Early Spring

This may seem a little out of place for a post on "Early Spring," but I can explain. This is the main photo on the Bountiful Gardens seed catalog (which sells specifically open-pollinated, non-treated seeds), and what gardener isn't being inundated with all of their favorite seed catalogs right now? It is bliss, with a bitter twist: you can't try all the new varieties you want. Few of us have that much space. This photo is of the crew in late summer 2008- Dan, Ellen, David, Sandika, Margo and Philip. David and Philip were from (and are doing great work now in) Kenya. Sandika was from Sri Lanka.
What has Margo been up to while I have been toying with grains? She has been devising the garden plan for our coming season. It is based on a diet she planned during our 6-month course in 2006, and has been altered as we found we could not eat so much of some things and wanted more of others. Margo talks about this process as a movement toward a sustainable diet from both ends: a diet design that will provide more of what we actually eat, and a diet closer to what we can actually grow (hopefully someday we will meet in the middle of the two). The purpose of the diet exercise is to figure out how to meet one's caloric and nutritional needs in the smallest area, while growing enough biomass crops to supply the garden with its fertility through compost. In essence, this is the GROW BIOINTENSIVE method. You can see her previous plan, worked up in a 5-Bed Unit, on Ecology Action's website.
This deserves a new paragraph: Margo has also managed to create a crop rotation for the 4000 square feet we are currently managing. It will span something like 16 years, since the area is divided into that many beds, and few of those beds are one entire crop. A few are all flour corn or all potatoes, but not many. This is much more incredible than I can make it sound, not having spent the hours on it like she has. I'll try to come up with some graphic representation for a future post.
I'd like to stick a before-and-after set in here from the willow beds I am working on. As has happened in a few other spots in the garden, someone in the past has removed a bunch of rocks and dumped them all in one area, around a perennial or at the end of a bed. The logic, I think, was that they would make weeding easier and hold water better. Unfortunately, when there is a layer of rocks around something like basket-willow plants (which are only given attention once a year at harvest) the grass grows higher and people forget to water them. And willow needs water. Plus, once you do want to get in and harvest the willow the rocks interfere and mess with the pruners. And need I say rocks, in large numbers, are heavy? Better to put them in a pile somewhere you won't want to move them. Or on your [gravel] driveway. On the left you see a cleaned up bed, with almost imperceptible willow stumps.

Margo and Ellen spent some time two weeks ago pulling up the dead asparagus tops, gathering them into piles, and moving them to a dry spot for use in composting later. Here is the stash...

One last little bit for this post. This being a learning garden, and us all being observant and interested, we keep record of our daily temperatures. Though it might be easier and more informative to have a data-logger hooked up to a computer charting hourly temperature fluctuations, we would need the hundreds of dollars to buy it and would probably never look at the results anyway. Our (relatively) cheap solution to this is a standard min-max thermometer. It is a mercury thermometer shaped like a U, where when temperatures are rising, the mercury on the right raises, and when the temperature drops the mercury level on the left raises. Fun! There are little blue pins inside the glass column, and the mercury pushes them. Where it stops, they stick. A magnet is used to reset the pins, which you do by drawing them both down to the current mercury levels. We check them once a day in the morning, after the low has been reached and the temperature is rising. This thermometer reads a 24-hour high of ~74° F and low of 38° F. The high/low are then recorded on a 6-month data sheet, seen at the left here.

Thus we have records of yearly and monthly averages, highs and lows, nights above 60° F, and anything else we could hope for. Except hourly fluctuations...
Coming up next, the reasons I didn't post this last week!