"How we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used." ~Wendell Berry
The Integrated Homestead
Harvey Ussery presented at the eighth annual conference of The Weston A. Price Foundation
November 9, 2007
Why Bother?
We are fortunate to live in an age of scientific agriculture and technologically advanced food processing. As a result, the American food supply is assured, in all its abundance and endless variety. Because of scientific agriculture and food technology, Americans enjoy the safest, highest quality, most convenient, and--most amazing of all--cheapest food supply of any nation on earth.
What is wrong with this picture? I will suggest four reasons to revise this rosy view of our food system, four reasons we might prefer to go against the grain and actually grow our own food, which to most of our fellow citizens is on a par with knocking two rocks together in the age of the Zippo lighter. Why all that messy effort, when supplying whatever we want to eat from the supermarket and fast food restaurants has never been so easy, so cheap--and best of all, doesn't slow us down?
Perhaps the easiest challenge to mount against the upbeat assessment of our food supply is the question of food safety, since it has been so much in the media lately. If the American food supply is the safest in the world, why is it that spinach contaminated by E. coli in a single field in California sickens consumers in twenty-six states in this country, causing several deaths? Why is it that food imported by the shipload from countries not under our inspection is contaminated sufficiently to kill, as demonstrated by the death earlier this year of thousands of pets and hogs from eating canned pet food from China? Why is it that contamination by botulism in a single industrial processing vat results in the panic recall of hundreds of thousands of cans of meat products from supermarket shelves? Botulin is one of the most toxic substances on the planet--you could carry on biological warfare using botulin as your weapon. Food safety?
Certainly I do not have to convince members of the Weston A. Price Foundation that there are problems with the quality of food from our industrial food system. Our foods are grown on increasingly depleted and demineralized soils, and processed to the last degree, with consequent losses of much of whatever nutrients do remain in those primary ingredients. Many food products on offer in the supermarket are "pseudo-foods," imitations of traditional foods (such as real cream from real cows) made from cheap commodity foods bearing no relation to the original (such as Cool Whip, made from water, vegetable oil, and corn syrup, but containing nothing that ever saw the inside of a cow). Such foods offer virtually nothing the body can use to support growth and health. Finally, modern ersatz foods are laced with a witch's brew of chemical additives that are likely implicated in a range of disorders, especially among children.
An issue to which the average American eater has given entirely too little attention is that of food security. Our economy, both national and global, is dependent at every point on lavish use of cheap, abundant, easily accessible fossil fuels. Nowhere is this dependence more obvious than in our industrial food systems: Agriculture is heavily dependent on energyhungry machinery, chemical fertilizers made from natural gas, and pesticides made from petroleum. The excessive processing and packaging of most modern foods are energy and resource intensive. The average bite of food on the American table has been transported 1500 miles from field to fork.
We reflect far too little on the fact that geological deposits of hydrocarbon fuels are limited; and that we are at or very near the peak of their extraction. That is, at the point of our maximum dependence on fossil fuels, and exploding demand from major new players in the global economy such as China and India, the global supply is about to start shrinking. Historic trends toward ever greater anonymity, centralization, and energy intensity in food production will reverse. Access to food that is local, decentralized, and less dependent on hydrocarbon fuels will become more desirable as the supermarket/fast-food system becomes increasingly subject to disruption by uncontrollable changes in the global economy. There is no more local source of food than in our own back yards.
A final reason we might choose to grow more of our own food is our despair over the Big Problems of our time--destruction of prime agricultural soils, pollution of groundwater and other water systems, loss of species, climate change. These are no longer distant threats on the tongues of crackpot doom 'n' gloomers, but terrifying present realities. We all feel the urge to do something to reverse the tide of destructive change, but experience it as a tsunami of such magnitude that our individual actions cannot possibly deflect it.
Consider this statement from Wendell Berry, one of the wisest voices of our time: "How we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used." That statement is a potent reminder that many of the problems we have created for ourselves derive from the fact that eating in our time has become a great act of forgetting. Forgetting foremost our sacred responsibility to nurture and safeguard our land, abrogating that responsibility instead to a faceless, anonymous juggernaut which tills the land with no thought to its preservation, pollutes our drinking water and natural water systems, devastates wild habitat, and contributes to the accumulation of greenhouse gases. All in our name. All for our dollars.
But Wendell Berry's statement contains also the promise of hope. Each of us individually can help reverse this awful tide by choosing to eat in ways that are more sustaining and nurturing of the land and of natural systems. Turning more and more to "food with a face," food with which we have a personal relationship and which we can once again revere as a sacred gift, will be a real step toward better health not only for us and our children, but for our world.
The Foundation: Diversity and Integration
If we conclude that there is wisdom in growing more of our own, what is the fundamental perspective that should guide our efforts?
I take it as a given that our efforts to nurture living plants and animals will be the greater, the more closely we imitate natural systems. The complex interplay of natural communities has evolved over billions of years--human agriculture represents but an eyeblink. Truly, we should "behold the lilies of the field" as we begin the task of cultivation.
Imitating natural systems means first and foremost seeking diversity. Modern "scientific" agriculture is enormously reductionist, with the conscious goal of cutting out most of the messy complexities of natural systems and reducing the work of agriculture to a few simple components. Its great fallacy is the delusion that we can improve on nature, that we can conquer her through pigeonholing the world.
Negatively, imitating natural systems means avoiding the sorts of one-for-one solutions that are the hallmark of industrial agriculture. Soil fertility? That's something you buy in a bag. Crop damage by insects? Spray something stinky from a bottle. Such one-for-one solutions, each adopted in isolation from one another, are almost always destructive, because they ignore the broader ecological context in which our food growing needs and practices play out, and from which they cannot be separated. Purchased, highly soluble chemical fertilizers are destructive of soil life and leach as serious contaminants to groundwater. They also grow vegetables and fruits that are less nutritious than those grown using more natural soil fertility practices. Toxic insecticides are distructive of soil life, pollute groundwater, leave residues on the foods we eat, and disrupt natural balances in insect communities, leading in the long term to a greater problem with insect predation, not less. We cannot garden as if there is or can be a wall between our garden and the Garden surrounding it.
Adopting one-for-one solutions is also inefficient. As long as we approach the challenge of soil fertility and insect damage in isolation from each other, we will never discover synergies in which the same strategy can serve both purposes.
The reductionist approach shuts off avenues of thought that could lead to more creative solutions. If we think that fertility is something to buy in a bag, we are unlikely to explore the miracle of natural soil fertility.If we buy a power tiller as the major component of our soil care strategy, we are unlikely to ask a fundamentally important question: Why till at all?
Positively, an imitation of nature means that we seek integrated patterns in which each element of the food production enterprise supports and enables others. We do not see any goal, challenge, or problem in isolation, but seek to put into place broader patterns in which the same project or effort answers several needs. This paper will focus on strategies the homesteader can adopt to achieve greater integration of the various elements in the homestead, leading not only to bountiful harvests of wholesome food, but to emergent synergies, more efficiency, and ever greater diversity and ecological health.
Understanding Soil Fertility
The living soil
The first task, whether in the first day or the fiftieth year, is always: proper care and nurture of the soil. Our concern for the health and well-being of our soil should be on the same order as our concern for the nurture and health of our children.
