One of the threads here at Greenerminds is to record the transformation of my garden this year. Many gardeners keep a garden journal, and this is mine. I want to be able to come back next year and see where I was in development at various points in time.

With that said, I want to indicate what I believe the final frost date for 2008 here in the Rochester, NY area was Wednesday, April 16. Actually I’m a bit south, but not yet in the higher elevations that start about 10 miles south. Officially we’re all in Zone 6 but there are many microclimates and miniclimates. I got some frost on parts of my site yesterday, and it was very light, with a low temperature overnight of around 32° F.

Which meant also that I was able to put out the first seedlings last night, which I’ve been hardening off (taking out during the day, back in at night) for the last two weeks. I put these seedlings in two raised beds I built last summer using a sheet mulch, and the dirt is nice! There were tons of earthworms and other soil activity. Anyway, I put out parsley, cilantro, mesclun, arrugula, tai sai, broccoli raab, broccoli, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, snap and sugar peas.

I also rented a rototiller for half a day Saturday. I’m only rototilling the swale / paths and where the pond will go, just to make it easier to dig. I’ll do another post in a few days on how the swales and paths go together. I need to get some red or white clover for the paths, and may need to scrounge some mulch for the swales. Fortunately, tons of free organic material is available on the local sides-of-the-road as people do their spring yard “cleaning.”

George Monbiot finallly makes the point today in the Guardian, that I have been wanting to make about the emerging global food crisis. While some stories on the subject in recent days have mentioned the epic drought in Australia, likely due to global warming, most blame the situation on biofuel use of corn. The fact is that most corn, and indeed most food grain is fed to livestock. Livestock can eat a lot of things beside grain, but grain feed allows for factory production, where massive numbers of animals can be housed on small areas rather than free ranging on pasture. Corn-fed beef and pork are also more “marketable” than pasture-fed.

Monbiot says this:

But there is a bigger reason for global hunger, which is attracting less attention only because it has been there for longer. While 100m tonnes of food will be diverted this year to feed cars, 760m tonnes will be snatched from the mouths of humans to feed animals - which could cover the global food deficit 14 times. If you care about hunger, eat less meat.

He proposes eating farmed tilapia which is very protein-productive and efficient. I’m looking into raising a few in my new mini-pond, when it gets dug later this year. This is the first I’ve heard anyone mention tilapia outside Permaculture circles, although a commenter mentions problems with Chinese and Taiwanese farmed tilapia.

In energy descent, rather than centralized grocery shopping, fed by centralized distribution centers and trucking, fed by monoculture stockyards, fed by monoculture grain production, we need a system where most of the food is much closer to the point of consumption.

In other words, grow a garden. Farm some tilapia. Raise some chickens for eggs and perhaps meat, and maybe a goat for milk. Grain production may still be more efficient on medium to large scales, from an energy standpoint, but most industrial vegetables and fruits are clearly energy losers, even before they get shipped from Chile or California.

One point raised in the comments to Monbiot’s article indicates that the financial crisis does in fact play into the food crisis. Speculative excess capital has flowed into commodities of all kinds over the last two years and this is having a huge cumulative effect on grain prices, including energy and fertilizer input costs and a new midwestern land price bubble. Without being able to systematically untangle the skein of interrelated forcings, we can’t say for certain how much any of these factors —ethanol, oil, climate change, meat habits and speculation —directly contribute to hunger; we only know that they do.

I’m killing my lawn and turning it into a food garden.

Let the sheet mulching begin! I went for a walk around town the other day, poking around the old abandoned railway lines (often a good place to find old tree and shrub stock), and walked past a feed and grain store I hadn’t paid much attention to. I called them up and asked if they sold strawbales, and they did. I ordered 20 at $4.50 each.

Unfortunately they don’t deliver and I don’t have a pickup any more. So I decided to rent a U-Haul, and found that the repair shop around the corner from me rents them- I could walk there if necessary. So I lined up a truck for this weekend.

Meanwhile I went on craigslist and discovered all manner of cool free stuff including rotted horse manure and creek rocks (don’t tell these folks, but people pay good money for this stuff). Haven’t heard back from the rock people yet, but I have the manure and straw pickups scheduled for this Saturday. Naturally, the forecast is for rain.

