A time-honored response to economic distress and
uncertain times is to start or expand a vegetable garden. After all, we have to
eat, and food purchases account for a considerable percentage of our expenditures,
even with subsidies to large agribusiness concerns that drive down that percentage.
Sharon Astyk and Aaron Newton, in their book A Nation of Farmers, document how the victory gardens of World War
II supplied a surprisingly large amount of the fruits and vegetables eaten
during that time.1 Small city gardens and backyard livestock still
supply good-sized percentages of vegetables and meat in large cities such as
Hong Kong.2 Following the economic crisis of 2008, Fedco Seeds, a
small seed company in Maine, experienced rapidly growing sales.3
Just because more people may be gardening or may
have enlarged their gardens, however, does not mean that they are gardening in
the most beneficial way, for themselves and for the ecosystem of which their
backyard is a part. While there is a considerable body of information in book
and online form about backyard gardening, including information available from
the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the form of state Extension publications
for home gardeners that help gardeners respond to issues specific to their
region4, little of it is devoted to how to raise foods that offer
the highest value in calories and nutrition for the space used. Since growing
staple foods has become almost entirely the responsibility of agribusiness,
backyard gardeners have concentrated on crops such as lettuce, tomatoes, peppers,
cooking greens, snap beans and peas, sweet corn, and culinary herbs. Most haven’t
concerned themselves with growing calorie-dense crops, primarily root and dry seed
crops, because these are widely available at low cost from agribusiness and its
distributors and retailers. Gardeners prefer to grow the more perishable crops
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 from a local farmer than to grow themselves. While this is
a reasonable way to garden for people with limited time to devote to gardening
and sufficient income to purchase most of their food supply, it will not scale
up well to providing a sizable fraction of the calories and nutrition a person
requires in a year. For that a different range of crops must be grown and
gardening techniques adapted to produce them at the times and in the amounts
needed.
Table 1. 1400 square foot complete-diet garden,
northern version
Crop
|
Number
of crops grown per year
|
Assumed
yield lb/100 sq ft
|
Crop
area for women, sq ft
|
Crop
area for men, sq ft
|
Wheat
|
2
|
10
|
500
|
675
|
Garlic
|
1
|
120
|
25
|
34
|
Sunflower
seeds
|
2
|
5
|
50
|
68
|
Potatoes
|
2
|
200
|
225
|
304
|
Onions
|
2
|
400
|
25
|
34
|
Parsley
|
2
|
35
|
50
|
68
|
Turnips
|
2
|
200
greens, 70 roots
|
25
|
34
|
Collards
|
1
|
300
|
25
|
34
|
Parsnips
|
2
|
238
|
25
|
34
|
Filberts
|
1
|
12.4
|
240
|
324
|
Table 2. 1400 square
foot complete-diet garden, southern version
Crop
|
Number
of crops grown per year
|
Assumed
yield lb/100 sq ft
|
Crop
area for women, sq ft
|
Crop
area for men, sq ft
|
Sweet
potatoes
|
1
|
82
|
325
|
439
|
Soybeans
|
1
|
8
(dry)
|
75
|
101
|
Potatoes
|
2
|
200
|
250
|
338
|
Sunflower
seeds
|
2
|
5
|
50
|
68
|
Peanuts
|
1
|
10
|
250
|
338
|
Turnips
|
2
|
200
greens, 70 roots
|
25
|
34
|
Onions
|
2
|
400
|
15
|
20
|
Wheat
|
2
|
10
|
100
|
135
|
Parsley
|
2
|
35
|
15
|
20
|
Garlic
|
1
|
120
|
38
|
51
|
Leeks
|
1
|
240
|
25
|
34
|
Because the average residential home sits on
slightly less than ¼ acre (approximately 10,000 square feet) of land6,
Duhon’s minimum-area garden plans could put the growing of a full diet within
range of a good-sized fraction of U.S. residents. However, a careful reading of
One Circle reveals that Duhon does
not claim to have planted and eaten for a year from such a garden, thus it does
not document that the assumed yields
upon which the garden plans depend have been obtained by Duhon or by anyone
else at Ecology Action.7 The value of the book rests with the
nutritional analysis that Duhon has done and the way in which he has used
nutritional needs and the postulated
yields obtainable by Ecology Action’s methods to develop some versions of very
small gardens that can meet those needs. He has also addressed how one might
transition to a diet based on only those foods while one is developing skills
