Science as Dialogue: What My Garden and I Are Discussing in 2013

Another cloudy, wet spring day in St. Louis. The mulched bed is my herb garden.

In the last post I brought up my use of the scientific method in my gardening practice. Now I’d like to talk more about how ordinary folks (and as far as gardening goes, I’m as ordinary as any of you) can use the scientific method to solve problems that come up with the materials of everyday life. What I hope to do is de-mystify the method and also separate it from any negative associations you may have picked up about it from prior experiences, so that you can turn to it when the question you have in mind is amenable to its use.

In my previous post I quoted Wikipedia’s definition of the scientific method: “the process of systemic observation, measurement, and experimentation and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses.” It’s an accurate enough description, but I suspect rather forbidding for ordinary people to apply to everyday problems in the material world. This may have something to do with schooling and its tendency to separate knowledge into fields that seem to have nothing to do with each other. The scientific method gets classified as something you do in science class and nowhere else. If you didn’t like or do well in science, you may not realize how useful the method can be.

So let me suggest a more informal and friendlier description of the method so that anyone who is curious about a problem in the material world can use it fruitfully. Think of the scientific method as a dialogue with the material world, a process by which you can ask questions about aspects of the material world that puzzle you and obtain information that may help you to answer those questions, or modify them, or ask new ones, or any combination of these things. The questioning part corresponds to the hypotheses mentioned in Wikipedia’s definition. Obtaining information corresponds to the systematic observation, measurement, and experimentation portion of the definition. The questioning and information-gathering process continues for as long as you find the dialogue useful to maintain.

Suppose we want to find out why a friend holds a particular position. We might have an idea about how our friend came to that position and start by asking questions to see if our idea is in fact important to our friend’s thought process. Our friend’s answers to these questions would provide information that we would consider in deciding whether or not our idea has merit. If it doesn’t, we might have gained enough information from our friend’s answers to change our idea about how she came to that position, or perhaps we are now thoroughly confused about why she holds that position. Maybe we’d ask some more questions, especially in the latter case, as we attempt to understand her position from her viewpoint. Perhaps she’s changing her own ideas as she listens to and responds to our questioning; she may ask some questions of her own about our position and why we hold it. Eventually the process, done well, results in a clear understanding of each person’s position and the reasons for it. It may lead to changes in one or both peoples’ positions due to the new information that comes to light. This sort of extended dialogue is what I’m doing in my garden. I can’t do it through talk because of the language differences between me and the plants, animals, and other materials and processes that constitute the garden system. The scientific method, or scientific dialogue, offers me a language in which to ask and receive answers to questions that I have about the garden system and change the way in which I garden to interact more fruitfully with it. In the process, I’m likely to be changing the garden itself ... and it changes me in turn.

In the scientific dialogue that I am having with my garden, the major question that I’ve been asking since I first learned of Ecology Action’s work in the middle to late 1990s is the one that I mentioned in my last post: can a person grow all of his or her own diet in a small backyard garden in the St. Louis region without making it difficult or impossible for someone else to do the same thing in a similar sized garden elsewhere? At the time Mike and I were living on a 1/8 acre lot, of which I had less than 150 square feet in vegetables. I obtained One Circle by David Duhon no later than the 1999 three day Ecology Action workshop in Fairfield, Iowa that I attended. Duhon’s claim that it was possible to grow a complete diet in about 700 square feet of gardening space suggested to me that the answer to my question could be yes, at least in principle. If we chose to remove the trees, ornamental plantings, and patio from the back yard and planted the flattest portion completely to vegetables, and if I put some of the prettier edibles in the front yard, I could have installed close to 1000 square feet of garden space into that excessively sloped and paved-over (a 100 foot long driveway!) lot, enough space to provide two adults with most of a complete diet according to the book. That lot was similar in size to many urban lots in St. Louis. Most suburban lots in the region are closer to 1/4 acre in size; a sizable fraction, including our current lot, are larger than that.

Since the availability of sufficient gardening space didn’t appear to be an issue for most people in the region, the next question became whether or not I could obtain a high enough yield (measured as pounds of food harvested per 100 square feet of growing space) of the crops discussed in One Circle to grow the complete diet worked out there. The tricky part of working out a complete diet is that the usual crops grown in a backyard garden -- largely salad crops like lettuce and tomatoes along with fresh vegetables like snap beans and peas -- provide vitamins and minerals but not many calories for their weight. One Circle has an extensive discussion of human dietary needs, the first among them being calories, or food energy. Most backyard gardeners haven’t concerned themselves with growing crops dense with calories, primarily root and seed crops, because these are widely available at low cost from agribusiness and its distributors and retailers. Backyard gardeners prefer to grow the more perishable vegetables that do well in small spaces, often taste better grown and consumed fresh than do the multiple-day-old versions available through the agribusiness chain, and cost more to purchase fresh from a local farmer than they do to grow oneself. In addition, the seed crops such as wheat, corn, and rice that constitute a high proportion of the calories in my diet and that of most people in the U. S. take a lot of space to grow per calorie obtained, more than is available in a small backyard garden, and also require considerable processing to use. Root crops like potatoes and sweet potatoes, in contrast, do provide a lot of calories for the garden space they take up and don’t need special processing to use but do require a lot of storage space in living quarters. Potatoes are harvested in the height of summer and require a cool, dry storage space, something St. Louis conditions don’t provide at that time of year. Sweet potatoes may be better suited to our climate and storage conditions but still require a lot of storage space. Both crops are cheap and readily available in grocery stores however so most gardeners do not bother with them. All that being the case, One Circle puts forth a convincing argument that a backyard gardener who wishes to grow most of what she eats should concentrate on growing calorie-dense root and seed crops along with some highly nutritious greens. As jobs and income continue to erode and food costs continue to rise, the economic argument for raising a higher proportion of calorie-dense crops in backyard gardens gains merit as well, for me and Mike as well as many other people.

For this reason I started including most of the One Circle crops (potatoes, sweet potatoes, soybeans, sunflower seeds, onions, garlic, leeks, wheat, parsnips, parsley, collards, and turnips) in my garden once we moved to our current lot, where we have enough space for a 1500 square foot vegetable and grain garden. For the past several years, therefore, the form of the major question that I have been asking my garden to answer has been can I obtain high enough yields of the crops profiled in One Circle that we could grow almost all of our diet from them in the 1500 square feet I now have available for those crops? So far for all of these crops except parsley, the answer has been no.

I’ve been trying to understand why my garden keeps telling me no. As I noted before, it could be my gardening techniques are not optimal for this climate and I continue to pursue information that could help me to improve them. However, I think two other factors have a larger effect. One is an unbalanced soil mineral base as discussed a few posts back. That’s what has prompted the particular question that I am asking my garden to help me understand in 2013: what effect does proper soil mineralization have on the yields that I am able to obtain under my particular growing conditions and at the skill level I now have? As the year proceeds and I harvest my crops, I’ll be reporting on the yields I obtain and other garden observations I make so you can follow the dialogue as it proceeds. That may help you learn how a scientific dialogue could aid you with questions you have about your material world.

The second factor is one I mentioned briefly in the last post: it may be that growing conditions in the St. Louis region will not allow for high yields of some of these crops because our growing conditions do not match well to the requirements of the crops. I suspect this is the case for many if not most of the crops on the list. If after proper soil re-mineralization and attention to garden technique (planting the crops at the right time and in the proper spacing, for instance) I still cannot achieve the yields needed for the set of crops advocated by One Circle, then I’ll need to use the information in that book and a later Ecology Action publication, Designing a Grow Biointensive Sustainable Mini-Farm, to work out the space requirements for a complete diet specific to the St. Louis region and the yields I have been able to obtain. Then I’ll have to try growing that diet and eating it to see what modifications it may require. That means lots of good scientific work to be done in upcoming years and reported on in this blog!

As for how to conduct my dialogue with my garden, I rely on another of my favorite garden writers, Carol Deppe. She includes in her excellent book Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties: The Gardener’s and Farmer’s Guide to Plant Breeding and Seed Saving a description of how to conduct the dialogue (which she calls gardening research) as it pertains to variety trials. She points out that variety trials are central to answering gardening questions. I’ve used her work as a guide to my own.

