THIS BOOK has been inspired by the chaotic times we live in. It aims to put you in control of the production of at least part of the food you need. Food economists say it is now urgent that consumers start growing some of their own food, before shortages become the norm and prices hit the roof.
The book starts with a 3-foot-square plot of soil to grow your chosen vegetables, providing about one tenth of your food needs. An Australian food producer acknowledged on ABC Radio in 2004 that world food reserves in storage periodically drop to less than one month’s supply. Additionally, supplies are becoming increasingly potential or virtual supplies. Another expert revealed that more fish is fed to fish in aquaculture than comes on the market, and that oceans will get fished out in the foreseeable future. In “first world” countries, more grain is fed to animals—those we eat, those that work, and those that run the races—than is consumed by humans.
Although the world population keeps increasing, food production is decreasing. Only about two percent of Australians, Britons, and Americans are food producers. Countries at war cannot produce sufficient food or invest in agriculture. Their resources are destroyed or used to feed non-productive armies.
Since globalization took hold, the USDA reports that 32 percent of fruits and nuts and 16 percent of vegetables consumed in the United States are imported. Produce is purchased in places where labor is cheap or forced or growers are subsidized. While supermarkets sell imported food, local and small-scale growers are forced out of the industry.
In the United States, along with most other industrialized countries, the number of farms and farmers has steadily decreased since 1934, even as the demand for agricultural products continues to grow.1 To make up for this discrepancy, farmers have been forced to turn to engineered seed and chemical fertilizers and pesticides to force the most food from tired land. Additionally, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that more than 40 percent of America’s farmers are 55 years or older. The number of acres per farm worker has grown exponentially from 27.5 in 1890 to 740 in 1990. The global farming industry continues to dictate competition by lowering prices in supermarkets and raising shareholders’ profits. All factors combine to increasingly threaten what was once a quintessential American institution: the family farm.
Some people still believe that genetically modified (GM) foods will feed the world. But GM food has not been discussed enough, nor is it supported by long-term testing. Meanwhile, the better policy is to foster food plant diversity, preserve the inherently good qualities of reproducible food plants, and maintain extensive local seed banks in case of regional crop failures due to war, weather, or new space-age weevils. See Useful Addresses for seed sources and seed banks.
Professor Julian Cribb of the University of Technology in Sydney foresees growing populations needing to increase food production by 110 percent over the next four decades while facing decreasing resources of water, farmland, and soil fertility and a global decline in agricultural research.2 Even aquaculture—meant to feed us as the oceans get fished out—is in trouble due to contamination from the land. Frequent droughts are to be expected as the norm, and some countries will grow more biofuel crops than food crops. Professor Cribb regards adapting to greenhouse conditions as urgent, but not nearly as urgent as working toward doubling world harvests with fewer resources.
During half a lifetime of food gardening, in four locations with different soils and climates, I found that books with illustrations of perfect aspects, lush black earth, plentiful water, and beauty-parlor vegetables did not match my own experience. Hence, illustrations of my own vegetable jungles and cabbages with holey leaves. But I learned that healthy food can be grown anywhere. Food will grow where you are. The best agricultural land is being covered by suburbs; therefore we should grow our food in the suburbs.
Scientists calculate that if food crops are consumed by people instead of being fed to livestock, one person can, in theory, live on the produce of 100 square yards.3 That is 30 × 30 feet per person, intensively cultivated. A family of four would need four such plots, covering 60 × 60 feet (not counting paths) with one rotating plot growing grain, and another peas and beans to dry and freeze.
A 3-foot square garden gives you a fair idea how far you want to go. The labor required is minimal and pleasurable because you don’t start off with a big project only to find you have overreached yourself, throwing the garden fork away and running to the supermarket for half a sprayed cauliflower and two pale tomatoes.
In the year 1500, the globe supported approximately 400 million people of whom some 80 million lived in the Americas. Of these, Mexico had 25 million people who were fed on corn, beans, and squash. In 1999, the populations of the United States (258,233,000), Argentina (33,778,000), Chile (13,813,000), and Puerto Rico (3,620,000) alone totaled just over 400 million.4 In 500 years, the world population has risen to approximately 6.3 billion, taking up all arable land for sustenance, and is expected to increase to approximately 10 billion by the middle of the twenty-first century.
Important reasons for growing your own food keep mounting. The same multinational corporations that gave us global warming—by using fossil fuels in industry, cutting forests around the globe, robbing millions of people of self-sufficiency, and causing man-made disasters that force untold millions to lose their land, homes, and belongings (if not their lives) through floods, droughts, and climate change—are now bringing us genetically modified foods because they profess to have a new mission “to feed a hungry world.”