The most important key to understanding soil fertility is to recognize that soil is not an inert substance--it is alive. It is true that soil contains tiny particles worn out of the parent rock, plus water and air. But a mix of rock particles, water, and air is not soil, and will never grow a thriving plant. The soil food web is the complex community of organisms living in the top layer of the soil profile--feeding, reproducing, competing, and cooperating in ways that alter the nature of the soil in profound ways. These living organisms include bacteria, fungi, protozoa (single-cell animals), nematodes (minuscule non-segmented worms), arthropods (from microscopic to several inches long--insects, spiders, mites, centipedes, etc.), earthworms, and larger organisms such as moles, voles, even gophers, which have their role to play in recycling nutrients and maintaining good soil structure.
The sheer mass of living organisms in healthy topsoil is far from trivial: It has been estimated, for example, that total biomass of organisms in a prairie soil exceeds fifteen tons per acre, with the weight of the bacteria alone--invisible to the eye--totaling thirteen tons. A single teaspoon of that soil may contain 600-800 million individual bacteria from a possible 10,000 species; several miles of fungal hyphae; 10,000 individual protozoa; and 20-30 beneficial nematodes from a possible 100 species.
Retention of energy entering the system
Consider this paradox: Why is it that, in natural soil ecologies the world over--forest, praire, bog, etc.--there is a spontaneous accumulation of soil fertility over time, while human agriculture has most often led to a decrease in soil fertility (never more so than in modern industrial agriculture)? What are the essential differences between natural soil ecologies and those under the impact of agriculture?
In natural soil ecologies, every bit of organic matter laid down on the soil--fallen leaves, plants that die, droppings of animals moving over it, dead animals--is utilized as food (energy) for the teeming community of living organisms in the soil food web. Whatever the nature of the organic matter, some member of the soil community has evolved to jump on it and utilize it as food, its means to support growth, maintenance, and reproduction. Whatever nutrients (potential energy) it cannot utilize itself, it excretes as "wastes," but those metabolic byproducts themselves are passed on as energy sources to other organisms who can utilize them as food in turn. The end result of the intricate breakdown process is humus, the final residue of the parent organic materials, no longer recognizable as such, but visible only as a darkening of the soil. The microscopic humus particles are no longer a source of food for soil organisms, but they help with water retention, bond with nutrients in the soil and pass them on to plant roots, bind carbon into soil, etc.
Again, the food energy entering the soil food web (organic remains of plant and animal life) is passed from one "trophic level" (energy exchange pathway) to another. In other words, once potential nutrients for the soil food web enter the system, they are retained within the system because there are organisms feeding on their components at every stage of decomposition into their simple elements. That is, there is "someone" in the community adept at blocking any potential leak of nutrients (energy) from the system. If such potential nutrient leaks are constantly being "plugged," the result has to be a net gain of fertility over time.
Contrast modern agriculture, which relies for crop fertility on highly soluble chemical salts which add no organic matter or longterm humus accumulation, and which quickly leach out of the soil. Perversely, what are intended as nutrients in the agricultural sector become in effect toxins as they accumulate in natural systems.
One could object that natural systems can accumulate soil fertility only because there is no net reduction from the system analogous to harvesting: In the case of agricultural lands, taking harvests off them has to represent a net loss of fertility. This observation ignores a key element in fertility accumulation--the fact that sunlight is constantly being added to the equation. Given the continual flow of sunlight-energy into the system, we can--with wise soil husbandry to prevent nutrient leaks--add to soil fertility even as we remove crops for consumption or sale.
Lack of disturbance
The accumulation of soil fertility occurs when there is no disturbance of soil-life communities. This is not to say that there are never disturbances in natural soil ecologies. But fertility accumulation occurs when this pattern--the continual passing on of food/energy sources from one trophic level to another--continues uninterrupted.
In contrast, industrial agriculture involves frequent and drastic soil disturbance, breaking down soil structure and inverting the natural layers of the soil profile. The living communities of the soil food web have to "start over" after each tillage. If the food web cannot fully reconstitute itself before the next round of tillage, the soil is on a spiral of decreasing soil quality.
Absence of unnatural toxins
Plants and fungi are superb chemists, and make hundreds of thousands of chemical compounds, many of which they release into the atmosphere and the soil. But such naturally produced environmental chemicals are parts of the metabolic pathways to which members of natural communities have adjusted over deep time--indeed, they have become elements of the languages they have learned to speak with each other.
Present in the natural environment today, however, are artificially produced chemicals to which organisms have not had to adjust in the three and a half billion years of life on earth. Perhaps in a billion years they will adapt to these gifts from Monsanto and Cargill, but in the meantime, many of these compounds are seriously outside their range of adjustment--that is, toxic to living organisms.
Any agricultural practice based on imitating natural systems, therefore, will avoid altogether the introduction of man-made chemicals. We have to decide from the very beginning whether we are working in a Garden of Eden--or a zone of chemical warfare.
Choice of Tools
Homo sapiens is above all a tool using species. It is important to recognize, however, that we are shaped at least as much by our tools as we shape them. For example, the invention of the plow and the sickle accelerated production of grain crops tremendously--but also led to the development of cities, and to the ever-greater domination of political and economic life by urban culture.
It is good as we begin our food self-sufficiency project to reflect carefully on tool choice. There is far too great a tendency in our culture to assume that powered machines perform needed tasks faster, more efficiently, and better than human-powered tools. There is also a regrettable tendency to see the homestead as an analog in miniature of big industrial agriculture. Do we really need to mechanize at the homestead level? Are powered machine tools really more efficient? Are there simpler, cheaper, more natural solutions for growing our food?
As fossil energies become more scarce and more expensive, the purchase of a powered machine for every homestead task will be at the least a far more expensive proposition. It may be wise to explore low-tech, human-powered tools that require no fossil fuel to operate, and far less "embodied energy" in their production. From the standpoint of maintenance and storage, hand tools are superior choices. Finally, while it is said that powered machines make the job "easier," it is well to remember that they are noisy, jarring, and stinky. These physical effects of machine use add stress to the work, meaning their use is "harder" than we assume. By contrast, a well designed hand tool like a scythe or broadfork introduces a ballet-like grace to our task. Its rhythmic use makes good all-round use of the body, inviting us to relax into the rhythm of the work rather than tensing up as we "fight" a machine. As our skill increases, the body movement with the tool becomes a kind of rhythmic meditation.
It may be that a particular power tool does fit into your own homestead goals and needs. I simply urge that you not make the choice blindly, or with the assumption that the powered alternative is always superior.
Tiller
I have heard it argued that, above a certain size (as in the case of a large market garden), a power tiller is a virtual necessity. For most home gardeners, however, I think a power tiller is both unnecessary and unwise. I garden about 6000 square feet, and I gave away the only power tiller I ever owned years ago--and have never regretted doing so. Power tillage is destructive of soil structure and disruptive of soil life. An excellent, enjoyable handtool alternative is the broadfork. Other alternatives to machine tillage--even for tough tasks such as tilling in an established grass sod over compacted soil, in preparation for conversion to new garden ground--include using chickens to do the tilling; or heavy mulches which smother an existing cover, and start the process of loosening and feeding the soil.