Observations, data gathering, and record-keeping are essential to any scientific dialogue. Your partner in the dialogue -- in this case, my garden -- offers its answers in the form of things you can sense by sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste. So you won’t forget these things after you sense them, you need to write them down someplace where you can refer to them later as needed. These pieces of sensory information are what scientists call observations and data. An observation is usually something qualitative: the lettuce leaves have some kind of insect on them, for instance. Data is more often quantitative: on May 8 I harvested 13 ounces of asparagus. You want a place where you can record both kinds of information. The Bountiful Gardens website has a downloadable pdf (Crop Record Keeping) form with spaces for both qualitative information (called Observations) and quantitative information such as weight harvested (and number if it’s something like heads of lettuce or cabbage) and the date, as well as information on what variety was planted, when it was planted and in how much space, how the bed was prepared and how the crop was spaced, and other important information to help you figure out what your garden is telling you. You can use this form or devise a similar form more suited to your own garden. I keep records the old-fashioned way, using paper and pen, but there is nothing to stop you from keeping the information on your computer if that makes more sense to you. I use a separate sheet of paper similar to the form linked to above for each variety of each different crop I grow each year. I keep all the current year’s sheets in one binder, arranged alphabetically by crop and then alphabetically by variety within each crop, because that binder is small enough to carry with me to wherever I need it. After each variety is completely harvested and I’ve calculated the yield and written down anything else I want to remember about it, I file its data sheet into master binders also arranged alphabetically by crop and variety. Within each variety that I grow for more than one year, I arrange the sheets chronologically by year. I find this arrangement is the best for answering questions on yield and how it changes from year to year. You may prefer a different system depending on the questions you most want to answer. As for the information you might want to record, see Deppe’s book as she has a thorough list that you can choose from according to the questions you are asking.

In order to get answers to the questions you are asking, you have to know how to set up a gardening plan or design that will allow the garden to answer those questions for you. Scientists call this design an experiment. Deppe calls it a garden trial. Whatever you call it, you have to make sure you can obtain the answer you want from the way in which you garden. Since one of the questions I want to answer has to do with how many pounds of, say, ‘German Butterball’ potatoes I grow so I can compare it directly to the yield for potatoes in How to Grow More Vegetables, I need to know the number of square feet of those potatoes that I have planted and I need to weigh all the potatoes that I harvest from that area. The square feet of garden space devoted to these potatoes is noted on my garden plan for 2013 and on that potato’s data sheet. I weigh all the produce I harvest, and I also record the date it’s harvested. At the end of the season, I add up the total pounds harvested for these potatoes, convert that to pounds per 100 square feet using the actual bed space for the crop, and check that against what I’ve obtained for this and other varieties I’ve grown over the years. I’d like to see the yield increase in 2013; at least it should not decrease, or if it does, another factor like taste should increase enough to compensate for that. But I think it will take a few years for me to obtain a definitive answer to the yield question, for reasons I’ll explore farther down.

One of the claims for Ecology Action’s method is that when the soil has been properly fertilized, the compost that the garden produces maintains garden fertility without further importation of fertilizer. Steve Solomon makes a similar claim in The Intelligent Gardener: a garden with a proper mineral balance should maintain that balance for at least a period of some years and should require over time fewer mineral imports. A quantitative method to assess both of these claims is to test soil mineral levels each spring. If my garden is moving closer to a balanced, self-maintaining fertility, those minerals that are currently deficient or in excess should become less so over time. Each March I plan to repeat the same soil testing I did in April of this year to see if this pattern is observed. If anything is deficient, the 2014 garden prescription will be based on the March 2014 soil test. I expect it will take at least a few years to learn how the garden answers this question as well.

Besides these two quantitative tests, I will be evaluating some qualitative properties as well. One of Solomon’s claims is that produce grown on well-balanced soil tastes better. Since I have been running garden trials of different varieties of crops against current favorite varieties for many years, I will be checking for any obvious taste differences between, say, this year’s ‘Bronze Arrow’ lettuce and my memory of its taste from previous years. Obviously this sort of test is highly subjective and can’t make subtle distinctions, but that does not mean it’s useless. If it turns out that most of my favorite varieties seem to taste better this year, I’d consider that a major point in favor of soil re-mineralization even if nothing else changes. The other qualitative testing I’ll be doing is watching for any pest or disease pressure among the various crops. The major pest problems I have are squash bugs on the squash-family crops and harlequin bugs on the cabbage-family crops. A common disease issue, especially in wet years (and so far 2013 has been a wet year) occurs on many to most pepper plants and sometimes tomato plants as well. I’m not sure of its identity but I do know the symptoms so I will be watching for it. Again, properly balanced soil is supposed to grow crops that are less susceptible to pests and diseases, so this is my guess for what I’ll observe. And again, I suspect it will be a few years before I can say for sure how the garden answers this question.

I might be able to get quicker answers to some of my questions if I were more careful about using controls in my gardening dialogue. A control could be planting some of the ‘Bronze Arrow’ lettuce in a bed that was fertilized the same way I have fertilized that bed in past years, which in this case would be not at all. Using a control would correct for problems like unfavorable or especially favorable weather conditions or an unusual pest or disease problem or lack thereof that might happen in any particular year. This year, my lettuce crop is going in very late, probably next week in fact when I would prefer to plant it by April 20. If it gets and stays hot rapidly, none of my lettuces might do well. But if the lettuce in the re-mineralized part of the garden yielded better than the same variety in the control area, I’d be pretty certain that the reason was because of the re-mineralized soil.

The problem with running controls has to do with the large numbers of different crops I grow in most beds and the consequent small space devoted to most varieties of most crops. It would be quite difficult to get uniform yet different fertilization schemes into two 8 square foot areas next to each other, the amount of ‘Bronze Arrow’ lettuce that I grow each year. The only one of my crops that I will grow enough square feet of in different beds that I can use a control is corn. For corn I might in fact fertilize one bed (100 square feet) with the original fertilizer formula and the other two beds (200 square feet total) with the 2013 formula. As long as I segregate the ears from the differently-treated beds and weigh them separately, I will have a good control for that one crop. However, for most of the other crops I grow I do have at least one variety that I have grown from anywhere from 5 to 15 years, in a variety of different weather conditions. It shouldn’t be too difficult for me to determine if the yield I get for ‘Bronze Arrow’ lettuce is about what I would expect for whatever conditions it has to grow under, or much better or much worse. I can always change gardening patterns in succeeding years if it seems necessary to the quality of the dialogue that my garden and I practice.

A Project Takes Root

A week ago the dogwoods and redbuds were in full, beautiful bloom in our backyard. After three days of highs in the 80-87F range, their flowers have matured and the petals are dropping, while their leaves are expanding. During the same three days I finally planted the seed potatoes, about a month later than I would normally plant them. It hasn't been a normal spring, if such a thing even exists in the Midwest. But at least St. Louis won't be getting any snow today or tomorrow, just lots of cold rain. By next week I should be back in the garden to complete planting of the cool weather crops.

It’s funny how projects can creep up on a person. When I began this blog I intended to touch on different aspects of the practice of voluntary simplicity, or if you prefer voluntary poverty, in the St. Louis region. I don’t prefer calling it voluntary poverty because Mike and I own our land, at least as much as anyone does in the U. S., and we don’t feel poor, but most people would consider us poor if the only piece of information they had about us was our yearly income. Certainly we have limits on what we can do because of that income, but after years of practice we find we can do most anything we really want to do with careful use of the resources around us. More importantly, we know that since we can only do a few things, we’d better be very clear on exactly what it is that we want to do and why.

As I wrote more posts, it became clear to me and I suspect to those of you reading this blog that my gardening efforts dominate the subject matter, and that I approach gardening in a rather scientific way. That shouldn’t be too surprising if you’ve read this post out of the series that I wrote on how our simplicity practice evolved. My application of the scientific method to my gardening efforts isn’t something I have to think about; I can’t imagine doing it any other way. Making scaled graphs of each year’s garden layout, weighing all the produce that I harvest, calculating the weight harvested per square foot for each variety and comparing it to the target yields in How to Grow More Vegetables, comparing the yield and taste of new varieties of vegetables to our current favorites, noting the various patterns of pest and disease infestations each year, looking at all the data at the end of the season to determine what did and didn’t work, trying to puzzle out why something didn’t yield well or why something else got hit by a pest or disease, reading gardening publications in an effort to learn better gardening techniques: all of these things are part of approaching my gardening efforts in a scientific way. But I haven’t been explicit about that in my posts so far.

