THINK SEASONALLY. Instead of assuming summer to be an ideal time for gardening because you like to be out in the sun, regard summer as a time to do little else but maintenance, feeding, mulching, and judicious watering. Prune away dead matter and remove spent plants, but remain aware that the main aim is to help your garden survive summer. It is not a time to plant unless you are given plants with big roots, for these are better off in the ground with a deep watering then waiting in a pot. Cuttings can be taken in summer to grow in a shadehouse, roses and lavender in summer, daisies and geraniums any time—all make excellent hedges around the food garden. Apart from puttering to keep you connected, read garden books, start a garden notebook, and make plans. Learn the habits of one or two vegetables and herbs in Part Four for next season.
The gardening year really starts in early autumn. Plant shrubs and perennials to attract pest predators. Clear away spent plants, prune existing perennials and shrubs, and mark out a composting area. Set up compost bins (see Compost Compositions). Autumn is a good time to start a worm farm. Study the autumn list of vegetables in Part Four and select what you want to eat in a few months’ time. If all the plants in your square are spent, spread CMC and replant immediately.
Establish a Brassica Plot, an Onion and Garlic Plot, or a Stir-Fry Plot (see The Magic Square Plots). If an old plant is still forming seed, stake and work around it. Should you have more than one square, fork over plot after plot, apply CMC, and then plant. Position racks or cages to protect seedlings, and keep watering if no rain falls, even if there’s dew. Within five or six weeks, you will eat the first pickings. Prepare a sheltered area (inside or outside, depending on the severity of your winters) to raise next summer’s seedlings. My shadehouse (3 × 6 feet, with salvaged racks) is also the plant hospital, where dead sticks return to life, slow seeds germinate, and sick plants recover.
If you live in milder climes, such as the southern or northwestern states, the entire winter can be the busiest time for the gardener. In between rain showers, you are out in the fresh air preparing for spring, adding lime to acidic soil, planting shrubs, and pruning fruit trees and berries. After cleaning up, the compost is made and the previous batch turned. In mild winters, continue planting trees and shrubs so they can make use of good conditions.
Make an instant cold frame by bending a piece of reinforcing wire into a U-shape, folding plastic around it in such a way that you can open and close a front flap with a peg. Push the wire edges into the ground, place two bricks or pavers inside to capture the heat, and place seed containers on top of these. Don’t forget to ventilate and water! Or, find a crate to cover with removable glass, or plastic sheeting on a stick to roll up on sunny days. Place it on black plastic to hold the heat. Use a cold frame to raise spring seedlings of vegetables needing a long growing season. For a hot frame, see Seeds and Seedlings.
Spring is the season of exuberance. Everything happens at once. That’s why you did the preparatory work in autumn and winter. The weather goes from hot to cold and back again. Things want to grow but can’t, or should but won’t, yet trees and shrubs burst with buds and new leaves in thirty-seven shades of green. Crab apples and flowering plums are clouds of pink and white blossoms, and the orchard reveals daily miracles. Animals and insects wake from their winter sleep. In my garden, we are aware of snakes. They wake up on the first warm day and may decide to go for their first slither in the sun. I practically always wear boots in the garden, especially in hot weather. Snakes are part of our ecology, but we don’t want to surprise them or be surprised by them, as snakes don’t attack unless cornered or stepped upon.
Bugs and slugs may have crept into the cold frame. Remove all the containers once a week on a mild day and clean the inside of debris. Replace containers and water with LS to strengthen growth. Open the frame when the weather is warm, but always close up before dusk.
Press seeds of your favorite vegetables in containers of potting soil or seedling mix to keep the cold frame full. In its balmy atmosphere, many seeds can emerge within a week. Keep them growing with LS until they have four to six leaves. Don’t plant out until danger of frost is over, but do plant potted plants you didn’t get around to in winter. The rest of spring is taken up with weeding and mulching.
Start a Salad Plot now. Contemplate planting herbs. Take a look around the garden and see where you need to plug up a space or thicken a hedge. If you can’t buy plants, this is another good time to take cuttings from perennials, while the sap is rising. Soak cuttings or “heels” in water with honey or a willow branch, to help root formation, then stick deep into a pot of soil in shade. If you have a superb white daisy bush, stick twenty to thirty cuttings in a Styrofoam box, feed with LS, and do a mass planting next autumn. If you love buddleia, the butterfly bush, take shoots and tips for a small buddleia forest. Mass plant your garden with beautiful hedges at no cost.
For years, I drove past a particular hillside vegetable garden. It always lay fallow in winter, was dug over in early spring, and not planted until late spring. But this unknown gardener knew what she was doing, for by the first day of summer, the vegetables in that garden stood as tall as mine. Gnash! They probably bought all those plants. . . .
There’s the choice. By starting late, you avoid hordes of spring-born insect pests. Summer heat is advancing; nights are no longer cold. As long as you feed and water late seedlings, they may catch up on those raised early, but some may not get a long enough season.
These choices of when to grow major crops depend on your own rhythms, working patterns, and climate, or on whether you simply cannot wait after that first springy day struck you radiant in mid-March. If you have become an unstoppable food gardener, you plant in spring as well as autumn and do progressive plantings through summer on cool days, or plant in the evenings to allow new plants to brace themselves for dawn. This way, you will have all the vegetables you need throughout the year. But it does require the patchwork method, planting in between maturing vegetables and seed-producing plants. Somehow, that takes care of crop rotation as well.
Summer comes around again, you have done those small jobs throughout the year, and the garden looks vastly different compared with last year. Should you live in a brushfire-prone area, remove dry grasses, clean gutters, and collect dead wood. Don’t burn anything; there is enough air pollution and asthma already. Store wood for winter or pack a few bags for a relative. Dance on a heap of small twigs to make mulch, or compost them. Big pieces of wood shaped with an adze make natural borders for garden beds. Prune away dead wood on trees as high as you can reach, so that ground fires have no purchase on the trunks. Now, enjoy the results of your labor, and sit near a tree with a garden book amidst growth, colors, and birdsong.