Mower
When we mow, we imitate the effects of grazing animals on a grassland. Grassland perennials such as grasses and legumes (like clovers and alfalfa) have evolved in accomodation with grazers--they actually benefit from being grazed. Annuals in the mix are largely prevented from setting seed, and the natural succession of the grassland--first to weedy annuals, then to forbs and shrubs, finally to forest--is prevented. At the same time, soil fertility is actually increased by grazing, and not only because of the manure the grazers drop on the sward: In response to loss of top mass through grazing, the plants shed large numbers of root hairs in order to re-establish balance. These shed root hairs contribute organic matter to the soil, resulting in humus accumulation through repeated cycles of grazing and new growth. From the standpoint of achieving these benefits of grazing--stopping succession to forest, and accumulation of humus--it does not matter whether we use a power mower or a scythe. However, the long-stem grasses we cut with the scythe are much more useful for making composts and mulches: The chopped-up clippings of a power mower mat down into a putrid, anaerobic mess that resists penetration by air and water, and encourage growth of pathogens rather than decomposers in a mulch or compost heap. Long-stem cut grasses, by contrast, stay loose and springy, permitting penetration by air and water, encouraging the activity of microbial decomposers and earthworms. Further, the elegant rhythm of the scythe is as close as we can get to "dance" on the homestead in the midst of something we define as "work."
I still own and use a couple of power mowers. I prefer to use the scythe to cut the tall, lush pasture growth in spring, for extensive use in mulching. In the drier parts of summer, the yield of usable material is much smaller in proportion to effort expended. I use a large power mower in that part of the season in order to prevent aggressive production of seed by broad-leaved annuals ("weeds"). I also find use of a smaller mower with bagger extremely useful for keeping electric net fence lines free of weed and grass growth. I am using the scythe more every year, however, and am confident that I could achieve all my mowing chores with it if I had to. I am sure I will never buy another power mower.
Shredder
Nature provides shredders of all our organic "refuse" in abundance (fungi, the microbial herd, chickens)--the only reason I can think to opt for a power shredder instead is that we're in a big hurry. But didn't someone say that patience is a virtue? It most certainly is so on a working homestead. And there is to my mind far more magic in watching the natural "shredding" processes that go on to return materials like crop plant residues, straw, leaves, etc. to earth--than in enduring the shrieking whine of a shredder while feeding those materials into its chattering maw.
Weed whacker
Borders and fence lines are challenging, no doubt about it. Anywhere we cannot easily mow, opportunists like honeysuckle and poison ivy are going to take off. I still own a power weeder, and occasionally use it on a long fence line I can't clean with a mower. I use it less all the time, however, in preference for more natural alternatives. For example, I am making tight plantings of comfrey as a border along that fence line, in order to crowd out adventitious plants like honeysuckle. Heavy mulches at the base of nut trees I've planted there also limit the opportunities of weedy vines, while benefiting the young trees.
Sprayer
I keep a hand-pump backpack sprayer for the occasional spraying job. (A power sprayer I foolishly purchased got to be a maintenance pain.) Once one has made the decision never to spray toxic chemicals in the environment where he grows his food, the main use of a sprayer would be for foliar feeding of crop plants. Foliar feeding should largely be seen, however, as a nice little "bonus" we can offer our plants--the main thrust of our effort to "feed" them should be in the root zone.
Chain saw
I find the chain saw one machine tool that is difficult to replace. I do own a two-man crosscut saw of the type used for felling trees, but its use would require a like-minded partner to use it. So far I haven't found that partner when it was time to thin trees in the woodlot. So the crosscut saw hangs in the shop, awaiting the chance to make its contribution when the energy crisis deepens. In the meantime, I continue to use the chain saw for the infrequent felling work I have to do on my place. (For all the heavy pruning work I do in the orchard, I use a hand-held bow saw.)
Choice of Species
The homestead grower should generally stick with the older breeds and varieties of livestock and plants, choosing those bred for similar soil and climatic conditions to her own. The "heritage" breeds and "heirloom" fruits and vegetables were bred for flavor and keeping qualities, for production despite environmental challenges like drought, and for robust immune response for natural resistance to disease. Most heirloom vegetables are open-pollinated, meaning we can save their seeds with the assurance that offspring will grow true to type. Specialized hybrids bred for mainline agriculture assume high purchased and management inputs to succeed. They are also bred with an eye toward harvesting convenience and uniform ripening--or for super-fast growth--rather than flavor. Offspring from hybrid breeds and varieties will not reproduce with the same characteristics as the parents. Many are one-size-fits-all Wunderkinds suited to industrial agriculture paradigms, not to the needs and regional conditions of the homesteader.
It is wiser to accept the nature of our own local ecology, and to forego fruits and other crops we want to grow, if they do not thrive in our area without extensive spraying, or other highly interventionist input. In my case that has meant ripping out the four peach trees I nurtured for years, getting perhaps a dozen ripe peaches for my pains, and planting instead kaki (Oriental) permimmons, jujubes, pears, and quince, all of which are largely disease and insect free in my conditions. At present I'm sticking with my three plums, whose fruit I often lose either to the late spring frosts typical of my area, or to brown rot. However, I have advised the plums that I am thinking of easier-care alternatives: medlars, loquat, mayhaw, and hardy kiwi.
Finally, we should manage the species we work with as they evolved to live and eat. Thus plants should be sited as much as possible in the soil type and level of sun exposure to which they are adapted. Poultry should be given as much range as is practicable--they did not evolve in confined conditions. Ruminants eat primarily grass and forbs--not corn and soy.
Soil Care Practices
Soil nurture has to become as important to us as the nurture of our children.
Adding organic matter
Again, I cannot stress too strongly that soil fertility is not something we buy in a bag. Our main soil fertility strategy should be encouraging maximum diversity and population densities of soil-dwelling organisms, and "feeding" the soil with the maximum amount and variety of organic matter possible. If you are eager to feed your soil with any and all organic materials you can get your hands on, you will cringe hearing reference to organic "wastes." Nothing that our soil dwelling friends consider a veritable feast should ever be thought of as waste. Remember that the organic residues from numerous projects on the homestead-- deciduous leaves, grass clippings, spent crop plants, weeds--can become food energy for the soil food web and, eventually, humus. Hauling such treasures to the landfill is a crime against sustainability.
Neighbors who may not have the same perspective on the "black gold" in their back yards may be eager to part with them--their loss can be your gain. I have a neighbor who hauls oak leaves to me by the pickup load. I bow down to her and say "Thank you! Thank you!"
Mulches
Certainly the easiest way to use available organic residues is mulching. Try to think where in nature you ever see bare soil. Either soil is covered with a dense profusion of plants, or with a nutural mulch like fallen leaves or, in winter, the dead foliage of perennials awaiting the time to emerge for another round next spring. Anywhere your own garden or orchard is not covered with plants, cover it with similar organic residues. Practically speaking, this means that any clean-up chore like raking leaves, mowing the lawn, weeding, pruning, or wood chipping (your own or someone else's) is an opportunity to protect the soil and boost its fertility with mulches.
Mulches protect the moisture and texture of the soil, while moderating temperature extremes--all ideal conditions for encouraging proliferation of soil organisms, who then "eat" the mulch even faster and convert it to humus. Some mulches are appropriate in garden beds, tucked in between crop plants, such as straw, leaves, or grasses cut from pasture. Others are not appropriate there, such as prunings or wood chips or sawdust, but can be well used in pathways or around the base of trees.
Remember cardboard and newsprint as high-carbon mulching materials. American and European cardboard is safe to use in such applications (cardboard from elsewhere may or may not be), as is all newsprint these days (with the possible exception of slick, highly colored parts of the newspaper, which I discard). Cardboard and newspaper, covered by other materials like wood chips or grass clippings to hold them in place, make great plant-suppressing cover over garden or orchard paths, or "kill mulches" for smothering an established sod.
