The Integrated Homestead - Part 2
by Harvey Ussery
click here to read Part 1
Season Extension: Growing in Cold Frame and Greenhouse
To this point we have sketched some general principles and overall strategies. Now we will consider specific projects, focusing on the integrative possibilities for each.
Extending the harvest season with sheltered growing is about imitating for naturally cold hardy plants an unusually mild winter--not transporting them in effect to Miami. That is, no gardener interested in sustainability should aspire to grow tomatoes in January by pumping in ungodly amounts of artificial heat. Instead, the goal should be to give naturally cold hardy plants sufficient protection from the extremes to accommodate winter's onslaughts.
One way to extend the season on a small scale is simply to grow salads like lettuces and chicories, and potherbs like spinach and kale, in a fall garden bed as usual. Then, when winter starts to nip, assemble a cold frame over them, and tuck a heavy mulch around the exterior sides to keep the surrounding ground from freezing.
A more ambitious alternative is to assemble an unheated greenhouse from a kit. I recommend the largest model you have funds and space for, since you will certainly discover more and more ways to use your greenhouse as the seasons roll.
My greenhouse is 20x48 feet, a Paul Boers gothic (with a rounded peak at the top) based on 1-1/2-inch steel arches. Here are some of the integrative ways I've learned to use my greenhouse:
Growing winter greens
Some are more hardy than others. My lettuces will succumb to
a particulary severe chill, but the chicories offer fabulous salads right through the dead of winter. Tatsoi may also be more limited in the unusually cold temperatures, but spinach is basically un-killable in my climate (Zone 6b).
Winter forage for livestock
I reserve space in the greenhouse for growing cut-and-omeagain green forages for my poultry--small grains, crucifers, peas. This vitamin-rich fare is a godsend in a time of the year when there are few other possibilities for fresh foods.
Winter shelter for livestock
Actually, a greenhouse can be used to house livestock as well, poultry and pigs for example. The body warmth from the animals, and the CO2 from their exhalations, benefits the growing plants.
Shelter for tender perennials
Some perennials are tender enough to be marginal in my area (rosemary, white sage, tarragon). If I take the trouble to transplant them into the greenhouse, I ensure that they survive to take up their tasks again when moved back to the garden, come Spring.
Earlier crops in Spring
I plant extra-early (by one to two months) crops of potatoes, carrots, cabbages, and tomatoes in the greenhouse, ensuring harvests from these crops much earlier than from their garden siblings. (Some varieties are better suited to greenhouse conditions than others.)
Starting warm-season transplants
The shelter and higher temperatures of the greenhouse allow me to start heat-loving summer crops like tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, and sweet potatoes for transplanting to the garden as large, rapidly growing transplants when the season is right.
Habitat for insects
The idea of encouraging beneficial insects with habitat plantings applies in the greenhouse as in the garden. A couple of seasons ago I set plantings of yarrow throughout the greenhouse beds. This past late winter and spring, I saw more lady beetles than ever before, and the aphid population was a fraction of what it has been in previous years. Once the beetles have achieved their task, they seem to migrate outside, perhaps ensuring an earlier start on their work in the garden.
Vermicomposting
I mentioned vermicomposting above as an excellent way to practice
responsible manure management, produce fertility for our soil (earthworm castings), and even to provide a source of live, nutrient-dense food (harvested worms) for poultry (or pigs). Two years ago, I installed 40 feet of worm bins (4 feet wide, dug 16 inches into the earth), right down the center of my greenhouse. Since I needed that center access anyway, I didn't lose much growing space to the worm bins. The heavy-duty lids over the bins have been a great place to lay out construction projects, as well as to set up a table for a winter picnic, or benches for a class on a raw March day.
There is no better place to site a vermicomposting operation than in a greenhouse-- the activity of the busy earthworms, including reproduction, continues through winter, without a dormant period.
Our Lady of the Shadows
One caution about working in a greenhouse: It can provide good habitat for black widow spiders, who like dark, hidden spaces close to the earth. I try to avoid leaving clutter like plastic trays and cell-packs lying around, but I see the shy lady of the shadows from time to time. (The undersides of the worm bin lids are prime real estate.) These are beautiful and unaggressive spiders, as welcome in my greenhouse as the skinks and garter snakes that hang around in the worm bins. It is unlikely that the gardener will ever have a problem with the black widow, if she is careful where she puts her fingers.
Energy issues of greenhouse use
The objection is often made that a greenhouse is an unnatural and unsustainable use of energy and resources: The metal frame represents a lot of "embodied energy"--greenhouse plastics are made from petroleum. That is true. But the energetics of greenhouse growing must be measured first of all against actual energy-expenditure patterns in our current food system. The hydrocarbon fuels expended in moving a single shipment of lettuce from California or Chile to my state of Virginia, is greater than the energy expended to create and cover my greenhouse. (Eliot Coleman has calculated that the fuel expended transporting a single head of lettuce that distance is more than three times the "embodied energy" in a square foot of greenhouse plastic.)
Local greenhouse growing can take us a long way toward rehabilitating an extravagantly wasteful food/energy system. Once we've made that step, we can focus on deeper sustainability issues farther down the road.
The Forest Garden
The permaculture concept of the "forest garden" is the more diverse, dynamic, interesting alternative to the conventional orchard, which usually has a limited number of species: fruit trees, grass ground cover. Unless we are going to do something interesting like grazing sheep in that orchard, the level of diversity is unimpressive. It is much better, as anywhere else on the homestead, to create patterns as kaleidoscopic as possible.
The model for this increased divesity of species and function is provided by a natural forest. The largest, tallest plants in the forest are the trees, which form the canopy with their greedy reach for the sun. Their smaller siblings, the shrubs, cannot compete for canopy space, so have had to learn to thrive and even produce fruit and nuts in the partial shade of the trees. At ground level is a diverse cover, mostly perennials, also adapted to varying degrees of shade.
Such a mix, if well planned and executed, can be more productive than the conventional orchard. That shouldn't be surprising, once we start "shoe-horning" compatible shrubs in between the larger fruit and nut trees, and covering the ground with a profusion of plants, many producing harvestable food.
The forest garden is also more productive because we can harvest continually over a greater portion of the growing season. Orchard fruits and nuts have a harvest season of only a few weeks at most--but we can harvest in the forest garden throughout the growing season. We might start the season by digging skirret, a perennial that grows a root which tastes like a cross between potatoes and parsnips. Much of the harvest can be taken to the table, while a few root divisions are replanted in place to continue the cycle. As the season moves on we might harvest perennial bunching onions, garlic chives, violets (both flowers and leaves are edible), and sorrel; medicinal perennials such as Chinese milkvetch (Astragalus membranaceus, one of the most important Chinese medicinal herbs), feverfew, lamb's ear, and yarrow; culinary herbs such as chamomile, lemon balm, catnip, and anise hyssop; and small fruits like bramble berries, cranberry, lingonberry, and wintergreen. Don't forget the "weeds" that make nutritious "people food" as well: dandelion, upland or field cress (Barbarea verna), burdock, and poke, whose (very short, early ) shoots make an excellent cooked "spring tonic." Also clamoring for our attention might be nodding onion, Good King Henry, sea kale, Solomon's seal, and edible ferns.
After listing a few of the many possibilities above, we have yet to ascend into the shrub and canopy layers of the forest garden. Our current plantings in these levels include three plums, six apples, three kaki (Oriental) permimmons, one American persimmon, one quince, one medlar, five European pears, two Asian pears, three paw paws, four cherries, a juneberry, three mulberries, several elderberries, three gooseberries, two currants, two bush cherries, two Nanking cherries (one each of white and red), two jujube, and one che (melon tree). Nuts include eight filberts (hazelnuts), two each of pecan, walnut, and hickory, and one each of hican (hybrid of hickory and pecan) and Carpathian walnut. (Our bit of woodlot already has wild black walnuts and hickories, as well as large old white oaks producing abundant crops of acorns.)
