I wrote earlier that traditional cottage garden plants were primarily edibles or medicinals, but some flowers were included just for prettiness.  Cottagers couldn't afford to buy flowers, but they often dug up pretty wildflowers to transplant into their garden, or traded plants with their neighbors.  The flowers in a traditional cottage garden sound exactly like the flowers I allow in my garden --- they were easy to propagate and often self-sowed, needing little care.

The close spacing of flowers in the cottage garden helped minimize the amount of time the cottager spent weeding since the flowers choked out any weeds.  Forest gardeners use this same technique, talking about filling all unoccupied niches so that unwanted plants don't have any space to gain a foothold.

I'm unlikely to focus on flowers anytime soon, but I have started setting aside patches for self-seeding annuals like cosmos and fennel and have some spring bulbs that require very little care.  I like to think that my garden is more closely akin to the traditional cottage garden than modern "cottage gardens" are, complete with fruit trees, herbs, lots of vegetables, bees, and chickens.  All I need is a pig.

One of the most common questions I hear from new gardeners is, "When should I plant my first spring vegetables?"  I'm not surprised that folks are confused since there seem to be several schools of thoughts on the matter.

Around here, many people plant by the signs.  You pick up a calendar at the local hardware store with phases of the moon and planting dates on it, then put your seeds in the ground when the moon dictates.  People who plant by the signs also tend to believe that you need to put in your fence posts at a certain phase of the moon, but I've yet to meet anyone who set up a controlled experiment to test the effects of the moon's phase on their garden.  I dismiss planting by the signs as voodoo, although I would like to see some scientific data one way or the other.

The next faction is the scientific set, of which I'm partially a member.  They figure out their local frost free date (May 15 here in the mountains of southwest Virginia) then download a spring planting chart and use some simple math to figure out their planting dates.  The chart below comes from the Virginia Cooperative Extension, and I've posted an explanation of how to use it here.  Note that the example assumes a frost free date of April 15.


I used a chart like this to make a spreadsheet with optimal planting dates on it, but I don't mark the exact dates on my calendar.  Our seasons can be so variable that I suspect the best way to figure out optimal planting dates is to pay attention to natural signs, like when the first chorus frogs begin to call or when certain flowers bloom.  These plants and animals are more alert to the intricacies of soil and air temperature than we are, and chances are they know best.

Unfortunately, I haven't got this method really figured out yet, beyond the old saying that you'd best plant your corn when the oak leaves are as big as a squirrel's ear.  So, for now, I just add in a one week window on either side of the "optimal planting dates" to allow for rain, drought, strange freezes, or warm spells.  For example, although I'm slated to plant our main crop of peas next week, we rushed and put them in the ground on Thursday morning before the rain came.  The ground is warm enough that my hands don't freeze as I pull weeds, and the less clayey areas are actually drying up on top (though some of the clayey beds would have liked a few more days to evaporate winter's moisture.)  I figured I'd be better off putting my peas in the ground now than waiting until the ground is dry again, which may not happen for over a week.

Of course, the real reason I planted our main crop of peas early is because I talked to my garden guru on Monday and she'd just planted peas in her own garden.  Gotta keep up with the Joneses!

With the driveway finally dry enough to drive over, Mark spent most of his time this week hauling in load after load of soil amendments.  In the process, I've been learning to visualize a much larger unit of measurement than I'm used to --- a cubic yard.  Obviously, a cubic yard is a volume that's three feet on each side, equal to 27 cubic feet.  That's equivalent to about 40 five gallon buckets, or half of Joey's pickup truck bed.

By my estimate, we netted two cubic yards of wood chips during our chipper rental weekend, for a cost of about $33 per cubic yard (not counting our time and gas.)  Ten pounds of King Stropharia spawn used up a full cubic yard of those fresh chips, with the other cubic yard set aside for later.

On his way home, Mark bought two cubic yards of well composted wood mulch, for a cost of $24 per cubic yard.  The mulch covered the ground around a dozen blueberries, eight grapes, and about seventy linear feet of blackberries and raspberries.  The seemingly huge amount of mulch was perhaps a third of what I use on my woody perennials each year (and maybe a tenth of what I could easily put to use if I had an unlimited supply.)

When I sent Mark over to the neighbors' to shovel up some of their horse manure, I decided to translate the five gallon buckets into cubic yards for comparison.  He filled up the truck with twenty buckets of well composted manure, which is about half a cubic yard.  That scantily covered twenty garden beds.  In fact, I put in into the garden nearly as fast as Mark could haul it in to me, and figure I will need at least 5 cubic yards of compost/manure to feed the vegetable garden this year (and could use twice that much or more without overfertilizing.)

I'm not quite sure where I'm going with this thought, except to say that I really like soil amendments, and I could use many, many cubic yards of them.  I guess I just like to keep track so that we can work up to providing all of the mulch and compost our farm needs.

 

I really enjoyed the recent interview with Frank Aragona on the Diet Soap podcast.

Frank goes into some detail about a new project he's working on with a group in New Mexico that wants to expand a program that teaches gardening skills to school children.

It's a concept that is long overdue and I can't help but to feel like a couple of hours working in the dirt might actually help to calm down some of the more energetic students that can never seem to stay in their seats.

I would take it a step further and teach the kids some basic janitorial skills and put them to work cleaning the school like students do in Japan.

I can easily imagine how a beehive would be an essential part of a cottager's garden since they probably had no other source of concentrated sugar.  Due to the ubiquity of bees in the cottage garden, Christopher Lloyd's The Cottage Garden contains a whole section on bee-attracting plants.

Christopher Lloyd recites the common wisdom that the mint and aster families are bee favorites, but goes on to add several other species that are a must for bee habitat.  Crocuses and willows are on his list as good sources of early spring pollen, allowing the hive to quickly build up their numbers so that they'll be ready for the summer rush.  Speaking of the summer rush, Hydrangea villosa, basswood, borage, fennel, thyme, sage, clematis, and white clover are all given pride of place as bee-friendly summer flowers.  Finally, Christopher Lloyd notes that fall-blooming Sedums are important nectar-providers.

I tend to overlook flowers in the garden, but will have to consider adding some of these top bee plants to nooks and crannies over the next few years.

Huge pink buds under the leaf mulch give way to pale yellow leaves --- the rhubarb is ready to grow.  I rake autumn leaves off the rhubarbs, strawberries, and asparagus to give my early risers an opportunity to bask in the early spring sun.  Within minutes, I count two salamanders, half a dozen spiders, and innumerable worms.  It may just be my imagination, but the soil seems more alive than in mulchless Marches.  Once my plants spread out a bit, I'll push the dead leaves back underneath as mulch, but for now I don't want my perennials to fade away from lack of sunlight.

Meanwhile, with our freezer nearly empty, I'm eying those rhubarb buds with uncharacteristic glee.  I'm ashamed to say that even though I've had a very healthy patch for years, I don't think I've eaten a stalk.  What's your favorite rhubarb recipe?  (Not strawberry-rhubarb pie --- I consider any cooked form of strawberries a waste of their vibrant goodness.)

The traditional cottage garden had to be enclosed by a fence, hedge, or wall to prevent wandering sheep from eating up the plants.  Of these three options, a hedge was the most traditional enclosure since it was cheap and relatively easy to create.  A well developed hedge kept livestock and wind out of the garden with ease.

Traditional British hedges often contained a mixture of native trees, roses, hazelnuts, blackberries, forsythia, quince, damsons, and hawthorns.  Christopher Lloyd noted that hedges did double-duty, both keeping out unwanted livestock and providing edible plants without taking up valuable garden space.  The hedges did require trimming once or twice a year, but that was a small price to pay for free and tasty fencing.

 

Total cost on this home made golf cart dump box was just over 5 bucks thanks to using scrap wood from the old house.

It expands the back hauling capacity of the golf cart from 2 buckets to 7, with about 3 buckets worth in between the cracks.

Next up is a wooden rack to take advantage of some space up front.

The cottage garden arose naturally over the last half millenium as British peasants planted gardens around their small houses.  These were hard-working laborers who didn't have the time or energy to spare for mere prettiness, so they planted large vegetable, herb, and fruit gardens, interspersed with a few flowers.  The cottage garden traditionally held a pig sty, a chicken coop, and bee hives as well to round out the cottager's fare.

Around the end of the eighteenth centuries, these poor peasants were joined by the first wave of back-to-the-landers.  Members of the gentry began to idealize the cottage life and to create their own cottage gardens.  This is when the cottage garden began to veer toward prettiness for its own sake, with scads of flowers often replacing the original mixture of edible plants and animals.

In either case, though, cottage gardens were beautiful.  While the vegetable patch was usually planted in bare, straight rows, the rest of the garden consisted of plants pushed together until no soil could be seen between the leaves.  This informal clumping is the signature feature of the cottage garden and can also be seen in the hodge-podge of closely packed plants in Robert Hart's forest garden.

When it snowed the first four days of March, I started feeling like maybe we weren't getting spring this year.  But then came four days of brilliant sun, and our farm now looks completely different.

As I worked more buckets of stump dirt into the garden and planted greens, I felt like I was living in the climax of How the Grinch Stole Christmas:

Not only did my heart grow three sizes, I saw two species of butterflies out flitting about --- the Mourning Cloak I captured in pixels and either a Comma or Question Mark.  The bees were foraging in earnest, though I didn't take the time to hunt down their quarry.  Best yet, Mark got the golf cart all the way out to the parking area with just a bit of encouragement.  We're back in business!

 

Dropped off the rental chipper bright and early today in Kingsport which happens to be down the road from the Mulch store.

We bought 2 cubic yards of double ground, slightly aged mulch for 48 bucks.

Anna got a bit weak in the knees from her first handful and sniff not unlike the reaction you see when a wine expert gets his or her hands on a glass of 1943 Chateau Picard.

As you've probably surmised, I'm intrigued by traditional methods of gardening and farming.  In previous lunchtime series, I've explored Central American farming, Chinese farming, and tropical forest gardens from around the world.  This week I want to look at a gardening technique that is much less exotic --- British cottage gardening.

The Cottage Garden by Christopher Lloyd is a pretty and chatty book, perfect for flipping through when you're yearning for spring.  It's nearly a picture book, and doesn't have any in depth information, but the book is a helpful look at the tradition that helped give rise to Robert Hart's forest gardening.  Cottage gardening also has something to teach anyone who strives to be self-sufficient.

Wood chips make me chipper.  What can I say --- some women like roses, but I like mulch, even if it won't be properly aged until several months from now.

We spent most of the day Saturday over at our neighbors' helping them chip the biggest pile of saplings I've ever seen.  Sunday afternoon it was our turn.  One neighbor drove the chipper over to our place with his amazingly huge tractor, and then we chipped up a storm for about four hours before giving in to exhaustion.

Despite being pleased as punch about our wood chips, I have to admit that I think the chipper rental won't be an experiment we'll be repeating.  Once I put on my wrist braces, my carpal tunnel simmered down, but it was still an awfully wearing weekend for about as many chips as we could get for free if we hunt down the utility line guys.  Add in a few hours drive to pick up and drop off the chipper, and we might have been just as well off to buy mulch.

On the other hand, we did clear up some brushy edges that needed work, and I have my wood chip piles segregated into partially decomposed (for mulching with this year), fresh pine (for mulching the blueberries next year), and fresh box-elder (for planting mushrooms in.)  The control freak in me is well pleased.  And, look, the year's first crocus!!

This short video provides an accurate yet boring picture of how the rental chipper cuts a rug.

Our share ended up being 1/3 of the weekend time which worked out to be 65 dollars.

It was a great opportunity that would not have been possible without our neighbors' suggestion of sharing the time and the aid of their tractor to pull the thing all the way back here. Well worth waking up early tomorrow morning to drive it back to it's home in the big city.

I imagine this might be the closest thing we have to participating in an old fashioned barn raising which is too bad because this neighborly cooperation thing is a pretty darn good feeling at the end of the day.

The lettuce I planted a solid month ago in a cold frame is up at long last.  Usually, we would have been eating the February lettuce by now and would have planted a bed of March lettuce to eat next month.  But this abnormally cold winter has resulted in abnormally cold soil which sets our seeds back.

Luckily, I can tell that the ground temperatures are finally rising.  Not only is the lettuce up, but our water line has started thawing during the days --- more signs of spring!

On the bad news side, I've been overdoing it and my carpal tunnel is flaring up.  That means I don't sleep well, which means I'm grumpy and my head goes wonky during the day.  I apologize if nothing I write makes sense.

While digging around in the stump dirt Thursday, I uncovered some found art.  Lucy must have buried a carcass in the base of the stump because my scrabbling fingers turned up tufts of fur and leg bones...and then this perfect skull.

I found a very useful key for identifying mammal skulls and soon discovered the skull's owner.  The answer is after the second picture for those who want to guess.



The first distinguishing feature is the large gap between the majority of the teeth and the incisors, which determines that the animal was either a rodent or a rabbit.  If you look closely below the big incisors at the front of the jaw, you'll notice two smaller teeth tucked back into the skull.  These peg teeth are used for grabbing or cutting food and identify my skull as a rabbit.

I find skulls endlessly fascinating and once had a collection, but eventually learned that collections bog me down.  So I gave this rabbit to our winesap apple tree as a source of calcium.

Every morning this week, I've woken up to a light coating of snow on the ground.  The snow cover gently melts off by lunchtime, meaning that the soil in the floodplain has been too wet to drive on since Tuesday.  As a result, we couldn't haul in loads of manure from our neighbor to fertilize the onion beds I need to plant this week.  What could I do?