Even quite coarse materials like prunings from orchard trees can be used in mulches. When I prune my fruit trees, I put the prunings down as the bottom layer of a mulch that is not going to be disturbed for a long time. For example, I use them to line the paths through the forest garden, cover them with cardboard or newspaper, then put on a finish cover of wood chips, stable bedding, grass clippings, etc. Or I might use them as the first layer of a "kill mulch" in the forest garden, in preparation for establishment of a permanent ground cover.
Manures
Nothing that comes out of the far end of a domesticated animal should be overlooked as a source of soil fertility! Whether you bring in manures from neighbors who see them as more nuisance than treasure, or whether you are seeking responsible management of manure from your own livestock, make this "black gold" a source of fertility rather than environmental pollution or vector for disease. Sometimes it is appropriate to work fresh manures into the soil. For example, the nutrients in manures (particularly their nitrogen content) are available for immediate uptake by heavy feeding crops like corn and squash. However, fresh manures can cause problems for germination of some crop seeds. Also, excessive use of manures-- especially in clay soils--can lead to unhealthy buildup of salts. It is usually better to use manures in the making of composts (or to do something really fun like vermicomposting).
The question of humanure
More enlightened agriculturalists in this country strive to utilize animal manures for their fertility, while preventing their serving as a vector for disease or source of water contamination. But there is one animal whose manure is almost universally ignored as a source of recaptured fertility: Homo sapiens. We prefer the sleight of hand of the flush toilet to whisk our own eliminations "out of sight, out of mind." This temporary convenience has devastating consequences, however, whether these potential nutrients are flushed away thoughtlessly into natural water systems (where they act more like environmental toxins than beneficial nutrients); or whether they are processed into "sludge" or (the preferred euphemism these days) "biosolids," which are applied to agricultural lands despite carrying a heavy load of heavy metal and other industrial contaminants, with toxic effects that will last generations.
Ultimately we have to make more sane and sustainable use of the substances our own bodies eliminate as no longer usable (but which are a major potential nutrient source for the soil food web). I don't have much hope there will be an outbreak of sanity at the governmental/regulatory level anytime soon. Even at the homestead level, in most jurisdictions, doing something more sensible with our own poops is likely to be a criminal act. I'll just close by noting that a proof-of-concept humanure composting operation (involving little more than a couple of plastic buckets and a composting bin) can be very low-profile indeed. Joe Jenkins's The Humanure Handbook is the bible for homesteaders interested in experimenting.
Compost
Clasically the ideal way to convert organic materials to soil fertility is the making of composts. Assemble the heap with layers of more nitrogenous components such as fresh green material (fresh cut pasture grasses, green crop plant residues like pea vines), hay, or manures--alternating with layers of higher carbon materials such as straw and leaves. Make sure the mix is loose enough to provide oxygen for decompositional microbes, and is neither sopping wet nor dry. With the right mix of carbon and nitrogen (at an ideal ratio of about 30:1), air, and water, the decompositional microbes utilize the nitrogen in the mix as energy as they break down the carbonaceous materials to simpler components usable by plant roots as nutrients. Properly made compost also carries a huge load of beneficial microorganisms that boost the microbial populations in the soil.
In the decomposition process, the microbes generate a good deal of heat. Some gardeners like an extremely hot compost heat, to kill disease organisms and weed seeds, and to hasten the breakdown process. Others believe that a hotter compost heap destroys potential nutrients, or volitalizes them to the atmosphere (especially nitrogen, in the form of ammonia). This is an area for research of your own. My own tendency is again to conclude that patience is a virtue, and that a compost that takes longer to finish retains more nutrients and makes a greater contribution to soil carbon.
Sheet composting
Composters may debate technique, but all agree that making compost in classic heaps is labor intensive. As I get older, I prefer lazier alternatives. One is "sheet composting," "layer composting"--some even call it "lasagna gardening." Rather than assembling compost heaps (which have to be laboriously turned two or three times during the breakdown process), we lay over a garden bed the greener, more moist and nitrogenous materials we would use in a compost heap--and cover them with the drier, coarser, more carbonaceous materials as a protective cover. The soil microbes, earthworms, and other transformation artists feed on the more readily used bottom layer, while being protected from drying and temperature extremes by the coarser layer above. Eventually, of course, just as in a standard mulch, all the material is broken down and drawn into and through the soil food web.
Such a sheet-composted bed can be left for a season for the process to complete. There is no reason we shouldn't crop that bed, however. It is possible to open holes in the layers and plant large transplants such as tomatoes, peppers, broccoli, and cabbages. We can open up a furrow just wide enough to sow rows of beans in the bed. If we're generous with the water during germination, we can even broadcast a crop like cowpeas into the top layer, rake the seeds in just enough to cover them, and keep them moist enough to germinate and start to grow. From that point the sheet compost will benefit the plants, and the close cover will speed up its decomposition by soil dwellers.
Vermicomposting
Converting organic residues to fertility using earthworms is fun--maybe a rewarding project for the younger members of the family--and can be done at any scale. You can buy ready-made worm composting bins, but I started with a simple frame of 2x10 lumber, three feet by four feet, dug into the soil inside my greenhouse. For bedding I used coir (particulate residue from the processing of coconut husks for fiber), though other organic materials can be used, including shredded cardboard. For four years I cycled all the kitchen refuse that we didn't feed to the chickens--vegetable peelings, banana peels, coffe grounds, tea leaves-- through the bin as feed for the worms. (Technically, these vegetable residues serve as food for teeming bacteria, who are fed on in turn by the worms.) When one section of the bin had been converted to pure castings (earthworm poop), I removed them for application in the garden. As with compost from a compost heap, worm castings contain not only nutrients easy for plant roots to assimilate, but large numbers of microbes to boost the soil microbial populations.
Though many "vermiculturists" use self-contained bins, I simply dug my 3 by 4-foot frame into clay soil. There is no reason to be concerned that they will escape from the bin: Earthworms used in vermicomposting are the "red wriggler" or "manure worm" type (Eisena foetida is the species most often used) that you would find in an aged manure heap, not the "night crawler" types that burrow deep into the soil. The composting worms will not burrow into the packed clay under a worm bin, nor will they crawl out the top. The nutrient-rich bedding prepared for them is just where composting worms want to be, and they will stay in the bin, eating the bounty provided and reproducing prolifically, rather than leaving the bin for a less hospitable environment outside.
Cover crops
What a great idea for soil fertility--grow your own! The gardener should miss no opportunity to grow cover crops, in every bed not required for current cropping, in every season of the year, in every nook and cranny. When cover crops are killed, their green biomass is fed upon by bacteria and other members of the soil food web. Their roots decay (are consumed by microbes) in place, loosening the soil well into its deeper layers and opening it to penetration by air and rain. Grain cover crops, especially rye, have extensive root systems and thus add a lot of biomass to the soil, and eventually humus. Cover crops in the legume family (beans and peas, clovers, alfalfa, and many others) set nitrogen in the soil, for a big boost in fertility. It's a great idea to precede heavy feeding crops like corn and garlic with a legume cover. Buckwheat does not add as much biomass to the soil, but it is amazingly fast growing (from seed to flower in thirty days in my garden), and is a good choice for getting in a quick cover between a spring and a fall crop. Oats also comes up fast and offers a tight cover, so is often used--like buckwheat--as a "nurse crop" for more permanent plantings like alfalfa, covering the plot closely enough to keep the soil cool and moist, and discouraging competition from weeds. When these more short-lived nurse crops die or are mowed, the permanent crop comes on strong.