Note that not all the plants in the forest garden are planted for harvesting food. Some we plant for soil fertility--our dynamic accumulator friends like dandelion, comfrey, and yellow dock; and nitrogen-fixing legumes like clovers or Baptisia--while others are planted to encourage insect diversity, or to provide medicines.
The forest garden project often starts with killing an established grass sod, in preparation for the planting of a more diverse mix. Remember that it is far preferable to do so without disrupting and hampering our friends in the soil food web. A "kill mulch" for killing the sod while leaving soil organisms undisturbed can be assembled from refuse from clearing/cleaning operations elsewhere on the homestead--raking leaves, mowing grass or pasture, chipping prunings, etc.--together with ever-accumulating newspapers and cardboard.
The Woodlot
If you are lucky enough to have some woods, remember the many ways they can be used to produce harvestable food.
Medicinal and culinary woodland plants
Some useful plants grow in the deep shade and moist soil of a woodland setting. I have made a little woodland garden that includes medicinals such as spikenard, downy rattlesnake plantain, bloodroot, goldenseal, black cohosh, blue cohosh, and Solomon's seal.
Culinary plants in this lovely little retreat are ramps (wild leeks), sweet cicely, and wild ginger (Asarum).
Tree crops
Look around you--you may find that your woodlot already contains large numbers of valuable food trees such as mulberries, black walnut, hickory, oaks, and native American persimmon. Oaks? Actually, the native Americans used acorns as food. Some oaks have been bred to have sweeter acorns which are more appropriate as "people food." However, acorns, wild persimmons, and mulberries were once especially prized as free, self-foraged feed for livestock. Many a small farmer and homesteader of previous era fattened the fall crop of pigs and turkeys by turning them loose in wild stands of such trees.
Wild Water
If you have any sort of "wild water" on your place--spring, pond, stream--you are lucky indeed. Plan to incorporate it into the needs of the homestead and its communities. Establish wetland plantings and habitat for useful and interesting species. Neighbors of ours dammed a spring on their place to make a small pond, which became a magnet for all sorts of amphibians, dragonflies, aquatic plants, and birds, greatly increasing the diversity of their landscape. A future project as our forest garden becomes better defined will be the addition of a small artificial pool for aquatic plants, and a water source and egg-laying site for insects and amphibians.
Livestock in the Homestead
When we look at almost any natural ecology, anywhere in the world, we see that it is a complex, interrelated community of plants and animals. If we wish to imitate natural systems, we should welcome one or more species of livestock into the homestead if at all possible.
Domestication of animals is sometimes seen as a harsh exploitation of fellow species in the service of man, but in truth it is as natural an alliance between species for mutual benefit as we will see anywhere in the natural world. When humans first started practicing agriculture, they opened up new ecological niches, into which certain opportunistic species such as sheep and cattle moved. A period of accommodation settled into patterns of interdependent alliances. We are true to the spirit of those mutually beneficial alliances when we treat the animals in our care with respect, best nurture, and gratitude.
While meat has often been denigrated as being "wasteful" of agricultural resources, it certainly does not have to be. While Frances Moore Lappe's observation (Diet for a Small Planet ) that "it takes ten pounds of grain to make a pound of flesh" (with the implication "better that humans eat the grains directly instead") points to inexcusable waste indeed-- such waste is primarily in what has become the "conventional" approach to meat production: the CAFO (confined animal feeding operation). If we think of the homestead as a resource base, we obviously achieve fuller and more productive use if we introduce animal species able to utilize resources that we cannot--chickens eat insects, geese eat grass, pigs and turkeys eat acorns in the woods--and turn them into food resources otherwise not available--eggs, meat, and milk. Goats can browse areas of underbrush, hedgerow, etc. not usable for crop space. Sloped fields that would erode disastrously if plowed (to grow grains and soybeans to feed people) are well used by planting to fruit trees and grazing with sheep. We may feel as passionately as Lappe about the abuse of agricultural lands and resources; but Lappe was not a farmer, and lacked a farmer's vision for fitting appropriate food production to the land (as opposed to the reverse).
Stacking of species
If our available space is more limited than our desire to raise as many livestock types as possible, we should remember the concept of "stacking" species. Say we have a piece of pasture that will support a cow and her calf only--adding any more cattle would lead to overgrazing and abuse of the pasture. We have maximized the usage of the pasture--for cattle. But it is still possible to introduce a flock of chickens to share that pasture as a resource. The chickens will eat some of the green forage, to be sure, but not so much as to seriously compete with the cow and her calf. They will also reap a large harvest of live animal foods such as earthworms, slugs, and insects which the cattle can't utilize at all.
Other examples of stacking: Include a flock of sheep and a flock of geese in the same pasture rotation. The geese and the sheep are both grazers, but will tend to graze different pasture species by preference. Raise rabbits or pigeons over deep litter in the poultry house. No additional floor space is needed for the added species (and increased production), since their housing is suspended above floor level, and the chickens provide the service of dispersing the droppings from the pigeons or rabbits into the litter.
Responsible manure management
In industrial livestock operations, what comes out of the far end of domesticate animals has become a curse: There is just so much of it in one place, and inevitably becomes a source of serious pollution of groundwater and streams. On the homestead, wise practice allows animal manures to become instead a blessing, as we recapture their potential fertility, while preventing its loss to natural water systems, where it functions more as toxin than nutrient.
The key to responsible manure management is encapsulated in something I've heard my friend Joel Salatin say many times: "If you're around any livestock operation, regardless of species, and you smell manure--you are smelling mismanagement!" What a surprising statement: We have come to accept that any livestock husbandry has to be stinky. What a relief to know that we can keep useful domestic animals, without enduring the reek of raw manure. (We will consider specific strategies below.)
Natural feeding
The key to wholesome feeding of livestock is first of all to feed each species as they evolved to eat. Industrial beef operations "supercharge" ruminants, who would naturally eat a mostly grass diet, with grain, corn, and soy feeds, at great cost to the health of the cattle and, incidentally, with an inherent tendency to encourage natural and harmless types of E. coli to mutate into strains pathogenic for humans.
On the homestead, the heart of our feeding program should be maximizing our animals' access to live, natural foods. We should learn from practices of previous generations, in lieu of the assumption that animal feed is always something to buy premixed (by somebody, somewhere, using who knows what ingredients and processing methods) in a bag. For example, rather than going to the additional labor of harvesting and storing a field of corn, a farmer might turn his pigs in to "hog it down," getting a big boost in growth and fat content before fall slaughter. Farmers would also plant whole fields of turnips or mangels (a fodder beet) or rape (a relative of kale), and turn cattle or pigs in to feast on this cold hardy banquet in winter, when there were no other sources of fresh green forage available. Flocks of free ranging chickens largely fed themselves by foraging insects and other nutrient-dense foods of a quality and nutrient density greater than anything the farmer could have purchased. Their assistance with insect control in the orchard was a major reason that our grandparents could grow fruits like apples without toxic sprays--before Monsanto, Cargill, et al. tried to convince us that simply can't be done.
Other integrative livestock practices
Joel Salatin feeds his breeder cattle over winter in a large loafing shed, where they eat hay harvested from the Salatin fields. As the winter progresses, the cattle manure, mixed with waste hay, builds up in a "pack" four feet deep. From time to time, Joel scatters whole kernel corn, which gets buried in the deepening manure pack. By spring, the pack is a treasure trove eager to expend its fertility onto the fields. First, however, it has to be aerated to become a finished compost readily assimilated by the pasture sod. Does Joel drive in a big growling tractor with a frontend loader for the task? Why, no, he turns in his "pigerators"--300-pound pigs who go after the fermenting corn kernels in a feeding frenzy, in the process turning over every cubic foot of material, speeding its decomposition and readiness for application. Labor-saving bacon--now that's using your head!
