Signs of Spring

Witch Hazel blooming in the garden today

It was a beautiful sunny day today (high of 62!) and I spent a good chunk of the day in the garden before I had to shower and get into professional mode and drive in to town for a meeting.

It felt so much like Spring outside today. I had to keep reminding myself that there's likely plenty more cold in store for us. We still have two more

months before the average last frost date here, but I couldn't help it, I just let the Spring fever flow and planted some seeds.

Crocuses!

In my defense, I did plant the seeds in a cold frame and in another raised bed we have covered with a mini-hoophouse type structure, so it really is possible they will germinate, grow, and produce food. I planted several spinaches (Bordeaux, Space, Winter Bloomsdale), Ruby Streaks Mustard from the OGS Seed Swap, carrots (Oxheart, Scarlet Nantes, Napoli), radishes (French Breakfast, Easter Egg), a little lettuce (Pinetree Winter Mix), and beets (Early Wonder, Golden Detroit, Chioggia).

While I was getting the beds ready for planting, I encountered this little critter: one more reason I am glad we do not use a tiller. She was a little disoriented when I uncovered her with the fork I was using to work in manure, but she would have been dead meat with a rototiller.

You can see how she's barely visible in the soil. This was a moment when I felt really good about using hand tools, which are slow and gentle enough to allow life to go on in the garden beds despite our disruptions.

Another highlight of my time in the garden today was watching

the honeybees forage. I was kneeling in the herb garden to enjoy the crocuses up close when one of our honeybees landed on a tightly closed crocus bud and proceeded to open it up and get inside. It was really amazing to watch. She opened three buds this way, with

efficiency and enthusiasm. A good reminder, too, of the importance of early food sources in the garden for beneficial insects. This meal will help her and her hive sisters get

through the rest of the winter! (They're all sisters at the moment; the females kick the males out of the hive to freeze to death when resources

get scarce in the winter, and make more in the Spring.)

I was lucky to have my camera with me, and at some point remembered that it has a video feature. So here's a little photo

sequence of bee/crocus Spring

celebration, followed by my first HOME VIDEO posted to the Milkweed Diaries! It's just 14

seconds, but you can really get a sense of the crocus/bee lovefest in action....enjoy!

All Hail the Mighty Fava!

Q. The fava bean is:

A) a cover crop

B) a delicacy

C) a soil aeration tool

D) an ornamental plant

E) a fertilizer factory

F) all of the above.

If you guessed "all of the above," congratulations. Yes, the fava is all that. And more.

Like many McDonalds-eating teenagers, I had never heard of fava beans until I saw "Silence of the Lambs" in high school and heard Dr. Hannibal Lecter's now-famous "with a nice chianti" remark. I didn't taste favas until sometime in my twenties, and ever since I have eaten them every chance I get. Fresh favas are juicy, buttery, and silky; dry favas are fat, nutty, and meaty, sticking to your ribs in a deeply satisfying way.

Technically, favas are not really beans, at least botanically speaking. Favas, vicia faba, are a legume in the vetch family, and one of the most ancient cultivated plants. But from a cooking and eating point of view, they look, feel, taste, and are cooked like beans -- savored fresh in the shell stage or as "gigantes" -- giant dry beans for winter eating.

From a gardening point of view, the non-bean status is clear, though. While beans can only be planted when the soil is warm and grow fast and furious in the heat of summer, favas like a long, cool growing season. We plant them in December, and harvest them in the Spring. They fill a great niche in the garden, growing when nothing else does, in the coldest months of the year.

And all that time they're growing, favas are making nitrogen and storing it around their roots in the soil. As nitrogen fixers, they literally produce fertilizer out of thin air. And their fiberous root systems grow and spread all through the winter and early spring, breaking up hard soil and aerating the garden beds. By the time you chop up the plants (in late May or early June here), the place where the favas were planted is full of the nitrogen-rich, loose and deeply aerated soil that gardeners dream of. Perfect for planting warm-season crops as soon as the favas are done!

Favas are such a good cover crop that some large-scale farmers use them solely for that purpose, tilling them under as green manure without even harvesting the beans. That would be a tragic waste to my mind.

We're planting five pounds of fava beans this month as a winter cover crop. They'll provide one of the earliest spring harvests from our garden and we'll eat them, dry them, and sell them fresh at the tailgate market.

Favas are one of the crops that we're experimenting with in our no-till system -- we've never tilled the rich and loose soil you can see in the photo above. We have been able to put worms and plants to work for us --starting out with cardboard/straw sheetmulch and allowing worms to breaking up the soil, then aerating with a broadfork, and then planting crops that loosen and aerate the soil with their root systems.