The corporations are as compassionate about hungry humanity as giant pharmaceutical companies are about poor children with AIDS or malaria. These corporations have switched from mining, logging, and manufacturing to seed and food production because these are globally consumed commodities they don’t yet control. Moreover, it’s time to get out of manufacturing cigarettes and logging. They will want to get out of oil before it runs out.
Genetically modified foods are unknown quantities because manufacturers do not want to label them correctly, which would allow consumers to check contents, make informed choices, avoid substances that may cause allergies, or give the foods a miss altogether. Governments buckle at the knees because these food companies are also major investors in raw materials—from mining to wood pulping—and are potential investors in our mining, railways, and armament industries. That’s why they won’t legislate for adequate labeling. No long-term safety trials have been done either, so we don’t even know how GM and genetically engineered (GE) foods will affect our future health.
The best way to feed a hungry world is to return to poor people the security of an average plot of land with a water source and control over their own seeds, enabling them to grow their own food and sell the surplus in local markets. But corporations want to control the world’s seeds in order to insert terminator genes, meaning the next generation of seeds will be unable to germinate. The company can then sell farmers and gardeners new seeds every year, combined with the fertilizer and herbicides needed by these hybrids. Thus, they protect their investment in the “improved” seeds, which came from a farmer in the first place and whose ancestors saved them over centuries. Selling seeds has been identified as having a vast, as yet untapped, global market. See Saving Seed.
You and I are fortunate to have private plots of soil, however small, and should not waste a day to get stuck into these and avail ourselves of earth’s bounty. Nature will surprise us by conducting its own biodiversity maintenance as long as we feed, mulch, and water. It’s that simple. We only play at being conductors of a green symphony composed at the beginning of time on earth. The music starts slowly to end in a crescendo of delectable tones, tastes, and colors.
People who do not currently regard themselves as poor, who can afford to buy fruits and vegetables, are increasingly finding some produce becoming luxury items. Farmers have to pass on their increased costs to the consumer. Corporations are always “improving” seeds and want to be paid handsomely for their efforts—more handsomely than any farmer ever is—and water restrictions, droughts, and climate changes are making food crops scarcer and more expensive.
During 2001, the hottest summer in 95 years in the part of Australia where I make my home, zucchinis and cucumbers doubled in price, tomatoes and celery almost doubled, and potatoes went up by a third. Only onions, lettuce, cauliflower, and broccoli remained the same price, but were smaller and fewer. Patty pan squash, prolific in the garden, went from $5.00 to $7.00 a kilogram (in Australian dollars); by 2006, it was $9.50, and garlic stood at $10.00. By 2015, our hottest year on record, I have given up comparing prices.
In the recent past, people grew their own vegetables to avoid toxic sprays on their food, to get that lovely freshness and superb taste of a sun-ripened tomato, and because it saved a little money. Now, it’s becoming more serious.
In 1996, the USDA reported that a “conventionally grown” apple could test positive for up to 14 different pesticides and that 73 percent of all conventional produce showed significant pesticide residues. The Australian Government Analytical Laboratory reported organically grown vegetables can contain an average of up to ten times more nutrients than chemically fertilized vegetables.5 These facts are disturbing, but pale compared with other major forces that threaten our food supplies. We must start taking responsibility for producing some of our daily food.
Hunger is caused less by failure of food production than by failure of distribution, interruption from wars and regional conflicts, political chicanery, robbery, or plain apathy. Now distribution is being interrupted by the withholding of viable, reproducible seeds and exacerbated by years of drought. It would be foolish to think that a famine periodically happens somewhere else and could not happen where we live.
Even though the world has space, much is not arable. Underground water resources are being overused, and rivers have stopped flowing. Alarmingly, our wildernesses have shrunk and our forests are still being axed.
However, there is one place that can still be a biodiverse wilderness. That is our garden. Not just the backyard—that utility area for bins, barbecues, dogs, kids, and the washing—but the front yard, side yard, and the strip along the driveway: all are private domains. Privacy and wilderness are important to you. To almost walk into a giant spider web hung with dew on a path between two shrubs, to see brilliantly colored beetles at work, to find stick insects, lizards, frogs, and tiny birds skating between plants you have given the freedom to reach for the sun, is hugely satisfying and elevates the spirit. The only wilderness you can access daily, whose gates do not keep you out or charge a fee, is your garden. Make it beautiful. Make it a place of increase. Your own wilderness can feed your body and soul.