In a smarter but less energy-intensive era, another labor-saving use of pigs was to fell trees. The farmer used a long narrow auger to bore numerous holes into the root zone all around the tree to be brought down. After filling the holes with corn, he turned in the ever-hungry pigs. The trees didn't have a chance.
In the summer, Joel follows his beef cattle--managed through intensive rotational grazing-- with a big flock of laying chickens. The chickens scatter the cowpies, picking out the fly maggots in them as high-protein feed; and in the process disperse the fertility in the droppings over the entire sward, and break parasite and pathogen cycles by exposing them to nature's sanitizers: air and sunshine.
Goats are more browsers than grazers, going after honeysuckle and poison ivy and "weedy" tree saplings like Ailanthus and black locust in preference to grasses. Thus it is possible to use goats to clear areas of tangled brush or undergrowth, or to prevent a pasture area from continuing in its natural succession to shrubland and forest.
The usefulness of lactating animals like goats and cows (and even sheep) does not need to be stressed. Keep in mind, though, that excess milk--or skimmed milk and whey from butter and cheese making--can be offered as high-quality supplemental feed to most other livestock species. Indeed, the lactating dairy animal could be seen as the "foster mother" of the whole homestead.
Under the radar livestock
Homesteaders striving for greater food self-sufficiency may find themselves hampered by widespread prejudices, sometimes written into local law, against the raising of livestock. You may be pleasantly surprised at the possibilities available to you, however. My daughter Heather wanted to keep chickens, despite the fact she was living on a minuscule city lot in the middle of Greenville, North Carolina. When she checked with City Hall, however, she found that she was permitted to keep a maximum of four fowl within the city limits. We set her up with a large suspended cage something like a rabbit hutch, with room and nest boxes for four bantam hens. Those little hens kept Heather and her mother supplied with eggs for several years.
In some cases, whatever the actual zoning codes, in actual practice the most critical aspect is the tolerance of close neighbors of our practices. If we are careful first of all to manage animal manures in a way that will not generate offensive odors, our neighbors are more likely to be accepting of their presence. Noise is sometimes an irritant as well, so the choice of quieter species is well advised. A small flock of laying hens might pass muster with the local Noise Police, where the self-important bragging of a cock would find zero tolerance. (An often misunderstood fact is that hens do not need the "attentions" of a rooster to lay eggs.)
Rabbits are an easy, super-quiet choice whose care can be low-profile and inoffensive. Pigeons might be a good choice for those unable to keep the larger domesticated fowl. In some cities of the world, guinea pigs are raised as a low-maintenance source of meat for the family table.
Living Fences
A final thought about livestock husbandry: In previous era, people established "living fences" to confine and protect livestock. In the case of "pleaching," suitable trees were planted in a line, then woven into a dense hedge by tying branches together in crossing positions. In the species preferred for pleaching--such as linden, hornbeam, and hawthorn-- the points where the branches cross abrade and actually grow together, in a sort of natural graft. Another approach is to plant suitable trees or shrubs tightly spaced and prune them hard, to shape a stout, impenetrable hedge. If the plants in the hedge have thorns (hawthorn, Osage orange, Rugosa rose), so much the better. Though such a hedge can pose a barrier even to cats and other climbing predators, it will also serve double duty as a windbreak, and provide food and habitat for insects and birds. Some species might also provide fodder for livestock, or vitamin-rich foods for our own needs (hawthorn, Rugosa rose).
Contrast the living fence with its energy-intensive, expensive alternatives , which do not confer the additional ecological benefits enumerated above.
Using Fungi in the Homestead
The cultivation of mushrooms has made tremendous strides in recent years. These beings (fungi are not plants) have much to offer the homesteader seeking food producing strategies which fulfill other needs as well. Mushrooms can assist us to produce edibles and medicinals; to serve as decomposers in both garden and woodlot, speeding breakdown of organic residues to soil; and (sadly, an increasingly critical need) for bioremediation--the cleansing and reclamation of land abused by the toxic side effects of our careless industrial culture.
The cultivation of mushroom "spawn"--live cultures used to inoculate appropriate substrates (growing media) like logs, wood chips, manure composts, and straw--is a process requiring laboratory precision, equipment, and techniques. Most homesteaders will choose to leave those tasks to the experts, and purchase the started spawn, which is much easier to work with in the homestead setting. (Once we have mycelial "patches" started, however, it can in some cases be easy to propagate from those patches to make satellite colonies.)
In addition to the mushrooms we cultivate, we will find wild opportunists colonizing the permanent areas of organic litter which we maintain. On our place, for example, I've found blewitts and wine cap stropharia growing in mulches in the forest garden and elsewhere. Reaping where we did not sow is always welcome, of course, though we should consult a good identification guide (or several) before ingesting any mushroom. (A few species are lethally toxic.)
Here are some of the species we have grown or have begun experimenting with, and the uses to which we are putting them:
Shiitake
We have grown shiitake (Lentinula edodes) for years. We cut living hardwood trees in the dormant period of late winter--oak is best, white oak best of all--of a size to make logs convenient to handle. A month later we inoculate the logs by drilling numerous holes in each log and inserting the prepared spawn. After an "incubation" period of up to a year, the mycelium (the fuzzy, hair-like strands like the ones we see in decaying logs or forest leaf litter--those are the fungus itself) grows what we call "mushrooms," fruiting bodies for making and releasing spores, and reproducing the species. Shiitake are easy to grow. Like the garden tomato, the homegrown version is superior to anything you can buy--at a fraction of the cost.
Lion's mane
Hiricium erinaceus is a delicious, beautiful, and unique mushroom--shaggy and pure white. One of its great virtues is that it will colonize black walnut, which serves as host to almost no other fungi, as well as black locust. Maitake Grifola frondosa or maitake or hen-of-the-woods is a large, gray, fleshy polypore made up of numorous overlapping caps. It may be the best choice for recycling stumps after tree cutting operations, given its large size and gourmet eating qualities. Maitake is considered a potent medicinal as well--extracts are used for their antitumor properties.
Reishi and turkey tail Reishi (Ganoderma lucidum) and turkey tail (Trametes versicolor) are both shelf polypores growing on dead or dying trees. Both have long histories of medicinal use in Asia, and are being extensively studied the world over for immuneenhancing, anticancer properities.
Oyster Oyster mushrooms (Pleurotus ostreatus) are prolific, fleshy colonizers of dead trees. An exceptionally aggressive species, it offers itself as an ideal decomposer following felling and clearing operations in the woodlot. When we did some clearing of Ailanthus during this past spring, we did all our felling and trimming cuts with the regular bar lubricating oil replaced by "mycospored oil," a vegetable oil carrying a heavy load of oyster mushroom spore. Since Ailanthus is not desirable as firewood, we cut the trunks and branches into short sections to ensure better contact with the ground, and hence greater moisture in the wood. The hope is that the mushroom will hasten return of these woody materials to the earth, while providing excellent edibles for the table for several seasons.
Elm oyster
The elm oyster mushroom (Hypsizgus ulmarius) is a saprophyte (fungus feeding exclusively on dead organic materials) which can be used as a garden companion to boost plant crop yields while supplying excellent edible mushrooms. The elm oyster can be grown in the straw mulches in garden beds, or in sawdust or wood chip mulches.
Blewitt Blewitt (Lepista nuda) is another possible garden companion. It can be inoculated into mixed debris piles of tough, woody stems and stalks that are hard to break down in a compost heap. As it colonizes these materials--which could be laid down in mulches that will not be disturbed, as in blackberry beds--it speeds their decomposition while producing choice edible mushrooms.
Wine cap stropharia King or wine cap stropharia (Stropharia rugoso annulata) is another candidate as a garden companion which can colonize high-carbon mulches like straw, sawdust, and wood chips. This mushroom sometimes grows to extraordinary size (another common name is garden giant)--up to five pounds, and nearly two feet across. Once resident in the soil, it will continue to be active as long as approprite organic debris is added as mulches.
