm seems extreme. My reason for coming back to this today is to report that I feel basically the same for my own purposes which are those of a backyard grower. I have done some mechanical pest control this season. That is I have picked new born caterpillars off of my tomato plants and I have been out at night finding and throwing cut worms out of the garden beds, and I have squished aphids at the tips of bean plants. I still don’t mix any sprays for pest control, and I am careful to consider what I am saving when I am squishing a bug to avoid killing pests on plants I have no intention of using anyway. This season I have spent less than one percent of my time on pest control, and lost less than ten percent of my harvest to insects.
While I want to generate surplus, the surplus I create feeds just a few other people who only expect to get what has grown as it is harvested so I am not under pressure to meet some projected harvest schedule. It is easy for me to accept some losses to pests in my vegetable garden in order to pursue the ultimate in a balanced ecosystem in my yard, and imperfect produce is a guarantee that I will not forget my own family while harvesting for others. We always eat the stuff that doesn’t look perfect. As you may know it still tastes great!
If it is your business to create food for a market system, and you need picture perfect harvests then there are many organic or OMRI Certified Organic pesticides available to you, as well as some very mild recipes for herb and soap, and baking soda sprays. However it is important to understand that even if you are mixing a substance that is safe for humans it is meant to be toxic to insects. It is nearly impossible when using such things to kill only the insects you intend sparing all others. Some insects or creatures you didn’t aim for will be destroyed as well, and you will have set yourself another step away from the balance we all seek in the garden. It is even beneficial to have some pests in the garden because it means that the predators that feed on those pests are also nearby. You are less likely to have overwhelming and devastating infestations this way.
If you are not a farmer who is depending on his harvest for his living I strongly recommend you learn how to sacrifice a little for the good of the whole. Balance in the garden is a very desirable condition. If you build strong and nutritious soil, choose the proper location for your crops, and plant appropriately for the season (cool weather vegetables in cool weather, warm weather vegetables in warm weather), and rotate crops from season to season you will have very little need for sprays and pesticides. What I am saying is with some knowledge and experience you can be a wise gardener, and you won’t need chemical magic tricks or synthetic weapons to bring forth a great harvest.
In the home garden it is a good idea to plant many different types of plants across several families, and it is a good idea to mix them up together with concern only to what plants might make poor companions. Otherwise mixed plantings will help in the garden to avoid large losses from pests and plant diseases. Please stay tuned for a post about companion plantings. Knowing which plants will benefit or do poorly in close proximity to one another is a great help in the garden.
Since last writing on this subject I have learned some more about predaceous bugs (our friendly army in the garden). There are many predatory insects that help to keep our garden pests in check. If you don’t spray any pesticides you are likely to catch them at work in your garden. Lady Bugs and larval Lady Bugs, some Stink Bugs, Predatory Wasps, Syrphid Fly larva, Spiders, Big Eye Bugs, Assassin Bugs, Ground Beetles, Praying Mantids, Lacewings and their larva, and Robber Flies are all predatory insect eaters feasting on the pests that might otherwise consume our garden vegetables.
There is a growing body of evidence suggesting that the presence of the almighty earthworm in our gardens may provide protection from soil born fungal plant diseases as well as some insect infestations. This of course in addition to the great nutritional benefit worms confer upon soil just by eating pooping and tunneling there helps our plants to be strong enough to survive attacks. If you move some earthworms to the vegetable beds be sure there is mulch on the surface for them to munch.
Bees in addition to pollenating our flowering vegetables have an unnerving effect on caterpillars who can not tell their buzz from the buzz of predatory wasps and so will drop off of leaves every time they are buzzed to avoid being eaten which severely disrupts feeding, and may cause them to give up on those planted areas altogether. Predatory wasps are our great friends in the garden and their nests if not blocking household entrance ways should be tolerated.
Finally, it is a good exercise to accept that you are not in control of absolutely everything that happens in the garden. It is good to be humble there. It provides a sense of accomplishment and gratitude for what comes to fruit. I have had tremendous harvests for which to be grateful without the aid of any pest control sprays. You can too. Organic gardening is not about doing nothing to help your garden thrive and wishing for results while accepting unreasonable losses. It is about employing naturally occurring systems present in our environment so as to eat without doing damage to our ecosystem. It is about fostering interdependence with our world rather than conquering and ultimately destroying it. This is not mumbo jumbo new age magic, it is solid science with practical applications, it is stuff we knew once and forgot along the way. You can do this too.
