Category Archives: Soil

The Garden in July

I am a committed, joyful gardener who wants to teach everyone else to grow their own food, too! I encourage others to garden NOT because it’s easy and anyone can just do it. I have heard stories from people about how they tried gardening but ran into so many problems that the 10 tomatoes they ended up with likely cost them $15 each. It is frustrating and does happen! But I believe that it’s worth not giving up, rising to the challenge and learning the skills you need to have your own garden. Here are a few reasons why…

Environmental Benefits

For a few thousand years, many agricultural systems have created as many problems as they have grown food. The big traps we fall into are: monocultures, soil disturbance, and more recently, chemical use. Our current US conventional ag system is guilty of all of these sins.

Now, however, we have the information needed to grow in ways that can heal the planet. We can even reverse climate disruption if these techniques are implemented on a wide-scale! There are great people and groups leading new movements to change our large-scale food systems.

Another answer that I see clearly is that smaller food systems can be much easier to manage well and efficiently. More growers working smaller pieces of land can address problems of air & water pollution, water consumption, soil erosion and soil carbon loss while building a community’s food sovereignty (ability to feed themselves).

Garden, Mid-July

In your own garden, no-till is easy, diversity an obvious choice, and chemicals become unnecessary as you build healthy soil. You can eliminate food miles, use far less water, create healthy habitats for pollinators and other creatures, and sequester carbon in your own backyard!

Save Money

While there is the phenomonom of the $15 tomato, with a bit of skill and some good choices, gardening can absolutely save you money. The key is to identify what you like to eat, consider the prices for buying these, and find out which are easy crops to grow.

Beet Tops

Herbs and greens are pricey, high-end items, so if you love salad and basil, those should go to the top of your list. If you don’t like beets – don’t grow them. Even though they are an easy crop, this will feel like wasted effort in the end. Now, I know most everyone loves tomatoes, but – they are not easy to grow in New England! Tomatoes are a heat-loving crop that, in my experience, do better in dry conditions – does that sound like our climate? In our humid summers, there are numerous blights that will attack them, causing them to turn ugly and die before you get much from them. Actually, last year’s terrible drought in our area gave us the best tomato crops we’ve ever seen. If those conditions continue, maybe tomatoes

Zucchini

will become easy here, but meanwhile, be careful!

Don’t go overboard on one veggie either – remember that diversity is necessary in a healthy garden, and that by the 50^th zucchini, it will start to feel less like well-deserved bounty and more like a curse.

Your Health

Every day there seems to be another study pointing to good nutrition as a key to good health. One of the problems we face is that much of our food contains fewer minerals and more chemical residues than in the past. You can buy certified organic (higher priced food in this case is actually cheap compared to health care costs). You can also give even more attentive care to a small plot you watch over and know you and your family will eat from.

Red Nasturtiums

We also now know that gardening has positive effects on mood. Less depression and anxiety is a great bonus, don’t you think?

Connection to the land

It’s great to admire, love and watch our landscapes and wildlife. But, I think it’s even better for us to understand on a visceral level how much we depend on the land, the earth. In the US, where so many of us have been here for merely a few generations, we often lack a sense of rootedness and connection to place. We move and travel and don’t like to feel “tied down.” I don’t believe this is working out well for us.

First, I think it makes it easier to tolerate and ignore wrongs being done to the land when we think we can just move on.

Let me share with you this excerpt from an interview with author and environmentalist, Derrick Jensen: “It’s really problematical, because we can talk all we want, but the truth is, if my experience is that my water comes from the tap, I will defend to the death the system that brings that to me, because my life depends on it. If my experience is – not my philosophy – but if my experience is that my food comes from the grocery store I will defend to the death the system that brings that food to me, because my life depends on it. If on the other hand, my experience, my reality is that my water comes from a river then I will defend to the death that river, because my life depends on it. If my experience is that my food comes from a land base, from not a land base, but this land base, my land base, my home, I will defend to the death that land base because my life depends on it. So that’s part of the problem, we’ve been made dependent on this very system that is killing us.”

Kale

Second, I believe many people would feel happier and more secure if they felt they did belong somewhere.  (Making this sort of commitment to a place doesn’t necessarily mean you own that land, by the way.)

How well do you know the place you live? How was it used in the past? What sounds do you expect to hear when you open your windows this spring? What does the soil smell like after a rain? Where does water run across the landscape? How does food taste grown there?

My life is enriched just by asking these questions and looking for the answers.

As Robin Wall Kimmerer says in her book Braiding Sweetgrass: “This is really why I made my daughters learn to garden—so they would always have a mother to love them, long after I am gone.” 