I’ve been considering my reluctance to admit to the scientific aspect of my gardening practice. I think part of it is imagining the scorn that past scientific colleagues of mine would heap on me for working on what they would consider an uninteresting problem. Back when I was in grad school, we worked at the bleeding edge of science. We had a laboratory full of expensive, delicate optics directing high-powered laser beams that required an amount of electricity to generate that must have been orders of magnitude over what our household uses in the same period of time. We included lots of mathematical equations filled with Greek letters in the papers we wrote to describe our studies. We published these papers in the leading journals in our field of work. While I never presented a paper at a conference (I didn’t have the self-confidence to do so), my colleagues did. I was part of a group of people who considered themselves, and whom society at large considered, as bona fide scientists. Yet as far as I can tell, nothing that I did in grad school or in industry made the slightest bit of positive difference in the world. If anything, it went the other way. On the other hand, I think the gardening science I’ve been and will be doing does have the potential to be helpful to ourselves and others in a world of energy decline, even though it’s strictly amateur (in the sense of done for love rather than money), done on my own time, at home, without the need for fancy math or expensive equipment. It’s the sort of science that anyone can do and that I’d like to see more people learn and practice on the problems that are amenable to it. It’s this kind of science that I’m doing as I work on an issue that’s been of considerable importance to me and I suspect will become more so to more people over the years: just how much food can be grown by ordinary people in their backyards without making it difficult or impossible for other people to do the same thing?

Among the gardening books that are of use to me in my gardening practice,  John Jeavons’ How to Grow More Vegetables (HTGMV), produced by Ecology Action, most directly deals with the issue of growing the most food in the least space in the most sustainable way. Another Ecology Action publication, One Circle, claims that it may be possible to grow a complete diet for one person in about 700 square feet if the method is applied correctly, crops are chosen carefully, and one is willing to eat a monotonous diet heavy in root crops like potatoes and onions and oily seed crops like sunflower seeds. A prerequisite for growing so much food in such a small space is to obtain yields at the medium to high levels for each crop (these are given in HTGMV). However, I’ve only been able to achieve low yields for all of the crops except for parsley mentioned in One Circle, and in fact for most of the crops I grow. I’ve been trying to understand why this is so. After 19 years of gardening I think I’ve gotten pretty good at the basic techniques. I know when to plant each type of crop and how to grow them in St. Louis. But since I’m still obtaining low yields on most crops, there must be a reason or reasons for that.

One possibility is that St. Louis’ growing conditions do not fit well with some crops, especially crops like potatoes and cabbage that yield best in long, cool spring and summer conditions. For crops like these I may never be able to achieve high yields. I also may not have fully optimized my growing practices, hence my continuing study of gardening publications. Lately I’ve been wondering if mineral deficiencies in my soil might be part of the reason for continuing low yields for most vegetables I grow. While Ecology Action’s publications suggest that a proper application of their techniques allows for self-sustaining fertility, they do say that one should have a soil test done when beginning a new garden and fertilize to remedy any deficiencies in the soil before doing the first dig. After that compost made from garden and kitchen refuse should be sufficient to maintain balanced fertility in the garden. When we first moved to this house I had a soil test done through the Missouri Extension service. I made an attempt to fertilize according to its recommendations for the first bed that I dug. But I did not repeat that for any of the subsequent beds.

After reading Steve Solomon’s book Gardening When It Counts, I began to use a version of the Complete Organic Fertilizer (COF) recipe in that book to see if it might raise yields of some crops. It seemed to help a little but not as much as I was hoping. Two of the components I used in the mix, rock phosphate (for phosphorus) and greensand (for potassium), are mined minerals that are expensive to ship due to the weights needed to be effective as fertilizers. I was leery of relying on them both because of the expense and because it didn’t feel right to be using so much of these non-renewable resources in a world of limits. In the past year or two I’ve been using the COF only on the beds planted with corn, as corn is a heavy feeder that needs a lot of fertility to grow well. However, I wasn’t sure if that would leave enough fertility for the next four years’ worth of crops (I’m currently using a five year rotation of crop families to avoid building up family-specific pests and diseases in my garden beds). Meanwhile, I’d been reading Acres U.S.A., a publication devoted to various aspects of holistic farming, where I’d been exposed to the idea that most soils need re-mineralization to produce the kind of pasture and grain crops that make for the best health in animals and people. It sounded good, I wanted to try it, but the bewildering number of publications on re-mineralization was off-putting. I’ll admit, too, that I didn’t want to engage enough with chemistry to understand the science behind the method. You’d think I’d be the ideal person to make sense of it, but the thought brought back too many bad memories of grad school and industry. Thus my excitement at reading Steve Solomon’s newest book, The Intelligent Gardener: Growing Nutrient-Dense Food. Someone else had done all the hard chemical work for me and all I had to do was apply the results to my own project! The previous post began that project, with my calculating a fertilizer mix specifically to remedy the pattern of mineral deficiencies and excesses in my soil. As the gardening year continues, I will let you know the results.

I have two different reasons for writing about this project. The first is that some of you may find the results applicable to your own gardening efforts. As I noted earlier, all signs are that more of us will either want to or have to grow more of our own food in backyard-sized plots as ongoing decline in available fossil fuel energy intersects with the ongoing decline of Western industrial civilizations. If anything that I have learned can help any of you grow a better garden, I’d like for you to have that information. Of course you will have to translate what I’m doing to your own situation, but I will do my best to provide enough background and references for you to do that.

The second reason has to do with one of the common effects of civilizational decline as discussed by John Michael Greer in his excellent and highly recommended blog The Archdruid Report.  One of those common effects is the loss of a large amount of the knowledge base of a civilization. Greer is particularly concerned about the possibility of the loss of the scientific method to future generations as our civilization moves through the decline process. Note that he’s not referring to the vast body of knowledge built up by using the method. Most of that will prove to be of little if any use to people surviving on a very small fraction of the fossil fuel energy base that our civilization was built upon. He’s referring instead to the process by which that body of knowledge has been obtained: the process of systemic observation, measurement, and experimentation and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses, as Wikipedia puts it. Because we swim in a sea of science and technology, this may seem nearly unbelievable. But between the case that Greer makes for it and some of my own observations, I share his concern. Even so, I’ve resisted the possibility of doing my part to attempt to get the scientific method through decline. I think that has a lot to do with those same bad memories of grad school and industrial science that I mentioned earlier and the lack of self-confidence in myself as a scientist that resulted. But the scientific method has just as much applicability in the garden as it does at the bleeding edge of scientific research. Perhaps if I make my application of the method more explicit, which I will do in one of my upcoming posts, some of you will be inspired to apply the method to those problems for which it works well. Perhaps if any of you try it and find it works, you’ll pass on the method to someone else. The more of us who are applying the method to more different problems in more different ways and passing on our experiences to others, the more likely it is that we can get it through to the people who are alive when things settle down enough to begin work on whatever comes next.

I have lots of other things to talk about this year as well. Just to give you a hint: one of them has to do with tea. You’ll have to check back later for more ...

The Soil Doctor Writes a Prescription

Since my last post spring has arrived in St. Louis, bringing with it sufficient warmth to open the flowers on our serviceberries and magnolia, shown in the above photo. We have had a wetter and cooler than normal spring season. Last week I measured a total of 4.0 inches (about 10 cm) of rain at our location. I had prepared the bed for the onion and leek seedlings before the rain began but I haven’t planted it as I have been waiting for the saturated soil to drain. While I was waiting, I weeded and mulched the herb bed, just in time for today’s rain. I don’t think we will get nearly as much rain this week as we did last week so I will be able to plant the onions within the next couple of days. Then I must get busy on getting the rest of the cool season crops planted before summer begins and it is time to plant the warm season crops.