The obvious solution is chicken manure, but onions like soil high in organic matter and chicken manure melts into the ground almost like chemical fertilizers.  Clearly, I needed humus.  But I wasn't keen on the idea of carrying heavy five gallon buckets a third of a mile from the parking area to the garden.

As I stood peering around me with furrowed brow, I noticed Lucy digging frantically around a tree stump.  Four years ago, we cut down young forest in the mule garden, but we left the stumps in place since I refused to let Mark buy dynamite and blow them out.  We've been mowing and working around them ever since.

I'd forgotten about the stumps, but Lucy hadn't.  She was hard at work rooting out a shrew at one stump's base.  If I'd been in a comic strip, a light would have gone off above my head at that moment.  "Lucy digs for shrews, shrews love earthworms, earthworms love compost, and I want compost..."

I pushed Lucy aside, and ran my fingers through the rich stump dirt that had been sitting right in front of my face.  Over the last four years, turkey tail fungi had colonized the stumps and broken the cellulose down into compost.  By digging around at the soil line, I quickly came up with four beautiful bucket-loads of the soft, fluffy compost.  Thanks, Lucy!

Last year, a couple of friends teamed up and bought us a dozen beautiful blueberry plants in honor of our wedding.  We were sorely unprepared, so we only managed to whack down box-elders and open up the canopy, then roll the logs out of the way and plant the bushes in new ground.  This oversight caused a lot of problems since I couldn't really get the lawnmower around the logs, and by the middle of the summer, our blueberry patch had turned into a weed patch.  Luckily, the blueberries survived the neglect, and I promised them a more weeded existence this year.

We spent the morning Wednesday clearing up the tree carcasses in the blueberry patch to make this year's mowing much easier.  Mark's hard work with the chainsaw netted us half a cord of firewood, now drying in the woodshed, and my branch piles are growing too.  Our chipper rental date is tentatively set for this weekend, but Lucy didn't want to wait --- she did her part to increase the farm's wood chip supply while we cleared the brush.

Painters make conscious choices about their pictures' edges because the edges play a large role in the painting's impact.  Ecologists know that edges promote a diversity of species, more than can be found in either habitat which the edge joins.

I've been pondering edges as I whack back encroaching Japanese honeysuckle, sassafras saplings, and brambles along the boundary of our garden.  I've noticed that my vegetables are sensitive to even the slightest bit of shade, and that the boundary beds closest to the thicket produce about half as many vegetables as do plants in more interior beds.  These brushy edges also delight the deer, who feel safer encroaching if they can retreat back out of sight in just a few bounds.

Over the last few years, we've been beating back the edges, first clipping the woody plants, then running the chicken tractors across them, and finally beginning to mow them into a semblance of a lawn.  I don't believe in lawns for prettiness sake, but I do find them very useful as a way to keep the forest edges from encroaching on our garden, and the mixed herb pasture keeps our chickens happy.

I amused myself Sunday morning with a sudoku puzzle --- figuring out which beds each crop will grow in this year.  The process is actually quite fun, with three axes to consider --- soil depth, amount of sun, and plant family over the last three years.  As an example, I wanted carrots to grow in an area with deep soil, where carrots and parsley hadn't grown lately, with any kind of sun exposure.  In contrast, my peas don't mind thinner soil, but I want them in one of the sunniest spots since I plant them so early, and of course the bed can't have hosted peas, beans, or peanuts lately.

The puzzle was engrossing and fun, but I quickly realized that we don't have enough beds in rotation to plant all of the veggies I hope to grow this year.  Two years ago, I was working for a non-profit, trying to keep the garden going between writing grants and attending meetings.  I was so stressed out, that when I planned last year's garden, I cut out nearly a quarter of the growing area.  In farmer speak, I let those areas go fallow; in Anna speak, the weeds grew up.

The downside of last year's smaller garden is that we didn't grow quite enough vegetables to make it through this winter.  We'll probably have to buy some veggies in March and April, which is an unpleasant surprise since we we haven't bought vegetables (beyond onions and potatoes) in years.  On the upside, I managed to keep the beds that were in rotation last year well weeded and mulched and started to cut down on the awful weed population that grew up during my stressed out, non-profit year.  Overall, a year of gardening smaller made sense and was an asset to the farm (and my sanity.)

Even though I advocate no-till farming, I never manage to put down a sheet mulch a year in advance to start new  beds (or re-start fallow ones.)  So, I'm back to a bit of digging to delete the weeds from last year's fallow beds.  I like to plant potatoes in these spots, since the tubers necessitate a second round of digging in the fall, ensuring that few deep-rooted weeds survive the renovation year.

On Sunday, I dug up a few of the beds, just spading the soil enough that the chickens could get a foothold, then watched as our feathered friends went to town scratching up the soil.  After a few days of chicken scratching (and fertilizing), I'll rake the beds to pull out any big root masses, mound the soil back up, and cover the renovated beds with a heavy leaf mulch.  This method has worked very well in the past, as long as I plant the potatoes on raised mounds --- last year I flubbed by putting the seed potatoes below the original ground level and watched them rot in our wet soil.  Hopefully this fall, I'll have delicious potatoes and some newly weed-free beds.

The last forest garden tidbit that caught my fancy was Robert Hart's Bouche-Thomas hedges.  He planted apple trees diagonally so that they grew into each other and created a rigid fence like the one shown in the drawing here.  Since I'm currently in the research stage of including hedges on our property, these looked intriguing.

Overall, I found Robert Hart's Forest Gardening to be a bit disappointing since it was low on how to information and on plants suitable for North American climates.  His book isn't a reference work so much as it is a dreamer's manifesto.  But it often takes a dreamer to bring an idea like forest gardening to a temperate climate.  The next generation of forest gardeners are still working to make his dream a reality.

We played hookie Thursday morning to help our movie star neighbor film an audition tape.  I was a bit daunted by the idea of reading lines with him, but was thrilled once I learned I didn't have to be on camera...and found out that we'd get some of his homegrown honey as payment.  I forgot to mention that the beeswax we used to seal over our oyster mushroom plugs also came from this same neighbor, traded for a dozen eggs.  It sure is fun to barter with like-minded souls!

When the camera stopped running, I drooled over our neighbor's Meyer lemon tree.  I posted a picture of it last year, loaded down with over a hundred fruits, and this year the tree felt like it was twice as big.  I hesitate to call it a "dwarf" anymore, although the lemon isn't tall --- just six feet wide.  "My tree is so big, I can't move it outside any more," our neighbor complained.  "That's part of the reason I want to add a room to the house, to give my lemon space to grow.  I feel like I'm married to a tree," the bachelor finished, in mock despair.

"I can take it off your hands if you want," Mark said, ever helpful.  "I'd trade my wife for two of them."

Okay, so Mark only mentioned the part about two trees when I got indignant at only being worth as much as one lemon plant.  Luckily for us both, our neighbor only had the one tree on hand, so we decided to beef up our own lemon tree's existence instead.  Our neighbor attributes a lot of his success to the huge pot his lemon tree is growing in --- it looks to be about ten gallons in capacity.  We'll have to plan on hunting down a couple of mammoth pots to give our citrus room to grow.

Robert Hart created mounds in his garden just like the mounds I built for my hazel trees.  He layered branches and leaves on the ground, then topped them with turf (grass-side down), compost, and soil.  He considered the mounds a method of increasing his gardening space, with the improved drainage being secondary.  According to Hart, mound-gardening originated in China and was also very popular in Germany, where it was known as Hugelkulturin.

Hart also created little bog gardens, laying down a sheet of plastic and topping it with peat.  The bog gardens allowed him to extend his repertoire to include cranberries and other bog plants.  In fact, varied habitats could be considered one of the themes of his overall garden, which contained the forest garden, bog garden, annual vegetable garden, and even a little pond.  Intuitively, Hart had latched onto an idea that every ecologist understands --- areas with multiple habitats can support more species than less diverse areas.

As you've probably figured out, we've put a halt to our building for now.  We're not quite done, but we need a few days over 50 degrees to allow us to seal in the skylight so that we can finish the roof, then the ceiling, then the floor.  And we need the same temperatures to caulk around the windows, paint the outside walls, and then paint the roof.  But that's all okay, because there's a lot to be done outdoors before the growing season really gets into full swing.

Wednesday, Mark cut down a lot of red cedar trees while I stood around and looked pretty (aka watched to make sure the trees were falling the right way.)  We've had trouble getting our apple trees to grow since they keep coming down with cedar apple rust.  The solution seems to be cutting down nearby cedar trees, which serve as an alternate host for the fungus, so we took out the ones closest to our orchard and will take out more if necessary in later years.  We ended up girdling some of the ones closest to the power line rather than risking losing our electricity --- I hope the girdled trees die quickly and don't grow over the wounds.

I'm afraid that opening up the canopy over there has made me think big again.  I know that we don't have the manpower to expand our garden area now, but I can't help wondering if we should figure out what we'd like to use that space for and do some preliminary work to keep it from growing up in brambles and honeysuckle.  I could seed it in clover and turn it into spillover chicken tractor pasture, or plant some fodder trees and figure it'll someday be part of a pig or goat pasture.  I could take advantage of the sparse canopy of tulip-trees left behind and fill the space with fruiting shrubs like hazels or gooseberries, or could plant black locusts and sourwood in the understory for bees.  So much potential, and so little time left before the growing season will make its own decisions about the disturbed ground!

Robert Hart began his adventures in forest gardening as a plain old back-to-the-lander like us.  He had a twenty acre farm in England, most of which was pasture.  There he ran poultry, goats, sheep, cattle, and bees, but he soon found the inevitable slaughter involved in livestock-rearing to be too much and became a vegan.

Hart's forest garden was a replacement for the food he had once gotten from his livestock.  He focused on a one acre tract beside his house and began planting.  About an eighth of the garden was an old orchard, full of apples, pears, and damsons (plum-like fruits), while the rest of the area was originally a traditional vegetable garden.  Hart began planting herbs and black currants in the understory of the orchard, mulching heavily with with straw, compost, and grass clippings in the spring and early winter.  He quickly realized that the combination of mulch and perennials made the forest garden much simpler to keep up than the traditional vegetable garden, though he noted that he would occasionally have to go on a "crawl-and-claw expedition through the undergrowth" to weed.

Like traditional forest gardeners in the tropics, Hart maintained sun-loving plants in a different part of the garden.  But he was able to grow a surprising amount of food under and amid his trees --- masses of mints and other herbs, his signature black currants (one of the few temperate plants that fruits exuberantly in the shade), and a host of wild and semi-wild vegetables like dandelions, nettles, and chicory.  He also grew patches of osier and willow that he allowed his neighbors to coppice for use in basket-making.

 

We finished up the new oyster mushroom logs today and carefully moved the old logs to the new station. This time we're using two rows of metal pipe to keep the logs off the ground, which helps to keep out unwanted fungus that's not as edible.

Credit goes to Chest of Books.com for the lovely image next to our picture.

One of my favorite parts of Forest Gardening was its in depth description of several tropical forest gardens.  In locations as diverse as India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Nigeria, Central America, and the Amazon, people have been creating forest gardens for at least a thousand years.

I've described Central American forest gardens and Amazonian forest gardens in the past, and all of the tropical forest gardens seem to be pretty similar.  These forest gardens are usually small --- less than two acres in size --- and are located around the farmers' homesteads where they serve as a kitchen garden.  The many-layered forest includes fruit and nut trees as well as plants that produce timber, fuel, medicines, and other products.  In many cases, some of the trees are cash crops --- coffee, cinnamon, and nutmeg in Sumatra, bananas and coffee in Tanzania.  Most forest garden owners had plots out in the open where they planted cereals and other sun-loving vegetables to supplement their forest garden food.

Forest gardens are often in mountainous areas where tilling the soil would lead to erosion and soil loss.  In fact, a more modern incarnation of forest gardening was developed specifically for this erosion-reducing purpose.  In the 1970s and 80s in Nigeria, B.T. Kang developed a system called alley cropping that consisted of growing cereals and vegetables in strips between leguminous trees on hillsides.  The trees prevented erosion and fertilized the crops by fixing nitrogen.  The trees were also pruned heavily, with the cut branches used as mulch in the annual garden and as garden stakes, firewood, and fodder.

Why was forest gardening so widespread in the tropics but not in temperate regions?  The fact is that many useful tropical plants will fruit in the semi-shaded understory, while most temperate fruits need full sun to grow.  In addition, the light in the tropics is intense enough to enable tropical forest gardeners to grow traditional vegetables like beans, tomatoes, and corn in the understory of an open forest, another element that won't work here.  Developing a temperate forest gardening system was the challenge that Robert Hart and later pioneers faced.

Although Edible Forest Gardens is truly the book to read for North American forest gardening information, I'm always intrigued to go back to the primary sources.  So I checked out Forest Gardening: Creating an Edible Landscape by Robert Hart, the father of temperate forest gardening.

I have to admit that I was sorely disappointed by about two thirds of the book.  Robert Hart was clearly a dreamer, a poet, and a philosopher, not a scientist.  His book jumps around through a discussion of how important it is to eat your vegetables, how ley lines can impact your garden, and through several similar topics.  But in the midst of all that, he also documents his journey toward creating the first temperate forest garden.  As I suspected, there were some fascinating ideas waiting for me in the book --- we all have something to learn from this forest gardening pioneer.

Stay tuned for more information in this week's lunchtime series.  Meanwhile, if you haven't already, check out our series about the roots of permaculture and our how to series about planning a forest garden.