A list of summer, winter, and all-season vegetables and herbs precedes their detailed descriptions in Part Four.
SCIENTISTS ARE constantly readjusting predictions for the effects of human pollution on the world’s climates. As gardeners, we must grapple with global warming, global dimming, evaporation rates, less or more rain, and ultraviolet rays. Where you live, it may become cooler and dimmer due to increased pollution fall-out. You may experience less or more rain, storms, droughts, or periodic floods. “May you live in interesting times,” so goes the Chinese curse.
Relentless temperature increases of ocean waters have resulted in parts of the Great Southern Ocean being impassable for shipping due to floating ice. Surface melt of Greenland’s ice sheet is even greater. The result is the steady rising of seawater levels everywhere. We already have a water crisis and a fauna- and flora-extinction crisis (that may rise to 50 percent of species) and can expect biodiversity collapse in some regions’ near futures.16
More than half the world’s ecosystems are about to collapse. Then, there is the underreported fact that the global female population has declined to 10 percent less than the male population through the termination of girl-baby pregnancies, female infanticide, and starvation of girl children in some countries. Females are food growers and nurturers.
So much for the bad news. There is a little good news named “microclimate.” As food gardeners, we rely on our understanding of regional and local climates. Your macroclimate may still be temperate or subtropical, with or without El Niño, but your microclimate is something else. After adding the peculiarities of your location—elevation, desert, river, forest, or seaside—the interesting phenomenon is that any number of gardens in the same macroclimate region may have different microclimates, and therefore different growing climates, depending on their surrounding gardens, built structures, trees, and aspects.
A garden in a suburb near sea level with all its built structures and trees may be easier to grow food in or more complex, depending on the ratio of trees to concrete. Gardens bordered by a park or reserve will have a different microclimate from the next street.
The beauty of a microclimate is that you can control some of it, whereas all you can do about your general location is plant trees with the neighbors and protest against logging. Anything you do to slow down global warming, climate change, and the effects of El Niño weather patterns is worth doing for future generations, but won’t have much bearing on your food garden now.
You can influence your microclimate by manipulating details. When transplanting chilies into pots, create a favorable climate by doing it under a broad-brimmed hat to shade the little devils. Garden umbrellas save bean crops on scorching days. A length of shade cloth can be pulled as protection over a crop about to suffer sunstroke. In a cold snap, pack straw around root crops, fava beans, cabbages, and citrus trees. To protect against wind, erect a fence, screen, trellis, or fast-growing hedge of elderberry, artichokes, or fire-retardant agapanthus.
A body of water, however small, adds moisture to the atmosphere. At least fill up the birdbaths. A minute’s hosing of the food plot makes a difference. Naturally, microclimate is first determined by the lay of the land, structures that block or tunnel sun and wind, and whether there are trees and shrubs to provide shelter and shade.
Observe your microclimate before laying out the food plot. If you locate the plot south of a row of newly planted trees, their roots will absorb water and soil nutrients, while dense shade can reduce your crops and prevent insects visiting for fertilization and pest control. On a sunny day, feel the heat bouncing off walls and fences, heat that could be a bonus to plants a yard away, but a killer to anything hard up against it. On windy days, test where the wind tunnels are in your garden, and don’t plant your plot in their paths. But, remember that all plants need moving air, so utilize gentle breezes. Observe how much full sun, morning sun, or afternoon sun the area receives, remembering the sun is lowest in the sky in mid-winter, right overhead in mid-summer, and between these extremes in spring and autumn when you put in young vegetables.
Plan to create a more beneficial microclimate. Plant flowering shrubs for windbreaks and bird havens; they don’t have to grow high to benefit vegetables. A shadehouse, bush house, or plastic tunnel not only houses delicate plants and seedlings but also provides four new possibilities. Grow heat-loving plants on the south side, lettuce on the north side, honeysuckle and pot herbs around an eastern entrance, and a hedge of strong plants on any side where ferocious winds hit: elderberry, crab apple, large daisies, wild plums, or goldenrod. Any strong plant will do, but those with other uses are best.
Be aware that whatever you place in the garden—be it a tepee, birdbath, or table and chairs—changes the path of the wind, casts shade, and attracts perching birds. Your major success in creating a microclimate, beneficial to all types of fruit and vegetables, will come from how you plant your boundaries against the worst of weathers.
In a circular bed made with plastic water bottles, a tepee of wooden slats provides shade and shelter from the wind for climbing beans and other vegetables.
Just as you reshape your microclimate, so Planet Earth constantly reshapes the macroclimate. Coastal climates are moderated by warm ocean streams. Mountain ranges stop rain or provide snow melt. Volcanic activity destroys vegetation before creating new fertility. Wind and water constantly wear down the highest mountains and redistribute minerals across the valleys or carry them afar via creeks and rivers. Deserts march up or retreat. The whole amazing global fertility show is constantly shedding and adjusting to maintain some golden mean, which may well be what lies between those once prolific tropical rainforests either side of the equator and the two poles. Vast weather patterns do not stop at borders, a change of season or hemisphere, until they have worked off their energy. When the Northern Hemisphere has a severe winter, it may be preceded or followed by a wet one in the Southern Hemisphere. If one hemisphere has a drought, the other is often sure to follow.
We used to think of climate as constant and weather as erratic. A weather pattern can afflict half the globe in one season. We see global droughts, floods and regional phenomena like El Niño and La Niña, and know we will be in for unusual weather events, although we may live far from the source. Continental weather of storms and rain patterns affects neighboring continents or islands. Eventually, when certain weather patterns become regular features, they turn into climate, that supposedly predictable phenomenon that rules our lives. Yet over time, climates can change considerably.
Climate is one thing, weather is another.
When summers turn cold or dry, food gardeners need to be stubborn. Fruit may not set, pumpkins hardly flower, tomato plants huddle. Even if you assiduously add manure, compost, water, and mulch, nothing grows well. Wildlife becomes desperate. Birds scratch mulches, lizards eat unripe tomatoes, possums dig for roots, and some unidentified creature removes hundreds of newly sown onion seeds, earning a tummy ache as well as bad breath! Rabbits may nibble suburban lawns. A mouse plague is likely. In such years, the harvest is miserable and even zucchinis fail to keep you supplied. Chard becomes the Great Standby, with kale, picked young.