Please seize every opportunity to grow cover crops, which can serve so many functions at once. Cover crops do double duty as sources of cut material for mulches and composting, and fodder for livestock. Increasing the diversity of plants on your homestead by growing cover crops also increases the diversity of key animal species like earthworms and insects. You can undersow a cover like Dutch white, a low-growing clover, into beds with a small "footprint" such as pole beans or tomatoes.
Winter is too often neglected as an opportunity to grow cover crops, though protection of the soil over winter is perhaps more crucial than at any other point in the year. I sow every bed to cover crop just as soon as the late summer or fall crop is off. In late summer I have more options (cowpeas, clovers, crucifers, all the small grains). By fall, my best option might be rye or vetch (or a mix), which will germinate and establish later into the chilly season than any other crop.
Perhaps you'll be more motivated to plant winter covers if you remember a strategy I love: growing a heavy mulch right in place. In the asparagus beds, for example, it's great to mulch to prevent weed growth, keep the asparagus spears clean, conserve soil moisture, and add to organic matter. But I don't purchase expensive mulches, or move my mulches from distant parts of my pasture. Instead, I cut the asparagus fronds in late September, and sow the beds to a mix of oats and field peas (Pisum arvense, a close relative of the garden pea). These fast-growing crops grow thick and lush, knee-high, through the frosts of fall and early winter (the peas setting nitrogen for the heavy-feeding asparagus). When the ground freezes solid, however, these two plants reliably winter-kill in my climate (Zone 6b), lying down into the most beautiful mulch for the spring season you can imagine.
Fertility patches
Certain plants are especially useful in fertility patches, grown specifically for use in fertility applications. Comfrey and stinging nettle are excellent examples. Both are high in protein (nitrogen), and can be used to "fire" a compost heap, or for mulches. (I applied heavy nettle/comfrey mulches on my potato beds this year, and harvested the biggest spuds ever.) Both will benefit from massive infusions of organic fertility, in any form you can throw at them, even raw poultry manure. I am planting comfrey and nettle along one entire boundary of our property, which is not needed for other crops, and taking frequent cuttings of them to boost fertility elsewhere.
If at all possible, we should try to have at least as much ground growing "fertility crops" as food crops, preferably more. If that sounds like a lot, remember that any pasture ground you have can be a fertility patch par excellence: Especially when growth is fast and lush in the spring, you should be able to take a cutting, perhaps two, for use in composting or as mulches. If you do not have any pasture, consider using parts of your lawn instead, perhaps those less visible if you are nervous about a neighborhood outcry. I have begun overseeding my lawns each fall with the same sort of grass/clover mix I use on the pasture. In the spring, I allow some areas to grow about eight or ten inches before cutting with the scythe for fertility applications.
Protecting Soil Structure
Avoid excessive tillage
There are of course times when massive disruption of garden soil is necessary, as when digging potatoes or sweet potatoes. With these exceptions, however, we should avoid tillage as much as possible. Tillage breaks down the "crumb structure" built up by many soil-life processes, and inverts the natural layers of the soil profile. It is also erosive.
We usually think of soil erosion as the washing away of soil by rain, or of the blowing away of dry, exposed soil in the wind--both of which destructive effects are increased in soil that has been tilled. But there is a third, critical type of erosion: the oxidization of the carbon component (humus) through excessive exposure to oxygen. Oxygen is essential to soil life, but the required amounts are supplied by the opening up of the soil by earthworms, decayed plant roots, and soil aggregation. Frequent deep tillage exposes humus in soil to excess oxygen, which combines with it to form carbon dioxide. Yes, that carbon dioxide--CO2, the greenhouse gas. Though we think of greenhouse gas accumulation primarily as exhausts from our countless infernal combustion engines, actually modern agricultural practices emit enormous amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere as well.
That's the bad news. The good news is that we start to reverse carbon dioxide accumulation as we change our agricultural practices. It has been estimated that every 1 percent increase of carbon in a garden's soil is equivalent to the weight of all the carbon in the atmosphere above that garden, right out to the vacuum of space. By reducing tillage while adding all the organic matter we can, we reverse CO2 emission: Carbon is sequestered (bound up) in soil in the form of humus. The good news is that you can help ameliorate climate change in your own back yard.
The broadfork
Do note that there is one piece of shaped steel which can appropriately be used to loosen soil without breaking down its structure or inverting its layers. The broadfork consists of heavy 12- to 14-inch pointed steel tines, welded to a stout bar, to which is attached a pair of wooden or steel handles for leverage. The gardener kicks down or stands on the bar to push the tines full-length into the garden bed, pulls back on the handles to rock the tines in place and loosen the soil, and moves the broadfork over a few inches to repeat the process.
Please note that the broadfork is not appropriate for tilling tough sod to prepare new garden ground. (But note that a power tiller is not appropriate to this use, either. Anyone who has tried it will tell you: Attacking established sod over compacted soil with a power tiller will bust your butt!) It is better to start (slowly) either with a kill mulch over the sod, or by fencing a flock of chickens on the plot until they have killed the sod plants and turned them in. Either method can be followed by a cover crop; and by the time our hard-working friends in the soil have made some headway at "mellowing" the plot, we can start to use the broadfork to break it up further, allowing easier penetration by earthworm and root. It's better to be satisfied initially with a penetration by the tines of only a few inches, rather than exhausting ourselves by heroically forcing them into the still-compacted depths of the soil.
As the soil in our no-till beds becomes more friable each year, it is possible to do whatever tillage is needed with ever greater ease. Eliot Coleman (author of The New Organic Grower, and an experienced market gardener) says: "I have used it [the broadfork] outdoors on areas up to one acre without feeling too much strain." My own garden is fairly ambitious, at about 6000 square feet, and I have never regretted giving away, many years ago, the only power tiller I ever owned.
As the soil improves through our soil-feeding and no-till practices, it is less and less necessary to till even with the broadfork--it is increasingly possible simply to rake out the beds and plant.
Grow in wide beds
Grow garden crops in wide beds. Decide what is a comfortable reach for you, for planting and weeding--twice that distance should be the width of a bed you will work from opposite sides. My beds are 42 inches wide, with 18-inch paths between them. Keep all foot traffic in the pathways to avoid compaction of the beds. If it is necessary to stand on the bed for certain chores, stand on a piece of scrap plywood to spread your weight (and do this only when the soil is not wet).
Avoid bare soil
Bare soil is like a wound in the earth. Just as you cover a wound to protect it and hasten healing, so you should cover any soil bared in harvest or removal of cover crops, just as soon as possible. Applying mulches and growing undersown cover crops are great ways to cover the soil in a bed. It is also good practice to plant every crop as closely as it will permit--the merging canopy of leaves will protect soil moisture and moderate temperature extremes. Because it takes awhile for the plant cover to establish in this way, an excellent strategy is to plant even more tightly. For example, plant four times the number of lettuce or broccoli raab transplants than the spacing in the literature suggests, and a protective canopy will establish in a fraction of the time. Then, as the plants start to crowd, give them more space by harvesting "baby greens." You will have an earlier supply of green edibles, and will keep the bed covered for a greater part of the harvest cycle. Another strategy is to plant faster growing crops (lettuces, radishes) between slower growing ones (broccoli or cabbage, carrots or beets). The faster crops are ready to harvest at about the time the slower ones are large enough to form a canopy over the bed.
Remineralizing the soil
One of the great problems with current agricultural practice is the demineralizing of our soils, as revealed by the USDA's own "composition of foods" analyses over the past decades, which show a trend toward ever less mineral (and other nutrient) content. This decrease in mineral content should hardly be surprising in an agriculture which "feeds" the soil with soluble salts of only a few of the major elements needed by plants (mostly nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium--and sometimes calcium), ignoring those that are essential even if required in smaller amounts--iron, sulfur, boron, magnesium, manganese, copper, selenium, etc.