As urban food growing becomes a necessity instead of a hobby, it’s good to know there are millions upon millions of backyards in North America. Imagine squares of green edibles in every backyard that doesn’t grow vegetables yet! Globally, more than half of all people now live in urban areas, and urban food farming is bound to increase.
Naturalist Sir David Attenborough said in his television series State of the Planet that the decisions we humans make in the next fifty to 100 years will determine what happens to all life on earth thereafter. Sadly, what happens to all life on earth hereafter may have little to do with decisions you and I make and more with decisions by our and other people’s governments.
For decades, small producers have gone out of business due to competition from government-subsidized agribusiness. Agribusiness, in the language of the World Trade Organization (WTO), concerns soy bean, corn, rice, wheat, and canola, some of which go into processed foods that sit on supermarket shelves for years without going bad, but most of which feeds animals raised for meat to feed the humans who can afford to buy it.
Moreover, just one company, Monsanto, is responsible for 94 percent of all GM seeds planted across the globe. To have the world’s staple food crops narrowed to so few varieties, and to have ownership of practically all commercial seed for these major crops in the hands of one corporation, is an unprecedented and frightening situation—especially when you know that this company is also developing the technology for terminator seeds. The company wants the 1999 United Nations moratorium on this technology lifted. So do the US, Australian, New Zealand, and Canadian governments. Can they all be wrong? You bet they can.
Crops can fail. When they are big crops, they are big failures, causing famines. Corporations can fail, too—especially those that make huge mistakes incurring liability and causing the loss or disappearance of all assets. Meanwhile, the pollen of crops with terminator seeds, once let loose, will out-cross with normal crops, endangering their seed-producing viability. There is no known method to prevent this. In time—no one knows how long or short a time—seed stocks could be perpetually compromised until self-replicating seeds are a thing of the past.
Therefore, what we can do in the coming years with our part of the globe has already been decided by those who went before—which is how things work, of course. Or fail to work. Water shortages, the gradual death of river systems, the salinization of soils through irrigation and tree removal, and the droughts blowing away tens of thousands of tons of topsoil—these and many local land issues caused by lack of good governing are going to determine what we can or can no longer do, never mind what we had wanted to do.
For the home gardener, this means the garden becomes the last resource. As agricultural lands keep shrinking and water supplies dry up, it’s a piece of land not yet saline that, with care, can yield sustainable food production. The home garden will also increasingly be a place where biodiversity is preserved on a small scale.
As the best agricultural land around cities and towns is urbanized and put under concrete, it is an inescapable fact that the best land on which to grow our food lies at the back door. Even in a concrete jungle, you can grow food with some care. There may be minerals waiting to be unlocked, and like all other worlds, the plant world is one of entrepreneurs waiting for opportunities; all they need is a hand up.
Industrialized food is sometimes claimed to be cheap, but as India’s food activist Vandana Shiva has pointed out, it uses ten times more energy to be produced and ten times more water than food grown in organically maintained soil. She includes in the cost the technologists, producers of pesticides and farm machinery, truck drivers, the cost of diseases contracted by mono crops, environmental destruction in the name of agricultural expansion, government subsidies, and the cost of wars fought over the indispensable oil that drives the food industry. What you produce behind your home is dirt cheap by comparison.
Having used up in one century half of all oil resources—the halfway point, or peak oil, was reputedly reached in 2006, earlier than even the pessimists expected—we will now have to scale back our usage. Oil has given rise to previously unimaginable mining of resources from rivers, forests, seas, and soils, and the shipping of these resources around the globe. As a result, the carbon dioxide level of Planet Earth’s atmosphere has increased more than a third since the start of the industrial revolution.
It is now inescapable that every individual must scale down their oil consumption. By growing your own food, you save not only the petrol for driving to the supermarket, but also the oil the industry uses to place food on supermarket shelves.
There are times when really cheap food is on offer, just as the multinational corporations promised. But we ought to investigate the true cost of “cheap food.” It may be a dumping. In Britain, the question was posed at the start of this century during outbreaks of mad cow and foot-and-mouth disease. Both spread far beyond what would normally have been contained locally due to the globalization of trade and transport, the centralization of slaughterhouses, and a variety of animal husbandry measures intended to drive production up and prices down. Once the diseases broke out and spread rapidly, entire herds were destroyed, businesses went broke, and families became destitute. Now, many people live under a death sentence from diseases formerly not known to affect humans. Add that to the cost of your cheap food. Something similar could happen with vegetables and fruits.