Shaggy mane
The shaggy mane (Coprinus comatus) is a member of an interesting family of mushrooms that prefer grassy soils frequently receiving manures, such as horse pastures. Shaggy mane can help make the nutrients in manure composts more available in the soil, while producing mushrooms that are delicate in flavor but widely enjoyed by "mycophagists" (mushroom lovers).
The Energetics of Food Storage
The hallmark of industrial food is the fact that it is processed to the last degree, and loses much of the nutrients available in the primary ingredients. I question whether we should be trying to duplicate on a home scale the excessive processing of food in the industrial model. Further, as the energy crisis deepens and the electric grid perhaps becomes less reliable, it will be important to rethink the energetics involved in storing our food. To the greatest extent possible, we should seek natural alternatives to food processing and energy-intensive storage.
Eating fresh
We should see gardening as a year-round activity. Especially if we use season extension and sheltered gardening strategies--row covers, cold frames, and unheated greenhouses--in many climates we can enjoy fresh salad and cooking greens right through the dead of winter (or at a minimum, much earlier in the spring, and much later in the fall).
If we don't have the space even for a small cold frame, we can maintain pots of herbs-- which yield potent nutrition in small amounts--by a sunny window in the winter. Onions and garlic that have begun to sprout can also be potted up and set by a window, and their green tops cut and used to garnish soups and stir-fries until the bulbs are exhausted. Remember wild greens such as dandelion and field cress, which can provide fresh greens earlier in the spring and later in the fall than many cultivated plants.
At the animal end of the spectrum, "current account" foods like milk and eggs keep us eating fresh and healthy without processing for storage. Also, when we think of the energetics of food storage, the food value of livestock might be more sensibly stored in the live animal than in a freezer. As Dan Conine, a farmer in Wisconsin, put it: "A live animal is actually cheaper to keep than a dead one if the stored feed comes from my farm." (From private communication.)
Root cellar: The Cadillac of long-term storage
It is surprising to most beginning gardeners just how many vegetable crops will store naturally, with absolutely no artificial processing. Ambitious homesteaders might build a walk-in root cellar to store harvests of potatoes, sweet potatoes, carrots, beets, turnips, daikon and other winter radishes, cabbages and Chinese cabbages--as well as mangels (fodder beets), for our livestock friends.
In-ground storage
With the exception of potatoes and sweet potatoes (which do not do as well with cold storage), all these crops will store even better in a "clamp," an old fashioned word for what amounts to little more than a hole in the ground, with a depth below frost level, and covered by a plastic or plywood sheet to prevent standing water accumulating, and protected from freezing by a couple of bales of straw. The temperature inside the protected hole will be as cold as, or colder than, that in a refrigerator. Unlike in a refrigerator, which is dehydrating, the humidity in the earth storage remains high, keeping the vegetables from wilting for a long time--and with no addition to the electric bill.
Indeed, the best place to store dense root crops like carrots, rutabagas, and beets is-- right where they grew. At the end of the growing season--after the sugars stored in the roots of these biennials have peaked, and top growth dies back--simply throw on enough mulch (about eight to ten inches in my climate) to ensure that the soil will not freeze. (If they freeze, most root crops like carrots will turn to mush.) Your harvest continues right through winter--when you need to "go shopping," just kick aside the mulch, and maybe a layer of ice or snow, and dig carrots that are if anything sweeter than they were in the fall.
There are a few root crops--parsnips, salsify, scorzonera, skirret--which can go through any number of freeze-thaw cycles without damage, though of course we cannot dig them while the soil is frozen.
Storage for dummies
The queens of the natural-storage vegetables are those which store well in ordinary room conditions--they don't come any more user-friendly than that. Winter squash such as butternut, buttercup, and kobocha keep until spring in a cool closet in our guest bedroom. That's also where we store garlic and shallots, and the longer keeping onion varieties.
Nuts have no particular storage requirements, so long as they are protected from rodents.
Storage of meats
In a context of the mass-marketing of meats, most of us do not live near a small local butcher from whom we can buy fresh, unprocessed meat retail. For meats from the larger animals, therefore, there may be no alternative to buying in quantity and storing in a freezer. For example, in the spring my wife Ellen and I, together with a small buying group in our village, contract with good friends in the area to buy an agreed number of lambs and kid goats at the end of the season. In mid-fall, I pick the live animals up at the farm, and drive them to the abattoir. The abattoir staff slaughter and age our animals, then cut and wrap for the freezer. (Members of the buying group specify their own cutting preferences.) This strategy ensures that we get superior, hormone- and antibiotic-free meats from animals that were humanely raised, but it does require long-term freezer storage.
Those raising small animals of a size easy to butcher in the home setting, however-- pigeons, poultry, rabbits, guinea pigs--can kick free from the necessity of processing (packaging and freezing) their meats, with the concomitant energy usage and creation of waste plastics. They can operate more "out of current account" as they cull their animals throughout the productive cycle.
Fermented foods
We're all familiar with sauerkraut, but the commercial versions available (including, God forbid, canned ) cannot compete in flavor or nutrition with what we can make at home. Sauerkraut itself is made from cabbage, but there are many, many other vegetables (and fruits) we can preserve through fermenting--that is, the deliberate encouragement of bacterial growth in the shredded vegetable as a culture medium. The bacteria involved are benign, and crowd out pathogenic types, enabling long-term storage without artificial processing, sometimes in refrigerator temperatures, often simply in cellar conditions. Some of these bacteria actually remain alive when we eat fermented foods raw (which is almost always preferable), joining the active and essential bacterial colonies in our intestines. They also change the properties of the foods, making them more digestible and boosting nutrients, especially enzymes. Some nutrients are present in fermented foods, which are not found in the original ingredients themselves, such as Vitamin B12.
Fruits and vegetables do not exhaust the possibilities for making fermented foods. Numerous dairy foods--yogurt, kefir, mjo/lk, and cheeses of all sorts--are cultured or naturally fermented foods that are even more beneficial for us and our teeming intestinal populations, and will keep better because the benign fermenting organisms have left no room for pathogens to take hold. From Asia come traditional fermented soy foods such as natto, miso, and tempeh, which are the only forms of soyfoods any thinking person should be eating (certainly not the highly manipulated ersatz soy foods so ubiquitous in the industrial food supply). We can even explore traditional ways of fermenting meats and fish.
The Springhouse
If you have a good spring on your place, by all means consider turning it into a springhouse to provide cool storage of perishable foods. I do not have such a spring, but I once lived in a 200-year-old house without electricity, whose "refrigerator" was a beautiful stone springhouse out back. The single stone room, maybe eight or ten feet by ten or twelve, was earth bermed (dug into the bank of a steep slope). The spring had been cased with poured concrete. The floor was also concrete, with a raceway that zigzagged from side to side rather than making a straight exit, increasing the chilling effect of the cold flowing water.
The springhouse had options for many storage needs. Leafy greens, or heads of lettuces and cabbages, could be held on shelves around the walls, kept from wilting by humidity from the flowing water, in contrast to the dehydrating effect of a refrigerator. Foods like fresh cheeses could be stored on the cool concrete floor. About four gallon jars of milk could be set down into the quite cold spring itself. If you have the chance to make a springhouse like that, go for it. And I'll just politely turn green with envy.
The Integrated Homestead Flock
Let's take a somewhat more detailed look at the homestead poultry flock, by way of illustrating many of the integrating patterns discussed above.