A couple of posts ago I discussed Steve Solomon’s new book The Intelligent Gardener: Growing Nutrient-Dense Food. The book describes the re-mineralization process he has outlined for us home gardeners so that we may grow the most nutritious food possible in our gardens. I had a suspicion that our garden soil may not be as well mineralized as it could be and decided I’d like to test his program this year. So I collected 15 plugs of soil using a tubular soil sampler (it could be done with a stainless steel trowel as well but I sprung for the soil sampler because I expect to collect soil samples each spring from now on). Each plug was taken from the approximate middle of one of our vegetable garden beds; there are 15 of them in all, each 100 square feet in area. I mixed the fifteen plugs together as described in the book and labeled that sample Garden. Since I’d been using a version of the Complete Organic Fertilizer (COF) in Solomon’s earlier book, described in this post, on these garden beds for varying periods of time, I was curious as to what effect it may have had. To understand this, I took another 15 plugs of soil from the lawn in between the two largest groups of beds, mixed those plugs together, and labeled that sample Yard. I then packaged and sent both soil samples to Logan Labs, LLC, using their downloadable instructions and form. About a week later the soil report shown below landed in my email box.

From a quick scan of the results I learned some interesting things about our soil. If you look at the pH (level of acidity: 0 to 7 is acidic, 7 to 14 is basic) of both samples, you will see that the soil in the yard is more acidic (lower number) than the soil in the garden and that both values are on the acid end of the pH scale. (Fun but ignorable fact: because the pH scale is logarithmic, the yard soil is actually more than 10 times as acidic as the garden soil.) This makes sense because St. Louis gets about 40 inches of rain a year, enough to leach a significant amount of calcium out of the soil and thus raise its acidity. The garden soil has a less-acid pH than the yard soil because of the garden lime in the original COF formula that I’ve been using. Just about every gardener around here uses garden lime to raise soil pH and calcium to levels conducive to good vegetable growing. The pH value of 6.4 in the garden sample is about what most veggies want.

The organic matter level is nearly the same in the yard and garden samples, running around 4%. Solomon says that north of the Mason-Dixon line, levels of 7% are not difficult to achieve. South of the line, 4% is about as good as you can expect because long, hot summers burn up the organic matter in the soil. St. Louis is close to the line, perhaps just a bit south, so 4 to 5% organic matter is probably about the best I can expect. Considering that I have been adding only the minimum amount of compost according to Jeavons’ book and that last summer was the hottest, longest summer I have experienced here, I’m quite pleased with 4% organic matter. I may look into adding a bit more compost to each bed in the future to see if it might raise the organic matter a little higher, if I have enough extra compost for this.

The total exchange capacity has a lot to say to anyone who takes the time to study chapter 5 of Solomon’s book carefully. To very briefly summarize Solomon’s argument, the various minerals that plants need can be held onto (a chemist would say adsorbed to) either or both of the organic matter or clay fractions of soil. The more of each you have, the more minerals you can potentially store in your soil, available on demand to your plants. Clay has a higher holding capacity than organic matter for many of the minerals plants need in higher quantities but only organic matter can hold onto phosphorus and sulfur.

Our soil is a silt loam soil derived from wind-blown glacial deposits. Its clay content is rather low. Since summers are long and hot, I can’t hold a lot of organic matter in the soil. Thus my soil starts out with a major disadvantage: the soil mineral pantry will always be on the small side, sort of like the pantry in our 85 year old house is too small to hold everything Mike and I would like to keep in it. That’s what the total exchange capacity of around 7 means. Those of you with more clayey soils have an advantage over me because your soil’s pantry is potentially larger even if we have the same percentage of organic matter in our soils. What this means to me is that re-stocking my garden soil’s pantry by side-dressing with extra fertilizer in midseason could boost my yields to some degree. I will consider that possibility as the garden season progresses. Certainly with that small exchange capacity I need to be attentive to re-mineralizing every year, especially for crops that need high nutrition to grow well.

In order to understand what the rest of the results on the soil report mean and how to develop a soil prescription from them, you’ll need to read chapters 6 and 7 of Solomon’s book. He has developed a worksheet to help with that process. You can find the various versions of it in Appendix C, or you can download a pdf file of the latest version of the worksheets at this site. Since I have an acid soil, I used the acid soil worksheet in the downloadable version.

Please forgive me for not subjecting you to the level of detail Solomon does in the example in his book; I’d really like for you to read the book yourself rather than attempt to summarize it for you. What I’m going to do here is discuss the pattern of mineral deficiencies and excesses for my soil and the COF prescription that I’ve designed to address those patterns.

Above is side 1 of the filled-out worksheet, in which I used the information from the soil report to determine the pattern of deficiencies and excesses for my soil. Note that sulfur and phosphorus are both deficient. The phosphorus deficiency is to be expected since I do not use N-P-K  fertilizer (the P represents phosphorus) on my garden and the organic matter level is not high. Plants need and use a lot of phosphorus so many soils are deficient in it, thus the widespread use of N-P-K fertilizers. My soil also has a considerable sulfur deficiency, as does the example soil in the book. As for the rest of the minerals, magnesium, potassium (the K in N-P-K), iron, and manganese are all present in excess in my soil, while the rest of the minerals are deficient.

Above is side 2 of the acid soil worksheet, in which I work out target amounts of minerals to include in my customized COF prescription for 2013. It was easier to work out the quantities and materials for my COF versus the book’s example soil because I have an excess of potassium and because I need to add sulfur and calcium but not magnesium. Gypsum (calcium sulfate) is the perfect choice for this situation. Two other minerals I need to add, copper and zinc, are added as their sulfate salts (salts with sulfur included in the formula). What I did was determine how much of each of these minerals I needed and how much sulfur they brought with them, then adjusted the amount of gypsum to add to remedy the rest of the sulfur deficit. We are cautioned to avoid adding over a certain level of sulfur each year. Our sulfur deficit is less than that so I don’t have a problem there. I’m really glad to be adding gypsum because our soil has the classic symptom of a soil that needs it: it’s sticky when wet and compacts easily. Solomon had the same problem with his soil and found that adding gypsum greatly improved his soil’s texture. I’m eager to see if it does the same for ours!

The gypsum brings with it about half of the calcium our soil needs. Because our soil already has too much magnesium, I don’t want to use the dolomitic form of garden lime to add the rest; dolomitic lime brings in some magnesium along with the calcium. What I need to use is high-calcium lime, often referred to as high-cal lime. I determined how much of that to include to remedy the rest of the calcium deficit.

To add phosphorus, I chose to use rock phosphate because I have a nearly-full bag of this at home. The analysis on the bag suggests nothing else on the worksheet is coming in with it; I hope that is the case. If calcium comes along it won’t be a major problem. Once I use up the material on hand, I’ll probably switch to bonemeal for the phosphorus requirement since it does not bring in anything that is in excess in our soil.

This leaves two more minerals to balance, sodium and boron. Both of these are needed in only small quantities and toxic at levels not much higher than the needed levels. St. Louis gets enough rain that sodium chloride (table or sea salt) will leach out of the soil, which is probably why our soil has a small sodium deficit. I don’t find any information about sodium in the water quality report of our water supplier (it’s probably low because we draw water from the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers rather than a well field) and we still have a sodium deficit after irrigating heavily most of last summer, so I will add sea salt for the sodium requirement. It brings in some valuable trace minerals as well. For boron, my target to add is below the application limit, and I will use borax as recommended.

Solomon says that pounds per acre is about the same as grams per 100 square feet, the size of my vegetable beds. There are 454 grams in one pound, which I need to know because my postal scale reads in pounds. Some of the minerals are added in just a few teaspoonfuls for a 100 square foot bed; Solomon has those measurement equivalents on page 191 of his book. I’ll spare you the calculations that I made to convert pounds per acre to the amount used in the prescription for our soil.

Two other components besides those mentioned above will be part of the 2013 prescription. The first is an oilseed meal, cottonseed meal in my case (lots of cotton is grown in southern Missouri) since that is what I have been using in the earlier version of COF. Solomon suggests using about 3 quarts of this per 100 square feet. The meal feeds the soil microlife which in turn makes nitrogen (the N in N-P-K fertilizers) available to the plants as the microlife eat, poop, breed, die, and decay. The second component is kelp meal, used to provide a lot of trace minerals as well as a little nitrogen. Solomon suggests using 1 quart of that.