You get one debacle or another, or two ganging up, but usually not all at once. But as times are unpredictable, it is wise to grow a variety of foods. One cold summer, we had good cabbages, quinces, and pears. The next spring came after a sunny, dry winter with frosts. When good spring rains arrived, the remaining cabbages, broccoli, and cauliflowers cried: “What’s this? Rain? Never heard of it!” They took up the moisture all right, but soon one in every ten plants had a head full of aphids. Those were the weakest plants, out-competed for water and food by their relatives. Whereas I claim elsewhere that even the smallest brassica can suddenly decide to become a real cabbage, when it is aphid time, it’s the runts that are attacked.
So you cannot wholly rely on charts telling you what you can grow in your climate. These are rough guidelines only. By becoming a food gardener now, you can make adjustments and invent methods that create a microclimate in which to survive the future. Macroclimate, microclimate, seasonal weather patterns, and your adjustments braid something unique together. This is where food gardening becomes as exciting as competitive sport—it’s about having the edge on the odds.
Never garden in a mood of wanting to control everything. Observe nature’s ways. Don’t be quick to interfere when things grow in unexpected ways—there may be reasons. Patient gardeners discover out-of-season surprises, such as ripe pumpkins in winter. Fruit tree seedlings may spring up from the compost. Wait a year or so, and perhaps they’ll become disease-resistant plants that bear unexpectedly good fruit true to type. Let nature take over a little—become her assistant. Feed and mulch where soil looks exhausted, and hand water to stay in touch with what grows where.
PERMACULTURE IS a system devised by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, and was first launched in Tasmania in 1980. Permaculture is aptly named as it strives to create agricultural and horticultural systems that become self-perpetuating. Human ingenuity blossoms in permaculture set-ups, and no two are alike, although there are now many properties and gardens in North America being run on permaculture principles. Permaculture embraces not only the food garden, orchard, and livestock but also birds, insects, surrounding gardens, land management, integrated functions of houses and outbuildings, and the use of people’s time and energy.
There are permaculture books, courses, consultants, and open days. Permaculture is being exported to countries that need more sustainable agricultural methods to encourage food gardeners to stay clear of artificial fertilizers that ruin their soils and GM seed companies that deprive them of control over their own seed production. Bill Mollison has been tirelessly spreading permaculture principles in Africa and Asia, while those who have learned from him and David Holmgren have fanned out through the Pacific and Southeast Asia as far as Afghanistan.
Permaculture is about closed cycles in which each component aids the others. It means that if you grow something to provide mulch and food for animals, who then give manure to put around fruit trees and vegetables, and the cycle is sustainable, you have a closed cycle. For most home gardeners, this means kitchen scraps going to chickens that lay eggs and produce manure for vegetables and fruits that produce more scraps. In dwellings, it is about trapping heat in winter and excluding it in summer by using the orientation of windows, attached greenhouses, and slate floors to retain warmth, the angles of roof overhangs, solar and wind technology, and water management systems.
Another tiny closed cycle is created by excluding chemical sprays and instead running chickens in a fenced orchard to control pests where they scratch for insects, eat fallen fruit, and lay bonus eggs. If you have more land than one garden, grow the little amount of wheat the flock needs and exchange it for manure mixed with soil and straw from their run. Use this on vegetable plots or in compost to grow fruits, herbs, and vegetables of which the chickens get the peelings.
The closed cycle principle goes as far as the universe stretches, but you can attempt closed cycles in an ordinary backyard. Compost bins, worm farms, food production, pond life, energy, gray-water disposal—all these fit on a suburban block and further your self-reliance.
If you have acres, you might be interested in land contours, wind and weather, and how to preserve and improve your piece of the planet and make the best use of it. Borrow a permaculture book from the library for a feast of ideas useful to your future. Put your thinking cap on as to how permaculture designs can apply to your patch of earth or your patio or balcony, and sketch your ideas on the back of an envelope.
POSTSCRIPT: In 2016, the first-ever Graduate Certificate in Permaculture Design course will be launched by Central Queensland University through a distance education program, but including fieldwork in two locations.
PEOPLE IN full-time jobs have barely time on mild evenings and weekends to enjoy their gardens and food plots. People working at home can take their lunch breaks in the garden. Saving time by not commuting, they could spend ten to twenty minutes daily doing small jobs and picking the night’s meal. Refreshed, they work better in the afternoon. Retirees and those mostly at home for other reasons, will soon find the food plot becomes their first destination each morning for a good intake of fresh air and a noseful of fragrances. These three groups have different needs their food plots must meet.
Here are suggestions for crops suitable in a small food plot, to be adjusted by your taste, time, and passion.
Grow open-headed lettuces, perennial sorrel and spinach, Swiss chard, Siberian kale (Red Russian), and broccoli. These can produce for six months, any season, but sorrel mainly in spring and summer. In summer, grow well-mulched potatoes, pumpkins, green beans, one zucchini or one cucumber or one mini-squash (tiny but prolific), one tomato, and open-headed lettuces. Plant one rhubarb crown. Plant parsley and let it seed itself. Plant your three favorite culinary herbs in a box. In autumn, plant two boxes with garlic. This is a low-maintenance, long-lasting growing pattern that will provide countless quick, flavorful, fresh meals. Remember to water regularly and douse with liquid seaweed twice a month. Easy!
In autumn, plant broad beans, snow peas, broccoli, kale, and salad greens. In spring, plant cucumbers, eggplants, bell peppers, broccoli, mulched potatoes, one each of mini-squash, zucchini, tomato, rhubarb, and a few pumpkin vines. Plant parsley. Plant half a dozen culinary herbs: oregano, thyme, and a rosemary bush; and for herbal tea: lemon balm, sage, and tarragon. Or the other way around! Sow marigolds (Calendula officinalis) between vegetables. Dry some flowers and store the orange petals for a festive touch in rice pilaf, pasta, crumbles, cakes, and biscuits.