One solution to the challenge of remineralizing our soil is the purchase of soil amendments. There is nothing wrong with this approach, subject to a couple of caveats. We should think of such amendments largely as a one-time thing, in order to make needed adjustments quickly. Not too quickly, however: Do not ever apply highly soluble amendments of any sort to your ground. Add slow-release rock powders and mined mineral deposits such as greensand, azomite, colloidal rock phosphate, and lime if soil tests suggest a need for amendment.
As for soil tests, use them with caution. Different laboratories use different testing reagents and techniques, and apply different principles to interpretation. An experiment was done to test the soil testers: Identical samples were sent to one hundred different soil testing laboratories. The results varied widely, and made a bell curve when plotted on a graph.
It is best not to opt blindly for the testing service which is the cheapest or most convenient, but to seek out a soil consultant whose approach you have confidence in. You will pay more, but will likely get better information about your present soil condition and advice for amending it. For example, for years I used the free state soil testing service available through my county Extension Office. It always puzzled me that the results for phosphorus and potassium consistently reported as "very high"--and just as consistently, the advice was to use a fertilizer that contained 10 percent each of these elements. When I turned to a student of William Albrecht, one of our greatest soil scientists of the past century, he advised "no fertilizer needed" with regard to my oldest garden soil, and only lime and a little boron for my least-worked ground, my pasture.
But we must realize that in the long run, sustainability cannot mean transporting soil amendments to our back door from far away, at great energy expense. What are more local, more "integrative" solutions right on the homestead?
Fortunately, we've already begun on our remineralization strategy if we are maximizing the return of organic residues to the soil. These materials supply not only nitrogen for plant growth and carbon for humus formation, but as well the mineral components of the plant tissues or undigested nutrient matter (manures) involved. These mineral elements are made available in the trophic exchange pathways of the soil community, which boost their availability for uptake by plant roots.
Another strategy for increasing mineral content in our soil is the cultivation of dynamic accumulators in our fertility patches. Certain plants grow roots into the deep subsoil, and aggressively "mine" it for minerals that otherwise would not be available to more shallow-rooted plants. When these plants die or shed their foliage over winter, their mineral content is made available in the top layers of the soil profile. Dynamic accumulators include such useful plants as comfrey, stinging nettle, dandelion, and yellow dock. I am making extensive plantings of these plants--along borders, under fruit trees in the forest garden, and in any nook or cranny not dedicated to other uses.
A new relationship with "weeds"
"Wait a minute--`useful plants like stinging nettle, dandelion, and yellow dock' ? Those things are weeds! Are you nuts?"
It behooves us to get to know all the plants possible in our specific ecology, and to appreciate the role each plays, and the contributions it can make. (Yes, that includes poison ivy--that's your koan for today.) With regard to the addition of organic matter via composts and mulches, weeds serve as well as any other organic material. But weeds tend as well to be aggressive scavengers of minerals in the soil and subsoil, with different weeds concentrating different mineral elements, and hence can be especially useful for remineralization.
It is far better for soil to be covered with weeds rather than bare. If there is a patch of soil that you will not be cropping for awhile, and you don't have the time to put it into cover crop, it might be a good idea to leave the weeds to establish as a natural cover crop. I would advise, however, that you mow the patch occasionally in order to prevent a heavy set of seeds--those guys can get pushy if you don't impose some limits.
More and more, I am welcoming former "weeds" to take part in the ongoing festival that is our homestead. When dandelion and yellow dock volunteer in my forest garden, I either remove them or encourage them, depending on my needs for that space. If I encourage them, I can cut the foliage several times during the season to use in mulches, and allow these robust plants to regrow.
Dealing with the Competition: Insect threats and insect diversity
Once our soil improvement efforts take hold and our crops begin to thrive, we inevitably make the unsettling discovery that somebody out there likes our crops as much as we do. What do we do about threats to our harvests from herbaceous insects?
The problem with "shooting from the hip"
The response we've been conditioned to, most likely, is to seek out something potent to kill those guys. Monsanto, Cargill, and their minions stand ready to help us in that quest, as indicated by the more than 550,000 tons of synthetic pesticides sold in the United States every year. But seeking a simplistic, one-for-one solution to insect competition is enormously destructive. Almost all pesticides are "broad spectrum" in their effect, meaning they kill all insects who eat them or with whom they come in contact, not just the target species.
In case your response to that last statement is "So what?", let me tell you a little story. I have always been an "organic gardener," but early on in my gardening I thought that meant it was okay to kill problem insects with "organically approved" pesticides like rotenone. I found Colorado potato beetle one of my most difficult "pests" to deal with, and dusted with rotenone several times per season to bring in the crop, always just barely keeping the surging population at bay. Fortunately, even a bonehead like me is capable of learning; and as I learned more about insect diversity, it bothered me to think that my use of rotenone in a death struggle with potato beetle was knocking out as well lady beetles, praying mantises, lacewings, ground beetles--"Hey, didn't someone say those are the good guys?" (In military conflicts it's called "collateral damage." Or maybe "friendly fire"?)
At the beginning of one season, therefore, I took a Great Vow: I would not use rotenone in the garden, even if it meant losing the entire potato crop. So I was overwhelmed by potato beetle, right? Actually, I found five potato beetles in the potato patch the entire season. I knew by that time that insect problems can swing wildly from one year to the next, so at first assumed that I was just enjoying a lucky season for potato beetle. Until I bumped into my neighbor from across the road, whose garden was about seventy-five yards from mine. "My, my!" she wailed, "ain't these potato bugs just awful this year. I dust and I dust and I dust, and I'm still out here every day, pickin' 'em off by hand!"
You've read stories about that Zen "moment of enlightenment"? In that moment I could see the complex, teeming pathways of insect life over my garden, yearning to come into balance. And no, my good fortune was not just the luck of a single season: In almost two decades since, my experience with Colorado potato beetle in every season has remained exactly the same. Indeed, it has become the easiest of all insect competitors in my garden to deal with.
It is precisely the enormous diversity of insect species which offers a possibility for beautiful balance, in which insects who can be a problem for us develop problems of their own-- surging populations of insects who want to eat them. A reflexive toxic response to insect pressure tears great holes in the fabric of insect life. It kills insects, yes, but it kills most of all the possibility for that balance. Indeed, the adoption of any strategy based on killing insects is flawed. Remember, when we remove any part of a natural system, we inherit its work. We should beware imitation of a toxic agriculture which has shown itself so little capable of taking on that task.