There is no free lunch. There is no cheap food. The cheapest and best food is the food you grow yourself—food that does not accumulate added costs for transport from other states or continents, needs no refrigeration because you pick it minutes before preparing it, does not add to pollution because it only travels from garden to back door, is free of costly chemicals, and needs no packaging. Consider the real cost of a cucumber in a plastic jacket, grown in a temperature-controlled poly tunnel, refrigerated, put in the jacket, transported a great distance, and displayed in an air-conditioned supermarket under burning lights. The cucumber you grow yourself just has to be fresher, tastier, and healthier than that, doesn’t it?
By growing your own organic vegetables, you make unnecessary all the spraying, heating, cooling, and transport—from state to state and continent to continent—needed to stock greengrocers and supermarkets. Heed the warnings of outspoken oil experts. Without oil, transporting food over vast distances becomes prohibitive. We ought to start shortening as much as possible the distance between our fork and the farm.
All it takes on your part is a seasonal pick-up of a packet of straw and some organic fertilizer or manure. If you don’t have a car, buy compressed straw cubes and organic fertilizers in small bags that fit in your shopping cart. If the garden center doesn’t have what you need, persuade them to order it in. Buy seed as you do other shopping, or by mail order—see Useful Addresses. Find a hand trowel and fork. Yes, there is some transport involved, but the reduction is enormous.
As your food ripens a few steps from the back door, the environment is spared clouds of toxic fumes and runoff because you turned a sod one Saturday and wielded a hand-held hose as you watched the sunrise. You are doing Planet Earth a service, as well as yourself and those you provide for. More so if you frequent local growers’ markets for what you cannot grow yourself.
As part of this process, we simply have to change our expectations of how vegetables ought to look. The horticultural industry achieves those sleek good looks by toxic means. With your own plot, you will eat vegetables and fruits in season and adjust menu planning to what the garden offers. Whereas a shopper muses, “Shall we have cauliflower or green beans?”, the gardener lifts up leaves and discovers that it is bean day, cauliflower day, or a zucchini emergency. If there’s nothing but chard and tomatoes in quantities, it may be a stir-fry day with small pickings: beans, broccoli, a patty pan, the biggest rutabaga, or maybe two carrots and an Asian radish. Add a handful of pick-and-come-again greens and herbs and you will still have a feast of flavors!
Therein lies an enormous plus for the home grower. The selection in shops is limited to varieties that have shelf life. If a shop provides vegetables with short shelf life, you pay a price that has quick wastage calculated into it (plastic bags of mixed salad greens, for example). So grow a dozen salad greens on one square, pick daily, and grow them for months. You can grow fifty varieties of fresh beans and peas in your garden if you so choose, but buy only two at the shop. You can experiment with pumpkins in all colors and patterns, grow exotic cucumbers, or a dozen different chilies and black tomatoes. There are many vegetables that never even reach the shops, not even the markets, so read a catalog of organic non-hybrid seeds and let your imagination take flight.
TO START GROWING your own food without delay, put down this book, go out in the garden, and select a spot in the sun. Dig over a 3-foot square with a garden fork and remove all the weeds by hand. If digging up lawn, cut out the sod with a spade, roots and all, and stack them upside down under a tree as mulch.
Come inside again and thoroughly wash your hands and clean your nails, as you must always do after working with soil. Pick up this book and in Part One find all the information you need to make your magic square flourish. Then turn to Part Two to select what you want to grow in your first Salad Plot. This book presents plot designs graded from the easiest and most robust to the complex and tender, starting with five plans for salads and leading you in easy stages to the degree of food self-sufficiency you decide on. The sequence presented takes care of crop rotation to keep the soil healthy. However, you can grow plots in a different sequence by feeding plants regularly.
A Salad Plot showing six varieties of pick-and-come-again lettuces and a broccoli seedling and shallots around an onion setting seed. A dozen new lettuce seedlings have been plugged in between with fresh compost.
You can read descriptions and helpful tips about the vegetables you’ll be getting in List of Common Vegetables in Part Four. While you’re at it, put a bookmark at every vegetable you would like to grow down the road. It’s easy to grow your own spuds. No more lugging home ten-pound bags—lug manure instead. Love corn on the cob? That’s easy, too. So are artichokes, asparagus, and rhubarb. Make a list and go out to buy seedlings or seeds for your chosen vegetables and one small bag of blood and bone (B&B), since you don’t yet have compost and composted manure. If you dug a square hole in the lawn, you may need to fill it with a bag of potting soil and plan to put in deep edgings to keep the grass roots out. There must be something you can recycle!
Go outside again and rake a few handfuls of B&B through the square, loosening the soil to a depth of 6 inches. Water it in. Now plant your seeds and seedlings according to your chosen Salad Plot plan. Water again. Go indoors to scrub your hands and nails as a surgeon would.