Red Oak Lettuce

Produce is coming in well now, with picking, cooking and preserving a big part of my days and nights. I’m grateful for the resiliency of nature and the good soil I’ve been building that brings me any bounty at all in such a tough year. 

Pulling Garlic

Mostly, our annual garden has suffered, which is where we get most of our veggies. We are working on more perennial veggies, and fruit and nut bushes and trees, but those take years to establish. So, meanwhile, we have the annuals.

The first big challenge was critters of the herbivorous rodent types. Chipmunks, and, yes, at least one groundhog.

In our area, this season has been teeming with animal garden disruptors. I have talked to a number of people having extra trouble this year with squirrels, rabbits, chipmunks, raccoons,… I think it’s related to the mild winter we just had allowing an unusually large number of them to survive, leading to lots of competition for food, between themselves and with humans.

Potatoes

In any case, even one groundhog can be the end of it for a garden. We have good fencing, but it’s a few years old, and our GH was finding every weak spot that had developed. She got in at least 10 times, eating her way around. Favorites were peas, lettuce, all of my brassicas (kale, collards, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage), bean plants, and sunflowers. What I noticed she did not touch were garlic, onions, squash, eggplant, potato and tomato plants. When I write that out I do see that she was leaving us something, but we eat lots of brassicas and beans, so found it really painful to have them wiped out – more than once. They would disappear, then Steve would work on fencing, and I’d replant… and they would disappear again.

It was really frustrating and I admit to shedding some tears in the garden a couple of times. I considered planting a ring of stinging nettle along the whole border of the garden, but when I looked online to find out if this worked I only found a video someone took of a groundhog happily munching away on them! Wow, they’re tough little beasts – and smart to eat such nutritious food!

We had a Have-A-Heart trap set up, but no luck. We did catch the baby goats a few times! At some point in about mid-June, Steve did make the garden tight enough – including a new gate that is almost human-proof it’s so well-built!

Squash Vines in the New Orchard

At that point the GH moved higher up on our property and started in on my perennial gardens. This is much closer to the house, so we started to see her a lot. This led to the opportunity for us to bring a quick end to this chapter, I will say euphemistically.

Our Dominique Rooster Making Himself Heard

[A further word about my feelings/philosophy on this Ground Hog… I was frustrated and angry, but I tried to keep enough perspective to never hate her – she was doing just what she was supposed to do in the landscape! We were in competition, and I wanted to win, but had respect for her as a smart, tenacious being. I’m glad that there was a quick end to it. I’m not a big fan of relocating animals like this, who will likely either become a problem for someone else, or be so traumatized by the move that they die anyway after suffering. This felt like the right way to address it responsibly to me. And, yes, we did cook this GH, fattened up on organic produce! However, the taste wasn’t great, so we let our chickens eat her, giving them a blissful, oh, three minutes or so! These are the moments I remember that chickens are direct descendants of Tyrannosaurus Rex. Little dinosaurs in our yard…!]

Costata Romanesco Zucchini

After that was dealt with, I have still been losing some produce to the chipmunks, but a manageable amount compared to the GH loss. 

By this time, though, we were being hit with drought. Here in Seacoast NH we have been classified as experiencing a “severe drought” for about a month now. I heavily mulch our gardens for the health of the soil and for water conservation, and we have swale/berm systems set up. We will also water our garden, but it is possible to pump our well dry, and our rain barrels and ponds are only enough for a few deep waterings. This year none of that has been enough to keep up with what the garden needs for best yields in a year with months of drought.

While the competing critters are frustrating, the drought is depressing and frightening. It’s so far out of my personal control, and it’s so tough on the land. I think about other places dealing with worse drought. California shows up on the US drought map I check, with it’s off-the-charts lack of rainfall, but the global drought situation is truly scary. The connections between lack of water and violence and war are getting clearer and well-documented. This is why climate disruption is so clearly important to movements for peace.

Red Kuri Winter Squash

I have reflected a lot on how much more stressful this would be if we were truly and totally depending on this garden for our food, without back-up plans of buying from farmer’s markets and grocery stores. That’s how it used to be and still is for a lot of people: grow food, or be hungry. We are in a strange moment in time here when most (not all, I know) Americans have enough to eat without even having to think about food production. I completely support keeping everyone fed, whatever their economic circumstances. But I also think we’d be more resilient, smarter about what’s really important and happier if we all had a hand in the important work of feeding ourselves and our communities.  Meanwhile, I give thanks for my beautiful havests!

Black Beauty Eggplant

Winterbor Kale