with the methodology that Ecology Action espouses. However, I am aware of no reports
from gardeners who have attempted to grow the complete-diet gardens in Tables 1
and 2 to determine if in fact the crop yields required for them can be obtained
under their conditions.8
Later work by Ecology Action suggests that a larger
area, anywhere from 2,500 to 4,000 square feet or more, will be required for a
garden that produces all of its own compost material for maintaining fertility
as well as sufficient calories and nutrition for one person’s survival. In such
a garden about 60% of the area would be used to grow grain and seed crops for
calories and compost material, about 30% of the area would be planted in high-calorie
root crops such as potatoes and sweet potatoes, and the remaining area would be
planted to vegetable crops for vitamins and minerals.9 Ecology
Action’s 2003 publication Designing a
Grow Biointensive Sustainable Mini-Farm offers a template for design of a
backyard garden to meet dietary needs and sustainability concerns.10
However, without knowledge of the yield obtainable per unit area of each crop in one’s own conditions, it will be
impossible to determine if in fact one can grow most to all of one’s own diet
on a backyard scale, whether at the smaller size of Duhon’s designs or at the
larger scale that Ecology Action now promotes as necessary for sustainability.
In this report I will discuss my efforts as a
scientist-gardener to determine the yields I can obtain for the suites of crops
suggested by Duhon as a contribution toward developing a prototype minimum-area
sustainable garden plan applicable to the region in which I live. By doing so I
hope to encourage other scientists who also garden, as well as new and
experienced backyard gardeners, to work together to develop and publicize
similar plans for the regions in which they live. In the ongoing descent, Astyk
and Newton argue, we’ll need 100 million people in the U.S. to take at least
some role in raising their own food, to help cushion the blow from erratic
employment, rising food prices, and weird weather patterns and other
environmental responses to damage caused by human activities.11 If
by our example we can show the usefulness of the scientific method to helping
people grow most or all of their own food on backyard-scale plots, we may get
the scientific method into more hands and in a hands-on way. This could
contribute to getting the scientific method through the Long Descent12
as well as provide some measure of food security for anyone who takes up
gardening in this way.
Method
The garden is located in Spanish Lake, Missouri, an
unincorporated area in northeastern St. Louis County near the confluence of the
Missouri and Mississippi Rivers. The geological history of the area includes
periods of time when winds deposited glacial loess over the existing land
surface.13 As a result the garden soil consists of a very deep, moderately
well-drained, moderately permeable loess-derived silt loam and silty clay loam.14
Each garden bed is 4 feet wide by 25 feet long for
a total bed area of 100 square feet; fifteen such beds are currently in
production. The garden area slopes slightly to the east and south and is in nearly
full sun during most of the growing season, which lasts from approximately
mid-March till mid-November; the frost-free portion of the season is from
sometime in April through sometime in October. In 2013 the last spring frost
occurred on April 20 and the first fall frost occurred on October 25. When
needed, supplementary water is applied from the municipal water supply, or if a
small enough amount is needed (for instance, for a small area of newly-planted
seeds or seedlings), from previous rainfall stored in rain barrels.
Varieties, crop spacings, and planting dates for each crop from Tables 1 and 2 are given in Table 3 for the 2013 growing season and for the growing season in which I obtained the highest yield if different from 2013. The HTGMV spacing column reports the spacing in inches that is recommended for that crop in the 8th edition of HTGMV. In the actual spacing column HTGMV means planted on the triangular spacing recommended by HTGMV with spacing between plants given in inches. In the date planted column TP means transplanted for those crops transplanted as seedlings.
Table 3. Planting data for each variety of the
crops given in Tables 1 and 2.