Commercial poultry production in this country is a disaster. At every point we see the application of one-for-one solutions, in lieu of more natural, integrated practices. The foundations of these flocks are highly specialized hybrid strains, bred for fast growth and maximum production over all other considerations, assuming the requirements of artificial, high-input systems. Whether layer or broiler flocks, commerical chickens are crowded together by the tens of thousands, and are enormously stressed, requiring antibiotic feeds from day one to slaughter. Feeds are ultra-processed with high heat and pressure, starting with ingredients that in some cases are highly questionable to begin with (rancid oils from fastfood fryers, soy meal with possible residues of hexane, the potently carcinogenic solvent used in soy oil extraction). The thousands of tons of manure are trucked ever-greater distances to be spread on agricultural lands not already saturated. Unquestionably this concentrated manure is a source of pollution of natural water systems. Especially insidious pollutants are growth hormones, antibiotics, and even deliberately added toxins such as arsenic.
Certainly the homesteader is not going to raise tens of thousands of chickens in a single flock. In other ways, however, the general tendency is for the home flock to be managed as an analog in miniature of the big industrial flocks. In many cases, home "flocksters" are opting for the same superhybrids as the poultry industry, rather than the "deeper," more robust genetics of traditional breeds. Almost any commercial chick feed you can buy is "medicated" with antibiotics, though such medicated feeds are not needed in any well managed home flock. Commercial feeds for the home flock may not contain arsenic, but they are based on ingredients which are rancid (stale), extensively heat and pressure treated, with resultant destruction of many nutrients, especially fat-soluble vitamins. In many a home chicken coop, the manure simply accumulates in a noxious caked layer which draws flies and can be a vector for disease. If the birds are released onto a static run, it is not long before it is stripped of the last blade of grass, and thereafter festers as an accumulating slick of chicken poops eager to run for the sea with the next rain. What is wrong with this picture?
I will conclude this presentation with a brief overview of more creative and wholesome alternatives for the home flock, focusing especially on the ways our birds can be used to integrate with other needs and goals on the homestead.
Choice of breeds--and species
If we plan to use the flock to help weave integrated patterns in the homestead, it is better to avoid the one-dimensional super-hybrids of modern poultry breeding. We should hark back to the traditional small farm breeds, or even back to the historic breeds out of which all contemporary breeds were developed. Such breeds have more robust immune response and greater skill at foraging more of their food on their own, and thus offer greater indepenence of outside inputs like medication and purchased feeds. It is better not to keep such breeds in confinement--they do better out in the open, foraging and enjoying the benefits of sunshine, exercise, and natural behaviors.
Historically, breeds were bred for local conditions and needs, and to serve specific functions on the homestead. I expect that in our changed energy future, more flock owners will choose breeds on the basis of appropriate "fit" to their particular conditions and goals. For example, those with harsh winters might do well to choose a breed such as the Chantecler, developed in Canada, because its minimalist comb and wattles are almost immune to frostbite. Without expensive supplemental heat in their winter housing, the larger combs and wattles of a Mediterranean class breed like Leghorns are more apt to freeze, increasing stress on the birds. Some owners might want a flock made up of both historic breeds (like Old English Game, Asil, and Dorking), who retain the broody instinct, and non-setting Mediterranean types (such as Hamburg, Minorca, Leghorn) to keep up egg production through the breeding season. We might also choose some breeds known to be good winter layers (such as Wyandotte, Sussex, Plymouth Rock, Rhode Island Reds, and New Hampshires) to offset the scarce winter production of the older historic breeds. Whatever specific breeds we choose, we should try to get stock from breeders who emphasize homestead production traits, not the finer points of color or pattern typical of breeding for show.
The tendency is to focus on chickens when we speak of the backyard flock, because chickens are the most widely raised of domestic fowl, and are likely to be the ideal "starter poultry" on most homesteads. Remember, however, the usefulness of domestic avian species other than chickens. Each has its own contributions to make toward a more integrated homestead.
Heritage breed turkeys are able to feed themselves almost entirely if given enough biologically diverse ground on which to forage. Pigeons can be raised in pigeon lofts, but released to fly freely and self-feed. All forms of domestic fowl, especially geese, can help with orchard sanitation by cleaning up dropped fruit, breaking disease and insect cycles. Guineas are if anything even more skilled at insect control than chickens. Geese have long been used as weeders, and ducks for slug control, in compatible crops. Finally, put the waterfowl to work like I do--"mowing" the lawn and turning what would otherwise be a dead-end (and energy-intensive) chore for me into elegant winter meals and valuable cooking fats.
Pasturing the flock
If we assume that our poultry husbandry success will be the greater, the more we imitate how the Natural Chicken would choose to live, our first conclusion is that there is no place for close confinement of our flocks if we can possibly avoid it. Anyone with a bit of pasture-- or indeed, even a lawn--would do well to get his flock out onto it, using movable shelters and electric net fencing to protect the flock and keep them where he wants them. Birds on pasture self-harvest food of a quality we cannot hope to match with anything purchased, and enjoy the benefits of sunshine, exercise, fresh air, and interesting natural behaviors.
Feeding
The key to feeding poultry is: maximizing their access to live, natural foods. We should strive to find ways in which other projects on the homestead provide, in addition, feed for the flock.
I have recommended growing "fertility patch" plants like comfrey "around the edges" for soil fertility applications. A bonus is that we can harvest comfrey as high mineral, high protein green forage for our birds. In my area, two dynamic accumulators--dandelion and yellow dock--stay green deep into winter's chill, long after other plants have gone dormant. As long as I can get a spading fork into the ground, I dig up these nutritious and highly palatable plants by the roots, and throw them to the flock by the bucketful. (The chickens will eat some dandelion root, as well as the green tops.)
Around the edges I also like to grow plants like sunflower, sorghum, and amaranth, both for their beauty, their support of insect diversity, and their use for "people food." The ripe seed heads of these plants can also be fed to the flock throughout the winter.
If you are "blessed" in your area with an abundance of Japanese beetles as we are, combine control of the beetles with lunch for the birds: In the cool of the morning or evening (when the beetles are less likely to fly), shake the clustered beetles into a bucket with a gallon of water in the bottom. Dump the bucket out among the birds--and get out of the way of the feeding frenzy.
There may be a few brave souls willing to do as I have been doing for three years now: Harvest protein from thin air! In the fly season, I use beaver carcasses (donated from a friend with a trapping service) to generate fly maggots as high quality live food for all my domestic fowl (with the exception of the vegetarian geese, who are appalled). I use buckets drilled with numerous holes (to permit access by egg-laying flies but keep the chickens out) into which I place chopped-up chunks of the carcasses, padded all around with loose organic litter such as straw or leaves (to almost eliminate odor). Once the maggots (it sounds less gross if we call them "fly larvae," doesn't it?) are ready to pupate, they have the instinct to leave the feeding medium and go to ground. Since the buckets are suspended (either by hanging, or placement on a stand), they "bail out." The sharp-eyed birds see them in free-fall, often snapping them up before they hit the ground.
In the rest of this section we will encounter numerous other examples of ways to increase the flock's access to foods grown right on the homestead.
A role in the forest garden?
I used to run my flocks in the orchard to control fruit and leaf damaging insects. (It is a thrill to see a guinea take a coddling moth right out of the air!) They also--especially the geese--cleaned up dropped fruit, helping break the life cycle of disease organisms.
At present I am in the process of converting the former orchard to forest garden. Since I am trying so hard to establish a new ground cover (perennial polyculture) in the forest garden, I am keeping the flock out of that emergent ecology for the time being. Time will tell whether they can resume productive roles in the forest garden once the new ground covers are well established.
In the meantime, however, I have introduced the essence of the forest garden concept out on the pasture, where my flocks spend most of their time during the growing season. I have found that our single mulberry tree (now off limits in the forest garden) was a great benefit to the flock by providing shade on hot days, and abundant dropped fruit as an important source of vitamin-rich, self-foraged feed. I have planted two new mulberry trees out on the pasture, with close plantings of comfrey around their bases. As the trees grow, they will provide shade and fruit for the birds, who will benefit from grazing the comfrey as well.