So here is the Soil Doctor’s prescription for 2013 for our soil, to dig into each 100 square feet of bed space before planting crops.
 - 3 quarts cottonseed meal
 - 1 quart kelp meal
 - 5 pounds rock phosphate
 - 1 pound gypsum
 - 10 ounces hi-cal lime
 - 1.4 ounces sea salt
 - 1.0 ounces (about 2 tablespoons) copper sulfate
 - 0.8 ounces (about 1 1/2 tablespoons) zinc sulfate
 - 0.2 ounces (about 1 teaspoon) borax

To prepare the 2013 prescription, I’ll put the cottonseed meal into a large tin that formerly held popcorn. Then I’ll mix all but the bottom four items into that. Solomon suggests dissolving the borax in a full watering can, then watering the entire surface of the bed with that water, in order to get a reasonably even distribution. I believe I can do that with the salt and copper and zinc sulfates as well. The others won’t dissolve sufficiently in water to play that trick.

After I remove any existing vegetation from one of the beds, I’ll sprinkle the mixed prescription as uniformly as possible over the entire surface of the bed, sprinkle 3 or 4 five-gallon bucketfuls of my compost similarly, and then dig them into the bed using a broadfork. Following this I’ll dissolve the last four items into a 2 gallon watering can and lightly water the bed surface with that solution. Then I’ll plant the bed.

If you play soil doctor and come up with your own prescription, you will need to locate the materials for it. Most decent garden centers carry most of the materials I needed for mine and most you are likely to need for yours. Borax is the same borax that you find in the grocery store and use for various cleaning purposes. What I had a hard time finding were hi-cal lime, sea salt, and copper sulfate. For copper sulfate, I searched the ‘net and found out it is used by aquarium hobbyists and can be obtained in 5 pound quantities. Even for my size of garden this will be many year’s worth. Fedco carries sea salt and hi-cal lime as well as most if not all of the other materials in Solomon's book if you are unable to obtain them locally.

Watch this space for details on the results I get. If any of you want to try this, I’ll be curious to learn of your results as well. I’ll explain more fully why I’m doing this and how I will determine if it’s worthwhile in one of the next posts I make. In the meantime, enjoy life!

Lingering winter

I took this photo of plum trees and spicebush shrubs in our backyard following what the St. Louis National Weather Service has dubbed the Palm Sunday Winter Storm. The official snowfall total at Lambert Field, around 10 miles from our house, was 12.7 inches of snow. I measured 12.0 inches in my backyard, but some melting may have already occurred before I made the measurement. As is typical of late season snowstorms, the snow was quite wet and heavy. Until the breeze picked up later in the morning and the air warmed slightly above freezing, the snow clung to shrubs and trees. The weight of the snow brought down a branch of the blue spruce in the side yard. That branch fell on the nearby blueberry shrub, breaking one of its branches off. Another shrub, a spiraea, suffered stem breakage from the weight of the snow on it. As more of the snow melts, I will check to see if any other woody plants were damaged.

Today I pricked-out seedlings of bok choy, cabbage, broccoli, cosmos, and zinnia from the flat in which each was started into individual cell packs. It was a good activity for a cold, snowy, but sunny afternoon. It felt like winter outside, but on the porch the temperature climbed to 80F.

A year ago, spring came very early and I did not respond in time, losing some unknown portion of the yield I could have gotten from my spring garden. This year I am late getting the ground prepared, not only because we were out of town for several days a few weeks back but also because of the lingering winter weather. Until the snow melts, I won't be able to begin preparation for the peas and onions that should have already been planted, much less the next set of seeds that I should have been preparing for now. Once the snow melts I'll have to check the soil temperature to find out if it is high enough to support seed germination now that we have had a week of very much below average temperatures. A week ago I measured the soil temperature at around 48-50F, which would have been warm enough for many of the spring crops I wanted to plant. I hope it hasn't dropped much. All of this is a good reminder that despite whatever I'd like to think, I'm not in control and nature has no obligation to grant me or anyone else the sort of world we think we should have. The best I can do is try to respond in a timely and appropriate way to whatever is actually happening - and in this case it is winter lingering on.

Soil re-mineralization for the rest of us

Now that spring is supposed to be here, I should be outside working on garden beds for the earliest spring crops. But we are having a late spring this year, at least compared to recent years. The temperature at the official St. Louis NWS site is 33F as I write. One year ago, it was 81F. The average high for today is 58F.

To really appreciate the difference between last year and this year, compare the picture of two redbuds in my backyard above (the small trees in the foreground), taken yesterday, with the picture below of the same two redbuds taken one year ago.

Last year the redbuds were in full bloom. This year, they haven’t changed much from midwinter. Granted, this year is closer to climatic normal than last ... but even the magnolias and most of the daffodils aren’t blooming yet.

With winter hanging on for at least a few more days, I have had time to read most of the way through Steve Solomon’s new book, The Intelligent Gardener: Growing Nutrient-Dense Food. Unlike his previous book, which I discussed here, this book looks in depth at one topic: why and how to re-mineralize garden soils. I’m really glad Solomon wrote the book because a couple of years ago, I had a subscription to Acres U.S.A. and read about soil re-mineralization and how important it is in that publication. However, Acres U.S.A. is written for farmers rather than gardeners. The articles discussing re-mineralization referred to many books written by and for farmers and their advisers. I could tell that different people used different systems, but I wasn’t up to reading the various books in order to piece together what might make sense for me to use on a garden scale. Fortunately for all of us, Solomon became interested enough in the topic and, as he puts it, honestly passed high school chemistry, so he could read much of the re-mineralization literature and interpret it for gardeners.

The first few chapters of the book explain why soils need re-mineralization and why composting and manuring are not sufficient to restore a full mineral balance to most soils, although they do benefit soils by feeding the soil microfauna. For those of us, myself included, who grow by the organic method as explicated by Organic Gardening magazine, we have much to learn. Solomon isn’t knocking organic gardening methods; rather, he wants to extend them to take into account what has been learned by soil chemists and successful holistic farmers about the need for and practice of re-mineralizing farm soils. Soils need re-mineralization because they are leached by rainfall and because typical agricultural, horticultural, and landscaping practices (even organic practices) remove some of the soil’s mineral reserves without replacing them and may create excesses in some minerals that are harmful to crops. Crops grown on such soils will not be as nutritious as they could and should be to sustain their own health against disease and insect attack. Since they lack nutrition, they cannot create the proper level of health in those of us who eat them.

The good news is that we can gradually replace the missing minerals in our soils and reduce excessive levels where those occur; Solomon’s book tells us how to do both. For those of us who don’t have the inclination to have our soil tested, Solomon offers an updated version of his complete organic fertilizer recipe. It’s not quite as simple to prepare as his earlier recipe because his research has led him to tweak the mixture depending on where you live, but it should also work a little better than the version in his earlier book. For those of us who want to develop a mix better attuned to our particular soil, Solomon tells us how to collect a soil sample, where to send it to for analysis, and how to interpret the results and use them to develop a mix tailored to remedy the particular pattern of deficiencies and excesses our own soil exhibits. I’ll be doing this and will report on what I learn, the mix I develop, and its effect on my garden throughout the season. I encourage other gardeners to read the book and try the updated recipe (or, if you want a personalized mix, have your soil tested and develop your own mix and try that). Let me know how it works for you. I’ll be interested in comparing results with those of you who have the more clayey soil typical of most of the St. Louis region rather than the silt-loam loess soil that I have.

How I Got Here, part 5: Planning for Decline

You can find the previous posts in this series here, here, here, and here.