You are now a food gardener!
Having done the hard work, sit back and read this chapter and all of Part Two that you didn’t get to earlier, gathering ideas for your own little food paradise. Maybe you settle for gourmet vegetables or expensive delectables such as artichokes, asparagus, baby squash, garlic, or green onions. Easy and rewarding. Make notes on the back of an envelope. Don’t make it more complex than need be! If you never go beyond the Salad Plots, but maintain your square through the seasons by practicing crop rotation with peas or fava beans in the cool seasons, you could double your good health and well-being.
Each plot has suggestions for follow-up crops to avoid plant diseases that build up from growing the same vegetables season after season. Follow the plots list to become familiar with growing a variety of vegetables over several seasons on just a 3-foot square. If you grow all plots in succession, as presented in Part One, your square will remain healthy and productive. Or choose a Stir-Fry Plot, Pasta/Pizza Plot or Soup Plot, then grow green or bean crops in between (see Part Three). And if some vegetables fail to produce, there are many things to blame: climate change, freak weather, a scorcher, snap-freezes, dud seeds, or the neighbor’s cat. It’s not your fault. Flops happen to the experts. They just don’t publicize them!
Each plot is charted to start in the season best suited to the vegetables it grows, then carries through the year with other options for crop rotation. You can therefore start your square at any time of the year. Many vegetables are sown repeatedly through summer, while others are harvested to be replaced by cool-weather plants in autumn. The majority of plots grow a multiplicity of vegetables, so intercropping occurs naturally. Companion-planting principles and nitrogen-fixing plantings govern the plot designs. When the season and the spirit is upon you, check out other plot plans in Part Three and roam through the lists of common vegetables, herbs, and easy-care fruit trees in Part Four.
There are certain things you will want to know before you turn your second square, even if you are going to lay out that food garden in annual increments over ten years.
Some plots are sown like a jungle with mixed seeds, such as the Horta Plot for lovers of wild herbs and vegetables. Horta can be sown any season. You could make it your first plot as it grows fast, provides variety, and can be resown on one quarter each season thereafter.
It’s so easy to make mistakes that may be long regretted. One vital ingredient of a food garden is your choice of watering system. This should determine the layout of the beds, not the other way around. Read Water and Watering.
Another point to consider is the garden’s aspect. Where does the sun strike, the wind blow, the shade fall? Where is the garden bordered by walls, fences, trees, or buildings that function as windbreaks or heat reflectors? Think infrastructure and make a sketch.
Not all vegetables need so many adjustments, but a few minutes’ attention can mean the difference between a puny cauliflower and a snowy head. Placing wood or a tile under a pumpkin to prevent rot takes little effort. So does placing a shade cloche over seedlings or lettuces.
Of course, you can’t be self-sufficient in cabbages on a 3-foot square; the big drumheads feel crowded at four to a square. But you can be self-sufficient in one vegetable or another on one square. Plant compact sugar cabbages four to a quarter, with another four on a quarter not adjoining. That’s eight cabbages for coleslaw, with two quarters for lettuce, carrots, radishes, and a tomato. Check out mini cauliflowers.
Such density does not suit rambling pumpkin vines, but drape two cucumber plants over an old chair, trellis, or wire tower on a quarter. Go vertical with peas, beans, and mini pumpkins draped over the edge. With trellises on two sides you are in clover, but in summer, don’t place them against hot fences or walls. But in early spring or late autumn, a plot dug close to a fence or wall benefits from reflected warmth.
Everyone likes salads. Supermarket lettuces—too big for singles and couples—are often crisp from overwatering, but not always tasty. Yet a 3-foot square of soil makes you self-sufficient for months in pick-and-come-again salad greens, up in six weeks. Grow half a dozen varieties of non-hearting lettuces and radicchio close together, with chives and radishes in between, and cucumber and giant red mustard hanging around on the corner of the block.
Such a bed keeps going if you plug in more seed. If meanwhile you prepare another square, you will have salad greens all year on two 3-foot squares. For soil health, grow a bonus of beans in summer and peas or fava beans in winter on the finished plot. What is 9 square feet in most backyards in return for daily fresh salads and seasonally fresh peas and beans?
