Field Studies

The garden is starting to yield. Parsley, basil, mint tops, and early lettuce have all been picked and the first lesson of gardening is in hand; you must be a brutal realist.



Pruning and Thinning. Salad greens are topped, flowers are dead headed, and herbs are pinched back every day. If you harvest early and often you increase your yield. So by eating more mint, I get more mint?! Yes. You delay bolting and the plant going to seed. It is counter-intuitive.
When sowing seeds there are two major schools: One lays out rows, drills holes for individual seeds and assumes they will all be vital. The other plants the entire seed packet, waits to see which seeds produce sprouts and then thins the row to the proper spacing. You lose half or more of your sprouts. You get more yield.
When growing fruit trees you learn to prune back, to thin, in order to increase quantity and quality of yield. You mean if I knock or pick off every other apricot on that tree I will get more apricots?! Oh yes, and fuller, more flavorful fruit and a tree that can bear the weight.
Dead heading, (removing drooping flowers and their seed stems), your petunia, pansy, geranium plants will increase their blooms and their blooming cycle.



All of the above require intense hand labor. Determine how much you want to work and plan the size of your garden accordingly. End of lesson one.


You will learn to kill. Is it killing if I don't see my prey? Carrie, a near Jainist, will turn her fingers green with the bodies of the dead aphids she strips from her roses.
Pest control often evolves in the following cycle: Squirrels are cute, they are part of the scheme of things, it's fun to have them in the garden. Lets get a HavaHart and move the critters out. Does the city allow air guns within its borders.

Gardening will turn your world view upside down. No matter the scale, be it a single pot or a plot, you will never bemoan another rain shower. You will monitor frost warnings. You will learn to be sensitive to direction of and intensity of sunshine. You will become attuned to the vagaries of nature. There are going to be far more complications to this process than you imagined. The easy acceptance of the concept "organic" is going to be challenged. You will understand failure in new and important ways. You are not in control of your environment despite your best efforts. When all else is failing you will spray with chemicals, or, you will retire from the field. You will come to understand that every crop you plant is the result of genetic modification. The horror stories and the resulting rampant fear of GMO's may or may not be warranted. The patenting of our food supply is terrifying.

A garden is never "vital" for our sustenance, that is our privilege. It can however become a classroom for understanding the larger forces at work in the world. That is the promise of school based garden curriculum elements. They stop way short of the kind of truth telling that our citizens need to learn to appreciate where their food comes from. You get no second chance in a crop field. It is not a classroom. End of lesson two.


Promises of the learning power of the garden that won't be fulfilled include your understanding of your connection to the earth. At best you have a patch, a highly controlled and defined space. It is no more a microcosm of the earth than a goldfish bowl is to the sea. Growing a successful tomato in no way informs your understand of how you are going to sustain yourself in November. Gardens are not agriculture and large scale gardens, despite our desire to believe, are not capable of feeding us. Some of us may be able to afford $40 a pound greens but in the scheme of things that is irrelevant. Thomas Jefferson had most of it right at Monticello and in his design of The University, The Academical Village. From the time of Plato's "groves of academe," gardens have been linked to the contemplative and scholarly life as well. Jefferson described the University as a set of buildings "arranged around an open square of grass and trees." The Pavilion Gardens provided both a place in which to study and a subject of study. Jefferson wrote that "such a plan would afford the quiet retirement so friendly to study." As I continue to harp on the University as the available model of how we might live in the real world visit the UVA web site and appreciate that faculty and students alike fight to stay within the Village.

The Right to Know

The nation's attention has been turned to the idea of urban gardening. The enormous visibility of the First Lady and students from Bancroft Elementary School really accelerated the adoption of the program. Last week they gathered to harvest some of the produce they planted in March.


The First Lady's comments included; "This garden project, what we've done together, guys, has given us the opportunity not just to educate children, but to hopefully even educate a few parents and adults as we go along the way. How many of you have talked to your parents about what you've been doing? How many of you have started talking about fruits and vegetables and eating a bit more?
So we've seen some progress even among this small group of kids. The students with us today have learned about the seasons, right? We learned about when you plant what and why, where food comes from, what it takes for food to grow, the process of how food gets from the garden to the plate, and how much more delicious fresh fruits and vegetables are when they come straight from the garden."

These are important lessons. But we don't want the children to grow up with unrealistic illusions about gardening and because their school has just gone into recess, this might be a good time to backfill what these students need to know.

For example White House Associate chef Sam Kass said in the same pool report "no chemicals--fertilizer or herbicide-- had been used on the garden, but that the underlying White House soil had been "amended" with crab meal from the Chesapeake Bay, green sand compost and lime powder." He was pointing out the need to enhance the soil he was digging. Urban gardeners face a far more serious problem underscored by The National Gardening Association. They warn of the dangers of lead in urban soils. Their advice is to check with local authorities before starting a garden. To be more thorough you ought to consult the EPA pages "The Right to Know" which explains how to find out the history of the area on which you intend to plant a garden.



Mr. Kass went on to say "that the only problem he had noticed is that something is nibbling a little bit on the kale."

I might add that I find that comment a little suspicious. My experience has taught me that from the moment the students put the first spade in the earth, they became warriors with a host of creatures and critters in a fight to the death over exactly whose food this was going to be, and who was going to get to eat it. To actually get to eat any of the produce they hope to raise they are going to have to learn what an aphid is and how to kill it. This is but one of many pests gardeners learn to contend with and if they eschew chemicals they are going to scrape them off the leaves they infest and squish them with their fingers.
Other pests that they are going to have to learn to manage are outlined here; and that's just the pests that feed on lettuce.