Tradition dictates that we plant our first peas on Valentine's Day, but the weather thought otherwise --- it snowed on Valentine's Day, and on the four days thereafter.   We finally got lucky on Friday, with a stunning day that sent us scurrying in five directions to take advantage of the warmth.

I had soaked my snow pea seeds the night before, so they were plump and ready to hit the ground running.  Without fungicidal coatings (that pink stuff on some storebought seeds), the earliest spring peas are in a footrace, trying to sprout and grow before bad fungi in the cold, wet soil causes them to rot.  Since it's supposed to be a stunning weekend (temperature in the fifties!!!), I've got high hopes for my peas.

As always, I soaked a few peas too many, so I tossed them to our four year old hens.  These girls are still laying, probably because I give them treats now and then like these plump peas or last week's chickweed.  They gobbled down my excess seeds in seconds and then stood and stared up at me --- more please?

Last fall, I raked leaves out of the woods to cover nearly all of my vegetable garden beds.  My hope was that the leaves would keep weeds from growing over the winter, expedite spring planting, and also rot down to fertilize the soil.

Those leaves seem to have done their weed-killing job admirably.  The photo above is a bed which didn't end up getting mulched --- it's now completely covered with dead-nettles and chickweed.  The bed below was mulched --- notice the bare soil where I raked the leaves back to give me a spot to plant poppies.  The soil under the leaves was also unfrozen and I glimpsed a spider scurrying around, which is in stark contrast to the lifeless permafrost atop the un-mulched bed.

I was a bit disappointed to see that the leaves hadn't decomposed much at all, but in a way that's a good thing.  We'll add manure before planting to boost the fertility of the soil, and will push leaves back around plants once they come up to keep the weeds at bay.  I can already feel the year's weeding being cut in half.

Due to their nitrogen-fixing bacteria, legumes are a great way to break your garden out of the nitrogen cycle.  It's almost like printing your own money, this ability to create your own usable nitrogen out of thin air.  So how do you put your newfound knowledge to use?

The first thing to understand is that your legumes are holding onto every bit of nitrogen they can.  Planting beans beside corn plants and hoping that the beans will feed the corn is mostly just wishful thinking --- the beans are going to feed the beans.  However, when nitrogen-fixing plants die, the nitrogen in their bodies will end up back in the soil, so the next crop will benefit.  Take advantage of this bit of biology by planting spring peas, then follow them with summer corn.

Legumes also shake off their nitrogen-fixing nodules when they are stressed by drought, shade, defoliation, or grazing.  Robert Kourik suggested planting a row of corn between rows of clover, mowing the clover, and watching the corn take up the off-loaded nitrogen and increase its growth.  In fact, for those of you (like me) who are a bit leery of clover taking over in Fukuoka's do-nothing clover/grain permaculture, you might get the best of both worlds by interspersing rows of clover with rows of grain.

Of course, the most common method of using legumes to increase a garden's stores of nitrogen is green manuring.  You plant a legume as a cover crop, then till it into the soil when it is just about to flower (the stage at which the plant contains the most nitrogen.)  This method, although widespread, is difficult in a no-till garden.

So let's return to Everett's comment --- should I buy an inoculant to get my clover patch off to a good start?  If you already have clover growing in your yard (which we do), chances are good that the proper bacteria are already present.  Go out and dig up a plant, and you should be able to see little white bumps on the roots --- the nodules.

However, even if the nodules are present, your plants may not be currently teamed up with nitrogen-fixing bacteria.  The way to be sure is to cut a nodule open and look at the color.  Nodes that are actively fixing nitrogen are pink or red inside, while inactive nodes are white, tan, or green.  My nodes were white --- why?

The clover I dug up was right in the middle of our muddy mess, an area which has been waterlogged for about a month due to heavy rains and snows.  When legumes are stressed, they stop feeding their bacteria and start paying attention to their own survival, so acidic or waterlogged soil, drought, lack of organic matter, or even high soil temperatures can kill off your nitrogen-fixing bacteria.  I'll dig up another plant in the part of the yard where I want to plant my clover (currently under snow), and if I find more white nodes, I'll need to inoculate.

Why do gardeners start so many seedlings indoors when the plants nearly always do just as well when planted in a cold frame or simply direct-seeded after the last frost?  My best guess is that the same antsiness I feel as the days get longer affects everyone else too.  Starting some alpine strawberries this winter has been a good way to feed the ache without going nuts with grow lights and flats.

It took two solid weeks for my strawberries to germinate, but this weekend I noticed the first tiny specks of white as roots started digging into the stump dirt.  Monday, the cotyledons began to unfurl from the seed coats, and Wednesday the flat was full of tiny green leaves, each one heavy with a drop of dew.  I guess it's nearly time to take the lid off and let them start growing!

We're due to start some plants outside this week, too, if the ground thaws out.  People around here traditionally plant their first peas on Valentine's Day --- it's a crap shoot, but in the years when the early peas grow, everyone who bowed out is jealous.  I'll also be tossing out some poppy seeds, some for us to eat and some just for the bees.

Scientists have discovered that inoculating legumes with nitrogen-fixing bacteria can increase crop yields.  The theory is simple --- if your plants lack the proper bacteria to team up with, they're stuck begging ammonia out of the soil rather than producing their own.

But you can't just inoculate your entire garden with one kind of bacterium and be done with it.  Most plants that team up with nitrogen-fixing bacteria are picky about the bacteria species they move in with.  Clovers share one set of bacteria species, garden and soup beans another, and alfalfa, soybeans, peanuts, clover, and peas each have their own.  You can often buy seeds already coated in the proper inoculant, or can even transplant a bit of soil from your previous pea patch to your new one to get the useful bacteria started.

As a side note, I was intrigued to learn that legumes aren't the only plants that team up with nitrogen-fixers.  The other common, nitrogen-fixing plant in our area is the shrub alder (Alnus sp.)  I've been keeping an eye out for some wild alders to transplant into my forest garden as a method of naturally boosting the area's fertility.

"Nitrogen, nitrogen everywhere, but not a drop to drink," could be a plant's plaintive song.  The atmosphere we breathe is 78% nitrogen, but plants are incapable of putting the elemental nitrogen to use.  Instead, they need ammonia or nitrate and depend on the useful nitrogen they can suck out of dead plants and animals as part of the nitrogen cycle.

Nitrogen-fixing bacteria are the flip side of the coin.  These microorganisms can take the nitrogen from the air and turn it into a useful form, but the process takes up vast quantities of energy.  Some bacteria species are able to scavenge the energy on their own, but others have opted to team up with nitrogen-hungry plants.

The best-known symbiosis is between rhizobia bacteria and legumes.  It all begins when a bacterium senses flavonoids given off by the legume's roots.  "Home for sale!" the flavonoids say, and the bacterium secretes a chemical in reply --- "I'd like to move in."  "Great!" says the root, and it curls its tiny root hair around the bacterium to make a safely enclosed root nodule.  The plant fills the nodule with carbohydrates (free energy!), proteins, and oxygen, and the bacterium responds by fixing atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia to feed the plant.  The pair lives happily ever after.

Everett commented on my mention of planting clover to say:

I don't know why inoculant is so hard to spell, but I struggle with it too and seem to have to look it up every few weeks.  Anyway, back to the point....

If you're not a gardener, you may not realize that nitrogen is usually the limiting ingredient in many plants' growth, and is thus one of the big three components of chemical fertilizers.  Organic gardeners often add nitrogen to the soil with compost or manure, but others take advantage of nitrogen-fixing bacteria to turn the copious nitrogen in the atmosphere into nitrogen their plants can use.  This week's lunchtime series will explore how this symbiosis can be worked to your advantage in the garden.

As I mentioned before, Masanobu Fukuoka's natural farming helped inspire the permaculture movement, but I ended up being drawn in a different direction by his experiences.  I've been struggling to develop a workable no-till system for my garden over the last three years, and my constant problem is lack of sufficient mulch.  We mow all of our grassy areas and add the clippings to our garden beds and even rake leaves out of the woods to top things off, but I still end up with bare soil and way too many weeds.  So you shouldn't be surprised that my epiphany upon reading The One-Straw Revolution had to do with mulch.

The organic gardening and homesteading movement has us all growing our own tomatoes and broccoli, but I'd say that 99% of us have never even considered growing our own grains.  And yet, grains make up a huge percentage of our diets.  Clearly, they also made up a huge percentage of Masanobu Fukuoka's garden.  Perhaps the solution to my mulch problem is to return to a more holistic gardening method.  If we grew all of our own grains as well as all of our vegetables, I'd never be in need of mulch again.

Fukuoka says that his method of growing grains uses one hour per week per person, a figure that sounds remarkably manageable.  Could we tweak his system a bit, perhaps trading buckwheat, sorghum, or corn for rice, and replicate his success?  I'm suddenly determined to find clover seeds, buy a bit of straw to prime the pump, and plant my hull-less oats in a do-nothing test plot rather than in a traditional garden bed.

Masanobu Fukuoka realized that his system of natural farming wouldn't be exactly replicable in other parts of the world --- for example, we'd be hard-pressed to grow rice here in Virginia.  So he summed up his method into four principles that can be used anywhere.

First, he admonishes us not to till or turn the soil.  Although Fukuoka doesn't go into the science behind the disadvantages of soil tilling, he did mention that cultivating soil gives troublesome weeds like crabgrass and dock a foothold.  As my father can tell you, once crabgrass gets into your garden, you might as well move on.

Principle 2 is "no chemical fertilizer or prepared compost."  I know the latter may be fighting words!  But I see his point --- in nature, plant matter is naturally composted on the soil surface, a process which promotes the growth of beneficial fungi.  Fukuoka adds fertility to his soil by returning straw (and a bit of poultry manure) to the soil surface and keeping a groundcover of white clover growing at all times.

Third, Fukuoka refuses to weed by tillage or herbicides.  Instead, he uses mulch, a clover groundcover, and temporary flooding to keep the weeds in check.  In addition, his winter grain/rice rotation keeps the fields constantly covered with crops, so weeds never have a fallow period to gain a foothold.

Finally, principle 4 is "no dependence on chemicals."  All organic gardeners will agree to that.

So what did Masanobu Fukuoka's natural farming technique look like?  In the fall, he seeded white clover, a winter grain (rye or barley), and rice all at once into a field.  The seeds were rolled in balls of clay so that they could simply be dropped onto un-tilled soil rather than being pushed beneath the surface.

That autumn, the clovers and winter grains sprouted and grew while the rice seeds waited.  The clover formed a groundcover beneath the rye or barley, crowding out weeds and fixing nitrogen to enrich the soil.  By spring, the winter grains were ready to be harvested --- Fukuoka threshed the grains and tossed all of the straw back onto the fields, forming a thick mulch.  He added in a small amount of manure from his chickens, but no other compost or fertilizer.

Meanwhile, the rice had already sprouted and started to grow.  The young rice plants were trampled down when the winter grains were harvested, but quickly sprang back to life, growing amid weeds and clover.

The traditional method of growing rice in most of Japan and China consisted of flooding the rice paddies for the entire growing season as a method of weed control, but Fukuoka realized that rice is actually healthier when growing in damp, but not sodden, soil.  So he opted to flood his fields for a mere week in the spring, long enough to drown out most of the weeds and weaken the clover, giving the rice a head start.  Then he dried the fields back out and the rice grew happily above its nitrogen-fixing groundcover.  In the fall, he harvested the rice and once again returned the straw to the field, along with seeds for next year.

Fukuoka noted that after 20 years of using his natural farming method, the soil on his farm was much richer than when he began.  He harvested just as much grain (or more) from his fields as the commercial farmers using chemicals nearby.  And the photos in his book look remarkably weed-free --- I'm jealous.

If you've been following along for a while, you may remember my series about traditional Chinese farming practices.  The book Farmers of Forty Centuries opened my eyes to farming methods that were clear forerunners of modern organic gardening, complete with nitrogen fixing plants and massive infusions of compost.  As the name suggests, farmers in China maintained the fertility of the same garden patches for as long as 4,000 years using their ancient techniques.

Fast forward ahead just forty years after the book's publication date, and farming practices in Japan (once very similar to those in China) turned around 180 degrees.  After the end of World War II, Japanese farmers were sucked in by the allure of time-saving American "innovations" like chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides.  According to Masanobu Fukuoka, author of The One-Straw Revolution, centuries of building humus-rich soil washed away in just twenty years.  Within one generation, the Japanese soil was dependent on ever greater amounts of chemical fertilizers to produce a crop.

Was there any way for Japan to return to a more natural way of farming?  Fukuoka said yes, and his book struck a chord with both Japanese folks and Americans in the 1970s.  Stay tuned for his insights in this week's lunchtime series.

I've been a bit quiet on the garden front lately because now is really the time for dreaming, not for growing.  But the garden is actually in much better shape than any previous winter garden I've been in charge of, so I thought I'd take you on a quick tour.

It's quite possible to have some greens and lettuce even in the dead of winter around here as long as you start them in the early fall and the deer don't get them.  In previous years, the deer have always eaten my greens to the ground, but Mark's deer deterrents are worth their weight in gold!  This year we still have some kale and mustard hanging on --- just enough to put half a cup in potstickers every week or two.  (No lettuce because I planted it late and didn't get it up to speed in time.)

I've always read that you can eat parsley all winter, but the deer adore it so I've never had it later than August.  As a result, I've never even bothered to plant it in the sunny half of the garden (where I put the plants which will grow on warm winter days.)  Nevertheless, my small bed emerged from the snow a week or so ago green and beautiful!  The plants tend to have short stalks in the cold, but the leaves are delicious --- perfect for adding a bit of freshness to tuna or egg salad or soups.