Do you love garlic, nature’s antibiotic that adds such a kick to pastas and soups, salads and stir-fries? It is no longer a cheap knob because it takes the better part of a year to mature, tying up the commercial producer’s soil longer than other crops. Yet, if you deep dig one square, or one quarter of reasonable soil in a corner of the backyard, fork in composted animal manure, plant the cloves of garlic bulbs, and mulch thickly, you will have the joy of seeing green sprigs turn into edible straps until drying tops announce that new bulbs are ready for harvest. Plant plenty for cooking, pickling, and replanting. Enjoy the luxury of whole roasted garlic knobs, artichoke hearts in garlic sauce, or baby squash with garlic butter. Present a trio of knobs braided together to your best friends, who wouldn’t be your best friends unless they also loved garlic!
To recap:
1. Choose your first plot from the Contents (see here).
2. Read the section on your chosen plot.
3. Choose which vegetables and herbs to grow.
4. Read up on the vegetables and herbs of your choice in Part Four. If you don’t see a vegetable in the first list, it may be an herb.
5. Read the section Starting and Maintaining to learn everything of immediate concern.
6. Prepare soil as described for your chosen plot.
7. Plant seedlings and sow seeds; water in well and daily.
Now, sift your desires and visions splendid, clarify your aims, and postpone a few ideas. By the end of Part Three, you will know just what you want and be able to find any description you need through the Contents or Index.
No week, month, or year is ever the same in the food garden. Use the alphabetical lists in Part Four to make choices for each season, read up on favorite food plants, observe as they grow, and keep adjusting compost, mulch, manure, water, shade cloth, and companion plants until you get incredible results. Because you are gardening on such a small scale, in one year, you can become an expert on food-growing, a chef in your own kitchen, and a healthier, fitter human bean.
ONE MAJOR HANG-UP people have about growing their own food is not having the time. They look from their backyards to magazine pictures of gardens covered from fence to fence with productive beds and throw up their hands.
Do not do this to yourself! Small is truly beautiful. No matter how overgrown your garden is, you can weed one 3-foot square, plant it, and keep it tidy. It may lead on to two squares or even a block of four—that is up to you. But be kind to yourself. Start with one Magic Square for the plot of your choosing.
At present, your problem is that you don’t have time. You are overworked and a little stressed. You don’t get much opportunity to relax, and when you do, you’d rather . . . whatever. You worry weekly about the bills or the amount of fast food consumed. You may be depressed and unable to appreciate the good things in life. You are always busy—yet bored, not stimulated—and you don’t get enough exercise but hate jogging, the gym, hitting a ball—all those purposeless remedial activities.
If any one of these conditions depicts your life, change it instantly by digging up one 3-foot square. It won’t take much time or work, as it is only 36 × 36 inches, one stride by one stride. But it will relax and delight you, make you feel a long-forgotten feeling, and put you in touch with your wild side without leaving home! In a short time, it will provide you with fresh food. Your depressive moods will evaporate when you tend your Magic Square, and you’ll discover other micro worlds than the world you thought you lived in. Boredom will subside and you will do a daily three-minutes bending-and-stretching routine without being aware of it. Hand watering the square will become your meditation.
Where to find these minutes? Time is a gift from nature’s own lovely chaos. So many books on growing vegetables show photographs of neat, weed-free rows of carrots and beans with not a shriveled leaf in sight, bed after bed in similar order. These are ready-made free dinners for hordes of insects that can identify whole rows of their favorite food from the sky. Control your urban yearning for straight rows! Grow vegetable varieties in minute little plots within your square, interspersed with companion plants, self-seeding herbs, and marigolds—the hordes will fly over and the weeds will find no space.
You will argue this won’t be enough to feed a family, and you’ll be forced to dig up more squares once your loved ones are hooked on garden produce. But in Part Four, you’ll find tips to grow vegetables other than shop produce, so that you get by with a few broccoli, kale, come-again lettuces, and Asian greens for months of picking. Grow carrots closely and pull as needed, making space for the remainder to grow. Plant chard in a dense drift and pick it tender for several seasons. One square of sweet corn can yield fifty cobs, or twenty fresh fava bean portions and another twenty for the freezer compartment. Potatoes, beets, rutabagas, tomatoes, beans, cucumbers, and antioxidant greens are all high yielders in small spaces.
Less time spent on shopping for vegetables provides time to tie up the beans and plug in a few seeds. Bend, reach, turn, stretch, and take deep breaths of fresh air, so you don’t need to go to the gym, saving time and money and escaping conversations that go nowhere. Move beyond one square and you won’t need to go jogging, either. Forego boring club meetings with the excuse that you have to get stuck into the food garden (don’t say “veggie patch” lest someone tosses “corny” jokes). A food garden will soon acquire status. Be subversive in controlled green silence. Food gardening is the most intelligent adult endeavor on earth and ought to be understood by anyone who eats.