Last month my husband and I packed up the dogs and jumped into the van and drove to Maryland. His Dad was in the hospital and we were needed there to help out a little. Ten days later it was time for me to go, and my husband needed to stay longer. My brother and his wife decided that my brother would ride back to Florida with me and the dogs. A couple of days after we arrived in Florida it was time for my brother to catch a plane home. In the morning before leaving for the airport I ran out the door with scissors and a zip lock bag. I pushed a half a pound of cut lettuce into the bag and sealed it. He packed it into his carry on bag and off we went.
That nite back at his home in Maryland my brother was washing lettuce for the salad the family would eat with dinner when a dime sized frog jumped onto his chest. After a brief interstate conference my sister in law and my neices made a terrarium habitat for the frog they named Lettuce.
I remembered that when we were children living in Maryland we would catch toads that lived in the window wells around our house, and my father would get them to eat pill bugs we found under rocks by offering the bugs to the toads from the end of his forceps. I suggested my neices find those same bugs for their new frog. Though it was still quite cold they were able to turn up rocks and find pill bugs and sow bugs to feed the frog over the course of the next few weeks. They discovered that Lettuce was a nocturnal frog. He slept all day and came out to feed at night.
A month later when my brother and his eldest daughter came to visit Florida they packed Lettuce the frog into a bag of organic lettuce, put the lettuce bag into her backpack, and that night Lettuce the frog was released back into the garden from which he came. He had traveled a total of 2,000 miles, spent several weeks in a terarium in a zone 7b town in February, and survived to return to the land of his hatching.
Lettuce the frog is probably a Cuban frog, not originally native to South Florida, but he is just one of the many predators who work my vegetable garden helping to keep the pest insect populations down. I see frogs like Lettuce in the crooks of collard plants by day keeping moist. At night they come out to eat. When we released Lettuce he jumped off the ground and right up into a collard plant. The End
Greenbrier, Catbrier, Horsebrier, Smilax from the family Smilacaceae is edible. Not just edible for my rabbits, it is also edible for me. Better than edible it tastes great. I have heard it called wild asparagus, and I have found pieces so vigorous and large that they resembled asparagus tips a little. Like asparagus the part of the Greenbrier that you can eat is the tender new growth at the tips, including the tendrils. Unlike Asparagus this plant grows itself in my poorest soil and doesn’t require any nurturing from me.
Greenbrier is a thorny vine native to a great deal of this country including all of Florida. It’s berries are eaten by many birds including Blue Jays, Mockingbirds, Robins, Wood Peckers, and Wild Turkeys. It grows wild in my woods and is very vigorous. I never liked it before and have had to work very hard to keep it out of the landscaped areas around my house. It is glad to climb on in from the woods. When pulled it breaks off. I dug it out with a pickax. The root is a giant hard potato sized thing that can just keeps on trailing under ground making more of itself along the way. I have dug out many pounds of those roots at a time, and I always wondered at their size and whether they were useful for something. They are as hard as wood. Above the ground the vine grows up into trees and then at the top grows lots of stems and leaves curling its tendrils around branches to hold itself aloft.
Now that I find it to be useful my approach to controlling it is different. Oh I still cut it out of the trees, but I don’t worry about getting it out of the ground, and when I cut it down out of the tree I eat the tips. I am also grooming it now with production of new tips in mind.
Right now in March and going into April I see the Greenbrier is surging forth after a winter of little or no new growth. Everywhere I go I see the lime green of it’s new tips surging towards the sun.
I have eaten quite a bit of it lately. It has not so far disturbed my stomach. I googled Greenbrier and found it is not poisonous. I have also looked into how it was used medicinally. It doesn’t look like anyone used it as a purgative, mostly the leaves were used on boils, gals and scratches, and to help expel afterbirth. I also read of the root being used as food, but it is so woody I don’t know how.
If you are keeping some wild areas in your Florida landscape you probably have some Greenbrier too. Take a look around, snap off the tender new growth and give it a try. I think you will like it. Bon Appetit.
I have a very small Queen Palm or Cocos Plumosa in some of the whitest soil on my property. That poor palm has been yellow for as long as I can remember. Over the course of many years I have done very little for it. I am sure that at least once I have put a shovel full of Palm Fertilizer on it. It was better for a short time, but it always returns to yellow. This Palm matters very little to me. I have many more healthy specimens coming up all over my property. I see this poor little thing as a blessing though. It provides me with a chance to do an experiment. I have pulled the weeds from it’s drip line, and I have mulched it with tree leaves, bunny manure, and used coffee grounds.