Planting for insect diversity
How can it be that, in a single season, potato beetle ceased being a problem for me after I stopped doing anything at all to fight it? A lazy gardener like me always has edges of "jungle" creeping around the edges of my efforts to cultivate. Doubtless there were lots of flowering weeds that I just hadn't gotten to, all around the garden. Once I stopped knocking down my potential friends with rotenone--lady beetles, lacewings, praying mantises, assassin bugs, parasitic flies and wasps, ground beetles, spiders of all types, big-eyed bugs, dragonflies, aphid midges, damsel bugs, parasitic nematodes, predatory mites and thrips, rove beetles, tiger beetles--those islands of flowering plants started doing what they most want to do: provide food, shelter, and a place to meet and mate for their insect allies. (The insects are a lot like us, really--what they have foremost on their minds is: food, shelter, and sex.) With that natural alliance restored, those insects began feeding on potato beetle eggs. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Flowering plants--different species, with a variety of flower shapes and sizes, blooming at all parts of the growing season--are the key to the robustness and diversity of insect populations, and hence to balance. The take-home lesson here is not that you should imitate a lazy gardener like me and allow a jungle of flowering weeds to proliferate around the perimeter of your cultivated areas. Rather, you can establish habitat plantings of flowering annuals and perennials in and around the garden and orchard. Place the perennials throughout the garden, rather than off in their own little fiefdoms. As for the annuals, I grab ripe seedheads of umbels like dill and cilantro, and walk through the garden, beating them against my hand to scatter the seeds. The following season, if a dill or cilantro plant pops up where it's inconvenient to my plans, it's a weed, and I pull it out. But if it fits with the crop plantings I am making in that bed, I welcome and honor it for helping out my insect buddies.
We considered above the role of cover crops in soil fertility. Flowering cover crops like crucifers (e.g., turnip or mustards), buckwheat, and clovers also give a tremendous boost to insect diversity.
I said we should encourage flowering plant diversity "in all parts of the growing season," but actually we should be concerned for insect diversity in the winter as well. Learn to recognize the tan "frozen foam" egg cases of praying mantis, and be careful not to discard them when doing fall clean-up chores. With some plants, we should forego that fall clean-up altogether: The dead leaves of comfrey look a bit messy as the plants go dormant, but they offer critical shelter for spiders and overwintering insects.
How fortunate it is that making permanent plantings for insect habitat can serve multiple functions:
Culinary herbs
Flowering culinary herbs such as rosemary, thyme, basil, dill, and sage provide spice to our meals while encouraging insect diversity.
Medicinal herbs
I urge every homesteader to learn more about flowering plants that have medicinal uses. The tendency is to think either that home herbal remedies are just "folklore" with no real effectiveness, or that herbal lore is so complex and mysterious that we simple gardeners couldn't possibly master it. Neither assumption is true. The effectiveness of plant medicines has been scientifically proven time and again, as indicated by the use of plants such as wild yam to develop more than one potent pharmaceutical drug. Meadowsweet and willow unquestionably contain salicylic acid, and have analgesic effects like aspirin (but with fewer side effects). And when we learn just how many common plants have been used medicinally, we start to think that the subject is not so arcane after all. For example, the California School of Herbalism compiled a list of thirty medicinal plants that could provide the practicing herbalist "a central core of tonic and therapeutic plants." The list includes blackberry, calendula, cayenne, German chamomile, comfrey, dandelion, fennel, ginger, mullein, stinging nettle, peppermint, plantain, willow, yarrow, and yellow dock. How easy is that--some of these plants are common weeds, for heaven's sake!
In addition to the plants on the above list, I have begun planting medicinal herbs such as St. John's wort, meadowsweet, spikenard, bloodroot, goldenseal, astragalus, and more. It is a joy to be welcoming and getting to know these new friends.
Fertility plants
Many of the plants grown for their contribution to soil fertility provide food and shelter to insects as well. I find more places all the time to incorporate dynamic accumulators like comfrey, dandelion, and yellow dock, as well as nitrogen-fixing legumes such as clovers and alfalfa.
Feed for livestock
Some flowering plants that boost insect diversity can also provide fodder for livestock. Comfrey is an excellent example, either cut and fed fresh, or dried as a "hay" for winter use. I have experimented with stinging nettle as well, for a mineral-rich dried winter feed. The abundant tubers of Jerusalem artichokes can be used to feed pigs.
Ground covers
There may be areas in the homestead where we can establish flowering ground covers other than grasses which protect the soil and boost its fertility, while encouraging insect diversity. Michael Phillips, author of The Apple Grower: A Guide for the Organic Orchardist, has concluded that grass is not a good ground cover for an orchard, so has established a diverse mix of comfrey, crucifers, and other flowering plants under his fruit trees. Much of my work in the forest garden so far has been the laying down of "kill mulches" to smother the former grass sod, in preparation for planting more useful flowering ground covers.
Note that some plants play many of the roles above, in addition to encouraging insect diversity. Baptisia tinctoria (wild indigo) fixes nitrogen in the soil, is medicinal--and is beautiful. Many of the flowering herbs are both culinary and medicinal. Clovers fix nitrogen and can be cut for mulches, composts, or green feed or hay for livestock. In addition, red clover is an important medicinal. Indeed, a plant like comfrey serves all six of the functions discussed above. You will discover many others as you bring new plant friends into your increasingly complex homestead ecology.
Other Strategies
Hand picking
Every time I tell my success story about Colorado potato beetle, I add that these days, I find so few CPB's that it is possible to prevent a population build-up simply by hand picking the few adults that do show up and Squish! Inevitably someone asks: "But I thought you said any strategy based on `killing insects' is a mistake." But hand picking and killing insects that could become harmful if permitted to start raising families is a purely local event that has no deleterious effects in the broader insect community. A strategy of Squish! is entirely different from "going nuclear" and blasting our backyard ecology with toxic substances more appropriate to chemical warfare, in reckless disregard of the consequences for the rest of the season. And next season. And the one after that.
Hand picking sounds like a difficult and time consuming task, but it does not have to be. The key is to do what we should be doing anyway--strolling daily through the garden, saying hello and seeing how everyone is doing. On those daily visits, taking out those first opportunists will go a long way toward preventing a vigorous population build-up, giving our insect allies time to get involved as well, for example by eating eggs of herbaceous species.
Succession planting
We must be prepared for the fact, however, that hand-picking will not provide sufficient control of some insect species. Which ones are the "toughest," most aggressive to deal with will vary with your own particular conditions. For me, squash bug is one of the hardest of all insect competitors to control.
One possible strategy is simply to give up all idea of control, and to rely on the natural vigor of the crop plants to produce for us despite insect pressure. With summer squash, for example, I often plant an initial crop, and harvest from it while it is increasingly assaulted by squash bug (whose reproductive potential is awesome). At a certain point, the plants succumb--but by that time, I have a succession planting of squash elsewhere in the garden (preferably as far as possible from the current breakout zone). These plants produce and succumb in turn. Fast-growing species like squash can give three or more successions in a single season. It may seem an odd strategy--bowing to the impressive reproductive capacity of a tough insect competitor--but I can eat squash throughout the season all the same. And it's not contaminated with toxic residues.
Dancing with more than one partner
Another insect whose presence I know I will simply have to accept in my garden is Mexican bean beetle. Since I can't defeat this busy, prolific beetle with hand-picking, I grow two (or more) varieties of beans in a variation of succession planting: I plant a patch of bush beans like Contender, at the same time as I plant a bed of pole beans like McCaslan. The faster-growing Contenders start setting pods early, and I am able to get many pickings from them as the bean beetles obey the commandment to "be fruitful and multiply." At about the time the Contenders give up the fight, the McCaslans are setting pods. The bean beetles happily migrate into them as well, but the McCaslans simply have more resistance to them--they continue to produce heavily for me even while hosting a busy population of the beetles.
Dodgeball
It's possible simply to side-step the main threat from a particular insect--that is, to plant outside its main season. This year, for example, I didn't even try to grow summer squash early on--I just ceded that part of the season to my rival, the squash bug. Then in late August, I planted zucchini and yellow squash. By that time, the squash bugs had apparently made commitments elsewhere--I harvested many a fine dish of squash for over a month, seeing in the process only the rare lost and lonely squash bug.
