Garden Reading—Books, Websites & CD-ROMs
Plants & Gardens News Volume 21, Number 1 | Spring 2006
by Patricia Jonas
Growing Good Food
When my garden reaches a state of exuberant dishevelment late in the season, I am tempted to impose winter order on it too soon. But then the unharvested vegetables—still-green-but-faintly-blushing tomatoes; eggplants needing one more week of sun; sorrel, lovage, and chard gamely unfurling new leaves as if it were spring—remind me that eating well from my garden gives me as much pleasure as enjoying the garden for its beauty. "The highest pleasure is reserved," Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote in Mosses from an Old Manse, "until these vegetable children of ours are smoking on the table, and we, like Saturn, make a meal of them."
A bit gothic, but likely to strike a chord with the farmers who have shared their personal stories (and homey recipes) with Michael Ableman for Fields of Plenty: A Farmer's Journey in Search of Real Food and the People Who Grow It. The farmers he interviews during his cross-country pilgrimage are diverse, creative, and unconventional. Like Ken Dunn, a self-styled "urban land gypsy," who installs his "movable farms" on some of Chicago's 6,000 acres of vacant plots, generating jobs and producing serious quantities of food. He is one of a growing number of farmers challenging the common notion that food must be grown far from where most people live. "Every neighborhood in every city could have its own farm with orchards and greenhouses and a public market," Ableman writes. "These could become the new town squares." Inspired by the victories of small farmers like Dunn, humbled by the risks they have taken, and energized by their vision, Ableman has drawn an unforgettable group portrait.
Stewarding the Land
The landscape of eastern Long Island would be familiar to the ancients: Here there are builders of seaside villas who, like Pliny the Younger, enjoy city comforts while extolling the pleasures of res rustica (country life), and there are stewards of the agricultural lands who follow Cato's dictum to first plant, then build. Scott Chaskey, author of This Common Ground: Seasons of an Organic Farm, falls in behind Cato. Since 1990, he has been manager of Quail Hill Farm, one of the country's first community-supported-agriculture (CSA) farms and a project of a land trust that protects fields from being turned into villas by would-be Plinys.
Like Virgil, Chaskey is both poet and farmer. As well as quoting from his own poetry, he threads Wendell Berry, Walt Whitman, Gary Snyder, Elizabeth Bishop, William Carlos Williams, and others into his story. This Common Ground is one of those gotcha-from-the-first-paragraph books: "In a peninsular place the clarity of light is partly what lures the lover of land and water... Soil, stem, branch, leaf, and fruit reflect the sea, and the farmer or gardener contemplates beauty and utility in one thought." His observations of nature's mysteries and small wonders through the seasons are lyrical. He notes, for example, summer's "hazy, pervasive sound of bees feasting on the nectar of squash flowers" and the "effervescence" of kale leaves. He sees the land not as a "bundle of rights" but as "a complex web of relationships."
But not all of Chaskey's thoughts are literary: From an ancient custom of blessing the plow to Wes Jackson's "natural systems agriculture," the author explores the theory and practice of farming. On the same field once exhausted by years of monocrop rotation of potatoes and corn, now 15 to 20 varieties of potatoes are planted "with sufficient cover crops, compost, and crop rotations to create a healthy meal of spuds." Chaskey slowly transformed Quail Hill Farm's soil from one depleted by high-input industrial agriculture to a healthy medium that can support 225 varieties of more than 50 crops. Making constant repairs to aging machinery, he remembers how E.B. White defined his profession: "A good farmer is nothing more or less than a handyman with a sense of humus."
Organic, Inc.
I realized trouble was brewing when I started seeing organic farmers' notices at Union Square market explaining why they were not applying for certification in the National Organic Program. Quail Hill Farm is among those who have chosen not to continue certifying, and Chaskey's stories of how National Organic Standards interfere with farmers' best organic practices are troubling. Michael Ableman describes the dilemma in Fields of Plenty: "A movement that was based on the simple goals of regenerating soil and growing food for local communities has become an industry requiring a vast bureaucracy of organicrats to inspect, police, advise, and manage a comparatively small handful of folks who are actually doing the work of organic farming."
In Good Growing: Why Organic Farming Works, Leslie Duram presents a close-up look at the compelling reasons for practicing organic farming but acknowledges widespread concerns that the USDA now owns the word "organic." And she observes that fast-growing consumer demand for organic products and the dominance of the national food-distribution system are drawing some organic farmers back into industrial farming. The goal of eating locally (or at least closer than the several thousand miles most of our food travels) is incompatible with national food distribution and retailing, whether at conventional or specialty supermarkets. I would go hungry, for instance, if I set myself the challenge of buying only locally produced foods at the Whole Foods Market in my Manhattan neighborhood.
A New Vision
But even if you grow enough organic food to feed yourself, are you doing what's best for the ecosystem? "Many drawbacks of modern agriculture persist in organic farming and gardening," Dave Jacke and Eric Toensmeier write in Edible Forest Gardens, because they do not "mimic the structure of natural systems, only selected functions." Even Quail Hill Farm members are still harvesting mostly annual crops grown in plowed fields. Jacke and Toensmeier offer a radical vision for stepping out of the conceptual continuum of conventional agriculture and organic farming. They point to the productivity of temperate forests—which is twice that of agricultural land in terms of net calories—and take that as their design model. Building on Robert Hart's classic book, Forest Gardening, and incorporating permaculture practice, Jacke and Toensmeier propose a garden where many species of edible perennial plants are grown together in a design that mimics forest structure and function.
Edible Forest Gardens is an ambitious two-volume work whose influence should extend well beyond ecologists and permaculturists and, in the best of all outcomes, reach into the mainstream. Volume one lays out the "Ecological Vision and Theory for Temperate Climate Permaculture," and it also includes a very useful analysis of existing forest gardens (one only 50 by 90 feet) and a tantalizing 30-page appendix of "top 100" species. As of this writing, volume two, which focuses on practical design and maintenance considerations, is just being released, but on the evidence of volume one, I have no doubt the set will be an indispensable reference for gardeners and farmers for decades.
"When people have food gardens," the authors write, "they usually are tucked out of sight and out of view of the neighbors. They rely on external inputs of energy, nutrients, insect and disease controls, and water and are based primarily on annual plants. For some reason, growing food is considered unsightly, unseemly, possibly antisocial, and in some towns and cities, illegal! The tremendous infrastructure we have built in our cities and towns reflects a culture and horticulture of separation and isolation." The consequences of such attitudes about growing food have been disastrous, and each of us can contribute to the repair effort. Jacke and Toensmeier say that the principles of forest gardening can be applied even in a tiny urban yard or on a rooftop. Containers of edible perennials and annuals on a rooftop are not most farmers' idea of agriculture, but I grow nearly 20 percent of the authors' top 100 species and intend to look for ways to take this small start much further.
And what about chocolate and oranges? Clearly there are foods that cannot be grown in a temperate forest. "We do not expect forest gardening to replace regular gardening or the foods we know and love," the authors admit. "Just how far we can take forest gardening in supplying food for ourselves is not yet determined." Finding the answer may be the most optimistic work gardeners and farmers can do.
Patricia Jonas is a horticulturist and writer, and director of library services at Brooklyn Botanic Garden. She is a regular contributor to Plants & Gardens News.