Crop
|
Variety
|
HTGMV
spacing, inches
|
Actual
spacing, inches
|
Date
planted
|
2013
spacing, inches
|
2013
planting dates
|
Garlic
|
Inchelium
Red
|
4
|
4,
HTGMV
|
11/16/1999
|
6,
HTGMV
|
11/10/12
|
Potatoes
|
Rose
Gold
|
9
|
9,
HTGMV
|
4/7/2006
|
||
Elba
|
In-row
12, between-row 24
|
5/1
|
||||
German
Butterball
|
In-row
12, between-row 24
|
4/30
|
||||
Onions
|
Potato
(multiplier)
|
Not
given
|
6,
HTGMV
|
11/26/2005
|
8,
HTGMV
|
11/10/12
|
Rossa
di Milano
|
4
|
In-row
6, between-row 12
|
4/24
|
|||
Parsley
|
Gigante
d’Italia
|
5
|
*
|
Sown
2/4/2008, TP 4/23/2008
|
||
Turnips
|
Purple
Top White Globe
|
4
|
In-row
variable, between-row 6
|
8/16/2008
|
In-row
variable, between-row 12
|
8/16
|
Collards
|
Even’Star
Champion
|
12
|
12,
HTGMV
|
Sown
2/1/2009, TP 5/17/2009
|
In-row
variable, between-row 12
|
8/7
|
Sweet
potato
|
Ivis
White Cream
|
9
|
In-row
15, between-row 24
|
6/21/2008
|
||
O’Henry
|
In-row
12, between-row 48
|
5/29
|
||||
Soybean
|
Asmara
|
6
|
**
|
7/2/2011
|
**
|
6/16
|
Leeks
|
Giant
Musselburg
|
6
|
6,
HTGMV
|
Sown
2/1/2006, TP 4/14/2006
|
||
Bleu
de Solaize
|
In-row
6, between-row 12
|
Sown
1/22, TP 4/24
|
||||
Peanut
|
Tennessee
Red Valencia
|
9
|
In-row
12, between-row 24
|
6/3
|
||
Wheat
|
Hard
Red Winter
|
5
|
Broadcast
|
11/16/2012
|
*Parsley: 4 plants per square foot
**Soybean: 4
seeds per square foot
In Tables 4 and 5 the yield
assumed by Duhon for each crop in the 1400 square foot complete-diet gardens is
contrasted with the best yield I have obtained for that crop from 2000 through
2013. I have also reported the 2013 yield for those crops for which the growing
season is complete as of this writing.
For some crops I plant a certain number of seeds or
seedlings in a square foot instead of using the triangular spacing recommended
by HTGMV. Some crops are planted in rows across the short dimension of the bed
(turnips, leeks, bulb onions) or the long dimension (peanuts, potatoes, sweet
potatoes). For those crops both the in-row and between-row spacings are given
in inches. For some crops the in-row spacing is variable and is so noted.
Planting information, including the number of square
feet planted and the weights harvested on each harvest date as measured with a
0-5 pound or 0-25 pound scale, are recorded separately for each
variety of each crop. At the end of the growing season the total harvested
weight is obtained by summing the weights measured on each harvest date. For each
different variety of each crop the total harvested weight and the area planted
are used to compute the weight harvested per square foot of garden space
planted to that variety. The weight per square foot is multiplied by 100 to
obtain the weight per 100 square feet for comparison with Duhon’s assumed yield
for that crop.
