Grow a Sustainable Diet: Planning and Growing to Feed Ourselves and the Earth (17 page)

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Authors: Cindy Conner

Tags: #Gardening, #Organic, #Techniques, #Technology & Engineering, #Agriculture, #Sustainable Agriculture

BOOK: Grow a Sustainable Diet: Planning and Growing to Feed Ourselves and the Earth
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Figure 8.2. Transition Garden

On May 21, tomatoes, peppers, basil, and parsley will be transplanted. Tomatoes and sweet potatoes are in one half of the bed, with peppers and parsley in the other half. The sweet potatoes could go in the same day, but since I wait until the last week of April to start sweet potatoes in the coldframe, I don’t have them ready for the garden until June 7. The rye/vetch mulch is providing a good ground cover until then. Sweet potatoes like hot weather, so don’t be in too much of a hurry to put them in. The tomatoes would be on a trellis in the middle of, in this case, a four-foot wide bed, with sweet potatoes planted along the outer one foot on each side. I use a section of fence for a tomato trellis. Peppers are planted with a border of parsley. Most people like to have tomatoes in their garden and basil is their natural companion, both in the garden and on the table. Make sure to plant basil with your tomatoes. You can eat tomatoes fresh, and they are easily preserved for later. The same goes for the peppers and parsley. Peppers, parsley, and basil can be dried. I only have the freezer space that comes with my refrigerator, so I don’t generally freeze vegetables, but I do chop some peppers for the freezer. They need no other preparation. If you are canning spaghetti sauce, or making it from dried ingredients, basil, peppers, and parsley make great additions to the tomatoes.

The sweet potato vines will provide a living mulch for the tomato plants once the rye/vetch mulch disappears back into the earth. Before the first fall frost is expected, dig the sweet potatoes and put the vines in the compost pile. If you wait until everything is killed by frost, the vines will not have as much biomass for compost and you will be losing some of the goodness.

The tomatoes in this example are an indeterminate variety, hopefully producing all the way through the season. If you plant a determinate variety, all the tomatoes will be produced within a smaller window of time. If you have a shorter growing season than I do — your last spring frost is later and first fall frost is earlier — you might need to plant a determinate variety to get the full harvest in. With a shorter season, you could go with just the hairy vetch cover crop so you don’t have to wait the two weeks before planting. Look for varieties of the other summer crops with early maturing times if you have a shorter season. Austrian winter peas are the cover crop to be planted in this bed when the summer crops are finished. That is the legume that can be planted the latest in the fall and still produce well. Other types of field peas are not winter hardy in my climate, but might be in yours. Rye is the carbon-producing crop that can be planted the latest in the fall.

The crops from Bed 1 were planted in Bed 2 last year, leaving Austrian winter peas there at the end of the year. This crop will put on only a little growth in the fall. You can cut the ends of the plants — the pea shoots — for stir fry, or to eat in your salads through the winter. In early spring, the rate of growth of the plants will speed up. According to this plan, these winter peas were planted in mid-October. If they were planted around September 1, they would have grown a lot and maybe even flowered before the weather turned cold. In that case, they might have winterkilled. I like to let winter peas grow until at least April 1, but if they can go longer, all the better. In this case, in Bed 2, they are in until the first week of May, about the time they will be flowering. The pea vines can go right to the compost pile. It would be good if you have some carbon material to add at the same time. If you grew Jerusalem artichokes and dug them through the winter, you could use those stalks as your carbon material. Otherwise, you might have saved some stalks from corn or sunflowers from the previous fall to add now.

I chose popcorn for this example because it is fun to grow and eat. If you have only grown sweet corn, growing corn out to the dry stage on the stalk is a new experience. The popcorn, like the corn that you would grow to grind for cornmeal, will stay on the vine until the husks are dry and the plant looks dead. When you cut the stalks at harvest you can use
them as a fall decoration before they become compost material. I use a machete to cut the cornstalks, first to cut them out of the bed, then to cut them in lengths convenient for compost material. We occasionally get summer storms that can knock the cornstalks down if they are planted intensively. Sometimes they stand back up by themselves, and sometimes not. In any case, they are never the same. To avoid that, I plant corn in circles, as you see in the planting diagram. Corn will germinate pretty quickly, as will beans. Crows love to eat newly germinated corn seedlings and I found that if I transplant it rather than put the seeds in the ground, the crows are not a problem. Generally, I put five corn transplants in an 18″ circle, with the center of each circle four feet from the next. That leaves room for the wind to blow between the corn circles without taking down the corn in those summer storms.

Planting the corn in circles leaves half the bed available to something else. In this case that other crop is peanuts. The peanuts are transplanted in the rest of the bed on 12″ centers. Marigolds are at the ends of the bed, both for pretty and because I think they help the peanuts. Just as with the sweet potatoes, I want to let the peanuts grow until there is danger of frost, but not until after the frost hits. The peanuts themselves will be growing underground. I dig the whole plant, shake off the dirt (the peanuts will stay attached), and hang bunches of the plants in the barn for at least a few weeks to let the peanuts dry. The plants will dry, becoming peanut hay. The peanuts can then be picked off to eat. Alternatively, you could pick off the peanuts at harvest and use the plants as green material in the compost, along with cornstalks as the carbon material. The nuts will need more drying and you can accomplish that by laying them out on screens. If you do that, make sure it is in a mouse-proof area. The mice will steal them, but to you it will look like they just disappeared.

You can leave the corn roots in the bed, amend with compost and anything else that is needed (as you would before every new crop) and broadcast the wheat. I use a four-tined cultivator to chop the seeds into the soil. You could also use a hard rake. If the weather has been dry and is not promising rain, it might be better to make furrows for the seed, cover them with soil, and water well. In fact, at times when we are really in a dry pattern, I’ve watered the furrows before I covered them
to make sure the seeds got off to a good start. That tip goes for any crop, not just wheat.

