Grow a Sustainable Diet: Planning and Growing to Feed Ourselves and the Earth (11 page)

I have two methods of threshing. One requires an old bed sheet, a piece of plywood at least 2′ × 6′, something to lean the plywood against (I use the picnic table), and a plastic baseball bat. Lay the sheet on the ground to catch the grain. Put one end of the plywood on the sheet and lean the other end against the picnic table or whatever you are using to support it. Working with one bundle at a time, hold the wheat or rye by the straw on the plywood, grain heads pointing down, and hit the grain heads with the bat. The grain will separate and roll right down the plywood to the sheet. There will be bits of straw, chaff, and grain in the sheet. I put it all through a piece of half-inch hardware cloth to take out any straw. The next step is to winnow the grain.

Traditionally, the grain and chaff was tossed in the air. The wind would blow the chaff away and the grain would fall into a clean container. Since I can’t count on windy days when I thresh, I pour the grain and chaff from one bucket to the next in front of a fan to remove the chaff. Wanting to have clean grain to put away in my pantry, I wash it next. To do that I put small batches at a time in a very large bowl filled with water. The chaff, any other dirt, bird droppings, and small insects float to the top and can be poured off. I’ll fill the bowl with water again until there is nothing to pour off but clear water. The grain is then drained and spread out on towels in the house until dry. This method of cleaning the grain might not be suitable if I had bushels and bushels, but for a household amount that comes from the garden, it works for us.

Rather than threshing with a bat, an even easier method is threshing with your feet. The sheet is spread on the ground as before, and this time I lean a frame with half-inch hardware cloth attached to it against the picnic table bench. Sitting in a chair in front of that frame and wearing a clean pair of sandals that I keep for that purpose, I hold the straw with the grain heads against the hardware cloth and proceed to shuffle my feet back and forth. The grain falls through the half-inch wire onto the sheet. Winnowing is the same as before.

Even if you aren’t growing grain to eat, you can grow it for the straw for compost material and you will have seed to save for your next cover crop at the same time. Since the grain crop has finished its growth cycle, the bed is easily prepared for the next crop, leaving the roots in place. Without removing the stubble or doing any tilling, transplants can go in or rows can be easily hoed in the stubble for planting seeds. Although I usually broadcast the grain in the fall to plant it, in the area where I’ll be planting carrots and beets the next summer, I seed the rye in rows. When the grain is harvested in June, there will be rows of stubble in the bed. I lightly hoe between the stubble rows and sow the seeds for the root crops where I’ve hoed. The stubble protects the new roots as they begin to grow and feeds them as it slowly decomposes. I pay particular attention to watering that bed after planting to get it off to a good start and reseed if there are spots with poor germination. After things are up and growing little extra attention is needed until I harvest carrots and
beets for fall and winter food. In the spring that bed would be empty and ready to plant to a new crop.

If you have children or grandchildren around for the harvest, growing your own grain is fun to do and what a learning experience they will have. Another fun thing to do around grain harvest time is to go to the library and find as many different versions of
The Little Red Hen
as you can. I did that one year with my grandson. We were surprised how many different stories on the same theme there were — including one set in the city with the wheat being made into pizza!

I sold my tiller years ago and am happy it no longer takes up space in the barn. Some of you, no doubt, will be using mechanized equipment on your land. Pam Dawling, garden manager at Twin Oaks Community in Louisa, Virginia, uses cover crops, often managing them using tractors and tillers. Whether you are using tractors, tillers or hand tools, you will find much helpful information about cover crops and growing your food in general, in her book
Sustainable Market Farming.

6

Companion Planting

O
VER THE YEARS
I’ve heard many people say that if they can’t eat it, they’re not going to grow it. To be honest, in my early years of gardening I was that way also. However, we would do better to take a broader perspective. Our food crops are part of a much bigger ecosystem that all works together and we have to consider the whole of it. That’s where companion planting comes in. It can mean planting two or more crops next to each other or planting them nearby, such as in a border. When crops are mixed in the bed it is called interplanting. When plant-eating insects are scouting out their targets they are attracted to monocrop systems where there are whole fields of one thing — all their favorite food in one place, how nice for them! A sustainable garden will be developed with diverse plantings that attract beneficial insects, that will then feed on the not-so-beneficial ones, all without chemicals. These plantings will enhance the beauty of your garden and increase the flavor of your vegetables.

