Suburban Garden Expansion Part Three!

I came home to Pennsylvania this weekend to resume work on the garden. Spring is such a wonderful time to be alive! Many trees were budding (including both of my apple trees), and some were even flowering. On Saturday morning, birds are chirping everywhere, a falcon circled the turquoise sky. Our neighbor's dog, Biscuits, was lounging around, and my backyard was awash with the verdant colors of new growth.


Before even starting my work, I noticed strange tufts of green grass growing all around the back of our property and extending a bit into our neighbor’s yard. There were dozens of such plants. Upon closer examination, I realized that these little plants were the descendants of the 4 heirloom green onions that I grew last year. The green onions are cut and come again annual vegetables whose seeds are propagated by the wind. Apparently, the 4 original onion plants had cross-pollinated each other. Their children must have colonized the marginal lands adjacent to the two properties.

And the land is surely marginal, stuck between my garden and my neighbor's flower beds, it's rocky as hell and laced with pine needles. The only plants growing there are some weeds, lichen, and of course my onions!!! This fortunate colonization will provide our family with several times the amount of edible green onions as compared to last year, and without any additional effort on our part. What we are seeing is in effect, permaculture in action. Our plant has created a niche for itself in a previously barren habitat.

After examining the green onions, I went straight to work. Seven new V-shaped troughs were created with the trusty shovel and pick-ax. Three of them were along my neighbor’s fence to the east, another four were dug along the land bordering our neighbor to the south. These troughs were about a foot long, six inches wide, and ten inches deep. The bottom of each trough was lined with rich compost and buffered with three inches of organic garden soil. The four troughs along the southern edge of the backyard had to be fortified with extra garden soil, since the natural soil base there is so poor and rocky to begin with. Each trough is then given a single asparagus crown buried under another 3 inches of garden soil and then watered thoroughly. In time(hopefully) the asparagus will become a hedge like border that produces food and acts as a windbreak.

The asparagus is a perennial plant that once established, will produce nutritious green spears for decades. While the reproductive strategies of plants are varied and interesting in general, the strategy taken by the asparagus is highly unconventional in my opinion. Basically, a parent Asparagus’ root system is composed of crowns of individual root shoots. Now depending on environmental conditions or just plain chance, some of these crowns will bud off or get broken off from the main root structure. Each crown has the potential of becoming an independent Asparagus plant. Yet unlike other budding root plants, each crown isn’t a clone of the parent, it’s actually a bundle of genetically distinct child asparagus cells surrounded by the parent’s root tissue. As a newly broken crown grows, the child cells will replace the parent tissue, cell by cell. Thus, prior to budding, it is as if a parent plant and all of it’s children are part of the same functioning organism!

Suburban Garden Expansion Part Two!

On Sunday, I decided to add some much needed perennials into the garden. The trouble with annual crops such as corn and tomatoes is just that...these plants only live for a year. The act of breaking ground and sowing new seeds every year is a relatively uncommon and highly destabilizing event in nature. Firstly, fine tillage of even small plots require substantial amounts of energy. Industrial agriculture makes this look easy through the extensive use of non-renewable fossil fuels. And as we have seen firsthand yesterday, doing the job with muscle power alone is incredibly exhausting. More importantly though, the act of plowing destroy soil systems. Huge amounts of nutrients are leached out of plowed soil through erosion, thus requiring the tedious application of fertilizer and compost every year. Beneficial insects and micro-organisms are killed wholesale through the breaking of ground, paving the way for later epidemics of pests and weeds. Interestingly enough, weeds are nothing more than hardier, low-yielding relatives of the common grains that we consume. Without broken earth, weeds would have no place to establish themselves. Thus when we plow our fields, we are literally sowing the seeds of our own future misfortune!

