kitchen garden

aside from the eastern gamagrass that is chugging along and the teosinte that i am hoping will take root my backyard has a growing plant population that mirrors the campus garden in some ways ( mostly as a back-up ) and has some features of its own...there is asparagus out there that is doing just as well as the ones at iu...i waited until after mother's day to plant my tomatoes only to have the weather turn cold...they will be okay, just unhappy for a bit...others out there don't much mind the cold... i have a few rows of beets up in one bed and some peppers in containers...the top photo is of some of the thirty-eight potatoes i planted on april 10th...thirty-seven are up including all seventeen i planted in the annex along the back of the beds...there will be more posts as the season progresses and i begin to hill them...the winter wheat in the half barrel is coming along well ( there's some in the bed with the elephant garlic, chinese yams, and jerusalem artichokes but it's not in the photo...you can also catch sight of some spring wheat in the top photo in the bed closest to the house) that's the elephant garlic in the third photo...it has been up since march and will be done by the end of june along with the winter wheat...you can see four jerusalem artichokes along the back in what has become a bed of perennials...the fourth photo is of some turnips and spinach that also like he cool weather that's found us in mid-may...they will both be done soon as well although i am considering letting some of the spinach go to seed...the bottom photo is of two of the rouge jerusalem artichokes form campus that found their way home...they have the run of the back fence to colonize and keep me in tubers in perpetuity...i have twenty-one of them altogether and i am sure to be culling volunteers for as along as i am here...best of luck to the next owners of this deluxe property in controling them when i am gone...it's early in the season yet but i am feeling okay about this...still concerned about teosinte in the beds...but on the whole we're doing fine...i'm off to plant some onions and shallots.

why perennials?

"there is no such thing as a post-agricultural society."
timothy weiskel

"none of our technologies can do better than nature's renewability powers. to believe otherwise is to cultivate an illusion based on a lack of acknowledgment of our scaffolding-developed during the industrial era- is wearing out. much of it will need high-quality energy for repair, the kind we have burned to build it, and it won't be around."

"...essentially all of nature's land-based ecosystems feature perennials. this has to do with the fact that only twenty-some elements...go into all of earth's organisms. and importantly only four of those building blocks circulate in the atmospheric commons. the rest are in the soil and they are water-soluable. managing these elements and water is accomplished by a diversity of roots below the surface. this management scheme occurs in millimeters and minutes."
wes jackson form "consulting the genius of the place."

"ultimately the system could not withstand the clash between environmental and technological limitations of agricultural production and the political demands for surplus."
peter christensen from "the decline of iranshahr.

industrial agriculture is skewed toward annual cereals as feedstock for processed foods and is heavily dependent on petrochemicals in the form of fertilizers, pesticides , and herbicides. tilling used to artificially disrupt the soil to provide the environment the annuals require leads to soil erosion and water quality issues through a lack of an ecosytem containig deeply rooted perennials that manage both the runoff of water and obviate the need for "chemotheraphy for the land" [jackson] perennial staples would reduce agriculture's dependence on oil and help to both reduce erosion and the degredation of rivers and estuaries with agrucultural runoffs ( the gulf of mexico was a chemical sump long before deepwater horizon). this runs counter to the "political demands for surplus" that, in the modern era, began in the 1950s as part of a world bank/imf assault on traditional agriculture through the export model and the questionable concept of "competitive advantage"...in an era of declining energy availability coupled with inflated ( artificially or not) costs a local and traditional agriculture would seem to represent a much more stable form of food securtity than a world dependent on import/export models that allow commodity speculation and unwaranted manipulation of food pricing...perennials lead to a more locally robust agriculture and a healthier environment...i'm not interested in hot pockets or macdonald's.

the top photo is of the chinese yams finally out of dormancy...a rootstock perennial that expands its root system every year it will be a binding force on the soil in the garden as it moves towards a permaculture existence after the annuals growing this season as a comparison to last year's perennial tubers are gone...they had me worried...particularly the one that had been damaged by moles and i am relieved to see them up and running ( plus the vines on a trellis look really neat as the summer progresses)...the eastern gamagrass, another rootstock perennial, has greened-up nicely and will do well this season...the botton photo is of a "ferned" asparagus spear working on feeding the roots...aparagus is a rootstock perennial as well ( as opposed to the jerusalem artichokes which are tuberous perennials that set tubers to reproduce rather than growing from the same roots year after year)...all three ( along with the intermediate wheat grass, yet another rootstock perennial) will serve to caputre the nutients that leach down through the soil form the organic processes going on in the upper layers and to sequester carbon dioxide in the roots in the form of carbohydrates for the next year's growth...a garden eventually intended to be skewed towards perennials as a rational response to an artificially manipulated annual system.