As if the food value and soil-building value of favas were not enough, the icing on the cake is their ornamental value. To my eye, their black and white pea-like flowers are elegant and lovely. Favas are one of the earliest plants to bloom in our garden, their flowers little bright spots against the vigorous, bushy green leaves of the fava plant. All of that green is a welcome sight in early spring, too, when most of the rest of the garden still looks fairly drab.

So here's to the fava, gourmet delicacy, garden workhorse, spring garden jewel, and sustenence-provider since ancient times. Viva la fava!

Favas planted last December, growing in early March of this year.

Favas in the garden in May

Big old juicy pods on the fava plants in May

Favas ready for shelling, May 2009.

More on favas at Foodista:

Exciting New Tool and Further Reflections on Not Tilling

Last week our broadfork was delivered, mysteriously arriving in several pieces brought by different carriers (the base came via Fed-Ex and the oiled ash handles by USPS). It's a big 7-tined, 28-inch-wide beast of a tool.

Before now, we had been borrowing a smaller broadfork from a neighbor, but now we have our very own!

The 727 Broadfork from Johnny's

We ordered this fabulous tool from Johnny's Selected Seeds, a worker-owned company based in Maine. CF, a consumate tool nerd, spent a lot of time researching different broadfork options, and decided that this one was the best quality and price. Johnny's broadforks are designed by Eliot Coleman of Four Season Harvest and New Organic Gardener fame.

So why are we so excited about this tool? The broadfork, also known as a U-Bar, is an old French gardening tool known in French as a Grelinette. By any name, it is a low-tech, human-powered tool that deeply aerates the soil while preserving soil structure and microbial life. We are using the fork to cultivate permanent beds without tilling.

With tilling, there is a short-term microbial die-off which might actually add to short-term soil fertility, but degrades the soil over the long term. Soil structure and living organisms in the soil are disturbed, and soil health is compromised.

CF works the fork.

Unlike a tiller, the broadfork does not harm the microscopic web of life in the soil, and it is also far less likely than a tiller to kill worms, mole salamanders, and other critters that contribute to healthy soil.

Here's an article from The Modern Homestead on why broadforking is better for the soil than tilling, and another on tilling vs. broadforking to create new garden beds. The Modern Homestead (Harvey Ussery, proprietor) has a lot of great info on tools and methods for human-scale food production, as well as information on soil ecology and how to preserve it. A disclaimer: several of the methods Ussery suggests are counter to my experience of what works in the garden. For example: I have not found that plants thrive when planted into un-cultivated ground through holes cut in cardboard sheet mulch.

To cultivate new beds, we use the broadfork in combination with sheet mulching. The sheet mulching encourages microbial life and worm activity, especially if you load on the organic materials --we use rotted leaves and straw piled on top of cardboard. With heavy sheet mulch kept relatively moist over 3-6 months, the soil is already pretty "worked" before we even touch it with a shovel or fork. And it contains a teeming community of life that is mostly invisible to the naked eye. We always find an abundance of worms when we pull up the remains of the rotted cardboard, and often there are also tunnels made by rodents and mole salamanders under the mulch too. The microbes, the fungi, the worms, the rodents, and a host of other creatures all contribute to breaking up and aerating the soil, making less work for us!

After the well-rotted sheet mulch is peeled back, the broadfork loosens the soil even more, and allows air and water to penetrate the soil deeply, promoting plant growth. With the fork and shovels, we create raised or mounded beds which will never be walked on and permanent paths for foot and wheelbarrow traffic. The beds are disturbed as little as possible after they are built.

We use heavy mulches in the beds year-round to retain soil nutrients and moisture and to protect all of the life in the soil. With mulch, occassional top-dressing and digging-in of compost, and broadforking before each planting, the goal is to build the soil with every growing season. This fall, we'll begin adding cover-crops as a further strategy to sustain soil health.

All of these methods combine to build a thriving soil ecology, and healthy soil stucture to support ongoing food production. Needless to say, these strategies are starkly different than typical large-scale farming practices which leave the soil more depleted after every season--and more and more reliant on petrochemical fertilizer inputs.

The god of small things in his broadforking outfit.

For more on the broadfork and related matters:

A more philosophical post I wrote last fall about broadforking: "One Day in the Century of the Small"

The Broadfork on "Toolmonger"

GRIT article by Harvey Ussery on Simple, Low-Tech Tools

The Broadfork and Other Low-Tech Tools on "Sharing Sustainable Solutions"

One Day in the Century of the Small: Broadforking

''Who knows, perhaps that's what the 21st century has in store for us. The dismantling of the Big. Big bombs, big dams, big ideologies, big countries, big mistakes. Perhaps it will be the Century of the Small. Perhaps right now, this very minute, there's a small god up in heaven readying herself for us. Could it be? Could it possibly be? It sounds finger-licking good to me.''