The pictures show what has happened to my yellow Cocos Plumosa in a month since I mulched and fed the soil beneath it. New growth is coming out green. I will make another post on the progress of this experiment after another month or two no matter what happens. This is a simple experiment. I can put anything but synthetic fertilizer on it, and I will report everything that I apply, and post new pics.
Over the course of this year we have had the good fortune to harvest and eat swamp cabbage, or the heart of the Sabal Palm three different times. The first tree fell casualty to our new shed. We had to do some clearing to get the shed in. That was the only tree other than some Brazilian Pepper Trees to be knocked over. The Brazilian Pepper trees are invasive non native trees. It was a great thing to knock them down.
I was interested to find that the Sabal or Cabbage Palm we took out had lost all of it’s boots and was smooth trunked, or as smooth as one can get. When I opened it up I found large black and red Palm Weevil beetles moving in around the boots at the top, and there were beetle larva in the white new boot growth of the interior. Over time they would have killed my palm, but the top was still green, and the heart of the palm was not yet damaged. This Palm tree was in the woods, and had never been pruned properly or improperly. I do worry that if the weevils were attacking it there was some weakness already there. The University of Florida has a recently discovered a palm bacterium that is attacking and killing the Sabal Palms here. It is the phytoplasma that has been causing the lethal yellowing disease in Canary Island Date Palms, Wild Date Palms and Queen Palms. I hope it is not ongoing in my palms. I haven’t yet contacted anyone about a test. New Sabal Palms come up on my property quickly and constantly. I am for now taking a watch and see attitude. I lost a pair of vigorous Queen Palms several years ago, but there was no yellowing first, they both just lost their centers and slowly died.
The second palm I harvested the heart from was up at the road in front of a neighbor’s house waiting to be picked up by waste removal services. My husband and I saw it there while walking the dogs, and hightailed it back to the house to get the truck and a hand saw. When we returned to the tree we cut the top fronds off, and loaded it up into the truck.
The last Cabbage Palm I harvested this year came off of my property. It was blocking the western exposure for several of my garden boxes. It was a young tree, maybe about 10′ high, not far from two others about the same size.
Harvesting Cabbage Palm hearts is not what anyone would call a sustainable practice, but if you have to take one out it is a good idea to plan to get the food out of it. If you don’t run into a Sabal Palm that has to be sacrificed you can also find it in the grocery store in the canned vegetable section. Even that harvest though is unsustainable, so I would call Palm Hearts a specialty occasion food only.
Even with the sharpest hatchet, the harvest process takes me over 4 hours. By the third harvest my time had not appreciably improved. This harvest is hard work, but when you get that big smooth cylinder of meat out of there it all seems worth the trouble. As I am chunking it out I save the edible parts in distilled water with a lot of lemon juice. That seems to keep it from browning. That is also how I store it in the refrigerator until I can use it. It is good like that for at least five days with a water/lemon juice change in between.
The Palm heart has a pleasant smooth crunchy texture and almost no flavor. As it goes down toward the more pithy inedible parts it gets bitter. I ate a good bit of that bitter part raw while working on it. It’s not bad while it is fresh! I used the rest of the harvest to make stir fry, added it raw to salad, and cooked up a bunch in a stew, most of which I froze for another day. All the other parts went into my compost.
The Sabal Palm is the State Tree for Florida and South Carolina. Indigenous people used the leaves for thatch roofing, the heart for food and chewed the berries for a headache remedy. It is a native plant in much of the south, drought tolerant, cold hardy and low maintenance.
From my article Why Soil PH Matters I got a slammin’ comment from Christine. I was inspired by her comment to write this blog which is an open response to her comment. I think this also answers most questions experienced gardeners might have about whether or not the Master Gardeners program would benefit them.
Christine,
I think you are right on the money watching your leaves for signs of nutritional deficiencies and attacks. We learn to do exactly that in the MG class. We get a note book full of pictures of leaves and symptoms and signs, and of insects, beneficial predatory and pollinating insects, and harmful ones with chewing or piercing sucking mouth parts! hehe, and much more.
You are already a great gardener with a lot of practical experience. I don’t think I went into the MG program with as much knowledge as you have already, but for me this class has better arranged the knowledge with which I came, filled in my gaps of understanding, and has made concrete for me the belief that I am absolutely on the right path in regards to the environment, and sustainable organic growing.