teosinte

geeked

mother's day jaunt

happy mother's day to all you moms out there...after i had lunch with my mom (pizza) i went out to campus to have a look and do some work...and water a bit...disappointing rainfall this week...i back-filled the holes i scooped out for the asparagus earlier this spring with fresh compost to feed the hungry little devils and then pulled the hills of dirt down over that so the garden looks less like the home of giant moles...seven of the eight Zea dipolperennis seeds i planted are up so if i am vigilant i will have teosinte to go with the gamagrass as a display of Zea mays ancestry ( depending on whose take on corn ancestry you believe)...the fourth photo is of a disturbing cluster of jerusalem artichokes...there are actually two of them...i keep watering them as if they needed encouragement...on the bright side i did not discover any rouges popping up today...perhaps the sixty-eight i have removed so far ( i took out two more last friday ) will be the end of them...won't be holding my breath however...the last photo is a panorama of the second season of the perennial garden project as it stands today...everything seems to be fine(except no yams yet...worrisome)...with work and luck it will continue to be so...i'm off to weed the potato patch in the back yard nd do some watering here.

photos that wouldn't fit in the post

top photo is of the jerusalem artichoke, spinach and turnip beds.
the second one is today's jerusalem artichoke cull.
third photo is winter wheat in the foreground and intermediate wheat grass in the background...i see a family resembelance.
the fourth one is what i hope is Zea diploperennis.
and the bottom is a portrait of a jerusalem artichoke and a spinach plant.

annuals versus perennials

"in the period between about 9000 and 2000 b.p. populations throughout the world, already using nearly the full range of palatable foods, were forced to adjust to further increases in population by artificially increasing, not those resources which they prefered to eat, but those which responded well to human attentiona nd could be made to produce the greates number of edible calories per unit of land...agriculture is not easier than hunting and gathering and does not provide a higher quality, more palitable, or more secure food base. agriculture has, in fact, only one advantage over hunting and gathering: that of provideing more calories per unit of land per unit of time and thuis supporting denser populations..."
the food crisis in prehistory: over population and the origins of agriculture. mark nathan cohen. 1977 p.15

more bang for the buck as it were...or feeding more people per acre...an artificial carrying capacity necessitated by a neolithic population boom...foragers certainly would have been well versed in the biology of their environments and in plant and animal behaviors...coming to some sort of decision on which would respond better to human intervention probably would not have posed too great a problem ( if it had we would not have the social structures we have, would we? it would be a differnt planet.)...part of the working hypothesis for the garden's first season ( it is an academic project , on campus anyway, my backyard is much less structured and i can do things there that don't really fit in the academic parameters) was that annuals became the overwhelming majority of staples because they produced more edibile calories per unit of land than perennials do...that idea is in serious need of adjustment...the jerusalem artichokes blew that out of the water...the top two photos are of jerusalem artichokes i have culled form the campus garden...sixty-six volunteers that i have had to remove so far just to keep the campus population at double the six i consciously palnted last fall...so there's obviously some other mechanism at work in the annuial/perennial staple dichotomy...storage was another issue i wrote about in the paper on the first season, thinking that storage issues might have some impact ( i had something of a premonition when i statred harvesting) but there seem to be at least as many problems with storing annuals as there are with perennials ( this is traditional , not industrial, storage technology we're talking...the neolithic revolution had some environments where freeze-drying was used, to remove glyco-alkaloids from the higher elvation, frost-resistant potato varieties domesticated in the andes for instance, but no industrial refrigeration or preservatives...we're thinking in terms of cache-pits and rudimentary storage buildings) and we have seen that my jerusalem artichoke storage technology is in dire need of tweaking if i plan to eat them all next winter ( and i do...this could become a major embarassment)...so if it's not more calories or easier storage what is it? i have a few ideas, but i'm not tipping my hand...just looking around for research materials and planning some summer reading, growing gardens, collecting data, and then writing...i think i have found a sort of vocation for my dotage...something to keep body and mind moving...nothing wrong with that.

the middle photo is of my stand of winter wheat....an annual, i know, but still part of the second season thinking...the fourth photo is of some really happy perennial asparagus ( i finally remebered the photographic scale)...the one-year-old crowns i planted in april of 2010 are into their third season so next spring we can start harvesting spears...the bottom is the pgp as it looked yesterday evening about five or so

mayday 2011 in the garden

a maintenance trip this morning and six more jerusalem artichokes culled...they continue to pop up, and most likely will do so for the foreseeable future...vigilance is a virtue here...persistence as well...i seem to be unable to remember to bring a photographic scale with me on these jaunts ("nice asparagus, where's the scale?" i can hear it now) so i put my cup of tea next to the asparagus to provide some scale...the cup is eight inches tall so that spear is already double that size...another year of letting the "ferns" feed the roots and they will be well setablished enough to harvest next season...the next two photos are of sprouts in the Zea diploperennis bed...they are grass, and i'm still hoping for teosinte on campus...that would be neat and a fulfillment of more than a year of trying to get some to grow...anywhere...the spinach and turnips are cruising along and there are a couple of beets up...both strains of wheat are fine and there's no stopping the sunchokes..we're on for another season...can't wait to see what happens.