Plant French beans and peas in spring and broad beans and snow peas in autumn. Plant enough dark green vegetables for a daily feed, as these boost your immune system and keep your eyes, blood, and brain healthy: Swiss chard, kale, giant mustard, broccoli (stir-fry the leaves), spinach, cabbage, beets (sauté the leaves). Sow carrots, rutabagas, onions (eat green straps), and garlic. A Florence fennel can be grown for the bulb and for fragrant fern to pick as an herb. Sow parsley in the soil and your favorite three herbs in a box. Also keep a pot of mint on a saucer, for pep-up mint sauce and tea.
Easy vegetables are those growing in winter, as rain is the best water supply for plants. Days are often sunny and nights cool. All vegetables hate heat waves, often going to seed, but many love growing in winter—check seed packets. Many insects are dormant until spring. Snails and slugs overwinter, but are easily collected. Seedlings are sown or planted in autumn while the soil is still warm, before wintry weather sets in with the possibility of frost.
Of the three divisions of vegetables: the leafy greens, the fruiting crops, and the root crops, the low-maintenance ones are:
◆ Leafy greens: Kale, leeks, spinach, Swiss chard, arugula, open-hearted lettuces, Asian greens, dill, cilantro, parsley.
◆ Fruiting crops: Broad beans, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, peas, cucumbers, pumpkins, squashes.
◆ Root crops: Beets, carrots, garlic, onions, radishes, rutabagas.
A healthy choice is unavoidable. If your favorite vegetables aren’t there, it is probably because they are summer vegetables. If your soil is heavy, make a light, sandy soil mix in a deep banana box for carrots.
The easiest summer vegetables, sown or planted in spring, are:
◆ Leafy greens: Asian greens, kale, mustards, perennial spinaches, Swiss chard, perennial wild arugula, open-hearted lettuces, parsley.
◆ Fruiting crops: Eggplants, green beans, bell peppers, chilies, cucumbers, pumpkins, squashes, tomatoes. Overwinter eggplants, bell peppers, and chili plants in pots and plant out again next spring. A potted tomato can ripen indoors when winter strikes early.
◆ Root crops: Beets, carrots, radishes, rutabagas.
Vegetables grow in either or all seasons, but winter vegetables have dependable growth due to lack of scorching heat. Summer vegetables may bolt to seed early and have to be re-sown several times for continuous crops. This depends on your microclimate and the weather in any particular year. You will learn quickly what works and what doesn’t in your plot. Adjust your planting next year.
There is an endless variety of vegetables in the three groups to experiment with, so plant one experimental crop each season. If an experiment doesn’t succeed, all you have lost is some seed. Although there is no saying the seed would do better next year, you may as well give it a try, but don’t let it take up space in the plot. Put it in a pot. If it germinates strongly, you can transplant seedlings.
Take photos before and after each season. Keep prints in a special food garden album. You’ll be surprised when you look back in a few years at early snapshots of the bare beginnings of a food garden that has been sustaining you ever since.
OPEN-POLLINATED SEED is seed that has been grown with the aid of bees and insects in the open and will breed true to type, unless several so-called promiscuous species of the same family grow close together and the bees cross-pollinate one with the other. Familiarize yourself with the chapter on vegetable groups in Part Four and either grow one variety per season, or space members of the same family wide apart in the garden to avoid cross-pollination and reaping seed producing a “cukin” or “pumpcumber!” If your only square is full of brassicas, cut the flower heads off all but the one you want to grow seed from. Cook all brassica flower heads as broccoli or in stir-fries. Learn more about cross-pollination from the Seed Savers Exchange (see Useful Addresses).
Saving your own seed is highly recommended because seeds grown in the conditions of your garden will do best when replanted there. Seed saving allows you to sow thickly—see Chard and Brassica juncea in Part Four—and keeps open-pollinated varieties viable in your district as you share seeds with friends and neighbors. Sometimes, seed saving leads to self-seeding so that new plants come up in their own good time in the plot or compost.
The general rule for saving seed is to let pods and seed heads dry on the stalks. This enables seeds to take up all the goodness of the dying plant. You then cut off the seed, place it in a paper bag, and hang it in a dry, dark place for a few weeks. After this, you can harvest the seed from the pods or casings and store it in airtight, screw-top jars or plastic containers kept in a dark, dry, and cool place.
Reduce any humidity in seed containers with silica gel packets saved from vitamin bottles or photographic equipment. Humidity is a great spoiler of otherwise viable seed, either destroying or reducing the duration of its viability.
Don’t keep seeds in the shed, for sheds get hot. Total seed-saving buffs keep their seed in glass jars in the bottom of the fridge. Find a shelf in the coolest room of the house for your precious seed collection, the food of the future. Use a closet shelf, for your seeds are more valuable than your clothes. Inside the door, pin a timetable of when to plant what. Also store seed catalogs here and a book on companion planting. Spread it all out on the bed for action.
When my beans start to bean, I tie a bit of red yarn around the fattest, longest beans, so that I don’t pick those for the pot. These seed beans dry off with the plant. Red yarn also marks my best sweet corn cob.
When carrots wave strong, green ferns, indicating that the roots are ready for pulling, save the strongest, pushing a tall stick alongside it. Tie it up when it grows a stalk and let that one produce seed. Carrots flower like Queen Anne’s lace, attracting beneficial insects by the thousands. Let the large flower heads dry until they are full of tiny, disc-like seeds. Further dry the heads indoors, then shake out in a bowl, and store.