So the way sheet mulching works is this:

1. first I put down a layer of manure, an inch or two thick, directly on the lawn.
2. If I need soil amendments, these go down now too, and I probably should lime and rock phosphate a bit, especially up the end with the spruce tree.
3. Next we need a weed barrier. My preferred material is corrugated cardboard from the gazillion shipping boxes left over from Christmas and various birthdays, coffee shipments, etc. Thick newspaper, cotton clothes or even carpet will work too. This is to prevent the lawn / weed from coming up through the manure fertilizer.
4. Next layer is a bit of topsoil, maybe an inch. This isn’t really needed, but I put it in anyway.
5. Then comes 6″ to 10″ of straw or other mulch. Last year I used double-ground bark mulch, but it was a bit too woody, so I changed to straw this year.

The great news about sheet mulch:

• no digging
• goes really fast
• you can plant into it right away by making little soil pockets into the mulch
• no digging

Once I get this going, I’ll include some pictures and maybe even a video on the process.

I’m gradually coming to the conclusion that it’s probably more helpful and productive for me to stop arguing the fine points of systems theory, energy dynamics and rhetoric and get down to doing some work, spending some time in the trench.

Finally, and I do mean finally because it’s taken me 13 years, I have a decent seed starting space set up down in the basement. Take a look:

I got my big batch of seeds from Seeds of Change this afternoon and got inspired. I set up the second table and light, on the left, and brought in the seed medium. I’ve also got a heating pad to help the new seeds germinate. Lights and heating pad are plugged into a three-way extension cord, plugged into a three-to-two adapter into a timer on the end of another extension cord. Hopefully the house won’t burn down.

I started the first seeds two weeks ago: cilantro, broccoli, broccoli raab, cauliflower, parsley, brussels sprouts, mesclun and snap peas. I used plugs to start these, which I haven’t used before. The cilantro, on the far right, is just now sprouting, but everything else is looking pretty green. It’s about time to snip off the lesser seedlings.

The next batch started about ten days ago and includes mung and adzuki beans, lacinato kale, lupines and poppies. The mung beans, in the middle, all sprouted really easily, being sprouting beans, but I’ve only got about 10% of the adzukis to come up. The kale is on the right. These were dried beans, several years old, so I guess I’m not surprised. The lupines I saved from pods last fall and the poppies are new seed my sister sent me for Christmas.

I like the fact that these plug trays come with a little clear plastic cover to keep the moisture in, but I’m finally utilizing the egg cartons I’ve been saving for the last year. Today’s batch includes red leaf and romaine lettuces, tai sai chinese cabbage, sorrel, spinach and golden chard.

Now the question is, how am I going to plant all this stuff? I have a couple of beds that could take some things as soon as it warms up a bit, but I’m hoping to sheet mulch about half my lawn this year. I’m guessing I need four yards of manure, two yards of topsoil, about 20 bales of straw, and maybe another two yards of ground bark mulch, just for aesthetics. There’s a feed store in the neighborhood so I thought I’d ask there first for who’s selling manure and straw. Otherwise there’s a small dairy operation not too far, and plenty of horse farms. I figure I can rent a UHaul pickup, now that the Kidney Foundation took the old Nissan pickup.

I also want to put in a few shallow swales before mulching the beds. A swale is basically a ditch on contour, with a small berm on the downslope side. The ditch is then filled with mulch or gravel. As water flows downslope, it sinks into the swale and gets stored in a plume underground.

I figure I’ll rent a rototiller and till these contour lines as soon as it dries out a bit- been pretty wet the last month or so. I’m thinking I ordered red clover to plant on the berm-lets, but it must have been back ordered, because it didn’t come with the other seeds. I have a fairly flat lot but there is still an advantage to swaling here I think. I’ll put paths on the upslope side of the swale and plant these in clover as well, and mow them with a push mower.

The stuff we are talking about- home, urban and communitiy gardening, food, pattern, integrated landscapes, victory gardens, ecology, edge, small farming, relocalization- is suddenly mainstream. Allison Arieff blogs on these and other topics on the front page of the New York Times website.

