Grow a Sustainable Diet: Planning and Growing to Feed Ourselves and the Earth (18 page)

Cowpeas produce well when planted after potatoes and they are next in the rotation. The date, mid-June, is the same for taking the potatoes out and for planting the cowpeas. To insure a tight rotation, the next crop goes in without delay. There will be a gap of about a month from when the cowpeas come out to when the garlic and winter peas are planted. Buckwheat is a great crop to plant to fill that spot. It is a summer cover crop that will be killed with the first frost. It doesn’t produce much biomass, but it keeps the weeds out and provides nectar for the bees on the flowers that appear within 30 days. Keep some buckwheat handy for any place that will be empty for about a month. It can be easily pulled out when the next crop goes in and it leaves the soil in great condition.

The time to plant garlic in Zone 7 is between October 15 and November 1. Austrian winter peas are planted on the two thirds of the bed that are reserved for onions and collards for the following spring. If the cowpeas were out in time, oats or radish could go in that spot instead, with buckwheat only in the part of the bed that will be occupied by the garlic.

In Bed 2 you can see that the garlic planted the previous year is there and will be harvested in June. The winter peas gave way to onions and collards in March. This gives you garlic and onions to eat and store, and calcium-rich collards to eat all spring. The onions planted here could have gone in as sets (small onion bulbs for planting) or onion plants. Winter squash is next. Find a variety that is best suited for your area. I grow butternut because it does well in my hot, humid climate, fends off the squash bugs better than other varieties and, properly stored, can last all winter with little attention. In the fall, rye and vetch are broadcast in the bed.

As before, the rye/vetch cover crop is cut as mulch for the corn. Instead of peanuts, as in the Transition Garden, Bed 3 has sweet potatoes planted two weeks after the corn. I like to let the corn get off to a good start first. The sweet potato vines will grow to cover all the space
not taken up by the corn circles. If you don’t have trouble with your corn being damaged by summer storms, you might want to plant corn intensively, filling the whole bed without a companion crop. I enjoy planting things together and have had good luck with sweet potatoes under corn. Wheat and Austrian winter peas follow the corn and sweet potatoes.

In Bed 4, cowpeas are planted after the wheat harvest. In this case, however, they are grown for a biomass crop for the compost pile. They will be cut at about sixty days, or when they are flowering, and the biomass will go to the compost. Wheat straw can be added to the compost pile at the same time.

Figure 8.4. Garden of Ideas

Garden of Ideas

If you are serious about growing compost crops, in addition to growing your food, the Garden of Ideas map (
Figure 8.4
) is for you. There is a lot here to show you how to make your garden and diet more sustainable. You’ve just seen the crops in Bed 1 on the previous map. In Bed 2 in the Garden of Ideas, in early March, red clover is broadcast into the wheat that was planted the previous fall. Red clover will grow under the wheat and not be a problem with the wheat harvest. When the wheat is cut, the clover will continue to grow and you should get one cutting off of it the first summer. As the map shows, it stays in the bed through two cuttings the following year. I don’t have dates there, because it all
depends on how you manage it. If it dies out and the bed is open, you could throw some buckwheat in until time to plant the rye.

Bed 4 shows corn and sweet potatoes again, as you saw in the Quartet of Beds, but this time the following cover crop, which could be wheat or rye with winter peas, is planted in rows, not broadcast. When that grain is harvested, the stubble will be in rows. You can lightly hoe a furrow for seeds between each set of stubble rows and plant carrots and beets there, leaving the stubble in place. Water well and keep a look out for the seeds to germinate. If you have spots with poor germination, plant again. Soon everything will be up and growing and you will have carrots and beets to eat through the winter. I don’t add a cover over the bed because I don’t want the voles to move in. If our winter was a little more severe, I would put leaves or straw over the bed once the weather turned cold. I would want the voles to find other winter homes before I do that. If we had more severe winter weather I would put a low plastic tunnel over that bed as I do over the collards and kale I grow. The carrots and beets will be harvested by early March. If there are any left, you will need to take them out before they send up seed stalks, unless you want to let some go to seed. Vegetable crops can go in this bed from March through the summer. In the fall, compost is built on part of the bed as the other beds are cleaned up, and cover crops are planted. The next year winter squash will be planted around the base of this pile, covering it with vines and shading out any weeds. This pile will be ready to use next fall. Any compost made in Bed 7 that is not ready to use yet gets moved to Bed 6 at this time. This is the compost that was started in the summer. It will be ready to use early in the season next year. If you don’t need to use the whole bed for compost, you can plant wheat or rye in the empty space in Bed 6. That space will be needed for a compost pile the next year after the grain harvest.

