Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times (Mother Earth News Wiser Living Series Book 5)

by Steve Solomon

But during hard times, having 2,700 square feet of veggie garden made all the difference between health and sickness, between having enough to eat and low-grade hunger.

The healthful potato is really the thing for getting through hard times. (If you don’t believe that the potato is a health-producing food, please skip forward to Chapter 9 and read what else I have to say about the common spud.) The healthful spud The “Irish” potato actually is a native (South) American crop from what is now Peru and Bolivia. However, to arrive in North America it first had to be carried to Spain in the 1500s. For two centuries the Europeans considered it only an amusing oddity until, in about 1700, a plant grown in a botanical garden in Sicily began forming tubers early enough in the season to be useful in temperate latitudes. Then the potato’s amazing productivity caused a massive increase of population throughout northern Europe. These people became the migrants who so rapidly filled North American farms and factories. Before the English brought potatoes to North America, the native North Americans practiced an agricultural system based on corn, beans, squash, and sunflowers, crops that had probably moved into North America from Mexico about 1,000 years before the arrival of the English. This gardening system required nearly an acre to support an extended family. The English-speaking Americans adopted the Native American crops; combined them with food crops brought from England, which included the potato from South America; brought the sweet potato (probably from the Caribbean); and created a hybrid agricultural system combining the benefits of three co...

Winter’s freezing halts the soil’s biological process. When the thaw comes, the soil ecology starts up again, but from near zero. From this cold start, useful soil microorganisms and small soil animals have as good a chance to dominate as do the unwanted ones. The good guys can be helped out with crop rotation and a bit of compost.

Low-demand vegetables. Some vegetable species can still cope with soil of the sort that will grow field crops if the soil has been well loosened by spading or rototilling. Low-demand vegetables include carrots, parsnips, beets, endive/escarole, snap and climbing (French) beans, fava beans (broad beans), and garden peas (see the sidebar listing vegetables by the level of attention they require).However, when low-demand vegetables are given soil considerably more fertile than their minimum requirement, they become far more productive. Low-demand crops are capable of struggling along and usually will produce something edible even under poor conditions.

Medium-demand vegetables. These veggies need significantly enriched soil to thrive.This group includes lettuce, potatoes, tomatoes, corn, etc.What I consider the minimum enrichment for this group would be spading in a bit of agricultural lime plus either a half-inch-thick (12-millimeter) layer of well-rotted low-potency manure or else a quarter-inch-thick (6-millimeter) layer of well-made potent compost. But medium-demand vegetables will do enormously better when given soil considerably more fertile than their minimum requirement.

High-demand vegetables. These are sensitive, delicate species. High-demand vegetables usually will not thrive unless grown in light, loose, always moist soil that provides the highest level of nutrition. These vegetables become rather inedible unless they grow rapidly. In Chapter 9 I will discuss these vegetables one by one and will provide full details about how to cultivate them. If gardeners are not able to provide the nearly ideal conditions required by high-demand vegetables, they would be much better off not attempting to grow them.

the mineral nutrition of plants is more straightforward. Agronomists are confident about which minerals are required, and in what proportions. As an example, most plants use a lot of calcium, but for every six to eight measures of calcium, they’ll also need one measure of magnesium, maybe a sixteenth measure of sulfur, and one ten-thousandth measure of boron. If they have heaps of calcium but are short of magnesium, then they won’t be able to grow any more than the amount allowed by the quantity of magnesium they’ve got. If they have adequate calcium, magnesium, and sulfur, all in the right proportions for ideal growth, but are desperately short of boron, then they will grow as poorly as though they were short of calcium and magnesium and sulfur. Figure 2.1: Each stave in the barrel represents a different plant nutrient in soil. The ones at their full height are in full supply. The barrel at the left illustrates a soil in which the greatest deficiency is of nitrogen; plants will grow no better than the level of nitrogen. The barrel on the right shows that soil after nitrogen has been added. Now the most limiting deficient nutrient is potassium. The plants will grow no better than the level of potassium permits. According to Dr.William Albrecht, chairman of the soils department of the University of Missouri during the 1940s and 1950s, the broadest differences in soils are caused by climate. Albrecht repeatedly pointed out that where it rains just barely enough for agricultu...