Moving from a small house on 1/8 acre to a small house on 1 acre provided many advantages. The much larger lot would allow me to raise both a larger proportion and a greater variety of the foods we eat. A small flower garden near the house included several peonies, a favorite flower of mine, and a magnolia tree graced the front yard. The property was located in the loess hills created by glacial processes so I knew it had deep and decent soil, and it sloped slightly to the south and east for a good solar aspect. The house was located close to the street and faced south, suggesting a potential for some passive solar heating. Mike and I had invited his parents to join us when we toured the property with the owner before negotiations began; we knew his father would be sure to tell us about any structural flaws the house might have. While the house did not show well due to worn out carpeting and linoleum, peeling plaster and paint, old fixtures and finishes in both kitchen and bathroom, and evidence of mold in the basement and the two back bedrooms, none of us could find any serious structural flaws. The cosmetic issues meant we could get the house for a price we could (barely) afford. Both the refrigerator and clothes washer were 1960s vintage, thus well past their expected life span, so we could replace them with far more energy efficient versions. The stove and oven unit and the clothes dryer were relatively new so we would neither need to replace them nor would gain an energy efficiency advantage in doing so. The previous owner told us the furnace and central AC dated from the late 1970s, so replacing them with much more energy efficient versions also made sense. We could replace all of the elderly appliances from what remained of a small inheritance I’d received a few years previously. The only work we needed to do before moving in, in addition to replacing the appliances, was to remove the carpeting and linoleum layers to expose the wood floor we expected to lay beneath them and hire out the floor refinishing work. We encountered a few surprises while removing the old flooring: some of the rooms had two layers of linoleum, others had a layer of carpet on top of linoleum, and some of the flooring had been installed using ring shank nails, making for slow progress in removal and plenty of cuss words uttered during the process. Once we got down to the wood floor, we found it was pine rather than oak and in the living room it had been stained darker than the rest of the flooring but along the edges only. We learned this pattern of staining was common to houses built around the same time as ours (1928). Typically a large rug covered most of the floor area in the living room so only the edges of floor that the rug didn’t cover were stained to whatever color the owner wanted. Oddly, when the floor was refinished the stained area ended up lighter in color than the rest of the floor!

By the end of April of 2002 we moved into the current house and sold the previous house. I dug up a few of the plantings from the old lot -- most of the herbs, some native plants and daylilies, and a few of the smallest trees and shrubs -- and brought them to the new lot, planting them into the front and side yards to keep them alive until I knew where they would find a more-permanent home. After the stress of the move I wasn’t up to more gardening that year, and just as well because I wanted to take the time to produce a good design.

I’d been studying permaculture design on my own for the past few years and now I wanted to use the permaculture design process to create a design for our yard. I had the first edition of Toby Hemenway’s book Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture in hand as well as various issues of the quarterly magazine The Permaculture Activist (PCA). Hemenway’s book was the first book to focus on applying permaculture design in North America. It laid out a design process I felt I could follow without taking a permaculture design course that I didn’t have the money to take, so it became the main source I consulted in developing my design.

Part of the design process was to observe patterns of sunshine, wind, soil, and water flow for some time in order to best work with those crucial energies. The usual recommendation is to observe for a full year before beginning the design process. I didn’t wait that long to develop my design since I wanted to get the trees and shrubs I’d brought over, and others I purchased that spring, into their final locations by the end of autumn, but I did observe the energies from spring through mid-fall while I worked through the design process Hemenway described. When I was finished with the design, I’d laid out the bones for an edible forest garden for the front, side, and near back yards; a large sunny vegetable garden area occupying the middle back yard; and in back of the vegetable garden, on the highest, flattest, and most northerly part of the property farthest from the house, a prairielike area where the previous owner’s vegetable garden had been that will eventually be shaded out by large oak, pecan, hickory, chestnut, black walnut, and wild cherry trees, evocative of the oak-hickory savanna or woodland that was probably here before European immigrants turned it into an apple orchard and then a near suburb of St. Louis.

The next couple of years I concentrated on planting the tree and shrub layers and on getting the first few vegetable beds dug and planted. I did not design the herbaceous layer of the edible forest garden since I wasn’t sure what I wanted there and didn’t have the money for large-scale herbaceous plantings in any event. Instead I observed how what was there changed as the trees and shrubs grew. When I saw the lawn grass slowly weakening and violets, a favorite spring wildflower whose flowers are edible, taking over as shade increased, I was quite pleased (I’m not a big fan of lawns) and decided I could continue to wait to design the herbaceous layer while I concentrated on expanding the vegetable garden to the point where it provided us with the majority of the vegetables we eat. That basic design, with tweaks introduced as some plantings died and others proved disappointing, remains in place today and has proven to be well suited to the site energies and to our goals.

After the older appliances were replaced, we didn’t do any further work on the inside of the house. I wasn’t sure what to do about the mold problem and didn’t want to paint the walls till the mold problem was corrected. We knew the house needed to be sealed and insulated to further reduce energy usage and cold drafts but we didn’t feel up to doing the work ourselves, plus we were no longer saving money and did not want to reduce our interest income any further by using any of our investments to pay someone to do the sealing and insulation for us. For the same two reasons, we did not do anything further to enclose the south-facing front porch to turn it into a sun porch and solar heat source. While we didn’t give up on any of these projects, they would have to wait until we had the financial means to hire them out.

Until 2004 I hadn’t heard of the growing concern about peak oil (the time when oil production stops increasing from year to year because consumption has grown to the point where production can only keep up). I had kept track of our energy usage for the past 10 years, and we worked to reduce energy usage, for other reasons: because it cost money that we could better spend on things and activities we found more fulfilling; because we knew that fossil fuel consumption released carbon dioxide and that increasing amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere threatened to push climatic processes into a different state that would probably lead to hotter and drier summers for us; and because we were attempting to live up to our practice of voluntary simplicity, of using less of everything so there would be more to go around.  It was reading Richard Heinberg’s book The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies that woke me up to the imminence of the peak of petroleum production and the difficulties we’d all face as we hit and passed its peak. A review of the book in the winter 2003-2004 issue of PCA inspired me to read it. It is one of only a handful of books I have stayed up almost all night to read. As a chemist I was already well aware of the ubiquity of oil as feedstock: after oil is broken down into a variety of components, those components are then combined into many essential materials such as textiles, plastic and thermoset polymers, medicines, pesticides, cleaning products, and many others. I also knew that agriculture relied heavily on oil in the form of diesel fuel and that natural gas contributes the hydrogen to form ammonia via the Haber-Bosch process; the ammonia gas thus formed is the fertilizer of choice for the huge farms of the Midwest in which I live. With all of this background, the information I gained about peak oil and natural gas from Heinberg's book, and knowing that the end of energy growth is also the end of economic growth, I immediately understood the seriousness of peak oil and peak natural gas. It was time for us to get serious about further energy use reduction.

Some internet research through the Energy Star website led me to a concept called home performance. Home performance assesses potential problems with moisture levels and other air quality issues, leaky ductwork and other sources of air leaks into a house, missing or inadequate insulation, improperly sized HVAC equipment, and related issues by doing home energy audits and providing the owners with a detailed report and suggested improvements. In some cases the companies can also do the work needed to fix the problems. Mike had recently received a small inheritance and was willing to use his inheritance to pay to have this work done on our house if I found a contractor. In 2005 I found a contractor who could do the audit for us and who could do some of the work the audit indicated should be done and subcontract the rest. Once all the work was completed, a drainage system and sump pump had been installed to keep the basement dry; the crawlspace under the two back bedrooms had been sealed; the ductwork had been cleaned and sealed; other air leaks into the house had been sealed; the basement ceiling, attic floor, and walls had been insulated (the attic to R-44 and the rest to the extent the cavities allowed); the moldy wallboard in the back two bedrooms had been removed and new wallboard put up; and the leaking electric water heater had been replaced with a natural gas water heater. Testing after the work was completed revealed that the rate of air infiltration into the house had been reduced by 41%, our contractor told us. My records indicate that electricity usage went from 5237 Kwh in 2004 to 3103 Kwh in 2006, a 41% decrease, while natural gas usage went from 477 to 338 Therms, a 29% decrease, in the same time period. It had been work well worth doing.

For the next few years our main efforts focused on the nonprofit organizations we were members of and in two cases on the boards of, and on continued expansion of the vegetable garden as I waited for the fruit trees to mature enough to bear fruit. While I slowly got better at vegetable growing, the lack of further progress in energy reduction and continued excessive driving to execute our various responsibilities to the organizations we belonged to were a source of some frustration to me. The frustration grew as we added another Stream Team to our list of organizations. In early 2009 we and three other people began what the Missouri Stream Team program calls a Cooperative Stream Investigation (CSI) project in our home watershed to better understand the amount and distribution of E. coli and chloride pollution in Watkins Creek and its tributaries. This entailed monthly visits from April through October to six different sites to collect water samples for E. coli analysis and to do the other chemical tests that we’d been trained to do ourselves; then we had to drive the samples across the county to the laboratory that could do the E. coli analysis because the lab had to begin that analysis within six hours of when we obtained the first sample. By this time Mike’s father had died and Mike picked up the additional responsibility of visiting his mother, who lives about six miles away, twice a week and driving her on her errands since she’d never learned to drive. Our gasoline consumption had jumped and we knew we were being pulled in too many different directions, but it took awhile until the stress built up sufficiently to jolt us into action.