-Arundhati Roy, The Greater Common Good

At left: Christopher uses a borrowed broadfork to cultivate a new garden bed for garlic.

Several years ago I wrote an article for our local weekly newspaper with some policy ideas for our new City Council. To my chagrin, the editor changed the title at the last minute to "Think Big." I winced when I saw the article in print. "No! If anything I would have called it 'Think SMALL!' " I remember wailing.

I've never bought the bombast of the "bigger, faster, newer" credo of American consumer culture -- and when I started hearing about the Small is Beautiful movement, it resonated with my intuitive sense of the value of simplicity. Then, some years ago, I read Arundhati Roy's essay quoted above (the link above goes to a site where you can read the whole thing online, or you can buy the beautiful print edition here).

Yes! The century of the small. The century of the simple. The century of slowness. The century of worms and microbes hard at work in a compost pile. The century of handmade objects rubbed smooth by many hands. A time for clothespins and cast iron to replace driers and microwaves. An era when sing-alongs and craft circles and clothes swaps become more popular than video games and Walmart and designer labels. A time of small farms, small businesses, and small homes. The century of the grassroots. So may it be!

The broadfork is a great tool for this new century. It is a perfect example of appropriate technology: a small-scale, simple tool powered by human energy rather than petroleum, a tool that works at a pace and on a scale that are in step with the rhythms of the natural world.

Appropriate technology is one of the concepts illuminated in the famous 1973 collection of essays by British economist E. F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered . Schumacher and others in the Small is Beautiful and related simplicity movements came to define appropriate technology with four characteristics: appropriate technologies are simple, small in scale, low-cost and non-violent.

Earlier this year, I wrote about one of the non-violent aspects of deciding not to till--saving the salamanders. There are much wider environmental benefits to cultivating the soil by hand -- of course there is the energy savings (or more accurately, the substitution of human, worm, salamander, and microbe energy for petro-energy), but also soil ecology and soil structure are preserved, and erosion and runoff are less likely. So it's one less contribution to the more subtle, creeping violence of human activity damaging systems of life on the planet. And to me it just feels right. Working the soil by hand, I feel more peaceful, more graceful, more in harmony with the earth and its webs of overlapping systems and patterns and cycles than I do when using a loud, fast, petro-powered machine.

So far, all of the cultivation that we have done on our 5 acres has been either by double-digging raised beds or by broadforking mounded wide rows. We've cultivated about 1,200 square feet so far in the past two years with these simple tools.

Left: Christopher takes stock of 40 foot-long wide row he's broadforked.
Below: Triumphant after double- digging our first two raised beds in 2006.

We also use heavy mulches on all of these beds year round to protect soil nutrients and conserve water, and we add compost and organic matter to the beds before every new planting. Most of our beds are polyculture gardens/ companion plantings, as well, rather than just rows of a single crop. We've been able to space plants much more closely than you would in row-cropping by using these methods, and we've grown a lot of food in these beds.

Above: planting in a double-dug raised bed, Spring 2008

No-till combined with mulches, raised beds, and soil and water conservation techniques are all elements of what is sometimes referred to as "biointensive" farming. "Biointensive" is a word that is defined in a variety of different ways by people practicing different methods, but here's more about biointensive farming from an organization whose definition pretty much matches mine. And there are lots of great links on the wiki page for "biointensive" -- including information about French intensive methods and other old biointensive traditions and further reading.

Biointensive polyculture in a "keyhole" bed in our garden this summer

I believe that all food-growing was what is now called biointensive for most of human history, just as all food was organic until relatively recently. (See Farmers of Forty Centuries for more about how people grew food for thousands of years before modern farming took a turn for the worse).

Modern, petro-powered, non-intensive farming was an invention of 20th century America -- coming out of a paradigm based on the false assumption of unlimited resources. Monoculture became the standard way growing food, and farmers started departing from traditional methods -- spreading out, depleting the soil, adding petrochemical fertilizers rather than organic materials, and wasting lots and lots of water, not to mention washing away precious topsoil. The radically different idea behind the various biointensive approaches is to conserve and even increase resources, including topsoil, soil ecology, water, and energy.

So, back to our own Adventures in Smallness and Simplicity: Christopher borrowed a broadfork from the Warren Wilson garden crew, and over the last month or so cultivated about 480 square feet for garlic beds. In these beds we planted 1,489 cloves of garlic, of thirteen different varieties. Sometime next July or so we'll harvest almost 1,500 heads of garlic.