These is where perennials come in. These long-lived crops require but a single planting and can yield food for decades or even centuries. But of course, nothing comes for free in life. Planting perennial crops takes a ton of effort. We started early Sunday morning by planting two apple trees of different breeds, golden delicious and red winesap. Apple trees require a significant degree of genetic variety to ensure successful cross-pollination. My father and I started by digging two giant holes in the ground spaced 15 feet apart. These holes were 3 feet across and 1.5 feet in depth. We attacked the ground with the trusty shovel and pick-ax. The work was brutally hard. Below 6 inches the ground turns into hard clay, below a foot, the clay earth is packed with boulders the size of bowling balls. We literally removed hundreds of fist sized stones and a score of boulders with the pick ax and our bare hands during the excavation. The soil that was dug up had to then be siphoned for larger stones, this was back-breaking work which yielded hundreds of additional egg-sized stones.

After the deed was done, we began to manually rototill large amounts of sand and rich garden soil into the 2 hills of unearthed clay soil. I wanted to use compost initially but after some research, it appears that compost would burn the roots of the young trees. In any case, some of the soil mixture was carefully spread into the base of the hole until the top of the young tree's root bundle stood at exactly ground level. At that point we transplanted the young trees and began shoveling in the rest of the soil mixture around the tree. We packed the soil down hard with our feet to ensure that the tree was firmly anchored. The next step was to hammer down some of our unearthed stones around the edge of the now filled pits, thus forming a lithic mulch. The stones basically absorbs solar energy during the day, and releases that energy as heat at night, thus warming the delicate young roots of the trees. Additionally, rainwater leaches essential minerals out of the circle of stones into the soil whenever it rains, thus serving as a long lasting fertilizer for the tree.

The last stages of the tree planting were pretty straightforward and not too exhausting. We dumped gallons of fresh water into the soil and then topped the entire soil bed off with 2 inches of mulch. The mulch helps the soil retain moisture.






After a short break, we started on the blackberry plantings. The process itself is pretty straightforward, dig a small, 9-inch deep hole, add some compost, and drop in the sapling. But the difficulty was in determining a location. The berry performs best under conditions of moist, acidic soil, and good sunlight. But we had no such place to put this plant, at least no place that wouldn't be threatened by the lawnmower. After arguing for a bit, the decision was made for us. My mother began berating us from the second floor of the house about messing up her backyard. The complaints were largely ignored, however, she did point out a hitherto unnoticed fact. Our yard's old satellite dish was unused, since the TV satellite had long ago fallen out of orbit. Yet the dish was sitting on moist ground right next to the rainwater drainage pipe connected to our roof. Moreover, the land was in full sun and close to our pine tree, so the ground was laced with pine needles, making it acidic. Thus, we removed the huge old satellite dish and planted in our blackberries.

After the day's exertions, my body ached all over. I couldn't even hold onto my laptop very tightly as I left the land of my childhood back towards the island of glass and steel that is Manhattan.

Suburban Garden Expansion Part One!

The delightful weather of spring has lured me back home to Pennsylvania this weekend. I had some major improvements in mind for the suburban garden. So bright and early Saturday morning my father and I got to work. I chipped away at the hard clay soil of the lawn with the trusty shovel. The goal of the effort was to create 2 additional semi-raised beds for the garden. Reclaiming agricultural land from the standard suburban lawn has always been a tedious task, and before long my arms and back were straining due to the sheer human effort. The lawn soil was of course devastated by the repetitive use of the same type of grass along with harsh chemical fertilizers/pesticides. It was hard and yellow, almost like clay. To add to the difficulties, we live in a region of rocky soils. So the clay soil was filled with egg sized stones which had to be removed by hand! After a while, the old rhythms of garden bed creation took over. I shoveled out pieces of lawn grass in a row and removed the underlying earth to form a foot deep trough. After which I stamped down the pieces of turf upside down along the spine of the trough. Finally, the entire row was filled with the removed dirt. The upside down turf serves as an initial nutrient layer to improve the hard yellow soil. For each row of cleared turf, I also added in several pounds of composted leaf molds to further increase the soil's organic content. Some 3 hours of hard manual labor transpired, but eventually I was finished, and exhausted by the effort.