That brings us to Bed 3 and the wheat that was planted there the previous fall. It can be cut with a sickle when the grain is mature, which is about mid-June at my place. Watch it closely as it approaches that stage, so you can see what is happening. Pull some off the seed heads and taste it. You could buy some wheat berries at the health food store if you need something to compare it to. When the time is right, cut the stalks close to the ground. I talked about harvesting grains in
Chapter 5
. Once the wheat is harvested, the bed is clear except for the stubble. The plants have reached the end of their lives and that stubble is not firmly attached to the roots, which are already on their way back to the earth. The next crop can go directly in the ground, with the stubble still there, as long as the bed has been cleared of any weeds that may have crept in. In this case, the next crop is dill, cucumbers, and snap beans.

The cucumbers are grown along a piece of fence, or some other trellis, installed down the middle of the bed to save space, and snap beans are planted on the sides. The June 15 planting date indicates that they will be planted when the wheat is harvested. You need to have plenty of foliage on the cucumber plants to plant this way. If there is not enough leaf cover, the cucumbers will be scalded by the sun. In that case, you would have to forgo the beans and plant the cucumbers without the trellis, letting them sprawl in the bed. Dill is beneficial to the cucumbers and many other plants. It is also an ingredient in pickles, which you would want to make. You can find directions for Sour Pickles in
Wild Fermentation
by Sandor Katz. These are the dill pickles that you would most associate with a deli. I like to make a gallon jar (or larger) of these at a time in the summer and have it on the kitchen counter to eat from as we want them. The snap beans can be eaten fresh or canned. Rather than canning them, to save fossil fuel you can salt them down in a crock as Seymour shows in
The New Self-Sufficient Gardener.
1

By September the cucumbers, beans, and dill will be ready to give way to rye and hairy vetch, which will be broadcast and chopped in, like the wheat seeds. Next year, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, peppers, and parsley will be in this bed. Remember, I’m just giving suggestions here,
but if you grew these crops you would have tomatoes, peppers, and parsley to put in your solar dryer, which I’ll be talking about in
Chapter 11
. You can just hang the basil to dry in your kitchen. You’ll learn fermentation techniques with the cucumbers and beans, and learn to grow corn, wheat, and peanuts to their dried state. You could grow a variety of bush beans that is suitable to use as a dry bean and let the beans grow out to the dry seed stage, rather than picking them as snap beans. The rye can be planted in October if the beans occupy the bed until then. You could use either hairy vetch or Austrian winter peas as the companion legume with the rye. If you are using vetch, as shown on the garden map, you would want to plant the rye/vetch by early October. If the planting extends later than that, make Austrian winter peas the companion legume with the rye. I mentioned in
Chapter 5
that it is beneficial to plant a legume with a small grain, but in small amounts, so the legume doesn’t overtake the grain. In this plan, the crop will be cut down and left as mulch for the tomatoes, so the amount of legume isn’t so much of a concern.

Managing a garden this way is different than managing a garden with a tiller. The ecosystem benefits from the diversity of crops and the fact that the ground isn’t churned up on a regular basis. There is some learning to do on your part, for sure, to become comfortable with this system. Once you are, you will find that you are gardening smarter, not harder, which is always a good thing.

Quartet of Beds

I’ve added some things in a four bed plan (
Figure 8.3
) that go beyond basic gardening skills. In Bed 1, you will see oats that are there to winterkill ahead of the potatoes. In order for that to have happened, the oats must have been planted between mid-August and mid-September to allow enough time to put on good growth and maximum biomass before the cold weather stops it. It will look great until January. A guideline for you to follow would be to plant the oats at least a month or more before your first expected fall frost. If your winter is unusually mild, or for some reason this bed is in a protected place, the oat plants might not die as
planned. Potatoes are the next crop intended for that space. I would plant oats in early spring if I wanted them for grain. Oats have a hull on them that would be hard to remove with the threshing methods I use for rye and wheat. If I was growing them to eat I would grow a hulless variety.

My compost piles are on a garden bed and part of the rotation. One year I planted oats, intending them to winterkill, on the south side of the compost bed. The compost piles were enough protection that the oat crop survived and thrived through the winter. It would have been great to have had a bed of winter greens in that spot, to eat through the winter, but not the oats that I wanted to winterkill.

Figure 8.3. Quartet of Beds

Instead of oats in Bed 1 of the Quartet of Beds, I could have planted radish (oilseed, fodder, or Daikon) to winterkill, but remember I said they attracted the voles and I didn’t want that with the potatoes. Planted at the same time I recommended for oats, the radishes can get quite big and you can harvest some to eat — until January. They will die when the really cold weather moves in, leaving lots of decomposed biomass, holes for air and water to come in, and a clean seedbed. With these winterkilled crops, the bed is ready at the beginning of March. Things like onions, peas, lettuce, spinach, collards, and kale could go there, but in this case potatoes — that great calorie producing crop — are going in. Make sure the weeds don’t move in before you get the potatoes planted. The dried oat biomass (foliage) will be lying on the bed. Providing it was a thick stand of oats and you didn’t wait too long to plant your potatoes, you can just pull the dried biomass away and put the potato pieces in the ground using a trowel. The roots of the oats would have decomposed by that
time. The oat biomass can be put back on top of the bed as a light mulch and the potatoes will grow right through it. If the oat planting was not a thick one, as soon as the soil begins to warm, spring weeds will come up that will need to be dealt with before the potatoes go in. Potatoes are dug all at one time when the plants begin to die back.

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