Another PCA book review led me to Sharon Astyk’s first book, Depletion and Abundance, in 2008, but it wasn’t until we upgraded our computer to a slightly less obsolete model that could handle Mac OS X that I could read her blog. Reading her book and blog got me interested in trying to achieve the 90% reduction in average U.S. usage that was the goal of her Riot for Austerity project, discussed in that book. For us that meant reducing monthly electrical use from about 233 Kwh to 90 Kwh and reducing yearly natural gas usage from about 377 Therms to about 100 Therms. And those were the easier targets ... we were so far above the Riot gasoline target of 50 gallons per person per year it wasn’t funny. I didn’t see how we could reduce our usage any farther in any of these categories. Meanwhile, now that the vegetable garden was over 1000 square feet in size I found I didn’t have enough time to properly care for it and still execute my responsibilities toward the groups I was involved with and the two bands we now played in. Once the work started on our Zen center’s major fundraiser in the summer of 2009, a fundraiser for which I had taken on the overall organizational responsibility for the past several years, I knew something had to change; I was stressed out to the point of it affecting my health. I’d enrolled in Astyk’s online Adapting in Place course during that time, hoping that I’d learn something to help us further reduce energy use. But instead I learned that our first goal had to be prioritizing our responsibilities. Until we did that, no further progress in energy reduction or reducing the complexity of our lives would be possible. Over the next two months we dropped out of the food co-op we had belonged to for 14 years (it was too far away and took up too much of Mike’s time) and the Dances of Universal Peace band. In 2010 I dropped the farther away Stream Team in order to concentrate on the CSI project on our home stream, a project which continued through last October. In early 2012 I resigned from our Zen center’s board and we reduced our attendance there from once a week to once a month. With these changes our lives came into better balance.

It was through Astyk’s blog that I learned of John Michael Greer’s Archdruid Report blog and his book The Long Descent. Mulling over what I learned from Astyk and Greer, I realized that in the long run we’d do better to cash out some of our investments so we could hire out the work to glass-in the south facing front porch. We’re quite pleased with our sun porch, completed in December 2010. Even though the large pin oak trees in our neighbors’ yards to the south and west shade our sun porch too much in the afternoon, reducing the solar heat gain, it still gives us a place warm enough to overwinter subtropical plants such as citrus trees and rosemary as well as a warm spot to enjoy a cup of tea on a sunny winter day.

Astyk’s and Greer’s examples kind of shamed me into lowering the thermostat to 60F most of the time in the winter. I dislike feeling cold more than I dislike feeling hot, and I have difficulties with circulation in my feet and hands during heating season, but taking Astyk’s online course (now available in book form as Making Home) helped me figure out how to dress to manage in a 60F house. I still don’t like it but I can tolerate it, at least on most days. Having the sun porch warm up to near 70F on a cold sunny day in December and January really helps ... and opening the windows and door between it and the house can raise the temperature in the living room by 2F as well. When the sun is stronger in fall and again in late winter and early spring the porch warms up the house even more. With the addition of the sun porch and lowering the thermostat our electricity usage dropped to 2384 Kwh and our natural gas usage to 201 Therms in 2012. We’ll need to install a wood stove to achieve further reductions, something we hope to have done sometime this year or next.

It has been from Astyk and especially from Greer that I’ve come to fully appreciate the extent to which we not only live in a (declining) empire, but how much I myself have benefited from living in that empire. The five parts of this series have been inspired by this realization. While I have not benefited as much as some people, I still have to own up to my own part in keeping empire going and living off its spoils. At the same time, as I hope this series also shows, I have been slowly owning up to my responsibilities to reduce energy and material consumption, and we plan to continue doing so.

The story isn’t ending although I have caught it up to the present. With winter coming to the slow and sputtering end typical of the Midwest, another gardening season is beginning. I plan to share more of our daily lives here at Living Low Acre, more of our efforts to use less energy and materials, and also more about the slow evolution of the permaculture design and the fruits (and veggies, and mushrooms) of our gardening efforts. In the meantime, I have a lovely mix of snow, sleet, and freezing rain to shovel off the driveway tomorrow morning. Gentlepeople, grab your shovels!

How I Got Here, part 4: Making Changes

This is the fourth in a series of posts in which I describe my journey from a more or less standard issue middle-class life to the lower energy, lower spending life that is the subject of this blog. Here are parts 1, 2, and 3 if you missed them. I pick up the story after I quit paid employment as a chemist in 1992.

After resigning, I had more freedom than I had had since I was a teenager. True, I continued to do the minimal housework I’d always done, but with no paid employment, no school, and no volunteer activities, I had time to read, to garden, to play music, and to think. At first I felt guilty about having so much time to myself. Mike encouraged me to slow down and enjoy the time, to not rush into something unsuitable out of perceived discomfort with being “idle.”  I was glad to have his support and he was glad that I relaxed and slowed down to closer to his pace.

One of the first things I did was to take a workshop on the process of designing an ideal job and finding a real job that was a close-enough match. I’d participated in a similar process while I was still employed. While both processes provided insights, I couldn’t see how to turn what I learned into a paid position without further schooling. After nine years of post high school education, the last thing I wanted to do was to park my behind in classrooms for however many more years that it would take to get another degree in a different field.

If the time needed for retraining hadn’t been sufficient as a demotivating force, the money needed for it would have been. Mike was making close to median income for the time, we had a cheap house with a small mortgage, utility costs were low because the house was small, and our cars were paid for. All evidence suggested we should have no difficulty living within his income. Nevertheless, within several months we’d gone through most of the savings we’d put aside toward what was supposed to be a temporary period of unemployment on my part. Any retraining I might pursue would require us to go into debt, something we refused to do.

I found home accounting software that would work on our aging Macintosh SE computer and began to track expenses in an attempt to figure out what expenses we could cut in order to live within Mike’s income. But that wasn’t the main focus of my efforts during the first couple of years after quitting paid employment.

Instead, I started to spend much more time outside, caring for a tiny prairie garden I’d started from seed and some perennial plantings as well as a container garden consisting of a few herb plants and a tomato vine. After we’d had the property landscaped, I’d planted the flowers and the bit of prairie, and I took over lawn-mowing from Mike. Mike didn’t mind the flowers, but he’d grumbled about the lack of anything that he could eat in the garden. I hadn’t planted any food plants because I had an idea that I would not be successful at growing them. But now I decided to try growing a food plant or two in containers; if they failed, we wouldn’t be out much, and succeeding would make Mike happy. The tomato plant was for Mike as I didn’t care for fresh tomatoes at the time but he loved them. The herb plants were for me. I’d begun to learn a bit about herbs and wanted to plant a small herb garden; growing a couple of herbs in pots seemed like a good way to start. The first time I snipped herb stems and hung them up to dry, I felt a sense of satisfaction that seemed much larger than warranted by the amount of leaves obtained. I could grow something useful to us after all! Even though the torrential rains of that summer rotted some of the tomatoes (the Flood of 1993 was historic in the St. Louis region) and squirrels took most of the rest, I felt the same sense of satisfaction with the few that I picked. I decided that in 1994 I’d dig and plant a vegetable garden in the side yard, a small rectangle of land that got more sun than what level ground remained in the back yard.

Accounting for what we spent didn’t bring the hoped-for reduction in expenditures, but it did make it even clearer that we didn’t have too many months to go before we’d have to tap into our retirement accounts if our spending kept up at its current rate. Meanwhile, the reading, learning, and thinking that I was engaged in pointed clearly to a like overspending of nature’s accounts. In the mid 1990s, the concept of sustainability, meaning a way of life that could be maintained on nature’s resources for many generations, was surfacing into discussion. I caught wind of it from a local radio show, went to the reference area of the county library’s main branch to find out more, and learned of a periodical called In Context. I subscribed and in one of the first issues I received I read an interview with Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez on their recently published book Your Money or Your Life (YMOYL). What I learned intrigued me enough to check out the book. And once I read the book, I was a woman on a mission.