The Extension teachers have to expose us to everything that the University offers. It doesn’t mean that the teachers don’t see what’s coming, or embrace principles in growing similar to our own, many of them do. Not all the kindred spirits I have met in that program are other students. In any case anyone who goes in to that class at any level, whether conventional or organic in his ways will come out more educated, and better equipped to choose one practice or another. To answer your question directly I think the amount of the class time dedicated to synthetic pesticides and amendments was probably less than five percent.
I think that what the Master Gardeners Program best teaches us is how to efficiently research any botanical or agricultural query we might come up against. Many people go into the program with little or no practical experience with growing here. Those of us who go in with a lot of practical experience are able to glue new pieces of information to stuff we have known for years. It sharpens us like crazy!
Because the Master Gardeners Program was established to make a voluntary corps of garden gnomes
volunteer work is a big part of the obligation. I get to stand around talking about gardening with people who want to know about gardening. I think what I am doing is important, it is easy, and being more knowledgeable in my field will make me more valuable in my work.
And yeah I know I have begun to read like a Master Gardeners Cheer Leader, so I will promise not to write another blog about the same for a while. Rah Rah!
In my previous post The Master Gardeners Program I wrote about all of the new information I was assimilating. Being a long time gardener in South Florida I possess a bit of knowledge about all sorts of gardening, but there were some persistent mysteries for me. One particularly irritating gap in my knowledge was concerning PH and why whenever I made a soil nutrient inquiry with the Cooperative Extension, or with any educated grower the conversation immediately turned to PH. PH! Why PH? I want to ask about soil nutrients, and they just want to talk about PH! So what if my soil is alkaline, neutral, or acidic? I just wanted to know what nutrients the soil needed to grow good plants.
If this was all that I learned in the Master Gardeners program it alone would be worth the time and money spent on that class. This is such a gem! Here is why PH matters when talking about soil nutrition: Soil nutrients are only available to plants at certain and specific PH levels. The chart you see above tells it all.
You see, a plant could be showing symptoms of a phosphorus deficiency while the soil in which it grows is packed with phosphorus. If the PH is not between 5.3 and 6.8 phosphorus will not be available to the plant. You can see in that chart above how past 6.8 phosphorus and calcium bind. Above 6.8 plants will have trouble with the bound up phosphorus and calcium. Below 5.5 phosphorus availability drops off a great deal.
You can see on the chart above that Iron and Manganese don’t become available until a PH of 5.5 or lower. Plants that need a great deal of those nutrients, like Blueberries, and Ixora will benefit from an acidic soil.
So you see when we talk about a plant loving acidic or alkaline or neutral soil we are really talking about what nutrients that plant needs to find available in soil to thrive. Once you have a PH reading on your soil then you can consider or test further for what nutrition it may need.
On a recent soil test I submitted to the University I found that my compost based garden soil was off the charts for all of the nutrients for which they can test and my PH is 7.4. That is just a bit past neutral toward Alkalinity. My vegetables are growing great in that soil, and this information helps me to chart my course for the summer or fallow season. I plan to plant some cover crops like peanuts and peas on some sections which will help bring nitrogen in, and keep weeds out. I will probably add manure to the sections I let go fallow, but I will take it easy on the leaves and straw in the hopes of bringing the PH down just a little. When I am brewing compost I will go a bit heavier on the green or nitrogen heavy additives like manures and green plant wastes. The ideal PH for vegetable gardens is 5.8 to 6.5.
Adding organic materials in the form of composts and composted manures is a great way to ensure that your soil has all of the nutrients that plants need. Doing a PH test is an invaluable tool for a gardener in the know.
"Anita Neal SLC Extension Director and Kate O'Neill Program Specialist "
Photos courtesy of Nichole Rouse
I am in the Master Gardeners Program in St. Lucie County Florida. I signed up for it knowing that I might be exposed to information that would not please me, like how to use pesticides, herbicides, and synthetic fertilizers, but I believed that even so there was so much resource and education available to me through that program that the education I desired would far outweigh the information I did not care to practice. Boy was I right! I am in the last month of my training. I have an amazing stack of resource books, I have made great connections with others in the program as well as my mentor and several excellent Extension agents from two counties. I have had the pleasure of learning from various experts in the fields of agriculture, botany, entomology, horticulture, and plant pathology. I am learning so much and so quickly that I barely have time to assimilate. It is a good thing they give us so many books and handouts.