In Bed 7 you see the compost area for the current year. Winter squash is planted around the base of the pile built the previous fall. The squash vines grow over the pile, shading it and discouraging weeds. In the fall, the finished compost (under the winter squash vines) will be used on the garden, the summer-built compost will be moved to Bed 6 (the only time it is turned), and rye and winter peas are planted. I have my best
corn yield in the bed that follows the compost. Until you really put this system to use, it is a balancing act to have carbon and nitrogen biomass from your garden in the proportions you need. Keep with it and you’ll get the hang of it. When you do, it will be transforming. In my garden in an area with eighteen beds, one is for compost in the rotation, exactly as you see here. In that rotation of eighteen beds, I have one planting of red clover each year (plus the bed where it overwintered). Actually, it’s half red clover and half alfalfa because I’m studying both. I have packed a lot of ideas in this map so I could show you how compost piles, second year biomass crops, and winter-harvested carrots and beets work in rotation. You wouldn’t necessarily be planting a group of seven beds just like this. These are ideas to incorporate into your larger garden. You can see how all this works in my video
Cover Crops and Compost Crops IN Your Garden
.

9

Seeds

A
SUSTAINABLE DIET
begins with sustainable seeds. That means seeds grown and saved in a manner that is good for the earth and that will perpetuate their genetic heritage. If you are not into saving seeds yourself yet, you need to find them from a source that follows those guidelines. You will be looking to seed companies that have signed the Safe Seed Pledge to “not knowingly buy or sell genetically engineered seeds or plants.” You will also be looking for open-pollinated seeds — seeds that are bred from parents of the same variety. When you plant them, the offspring are the same as what you planted. Seeds in the catalogs are open-pollinated or hybrid. Hybrid seeds are bred from parents of different varieties. Seed companies do that to produce a variety with distinct characteristics, often marketed to a large geographic area. The hybrid varieties will be designated with an F1 near the name or will just have “hybrid” in the listing. The offspring of the plants produced from those seeds will not necessarily have the same characteristics as the parent. You will have to go back to the seed company each year for hybrid seeds. You could de-hybridize a variety yourself, with careful selection, but it would take about seven years to have a stable variety. Heirloom varieties are open-pollinated.

What you are looking for is not a variety that a seed company thought would be marketable. You want seeds that will produce well in your area, specifically in your garden, no matter what the weather conditions. If you have a drought year or abundant rainfall, these are the plants that will not fail you. If you are saving them yourself and you save seeds from the plants that thrive at your place, you are one step closer to sustainability. If you are not saving them, you will need to look for a seed company in your region that can supply you with seed from their own gardens or from local/regional growers. That company will even tell you about their growers in their catalog. When you go to conferences you might even meet these people — both from the seed company and the growers. Here in Virginia we are fortunate to have Southern Exposure Seed Exchange. Many of their varieties will do well in other areas and all are well adapted to the mid-Atlantic area, but some are designated to be especially well-suited to the Southeast and the hot, humid summers you find there. Take some time to find sources of seeds suited to your climate and region.

If you are buying plants to get started, consider buying the ones grown in your area. Farmers markets are often good sources, but you will need to either put your order in early, or buy the plants when you see them at the market. There are no guarantees that they will be there the next week, unless you talk to the farmer about saving some out for you. If you find that there are not enough sources for locally grown plants, you may have discovered a niche you could fill in the future. Often the plants for sale, even in small businesses, are trucked in from a distance. That means that in a large region all the plants could come from the same place. Not so long ago, there was a disease problem with tomatoes that raged up and down the East Coast. It was spread by tomato plants from just such a source. Even though you might notice your local farm store selling these types of transplants, talk to them and ask if they also have sources from local growers. Maybe their sweet potato slips come from just down the road. If not, they might direct you to someone who can answer your questions or supply you with plants. If enough people ask these kinds of questions, the store management will see that there is a need that is begging to be met. If they think you are a little crazy for being concerned about such things, that’s okay — make friends with them anyway. One day someone else will come in with the same concerns and they will refer them to you. Before you know it, that store will begin to stock the things that you and your new friends have been asking for.

Seed Inventory

Before you order more seeds you need to know what you already have. To find out, take an inventory. I used to just write it all down on a piece of notebook paper each year, but once I got more organized I made the form that you will find here (
Figure 9.1
). The more information you put on the form, the more it will help you through the season. I keep my inventory in my garden notebook and find it helpful to refer to if I’m wondering about varieties I have on hand, what I’ve ordered, etc. Once you order new seeds remember to add them to your inventory. I frequent events that have seed exchanges. If those new seeds are added to my inventory, it is more likely that I’ll remember to use them.

In your inventory, besides listing the crop and variety, determine the amount of seeds you have. Sometimes I put the weight there, sometimes the count, and sometimes I just put “lots”, “enough” or “not enough”. Knowing the source of your seeds is important, along with the year it was grown or sold. If I’ve bought the seeds, I put the initials of the seed company and the year I received them, such as “SESE ’13”. If I grew them myself, I put a star and the year they were grown — “* ’13”. Seeds lose their vitality as they get older, so don’t keep them forever. If you have a stash of seeds that have some age on them, do a germination test to see if they are still viable. If not, throw them to the wind, or at least in your backyard, chicken yard, or birdfeeder. Even if they don’t grow, they can be picked up by birds or composted back to the earth.