All the brassica family (see here) produce prolific tiny, round, black, or brown seeds in pods ½ to 1 inch long. Hang the pods in paper bags to dry. Only radish seeds are bigger. To plant radishes, break open the pods to release the seed. The others have to be winnowed, best done on a windless day. After a few weeks’ drying, transfer one type of seed stalk at a time (like kale) to a pillowcase. Slap the pillowcase from left to right on a table or hard surface to break the pods. Soon you will have seeds and chaff. Go to the vegetable garden and stand beside a plot where you don’t mind a few self-seeded kales and take handfuls of empty pods from the bag, spreading them on the plot. The seeds will remain at the bottom of the pillowcase because they are heavier. Next, empty the pillowcase’s contents onto a tea tray with a rim and blow gently across the tray, holding it above the plot. The chaff will blow off while the seed remains. A few seeds may jump down to take their chances. Shake the tray gently from side to side to separate seed from chaff between blowings. This is one of my favorite harvesting operations. You end up with fairly clean seed to store; it will be viable for several years. Winnow all seed above the same plot for a carefree escapee’s Stir-Fry Plot!
The cucurbit family of pumpkins, squashes, melons, and cucumbers have large seeds. Leave one fruit on the vine until the vine dries up. Open the fruit and scrape out the seed; wash and dry thoroughly before storing. Easiest are the pumpkins. Select your biggest, handsomest pumpkin, and when it looks ripe enough to eat, the seed is mostly viable after drying. A spell in the fridge may improve it. The other cucurbits are messier.
Refresh your stock annually or whenever possible.
Even seeds from the pyramids have been germinated in the 20th century, but generally, there’s no point keeping cucurbit seed for more than a couple of years.
Once you have a well-stocked seed bank, and not before, use old seed to grow a dense green crop on a vacant plot and dig it in. Or, let it grow and eat it. Or, save new seed from it.
United States farmers are aware of the Plant Variety Protection Act of 1970 (PVPA) and Plant Patent Act of 1930 (PPA). Under these regulations, seed companies hold patents on seeds they claim to have improved, and farmers pay a series of levies to keep PVPA and PPA operating so that they may have access to the improved seeds. Growers are not allowed to share seed grown from these improved seeds with neighbors or other growers, as this violates the intellectual property rights of the seed company that owns the patent for the improved seed sold to the farmer. To assure future sales, global seed companies have created “terminator seed,” which produces plants that cannot procreate. This compels farmers to buy new seed from the seed company each year. Presently, there is still a worldwide moratorium on terminator seed technology (see The Terrifying Importance of Growing Food).
Until the 1980s, there were some 7,000 small seed companies, each making a living from less than 1 percent of the market. Then, the first shadows of genetically modified and engineered seeds fell on this pastoral trade. Chemical companies moved in to buy out these small traders. The aim was to produce value-added seed, sold with its own particular fertilizer and pesticide. Once patents were taken out on these new seeds (mainly of commodities, like corn, soy, and canola), a seed company would control a part of the food-supply chain.
Before 1980, seeds were a universally free gift from Mother Earth that farmers and gardeners shared, swapped, and passed on to improve crops by selecting future seed from their best plants. This was the world’s best insurance to preserve biodiversity in food plants and avoid species collapse. Suddenly, seeds of important commodity crops that feed billions of people are owned by a company who controls what can and what cannot be done with them. In the hands of GM companies like Monsanto, DuPont, and Syngenta, “improved” seeds have become genetically modified or engineered seeds. As of 2007, these three companies held 44 percent of the global seed market, with one fifth in Monsanto’s lap. The sale of transgenic seeds and traits made up almost 75 percent of Monsanto’s 2007 profits.
The sharing of patented seed is now called piracy, even if the wind or a bird deposits it into your field. The US, Canada, and Australia have seen hundreds of prosecutions against farmers, including the bizarre prosecution in Canada of farmer Percy Schmeiser, onto whose land had blown some genetically engineered canola seeds from a neighboring farm, which then germinated. In the 1990s, he was saving his own seed and growing it on, whereupon Monsanto’s seed police detected he was growing their particular brand of GE canola and was therefore guilty of patent infringement. Farmer Schmeiser claimed to know nothing of this seed but was convicted, and the seed company won that day in court. The Canadian Supreme Court’s decision in favor of Monsanto in 2004 was followed by some ninety US farmers being similarly sued. Percy Schmeiser now travels the world for the cause of farmers’ rights. Injustice makes activists out of people who just wanted to farm in peace.
Prior to 1987, when the debate over plant breeders’ rights raged, it was feared that home gardeners would be prosecuted if they shared seeds with neighbors. It initially appeared to be the intention that all commercial seed would eventually fall under PVPA and PPA and hence were likely to become “value-added,” with more pesticides to contaminate more soils, rivers, and ground water.17 Organic growing with organically raised seeds is the only alternative.
When the PVPA was introduced, some people questioned whether the seed companies claiming these rights had paid royalties to the original owners of the seed they started with, meaning those farmers who had grown that seed or plant for generations through the ages. It appears that’s not how it is done. One apparently goes to a third-world country and acquires plants and/or seeds cheaply and easily. One takes them home, alters them, and then markets them under PVPA or PPA laws (or the equivalent laws of the country in question) as new and improved seed burdened with intellectual property rights incurring fines when violated. The international seed industry is waging a global campaign to have all farm-saved seed declared illegal or subject to government royalties. Should they succeed, home gardeners may well be affected.18 It is probably only a matter of time
The good news may be that on June 29, 2004, the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture became an international law. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) described it as “vital in ensuring the continued availability of the plant genetic resources that countries will need to feed their people.” This should preserve a greater variety of food plants and genetic diversity so necessary to keep intact the web of life that sustains humanity.19 It looked as if the FAO recognized that having the world’s seeds in the hands of just a few companies is a recipe for worldwide famine. The bad news is that the FAO didn’t seem able to stop a new law in Iraq, as part of US reconstruction, that prohibits Iraqi farmers saving their own seeds, compelling them to buy seeds protected by PVPA from a US-based corporation that operates under “no competition” conditions. This could indicate that the genetic seed sources the FAO protects may not necessarily be preserved for the people who protected these resources for an untold number of generations. Ironically, the FAO had estimated in 2002 that 97 percent of Iraqi farmers, whose ancestors were the first farmers ever to grow and improve wheat, saved their own seed. Now most of these wheat varieties may soon be lost forever.It could be that the FAO’s agenda is similar to the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) push to make member governments adopt PVPA laws aimed at government control over all food seed sources.