Before we dig beds with either a broadfork or shovels, we let the areas to be cultivated sit under thick cardboard and straw sheet mulch for at least a few months -- preferably for six months or more over the winter with plenty of rain. Worms, microorganisms, macroorganisms (mice and salamanders, for instance), moisture and rotting organic matter do a lot of work for us before we break ground, and then we pick up with the broadfork or shovels where they left off.

We figure that from start to finish (clearing, sheetmulching, cultivating, and prepping) this method takes about 10 person hours per 100 square feet of garden bed. It's time and labor intensive, but only the first year. Once permanent beds are double-dug or otherwise deeply cultivated, and if they are maintained with mulch and protected from being walked on, they are much easier to re-work in future years. We've planted in some of our raised beds 4 or 5 times by now, and it requires almost zero time and energy to cultivate the beds after the first year if they've been protected. We're planning to cultivate another 500 square feet or so with these methods before spring comes.

It works. And it feels good. And as my Dad tells me my grandfather used to say, "when you go slowly, there's more time to correct your mistakes."

Long live slowness! Welcome to the century of small and simple technology! Let's bring it!

High Harvest

Clockwise from 6:00: peppers, okra, cherry tomatoes, dill, onions, tomatoes, garlic, japanese long cucumbers, zephyr squash, beet greens and celery greens, orange cucumbers, beets, italian edible gourd, more tomatoes, and carrots.

We are experiencing massive garden overload!

Produce is pouring out of the garden faster than we can eat, preserve, and process it.

It's amazing how generous the earth is. We're trying to remember to have gratitude for all this abundance as tomatoes, cucumbers, and squash overflow out of our kitchen onto every flat surface in the house.

Anyone want some refrigerator pickles or brined veggies? Tomatoes? Help us eat this food!


A garden shot....











Meanwhile, the garden is swarming with pollinators, beneficials, and a few detrimentals (squished a spotted cucumber beetle today). Sunflowers, fennel, and ironweed are surrounded by clouds of buzzing, feeding, pollinating bugs - hurrah!

Bees enjoying a sunflower...

Spotted Salamander

Last spring, somewhere midway through the back-breaking process of digging new garden beds, we started talking about renting a small tiller to make life easier for ourselves. We knew we really didn't want to till, and that we wanted to grow in bio-intensive raised beds, but we were thinking of just doing it once, for the first year, to make the digging less exhausting. We had pretty much decided to go ahead and compromise and till, when we had an encounter that made us swear off the tiller forever.

I was digging one day with the moral support of Mom and MT when I uncovered a huge, fat, beautiful salamander--shiny black with yellow and red spots, at least an inch wide and eight or nine inches long, and looking something like the noble creature pictured above. She was gorgeous! She scuttled under some sheet mulch after we had all had a good look at her, and we knew then that a life of no-till fundamentalism lay ahead of us. If we'd been using a tiller, that salamander would have been toast.

Last Sunday, almost a year after the first sighting, we had another spotted salamander encounter. Digging the first Three Sisters bed, I was chopping away with a hoe-like cultivator, when who should I uncover but The Spotted One. We had to move this one, to avoid injuring her with our shovels and cultivators, but I felt like seeing her was a reminder to slow down, take care, and pay attention.

It turns out that the Spotted Salamander is fairly widespread (see the map of their range above).

Googling turned up lots of information on these beautiful amphibians. It turns out that they are a type of "mole salamander," which makes sense, since they seem to burrow out mole-like tunnels.

They apparently have a "brief but intense" mating season in January and February in watery areas--creeks, ditches, or "vernal pools"--and the eggs develop in the water. We've seen eggs like these in our creeks in the winter and early spring and assumed they were frog eggs, but maybe they were salamander eggs!

In elementary school, I did a project on salamanders, and learned that there are more varieties in western North Carolina than anywhere else on the planet. We've seen quite a few different types on our land, but the Spotted is the only one who hangs out in the garden (that we know of). There's a slender silvery little one that lives down in the pipe where the well water hook-up is. I've heard that seeing a salamander is an old mountain indicator of clean water.

Salamanders are an indicator species, which is good news.

And, they eat cabbage moth larvae!!! It's clear from the tunnels throughout the ground that we were digging up that they help break up the soil, too. So I would call them beneficial amphibians.

Anyway, check out these amazing photos of the life cycle of a Spotted Salamander -- they begin as aquatic creatures that swim and live underwater and then become burrowing land lubbers, until they head back to their birthplace to make more salamanders.