Our winter garden is now about two months old (though the planning and seedling starts began in August 2011), so I thought I’d give a (partial) pictorial update of what’s been happening in our 250 square foot plot.
Fava Beans
First up, we’ve got 48 square feet of fava beans growing, occupying two of our 6′ x 4′ raised beds. There are somewhere around 100-125 plants or so, and half of them (the bed in the background) were started via direct sowing of the beans 3 inches under, and the other half (the bed in the foreground) were started in seedling flats and transplanted three weeks later. So far the transplants seem to be doing a little bit better, and are about two feet tall. While most of them are growing pretty straight at the moment, eventually they get to about four to six feet, at which point we’ve found they need some support. This first patch happens to be growing where I set up a cold frame, so we’ll rely on those pvc pipes to help hold these plants up.
Why fava beans, you ask? First off, they are what the biointensive method calls “heavy givers,” meaning that they give to the soil instead of taking away. To do proper crop rotation, you need to have a three-part rotation between heavy givers, light feeders, and heavy feeders. Second off, they’re easy to grow in SF, do well in cold and foggy climates, and produce some actual beans you can eat! Third off, they provide ample green material that will later be used in our compost pile. It’s a pretty good win-win-win crop, and we got a whole lot of seeds for a relatively inexpensive amount.
Next up we’ve got parsnips!
Parsnips
We’ve never actually eaten parsnips before, but from everything we’ve read they’re just like carrots, only white. Moreover, they’re easier to grow than carrots! Here we’ve got about 4-5 square feet of them, and the leaves are quite strong and robust. They’re planted on four inch centers, and we probably have about 40 plants here, and another 15-20 in another patch that was stagger planted so they’d mature at different times.
Batting third…Swiss Chard!
Swiss Chard
Swiss Chard did quite well in our garden last winter with three plants, and looks pretty good this time around as well. We have about fifteen plants, all started in flats. After a somewhat dicey start with some slugs eating a lot of their leaves, they are now quite robust, producing a lot of deep green, healthy looking leaves. We just ate a spinach and chard quiche this week, and it was delicious!
A Wide Variety of Potatoes
Next up is our potato patch. Pictured here we have eighteen potato plants, and the blank spot to its right now has about 8 or 9 potato plants coming up that were stagger planted. You know how the eye of a potato sprouts after a while and starts looking gross? Well, that’s how you start new potato plants! Once they’ve sprouted for a couple weeks, you cut up the potatoes so that each piece has about two to three eyes on it, let it sit for a day so the cut can scab over, and you stick it in the ground 6 to 9 inches deep, eyes facing up. Wait two to three weeks, watering frequently, and plants come up!
The crazy thing about growing potatoes is that you have no idea whether they’re actually developing underneath the dirt. You simply have to trust the process. Once the plants die, wait a couple weeks, and then gently dig them up with a spading fork. Last year, it was an exhilarating experience to do that and find…potatoes!
This year we have a variety of potatoes growing, including Yukon Gold and red potatoes. The other thing to keep in mind with potatoes is that you can’t grow them in the same place within a three or four year period. Last year we grew them in the patch right behind (where you can barely see our cereal rye growing), and we put it down in our historical chart so we know where we planted before.
Lacinato Kale
Lacinato (or dinosaur) kale is our next featured crop.
We sort of overdid the number of seedlings we started in response to the 2011 Slug Attack, so we had too many kale plants for the space we had. So we made some modifications to our garden plan. Here’s one patch of seedlings in our side 1.5′ x 6′ beds, alternate spacing at about 10-12 inches. Last year we had a very productive kale crop through the summer, so we’re hoping for some good success this time around as well. We probably have around 25 plants or so. Our main consumption method for kale is in chip form: clean the leaves, spray olive oil, sprinkle some salt, and bake them for about 20 minutes at around 300 degrees. When they are nice and crispy, take them out, and enjoy! The kids love them too.
That’s it for now. I’ll let you know how the rest of the season goes!
In my reading, I’ve been encountering some challenging suggestions by Michael Northcott from his book The Environment and Christian Ethics. First, he contends that the development of a market economy, a system that basically made everything “ownable” (i.e. land, buildings, labor, time, etc.) has led to a disregard for the value of non-human objects like rivers, forests, and other ecological features. In other words, once economies started moving away from tangibles (like bartering for physical goods) and to intangibles (like paying for services, consulting, paper money, etc.), approaches to nature shifted to seeing it as something you could buy, use, and even abuse. Thus, he contends, “The development of an economy independent of land and human work produced a cataclysmic transformation in the human approach to nature, and to natural resources.” (Northcott, 48).