More time can be found by working according to methods that suit you. Let method be your mentor. “Small is beautiful” also means not saying, “Oh, it’s a mess, I must clean up the plot and weed that path.” Instead pick over a quarter, plant seedlings, sow seeds, water them, and call it a day, satisfied. Another day, remove spent plants from a productive corner and manure and water that, ready for replanting.
Work in time increments. Ten minutes of mulching. Time yourself. Don’t cry: “Oh Mother of Cabbages, I have no time for all that today!” Look at one aspect, like staking three tomato plants before dinner. On your weekend afternoon in the yard, the very worst you can do is cast eyes over a four-square food garden and wonder how in heaven you can do all you want to do by evening. The whole vision can be depressing. Deny the greater picture—go for the detail. Most plants and plots can wait another week, but there may be one thing that is urgent. Do that!
List small tasks, decide priorities, and do one of these only:
◆ weed and mulch one corner and feel good.
◆ string up flopping beans.
◆ prune broccoli and pumpkin vines to increase productivity.
◆ free up two tiny plots for sowing next week and manure now.
◆ spray the whole plot with liquid seaweed and feel virtuous.
These jobs take from five to fifty minutes, depending on how long you linger, so there’s also time for a break with a drink in the shade to admire your work. Enjoy your garden. Don’t despair of an overgrown plot after being away, big rains, or plain neglect. Think of how the wildlife enjoys it. Don’t abandon it, but do a corner, a bit, or a border. In no time, things will be back on track. You will experience abundant satisfaction.
Just like abandoning straight rows for sweet chaos, so, too, can composting be simple. If you prefer to process kitchen scraps instantly, read about worm farming in Compost Compositions. Some plants lend themselves to self-mulching. Decaying leaves of artichokes, chard, cabbages, squashes, and pumpkins can be cut and folded at the base of plants to return their nutrients to the soil. The leaves soon decay or can be covered with straw.
Try achieving closed cycles in what you do in the garden to save time and money.
Consider livestock to help you in the garden. In urban areas, roosters may not be welcome, but hens may be allowed. Maintaining a feathered flock creates an almost closed cycle—you need to buy or construct a coop and run, buy straw for bedding, and distribute a handful of grain before sunset. The fowl mix their manure with soil, straw, and vegetable remains into ready-made compost. Pure chicken manure needs composting with other ingredients before going on garden beds, but I spade out composted black earth from the run several times a year to use straight on vegetable plots. Bedding straw goes as mulch on unused plots to break down further before I make ditches to fill with compost. Outer leaves of vegetables, fallen fruit, and other plant debris provide food for the flock to turn into eggs.
Read Permaculture to save time in the long term and Easy Vegetables to Grow to plan the best garden for your lifestyle. Plan for later if you can’t do it now.
TO SOME, a backyard is a combination graveyard for deceased cars and stalled machinery and a playground to plant a barbecue and basketball pole. Or it may be your spacing-out secret place, or a display the neighbors judge you by. If you fall in between, why not put up a sign near the gate announcing “Work In Progress,” to tell visitors what not to expect and stop yourself apologizing.
A work in progress allows freedom to refrain from interfering, an important activity that takes place in the mind and consumes no real time. It happens when you see a new green shoot not far from an old plant, or in an unexpected place, and contemplate what it might be. If you have an anti-weed attitude and pull it up, you will never know. Why not watch it for a few weeks until it declares itself? In this way, I gained good self-sown fruit trees, herbs, and vegetables. One memorable nectarine seedling bore delicious fruit.
You can be a food gardener, although still burdened with society’s attitudes. Step back from these to notice and give gratitude for a giving garden. You know how much edible vegetable matter is wasted in retail outlets: outer leaves of cabbage and cauliflower, tops of celery, beets, and carrots, and only broccoli heads are being sold. Only big vegetables reach the supermarket, except in country towns where local growers sell surplus through the local shop. There is nothing wrong with small beans, carrots, and cabbages. There is food value in outer leaves and tops.
Your supermarket-shopper attitude may turn around 180 degrees. In shops, we expect perfect looks to make up for lack of taste. In the garden, a cabbage with holes in its socks is still a great-tasting cabbage. The holes prove it was organically raised. Shopping for vegetables and fruits makes people choosy, rejecting broccoli with yellowing tips, limp greens, and discolored fruit. But if you have backyard fruit trees, you do not throw away half your crop because some fruit has spots, bumps, or bird bites. You treasure homegrown fruit enough to sort the good from the not so good, and clean up damaged fruit for juicing, stewing, and freezing.