Of course, no winter garden is complete without scads of Egyptian onions.  I planted a couple of beds of them, and then tried to compost the extras, which meant I instead spread volunteer onions all over the yard.  You can never have too many, though --- I put the fresh green tops into omelets and egg salad and cut up the entire onions into soups.

Meanwhile, inside, we still have enough sweet potatoes and garlic for several months, though the carrots are beginning to reach the bottom quarter of the drawer and we've only got three butternut squash left.  The freezer is still full of the bounty of the summer, and the only vegetables we buy in the store are potatoes and onions (because our crops were disappointing this year.)  And now it's February, and time to plant the first lettuce bed!

One of my favorite bloggers posted about the new plants she'll be trying out in her garden this year, and I thought it was an interesting meme.  So, without further ado, 2010's experiments and additions:

• New mushrooms: Winecap (aka King Stropharia), White Morel (reported to be a crapshoot, but I feel lucky), and a summer fruiting Oyster Mushroom --- just ordered the spawn from Field and Forest Products!
  
• New woodies in the forest garden: Osage-orange (for hedges), honey locust (for forest pasturing), and Korean stone pine (for pine nuts).  I'm starting them all from seed, the first two from seeds collected in the wild and the last from seeds I bought on ebay.  All are experiments!
• New fruits and veggies: Alpine strawberries, hulless oats, soybeans (labeled as edamame for fresh eating), garbanzo and urd beans (the latter for sprouting), Afghan sesame, Hungarian breadseed poppy, manna de montana amaranth, and temuco quinoa.  All are from Seeds of Change except the strawberries, soybeans, and poppies from Renee's Garden.

And, of course, there's the usual trial of new varieties of common fruits and vegetables (most of which I buy from Jung.)  What's new in your garden this year?

(This image, by the way, shows the osage-oranges I collected slowly rotting down to seed pulp for the spring.  They're already quite mushy and stinky.)

If the process of threshing, winnowing, and dehulling your grains for human consumption seems a bit daunting, you might choose to start growing grains for your livestock instead.  Your animals are likely to be less picky than you are, so you won't have to go to quite so much trouble when adding homegrown grains to the menu.  I'm hopeful that as we start growing our own chicken feed, we'll begin saving money and end up with healthier chickens due to a more well-rounded diet.

Currently, we're starting a new series over on our chicken blog with all of the nitty gritty info on formulating your own chicken feeds.  If you're interested, you might want to subscribe to that blog to read all about recipes, protein content of grains, and non-grain alternatives over the next few weeks.  Meanwhile, here's a brief summary of the tips in Gene Logsdon's book about growing grains specifically for livestock.


Tips for the lazy farmer

If you're a lazy farmer, like me, you're probably interested in ways that you can feed your animals with the least work possible.  One option is to plant winter wheat (or barley or rye) at the end of the summer, around September 15.  About a month after the grains go in the ground, they will be established enough that you can graze your animals on them during the winter and spring.  With careful rotation so that the plants aren't overgrazed, you will be able to harvest nearly as much grain from these plants as you would have without grazing them.

Pigs are a great tool for the lazy farmer.  Logsdon notes that you can turn pigs into a cornfield in the fall and they'll harvest the grain themselves, fattening up just when they should.  I envision planting a small corn paddock as part of my forest garden grazing rotation and moving the pigs in at just the right time of year.


What grains should I grow for my animals?

If you're going to go the traditional route of harvesting grain for your livestock, you will probably want to grow some combination of corn, oats, barley, grain, sorghum, and soybeans.  The bulk of commerical feeds are made up of two components --- corn and soybeans --- but your animals will probably be healthier if you give them a bit more variety.

Although we tend to think of grain as being aseasonal, you can in fact plan your garden so that your animals (and you) eat nearly fresh grains throughout the year.  Rye and barley are the first grains to ripen in early summer, then wheat, oats, buckwheat, and sorghum are ripe in the fall.  In the winter and spring, you can feed the easily stored corn and soybeans.


How much grain should I grow for my animals?

Logdson estimates that a single chicken needs about a bushel of grain per year.  A hog needs 12 bushels of corn to be fattened to butchering weight and a cow needs five to six bushels.  A ewe and lamb need just one bushel of grain per year between them if they are on pasture, and goats may not need much at all except when they're being milked.


How do I prepare grain for my livestock?

Some grains can be fed whole, but nearly all grains are more digestible if they are ground.  If you're grinding grain into flour for yourself, you can use the same hand-cranked mill to grind a bit of grain for your chickens.  On the other hand, if we really get into growing our own feed we'll probably find a way to make or buy a better mill.

Old timey farmers knew that sprouting was even better than grinding.  If you're willing to put in a little extra time, you can sprout all of the grains you feed your animals, a process that makes them even more nutritious.

We're in the very early stages of our homegrown grain experimentation, but we'll be sure to update you as we test all of these methods of growing grain for both ourselves and our animals.  Stay tuned!

Now that you've got an idea of which grains to try growing in your backyard and how much space you need to grow the grains, let's talk about the actual growing process.  Most of grain-growing is pretty similar to growing anything else.  Some grains are planted in the spring and others in the fall, then you weed them and hope that bugs and diseases don't do much damage.

One major difference between grains and vegetables is that grains are traditionally planted in solid blocks in America rather than rows.  Commercial farmers depend on heavy applications of herbicides to keep these fields of grain weed-free, but Logsdon suggests that the American farmer might be better off using the Chinese method of planting in rows so that your grains can be hand-weeded.  Alternatively, you might rotate your grains after a crop that's cultivated intensely for weeds like strawberries or potatoes.

The main differences between growing grains and vegetables, of course, come during the harvest.  On the backyard scale, most grains are harvested by cutting the whole plant down with a scythe when the seeds are mostly or fully mature.  You can tie plants into bundles and then into shocks to dry in the field, or bring them under cover and let them dry inside.  Either way, in a couple of weeks once the plants are fully dry, it's time to separate the seeds from the head.

The first step is threshing --- lay the plants down on a big bedsheet on a flat surface and whack the daylights of out them with a bat or stick.  Alternatively, beans can be threshed by putting the whole plants in a bag and beating the bag around.  When you're done threshing, the seeds should have fallen out and you can take away the bulk of the plants for the chickens to peck through and then to be used as mulch.

Of course, a lot of bits of chaff (excess plant matter) end up in with the seeds after threshing, so the next step is winnowing --- removing the grain from the chaff.  Logsdon advocates pouring the grain and chaff mixture from one bucket to another, either outside where a breeze can pull away the chaff or in front of a big fan.  In either case, you will need to pour each bucket of grain six to ten times to end up with clean seeds.

If you're working with wheat or some other grains, you are now done with the grain separation steps, but oats, barley, buckwheat, and rice all need to be dehulled.  These seeds are coated in a tough substance that won't be very tasty, and which is, unfortunately, hard to remove effectively at the home scale.  Logsdon suggests heating the grains at 180 degrees Fahrenheit for an hour and a half, putting them through a blender, then sifting out the hulls, but he admits his method is only moderately effective.  Southern Exposure Seed Exchange has instructions for turning your grain mill into a dehuller, which might be worth a shot.  Or just grow hull-less oats and feed hull-covered grains to your livestock.

We certainly aren't going to jump to the level of growing all of our own grains immediately, but I wanted to crunch the numbers and see if that would even be feasible.  The first step is to figure out how much of each type of grain we eat.  That part was pretty simple since we started buying our flour in bulk last year, and thus know that we go through about 100 pounds of wheat flour, 5 pounds of cornmeal, and 25 pounds of oats in a year.  Here's my estimate of how many pecks of whole grain those pounds of flour and rolled oats are equivalent to:

As you build your own estimate of how many pecks of grain you eat per year, you might find the following conversions useful:

• 1 cup of wheat converts into just a little more than a cup of whole wheat flour, and that weighs about a quarter of a pound --- this might help you convert from the five or fifty pound bags of flour you buy to cups.
  
• A peck is equivalent to about 37 cups (and is also a quarter of a bushel.)  So if you go through one five pound bag of cornmeal each year, like we do, you're probably eating 0.5 pecks of corn, very roughly.

How much land would you need to grow your own grains?  Basically, to provide our current near monoculture diet of wheat, corn, and oats, we'd need about a fourteenth of an acre.  That's an area about 56 feet by 56 feet --- pretty big, but not unfathomable.  It would simply mean expanding our garden by about a quarter.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks for me in growing my own grain was that I just didn't know where to start.  There are at least a dozen grains available in the grocery store, but since none of my neighbors grow any of them, I didn't know which ones are suited to my climate and to my uses.

Here's a quick rundown on the pluses and minuses of various types of grain, from the backyard perspective.  I've put the most promising varieties near the top so that you can stop reading if you get bored.

Corn is the king of high output per unit area, but low protein.  This is the only grain commonly grow in the backyard, for a good reason.  You can easily harvest corn on a small scale, picking the corn and shelling it by hand or in a hand-cranked sheller.  Corn makes up the bulk of many animal feeds and is, indeed, a cheap and easy way to start breaking your dependence on storebought feed.


Wheat is the other primary grain that Americans eat, and you can't beat the taste.  As a backyard grain, it's harder than corn but easier than many others.  It can be used as animal feed and can also be grazed by livestock in the spring without unduly affecting your grain harvest.


Oats are one of the best grains, health-wise, due to their high protein content.  They are a bit more difficult than wheat since the seeds are coated in a tough hull that is difficult to remove at home, but I plan to try a hull-less oat variety that lacks that problem.  In addition to being used as human and animal food, oats were traditionally grown as a cover crop for strawberries in England.  The oats were planted in late summer to early fall between the strawberry plants, grew for a while, then were naturally killed by frost before setting seed.  The grass-like plants fell and mulched the berries --- how can you beat a mulch that spreads itself?


Soybeans clearly aren't grains, but Gene Logsdon includes them in his book because they make up the other major portion of commercial animal feeds and are a great source of protein.  They are grown like garden beans, and can be eaten at the green stage (aka the delicious edamame you might have tried as an appetizer in a Japanese restaurant) or dried and used like soup beans.  Soybeans also make a good hay and green manure.  When feeding to animals, though, you shouldn't feed soybeans raw because the beans contain a substance that interferes with digestion and protein absorption.  As long as you roast the beans first, they are a cheap and easy way to add protein to your chickens' diets.


Buckwheat is only kinda-sorta a grain as well.  (It's in the smartweed family instead of the grass family.)  One of our readers suggested that we give this a shot, and I have to admit that it looks like a homestead winner.  Buckwheat is high in lysine, an amino acid that other grains lack, and is a dynamic accumulator of phosphate.  It can be planted in early summer when gaps start opening in the garden from spring crops, and the fall flowers are an excellent source of nectar for honeybees.  You can go the normal route of threshing and winnowing, or just pick a cup or two by hand in the garden.  Logsdon reports that his chickens love buckwheat.


Sorghum is a grain I've never eaten but one that my neighbors actually grow.  You can grow grain sorghum (aka "milo") specifically for the edible seeds or grow sweet sorghum and use the stalks for molasses and the grain for food.  Sorghum has yields as high as corn, and is very easy to harvest for animal feed since you can just cut the entire seed head and toss it to your chickens.  Threshing is also easier than other grains --- just rub the sorghum heads between your hands and the seeds will drop right out.


Millet isn't often used for human food in the U.S., but is a primary grain in northern China.  Pearl millet (Pennisetum glaucum) seems to have potential for the backyard since it threshes free from the hulls naturally, and chickens can be fed a whole seed head, as with sorghum.


Rye has the most potential as a pasture plant since it is very tolerant of cold weather and will stay green all winter.  Unless you love the flavor of the grain (which I don't), there's no real reason to grow it for grain the backyard.


Barley makes good livestock feed and beer, but is also not one of the top backyard grains.


Rice is, unfortunately, a backyard loser.  The grain requires at least forty days with minimum temperatures greater than 70 degrees Fahrenheit, conditions that can be found in Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas, and California, but not Virginia.


Wild Rice is a delicious, native North American alternative to cultivated rice.  Unfortunately, we are again outside its range.  You might try growing wild rice if you live in New England or the Midwest.

Despite swearing up and down that I wasn't going to start any seeds indoors this year, I filled a flat with stump dirt Monday and sprinkled in tiny alpine strawberry seeds.  I tossed a few in the ground outdoors, too, as a control since I believe that plants people baby indoors often do just as well when planted straight in the garden.

I'm excited to add alpine strawberries to our current repertoire of June-bearing and everbearing strawberries.  I've read that alpine strawberries can cope with partial shade and make a good addition to the herb layer of forest gardens.  Plus, the fruits are reputed to have the best flavor of all strawberries, even though they're so tiny that you probably don't want to pick too many.  Best of all, alpine strawberries can be started from seed as long as you do so indoors, which eliminates the high startup costs of traditional strawberries.

This is our second shot at starting strawberries from seed.  We grew some our first year on the farm, planting the seeds in the middle of January and eating fruits by summer.  Yields were good but, unfortunately, the variety we grew (fresca) was some sort of odd hybrid with full-sized berries that were quite tasteless.

In case you're a botany geek like me, you might be interested to know that the various types of strawberries are in different species.  The big June-bearing strawberries are Fragaria x ananassa, which is a hybrid between the eastern North American native Fragaria virginiana (which grows wild in our woods) and the large-fruited, South American Fragaria chiloensis.  Alpine strawberries were bred from Fragaria vesca, a native strawberry to parts of North America, Europe, and Asia.  Although we don't hear much about Alpine strawberries, they have been eaten since the Stone Age and literal tons are still picked commercially each year in Turkey.  I look forward to picking our own this summer!