Another form of pest we have to mitigate are the vermin, the mice and rats that will find their way into their garden. Heed the advice from Washington State U.

It is a hard lesson for all of us to learn and not some theoretical exercise; the war is on. When your food supply is at stake you learn to steel your heart and fire away with whatever you've got and that the law will allow. Urban gardeners that raise chickens will never forget the blood curdling squawk of their chicken in the clutches of a possum. You will kill the possum.

Chef Kass pointed out that rain had been plentiful this spring but our gardeners are not going to always have such luck. I have lost more tomatoes to blossom end rot, brought on by uneven watering, than to tomato hornworms. Gardeners need to know what the fertilizer and water requirements are for their plants and plan accordingly. They need to shade some crops from the hot sun and block killing winds with screens, and every gardener learns special tricks to protect their crops from early frosts.

The above is intended to illustrate the fact that we don't want to raise a generation of dilettantes who believe that gardening is an easy and part time exercise the produce of which is trouble free. Chef Kass said that "there has been one big weeding once a week and that he and a pastry chef along with "volunteers" from the White House had done the weeding." Our students are not going to be so lucky in their home gardens.

Antonio Roman-Alcalá is a realist, a professional with in-the-field experience and his story is well worth reading. He started his new career in one of the nation's first urban farms, the Alemany Farm in San Francisco.

What he reminds us of is the fact that food production, even small scale is a profession. It is not for the faint of heart or those with tired bodies.

There are many different motives by many different people who are climbing on the urban gardening bandwagon. Some hope to improve the quality of their food sources by knowing where it comes from and how it was grown. To them it is critical to measure just how much of their annual nutrient requirement they will be able to supply, and become realistic about how to supplant it during the non growing season. Others want to green their cities, cool them, and remove toxins associated with lawn maintenance. These people may need to examine the major sources of pollution and work to mitigate the main causes instead of working on the margins. Still others want to help the poor get a healthy alternative to junk food and provide money saving opportunities. It is asking an awful lot to suggest that a single parent return from her day job, feed the kids, and then weed her patch.

If this is to be a sustainable activity we are going to have to learn how to continue when the grants run out, when the volunteers go back to college, when the economy shifts and cities reclaim these plots as valuable for development. I believe that small scale farmers like Antonio Roman-Alcalá have the answer and we ought to be listening. Support local small scale farming, and appreciate the toil and trouble they go through. Grow your own salad if it makes sense, and enjoy the fruits of your labor.

Trolling

When movements cross the great oceans, urban gardening (see RUAF)is a prime example, the reason for the activity is often lost in the rush to get on board. When the Bay Area by example promotes the development of local agriculture it is in the name of community building, a noble enterprise. Locavores, Greens, and health food enthusiasts, support the movement for their own reasons. But I am forced to ask myself if this expenditure of time, energy, and resources in the planting of these seeds is a truly meaningful exercise in the practice of urban living.

My understanding of human development, the growth of cities, and the creation of the enormous infrastructure to support them, was a way and means to broaden the scope of human creativity and allow the aggregation of numbers to increase peoples' collective wealth. Now that we have the great cities up and running it is a foolish enterprise to act as if we can turn back the clock and replant the groves on which they were built.

An enormous opportunity exists for new agriculture and it is reflected in the USDA policy directive re. small scale farms. All of the stake holders in the concept of urban gardening could achieve their common objectives in the support of these small scale farms while reserving precious urban space for more appropriate uses; say housing!

If eating, feeding, and responsible consumption practices are an issue then it occurs to me that what urban residents need to know is contained within their own turf. Short of dumpster diving, (a perfect reflection of the fact that we have too much food, not a scarcity), smart urban residents could use some serious lessons in how to get the most out of their locally available food supply.

Foraging, the practice of hunting and securing foods from the wild is being reconsidered in an urban context. Great fun if you have the time. Simpler is the idea that the vast storehouse of food, your neighborhood market, contains within it some of the most nutritious, affordable, and sustainable items for consumption on a regular basis and they are yours for the finding.

So drift down the canned fish aisle of your favorite market and pause at the canned salmon section. You will note more than one variety, at least red and pink and a great disparity in price. Red is scarcer, contains more oil, and therefore costs more. There is little nutritional difference. The reason that pink salmon is cheaper is that it is the most abundant, counting for more catch than all of the other varieties of salmon combined. It is also smaller and therefore less prized as a game fish. This is thought to be the primary reason it is held in poor esteem. Lets take advantage of others foolishness. Cans vary in size and the best bargain is the larger, up to 15oz. You will find many brands, generic, and popular like Bumble Bee. The only thing to look for on the label is that it is wild caught, Alaskan, and has no additives. I keep a two dollar maximum price point and have no trouble finding it on sale for much less. If you are worried about the state of the salmon consider the following report.

We now have in hand a wild caught, highly nutritious food, the proceeds of the sale of which flow back to native Americans, and is sustainable. Works for me. I am not going to write recipes here but will link to a beautiful site that you will enjoy. First a word on the can. Open one end partially and drain. Open the other end and invert and slip the can off of the tower of salmon. You can now see the back bone which you can remove by breaking away the adjoining chunks. You will see other obvious bones. Remove them and place the remaining fish in a bowl. Scruntch around with your hand breaking the pieces and feeling for bones that are trying to hide. You are now ready to enjoy this link and its recipes.