Meanwhile, my father was busy spreading out the compost upon the 4 existing garden beds. Each bed recieved roughly 20 lbs of rich black compost. Since we have deposited at least 40 lbs of fish guts into our piles over the last year, the resultant compost was especially rich. It had a thick, semi-sticky consistency, quite like some sort of petroleum product in fact. Fertilizing the fields required him to manually roto-till the compost into each of the existing beds. Every last bit of the compost was worked into the soil, nothing is wasted around our little garden. Along with the compost, some leaf molds and a small amount of pine needles were also worked into the earth. The leaf mold serves as a good source of carbon to aerate the soil, while the pine needle gave the soil PH a slight kick towards the acidic spectrum. I figure we needed to put some more natural acidic fertlizer into our beds due to harvesting over 200 lbs of tomatos out those same beds.

As we worked, I could not help but feel that we are but following in the foot steps of a hundred generations of farmers before us. A food-producing tradition that has spanned a journey across continents and millennia. What is surprising to me is not that we are personally farming the land as our ancestors have done before us. Rather the surprise comes from the fact that most of my(and my father's) generation would be the first people in all of human history to NOT produce our own food. We are the first broken link within this continuous chain of tradition that stretches back thousands of years. Thus it may be the case that producing one's own sustenance locally is a norm in human history, while our current long-distance consumerist way of life is merely a brief exception. A single broken link in an otherwise flawless chain.

Inspired by a Symposium!!!

My winter-time drudgery of work, sleep, rinse, and repeat has been delightfully lifted by the soft showers of spring. Much has transpired in the last 3 months. Our green business, Grown-Up-Permaculture, is off to a great start. Work is already underway on multiple rooftop garden projects with several major clients. Needless to say, I have been in work fanatic mode for quite a while now. It's not easy keeping the day job and a hobby-turned business at the same time!



So to scout out the landscape of the green movement here in NYC, I decided to take a field trip today to the 27th Making Brooklyn Bloom Symposium held at the famous Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. So in the soft rains of march, I made my way to Prospect Park and entered the main Botanical building. The conference hall was packed with Green businesses, non-profits, and community groups of all sorts. There were companies and organizations representing almost every aspect of the Green movement as it relates to food production. There were CSA(community supported agriculture) provider groups, urban farmers, educators, forest gardeners, human-powered produce delivery firms, poultry raisers, seed distributors, resource recycling outfits, and a host of other green niche groups. So many people attended today that the conference hall and every single workshop for the entire day was packed and overflowing with New York urbanites.

I found much useful information( and amusement ) while attending a series of highly detailed workshops ranging from urban soil lead mitigation to raising chickens in the city to the fine arts of indoor seed sprouting and dwarf tree pruning! I felt energized by the sheer level of dedication, enthusiasm, and hope that so many people at the conference seemed to genuinely have. Prior to today, my notions of the purpose of a garden spans the vague concepts of natural self-sufficiency to that of an interesting stress-relieving hobby.

But this gathering has expanded upon those initial ideas. Using organic agriculture and perma-culture, we can actually change this city, and the world, for the better. The conference's themes of teaching the needy to gain nourishing sustenance for themselves, providing honest work for those without opportunities, and achieving a degree of equality(even if only dietary :P ) for everyone, these messages simply strikes a solid cord within me.

I know that the foundations of our world cannot and will not change. Politicians will always be corrupt, big corporations will always try to suck people dry, and the elites will continue to do anything to maintain the status quo. No matter what we do, we'll still face the challenges of resource depletion, weather changes, and economic dislocations caused by our own foolishness. But despite these looming issues...we still have within our hands the means of making our world so much better. This gift of knowledge, just the knowledge of growing food for one's self and family, it shouldn't be denied to anyone. And if people with the means simply had the heart and will to spread this knowledge to their friends and neighbors, just think of how awesome our world would be. I saw a glimmer of such heart in a bunch of ordinary people today, and it really inspired me. Perhaps I'm still too young, but I can't help admiring these people who try so hard to make a better world despite the odds stacked against them. And come to think of it, it would be my greatest fortune if our own little quest can end up making a positive difference in the lives of others.