On Sunday, Sharon Astyk wrote at Casaubon’s Book about Victory Gardens. We must all be tapping into something here. There are a couple of links to sites that are promoting a new brand of Victory Garden, probably as part of the Relocalization movement. I’m going now to read the whole thing and maybe post a comment.

Hat tip to Energy Bulletin.

As part of my Permaculture Certification training, I’ve started doing a little research into WWII Victory Gardens. How this came up is that one of the other students was asking about apple varieties, and I was relaying the story in Masters of the Victory Garden about the man in Virginia who’d collected 1800 varieties of fruits in his half-acre suburban plot. Andrew caught the words “Victory Garden” and asked me to explain what a Victory Garden was. All I knew was that Victory Gardens were planted in the US and England during WWII. Andrew “suggested” this would be a good research project- find out more about Victory Gardens.

So this week I’ve done a little web research and found a number of sites (K-12 resources, Victory Seeds, Pennsylvania VGs, Canadian story), documents and photos. Victory Gardens, or war gardens, started in WWI, so there was a history of the activity when the US went to war in 1941. Many gardens appear to have sprung up spontaneously but a conference of the Civilian Defense and USDA held in 1941 added organizational and communications power to the movement. Commercial enterprises like Beechnut and International Harvester also joined. By 1942 there were 6 million Victory Gardens planted. In 1943, this number shot up to 20 million, and the home gardener was supplying around 40% of the nation’s total vegetable production. This number is huge when you consider that we were also supplying troops and Allies’ food needs. In 1946, after the end of the war, few gardens were planted and the US suffered significant food shortages.

Victory Gardens graced Boston Common and San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Schools, government buildings, vacant lots and many back yards were used. At least one Victory Garden, located in Boston’s Fenway, still exists.

Victory Gardening was driven by real needs- rationing, food shortages, tin shortages, and limits to transportation. A large part of the program was aimed at preserving food as well as growing it. Preserving techniques were centered around canning, but also included drying, cold storage and the brand-new idea of refrigeration. Pressure cooker sales went from 50,000 in 1942 up to over 300,000 in 1943.

The government and industry assisted by promoting the program and publishing guides and pamphlets that gave very basic training in vegetable gardening. The explicit assumption was that the average suburban gardener would have little, if any, gardening experience. Alongside the quaint references to insect pests as “Japanazis,” these guides include very practical tips such as using straw mulch between rows and preparing soil with animal manure. They also include garden plans and planting schedules.

Victory Garden Committees were set up to support gardeners, give advice and coordinate work and distribution of produce. In Pennsylvania, 1500 committees supported over 1.5 million gardens, a ratio of about 1 committee to 1000 gardens.

I found that the Canadian Government was much less proactive about home gardening. Two urban gardeners from Victoria, B.C. pestered the government so much though, by way of their MP, that eventually in 1943 the Canadians joined the movement. The story seems to show that a concerted and organized effort coupled with real need and grass roots organizing led to near food self-sufficiency within a couple of years. This gives me great hope that when the chips are down we can do it again if needed.

I just completed the first of five, weekend long modules at Hancock Permaculture with Andrew Leslie Phillips. If you are also attending the course, I mentioned the Placement Randomizer Tool, which takes a little digging to find here. Here’s a link to Peak Moment TV- lots of great interviews with Peak Oil as well as Permaculture and other cultural creatives. Also I’ve got a link here to Greeening the Desert.

I’d like to offer this as a place for us to work together virtually, in between and after the training sessions. If anyone is interested in contributing, send me an e-mail and I’ll create an account for you, and give you a little run through on how to write a post.

Finally I want to say a big Thank You to all of you for coming and inspiring me and eachother to move forward with Permaculture. I was looking at an old list of things I would do if I had unlimited time and resources and this training is on the list. Special thanks for the great food, coffee, pie, smoked fish, cheese, and Little Debbie cakes! See you next month.

I’m often annoyed by projections that start out “given current rates of …” I’ve noticed there are a lot of stupid things we do as a society, which when changed on a large enough scale will start to bring us into alignment with reality once more. I rarely see anyone analyze what the effect of eliminating stupidity would have.