As the next step in my pursuit of easy to grow grains, I decided to take everyone's advice and read Small-Scale Grain Raising by Gene Logsdon.  I thoroughly enjoyed the book, although (as usual) I felt it glossed over some very important aspects of bringing grain growing to the backyard.  Still, the book made me feel that growing grain was within my reach.

I have to admit that before reading Small-Scale Grain Raising, I fell into the category of folks who don't really think about where their grain comes from.  The only grain commonly grown in my area is corn, and I grew up thinking that flour came from the store.  I assumed that grain-growing was an esoteric undertaking requiring vast amounts of land, equipment, and know-how.  And could you really grow it around here?

But some rough and dirty math suggests that I could create the three cups of flour I use in my favorite pizza crust recipe from 22 square feet of soil --- about the size of one of my raised beds.  As I'll explain later, Logsdon has had success threshing and winnowing grain on the backyard scale.

Many of you are probably thinking --- why grow grain when you can buy flour so cheaply in the store?  My primary motivation is a bit geeky --- I just like knowing how to do things myself.  But growing your own grain has other perks.  When I read Farmers of 40 Centuries, I was a bit jealous of the endless rice straw these farmers seemed to have on hand for mulching.  Straw is a major byproduct of all kinds of grain-growing, and I am always on the lookout for more sources of mulch.

Growing your own grain is also the key to independence from store-bought chicken feed.  And if you grow your own grains, you can make true whole grain flours, without the healthy germ removed.  All in all, it looks like an endeavor worth experimenting with.

In response to my post on easy to grow grains, two of you asked whether I was concerned about amaranth being a weed.  I decided to do a bit of research and disentangle fact from fiction.

The word "amaranth" can be used to refer to any plant in the genus Amaranthus --- 70 species total.  Some species are weeds and some are useful foods dating back thousands of years. 

The weed species are generally known as pigweed and include Amaranthus albus, A. blitoides, A. hybridus, A. palmeri, A. powellii, A. retroflexus, A. spinosus (the one that wreaks havoc on my bare feet in the summer), A. tuberculatus, and A. viridis.  I wonder whether any of these plants were also grown by Native Americans for food, accounting for their widespread growth across the U.S.?  Unfortunately, I couldn't find any data on this.

On the other hand, A. caudatus, A. cruentus, and A. hypochondriacus are grown as food plants, with the latter being the species most often grown in the U.S.  Amaranth was grown by the Incas, the Aztecs, and various Native Americans in what is now Mexico until the conquistadores came and nearly wiped amaranth out of existence.  Nowadays, you can find the seeds of the edible varieties for sale from some of the more heirloom-inclined seed companies.

We opted to buy some Manna de Montana Amaranth from Seeds of Change --- I'll let you know how it goes as the growing season progresses.  Meanwhile, I splurged on a few more experimental crops --- Hungarian Blue Breadseed Poppy, Temuco Quinoa, Urd Sprouting Bean, Black Kabouli Garbanzo Bean (since we have to drive an hour to get these in the store), Hullless Oats (thanks for the tip, Sena!), and Afghani Sesame.  I figure at least one or two should work out and make it onto our list of regulars!

Last week, I was paging through old blog entries from this summer and literally couldn't remember the earth looking so green.  On the south side of the trailer, the ground is still covered by snow where it's shaded by the hill, and the rest of the world is mostly brown.  I watch deer pulling honeysuckle out of trees and dream of a big, black bull calf doing the same in search of green leaves.

How do I relieve winter gardener's blues?  Luckily, I've got some house plants in need of attention.  My citrus trees (dwarf Meyer lemon and dwarf tangerine) have sunken down in their pots over the long growing season and need a new infusion of stump dirt.  I also have a rosemary in need of potting --- one of the six sprigs I got from my father finally sprouted roots.

So I climb the hill halfway to the cars, heading straight to my favorite, hollow beech.  This old beauty churns out around seven or eight gallons of stump dirt every year, which I scoop out with our yellow-handled shovel, savoring every teaspoonful.  I chose a warm day so that the stump dirt would be shovelable, but that means the driveway is too wet to drive on.  So I lug the dirt home in five gallon buckets.  It's all worthwhile, though, when I get to sink my fingers into rich soil, the combined scent of actinomycetes and rosemary smelling as good as baking bread.

To hear Michael Phillips write about it, you would think that apple trees are fortunate to make it through the year, let alone set fruit.  He fights a slew of insect pests along with fungal, bacterial, and viral diseases, struggling to end up with a harvest of fruits pretty enough to sell to his customers.

I feel lucky to be a homesteader who cares mostly about taste.  Still, I plan to take some of his preventative advice to heart.  We're slowly cutting down nearby cedar trees and would do the same if we had nearby crabapples or hawthorns since all three serve as alternate hosts for apple diseases.

Once our trees are bearing, we'll rake up their leaves in the fall and compost them since fallen apple trees can innoculate the tree with diseases the next year if left in place.  While thinning our hypothetical fruits, we'll be careful to remove insect-damaged apples and will also rake up June-dropped fruits to feed to our chickens.  Old timey apple farmers used to run poultry and swine under their trees during that period --- maybe we'll have pigs by then and can work something out.

For now, though, we're in that golden period before the apple trees mature when we can fantasize that our fruits won't fall prey to any diseases or pests.  I'll dream while I can, and remember The Apple Grower for organic tips when the time comes.

Apple trees can take up to a decade to bloom and produce their first fruit, so the rest of the book presents information I can only consider theoretically.  It sure is nice to dream about white apple blossoms and growing fruits, though.

I was stunned to read that an apple flower requires an average of 68 bee visits to ensure proper pollination!  It turns out that the multiple seeds inside an apple need to be individually pollinated, and that a fruit with only one or two seeds is likely to be dropped by the tree before it is mature.  Michael Phillips borrows honeybees to put in his orchard at the critical period and sometimes even cuts his dandelion flowers down to make sure the bees concentrate on apple blossoms.  He also encourages wild flowering plants at other times of the year to build up his bumblebee and orchard bee population.

Then, after carefully getting as many of his flowers pollinated as possible (usually 1 in 8 will make fruit), he goes back to the orchard and manually thins the tiny fruits to one apple per cluster.  He also picks off fruits until they are no closer together than four inches along the branch.  Thinning the apples about 35 days after full bloom helps make sure his trees bear every year rather than lapsing into biennial fruiting.  He ends up with about the same weight of fruit as he would without thinning, but the resulting apples are much larger.

One of the biggest chinks in our food independence is grain.  We grow sweet corn and could grow field corn though our consumption of corn meal is so low that the latter doesn't seem like a good use of space.  But we also buy masses of wheat flour and rolled oats every year, along with some rice.  Can we become less dependent on commercial supplies of grain?

I've held off on planting grains because, frankly, I'm terrified of the extensive process of cutting, threshing, winnowing, and what all.  Instead, I'm currently looking at two grains that used to be staple crops for Native Americans --- quinoa and amaranth.  It sounds like both can be easily harvested by hand and their seeds aren't covered with a hull, so they don't need extensive processing.  (Quinoa seeds are covered by a soapy substance called saponin that can be removed by washing them in cold water in a blender, changing the water five times or until it is no longer sudsy.)

Maybe I should splurge and buy some of the grain to eat first to see if we like them, but I've heard they're both delicious cooked like rice, and that amaranth can also be ground into a flour.  Both are higher in protein and lower in carbohydrates than more traditional grains, which can't hurt.

Has anyone had luck growing quinoa or amaranth?  I think we may splurge and buy some seeds this year and give them a shot!  (Can you tell I'm in the midst of garden-planning for next year?)

I learned last week that the worst thing you can do to your soil biology is to grow grass under your fruit trees.  So I was surprised to read that Michael Phillips grows grasses in his orchard.  His technique, though, is nothing like the often-mowed lawns found in other orchards.

Michael uses gravel directly around the base of his trees to prevent any weed growth.  Outside this gravel circle, he mulches his young trees with rotten hay.  Once the trees have reached bearing age, though, the purchased mulch gives way to what he calls a sod mulch system.

Under these mature trees, grasses and broad-leaved weeds are allowed to grow outside the gravel ring until the petals fall from the apple flowers.  Then the groundcover plants are cut and the resulting hay is spread beneath the trees, shading out most of the plants it initially grew from.  The quickly rotting hay combines with compost to give the apple tree a quick boost of fertility, but the weeds are able to grow back through the next spring to create another year's mulch.

A 1923 study showed that this sod mulch system gave two to four times the yield compared to simply growing lawn beneath the apple trees.  On the other hand, some apple varieties responded slightly better to the surrounding soil being tilled and planted with a cover crop annually.  I like the direction I've been going in with comfrey under my fruit trees, but sod mulch would definitely be worth a shot if I was running an entire orchard and needed to mechanize the process.

The most vivid part of the entire book is a quote from a nineteenth century text about apples and bones.  Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, was buried with his wife beside a large apple tree.  The tree was attracted to his bones and sent a root from his skull, down his backbone to the hips, then divided in two to trace each leg.  The root bent at the knees and formed a man-like shape, in the process digesting every bit of Roger Williams' body.

From this anecdote, Michael Phillips determined that apple trees like bones.  In fact, calcium is a limiting factor in the trees' fruit production, just as it is for tomatoes.  If the proportions of calcium, magnesium, and potassium aren't just right in the soil, the apple tree may not be able to suck up enough calcium and the fruits will develop bitter pit.

Poultry bones are, in fact, one of the few waste products that shouldn't be a waste product on our farm.  I turn carcasses into rich stocks, but the stewed bones are no longer safe for Lucy to consume, so we carefully bury them out of her reach.  Given apple trees' need for calcium, we've started putting those carcass pits around our young apple trees in hope that the trees roots will find the bones and suck up the precious calcium.  Maybe someday we'll dig up the apple roots and find them curled into the shape of a bird.

Old timey apples are one of my oldest loves.  The first June apples, translucent against the sun, are far too tender to sell in the grocery store.  We used to gather them from abandoned roadside trees, then Mom turned them into the world's best applesauce and pies.

In the winter, Daddy would buy us Stayman Winesaps by the bushel.  We kept them in the basement with a bowl of sweet, tangy fruit always at hand in the house.  Since I was raised without sugared treats, that crunchy fruit was like nectar.

When I grew up and left the nest, I realized that most folks don't eat real apples.  They subsist on tasteless Red Delicious, insipidly sweet Golden Delicious, or blandly sour Granny Smith.

Which is all to say that I could see myself --- in another life --- running an organic apple orchard full of unique varieties, just like the one Michael Phillips documents in The Apple Grower.  I've critiqued his apple orchard microbusiness over on our microbusiness blog, but over here I'm going to pull out the gems that we small-time growers can learn from a master.

Lucy's worst trait is her tendency to dig up garden beds, diving in and sending dirt and vegetables flying in every direction.  Usually, I berate her and grumble under my breath about darn dogs, but lately I've had a change of heart.  I've been reading about how damaging mice and voles can be in the winter, girdling young fruit trees.  Granted, this guy that I found in the snow near one of Lucy's manaical digging sprees is a shrew (meaning that it eats insects and earthworms instead of plants), but I often find dead rodents left in her wake as well.  I wonder if she does more good than harm with her digging episodes?

Teaming with Microbes made it clear that we have to make some major tweaks to our mulching and fertilizing campaign.  The horse manure and grass clippings we apply to our vegetable garden beds are perfect, but next year we should shred our tree leaves much more before applying them as a winter mulch.

On the other hand, I'm starting to rethink whether I should have applied horse manure to our fruit trees.  It sounds like heavy mulches of rotting wood chips or leaves are more likely to lead to the fungi dominated soil communities these trees prefer.  At least we didn't fall into the trap of trying to grow grass under our fruit trees --- a big no-no since grass prefers bacteria while trees prefer fungi.

So how do we build vegetable gardens with soil dominated by bacteria while creating fungi-dominated soil around our trees?  The first step is to start being more sophisticated about our mulch choices.

Bacteria are good at breaking down what composters like to call "greens" --- grass clippings, food scraps, and even straw (since the grain was cut while it was still growing and full of sugars.)  Bacteria also thrive on easy to digest manures.  On the other hand, fungi shine when given "browns" --- fallen leaves, wood chips, and anything else full of lignin and hard for most other organisms to digest.

The consistency and application method of the mulch matters too.  Wet, finely ground mulch supports bacteria, even if the mulch consists of fallen leaves.  On the other hand, dry mulch in big chunks will encourage fungi.  Any mulch that is worked into the soil will feed bacteria first, while mulch placed on the soil surface will feed fungi.

So an optimal mulch for a vegetable or annual flower garden would probably consist of finely chopped, wet grass clippings.  Under our trees, the best mulch would be big chunks of leaves or wood chips.

Why do some plants like fungi around their roots while others like bacteria?  The answer takes us into the realm of chemistry...hang in there.

Most soil bacteria secrete a slime that holds them to soil particles so that the tiny microorganisms don't wash away.  This slime tends to be alkaline, so as bacteria build up, the soil pH rises above 7.

Meanwhile, the type of nitrogen in the soil changes.  Decomposers in the soil excrete ammonium as a waste product, but when there are lots of bacteria around, the bacteria convert the ammonium into nitrate.

On the other hand, soil fungi secrete acids that they use to break down organic matter, making it easier to digest.  The acids in the soil make the environment more difficult for bacteria to inhabit, so most of the nitrogen in the soil stays as ammonium rather than being converted to nitrate.