I have also planted three chestnut trees on the pasture. One of the challenges to growing chestnuts--a productive and nutritious asset for the homesteader--is chestnut weevil. The chickens and guineas will help control the weevil as it emerges in the spring, or goes to ground in winter. Chestnuts grow big spreading crowns which will also provide shade. I have established comfrey as the ground cover under them as well.
Responsible manure management: Deep litter
If a new visitor to our poultry house has ever been in a chicken house before, inevitably she stops talking, looks around, sniffs, and asks, puzzled, "Hey, why doesn't it stink in here?" I always point out that she's standing on the answer. A deep organic litter over an earth floor is ideal for manure management in the poultry house. The busy chickens scratch their poops into the litter (made up of high-carbon materials like oak leaves), which becomes in effect a "slow burn" compost pile. Metabolites of the microbes driving the decomposition in the litter include Vitamins K and B12 and other substances that fine-tune the birds' immune systems as they peck in it looking for little critters to eat. (I've even read that a mature, 12-inch litter contains enough such critters to supply 100 percent of the flock's protein needs, though cannot prove that out of my own experience.) Whenever we get a whiff of ammonia, we top off the litter with more high-carbon material. Once a year or so we clean out the thoroughly pulverized and colonized (by microbes beneficial to the soil as well as the flock) litter, and use it to boost soil fertility as a finished compost, without further processing.
And the real beauty of this marvelous deep litter system: The chooks do most of the work!
Stacking of species
I keep only poultry at present, so the only "stacking" of species I do is the mixing of different domestic fowl species in a common flock--chickens, guineas, ducks, and geese. However, poultry can be usefully combined with other livestock species such as beef cattle, as in the example from Joel given earlier. I would experiment with stacking poultry with any other livestock species, and would not assume "it won't work" without proving it.
Julia Cronin, a small farmer in Connecticut, uses chickens to help control parasites of grazing animals: "Chickens serve as a dead end host for many common intestinal parasites of cows, sheep, and horses. As worm populations are generally propagated through manure (with larvae deposited in manure, maturing, and then being re-eaten by the host animal), chickens break that cycle by ingesting the larvae. On our farm, we don't rely on it as the only way to keep parasites in check, but we have anecdotally seen a reduction in worms, especially in the sheep." [From private communication. What Julia means by "dead end host" is that the chickens utilize as food these worm parasites of other species, but are not themselves parasitized by them.]
Soil care
Chickens can help feed the soil by turning in cover crops and areas heavily grown up in weeds. In the process they find superior foods on their own (green plants, plus animal foods such as earthworms, slugs and snails, and insects), while "supercharging" the microbial populations in the most biologically active part of the soil profile, its surface layer, with their droppings. But note that the tillage done by the chickens is at that surface level only--their constant scratching does not disturb the soil deeper than a couple of inches, and doesn't mix or invert the layers of the soil profile, as does power tillage.
Of course, if cover crops such as cowpeas, buckwheat, and small grains are allowed to mature their seeds, an additional benefit for tiller chickens is the abundant harvest of nutritious seeds.
Chickens can even be used to kill and till in a tough established sod over compacted soil, in preparation for developing new garden ground--no mean feat, even for someone armed with a power tiller. I simply net the birds onto the plot to be tilled using electric net fencing, and leave them on the plot until their work is done. Moving them elsewhere for a few weeks, I grow a mixed cover of small grains, crucifers, buckwheat, peas or cowpeas, etc. When I move the chooks back onto the mature stand of cover crop, they till it into the loosening soil much faster. After this second round of tillage, the plot still has a long way to go to become best garden soil, but it is well on its way.
The last time I developed new garden ground using this strategy, I began in mid-summer. By the following spring and summer, I grew fine crops of squash, cucumbers, amaranth, and sorghum in the new ground. This past season, I have used the same strategy to convert part of my pasture to a stand of pure alfalfa.
Another fertility project on which the chickens do the work for this lazy old gardener: Rather than laboriously assembling and turning conventional compost heaps, I dump into an electronet pen all the materials I would have used to make a heap. The chickens scratch through it nonstop, in the process shredding it and getting it ready for rapid breakdown in the soil. The result is something between a mulch and a finished compost. When I apply it like a mulch, the finer material ready to feed the soil sifts to the bottom, while the coarser material remains as a protective layer on top.
Controlling insect predation
I have mentioned the control of orchard insects by chickens and guineas, as well as their projected use for chestnut weevil control.
I also use the flock to "sanitize" the garden of slugs and slug eggs: I net them onto the garden for two to four weeks before the beginning of the garden season. It is months before the slug population can reconstitute sufficiently to do any noticeable damage.
I net guineas (only a few are needed, usually three or four) onto my winter squash plot for 100 percent control of squash bug. (Note that chickens will eat squash bugs as well, but would destroy the planting eventually with their constant scratching. Guineas are not great scratchers.) It is said that a pair of guineas allowed free range will keep an acre entirely free of ticks.
Free ranging turkeys are also great gleaners of insects. Ducks are "hit squads" for slugs.
Poultry in the greenhouse
For three winters now, I have kept a mixed flock of poultry in the far end of my 20x48- foot greenhouse. Even though I have no way of measuring the effects precisely, I assume that the warm body mass (perhaps 250 pounds worth) moderates the chill in the greenhouse at night; and that the CO2 in their exhalations is a boost to the crops in the greenhouse. (Before you assume I'm nuts for factoring chicken breath into the winter gardening equation, know that in the Netherlands, growers pay good Dutch money to pump bottled CO2 into their greenhouses.)
I mentioned earlier my scaled-up vermicomposting operation. In addition to the benefits of responsible manure management ("pony poop" hauled by the truckload from a horse breeding and boarding operation) and added fertility for the landscape (worm castings), I also make regular harvests (in the winter, when other live animal food is not as available) of worms from the bins to feed the flock.
One of my winter practices I'm most excited about is the "mulched winter feeding yard" onto which I release the greenhouse flock. I always hated keeping the flock confined to the poultry house in winter, even though they had the benefits of deep litter, vastly more space per bird than in commercial models, and occasional short outings. But chickens cannot be constantly on a dormant sod--since it is not actively growing and repairing itself, the chickens' scratching would seriously degrade it.
These days, however, I lay down a heavy mulch, deep enough to prevent freezing of the soil, in the area behind the greenhouse, enclosing it with electronet. Since this area is one of my garden plots, it benefits tremendously from the mulch. (Garden soil should never be left bare over winter.) The chickens are able to get out and enjoy themselves on this winter mulch almost every day, rather than being confined to the boredom of the winter house. Since the mulch prevents freezing at the soil surface, the chooks have continued access to live animal foods there (slugs, earthworms). Finally, the thick mulch absorbs the poops laid down, retaining their fertility for the coming growing season, and preventing their runoff in the winter rains.
Natural breeding
Homestead "flocksters" seeking greater independence will rely more on breeding their own poultry stock. As we enter an era of rising energy costs and possibly more frequent disruptions of the electric grid, it will be wise to rely not on energy-intensive and expensive artificial incubators and brooders, but on real chicken mamas. The "broody instinct"--the inclination to hatch out and nurture a clutch of chicks--has been deliberately bred out of many modern breeds. If we raise hens of some of the older breeds, however, we may find that they "remember" the lore of incubation and rearing as the norm, not the exception. Whatever the contingencies with the electric grid, a good broody can be counted on to do what needs to be done.
Keep in mind the common-sense principles that have always guided selection and breeding of domesticated species. Choose those individuals as breeders who do best in your conditions and according to your own goals. Over time, you will select for offspring who do increasingly well in your specific paradigms. Cull potential breeders for structural defects (crooked beak or breastbone), but also cull against demonstrated weakness of any sort. If a hen becomes sick, when her sisters challenged with the same environmental issues remain healthy, cull her. This may seem cruel, but to my mind it is more cruel to future members of the flock to saddle them with weak genetics.