I’m not going to give you lists of what grows well together and what doesn’t, although I’ll be giving you some examples. There are plenty of resources where you can find that information, including
How to Grow More Vegetables
and
Carrots Love Tomatoes
. What I am going to tell you about is my experiences of seeing what happens when an ecosystem is
working. You can worry yourself silly trying to get the “right” combination of crops together and avoiding the “wrong” ones. It will be much easier if you understand the habits and life cycles of both the insects and the plants.

Some plants, particularly those with small flowers, are good at attracting beneficial insects. The beneficial ones are those attracted to the nectar and pollen of the flowers, but that also feed on the larvae of the insects you want to have less of in your garden. So, leaving some things to flower and go to seed in your garden is what you should strive for. When I first grew basil I had read in the herb book that you need to harvest it before it flowers for the best culinary use. I thought I was not being a good and attentive gardener if it went to seed. Well, if you’ve ever grown basil, you know that it is hard to keep trimmed all the time and eventually, some of it will flower. One year, the basil had gotten ahead of me and I went to the garden with my clippers to get it back under control. What I found was that my basil was teaming with life. There were so many insects, including tiny wasps, buzzing around those plants it was amazing! They were after the flowers. The insects being attracted were beneficial ones. I eventually trimmed the basil, but not that day. The best time of day to witness something like that in your garden is between 10am and 2pm. Now I make sure to leave some of the basil flower every year. Often the best crops to grow together are the ones you eat together and so, for example, I plant basil with my tomatoes.

Dill goes well with squash and cucumbers. All the umbelliferous plants — dill, carrots, parsley, and celery — are good plants to have. Celery, parsley, and carrots are biennials, flowering the second year. If you leave them to overwinter in your garden, they will be up early in the spring and flowering without you even needing to think about it. If you like to use celery seed in your cooking, just watch for the seed to mature and gather it. You will have enhanced the beauty of your garden in early spring, attracted beneficial insects, and produced food for your kitchen — all while just letting nature take its course.

Not enough gardeners and farmers save seeds. The value of doing so is that the process of saving seeds sets the stage to provide food and habitat for the “good” bugs. I’ll be talking more about seeds in
Chapter 9
.
I’ve heard of people buying ladybugs and other insects to put in their garden. You could do that, but if there is not enough food and habitat for them they won’t stick around. It is sort of a build-it-and-they-will-come deal. If you provide the right habitat, they will show up on their own. I began growing cowpeas because they were drought tolerant and we were in the midst of some drought years at the time. Cowpeas have become our staple crop for dry beans. I could usually find ladybugs on the cowpea flowers and one day when I was in the garden with the camera I decided to photograph one. The ladybug I had in mind was scurrying up and down the plant stems and I had to wait until she stopped. When she did, I snapped the picture. Upon a closer look, she had stopped to munch on an aphid. I didn’t even know about that aphid and it was being taken care of. You can find that photo in the color section of this book. In a sustainable garden the goal is to have a balance, not to eradicate any one thing.

Many years ago our son, Luke, was helping me in the garden and found a really strange looking bug. At the age of twelve he knew that you don’t just go around killing bugs — at least not until you’ve identified whether they are harming your crops or not. A university professor had been coming out each week to do some studies on our farm, so Luke saved it to show her. She identified it as a wheel bug, also known as an assassin bug, and explained that it is a beneficial insect that will suck the guts out of caterpillars. Luke set up a terrarium and kept it to study for about two weeks before he let it go back to the garden. Meanwhile, when we were working in the garden or washing lettuce for the market and came across a little caterpillar, he would feed it to his new pet. Sure enough, it sucked the guts out as he watched! Nature in action. That wheel bug wouldn’t have been there if we hadn’t provided an attractive home — a welcoming habitat. The professor coming to our farm thought it was wonderful to see so many insects here. I took it for granted and suggested that all farms had insects like that. She assured me that conventional farms did not.