Results
Table 4. Yields obtained for northern version crops
Crop
|
Assumed
yield lb/100 sq ft
|
My
best yield lb/100 sq ft
|
2013
yield
lb/100
sq ft
|
Wheat
|
10
|
*
|
Not
yet processed
|
Garlic
|
120
|
39
|
12
|
Sunflower
seeds
|
5
|
**
|
Not
grown
|
Potatoes
|
200
|
111
|
75,
Elba
|
38,
German Butterball
|
|||
Onions
|
400
|
78
|
33,
potato
|
34,
Rossa di Milano
|
|||
Parsley
|
35
|
84
|
Not
measured
|
Turnips
|
200
greens, 70 roots
|
101
roots
|
Still
growing
|
Collards
|
300
|
66
|
Still
growing
|
Parsnips
|
238
|
Not
grown
|
Crop
failure
|
Filberts
|
12.4
|
**
|
**
|
* grown in some years but no yield data was
recorded
** unable to obtain yield
Table 5. Yields
obtained for southern version crops
Crop
|
Assumed
yield lbs/100 sq ft
|
My
best yield lb/100 sq ft
|
2013
yield lb/100 sq ft
|
Sweet
potatoes
|
82
|
74
|
64
|
Soybeans
|
8
(dry)
|
41
(green)
|
Crop
failure
|
Potatoes
|
200
|
111
|
75,
Elba
|
38,
German Butterball
|
|||
Sunflower
seeds
|
5
|
*
|
Not
grown
|
Peanuts
|
10
(dry)
|
Not
grown
|
9.6
(wet)
|
Turnips
|
200
greens, 70 roots
|
101
roots
|
Still
growing
|
Onions
|
400
|
78
|
33,
potato
|
34,
Rossa di Milano
|
|||
Wheat
|
10
|
**
|
Not
yet processed
|
Parsley
|
35
|
84
|
Not
measured
|
Garlic
|
120
|
39
|
12
|
Leeks
|
240
|
107
|
Still
growing
|
* unable to
obtain yield
** grown in some years but
no yield data was recorded
Discussion
It is evident
from Tables 4 and 5 that except for parsley, turnip roots, sweet potatoes, and
perhaps soybeans and peanuts depending on the green/dry weight ratio, I have
been unable to obtain yields as much as half that required for Duhon’s 1400
square foot complete-diet gardens. For some crops I have been unable to obtain
a yield at all. Only for parsley and turnip roots have I obtained better yields
than those assumed by Duhon in developing his minimum-area garden plans.
Possible
explanations for being unable to obtain the yields assumed possible by Duhon
include gardener error in applying HTGMV’s particular method; other poor
gardening practices; poor choice of crop varieties; soil deficiencies; losses
to animals; and climatic factors and other possible problems with the yield assumptions
Duhon made to develop the garden plans. Each of these will be examined in turn.
Errors in applying HTGMV’s method. The hypothesis of gardener error in applying
HTGMV’s method gains merit when examining Table 3, which reveals that in many
cases I have been planting at wider spacings than those suggested by HTGMV and
than I have used in the year during which I obtained maximum yield. A wider plant
spacing generally translates into reduced yield since yield is measured in
weight per unit area and a wider spacing means fewer plants per unit area.
However, previous experience in using the crop spacings suggested in HTGMV for
those crops have shown that the wider plant spacings make up for reduced yield
by improving other aspects of planting and caring for the crop. I have
discussed elsewhere how I have changed my gardening methods as my garden size
has increased.16 HTGMV was originally designed for very small
gardens in the tens to a few hundreds of square feet, where it is easier to
work at small plant spacings. Weeding between onions planted at a 4 inch
spacing, for instance, means pulling individual weeds while kneeling in a 12-inch-wide
path as hoes small enough to fit between the plants do not exist. The
difficulty in doing this, and the time required to do it, led me to work at the
wider spacings shown in Table 3 for many crops. To the extent that other people
also experience these difficulties it suggests that a minimum-area garden, even
if it uses the same suite of crops as Duhon proposes, will require more area
than Duhon’s plans provide to grow the required weight of each crop.
Other possible
sources of error in applying the HTGMV method include not properly fertilizing
the garden beds before putting them into production; not producing the quality
of compost needed to maintain intensive production; and not planting in
synergistic combinations so plants can enhance each other’s growth. The error
of not properly fertilizing at the outset will be addressed more fully later
on. Compost quality depends in part on proper initial fertilization and also,
according to HTGMV, on using their technique for creating properly cured compost.17
I find the method too complex to apply as I often do not have the required
ratios of green and dry plant wastes on hand as the piles are being built. Thus
my compost is likely to be of lower quality than the HTGMV method claims is
required for achieving yields in the medium range (the assumed yields in Duhon’s
plans). “Synergistic plant combinations” includes aspects such as crop rotation
and companion planting that affect interactions between plants.18 Although
I have developed a workable crop rotation plan, I have neglected other aspects
of companion planting. However, Duhon’s garden plans will not be able to draw
on much of the companion planting lore and may not allow for optimum crop
rotation, suggesting that they may also be subject to lower yields than Duhon
assumed.