The 2006 United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity’s meeting in Spain debated lifting the moratorium on terminator seed technology, urged by the governments of Australia, US, New Zealand, and others. Brazil and India, on the other hand, have national prohibitions on terminator seed technology in place.20 In March 2006, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity met again in Brazil and upheld the moratorium on terminator seed technology until the next meeting in 2008. “This is a momentous day for the 1.4 billion people worldwide who depend on farmer-saved seeds,” said Francisca Rodriguez of Via Campesina, a world-wide movement of peasant farmers. “Terminator seeds are a weapon of mass destruction and an assault on our food sovereignty.”21
During a 1992 summit for indigenous peoples held in Rio de Janeiro, the right of indigenous farmers over their crop genes was formalized, recognizing farmers’ sovereignty over biological resources. More action is constantly required to make it work globally, but some countries have installed their own laws to protect indigenous seed.22
Indigenous seed may be easier to acknowledge than indigenous people when it comes to growing crops. Less than 4 percent of the world population is indigenous in the sense that anthropologists understand it, and most of them have lost their lands, so they are no longer growing food. Then, there are millions of people who were dispersed centuries ago, resettled elsewhere, and are living off the land. Obviously, they have developed local crop varieties. Even I, a rank immigrant from a tribe of migrants covering the five continents, developed a new variety of radish in my forest garden. Vegetable and fruit growers who put the better parts of their lives into working the soil they happen to live on, are, in my book, “indigenous” for the purpose of claiming rights over their biological resources.
Knowing all this, it’s no wonder those who opposed the Plant Variety Rights Act and the Plant Breeder’s Rights Act in Australia in the 1980s claimed that seeds were nature’s gift to everyone, that nobody could own them, that all humanity had a right to use them to grow plants, especially food and medicinal plants, those that big companies want to monopolize. Patenting seeds is like patenting the air we must breathe, or taxing the rain that falls on our gardens.
Therefore, while these debates rage on about who has rights to seeds and who has not, be on the safe side, obtain heirloom variety seeds, grow them, and set up your own little seed bank. Learning from those who have gone before can, in this case, save our seed and food resources from being modified away by dollar-hungry corporations who take out contestable patents, have in-house lawyers to argue their cases, and don’t mind spending a few million for a conviction to keep small growers cowed. Remember that few of the corporate managers have any innate knowledge or understanding of the art of growing food and preserving seeds. They are simply managers and may have started in the manufacturing of cars or cheese or basketball shoes. Those markets became saturated so they looked for other products to develop, and hey, people will always need food grown from seeds. So they hired scientists and financial wizards who, between them, came up with a plan to corner one or another crop in the world market. It’s happened to coffee, it’s happened to tea, it’s happened to soybeans. They now have their eyes on broccoli.
ONE GREAT delight in my circle of friends is the “peasant lunch,” a term we adopted to cover all probabilities and eventualities when serving an entirely home-grown meal. We sat around campfires in the earlier years, eating revolting communal stews concocted from tinned food brought by members of the archaeological team we worked with. No wonder we became foodies in later years, savoring the purest of foods, slowly and carefully prepared.
My early peasant lunches consisted of whatever vegetables and fruits were in season and dishes made with goose, duck, or chicken eggs. I might have bought cheese and cream, or added olives from a crate bought at the market and pickled annually.
Gradually, peasant lunches translated into meals from other cultures, using authentic recipes. Over the years, we have savored flavors from China (soy, spring rolls), India (chai, paneer, laddhu), Tibet (tsampa, momos, butter tea), Bali (chili, cilantro), Korea (pickles, roasted sesame seed), and the Middle East (salted lemons, almond mousse). Everyone contributes, often with no more organization than each person bringing a different course. Sometimes, a meal consists of starters, soup, salad, side dish, and dessert, omitting a main dish. And we have a wish list of countries whose cuisines we have yet to try in our super-mature years, when excellent food becomes the primary joy of life.
Fortunately, all great cuisines are based on peasant food and home-grown and farmers’ market produce. We found that Korean cuisine uses the same seeds, spices, sesame oil, and rice vinegar for almost every vegetable, yet each dish tastes different. In Malaysia, just about everything is made with rice flour. For some cuisines, we buy new ingredients, but mostly we rely on our gardens and markets to travel the world at our table. Needless to say, the wines are local, although we went to some lengths to make Tibetan butter tea and Indian chai.
For everyday cooking, I lean on recipe books for the volume of green-leaf vegetables I dish up. Books can be found that deal mainly with antioxidant open-leaf vegetables, those that help fight cancer and heart disease, and which include many of the brassica family. Instead of using greens as a garnish, a gesture, or a display bed for meat and fish, such recipes feature green vegetables as the main ingredient. In many cultures, most parts of the vegetable are used to make tasty salads, soups, and main dishes. One advocate for home growing, Mark Bittman, points out in his book Leafy Greens that leafy greens are easier to grow, have fewer pests than other vegetables, can be started earlier, will last longer, and many will grow throughout the year in temperate climates.
Have I mentioned pride? Well, no. Pride in produce is ultimately due as praise for Planet Earth, for providing the raw ingredients for us to grow and place the very finest food on our tables. Humble food is undeniably the best-tasting food. Bon appétit.
Eight carrots from 4 square inches!
The same carrots, washed up and ready for the table.
ANY VEGETABLE can be cooked on the stovetop, and many can be eaten raw, but with a few gadgets, you can get a lot more out of home-grown produce. Food gardens have times of overproduction. With a blender, a juicer, and a wok, you manage these times without waste. Buy during the sales and save dollars, or buy a combined blender-juicer, a cheap little machine giving years of service.
A blender enables you to make delicious soups, chutneys, and sauces with vegetables, fruits, and herbs. Experiment with blended, spiced-up cold cucumber or zucchini soups, apple and rosemary chutney, and fresh tomato sauce—simple additions to meals that you will not be without once tried.
