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.