As every gardener knows, plants care about pH.  What many gardeners don't realize is that plants also care about the form of nitrogen they take up.  Vegetables, annuals, and grasses tend to prefer nitrate, while trees, shrubs, and perennials prefer ammonium.  Now we know why lettuce is going to throw a hissy fit if the soil is full of fungi.

What is a fungi to bacteria ratio?  The fungi to bacteria ratio is simply the mass of fungi in the soil compared to the mass of bacteria in the soil.  In most cases, all you really need to know is whether the soil is dominated by fungi, dominated by bacteria, or has an even proportion of both.

In nature, disturbed soils like those after a mudslide or in your recently tilled garden have a strong bacterial dominance.  As the soil is left alone for a while, fungi start to move in until habitats like prairies or your lawn have a relatively even proportion of fungi and bacteria in residence.  Later, as shrubs and trees take over, the fungi in the soil build up even more so that forest soils are strongly fungi dominated.

Scientists have started to look at the fungi to bacteria ratio preferred by garden plants as well.  They discovered that carrots, lettuce, and crucifers enjoy strongly bacteria dominated soils while tomatoes, corn, and wheat like soils that are closer to evenly matched (though still leaning a bit toward bacteria.)  On the other hand, most perennials, shrubs, and trees like the soil to be full of fungi at ratios from 10:1 to 50:1.

Clearly, folks like me who have been treating our trees just like our lettuce beds need to stop!

I was sucked into Teaming with Microbes by Jeff Lowenfels and Wayne Lewis this weekend.  Teaming with Microbes took the information from my Living Soil lunchtime series and turned it into what felt like a fast-paced action novel, complete with stunning photos of the characters.

As you probably remember, a healthy soil food web equates to a healthy organic garden.  If you have the right critters in your soil, you'll have better nutrient retention, better soil structure, and better defense against diseases.

But Lowenfels and Lewis took the story one step further, explaining that not every soil food web is created equally.  Nor will one type of food web make all plants happy.  The key is to come up with the right fungi to bacteria ratio for each garden.

We love our dwarf Meyer lemon.  We got it as a tiny tree two years ago and ate our first four lemons last February.  We just got three more lemons that turned into the most delicious lemon meringue pie, and the tree still has four half-grown lemons and an explosion of flowers on its branches.

We've now met four other people who have dwarf Meyer lemons, and the reports are varied.  Our neighbor has a several year old tree that had 91 lemons on it last year:

On the other hand, my father's lemon tree is a year old with no sign of blooms or fruits.  Another friend's lemon tree looks even more puny.  What's going on?

I'm far from an expert on dwarf Meyer lemons, but I'm starting to think that the trees require heavy feeding and big pots.  Our lemon tree is in a five gallon pot that I filled with stump dirt, topped off later with worm castings, and now fertilize regularly with compost tea from the worm bin.  My neighbor's amazing lemon tree is in an even bigger pot and he feeds it Miracle Grow.  On the other hand, the less happy trees I've seen have all been in smaller pots.  Remember, creating lemons takes a lot of energy, so your tree needs plenty of nitrogen.

My advice, for what it's worth --- transplant your lemon into a big pot and feed it, feed it, feed it!  Under the right conditions, dwarf Meyer lemons are a great source of citrus for those in cold climates who want to grow their own as a houseplant.

I have to admit that my primary goal in reading Farmers of Forty Centuries was to discover whether farmers really put outhouses along public roads, hoping to trap travelers into depositing their wastes therein.  The book gave me a resounding yes, and noted that contractors also paid for the privilege of removing human waste from cities so that they could sell the precious substance to farmers.  Humanure was often diluted with water and applied directly to fields or dried and then applied in a powder form.

Of course, it took a lot more than humanure to maintain the fertility of fields for thousands of years.  King saw farmers building huge compost piles, planting nitrogen fixing plants (especially clovers) as a green manure, and cutting plants from the hillside and grave mounds to apply to the soil or to add to their compost piles.  Just like in Central America, high fertility silt was excavated from canals and applied to fields, and King noted that the snails in the canal mud were also important in the fertilizing campaign.  Farmers scavenged animal wastes from the roadsides and carefully husbanded any wastes from their own livestock, and they also drained fish ponds at intervals so that they could scoop up the high quality mud on the pond floor.  The addition of ashes from their cooking fires and all plant residues from their fields rounded out their organic matter.

Traditional Chinese agriculture made extremely efficient use of space and time.  One trick they used was to apply heavy inputs of organic fertilizer, allowing crop plants to be spaced very close together.  (More on the fertilizers tomorrow.)

Farmers also used several techniques to tease two to four crops out of their farm each year.  They started most plants in seed beds so that space in the main part of the farm was left open for an early season crop.  A typical rotation might include early season beans, followed by a grain (such as the rice shown here).  During the final month of a grain's growth period, a third crop (like cotton) was often interplanted so that the cotton could get a few weeks' head start on the fall season.  Those of us who are lax about our fall gardens should take heed!

As we all know, animals require about five times as much land per calorie as vegetables do, so it should come as no surprise that the traditional Chinese diet is very low on meat.  King noted that the primary meat animal was pigs, which he explains convert plant matter to meat at the most efficient rate.

And how about tree crops?  The best example of space-saving orcharding in the book was the technique Japanese farmers used to raise pear trees.  The branches were trained to grow horizontally along an arbor just high enough off the ground that farmers could walk underneath and easily pick the fruit.  Trees were spaced just twelve feet apart, and the dense foliage shaded out most undergrowth.  The technique sounds a lot like espaliered fruit trees to me.

Most vegetable and annual flower seeds are pretty easy to grow --- just throw them in the ground at something close to the right depth at the right time of year and they sprout just fine.  When you start trying to plant tree, shrub, and perennial herb seeds, though, propagation techniques often get a bit more tricky.  I always stumble when I'm told to scarify or stratify seeds, but both techniques are actually quite easy, as I discovered when I started looking up information about growing honey locusts and persimmons from seed.

Persimmon seeds need to be stratified before they will germinate.  People try to make stratification more difficult than it actually is, telling you to put the seeds in a pot of dirt or in a ziploc bag with a wet paper towel and leave them in the fridge for a certain length of time.  In practice, I've discovered that native plants have evolved to stratify quite nicely in the garden.  Just plant the seeds in the fall and they'll be exposed to plenty of cool temperatures and will germinate as usual in the spring.  I tried this with persimmons a few years ago with good success and am trying again this year.

Honey locust seeds, on the other hand, need scarification to germinate.  The problem is that many seeds evolved to be eaten by animals and to pass through the gut relatively unharmed.  Seeds need thick coatings to survive the stomach acids, but these thick coatings are often impenetrable to water, meaning that your seed won't sprout unless it's scarified.  The natural way to scarify seeds is to pass them through some animal's stomach and let the acids break partway through the seed coating.  Barring a handy animal, people will drop the seeds in a vat of acid or hot water, or will manually damage the seed coat (hopefully without damaging the seed inside.)  I tried to file my honey locust seeds with no luck, and instead ended up snipping through the edge of the seed coat with fingernail scissors.  This is my first attempt at scarification, so I'm very curious to see whether it works!

In the early twentieth century when Farmers of Forty Centuries was written, Asia was immensely overcrowded compared to the United States.  Chinese farmers only had about two acres of agricultural land to feed each person, compared to twenty acres per person in the U.S.  In addition, many parts of China had been farmed constantly for four thousand years --- clearly, Chinese farmers weren't subscribing to American tactics of using the land hard then moving on.

Although many of the traditional farming practices outlined in Farmers of Forty Centuries have probably been replaced by mechanization and chemical fertilizers in the last century, I think we still have a lot to learn from the book.  Urban homesteaders will be enthralled by traditions that allow a person to be fed on as little as a sixth of an acre of prime farmland.  And those of us watching the U.S. population explode will be equally interested since we currently have only about three acres of farmland to feed each American.

So how did Chinese farmers feed themselves on such small farms?  Read on.

The farm got an inch of rain while we were away --- perfect conditions to test out our new swales.  So far, I'm quite impressed by how they're working.  The ditches (swales) have filled up with water, but the surrounding ground seems firmer and less waterlogged than usual.

Unfortunately, I don't think the swales are quite big enough since the soil downhill still has some standing water.  Next time I'm working in that area, I'll decide whether to deepen the swales, add a berm, or just add more swales.

Yes...tomatoes are now considered carnivorous predators who kill insects in order to "self fertilize". Botanists have recently discovered for the first time how the stem of tomatoes has sticky hairs that can capture and kill small insects and then absorb the yummy nutrients when the bugs fall to the ground and decay.

Some people think this trait developed in the wild in an effort to boost the nutrient levels in poor soil areas, but most domestic varieties have the same ability.

I keep getting questions from folks wanting to know the difference between Egyptian onions, potato onions, shallots, and multiplier onions.  All are perennial onions that reproduce by bulbs, and it's easy to confuse them.

Egyptian onions (also known as walking onions) are easy to distinguish because they reproduce by little bulbs at the top of leaf stalks.  They don't make big bulbs, so are best eaten as green onions or scallions.

"Multiplier onion" is a term used to refer to any onion that reproduces by dividing its underground bulbs (just like garlic does.)  Multiplier onions can be separated into two categories --- shallots (which form bulbs up to 1.5 inches in diameter) and potato onions (which form bulbs up to 3 inches in diameter.)

We're growing potato onions for the first time this fall, and I have to say that I've already decided I love them.  I carefully planted them in raised beds a month ago and mulched them heavily with leaves.  Then, just as everything else in the garden and woods was turning brown and dying, the potato onions shot up fresh, green sprouts.  Hooray for perennial onions!

Time for another daffodil giveaway!  I said it best last year:

I don't know quite how many daffodil bulbs we'll be giving away.  We've got a couple of hundred at the moment, but we're also giving them away with our Avian Aqua Miser orders.  So, whatever's left come January 1 will go to our lucky winner.

To enter the giveaway, just leave a comment on any post by December 31.  I'll throw your name in the hat (multiple times if you make multiple comments) then will contact the winner through the blog.  (Be sure to check back on January 1 to see if you won!)  That way you have an incentive to leave us lots of comments.  I look forward to hearing from you!

As a gardener, it's not enough to simply know that your soil is teeming with life.  You probably want to know how to adjust that life to make the best possible environment for your plants.

Soil organisms detest most components of traditional agriculture.  Chemical fertilizers, soil disturbance (aka tilling), lack of oxygen, and excessive wetness can wipe out your soil food web in a heartbeat.  Growing annual plants with no perennials around will starve all of the beneficial bacteria and fungi that depend on root exudates so that next year when you plant your seeds, the soil is barren.

Instead, try no-till techniques and mulching in your annual gardens.  And if you really want a healthy soil environment, start forest gardening.  Some tree roots keep growing (and secreting sugars) all year --- just what your bacteria and fungi are craving!

Root exudates aren't the only products plants provide to the soil food web.  Dead plants (and animals too) add organic matter to the soil, spawning an entirely different web of soil microorganisms.

Bacteria are great decomposers of fresh, green plant matter, while fungi prefer the more difficult to decompose lignin and cellulose found in many tree leaves and in wood.  Protozoa and nematodes help too, although they also enjoy munching on the microorganisms smaller than themselves (and on each other.)

But most decomposers are too small to eat debris on their own.  Instead, they depend on soil arthropods (like sowbugs, millipedes, and ants) to chew up the debris for them.  The soil arthropods come back later when the bacteria and fungi have multiplied and the debris is well decomposed to get their reward --- the released nutrients in the organic matter and the tasty bodies of the decomposers themselves.

And don't forget the plants.  What do they get out of this mess of soil life?  Nutrients, of course.  At each stage in the decomposition process, some nutrients leach out into the water and get hungrily sucked up by the plants whose roots run through the whole ecosystem.

I probably could have left them in the ground a little longer, but the day before Thanksgiving just felt like the right time to dig the parsnips.  I ended up with a big bowlful, and the roots slipped quite nicely between layers of damp creek sand/gravel in a large flower pot.  They have now become the first inhabitants of our fridge root cellar!

Meanwhile, inside, I checked on the carrots I've been storing in the fridge.  After about a week, the top layer started to lose a bit of its crispness, so I wet a dish towel and laid it on top.  It seems like I need to re-soak the dish towel once a week, but the carrots are now staying nice and crisp.  The only problem is that we've eaten half of them already!  I guess next year we'll have to grow twice as many.

I still have a bed of younger parsnips and a couple of beds of young carrots in the garden.  I planted these too late to get large roots this fall, so I'm hoping that they'll overwinter in the ground under a heavy leaf mulch and grow for me in the spring.

Just as the sun forms the focus of the above-ground food web, plant roots form the nucleus of the below-ground food web.  Every plant exudes sugars, carbohydrates, and proteins from their roots, sometimes giving away as much as 40% of the high energy foods they worked so hard to produce.  Why?

Plants are, in essence, farming bacteria and fungi.  These microorganisms cluster around roots and soak up the high quality plant exudates, then provide services to the plant in return.  Mycorrhizal fungi bind to the plant roots and carry nutrients and water from long distances away to feed their plant buddies.  Fungi also store easily leachable calcium in crystals on their backs, where the nutrient can cycle through the food web and return to plant roots rather than being lost.

Bacteria do their part in the root zone too, cycling nutrients out of forms inaccessible to plants and into forms roots can easily suck up.  In addition, good bacteria (and fungi too) protect the plant from pathogens.  They both bind tiny soil particles into larger particles, thus improving the soil structure, drainage, and aeration.