A juicer is terrific when fruit ripens in the span of two weeks. Store unblemished apples and quinces on newspaper, in a dark, cool place. Bruised ones are best steamed, sauced, and juiced. I love that time of year when we drink glasses of fresh juice, concentrated goodness toning up the body.
People with cancer and those with digestive problems are often advised to drink vegetable juices. Why wait until you are ill? My favorite summer vegetable juice recipe is Cabbage Ribs and Co. Pick six big cabbage leaves, stripping the greenery for a stir-fry or chicken food. Cut lengthwise one large carrot and half a zucchini. Push cabbage ribs, carrot, and zucchini through the juicer with a knob of fresh ginger and a quartered apple. Or, add lemon or orange. You can use overproducing zucchinis at the rate of one every two days just by juicing.
The wok is a splendid invention from China, where it sits in a hole atop a brick stove. To use it on gas or electric stoves, buy a wok ring to steady it. Woks are for stir-fries, and stir-fries are for times of overproduction or underproduction, when a little of everything is enjoyed with rice or pasta, chutney or sauce.
Take a bowl and go for a walk around your Magic Square (or squares). Pick bits of everything, plus onion greens and a handful of mixed herbs. In the kitchen, wash, strip, chop, and divide all into bowls according to firmness. Assuming you have garlic and fresh ginger on hand, sauté these with onion in olive oil over fairly high heat. Pour in a little water or vegetable stock to create a steam cloud. Add the firmest vegetable, toss one minute, then the next firmest, toss, and so on, leaving tender greens till last. Add a squirt of soy sauce. Add chutney, sauces, grated cheese, or spices, and either cooked rice or pasta, for a very repeatable meal.
A spice grinder is another handy kitchen utensil, so useful for home-grown seeds of coriander, fennel, fenugreek, and dill—oh, the aroma! Or, get a cheap mortar and pestle from the Asian grocer and use elbow grease. Save brown paper bags and old pillowcases to dry spice seeds before threshing and grinding. Bring fragrance back into your life.
Wok time: young broccoli, giant red mustard, beans, and zucchinis.
CUPBOARD SELF-SUFFICIENCY is a natural companion to self-sufficiency from your square plot. By combining the produce of your square with the contents of a dry-foods cupboard, you will find it easy to prepare tasty meals of high nutritional value. Presently, we still enjoy the luxury of having a choice of imported and local grains, legumes, spices, and dried foods. Buy dry foods each time you shop. In the not-so-long run, you save money. You could stay at home for a month and never visit a shop for anything. And you can plant bought seeds and beans to grow and eat fresh, then dry the surplus.
Cook chickpeas or orange lentils till soft, drain, and mash. Chop a large onion into a juicy pulp and stir through legumes. Mix in a tablespoon of paprika, taste, and add more, as needed. Thin down with yogurt. Serve with corn chips.
For Indian curries, buy ready-made garam masala or mix your own from ground cardamom, coriander, cumin, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, ginger, fennel, fenugreek, black or white pepper, turmeric, and dried chilies. Store in a jar. For fresh garam masala, dry-fry seeds of cardamom, coriander, cumin, fennel, fenugreek, and mustard until they pop. Keep the lid on the pan. Mash in a mortar with drizzled oil, adding the other ground spices. Use fresh.
Make your own chai—spicy Indian tea. In a glass jar, stir 3 tablespoons of cinnamon, a tablespoon each of ground coriander and ginger, a teaspoon of ground cardamom, and half a teaspoon each of five-spice and turmeric. Vary by using aniseed, clove, fennel, or nutmeg. In India, tea is boiled with milk, sugar, and a heaped spoon of this mixture, but you can just add a teaspoon to the pot with the usual amount of tea and pour on boiling water. Good to chase away a headache.
Mushrooms are a healthy addition to any meal. Grow them yourself in a commercial mushroom box, buy fresh, or go for affordable dried mushrooms. Try varieties in small packets, as some can cause havoc with your personal plumbing. When you know which suit you, buy a humungous pack at a lower price. To use, boil fifteen to twenty minutes, then slice and fry.
Shiitake mushrooms—also known as winter mushrooms or dong gwoo in Cantonese—recommended for people with cancer, are available dried, looking like small potatoes bursting out of their skins. Soak them for ten minutes in warm water, slice, and cook with vegetables. If you worry about what is in meat these days, replace it with small amounts of tofu, mushrooms, and beans. Freeze tofu overnight before use, as this opens the pores to other flavors.
The food value of peas, beans, and lentils is so great that if you make it a habit to add them to meals three times a week, you’ll soon find yourself turning away from less-nutritious foodstuffs and saving money. Beans come in all colors and consistencies. The softest are lima beans, which are good with homemade tomato sauce, but most brown and red beans will cook soft after a soak. Brown lentils go with almost anything. Fry small orange lentils raw until crisp before adding to pasta and rice.
The versatile chickpea—supplying protein, iron, and vitamin C—makes great patties, hummus, dips, and fill for soups and stir-fries. Soak chickpeas overnight, cook until soft, and make delicious chickpea salad with a blended sauce of garlic, olive oil, lemon juice, and a crumbed slice of bread. Add arugula, parsley, mint, and ground rosemary, and top with sliced tomatoes.
Buy dried fava beans to make your own falafel, if you can’t grow enough. The hardest beans to cook are soybeans. After overnight soaking in just-boiled water, they need a long cooking time in fresh water. But plant them and you harvest fresh green soybeans called edamame, as gourmet as young fava beans and delivering all the benefits of soy. Store-bought soy products should be labeled as to whether they are GM-free or not.
Invest in a batch of fermented black beans to use sparingly in stir-fries or rice dishes. No cooking needed, and they keep well.
Reduce cooking time of beans and legumes by placing them in the freezer for a day. After soaking beans overnight, drain and rinse, boil vigorously in fresh water for ten minutes, then simmer till soft. Add pinches of aniseed, caraway, or fennel to the water to counteract flatulence.
