Sitting here in the 42nd parallel North, snow a foot high on the picnic table outside my window, and lows of 7F tonight (that would be -13C), my mind turns to summer. Turns to summer with a little help, that is, from my friend Doug Lea, whose writing about his many gardens has fascinated me for years (viz. "onions and beans are like dragons in a medieval drama"). Writing beautifully about gardening is as difficult as the gardening genre Doug discusses here. I like this piece so much that I'm tempted to tug phrase after phrase up here, into the intro, but better, I think, to let you discover his lovely turns and his wisdom about gardening yourself. (Someone get this man a book contract.) Last week he posted this great bit of garden-think to his Facebook page; I asked to re-post here. Thus, for all who dig the earth and love mud pies...
Doug with the artist (and his wife) Julie Savage Lea
By Douglass Lea
For three decades I’ve followed the intensive way of growing
vegetables. It’s a hard calling, best taken up by those with an excess
of time, friends, and vigor – or by those, like me, with an itch to
escape the modern swirl of abstractions and symbols, to connect effort
and result more directly, to find a grounding for self in the ground
itself.
Loosely defined, intensive gardening describes a set of interwoven techniques that maximize the yield from a limited area and maintain the long-term usefulness of the soil. Needless to say, it relies heavily on organic materials.
What does one do? Begin by digging – and then digging and digging again – until reaching a depth of 36 inches or more. Try, however, to keep removed strata intact, for one completes the “double-digging” process by putting loosened soil back where it came from, each layer in proper order. By raising garden beds a foot or more above surrounding paths, double-digging creates a fluffy texture that warms quickly in spring, keeps a steady temperature throughout summer, drains well with little erosion, retains moisture for dry months, and breathes easily.
Having survived a grueling test, one then mixes the top layers of newly aerated soil with compost, manure, bonemeal, and potash. The catechism here is unequivocal: industrial amendments undermine soil viability, weaken the integrity of plant structure, and invite pests and plagues to make a wasteland. Sir Albert Howard, founder of modern organic farming, said it bluntly: “Artificial manures lead to artificial foods, which lead to artificial people.”
Next, one inseminates the raised beds with the seeds or seedlings of diverse vegetables, herbs, and flowers, combining the varieties that flourish as companions and separating those that attack one another. Basil likes tomatoes, and the two should forever be joined together, in sickness as in health, on the plate as in the belly. But onions and beans are like dragons in a medieval drama, condemned to an eternity of ceaseless battle. Never plant them together.
Companion planting is complex enough, but it is overlaid by the equally strong and precise demands of succession planting, closecropping, and intermixing. Now the fun begins.
In succession planting, one works with an eye focused on the cycle of maturity for each variety, looking to fit the basic requirements and patterns of each into a larger whole. Will the corn planted today grow fast enough to shade the late peas and prolong their season of usefulness? How many weeks before the borage explodes?
In closecropping, one transplants seedlings into closely spaced geometric patterns – chiefly triangles and hexagons – to create, once plants have matured and leaves touched, a microclimate that moderates the vicissitudes of the macroclimate. Skillful closecropping eventually generates a living mulch that protects the soil and its microorganisms and discourages the growth of noxious weeds.
In intermixing, as the word implies, one intermingles varieties as much as possible – given the imperatives of succession planting and closecropping – in an effort to approach the mysteriously productive randomness of nature and avoid the infestations that descend wherever vast stretches of a single crop are cultivated year after year. Assign perfidious monocropping to the putative efficiencies of industrial agriculture, not to the mysteries of intensive gardening.
Having outlined the norms that govern intensive gardening, I think it’s time to grapple with the deviations. And they are legion.
In the final analysis, I’ve learned, the garden only partly belongs to me. Other creatures, both animal and vegetable, seem to have equally strong claims to my domain. And they have been waiting patiently for someone just like me – bursting with ego and determination – to appear and bring forth a newly disturbed patch of ground.
In short, my garden harbors a powerful array of biological and geophysical imperatives that insist on manifesting their own destinies. They resist the geometric overlays of human design; their chaotic patterns and turbulent cycles defy the logic of human control. My garden seems to have a mind of its own.
After three decades, for example, it is quite clear to me that the primeval forest of the Piedmont wants to repossess my little plot. Every spring it lets loose a million helicoptering maple seeds in a relentless effort to impregnate my fluffy beds. Every year I dutifully pull out the rooted progeny of the spring offensive.
The mere passage of time has also changed my garden, almost beyond recognition. Having situated my garden in a low, flat, pristine area, where sun, water, and fertility were plentiful, I fully expected an endless supply of perfect tomatoes, peppers, onions, salad greens, and other components of a healthy diet.
Not so. Gradually, I became aware of the extraordinary vigor of my neighbors’ maples, the shade from which eventually transformed my painstakingly double-dug, richly composted cornucopia into a shady, soggy habitat for moss and slugs. Tomatoes, eggplants, and peppers struggled.
I fought back. I decided to gather wine corks from oenophiles living within a five-mile radius – first, to deploy them as a heat-absorbing mulch to extend the effective length of the day for my sun-loving solanaceae and, second, to suppress the weeds attracted to the disturbed soil. It worked, although I had to wait a few years to be sure that the additional woody matter was not stimulating the expansion of slug populations. It didn’t, apparently because residual wines and tannins in the oak corks are noxious to slugs.
Coping has become my mantra, for change and surprise are the only permanent features of my garden. To make a garden is to manage in the middle. A garden is a living, physical manifestation of the dry principles of compromise. It mediates between nature and culture. Every garden has its own special conditions, its own unique combination of vectors. Climate, weather, soil, water, light, and ecological factors limit the ambitions of human design. One must learn to “design with nature,” the title of a seminal treatise on the harmonizing of human occupation with natural processes.
For me, intensive gardening has become a way of knowledge, a portal leading toward larger understandings of the world.