Other poor gardening practices. These include not planting at the proper
time for this location and not keeping the planted crop properly weeded. An
examination of the planting dates in Table 3 in comparison to Missouri
Extension’s suggested planting dates for this area19 indicates that
I am likely planting too late for the highest yields in bulb onions, leeks, and
potatoes. I am aware of this but have had difficulty planting early crops like these
at the proper time. The potato starts do not arrive before April 10 from their
source in Maine. Spring rains are often heavy, and cool soil and air
temperatures mean that the soil may be too wet to work when the preferred planting
window arrives. These factors may reduce the obtainable yield for this area to below Duhon’s
assumptions for his minimum-area gardens, thus requiring an increase in the
size of the garden to obtain the crop weight needed for the diet.
Weeding has been
a continual challenge, one that I acknowledge I have not met well. Besides
often not weeding in a timely manner, I compound the error by composting weeds
that have gone to seed, ensuring that more weeds will germinate in future
years. The size of the garden is a major factor. When I had only a hundred or
so square feet of vegetable garden space it was easy to keep even closely
spaced plantings weeded. A large (by most people’s expectations) backyard
garden, a crowded planting schedule, a life beyond the garden, and a tendency
to put off weeding when there is a conflict between it and other aspects of the
garden and of life have conspired to lead to excessive weediness and probable
loss of yield in my garden. As with planting dates, my difficulties may be shared by others attempting to grow the crops for a minimum-area garden
in this region and should be reckoned with in the garden design.
One way to
determine if poor general gardening practices are a factor in the low yields I
obtain is to compare them with yields obtained by other gardeners or by farmers
in this area. However, the Missouri Extension’s expected yield information is
based on row feet of garden space. It is not clear how to translate row feet of
yield into yield per unit area since only the length of the row and not its
width is given.20 I have been unable to find a source that lists
expected yields in weight per unit area for vegetable crops grown in the lower Midwest.
Poor choice of crop varieties. The possible yields given in HTGMV for
each crop do not indicate that variety chosen may affect yield. Farmers and
gardeners observe that some varieties of each crop yield better than others
under their conditions. The effect of variety can be dramatic, as shown in
Tables 4 and 5 for two different potato varieties planted in 2013 on the same
spacing and in beds prepared and fertilized in the same manner. It may be that
if I chose the best-yielding variety for each crop, I could achieve the
mid-range yield that Duhon assumes for his garden plans. To date I have not
been able to locate quantitative information on the highest-yielding varieties
for Midwestern gardens. Seed company claims that particular varieties are
“productive” do not include the kind of quantitative information that I have
provided in Tables 4 and 5. Without this information we cannot determine if Duhon’s
yield targets can be achieved with some varieties but not others.
Soil mineral deficiencies. Another factor that may reduce the
yields I obtain is an unbalanced soil mineral base. Ecology Action recommends
obtaining a professional soil test prior to first preparing each bed and adding
organic fertilizers as needed to bring nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and pH
to the level recommended by the testing organization for a vegetable garden.
While I had a soil test done by the Missouri Extension and followed its
recommendations when I prepared the first garden bed, I did not follow its
recommendations when first preparing subsequent beds. Instead I used a generic
organic fertilizer blend of 4 quarts of cottonseed meal, 1 quart of garden lime,
1 quart of hard rock phosphate, and 1 quart of greensand, mixed together and applied
to 100 square feet, when I added fertilizer at all.21 Steve Solomon
offers a more nuanced view of soil mineralization and how to bring it to
optimum levels in his latest book The
Intelligent Gardener.22 In April 2013 I had the garden’s soil
tested by the laboratory Solomon recommends. The results indicated that the
soil is excessive in potassium and magnesium and deficient in the other
minerals tested for. As a result, I developed a different blend of organic
fertilizers that more specifically addressed the soil’s mineralization needs,
following Solomon’s suggestions.23 I hypothesized that yield, taste,
and pest and disease pressure might improve in 2013 as a result.24
For the crops in Tables 4 and 5, the lower yield seen this year is at least partly
due to increased spacing in 2013 versus the year in which the highest yield was
obtained, as shown in Table 3. Because the spacings were different it is not
possible to determine if remineralization affected yield. For taste and
pest/disease pressure, little if any difference was noted in the crops
in Tables 4 and 5. Thus the effect of soil remineralization is inconclusive for
the crops reported in Tables 4 and 5.
