[Community_garden] 10, 000 pounds of food on 1/10 Acre (Liz Gardens) (Ken H.) - whoa!

[Don Boekelheide]

Whoa, Liz and Ken!

(Good to see your byline in print, Ken, happy New Year!)

Liz, I really like your idea about linking experienced gardeners' know-how to beginning gardeners. My experience agrees with yours, and please keep us all posted in how you do. I teach an ecological/organic gardening class at a community college, emphasizing food, and we get outside and _do_ things (our classroom is a community garden plot, by the way). It takes patience, seasons not just days, and lots of encouragement. Community gardens are ideal since people can learn with their eyes, too. Our big lesson this past year was watching a very nice woman who "believed  in" Sevin dust and who spread it as a "preventative" lose her garden to resistant pests, while organic gardeners made it through with little problem. There were, of course, more things involved - watering, timing, variety choice - but still...

Now, on the other hand, I'm less enthusiastic about super-sizing everything, in this case going for 6,000 or 10,000 lb yields in about 4,000 ft2 (4356 ft2 exactly, no?). We all have our doubts about Hummers and Big Macs, I reckon - then why are we so insistent that organic garden yields be at the upper limits of biological productivity? That's the cultural side. Begging forgiveness from Phil Ochs, I ain't a strivin' anymore. Yes, pushing your garden to the max is appealing in some ways, but it can be a pain, too. Output and input are linked, and those inputs include nutrients, water and management. And, yes, in a mature organic garden on a good year in some beds, you might just be blessed with huge yields, if you grow something like those amazing Tokyo Cross turnips or some potatoes or squashes. But not spinach, or collards, or carrots, much less salsify, or kohlrabi, or green peppers. You get my drift. Being all about size - well, haven't we all been
 there enough in the past decade?

Beyond the cultural, I have three other concerns.

The biggest is disease. You push soil to produce and produce, even if you add compost, and you'll get diseases building up. Nematodes, for instance. You can slow this with rotation (but there go those yields), but sooner or later you'll need to rest that soil. The harder you push it, I'm willing to bet, the sooner you'll need to rest it and for a longer time. In traditional ag, this is no problem, people move on, or the system floods out, and you can start over "clean". But in our community gardens, with a desire to stay put, get a lease, etc, we want them to stay in production as long as possible, don't we? And a way to do that is to go for reasonable sustainable yields, with resting areas and lots of diversity, not 10,000 lbs on 4,000 ft2. Sooner or later, we probably will need new sites, and will need to transition gardens to prairie or forest for awhile - but that step is out there in the future.

My second is biological. That's about 25 lbs out of a little square bed, 3 ft 3 in x 3 ft 3 in (more or less 10 ft2). Might work - if the garden had no paths and was nothing but production. And even then, I wonder. Turnips, potatoes, possibly. Broccoli? Be real! Tomatoes - well, 4 Celebrities or Better Boys, pushed to the max, over the whole season, maybe, but I'm dubious. And about those turnips - that would be roughly 10 turnips (1 per square foot, planted Alan Chadwick style and thinned). Each and every turnip with greens 2.5 pounds, over one kilo? K'mon. OK, then. Let's go for turnips, on a quick turn around, 8 weeks. No rest between harvest and next planting. And let's do a long growing season, 40 weeks. That's four harvests. OK, consistently, turnip and greens weigh between 1/2 and 3/4 lb. Pretty good - but that assumes everything goes perfectly. And you have edible quality over the summer (not here!). And you _really_ like turnips...And, what do
 you plan to do next year? You'd better not repeat with a brassica like turnips... So, you could do it, and 6000 lbs, that's, well, that's still very impressive and less implausible. But why, unless you face starvation and have only a little urban lot, would a gardener want to do that?

Now, you _can_ make lots of _money_ in some places growing high value crops on small lots (no, I'm not talking about that...cough, cough). I've seen that (both, in fact), in Berkeley, CA. But sustainable? No way. The urban microfarm I visited was growing mesclun mix for high end restaurants and cutting at 3-4 weeks, then repeating. Brought in "soil mix", "organic" in about the way big corporate farms 'organic eggs' are organic. This is marketing, not restoring the Earth and thinking ecologically, unless we're talking Biosphere or Mr. Neelix's garden on Startrek Voyager.

The final one is diversity. 10,000 pounds of what? Water and "stuff". It doesn't count nutrition, it doesn't count vitamins, it doesn't count beauty, it doesn't count calcium, it doesn't count protein, and the list goes on. It just weighs. I'll be damned if I'm going to grow a garden where I don't have room for zinnias and cosmos and a big gawky sunflower or two, and some nice fresh basil and thyme (or can we weigh them? But they don't weigh much). Rant rant rant. Yeah, maybe it is my middle class values, bless their hearts, but my homeless neighbors I garden with also want those flowers and herbs (not that herb - at least to grow...) too. Ecologically, and in terms of pest management, nothing helps more than greater diversity of crop and non-crop species, and in most cases less intensive plantings.

David Bradshaw, for Southerners a garden inspiration right up there with Chadwick and Mollison, has found that many heirlooms actually produce better when not crowded. Solomon has come to a similar conclusion in "Gardening When It Counts". 

I don't mean to be discouraging. Forgive my ranting, I can see that both of you - from your posts, how I wish we could all visit each others' gardens - are good dedicated gardeners, and any way you garden is fine with me, I respect it, and I'm eager to learn from it. But, for me, the question of "maximum yield" begs the essential questions of "how much work?", "at what cost?", "at what loss of diversity (and beauty)", and "how sustainable is it?"

We got snow this morning!

Don Boekelheide
Charlotte, NC
http://urbanministrygarden.wordpress.com

Message: 3
Date: Wed, 16 Jan 2008 23:10:54 -0500
From: "Liz Gardens" <lizgardens3 at gmail.com>
Subject: [Community_garden] 10,000 pounds of food on 1/10 Acre
To: community_garden at list.communitygarden.org
Message-ID:
    <f93568230801162010j10c68887sdf882cccc0585d9c at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

The Dervaes family members at
http://www.pathtofreedom.com
have been growing about 6000 pounds of food per year for the last
 several
years on 1/10 acre.  They have a 12 month growing season.

This year they are challenging themselves to grow 10,000 pounds of food
 on
their 1/10 acre.
This is a little less than nine 20x25 foot community garden plots

I started thinking about that rate of production relative to community
garden plots.
Their current rate is about 1.37 pounds of food per square foot.
Their 2008 goal is 2.3 pounds per square foot.

So for a 20x25 foot plot that would be 685 pounds at their current rate
 or
1150 for the new goal
or for an eight month growing season at the same rates --514 pounds and
 863
pounds.

Does anyone have gardeners who might be interested in trying a smilar
challenge?  Or maybe even people who are already growing gardens that
 are
that productive?

Liz
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Message: 4
Date: Thu, 17 Jan 2008 07:00:04 -0600
From: "Ken Hargesheimer" <minifarms at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Community_garden] 10,000 pounds of food on 1/10 Acre
To: "Liz Gardens" <lizgardens3 at gmail.com>
Cc: community_garden at list.communitygarden.org
Message-ID:
    <da97c7770801170500i5a5541c3i31e6b5b579dd9bbb at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

In 2006 a Cal urban mini-farm of 1/10 acre produced 6,000 of vegetables
 [is
not organic nor no-till].  Somewhere in my computer I have the website.

Ken Hargesheimer
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