The Master Gardeners Program was dreamed up by an innovative Extension agent in Washington state in 1972. Urban and suburban growth was increasing in the U.S. More Americans were becoming interested in gardening and the environment and the number of mostly seasonal home gardening questions coming to the Cooperative Extension office were increasing. Volunteers such as Extension homemakers and the 4-H Club Leaders had always been part of the extension, but not for homeowner training. A group of volunteers were selected, trained and certified as Master Gardeners. That first group not only succeeded in meeting their objectives, they exceeded the expectations of the Extension Agent who had trained them, and so the Master Gardeners Program was born.
Master Gardeners Training programs are available in more than 30 states in the U.S., and in 62 counties here in Florida. Our group is composed of students from two counties because the county north of ours has joined us due to radical budget cuts at state and county levels. I suppose that is bad news really except for that county’s Extension’s Director Christine Begazo-Kelly comes south to teach some of our classes. She is a very good teacher with a background in agriculture. She is a great friend to the local and sustainable agriculture movement, and she was present at the SSAWG Conference in January.
In my last post Traditional And Conventional Growing I wrote a little about growing in sustainable ways and The Great Dust Bowl of the 1930’s. I want to write about what happened to the farms and ranches on the great plains states of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and New Mexico in the 1930’s and how that disaster pertains to what we do in the garden and on the farm today, and the most important practices we can put into use to avoid another dust bowl disaster.
When European settlers first arrived the Great Plains were the range of the bison and of the Great Plains culture of the Native American tribes of the Blackfeet, Crow, Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche, Arikara, Mandan, Pawnee and Wichita. The deep roots of Prairie Grasses on which bison grazed held the soil on the Great Plains where some of the harshest weather in our country was common.
Several actions in the 1920s increased the region’s vulnerability to drought. Low crop prices and high machinery costs meant that farmers needed to cultivate more land to produce enough to meet their required payments. Since most of the best farming areas were already being used, poorer farmlands were increasingly used. Farming submarginal lands often had negative results, such as soil erosion and nutrient leaching. By using these areas, farmers were increasing the likelihood of crop failures, which increased their vulnerability to drought.
These economic conditions also created pressure on farmers to abandon soil conservation practices to reduce expenditures. Furthermore, during the 1920s, many farmers switched from the lister to the more efficient one-way disc plow, which also greatly increased the risk of blowing soil. Reductions in soil conservation measures and the encroachment onto poorer lands made the farming community more vulnerable to wind erosion, soil moisture depletion, depleted soil nutrients, and drought. An excerpt from NDMC What is Drought, Drought In The Dust Bowl Years
Farmers plowed the land to grow wheat season after season without rest. Ranchers grazed their cattle until the prairie grass was gone. A bumper crop of wheat in 1931 caused prices to fall. Many farmers didn’t make enough to keep their land, and plowed abandoned land was left unplanted. Other farmers remained through the drought farming what they could. Drought continued, and then windstorms, and blowing snow storms. Dust was everywhere. People and cattle died sickened and suffocated from the dust. People as far east as Washington DC saw dust that had blown from Texas, Oklahoma, S.W. Kansas, and N.E. New Mexico. Dust storms shifted soil, or what had been soil from farm to farm on the plains. By 1936 90% of farmers in the dust bowl were receiving aid from the government. When the drought finally ended nearly a decade after it began farmers changed the way they operated their farms on the plains adopting irrigation practices. We know now that just irrigation is not enough.
Today if you look at land that has been plowed and planted year after year you may notice that it is lower than the unplanted land surrounding it. It took ages for soil to cover the surface of our earth. In less than 100 years we have greatly diminished and depleted our best soils. Plowing the soil breaks the structure of soil, causes run off and erosion stripping our land of its precious soil. You can even see the soil taking to the wind as the plow runs through the field.
Sustainable No Till farmers have retired their plows, nearly never plowing farm land and pasture. Wise farmers now rotate crops allowing fallow lands to grow pastures of green mulches. A year ago I couldn’t have imagined a farm working without a plow. Farmers are changing, and I am changing too. This season I wrote about the first time I planted seeds into heavily mulched soil without turning it first in Soil Tilth And The No Till Garden .
If you are not raising or “uppening” the land every year then it is being depleted. Every season we should be adding organic material to our soil, mulching ornamentals heavily with chopped up yard wastes, mulching vegetable beds with brown leaves, pet cage bedding, newspaper, or straw. Whatever waste we generate that will break down should go back into our yards and gardens. This is what is called uppening the soil. It is good for your yard, good for our gardens, and will lighten the load on our landfills. Go ahead and put the mulch down, and plant right into it. Don’t turn it, don’t till it. Give the soil a break, and don’t break your back! Up You Go!