Losses to animals. In some cases, as with sunflower seeds
and filberts (hazelnuts), animals have eaten most or all of the crop before it
was ready to harvest. Squirrels and birds have been observed to feed on these
crops, and other animals may be feeding on them as well. Until I can find a way
to protect aboveground seed and nut crops sufficiently to retain most of the
yield, I cannot grow these crops. Since peanuts form underground and no
underground pests caused excessive crop loss this year, peanuts may prove to be
a more useful seed crop for my minimum-area garden than sunflower seeds or
filberts.
Other factors. Duhon’s minimum-area garden plans were
based on nutritional analyses and the expectation of Ecology Action that
experienced gardeners should be able to obtain yields two to four times that
which is typical of conventional agriculture.25 They do not appear
to take climatic factors into account. While a climate with a long, cool summer
is ideal for potatoes and would be reasonably expected to produce a higher
yield of potatoes per unit area than a climate with only a short period of cool
weather followed by a long and hot summer, Duhon’s northern and southern garden
plans assume the same yield is obtainable for each. My experience is that it is
difficult to achieve Ecology Action’s mid-range yields for most crops that
prefer long, cool growing seasons, while it is easier to achieve those yields
for crops that grow well in a long, hot growing season. This matches climatic
patterns for my location in east-central Missouri. Duhon’s northern and
southern plans attempt to take advantage of the length and warmth of the
growing season by the choice of crops, but because the southern suite still
includes crops like onions and potatoes that prefer cooler conditions and
assumes that yields will match those of crops grown in the conditions they
prefer, it may not be realistic in its area expectation. Table 5 shows that my
yields for crops that grow well in hot-summer climates are generally closer to Duhon’s
expectations than for those crops that prefer cooler summers, in support of my
argument.
Duhon’s southern
plan requires that 433 square feet of the garden area be planted to both a warm
season and a cool season crop during the growing season. For the double-cropped
area he proposes that the warm season component would include 233 square feet
of sweet potatoes, 100 square feet of peanuts, and 100 square feet of
sunflowers. The cool season components would include 153 square feet of fall
potatoes, 25 square feet of spring turnips, 25 square feet of fall turnips, 15
square feet of spring parsley, 15 square feet of fall parsley, and 200 square
feet of winter wheat.26 Because the frost-free growing season is only
about six months long and both spring and fall are short in this area, there is
insufficient time in the growing season to permit Duhon’s double-cropping
scheme without using season extension tools such as cold frames or hoop houses.
For those of us who do not practice season extension it will be necessary to
increase the garden area to avoid planting the same beds or portions of beds to
more than one crop during the growing season.
It is evident
from the plans that a diet based on them will be monotonous. Astyk has
discussed the difficulty that many people have in changing their diet even when
the necessity is obvious.27 Although the idea of a minimum-area
garden is valuable, I suspect that its acceptance will require a more varied
diet than Duhon’s proposed plans will allow and thus a larger garden area since
crops with lower calorie and nutrition yields per unit area will be included.
Finally, Duhon’s
plans were developed before Ecology Action proclaimed the necessity of devoting
a large proportion of the growing area, as much as 60%, to grain and other
high-carbonaceous-material crops in order to grow enough carbon to make enough
compost to sustain the garden’s fertility through time.27 Duhon’s southern
plan plants only 34% of the area to the carbonaceous material producing crops
of wheat, soybeans, peanuts, and sunflowers, thus the yields may not be
sustainable year after year if the only source of fertilizer is the compost
made from garden and kitchen wastes.
To address the various issues discussed above I am
developing a garden plan suited to this area that includes a larger variety of
crops than Duhon includes in his garden plans while working toward the
sustainability goal that Ecology Action espouses and improving my gardening
skills in the process. The current plan consists of a total of 15 beds (1,500
square feet), planted in five groups of three 100 square foot beds each. The
groups of beds, named after their main crops, rotate throughout the garden on a
five-year schedule and include the following crops in 2013.