A guide I’ve used often to find out which insects are good to counteract the undesirable insects, and what to plant to provide the necessary habitat, is
Farmscaping to Enhance Biological Control
. It is a publication
from ATTRA, which is a project of the National Center for Appropriate Technology. Much helpful information is available on the ATTRA website, including many short videos and longer webinars about sustainable agriculture. Although the ATTRA information used to be free, there may now be a charge for some of the publications due to federal budget cuts.

Farmscaping is a word coined by entomologist Dr. Robert Bugg to describe a holistic approach to insect management. The field days I attended on no-till farming methods were also about farmscaping. The publication that resulted from that research at Virginia Tech is
Farmscaping Techniques for Managing Insect Pests
. One of the authors, Dr. Richard McDonald, is the best presenter I’ve experienced on the subject of farmscaping. Both in the field and in the conference hall you can sense his excitement for insects. You will find lots of information and photos on his website at
drmcbug.com
.

Potatoes

When we first moved to our five acres in the spring of 1984 I planted a garden and put in potatoes. I’d had a small garden where we lived before and had grown potatoes with no problems. We got busy fixing up the house and the next thing I knew the potatoes had grown up and were covered with Colorado potato beetle larvae. There were few gardens where we lived before and I was probably the only one with potatoes there. Here, plenty of people grew potatoes and much bigger patches than mine. I asked around and the acceptable approach, at least for my neighbors, was to spray the insecticide Sevin to combat the potato beetles. I even asked a friend who I thought adhered to organic practices and she also suggested Sevin. That was not an acceptable approach for me. If I wanted potatoes treated with insecticides I might as well just buy the ones in the store. I taught our children, who were turning 11, 7, and 3 (all have summer birthdays), to identify and pick off the larvae and bugs. We did that for the next few years as part of our garden chores. My problem with potato beetles lessened and then just disappeared. I had developed the ecosystem so that things were in balance. I can’t say
exactly what I did that ended my problem with the potato beetles. The tansy I got started would have helped, but that was really only part of the whole.

In 2002 I was able to plant a garden at the community college where I was teaching sustainable agriculture classes. I put in potatoes and was disappointed that they were plagued by Colorado potato beetles. I had not had to think of those insects in years. I checked the ATTRA farmscaping publication and saw that the spined soldier bug targets potato beetles and the way to attract them is with the sunflower family (goldenrod and yarrow), bishop’s weed, and maintaining permanent plantings. I did not check into bishop’s weed at the time, but a quick internet search now indicates that although it is good for filling in shady areas, it can become pretty invasive. I sometimes had sunflowers in that garden, but they would have been blooming too late for the potatoes. The rest of the college garden contained annual plants, which were not much help in providing the perennial plantings that the publication indicated would be useful. I did put in some tansy along the fence surrounding the garden, but it wasn’t enough compared to what was going on all around. Herbicides were also in use. How the area surrounding the garden was managed had an effect on the garden itself. It is in building the ecosystems that we regain balance, not spraying chemicals.

Achieving Balance

Anytime you change something it upsets whatever balance was already established. Even if you are doing all the right organic things, when you put in a garden where there wasn’t one, the balance that was there needs to adjust to the new plants and system. A farmer needs to have not used chemicals and to have done soil building practices for at least three years before organic certification is awarded. It takes three years for that new balance to be reached and for things to be working as they should in the system. During the years I was selling produce I had two friends who had started farms tell me that they were doing all the good things they should be doing and they were not yet seeing results. They didn’t quite know what it was that they should be seeing, but they knew
it wasn’t there. They were each probably beginning their third year of growing at the time. I told them that they hadn’t been doing it for the full three years yet, and if they kept at it they would see the change. I am fortunate that they both came back to me later and said that it had happened on their farms, just as I told them it would. They could see and feel things coming into balance. If you are used to taking the fast and easy approach, it can be hard to wait. If you have a partner who prefers reaching for the chemicals over watching what will happen, it is even harder. Even using a little herbicide or insecticide sets things back. You can’t have it both ways. Look for organic controls that you can use while your system is developing.