When growing your own, you proudly bring in a broccoli head, enough to feed the whole family, but remember not to rip out the plant, as it will continue producing shoots for months. These shoots, as nutritious as the head, are never seen in shops as they cost too much to harvest and have a short shelf life. Undersize late tomatoes are almost as good in the kitchen as big early ones. A tender leaf with a hole cooks up just as well as a sprayed shop leaf, and is better for you.
The most important attitude for the food gardener is to eat what is in season.
Cabbage is a wonder food. Those outer leaves the greengrocer lops off, leaving only the pale inner cabbage, can be utilized in your kitchen if grown organically and not filmed over with insecticide. You can eat broccoli leaves stir-fried with garlic and soy sauce, dark green and delicious. First cut out the fat ribs and then juice these with carrots or apples for an energy-boosting drink. You can also juice kale and cauliflower ribs. Steam the tops of organically grown beets, rutabagas, turnips, and mustard. Make green tomato chutney. Sauté baby carrots. Weave baskets with sweet corn leaves. Cut and dry herbs every few months for herbal tea. You can do so much with the produce of your Magic Square that you could never buy in shops.
Trade in perfect looks for good taste and high nutrients—a recipe for a good marriage—and build up a relationship with your food plot that satisfies stomach and taste buds, but also your spirits.
As a child, I used to help my mother sort vegetables. They came from the greengrocer but, as all vegetables were organically grown, we floated each batch in a bowl of water to inspect the leaves one by one. Beans often carried caterpillars, and spinach came in bunches cut with seeding stalks that had to be removed. Cleaning and washing vegetables was normal then. Ironically, it went out when insecticides and herbicides came in, delivering clean-looking vegetables that carry invisible toxicity instead. Cultivate vegetable attitude. Pick over your own vegetables rather than chopping up something from the shop without even rinsing, as so many cooks do.
Vegetables and fruits are at their best when ripened in season. Eat them then and do not desire them too early or too late. Grow early, middle, and late varieties, but go without sometimes to experience the joy of a transient food coming into season. You waited half a year, now the moment has arrived. You know you are eating the best when you pick your first artichoke, strawberry, or baby squash.
GOING ORGANIC makes gardening easier. There are a lot of things you don’t have to do anymore, and going back to basics allows nature a chance to show what it is capable of. Nothing is wasted; all is used or recycled. The rules for organic farm certification are very strict, but by using common sense, the home gardener can achieve almost the same.
1 Think of a garden as a community where many different plants help each other and attract insects, which in turn attract birds to nest in thickets, contributing to a healthy balance without the need of toxic substances that harm birds, frogs, lizards, wildlife, and you.
2 Care for the soil. Don’t leave it bare for long. Don’t rototill. Keep digging to a minimum. Use a garden fork when loosening is required. Build soil with compost, mulch, manures, and green crops.
3 Compost manures or spread them under CM, keeping away from plant roots. Use LS, B&B, OF, and natural pest-control methods.
4 Never burn garden waste. “Cook” diseased waste in plastic bags in the sun. Don’t bring healthy garden waste to the dump. Compost everything to make your own soil and mulch.
5 Set up a worm farm and frog pond after you have stopped using toxic sprays. Plan to enclose your orchard trees and put in a few hens to control codling moth and other pests.
6 Rotate crops in the food garden, plant fragrant and pungent herbs for pest control, and practice companion planting.
7 Raise your own seedlings from open pollinated seeds, not genetically modified seeds. Save seed from your best plants and swap with others. Leave some vegetables to go to flower to attract predator insects.
8 If you need to buy mulches, potting soil, and other garden products, buy organic products or buy from unsprayed environments.
9 Never use toxic sprays, not even the one you are told breaks down quickly—yeah, sure—and disappears into groundwater until elements of it come up again to issue from someone’s tap. Don’t use snail pellets. They will kill frogs, lizards, ladybugs, lacewings, worms, small birds, and other assistant gardeners. Contact your local agency to dispose of your collection of toxic substances. They have facilities to do this without the substances leaking into the environment, which would happen if you just put them in the bin. If you must spray, make garlic or soapy water spray and keep well away from your pond and worm farm.
10 Utilize weeds for their nutrients in compost and green mulch. Control seed-setting weeds by cutting off flowers. Where weeds are rampant, mulch with wet newspaper, cardboard, telephone books, and pea straw. Then plant groundcovers and a tree, use that area as a pumpkin bed, or grow a crop of potatoes.
Think of your garden as your paradise, and paradise will emerge within a few years. Celebrate your garden’s birthday!