Grain
group: flint corn
Legume
group: cowpeas, edamame-type soybeans, peanuts, dry beans, shell peas, snow
peas
Cucurbit
group: potato onions, garlic, and winter wheat planted the previous winter and
harvested in early summer, followed by summer squashes (Cucurbita pepo), winter
squashes (C. maxima and C. moschata), muskmelons, cucumbers
Solanum
and morning glory group: potatoes, tomatoes, sweet and hot peppers, eggplants, tomatillos,
ground cherries, sweet potatoes, basil
Green
and root vegetables: lettuces, cabbages, collards, kale, broccoli, bok choy,
turnips, rutabagas, storage radishes, carrots, beets, parsnips, parsley,
cutting celery, bulb onions
Compared to Duhon’s southern complete-diet plan,
this plan offers a much higher variety of crops for the gardener to eat, at the
price of growing a large area to crops of lower calorie and/or nutrient density.
Thus it cannot provide all the calories and nutrition that the two adults who
eat from it require, though we eat a substantial fraction of our diet from the
garden from June through December and a smaller fraction during the rest of the
year. Compared to Ecology Action’s sustainable garden plan, the total of 40% of the garden area planted to
grains and legumes is less than the 60% of the garden area that Ecology Action
suggests, though it is more than the 34% in Duhon’s southern plan. Of the crops
Ecology Action currently recommends for the 30% of the area to be grown in high-calorie
root crops29, the plan includes only potatoes, sweet potatoes,
leeks, and garlic planted to a total of 216 square feet in 2013, for only 14%
of the garden area. The remaining 46% of the area is planted to crops placed in
the vegetable crop category that Ecology Action recommends should take up only
10% of the garden area. Again this comes at the price of lower caloric and
nutrient density, but with the advantages of good garden rotation practice (the
time between the same plant family in each bed is five years) and a higher
variety of crops available throughout and, by proper storage techniques, beyond
the growing season. At the time of writing the 2013 growing season continues.
After it ends, I will post the results for each crop and a discussion of the
overall garden performance and its effect on my planning for future years in my
blog, Living Low in the Lou.30
Future work
Much work remains to be done to develop garden
plans that provide significant amounts of calories and nutrients for the
gardener, are adaptable to backyard-sized plots, follow good gardening
practices, and produce a wide variety of foods the gardener will actually eat
over the growing season and beyond. As this report has demonstrated, one of the
linchpins of this effort is to obtain the yield per unit area for the various crops and varieties that are grown in
specific regions. I have made some such information from my scientific
gardening practice available in this report and will post more information to
my blog as it becomes available.
However, I am only one gardener in one region. If
there were more gardeners here in the St. Louis region interested in gardening
this way, we could run variety trials to find high-yielding varieties that
would let us raise more high-calorie, nutritious food on the same amount of
land. We could run spacing trials to determine the optimum spacing for each
different crop. We could develop garden plans for our region that marry eater
desires for variety with good gardening practices and sustainability concerns.
We could inform each other of our gardening failures, analyze them, and learn
from them to become better gardeners individually and as a group. Gardeners in
other regions could do similar things and should because something that works
here won’t work everywhere else.
What I have described is the application of the
scientific method to gardening. It requires little in the way of equipment and
prior knowledge, only paper and writing instruments for drawing garden plans
and recording planting and harvesting details, rulers and tape measures for
accurate garden area layout and area measurements, standard human-powered
backyard gardening tools, kitchen scales, and a knowledge of basic mathematical
operations and high school level geometry. (An abacus, for summing up weights,
and a slide rule, for calculating weight per unit area, would be useful
additions to this toolkit for those who prefer not to depend on the continued
availability of calculators and the batteries they require.31) Carol
Deppe has user-friendly information on how to do garden trials in her book Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties.32
By communicating our results – through blogs,
e-lists, local gardening and neighborhood associations, casual conversations,
and the like – we would help ourselves and others to make the most of our
gardening efforts and thereby reduce some of the negative effects of ongoing economic
and environmental changes. Since doing a good garden trial requires a working
knowledge of the scientific method and communicating the results to others
helps the community of gardeners evolve better ways to garden faster than would
otherwise happen, we would also get the scientific method into more hands and
in a hands-on way that produces many benefits for those who apply it. This
could result in more food security as we go through the Long Descent while
increasing the odds that the scientific method will make it through the
knowledge bottleneck that accompanies civilizational decline.33
Bibliography
Astyk, Sharon, Independence
Days: A Guide to Sustainable Food Storage & Preservation (New Society,
2009).