It wasn’t very long ago that I found out that people who farm with the aid of chemical pesticides and chemical fertilizers call themselves Conventional Farmers. That is good to know. We call ourselves Organic, or Natural which is the word I now lean towards more often. Organic is good, but as with everything else that gets big enough to be (re)defined by the FDA or the USDA that word is less meaningful. It has lost some of its purity.
I find myself carefully reading the content labels of food labeled Organic. I search for the origin state or country of the produce marked Organic in the grocery store. It’s not just that the word Organic is being redefined, it is also that there is more these days to my concerns with food than just whether or not pesticides and chemical fertilizers have been applied. Don’t get me wrong, I still care about those things, but there is more. I care to find food that has been grown in my home state, and was only recently harvested. I care that the meat, eggs, and dairy products I consume were raised humanely and on the pasture. I care that the farm that grew or produced my food used sustainable farming systems, and was a steward of the ecology in and around the farm.
The state of our current economy is unsustainable. Our energy sources and rate of energy consumption are unsustainable. Our food supply system as well as our conventional agricultural practices are also unsustainable. To be sustainable means that we can generate the stuff of our needs without depletion or ruination. We are either on course for destroying ourselves, or we are on a course for sustainability. My choice is for sustainability. I can not take giant steps in reducing my personal consumption, but every day I take small steps toward sustainable living practices, and I see my neighbors doing the same.
Before the second world war, before we figured out how to chemically fix nitrogen (which we learned to do btw in order to make bombs.) farmers had to grow naturally. In 1929 when our country fell into The Great Depression farm families fared far better than city dwellers. (Yes, I do know about the great dust bowl of the 1930’s. I have to say that those farm families lost it all. I guess I know what my next article has to be.) In 1900 50% of our nations population lived on family farms. Today just 2% of our population lives on a farm.
I have been thinking a whole lot about those early farms. They were sustainable farm systems. They had to be to make it. I imagine how it must have been when after the second world war farmer’s kids began bringing chemical fertilizers and pesticides on the farm for the first time and how well they would have performed at first in the old established farm soil built up from years of composting and manuring. Those kids who would be 80 to 100 years old today thought they had brought in a new and better way of farming, and the initial evidence would have supported that idea. They couldn’t have known that those chemical fertilizers and pesticides would kill the life in their soil, and foul their water. Their parents, and grandparents would have looked on in amazement imagining that their way had become obsolete, that their guiding principles for farming were no longer important. I can imagine they themselves might have felt obsolete. But were they? That was the birth of the Conventional Farm.
Today there is a return to sustainable farming practices. It turns out that sustainable farming is the most practical way for a farmer to make a profitable farm business, have a positive effect on the environment, and garner the support of the surrounding community.
Now I imagine the Conventional farmer of today constantly fielding requests for organically grown food he isn’t growing. He is loosing his arse every year buying tons of chemical fertilizers and gallons of pesticides and herbicides all the while knowing that practice is putting his hard earned dollars into the pockets of the petroleum industry. He knows his soil is dead..it has been for as long as he can remember, and it takes more and more chemicals and too much watering to prop up his crops in that dirt. His credit is maxed out. The bank quit loaning him money this year. The community as well as the EPA and the DEP are breathing down his neck because his chemical runoffs are poisoning the watershed system, and he has a growing pile of waste manure from his livestock that he has to pay to have hauled off before it too washes down into the canal nearby. Everything he has known and embraced as knowledge about farming is crumbling before him. Or he is a giant corporate farmer, and the government is subsidizing him to continue to produce food that is priced at less than it costs to produce it.
I see the cycle turning full circle. I can imagine that the conventional farmer could feel the same obsolescence his grandparents felt 60 years ago. Sustainable farming is resurfacing, but he does not need to feel obsolete, he can go to his local Agricultural Extension Agent and ask for an evaluation and a plan for sustainability because sustainable farming will set him free. Help is out there for the farmer who wants to convert his farm to a sustainable model.
Please understand that sustainable farming and organic farming are not the same things, but buying pallet loads of chemical fertilizers while dumping livestock manures and bedding are not sustainable practices. Sustainability is an exciting step toward profitability that farmers can get enthusiastic about, and I think a natural next step is to Organic, or Natural farming practices.
In a week or so I am attending the SSAWG (Southern Sustainable Agriculture Working Group) Conference in Chattanooga Tennessee, so expect to read much more about Sustainable Farming here in the next month or so. Happy Growing