Culling for the table, year-round
Chickens are ideal candidates for operating more out of "current account" throughout the year, allowing us to avoid dependence on increasingly expensive and perhaps unreliable energy for processing (freezing or canning), and production of plastic packaging waste.
We no longer raise big batches of "meat chickens" for the freezer--instead, we cull the flock through the entire year, based on both our own needs, and the needs of the flock as an ongoing entity. In the summer, we enjoy young, tender chicken for grilled, saut'eed, or baked dishes by culling this season's hatch of cockerels. Fall is a time for braised dishes such as coq au vin, using the older cockerels, and pullets not kept for egg production, as we reduce flock size for the winter. Winter itself reveals deficiencies in rate of lay, suggesting that Henrietta might serve better in the stewpot, where long, slow cooking emphasizes the rich flavor of an old bird and produces a matchless broth. Indeed, it is entirely possible to eat chicken frequently throughout the year, enjoying culinary adventures unavailable to those dependent on supermarket chicken, and never once package a bird for freezing.
We still observe a season for the slaughter of our waterfowl--ducks and geese--and continue to freeze some of them in the fall. Even with them, however, Ellen is more and more relying on a traditional alternative: the making of confit. She cuts up the ducks (and sometimes junior geese) and cooks them slowly in their own fat. After the pieces are cooked, she covers them completely with fat. We keep confit in the refrigerator for convenience, but traditionally in France, it was stored in cool cellar conditions. The layer of fat protects the cooked meat from opportunistic microbes, preserving it effectively for a long time. When we want to eat confit, it is necessary only to remove a few pieces and heat. The homestead version of fast food!
And don't forget the value of the high quality cooking fats from chickens, and (even better) from ducks and geese. Especially in the fall, there are large deposits of fat in the body cavity, which are easily rendered.
Conclusion
As said at the beginning of this paper, there are compelling reasons to grow more of our own food, in our own backyards (or seek it out from like-minded neighbors close by). Food safety is an increasingly hazardous game of Russian roulette; and it is ever more obvious that we must look to ourselves for the safety of our food--there is little reason to hope our government will improve its sorry performance anytime soon.
Industrial food--debased through excessive processing and contaminated with agricultural toxins and chemical additives--is a growing threat to our health, as indicated by soaring rates of cancer, heart disease--and, in children, degenerative illnesses previously thought the exclusive real estate of the very old. Despite its problems, the production of such food is part and parcel of the very foundations of our economy, and is not likely to change -- until the oil runs out. I recently read a careful study from Germany to the effect that global oil production has already peaked--in 2006--and that we can expect a decline of 7 percent per year from here on out. Our exploitation of "the remains of ancient sunlight" to fuel an economy on steroids is a one-time event in human history, a gigantic spike over a relatively flat line graphing energy use in the past--and in the future. The shrinking of global oil and natural gas supplies will be the major event of our time. (And I say that as someone who was born during the Second World War.)
As our global crises converge, we are all appalled at how helpless we are to make a difference. Producing our food in ways that are more nurturing and sustainable, however, will unquestionably ameliorate to some degree any global crisis you want to name.
But fear is caustic, it gets in the way. Yes, I hope you will be a bit frightened as you face some of the real challenges to putting decent food on your family's table, and of keeping them safe in a changing world. But I hope that your motivation for continuing will be positive, not negative.
Our alienation from the living world has become a deep sickness, and we will never find health as long as we stay largely within the artificial environments we have created. Working with the fellow beings in our backyard ecology--fungal, microbial, plant, animal-- we relearn the beauty of simple things. We reclaim our birthright, reestablish cherished alliances with forgotten friends. We reenter the cycling of the natural year, recognize and honor the presence and needs of species other than ourselves, reconnect with the spirit in every vine and bee and thistle and wren.
Working in our gardens, we step again into the Garden, teeming with life and dazzling with beauty beyond measure. And heed once again the command of the Creator, who charged us to love and care for it, to keep it as Garden, not wasteland.
Resources
The following references to print and online resources make no pretense to being complete-- they are a few that come first to mind to recommend as you begin or expand your attempts to become more food-independent.
Homesteading
Perhaps I'll be excused for starting with a link to my own website http://www.themodernhomestead.us/ (Note the "dot us" not "dot com".) The website will always be a work in progress. Check back from time to time to see what new material has been added.
Another site focusing on homestead issues is Journey to Forever http://www.journeytoforever.org Includes a library of out-of-print works, pages on composting, vermiculture, humanure, and much more.
Another repository of out-of-print books is Soil And Health Library: http://www.soilandhealth.org (This is a specialist library about holistic agriculture, holistic health and self-sufficient homestead living. Most of the titles in this library are out of print. Many are quite hard to find.)
The Encyclopedia of Country Living, by Carla Emery (Sasquatch, ninth edition 1994). A classic compendium on homestead life, a lifelong effort by homesteader Carla Emery, who died just a couple of years ago. Useful reference on many, many homestead topics.
I have given examples of Joel Salatin's creative approaches to multifunctional farming. He's written several books that can get you thinking along these lines, including You Can Farm and Pastured Poultry Profits. If you get a chance to hear him speak, don't miss it: Joel is always informative and inspiring, and his "revival preacher" style is great fun.
Sustainability issues
If an understanding of "peak oil" and its implications is new to you, just key those words into an online search engine and you'll be off and running. It is scarcely believable that most of us are largely ignoring the elephant in the room, but the shrinking of hydrocarbon fuel supplies will be the major event of our time.
Some books I can recommend on the subject are James Howard Kunstler's The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century and Richard Heinberg's The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies and Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World.
If you prefer visual media, see two DVD's: The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream and A Crude Awakening. I'm not a fan of the frenetic kaleidescope of images typical of such presentations, so I found both a bit irritating--but they hit me right between the eyes all the same.
It's hard to characterize Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel. A whirlwind tour of world history it certainly is, but from a perspective you may not have encountered in your history courses. It analyses, among other things, how changes in the way we produce our food have influenced the rise and fall of empires, the spread of disease, and "the fates of human societies." Even more relevant to the theme of sustainability (or non-) is Diamond's Collapse, a sobering study of numerous societies and whole civilizations that collapsed following their overrunning or undercutting of their ecological base (and a few who had the wisdom to avoid such a fate).
Read Wendell Berry! Since he is both poet and novelist and essayist, there will be books of his to suit your particular tastes. They all offer a vision of what has gone so profoundly wrong with agriculture, with culture generally, in our time, but also of the directions we need to take for healing, of both ourselves and the earth. Collections of essays include The Unsettling of America and What Are People For?, Remembering is a wonderful novel, buy a collection of his poems--it's all good.
Suppose you were to adopt the peculiar notion that sustainability in your own corner of the landscape depends on recycling, rather than squandering, your own body "wastes"? The book you'd need for this bit of madness would be The Humanure Handbook: A Guide to Composting Human Manure (Third Edition 2005) by Joseph Jenkins.
Understanding and working with soil
Dr. Elaine Ingham has done more than perhaps anyone else to enlarge our understanding of soil life. Her site http://www.soilfoodweb.com offers testing and other services, but also contains a wealth of information on the soil food web, compost, compost teas, etc. Check http://www.soilfoodweb.com/03_about_us/approach.html for links to various pages on these subjects.
Building Soils for Better Crops by Magdoff and van Es is a useful overview of soil ecology and soil care.
If vermicomposting, which I have recommended enthusiastically in this paper, is new to you, you might check out Worms Eat My Garbage: How to Set Up & Maintain a Worm Composting System, by Mary Appelhof. Something of a classic in the field, with information on worm biology and setup for using them to recycle kitchen "wastes." The basics are quite simple, though--you could easily find all the information you need through an online search engine. Start small and work up to vermicomposting on any scale you like.