Astyk, Sharon, and Aaron Newton, A Nation of Farmers: Defeating the Food
Crisis on American Soil (New Society, 2009).
Clason, Clyde B., Delights of the Slide Rule (Crowell, 1964).
Deppe, Carol, Breed
Your Own Vegetable Varieties: The Gardener’s and Farmer’s Guide to Plant
Breeding and Seed Saving (Chelsea Green, 2000).
Duhon, David, One
Circle: How to Grow a Complete Diet in Less than 1000 Square Feet (Ecology
Action, 1985).
Ecology Action, Designing
a Grow Biointensive Sustainable Mini-Farm: A Working Paper, Self-Teaching
Mini-Series #31 (Ecology Action, 2003).
Greer, John Michael, The Long Descent: A User’s Guide to the End of the Industrial Age
(New Society, 2008).
Hawker, Jon L., Missouri
Landscapes: A Tour Through Time (Missouri Department of Natural Resources,
1992).
Jeavons, John, How
to Grow More Vegetables Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land Than You
Can Imagine, 8th edition (Ten Speed Press, 2012).
Solomon, Steve, Gardening
When It Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times (New Society, 2005).
Solomon, Steve, with Erica Reinheimer, The Intelligent Gardener: Growing
Nutrient-Dense Food (New Society, 2013).
Notes
1. Astyk and Newton 2009, pp. 58-59.
2. Astyk and Newton 2009, p. 69.
3. Letter dated 1/18/2009 from C. R. Lawn of Fedco
Seeds, http://www.fedcoseeds.com/, and included with vegetable seed orders. At
that time the growth rate in sales relative to the previous year was 42.5%.
While the letters from subsequent years indicate that growth slowed relative to
2009, it appears to have continued.
4. The USDA’s Cooperative Extension System Offices
website is http://www.csrees.usda.gov/Extension/index.html. The different state extension offices can be located through it.
Missouri’s Extension website is http://extension.missouri.edu/index.aspx
5. Duhon 1985, pp. 191-196.
6. Astyk and Newton 2009, p. 28.
7. Endnote 9 in Jeavons 2012 regarding the possible
yields column in the charts states “Estimates based on our experience and
research. Use lowest figure if you are a beginning gardener,; middle if a good
one; highest if an excellent gardener with exceptional soil and climate. (The
testing and development process requires a long time and has involved many
failures. … There is still much left to be done.)” It is from the mid-range
yield given in an earlier version of the master charts that Duhon derives his
assumed yields for his garden plans.
8. Crop yields are dependent on a number of factors
such as growing season length, day length, severity of winter and of summer,
soil type, rainfall, differential performance of crop varieties, and so on that
vary widely across the U.S. There is no guarantee that yields obtained in
northern California will be obtained in other regions of the country.
9. Jeavons 2012, pp. 33-43.
10. Ecology Action, 2003.
11. Astyk and Newton 2009, pp. 58-62. The 100
million new farmers figure is on p. 61.
12. Greer 2008. His discussion of the vulnerability
of the scientific method to the effects of the Long Descent is on pp. 182-187.
13. Hawker 1992, p. 146.
14. According to the custom soil resource report
for this location obtained from the National Cooperative Soil Survey’s on-line
request service.
17. Chapter 3 of Jeavons 2012 addresses the
functions of compost in the method and how to produce properly cured compost to
maintain garden fertility.
18. Chapter 6 of Jeavons 2012 addresses companion
planting and crop rotations.
20. Download the free PDF from the website in note 18
for the row feet to plant per person per year.
21. The formula and the rationale behind it are
given in Solomon 2005.
22. Solomon 2013.
25. Jeavons 2012.
26. Duhon 1985, p. 194.
27. Astyk 2009, p. 102.
28. Jeavons 2012, pp. 39-43.
29. Jeavons 2012, p. 40.
31. Use your favorite search engine to find retail
sources for both of these. Slide rules were still being used as late as the early
1970s, thus local yard and estate sales are a potential source of excellent
slide rules at low cost. Clason 1964 explains how to use slide rules.
32. Deppe 2000, pp. 54-64.
33. Greer 2008.