For plants, the primary purpose of soil is as a reservoir of water and nutrients.  If you fertilize your garden with commercial fertilizers, the nutrient cycle is simple --- the fertilizers dissolve in the water and the plants suck them up.  But if you're an organic gardener, nutrient cycles are a lot more complicated.

Some nutrients, like potassium, calcium, and magnesium are extremely soluble in water.  The good news is that they quickly leach out of debris, and the resulting solution of nutrient water is easy for plants to absorb.  On the other hand, if plant roots can't suck the nutrients up fast enough (such as in the winter or during heavy rains), these nutrients are washed away into the surrounding streams or deep into the soil where roots can't reach.  One study showed that half of the calcium and potassium leached out of soil in just four hours.

Other nutrients stay put in dead plant leaves and other debris.  Although they don't leach away as often, these nutrients present their own problems to plants --- how to get at them.  Luckily, soil microorganisms are just waiting for their chance to enter the food web.

Our hybrid hazel plants arrived on Saturday!  Hazels are one of the few food-producing plants that grow well in partial shade, so I made them a home in our young forest garden.

This part of the garden is a trouble spot in wet weather.  I suspect that the topsoil eroded away when the land was pasture (before we bought the property), so the remaining soil is pretty much pure clay.  As soon as the grass dies back in the winter, the area turns into a waterlogged mess.  I've tried to plant directly into this soil a few times and ended up with dead plants, so this time, I opted for building mounds and swales.

My first step was to graze chickens pretty hard on the area.  They ate every bit of greenery and dropped a lot of good fertilizer.

Next, I mounded up some semi-rotted branches, asparagus tops, and wingstem stalks to give the mounds some structural integrity.  I dug ditches on the downhill sides of the mounds and piled the excavated soil up onto the branches. 

When raked flat, the mounds were a couple of feet off the ground --- that should provide plenty of good drainage.  I planted baby hazels in each mound, mulched the shrubs with leaves, then planted some comfrey along some of the mound walls to increase the structural stability.  I transplanted some horsetails from the floodplain into one of the swales to add fertility since horsetails accumulate silicon, magnesium, calcium, iron, and cobalt.  If they like it there, the horsetails should spread out to take over the whole ditch.

I'm hopeful that our new swales will help dry up a trouble spot.  If not, I'll dig the swales deeper and add a berm on the downhill side.

If you raked back the leaves and carefully weighed out all of the life in a forest's soil, the sheer quantity would astound you.  The soil invertebrates would add up to the equivalent mass of four to thirteen sheep per acre.  In a coniferous forest, where fungi are king, the threads of fungi in a single teaspoon of soil would unspool to stretch forty miles.  Tickle out the tiny bacteria and they'd add up to a few tons per acre as well.

That said, the volume of soil microorganisms doesn't hold a candle to their essential functions.  This week's lunchtime series is based on Dave Jacke's Edible Forest Gardens volume 1.  I didn't have room to present all of the rivetting information there, so if you're intrigued by this teaser, I highly recommend checking his book out and flipping straight to chapter 5.

On Friday morning, we hopped out of bed, fed the animals, and jumped in the car for a quick trip to South Carolina to visit my father.  We drove out of the Great Valley, up over the rumpled Blue Ridge Mountains, and then down into the Piedmont.  By the time we reached Daddy's house, I had slipped out of my winter coat and was marveling at the number of leaves still on the trees.

The difference that a bit of mountain elevation makes to the climate is amazing.  Daddy's garden seemed to be a month behind mine, with the basil dead but the last cucumbers and peppers still littering the ground.  We gave him a bucket waterer to keep his chickens hydrated, along with our first homegrown lemon of the year.  In exchange, we loaded up the car with some more wild River Cane starts, some oregano plants (part of my endless search to find the most tasty type), and sage and rosemary cuttings.  The last two are long shots, but I figure if they don't root, I can put them in dinner with no harm done.

Speaking of food, we ate our first Thanksgiving dinner of the year..and our second from the leftovers the next day.  Thanks, Daddy!

The final Central American farming technique for this week's lunchtime series is subirrigation.  Although I'm used to watering plants from above (or at least using drip irrigation slightly beneath the soil surface), many traditional Central American farmers watered their plants from below.  When farmers raise the water table to 1 to 6 feet below the soil surface (depending on soil texture), water naturally creeps upwards to roots through capillary action.  This damp but not wet region of the soil is known as the capillary fringe.

By raising or lowering the level of the groundwater, farmers can keep the damp soil within reach of plants' roots, allowing the plants to water themselves.  The zanjas (canals) I mentioned in a previous lunchtime series are primarily built to manage the depth of the water table in the surrounded garden beds.  Beds can be 40 feet wide in clay soil and still be watered by the surrounding zanjas, although beds in sandy soil are no more than 10 feet wide.  In either case, farmers do some hand-watering (dipped out of the canal) for shallow-rooted plants.

For the first time ever, I'm actually putting the garden to bed for the winter properly.  As of today, all of our garden beds and trees are safely tucked away under leaves.  I've just got the berries and grapes to go, and then everyone will be weed-free for the winter. 

In addition to cutting down weeds and adding fertility, I've read that mulching your trees at this time of year can give you several extra months of root growth.  By keeping the ground temperature above 40 F, the mulch prevents your roots from going dormant and results in a lot more growth through the winter months.

I even got a chance to take down all of the trellises and haul the netting and supports over to the barn.  I'm hoping that all of this hard autumn work will pay off in the summer when we have fewer weeds and healthier soil.

Cepas are expanding pit terraces created around trees planted on a slope.  When the seedling is first put in the ground, a bit of the hillside is hoed down to create a circular terrace with a lip at the downhill side to hold in water.  As the trees grow, farmers continue to hoe down the hillside, enlarging the cepa.

Farmers take advantage of gravity during the formation of cepas, just like they do during the formation of tablones.  The terraces around the trees trap water and debris flowing down the hillside, irrigating and feeding the trees without any work on the part of the farmer.

I love all of the terrace ideas presented in Gene Wilken's book, but he does include a word of warning --- slope management requires constant maintenance or it can cause dangerous conditions!  Everyone in my area knows about badly built settling ponds constructed in strip-mined areas, and about the disasters that ensue when the dams fail and downstream houses wash away.  Although I find terracing intriguing, I think I'll kick these ideas around for awhile before putting them into practice.

Much of Central America is mountainous, so it's no surprise to find a broad range of terraces throughout the area.  Tablones are a type of Guatemalan terrace created on steep slopes.  Farmers simply hoe soil downhill, using gravity to ease the work and creating step-like terraces about two feet wide.

Every year, tablones are re-formed by hoeing a bit of soil from the terrace above onto the terrace below.  Crop stubble is left in place and ends up being buried under the new dirt where it will decompose quickly.  Farmers can easily plant their seeds in the loose soil, then hoe down a bit more dirt to cover it.  The result combines the best of no-till and till techniques --- the majority of the soil isn't moved, so erosion is minimized.  But the soil is loosened, which makes it easy to plant and keep down weeds. 

Another familiar concept --- the raised bed --- is very widespread in Central American farming.  Unlike the fancy raised beds many Americans make with walls of wood or stone, Central American raised beds look an awful lot like our low cost garden beds.  The beds are simply mounds of earth of varying heights and sizes and with various purposes.

The most familiar to me are camellones (like the ones shown above), which average about 5 feet wide and a foot high by many feet long.  Camellones provide loose earth for easy planting and root development, improve drainage and lift plants above flood or irrigation water, retain moisture on slopes, and make it easy to control weeds and mix in soil amendments.  This type of raised bed is typically used for maize and other vegetable crops, although taller mounds are often created for planting mango trees in flooded areas.

Even more widespread are mules, a type of raised bed created by hilling up soil around young maize plants.  The process is reported to be very labor intensive and reminds me of hilling potatoes.  The mules are important in windy areas, where they keep the maize plants from blowing over, and mules everywhere seem to improve drainage and aeration, decrease evaporation, and control weeds.  Oddly, modern farmers don't think that mules are worth the effort, but some continue to hill up mounds of earth around the perimeters of their fields to serve as a sort of windbreak.

Am I harming the forest, I wonder, by raking out leaves for my garden?  Leaf litter in the forest lowers light on the forest floor, changes the temperature of the soil, and affects soil and water nutrient dynamics.  Depending on which plants you identify with, leaf litter can be a bane or a boon.  The fallen leaves prevent many seeds from successfully sprouting and growing, but on the other hand the decreased competition is good for other types of seeds that are well adapted to pushing up through the leaf litter.

Basically, raking leaves out of the forest turns the clock backwards a bit, making the ecosystem act a bit younger.  Wild Turkeys are constantly scratching, and one set of scientists found that turkey scratched areas tend to help Red Maple seeds sprout but prevent oak seeds from sprouting.  I wouldn't be at all surprised if there is some forest plant, animal, or fungus out there whose niche is forest soil scratched bare by turkeys.

I figure that as long as I keep my leaf raking on a turkey-like schedule and don't take leaves from the same spot every year, I won't do much harm.  I might cause some early successional plants to sprout, but they'll just be swamped by next year's leaf fall and likely won't get a toehold on the forest.

For more information, check out:
Rinkes, Z.L., and B.C. McCarthy.  2007.  Ground layer heterogeneity and hardwood regeneration in mixed oak forest.  Applied Vegetation Science.  10: 279-284.

Sydes, C., and J.P. Grime.  1981.  Effects of tree leaf litter on herbaceous vegetation in deciduous woodland: I. Field investigations.  Journal of Ecology.  69(1): 237-248.

And while you're at it, read our ebook about starting a small business or visit our homemade chicken waterer site.

With an armload of new permaculture books waiting on my attention, I figured it was high time to finish up my series on traditional Central American farming practices.  The first half of Gene Wilken's Good Farmers has already tempted me to to embark on a huge leaf-raking project.  Where will the second half lead?

To start with, the book noted that Central American farmers have been forest gardening since long before the term was invented.  Large scale farms were usually all annual vegetables, but most farmers had a kitchen garden that modern permaculturalists would approve of.  Coconuts arched over papayas and mangos which in turn shaded cacoa, bananas, peaches, avocados, pomegranates, ad oranges.  Enough light filtered down to the ground to feed maize and beans, and chickens ran free under everything.

Farmers noted that their kitchen gardens required more work than their less diverse fields of vegetables, and that crop quality was often lower in the crowded forest gardens.  On the other hand, the farmers seldom saw weeds or pests, didn't have to worry about erosion, and enjoyed having a diversity of food at their finger tips.  Clearly, forest gardening was worth their while.

Shooting the deer, of course, is the easy part of getting free meat out of the woods.  The next steps left me floundering and wishing I had a pro with me.  At least I had the internet!

Everyone you talk to says that it's essential that you disembowel the deer immediately.  I was surprised at how thick the hide was on the belly --- I hacked and hacked and didn't even make it through the hair before turning the knife over to Mark.  He did a better job and then I had no problem pulling out the steaming entrails --- a lot like gutting a chicken but with the addition of what seemed like a gallon of blood sloshing over my hands.

After carrying the deer back to the barn, we hung it up and went inside to figure out whether we should age the meat.  Some people seem to age their deer for up to two weeks, leaving them hanging out in the open.  A few minutes of research, though, suggested that you shouldn't age your meat outside if the temperature is above 40 or 50, and the day was beautiful.  So we moved on to plan B --- cut the deer up and age the meat for a day or two in the fridge.

Between the two of us, with the help of a sharp knife and hacksaw, skinning was fun and relatively painless.  Then we whacked off the head (to be composted), the legs, and the tenderloin before cutting up the rest of the meat for Lucy's dinners.  I've been reading Sharon Astyk's thought-provoking blog and was especially struck by her entry that calls us to task for buying mainstream pet food.  Although I would consider it wasteful to throw away all of the meat I plan to give to Lucy, it'll help lower our dogfood footprint (and will save me a lot of time cutting little bits of meat off the bone.)

I spent the next two hours chopping meat off the carcass and bagging it in meal-size portions.  I'm a terrible butcher, and I suspect this part could be done much better by someone with a bit of knowledge.  Still, it's hard to complain when a third of our fridge is now full of free range meat bought for the cost of a single bullet! 

We ended up with 24 pounds of meat for us humans, which includes the kidney (but not the heart, since I seem to have missed that.)  Nearly half of the meat is from the front legs and lower parts of the back legs and will be turned into roasts or sausage.  The rest is steak-quality meat, I hope.

All told, from my pre-dawn wake-up call to the last wiping down of the counters, it took six hours to kill and process my first deer.  If our chicken killing experiments are any indication, this time could be halved with practice.  Still, I think I'll wait a while before trying my hand at another deer!

Even though hunting season only started today, I've been hunting in my mind for two weeks.  After a serious bout of target practice at the beginning of the month, the gun has sat in front of the living room window.  At intervals, I would turn off the deer deterrents and let the deer into the yard, but every time I cracked a window, the deer were gone.

I learned that we have two sets of deer that visit our garden --- a doe with a relatively young fawn and a pair of adults.  I learned their paths, too, and the time of day they like to come to call.  Half a dozen times, I thought I might get a shot at them.  Three times, I took the safety off the gun and pumped a shell into the chamber.  But I wasn't going to shoot until I was sure I would kill the deer, not just wound it.

I turned off the deer deterrents last night, then woke at 5:51, dreaming of deer hunting.  At dawn, I opened the door --- and two deer fled up the hillside out of the yard.  Was that my one chance, gone?