Toward a new relationship with the natural world
Readers of this paper will perhaps have been surprised at the benign attitude I have toward insects of all species--and even black widow spiders. I guarantee that reading Joanne Elizabeth Lauck's The Voice of the Infinite in the Small will change forever the way you relate to the micro-world of insects and spiders.
There are many good books for getting to know the medicinal herbs we can grow--or discover growing all around us. Growing 101 Herbs That Heal by Tammi Hartung and 101 Medicinal Herbs by Steven Foster are good for making a start. James Green's The Herbal
Medicine-Maker's Handbook: A Home Manual is a good introduction to the various forms in which plant medicines are made and used. Perhaps its greatest contribution is illustrating just how easy plant herbal medicine can be. Check out books as well by Richo Cech, Rosemary Gladstar, David Hoffmann, Michael Moore, Susan Weed, and Matthew Wood
Stephen Harrod Buhner has written many books about appreciating the role plants play in the world. Stephen's vision for relating to the plant world more deeply goes well beyond a narrowly "herbalist" view. I especially recommend The Lost Language of Plants: The Ecological Importance of Plant Medicines for Life on Earth and The Secret Teachings of Plants: The Intelligence of the Heart in the Direct Perception of Nature.
Please get to know the amazing world of fungi, and how to bring them into the homescape in fascinating and useful ways. Paul Stamets, the big mushroom guru out in Washington state, has written a number of useful books on mushroom biology and cultivation. His latest, Mycelium Running, is perhaps the best overview of using cultivated mushrooms for edibles, medicinals, decomposers, and bioremediation (and even, Paul is not shy about adding, as psychoactives). Note that the subtitle of Mycelium Running is "How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World"--how can you pass it up?
The Covenant of the Wild by Stephen Budiansky is a useful book for anyone wanting a better understanding of the domestication of livestock species. The subtitle, "Why Animals Chose Domestication," hints at a radically altered view on how domestication came about, and hence its fundamental nature. Guaranteed to give a new perspective on the relationships possible with these special members of the animal world.
Forest gardens
Edible Forest Gardens: Ecological Vision and Theory for Temperate Climate Permaculture, by Dave Jacke and Eric Toensmeier (Vol 1: Vision & Theory; Vol 2: Design & Practice), Chelea Green, 2005. This is a huge work in two volumes, with a wealth of information on natural forests, and how to mimic them to grow forest gardens that are beautiful, low-maintainence, and bountiful. It can get quite tedious at times, is too concerned with labels and pigeon-holing of concepts, and is much longer than it needed to be. Nevertheless, I learned a great deal about soil biology and nurture, and was inspired by this hugely important work to put the concept into practice on my own homestead. The extensive appendices, about plant species for the forest garden and their characteristics, are alone worth the (considerable) price of the books.
How to Make a Forest Garden, by Patrick Whitefield (Chelsea Green, revised edition 2002) is a considerably shorter book that offers an excellent introduction to the subject. Written by a Brit for aspiring forest gardeners in England, but the principles enunciated (and many of the species referred to) have wide application in our own country as well.
Garden and orchard
Eliot Coleman's The New Organic Grower and Four Season Harvest (both Chelsea Green, 1989 and 1992). Excellent introductions to sustainable vegetable growing, either at the
homestead or market garden level. Four Season Harvest was the book that got me winter gardening. The design for my first "trainer" greenhouse was adopted largely from it.
Root Cellaring: The Simple No-Processing Way to Store Fruits and Vegetables, by Mike and Nancy Bubel (Rodale Press, 1979). From growing vegetables that store naturally to strategies for storage, from plain (such as the "clamp" described in the paper) to fancy (a room-size walk-in root cellar with provisions for storing many different fruits and vegetables).
The New Seed-Starters Handbook, by Nancy Bubel (Rodale Press, 1988). A great introduction to starting transplants from seeds--also a great quick reference I use all the time for the details no one can remember. A final section is an encyclopedia of various crops and their successful cultivation, whether direct seeded or started as transplants, from vegetables and herbs and fruits to wildflowers and trees.
Seed to Seed, by Suzanne Ashworth (Seed Savers Exchange, 1991). The best source of information for the homesteader on seed saving. Dependence on outside sources for one's seeds is a pretty serious dependency indeed. All gardeners should save at least some of their own seeds, in the process developing strains more suited to their specific climate and soil conditions, management and disease pressures, etc.
Food, nutrition, and health issues
"American Agribusiness is Making Food Less Nutritious," by Cheryl Long and Lynn Keiley, Mother Earth News, June-July 2004. An overview of the evidence that the nutrition in the national diet has been steadily declining for many decades.
Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, by Eric Schlosser (Houghton Mifflin, 2001). A must-read expos'e of the realities behind fast-food franchises and other purveyors of food for our fill-'er-up lifestyle; the manipulation of the consumer (especially children) by advertising; the trickery played on our palates by chemical engineering; and much more. The chapter on conditions in the industrial slaughterhouses is an excellent update on Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Schlosser's explanation of why meat in the marketplace has become so hazardous is quite simple: "There is shit in the meat."
Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma is one of the most important books on food, agriculture, health, and public policy of the past decade. It helps us understand how profoundly food has changed in the age of industrial food, becoming in the process more enemy (to our health, ecology, and future) than sacred gift.
Nourishing Traditions, by Sally Fallon, president of the Weston A. Price Foundation. (Second edition, 2001, New Trends Publishing.) This book goes far beyond the conventional cookbook. It is a comprehensive compendium of information on food and health issues, with a focus on the whole, natural foods emphasized by traditional cultures for thousands of years. It is a book that may revolutionize all your thinking about diet and health.
And please do check out the Weston A. Price Foundation at: http://www.westonaprice.org/
The site is a tremendous resource on nutrition and health. If you like what you see, please become a member--support the Foundation's work and receive its excellent quarterly Wise Traditions.
The Untold Story of Milk: Green Pastures, Contented Cows and Raw Dairy Products, by Ron Schmid (New Trends, 2003). My reading of this book revealed that almost all of what I thought I "knew" about the history of and the "need" for pasteurization was completely inaccurate. Chapters re-examining milk as a vector for the transmission of disease; the nutritional qualities of raw milk as opposed to heat-treated milk; and the disastrous results of the industrialization of milk--all are essential reading.
Wild Fermentation by Sandor Katz is an excellent introduction to transforming all sorts of foods with microbes--fermented vegetables like krauts and kimchis, dairy foods like yogurt and cheese, sourdough breads, beverages like beers, wines, and meads, and traditional soy foods (the only ones we should be eating) like miso and tempeh. Eat live-culture foods-- become more of a community!
Frances Moore Lapp'e's Diet for a Small Planet did a great deal to focus our attention on issues of sustainability and waste in agriculture as related to food choice. Unfortunately, she took current industrial agricultural (rather than traditional) practice as the norm, and drew the conclusion that direct consumption by humans of grains and legumes is always the more sustainable choice. She overlooked the many possibilities for wise resource use in which animal foods are actually the most sustainable option, not the most wasteful.
Forest management
If you have any size woodlot at all, and would like help managing it from people with a passionate commitment to wise and sustainable forestry, please check out Healing Harvest Forest Foundation at: http://community.roanoke.com/main.wsi?group%20id=11
Electronet
Electric net fencing is a fundamental tool for management of my poultry flocks. I have found high-quality equipment, excellent service, and expert advice at Premier Fencing Supply: www.premier1supplies.com
Friends whose judgment I value also recommend Kencove: www.kencove.com
Tools
I like hand tools. Particular favorites are the broadfork and the scythe--both are a joy when well used.
Check Lehman's for a well chosen selection of hand tools and other accessories of homestead life: http://www.lehmans.com/
I haven't ordered from them as yet (I plan to do so soon), but the Scythe Supply Company in Perry, Maine looks like just the place for a scythe afficionado. The website has a lot of good basic information about scythe design and use, accessories, etc. http://www.scythesupply.com
Back to The Integrated Homestead - Part 1
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