Green mung beans sprout easily. Sprouted beans multiply their food value a hundredfold and can take the place of vegetables when your square is bare. Steep 1 to 2 tablespoons of mung beans in hot water and soak overnight, then rinse, pour into a glass jar, and cover with cheesecloth secured with a rubber band. Keep near the kitchen tap. Rinse and drain through the cloth several times a day. Soon, the beans begin to sprout. Kids love to rinse and watch them. After a few days, start adding them to salads, soups, stir-fries, pastas, and rice. Use as a sandwich filling with chutney or tahini for a fresh, crunchy snack. Start a new batch for a continuous supply. Try sprouting other beans and seeds: alfalfa, buckwheat, or fenugreek for curried sprouts.
Rice and legumes combined are more nutritious than if eaten separately. One billion Indians can’t be wrong eating rice, dhal, and vegetables daily. The incomplete protein of legumes becomes complete when combined with a grain.
For a tasty dhal, fry a cup of orange lentils in oil until lightly browned. Add 3 cups of water and bring to a boil. Chop garlic and onion to simmer along with it. Separately dry-fry on low heat pinches of seeds of cardamom, coriander, cumin, fennel, fenugreek, and mustard until they stop popping under the lid. Pound spices. Sauté chopped ginger, chilies, and ground turmeric and add to the lentils. When dhal is soft, add fried spices. Serve with rice, vegetables, and sliced cucumbers in yogurt.
An unripe pumpkin harvested with its last desperate flower after the vine shriveled up. It made a decent pumpkin soup with lentils and spices.
My oma (grandmother) cooked in a haybox to save on gas. A haybox cooks rice, beans, and stews while you do other things. I have a lidded wooden box, painted ochre to double service as a rustic table or cushioned seat. It measures 20 × 20 × 15 inches. If you have a lidded box, fill six pillowcases with hay, padding bottom and sides, keeping one to place on the cooking pot. Spread newspaper on the table or floor. Bring beans, rice, or stew to a boil on the stove. With rice, wait until there is only water in the dimples of the rice. Whip the boiling pot onto the newspaper, wrap tightly, place in haybox, and cover with hay pillow. Close the lid and don’t look for three hours. It keeps it hot for longer, even all day. You can also cook in bed! Place the pot in newspaper wrappings in a bed and pile pillows and blankets on top.
On the flour shelf, you will find besan, or chickpea flour, suitable for people on a gluten-free diet. It tastes nutty and is used for all floury purposes; for the self-raising kind, just add a pinch of baking soda or baking powder. Use it for sauces, tempura, and dumpling batter, or mix with rice flour (great for cakes) for a tasty pancake. In Indian cooking, besan is used in homemade sweets. Making laddhu, my very favorite confectionery, takes time, stirring continuously for 15 minutes, but lets you meditate on the amazing properties of chickpea flour as it metamorphoses spectacularly under your spellbound gaze.
For Italian dinners, buy polenta. Boil in water or vegetable stock, stirring constantly. Make it thick (2 cups of liquid to 1 cup of polenta) to set in a foil-lined form. Cool and turn out as a loaf, then cut in slices to grill or bake with olive oil. Serve with goat cheese, olives, and arugula, or with casseroles of tomatoes, bell peppers, and mushrooms. The ways of serving polenta are as numerous as cooks. You can do the same sort of things with couscous. Consult Moroccan recipes for combinations.
Sago is your next purchase. I knew a sago expert in Papua New Guinea, and am ashamed to admit I laughed on hearing he was off to a sago conference in Manila. How ignorant I was. Sago is the staple food for millions of people in Southeast Asia and Melanesia. I have eaten it fried as crisp pancakes, cooked with vegetables, and smoked in bamboo over a coconut-shell fire. All most satisfying. Sago has little flavor, but plenty of texture to combine with strong flavors. A friend recently revived the recipe for lemon sago. So simple it hardly needs a recipe, it became our favorite palate-cleansing dessert.
Sago swells to many times its dry state, so be prudent! Soak half a cup of sago balls overnight in 3 cups cold water with the zest of one lemon. Keep the lemon in the fridge. The next day, bring sago to a boil. Add the juice of the lemon, or two or three lemons, depending on how strong you like it. Aim for a consistency of thick porridge. Add small amounts of water, if needed. When sago balls turn glassy, taste. When soft enough to chew, add half a cup of white sugar and stir to dissolve, but don’t drown the lemon tang in sugar. Pour into a bowl rinsed with cold water, cool, and then refrigerate. A marvelous dessert for people on diets. You can also make this recipe using oranges.
Buy brown and basmati rice in large bags. They taste nutty. I buy imported rice because Australian rivers can’t sustain rice cultivation, but this may be different where you live. If your home is not mouse-proof, buy strong plastic, lidded buckets, or use a new rubbish bin. Also stock up on noodles. Rice noodles for the no-wheat lobby. Thick, thin, and hair-thin.
Pearl barley is a fine filler for vegetable soups and making barley water for upset tummies. At one time, no kitchen cupboard was without pearl barley, but pre-cooked grains sent it into exile. Roast organic barley in the oven and grind it to make tsampa, a staple food of Himalayan mountain people. Brew strong black Chinese tea with salt and butter or ghee, and stir into a bowl of roasted barley. A truly exceptional taste experience, and so sustaining. Grow your own organic barley on several Magic Squares.
Somewhere near the barley, you should find coconut milk powder for stir-fries and curries. Small luxuries go a long way. Also look for a packet of miso for nourishing soups. Miso is commonly made from soybeans or rice. Miso bouillon with finely cut herbs and onion greens is delicious.
Stock up on dried fruit and nuts for snacks, pilafs, cakes, and breads. Raisins, figs, dates, walnuts, and almonds can change plain dishes into festive food.
Have a wonderful time shopping the slow food way! The slowest of dry foods has to be soaked the night before—half a minute’s work. Next morning, rinse off and pop in the fridge until you get home that night ready to cook. The quickest dry food is putting some almonds through a grinder, or toasting sesame seeds to sprinkle over freshly roasted vegetables. Your dry food supply waits in the cupboard for when you need it. Open the door and invent new combinations.