Here’s a quick list I came up with in five minutes.

1. Flushing toilets with drinking water

This clearly makes no sense in a world starving for fresh water. A simple fix is to use gray water for flushing. Run a drainpipe from a hand sink to the toilet reservoir. Here we run up against government bureaucracy and zoning regulations. Even a place as advanced as Berkeley, CA is attacking “gray water guerrillas” for re-plumbing their houses for gray water reuse.

2. Feeding food-grade grain to livestock

Energy calories are lost at every link along the chain from crude oil production to grain production, especially corn, and on to feed for cattle. Every calorie of beef requires many multiples of grain calories, which in turn use many multiples more of high-quality petroleum-based energy. The ROI on this energy is so far negative that no one in their right mind would even consider it. In fact, it is criminal insanity.

3. Feeding food-grade grain to machinery (ethanol)

At best, ethanol produces about 64% of the BTUs produced by gasoline. So does it make sense to grow corn, which is highly petroleum-intensive (as grown today) to lose at least 36%? Again the ROI is ridiculous here. In real estate, this is called an alligator. This doesn’t even start to get into the ethics of growing corn for energy or cattle feed when people are starving everywhere.

BTW, Sugar Beets yields double per acre what corn yields as an ethanol stock.

4. Deforestation, especially for ethanol crops or beef

Forests provide so many services, and are so productive, that there is not one good reason to cut them down. They create oxygen and soil, sequester carbon, filter and store water, maintain genetic diversity, prevent flooding, grow food, timber and medicine. Forests are a resource without a measurable opportunity cost, because the next best use is so far below and less than their use just as they are as to be wholly inaccurate. Therefore, all of our economic activity ought to be geared toward growing and harvesting forests. A friend of mine has just started an investment fund based on purchased forestland throughout the country. He suggested that the Southern Tier, rather than targeting switch grass for ethanol production, should be replanted to black cherry, which is in high demand for woodworking and grows in only a very small area in the world.

5. Depleting energy capital rather than energy income first

This is where I get annoyed with the current analyses, even at the Oil Drum, that show that solar, wind and biofuels will never replace the demand for petroleum-based energy. The point is we are outrageously and extravagantly liquidating the assets in our trust fund, when we could be living very comfortably off the interest.

6. Lawns

The American lawn represents one of the single largest agricultures in the world, the gross product of which is very nearly nothing. It uses more artificial fertilizer than the agriculture of India and requires endless hours of mowing, gasoline-powered equipment and chemical sprays. We could easily grow the bulk of our food by simply replacing our lawns and planting to vegetables, herbs and fruit trees. When we do this we see grass as it is: a weed.

7. Suburbs

Suburbs are clearly a result of car culture. I am not one to believe they need to go away, but need to be re-designed. There is a subdivision in Davis, CA called Village Homes that is built along sustainable lines. It includes a community garden, fruit trees everywhere, extensive swaling for water retention, and sidewalks in the back yards. All new subdivisions and housing developments can be designed and planned to avoid the suburban scourges, too much driving, water runoff from streets and parking lots, over-extended infrastructure and so on. Existing suburbs can be retrofitted to reduce need for driving and replanted to useful small-scale gardens and agriculture. Some reforestation can be started.

8. Seed Patents

I have nothing against intellectual property, but the idea of cornering parts of the food market is just plain wrong. The seed companies ought to be able to patent maybe the specific changes they’ve made to existing stock, but the original DNA belongs to no one.

9. Air Travel

George Monbiot has a lot to say about how destructive air travel is, so I won’t repeat that. High Speed Rail would be a much more efficient and cleaner way to travel long distances. This is practical today but would probably require infrastructure and subsidy on a national level. I’ve always found travel by train to be much more comfortable and enjoyable than air travel anyway. If you’ve flown recently, you might agree.

10. Market Fundamentalism

The Thatcher revolution, under whose cloud we’ve been forced to live for the last 30 years represented an extremist swing away from moderate liberal capitalism, where the excesses of capitalist redistribution of wealth from laborers to owners is moderated by democratic government. We have two hundred and fifty years of history to look at here. The laissez faire extremism of the last generation needs to move back toward the middle.