Furthermore, the modern scientific, rational approach to the world has had the unfortunate consequence of making every aspect of the environment something that can be taken advantage of to advance human needs:
Like any other aspect of human culture or knowledge, science is socially constructed and value-laden, and it is through these social processes, and the values of domination, mechanism, production and progress that the culture of science has made such a dramatic impact on the biosphere and on the ecology of both human and non-human life. In particular modern science expresses the powerful rationalist urge to remake irrational and ‘brute’ nature into mechanical forms which more perfectly serve rational human purposes. Thus the strangeness, chaos, diversity and wildness of nature are eschewed by the agricultural scientist in favor of the sanitized, chemically treated, mono crop field where only the crop planted by the farmer can grow, and where even earthworms can be disposed of, poisoned by modern pesticides, as their natural function of regenerating the soil is regarded as expendable, and replaceable by fossil fuel fertilizers. (Northcott, 62-3, boldface added)
I found that last sentence particularly challenging, especially in light of our current pursuit of sustainable farming in the backyard. We’ve even avoided the use of things like rototillers, which are actually too harsh on the dirt and end up destroying organisms like earthworms which are beneficial for the soil. Our seeds that we use are all non-GMO (genetically modified organisms) and naturally developed. Weed and pest control is all manual. This makes for hard work, but in another sense, it puts us closer in touch with the land. When we started, we had no idea what seedlings looked like, but now we can actually identify a handful of plant species, and thus know what’s a weed and what’s not. It’s also given us a new respect for ecosystems–there are good bugs and bad bugs, a need for flowers, you need to do crop rotation to let the land heal, and other balancing measures.
The modern, industrial approach to farming, however, imports mass amounts of fertilizer (which has to be stripped away from another part of the world) to produce mass amounts of food in a manner that, comparatively speaking, is inefficient. Top soil is being depleted at record levels, and repeated planting of the same crop (like corn) ravages the land. This is not sustainable in the long-term. Eventually, the top soil will disappear and we’ll have no where else to pull fertilizer from. This approach, however, emerged from a mindset that sees the land as expendable as long as the ends (more food in the short-term) justify the means (land depletion in the long-term). Could this be the result of the market economy and modern science? Quite possibly. What do you think?
A tip we got from our friends the Satakes: Instead of repeatedly going to the grocery store to pick up a bunch of green onions, and wondering how in the world you’re going to use all eleven bunches when you only needed one, you can plant some in your garden straight from the market! We got ours from a farmer’s market, organic ones, took them home, and stuck them in dirt. Those roots will take and each bunch will become a fully thriving green onion plant.
Every so often when we need some green onions, we’ll cut off exactly what we need, and use it. Or, when they are growing too rapidly, we cut off a bunch, cut them, and freeze them. The cool part is these will keep regrowing a new stalk when you cut one off, and thus you end up with a continual supply of green onions. These here have been in our garden for seven months, and they’re still going strong. We expect to have to replace them eventually, maybe at the year mark, but it’s a great, sustainable way to have fresh veggies with minimal work. Pretty nifty. Think Strega Nona, but vegetable style.
I was reading through Matthew 3:1-9 today, and came across a familiar phrase in verse 2:
“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near” (Μετανοεῖτε· ἤγγικεν γὰρ ἡ βασιλεία τῶν οὐρανῶν.)
Interestingly, the verb translated “has come near” (ἤγγικεν) is in the perfect tense, giving the sense that the kingdom has already drawn near, and also persists in staying near.1 So God’s kingdom, kicked off with Jesus’ incarnation, death, and resurrection, is not some one-time fleeting thing, but something that has a persistent effect all the way until now and beyond. The kingdom of heaven–God’s active rule and reign–is not fleeting, nor is it stuck in the first-century, but it is persistent, continuing, and enduring.
1So also Hagner, “The perfect tense here results in the nuance “having drawn near and remaining near.” Donald Hagner, Matthew 1-13, Word Biblical Commentary 33a (Waco: Word, 2002), 48.
Still one of my favorite movies, here’s the clip from A Charlie Brown Christmas where Linus tells Charlie Brown about the meaning of Christmas. Watched this the other day with little m.
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