Physical barriers
Physical barriers can give the edge to crop plants when they are young and tender and not yet well established. At this stage, for example, brassicas are vulnerable to cutworms, who can be quite destructive. A collar made from a strip of cardboard, pushed into the earth around each seedling, keeps the cutworms at bay until the plants have grown thick, tough stems immune to attack. Spun-bonded row covers are light fabrics used to protect beds of young plants from insects, while permitting passage of sunlight and rain. Finely crushed egg shells can be sprinkled generously around the base of transplants to discourage transit by slugs or snails (for whom crawling over the fragments is like walking barefoot over gravel for us). Some home orchardists spray a product called Surround, made from a superfine clay, onto their trees to coat leaf and fruit with a thin nontoxic barrier to disease organisms or to feeding by insects like Japanese beetles.
What about purchased beneficials?
Purchased beneficials are a great idea--for the CEO of the company selling them. They are expensive, and they migrate wherever they please after release, not necessarily where we want them to. If our garden ecology is welcoming to helpful insect species, they will come. If it is not, beneficials may give marginal results but will not thrive.
This is not to say that releasing beneficials is always a deadend strategy. It has been shown that release of purchased wasps like Aphidious colmani can be highly effective for aphid control in the more artificial, delicately balanced ecology of a greenhouse. I have used Pediobius wasps for quite effective control of Mexican bean beetle. However, Pediobius is not native to my area, and will not survive the winter as an ongoing population. Since I've come up with simpler accomodations with the bean beetles, I no longer go to the expense of bringing in the wasps.
Healthy plants
Our goal is first and foremost to grow healthy plants, using the soil care practices we have discussed. How fortunate that robust, vigorous plants in the peak of health are precisely the ones that best resist predation by herbaceous insects. Every gardener has observed the phenomenon: The plant that was growing vigorously from the beginning thrives despite the presence of insects that feed on it. The plant growing right next to it which for some reason was weak and struggling from the beginning, is devastated by insect feeding.
It has been shown that healthy plants can benefit from some insect predation--the loss to feeding of up to 10 percent of their leaf tissue can actually stimulate growth. Yet another reason why it is foolish to "go ballistic" when we see uninvited insect guests munching on our crop plants.
A crucial caveat
It would be an insult to my reader to spin fairy tales. Assisting the maximum burgeoning of insect life possible in our backyard ecology is, I am convinced, the most effective, sustainable, and sane approach to the problem of insect predation in the garden. In the long run it is the only approach that makes any sense. However, that doesn't mean that it is 100 percent effective--that there will not be some seasons when feeding by some insects results in significant damage in some crops. It is important, therefore, to keep in mind the underlying principles, and the goal of avoiding destructive toxic solutions at all costs--for a more balanced garden ecology in the future, and for pure food on our tables today. We will then persist with our strategy, even when we face insect challenges that might trigger our competitive impulse to win at any cost.
I told the story about my epiphany with Colorado potato beetle, how the surcease of its damage seemed to occur by magic, as soon as I stopped using broad-spectrum rotenone to "fight" it. But other insect competitors have not been this easy. I've found Mexican bean beetle and squash bug, as said, much tougher and more resilient. But I have also found ways to accomodate their aggressiveness, and bring in my crops anyway. Cabbage worm is still a bit of a problem, more in some seasons than in others, but the overall trend--for cabbage worm and indeed all my problem insects--is decidely down, as I plant more and more insect habitats.
With one glaring exception, one spectacular failure of the strategy. I want to tell you about that as well, not only because it's my duty to be honest with you, but because the tale makes the case all the more strongly that toxic warfare in the garden is always a mistake. I've seen the colorful harlequin bug in my gardens for years. So scarce was its discernible damage, however, in my naivete I assumed that harlequin bug was one of those "neutral" insect species that neither boost nor hinder the gardener's efforts. Then, three years ago, from one season to the next, several of my crucifer crops--especially turnip and radish--were decimated by thronging harlequin bugs. When I say "decimated," I mean total loss of those crops--zero return on the investment of my time and work. That has been the pattern for three growing seasons now.
There may be many among my readers who part with me at this point: "Rosy visions of ecological balance are great, but I can't go with hundred percent losses--no way!" But, even with insects at this level of predation, I still am not willing to eat toxic residues on what I've worked so hard to harvest as pure food. Even if someone offers an "organically approved" insecticide like rotenone (so approved because it "won't hurt me"), I still am not willing to undercut the chance for a more balanced, self-correcting mix of insect species in the future. Further, if I did use losses of this severity as an excuse for "going nuclear," I would never ask these intriguing questions: Why is it that an insect that I once didn't even recognize as potentially damaging is suddenly, from one season to the next, so devastating? Why is it that Joan and Mike, gardening only a few hundred yards away, are not having the level of harlequin bug predation I am? Why is it that, when I carefully cultivate turnips in my garden, they are destroyed, yet when I simply scattered turnip seed as part of an overseeding mix in the forest garden this spring and walked away --the turnips thrived, yielding fat juicy roots, the only turnips I've eaten from my own dirt for three years? Trying to puzzle out answers to these questions means far more to my garden as a functioning natural ecology, and to my own evolution as a gardener, than any amount of "quick relief" I could buy from Monsanto or Cargill.
For readers who remain skeptical, let me assure you that--whatever the nature of insect damage in one crop or another--we harvest from our garden more than we can eat or give away, every season, without fail. If you remember that, it will help you to relax, and be a friend to your garden and the teeming life over, around, and under it.
Pollinators
Thus far we have been focusing on insects that damage crops, and other insects who in their turn keep them from getting too rambunctious. But remember also that large class of insects on whose good work we are deeply dependent: the pollinators. Though their work goes largely unseen, there is no seed or fruit set without the assistance of these busy little fellow travelers.
Flowering plants--which include the majority of our food crops--go to the considerable effort and resource expenditure to grow flowers and distill nectar in order to form alliances with countless species of insects who will, in exchange for gifts of nectar and shelter, distribute pollen from plant to plant, achieving for immobile plants the miracle of sexual reproduction, with its variability and emergence of new traits after each roll of the genetic dice.
Our nurture of insect habitat plantings helps this daily miracle take place. If you ever doubt that, go sit by them and watch the dozens of species come and go--syrphid flies, braconid wasps, crab spiders, honeybees. If you listen closely enough, you'll hear them saying "Thank you! Thank you!"
Honey bees
Of course, all this interest in pollinators may inspire you to start raising them. Keeping hives of honey bees is fascinating and fun; contributes valuable hive products in addition to honey (multifunctional itself for food and fermented beverages, for medicinal use, and as a preservative)--such as royal jelly, pollen, propolis, and beeswax--and ensures heightened pollination of our fruits and vegetables.
We have enjoyed having two hives of bees on our place for two years now. We do not tend the bees ourselves--they are cared for by a friend who pays us a "rent" of five pounds of honey each time he harvests a hive. Keep this sort of arrangement in mind, even if you choose not to keep bees yourself.
Read The Integrated Homestead - Part 2 for more on season extension growing, the "forest garden," livestock, and using fungi in the homestead. In December we will complete the document with information on natural food storage and "eating fresh year-round," as well as a resources list for greater food self-sufficiency.
© Copyright Harvey Ussery, November 9, 2007. Individuals may copy and circulate this document freely under the following conditions: It must be copied in its entirety, including this copyright notice; and no charge may be made if copies are passed on to others, other than the actual costs of copying, if any. This document may not be published in any print or electronic media, whether or not for profit, without written permission of Harvey Ussery.
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