Clay soils The suggestions above apply if you’ve got a fairly workable soil — lots of sand or silt and not too much clay (for a discussion of soil content, see Chapter 6). If you have clay, though, you’ll have to do some extra soil preparation. Clay soils do have some agricultural uses — if they drain well and aren’t the heaviest, most airless sorts of “gumbo” or “adobe,” they can be good for orchards and for permanent pastures. But no sensible farmer or market gardener would willingly use a clay soil to grow any crop that required plowing to make a seedbed — which is what veggie gardening is all about. Clay is incredibly difficult to work. If you dig it when it is even slightly too wet, it instantly forms rock-hard clods. It also gets rock-hard when dry, and if you have enough mechanical force at your disposal to plow or rototill it when too dry, it then forms dust. The first time this dust is rained on or irrigated, it slumps into an airless goo in which almost nothing will grow. There is only a short period during the drying down of a clay soil that it will form something resembling a seedbed when tilled.This fact means a clay garden can be mighty late to start in a wet spring. In Chapter 3 I describe a “ready-to-till” test you can use to determine when soil is at the right moisture to work. This test is essential when working clay.

Clay can be turned into something resembling a lighter soil by blending enough organic matter into it. Not the essential little bit that enlivens a soil containing less than half clay, but huge amounts, a layer several inches thick. But remedying clay this way is not wise for several reasons. First, because in the long run this practice is expensive. The high level of organic matter you must create to improve the structure of clay decomposes rapidly and requires replacement every year. The first year might take spading in a layer three to four inches (7.5 to 10 centimeters) thick to significantly open up a clay. In subsequent years you might only need to dig in a 1 ½ inch-thick (4-centimeter-thick) layer to maintain the benefit.That effort demands a lot of hauling.And spreading. And consumes your time spent making compost.And when all’s done, the remedial clay will never grow vegetables as well as a light soil will — never. I am well aware of what garden magazines (and books) have said about the joys of turning any old clay pit into a Garden of Eatin’ by hauling and blending in enough composted organic matter. But please consider what I say in this book about the harmful nutritional consequences of unbalancing a soil after mixing too much organic matter into it. The quality of your garden’s nutritional output is your family’s health.

Remedying clay on the cheap. If your garden must be on a clay soil, and if you lack funds to do anything else and live where the native vegetation is a lush forest,my advice is this: before digging a new garden site for the first time, spread a layer of compost or well-rotted manure about one inch thick (2.5 centimeters) and spread 100 pounds of agricultural lime per 1,000 square feet (50 kilograms per 100 square meters). Add these large amounts only for the first year. If you live in a dry climate providing under 30 inches (75 centimeters) of rainfall a year (where soils may already contain significant levels of calcium and sometimes excessive magnesium, too) and have clay to deal with, I suggest that you consult with a local soil-testing service or agricultural agency before adding any forms of lime in excess of the minimal amounts in COF. You might be advised to use gypsum instead of lime. A one-inch (2.5-centimeter) layer of decomposed organic matter blended into a shovel’s depth of clay is not enough to make it seem light and fluffy, but it is enough to make a decent garden.You’ll never grow prize-winning carrots, parsnips, or sweet potatoes in this soil, and it will never produce gigantic broccoli, but it will serve. In subsequent years you can manage your garden as I suggest for other soil types, but take extra care not to dig it when wet. And especially when working clay, if you want to end up with a reasonable seedbed after the first year, put your amendments of c...

Soil temperature and oxygen Here’s something you probably don’t already know about plants.The business of construction, of growth, is mainly done at night. Plants store up energy by converting sunshine, water, and air into sugar during the daytime. They burn that sugar as energy to grow with during the night. Assuming the plant lacks for nothing in the way of nutrition, moisture, etc., then the speed with which a plant grows is determined by temperature. For every 10°F (5°C) increase in temperature, the speed of growth doubles, meaning the size increases from 1 to 2, then to 4, and then 8, 16, 32, etc.When the nighttime temperature is much below 50°F (10°C), all biological chemical reactions, including growing, go on slowly; nothing much seems to happen. Even fruit won’t ripen much when the nights are chilly because ripening is just another form of growing. Let’s say that during a chilly evening when the temperature has dropped to 50°F at sundown, the plant will grow one size larger overnight. If the nighttime low is 60°F (15°C), the plant can grow two sizes larger. If the night is a warmer one, when the low is 70°F (21°C), the plant enlarges by four sizes overnight. On a steamy evening when people can hardly sleep and it is 80°F (26°C) at sunup, all other things being equal, the plants in the garden may have grown eight sizes overnight. That’s why on a hot midsummer’s night you can hear the corn growing.