From the book I learned that we trade the finite hours of our lives for a paycheck, so that anytime we spend money, we pay for what we bought with the time we worked to earn the money for it. When we reduce spending we reduce the hours we need to trade for money and increase the hours available for the other activities of life. By figuring out exactly how much money Mike received for an hour of work, keeping track of expenses, re-calculating each expense in terms of the hours worked to obtain it, and then asking if the hours spent were either or both of satisfying and in line with our values, we could learn where spending reductions would have the most effect with the least pain or even an overall gain. As we reduced expenditures, we would free up money to pay off debts, then to save, and eventually to invest at interest. The final step in the process could be receiving sufficient income from interest to be able to leave paid employment before reaching official retirement age. As I read, I realized that since Mike and I already had considerable savings and only had a small mortgage debt, applying the steps could lead not only to my staying out of work but to making a dream of Mike’s, retirement before age 50, come true.

If you’ve read the previous post in this series, you may be wondering why I would be so excited about investing at interest. After all, since payment of interest and eventual repayment of capital require economic growth, and economic growth cannot continue over the long term on a finite planet, then in that long term investing at interest is as unsustainable as profit growth is. Dominguez and Robin raise the same point on page 325 of the first edition of the book under the heading “Yes, but what if everybody did it?” They then evaded their own question by posing a number of scenarios, all positive, that they claimed would be the outcome of more people following their program. (The current edition of the book, with Monique Tilford as coauthor and published in 2008, does not include this discussion.) Their evasion does not negate the validity of the question because enough people reducing their expenses enough would reduce economic growth enough to make the continued repayment of principal and interest impossible. I ignored that issue, however, so I could turn my attention to implementing the steps in the book. Since we’d already been tracking and categorizing expenses it was easy to add the other steps. At first Mike went along with the added steps grudgingly, as a favor to me. I’d tried explaining to him that I’d learned how we could retire him early, but I couldn’t get it across to him in a way he understood. A few months later I convinced him to read the book. As soon as he did he understood why I was so excited and became as dedicated to the program as I was. With both of us on board, we made fast progress in dropping expenses under his income. Over the next several years we paid off the mortgage debt on our house, began investing the savings we now had from Mike’s wages into interest bearing investments, and gradually cashed out the earlier investments we’d made, taking the tax penalties that applied, in order to re-invest the proceeds as the first edition of the book described. By the late 1990s we looked at our chart of income and expenses and projected it to a crossover point in 2001, when we could, just barely, live off the income from our investments. We decided that Mike would retire early that year once he passed his 10th anniversary with his employer.

Meanwhile, asking the questions each month about whether or not a particular expense category was fulfilling and in line with our values led to consideration of what our values were and then into a greater effort to live by them, pulling me back into volunteer work. Because I found the YMOYL program so valuable to us, I wanted to share it with other people who were ready to hear its message. Dominguez and Robin were offering materials for talks on YMOYL through a speakers bureau organized by their New Road Map Foundation, in order to further publicize the program. Since I like public speaking and the foundation would forward inquiries for speakers to me, I joined the speakers bureau, received the talk materials, and gave a few talks as inquiries trickled my way. As I became more engaged with the concept of sustainability, I started to pay attention to local efforts along those lines as well. In 1995 a nonprofit organization formed to advance sustainability within the greater St. Louis region. I heard about it within its first few months, joined it, and found I could publicize YMOYL through it. That led to more invitations to speak. In addition, I and two other volunteers formed a project within the nonprofit to offer group study courses within the St. Louis region. These courses, developed by a different nonprofit and organized around concepts such as voluntary simplicity, deep ecology, and sustainable living, offered people a chance to read about and then discuss various aspects of each topic with other people who were also interested in it. The group support helped people make changes in their own lives. Co-founding this project was a way for me to advance sustainability from the bottom up, as the more top-down work the St. Louis based organization was attempting to do was, not surprisingly, running into various obstacles.

As my economic literacy slowly grew and especially as I learned more about debt-based capital creation, I realized that our pensions and Social Security were as vulnerable to the effects of a slowdown in economic growth as the interest income gained from applying YMOYL to our finances. From studying sustainability, I knew that that slowdown in growth would likely hit while I was still alive to suffer from it. YMOYL was good as far as it went, but we needed to be prepared for a time when the collective financial hallucination wore off. I needed to learn some practical skills that would help keep us going should our income drop drastically below what our investments, pensions, and Social Security indicated we should expect in our old age. In addition, the more we put ourselves out as examples for living sustainably, the more we needed to do to live up to our example. So we started making a serious effort to reduce the amount of electricity, natural gas, and water we consumed in our household and the amount of trash we put out for collection as well as further reduce our consumption of material goods. Our efforts to conserve energy were made more difficult by the brick-on-clay-tile walls of our house that did not admit of a way to insulate short of building new walls and by the 1950s era leaky building shell. I did not feel up to the job of properly sealing the house and did not think it fair to ask Mike to do it since he had to work for pay. The less-efficient appliances we’d bought during the 1991 remodeling were too new to replace. While we did replace the furnace with a 92% efficient model and we made some simple changes to reduce our energy and water consumption, we were frustrated by the compromises we had to make. If nothing else, however, I learned enough to sympathize with similar difficulties other people faced in their efforts to live more sustainably.

Through the 1990s I expanded my gardening as far as the 1/8 acre lot would allow. I enjoyed the activity and I thought it was the best candidate for a useful skill to acquire, yet I was also frustrated because the yard was so tiny, strongly sloped, and shaded that I had little space to raise food. As I practiced gardening I explored various ways to grow a lot in a small space, such as square foot gardening and Ecology Action’s method, including taking a three day workshop offered in Fairfield, Iowa by Ecology Action in 1999. The more I learned, the more I wanted to do, and the more obvious it became that finding a small house on a larger lot would be required for me to make more than a tiny contribution to the food we ate. We started reading real estate ads and Mike made inquiries on a couple of houses he saw for sale while at work (he worked as a meter reader and thus saw a wide range of houses across the metro area). It soon became clear that it would be difficult to find a good-sized property with a small old house at a cost which would not lower our interest income too much to be unaffordable once Mike retired as planned. Besides that, neither of us looked forward to the work of moving. Instead I began to explore the possibilities of permaculture design to try to squeeze more food out of the shadier areas of our lot.

We wanted to reduce the amount of gasoline we used to reduce our contribution to urban sprawl and pollution. However, because I was giving talks and starting study groups and attending organizational meetings and we had started practicing Zen, and since the St. Louis region is sprawled out and we lived miles away from the areas where all of these events took place, we drove a lot. It bothered me since I well remembered the oil crises of the 1970s and knew that the trends were pointing toward a similar crisis in the not too distant future. I gradually started to pull away from the top-down projects in the organization I volunteered for in an attempt to reduce meeting attendance, but it was harder to give up the study circles since I had helped to bring that project into existence.

2001 brought major changes for us. First, Mike retired in February, making his dream, and mine for him, come true. Almost immediately he joined a small band putting on the Dances of Universal Peace once a month. I attended as a dancer and found them enjoyable enough to join the band myself later on. Around the same time as Mike retired, the project to offer group study courses ended after we received pressure from the organization that had developed them to expand the number of courses given more rapidly than we felt was sustainable. While I understood the sense of urgency expressed by that organization to spread the concepts widely, the conflict that resulted from driving to offer courses that counseled not driving bothered me enough that I could not continue the work. Not long after that I also resigned from the local nonprofit and became a member of a Missouri Stream Team which started working on a short stretch of one of the local streams. And by the end of the year, Mike and I bought a small house on an acre of land a few miles away so that I could put my gardening dreams into practice. Mike had seen the house and met the owner when he read her meter a year or two earlier. She told him that although she loved the house and yard, her children wanted her to move near them and she realized she’d need to do so within the next few years. Mike wrote his name and home phone on a card which he gave to her and told her to call him when she was ready to move because he’d like to buy her house. In September of 2001 she called; by December 31st the house was ours. With that purchase we had more opportunities to respond to the challenges of our energetic, economic, and environmental predicament. I’ll bring the story to the present in the next and last installment, which I plan to post within the next couple of weeks.