Still, it was the perfect dusky morning, just the time when deer like to travel.  I leashed Lucy, made sure the safety was on the gun, and headed off for our morning walk.  In the powerline cut, I startled our other set of deer, but these two only ran a few feet and stopped.  I crept forward and the deer watched me but stayed put.  My second chance!

I silently ordered Lucy to sit, then crouched down myself and took the safety off the gun.  Lucy is a good dog, but she's not used to hunting --- she tried to crawl into my lap with the gun, and the ensuing scuffle sent the deer running again.  But again they stopped and waited.  Again I crept forward.  This time, Lucy sat, I crouched, the deer watched. 

I'd been practicing to hit the heart, just behind the front leg.  But the deer in my sights was only visible from the neck up.  I could try for a head shot and risk missing entirely,  or guess where its heart might be and fire blindly into the weeds.  I chose the latter, checked one last time to make sure my aim was accurate, then pulled the trigger.

I can't even remember the gun going off.  Suddenly, the second deer was fleeing in huge bounds, her white tail a brilliant flag against the brown woods.  The deer I'd shot at was invisible.  Did I hit it?  Wound it?  Kill it?

I beat a path through the brambles to the spot where the deer had stood.  Nothing.  But I faintly smelled a hint of gunpowder and blood so I let Lucy off the leash, hoping she'd track down the wounded deer.  She set off like a shot and I raced behind her until she crossed the creek to the neighbor's hay field.  Was my deer really gone?

I circled back around toward home and nearly stumbled upon my deer.  It had fled about twenty feet, then died just outside the powerline cut.  Upon further inspection, I saw that my shot had been about five inches off, hitting the lungs instead of the heart --- still a pretty good hit.

I have to admit that at this point, my adrenaline was pumping so hard that I couldn't think what to do next.  So I made sure the safety was on the gun and ran home to my husband, waking him out of a sound sleep to come help me gut the deer, tie it to a board, and carry it home.

My very first deer!  I guess I shouldn't feel so special since the newspaper is always full of photos of six year olds and their first kill at this time of year.  But I'm oddly exhilarated, floating on air.  A deerslayer wannabe no longer, Mark has taken to calling me "Killer."

So far, I've been talking mostly about tree leaves, but what about smaller plants?  Jacke writes that understory plants make up only about 11% of a forest's biomass, but they contain 37% of the forest's nitrogen, 29% of its its phosphorus, 33% of its magnesium, and 32% of its potassium.  Clearly, non-woody plants would be my best choice for fertilizer.  I'm already using green comfrey and grass leaves as mulch, but I suspect I should expand this program.

I was intrigued to read that the understory of a forest can also help prevent nutrients from washing out of the soil during the winter.  As fallen tree leaves decay, they release soluble nutrients that can quickly leach away during winter rains.  Early spring ephemerals like bloodroot and hepatica are the only forest plants active at this time of year, so they are able to suck up the nutrients and use them to grow leaves and flowers.  When the trees leaf out a few weeks later, the early spring ephemerals die back and rot into the soil, releasing the same nutrients to be sucked up by hungry tree roots and complete the cycle.  I guess there's a reason other than beauty (and bees) to add early spring flowers to my forest garden!

Although the tree leaves I've been adding to my garden have some nutrients, they are really the iceberg lettuce of the organic fertilizer world.  They're primarily useful as an erosion-resistant mulch and, eventually, to boost the organic matter of my soil.  As I read about leaf decomposition, I came to realize that if I want to put really high quality leaves on my garden, I need to pick them green.

Green leaves are chock full of micro and macronutrients.  But trees aren't dumb; when autumn comes, the plants suck as many nutrients as they can out of their leaves.  Nitrogen content of fallen leaves is often less than half that in the same tree's green leaves, while the percent of lignin in fallen leaves more than doubles.*  The result?  Green leaves decay much faster and release more nutrients into the soil.

Suddenly, I understand why various books have recommended growing shrubs like elderberries and hazels to be coppiced.  If I cut green shoots of these trees during the growing season and use them for mulch, the mulched plants will get a much greater boost of nutrients than if I'd waited and raked up the fallen leaves.

*Mafongoya, P.L., K.E. Giller, and C.A. Palm.  1998.  Decomposition and nitrogen release patterns of tree prunings and litter.  Agroforestry Systems.  38: 77-97.

As I've been learning more about roots, I've started wondering --- does that mean we should be spacing our trees differently?  The official spacing recommendations you find in most books or on extension service websites are based on the width of the trees' crowns.  But if roots extend out 2.25 times as wide as the crown, on average, won't the trees be competing underground?

My Edible Forest Gardens book gave a good suggestion.  They recommend deciding which resource will be the most limiting for your plants and choosing spacing based on that.  For example, if you live in a dry climate, have sandy soil, and don't irrigate, you probably should be spacing your trees based on the extent of the roots since water will be the limiting resource.  On the other hand, if you have plenty of water but are on the north side of a hill, chances are that light will be the limiting resource and you'll need to space based on crown diameter (which tends to be the official recommendation.)  If nutrients are the most limiting resource on your site, you should probably go back to roots to determine your spacing.

In our garden, water isn't a problem (except when there's too much of it) and we add nutrients.  So I guess we can stick to the official tree spacing recommendations for now.

 

The old gas powered chipper/grinder got moved up to the front of the get fixed line this week in an effort to increase our mulch production. Its 50 year old Briggs and Stratton engine won the first battle yesterday afternoon, but today I figured out exactly what to do with that stubborn motor.

Delete it.

The first step was to remove the four bolts that hold the engine to the frame. Then it's easy to lift out. Next fabricate some sort of vibration plate for the electric motor to be attached to, I used a scrap piece of 2x6. Once you get the pulley lined up secure the whole thing down to the frame and wire up a switch.

One of my favorite studies was by Cornelisson*, who studied the rate at which senescing leaves from 125 British plant species decomposed.  While other scientists carefully measured the percentage of lignin, nitrogen, and tannins in the leaves, Cornelisson wanted to know if he could predict the speed at which leaves broke down using more easily measured plant characteristics.

He discovered that the plants that decomposed fastest were woody climbers, followed by flowering herbs, deciduous shrubs, deciduous trees, grasses, and deciduous subshrubs.  The leaves that were slowest to decompose came from evergreens.

He also found that plant family was related to speed of leaf decomposition.  From fastest to slowest decomposition were Caprifoliaceae (Honeysuckle Family), Asteraceae (Composite Family), Salicaceae (Willow Family), Fabaceae (Bean Family), Rosaceae (Rose Family), Betulaceae (Birch Family), Poaceae (Grass Family), Pinacaceae (Pine Family), Ericaceae (Blueberry Family), and Fagaceae (Oak Family.)  Perhaps this is a quick and dirty way to choose which leaves to throw on the veggies and which on the trees?

*Cornelissen, J.H.C.  1996.  An Experimental Comparison of Leaf Decomposition Rates in a Wide Range of Temperate Plant Species and Types.  Journal of Ecology.  84(4):573-582.

As I sink my hands into mass after mass of fallen leaves, I am always happy to see creepy crawlies.  Tuesday was no exception.  The leaves I raked out of the woods came with mushrooms, daddy-long-legs, one salamander (who I returned to the woods), and several spiders.

Despite many folks' odd antipathy to spiders, the arachnids are in fact a very helpful generalist predator in the garden.  Spiders will eat just about anything that moves, so they keep insect population explosions from getting out of hand.  But spiders hate bare soil, so they are often absent from conventional agricultural situations.

Mulching is the best way to attract spiders to your garden, but having perennial plants around is also a good bet.  Comfrey seems to be especially attractive, even more so if you let the winter-killed leaves lie on the ground rather than "cleaning" them up.  One study in Switzerland found 240 spiders for every square meter of soil beneath comfrey leaves.  Wow!

From: Burki, H.M., and A. Hausammann.  1992.  Uberwinterung von Arthropoden im Boden und an Ackerunkrautern kunstlich angelegter Achkerkrautstreifen.  Agrarokologie. 7:1-158.  (I can't actually read this, but the study is cited all over the organic gardening world, so I assume someone can read German.  I got it most recently out of Edible Forest Gardens.)

You may have heard that putting fresh wood chips on your garden is a bad idea.  Wood contains lots of lignin, which binds to nitrogen and won't let it go for months or years.  When soil microorganisms begin decomposing the wood chips, there isn't any nitrogen for them to eat, so they have to take nitrogen out of the soil.  The result is that plants whose roots are in the soil under fresh wood chips can't get any nitrogen and they struggle to grow.  After a while, the wood chips break down to the point that they release nitrogen rather than hogging it --- then your plants get happy.

Although leaves contain much less lignin than wood, the same effect can occur.  Leaves that contain more than 15% lignin are difficult to decompose.*  Although I couldn't find a comprehensive list of the percent lignin in all the tree species in my woods, I think I can use a pretty simple rule of thumb --- if leaves feel thin and melt into the ground within a couple of months, they clearly have low lignin levels.  Trees like oaks, beech, and sycamore with thick leaves that stick around for a long time have high lignin levels and might leach nitrogen out of my soil before giving any back.

I'll have to wait to see the results of my winter leaf mulching, but I suspect that the thin leaves I've put on my garden beds will melt in by spring and enrich the soil.  The thicker leaves may need to be raked back or supplemented by urine and manure.  Next year, I'll be more prepared and will use oak, beech, and sycamore leaves as mulch over manure in my perennial plantings while reserving leaves from maples and tulip-trees for my vegetable garden.

*Mafongoya, P.L., K.E. Giller, and C.A. Palm.  1998.  Decomposition and nitrogen release patterns of tree prunings and litter.  Agroforestry Systems.  38: 77-97.

As you know, I'm obsessed with leaves at the moment.  I want to know which tree leaves break down quickly for use in my vegetable garden, which ones provide the nutrients needed by my fruit trees, and so on.

The scientific literature is full of intriguing answers.  Agroforesters in the tropics have been untangling the costs and benefits of using tree leaves as a fertility source for decades and some suggest that tree leaves can make up nearly 100% of the nutritional requirements of vegetable crops.  But no one seems interested in using tree leaves on a large scale in the U.S.  I can only assume that chemical fertilizers are so much cheaper than labor here that using tree leaves isn't worth farmers' while.

Can we apply any of the lessons learned in the tropics to our southeast U.S. garden?  This week's lunch time series will at least give it a shot.

Jacke used the numbers shown here as one of his arguments for forest gardening.  He noted that forests are much more productive environments than annual agricultural land in terms of the amount of solar energy converted to biomass after the needs of the plants in the ecosystem are met.

His point is well taken, but I was more intrigued by another part of the graph.  Notice how wetlands are just as productive as tropical forests --- nearly double the productivity of temperate forests?  Can we create swamp gardens that mimic wetlands just like forest gardens mimic forests?

Some folks already make use of wetlands, but they seem to focus on the potential of wetlands to break down contaminants in graywater or sewage.  Since we have lots of floodplain land on our property, I can't help wonder if we could do something more interesting with it.  Maybe find a way to harvest biomass for mulch and compost to feed my hungry vegetable garden?  Rotate animals through it at a low enough rate that they take advantage of the fertility without causing erosion?  I'd be curious to hear if anyone has better ideas!

I got a kick out of your refrigerator burying idea, but wonder about the
cooling fluids, if there are any, and if there might be any chemicals you'd not want, seeping into any vegetables you might be storing?

--- Mom

That's a great question!  A century ago, the chemicals used to keep refrigerators cold included ammonia, methyl chloride, and sulfur dioxide, which leaked out of fridges and killed people.  As a result, we switched over to freon, a chemical that isn't toxic to humans but does rip big holes in the ozone layer if it escapes from your fridge.  In the 1990s, we switched again and started using a chemical that neither harms us nor the ozone layer.

Our fridge may date from the freon era, but since the fridge stopped cooling our food even though it kept running, we can be pretty sure that the refrigerants leaked out already.  The book we got the fridge root cellar idea out of suggested removing the cooling coils, but we think that we'd be more likely to puncture them and release refrigerants in the process.  Hopefully, any remaining refrigerant gases will be safely sequestered in the soil.

I first started noticing the term "permaculture" about a year ago, and the idea quickly struck my fancy.  My background is in forest ecology, and everything I read about forest gardening and permaculture just made intuitive sense.

Those of you who have been reading along know that we started planning our first forest garden last winter. That forest garden is still slowly taking shape, but hopefully in a decade it will be mature and bearing.  Every year we look forward to a greater yield with less work.  And, of course, to lots more fascinating permaculture books to keep our brains active!

This week's theme has been biomass transport.  Mark, the innovator, tripled our leaf productivity by changing our collection method.  I had been raking up leaves that fell on the driveway, stuffing them into our leaf bag, and driving back to the garden to spread them one bag at a time.  Mark figured out that we could put two to three leaf bags' worth of leaves into the heavy hauler with some judicious smooshing and a tarp tucked on top.

He also figured out that we could rake the leaves down off the hillside above the driveway and get scads of leaf matter for very little effort.  There's a chance the bared soil will erode some, but I have to weigh a little bit of erosion that will never reach the creek against extra transportation (aka, coal burned in the nearby power plant to pollute our air and water).  Some days, it feels hard to be human --- no matter what we do, it causes harm somewhere.

The good thing about the hillside leaves is that we get some duff with them, which helps solve our nitrogen problem.  Meanwhile, Mark has started peeing on some of our leaves to give them an influx of nitrogen and help them decompose faster.  Suddenly, the garden feels under control!  We topped all of the beds in the mule garden this week, which means we only have about two to three times that much garden left to put to bed for the winter.