Trauma Farm (12 page)

Gardeners are also relearning traditional cultivating techniques from Europe, Africa, the Orient, and what many aboriginal communities long knew. For instance, Native tribes, from Mexico to Maine, grew corn with beans and squash. The Iroquois called them the “three sisters.” Corn and squash are heavy feeders, but beans are a nitrogen fixer, and their compost and the decayed leaves of the bean plants and squash helped fertilize the corn and squash. Like the Iroquois, we replace any missing nutrients by digging seaweed and the remains of our fish dinners into the soil, along with ashes from our fire for potassium. The scratchy leaves of the squash plants also keep raccoons away from the corn. Balanced crops can coexist happily for hundreds of years, and even increase the wealth of the soil. If you grow only corn, using artificial fertilizers, you will gradually strip your land of life, as many farmers have belatedly discovered after damaging their soil so badly it will take centuries to heal. Our three sisters grow proudly every year in the garden, messy yet rich.

One of the intentions of Trauma Farm is political—to create while leaving only a small footprint. It’s an argument against the modern mythology of agribusiness that believes we can control the gorgeous organic complexity of the planet. The small farm is a dying anachronism in our age, but it is here that some of us are taking a rebel stand, returning to the traditional knowledge that grew good food for thousands of years. This is why we have tried to make our farm as circular as possible. We purchased this land not only for its fine soil but for its natural wealth of water and sunlight, two of the most important ingredients in a farm. I can irrigate the garden from our biggest pond and the excess water will drain back down to the pond below, where it can be pumped back to the garden. All of our compost is recycled into the gardens or the chickens. The chickens recycle their grain and the compost and the grass and bugs they harvest from the field, and they provide us with chicken manure, the major nutrient for our garden. Even the water from our septic system filters through the soil for a safe distance and eventually seeps down to the lower ponds so that our well water is not wasted.

THE FINAL INGREDIENT OF
a good garden is labour. A gardener needs “a cast-iron back, with a hinge in it.” It often feels like I am either leaning exhausted on a shovel at the end of a row or wrestling with a bucking bronco of a Rototiller that wants to go wherever I don’t want it to go—usually seeking garden netting to snarl in its tines. But then when I look upon the rich rows of earth, I feel the comfort of knowing we have made something well. Lately, we’ve divided up our labour because of my hectic schedule. I always complain I get the short end, the heavy mechanical business, while Sharon has the thrill of seeding and the flower beds, though she also inherits too much of the dreaded weeding.

In February Sharon organizes the seeds, and the greenhouses fill with trays of tiny seedlings—the hairlike onions, the slow and delicate peppers that take so long to sprout even on a heated soil tray. When the winds of March brush the moisture from the earth we can cultivate the high, dry sections of the garden.

All our vegetable planting is wide-bed. We till the four-foot-wide raised beds and then dig a trench or path around them, heaping that dirt atop the beds. After they’re raked out and their corners staked, they’re never stepped on again. Trampling and compacting the soil is as bad as not weeding it. That’s why my grandfather laid down ten-inch-wide cedar planks between the garden rows. If I ever stepped off a plank and onto the earth, I got my ears boxed or pulled until they grew as red as his Spartan apples.

Despite my admiration for his garden, I know our wide beds work better. The Chinese have used wide beds for centuries. I first saw them in the Chinese farms I visited with my father when he was buying potatoes for peddling. I remember one farm with soil so healthy you could practically serve it up for dinner. I’ve seen soil as healthy as that only in Cuba, where—because of the American boycott— the lack of chemicals and the organic local farms have created a rich earth and plants that glow electric in the Caribbean light. You can easily see the physical and colour differences between plants grown healthily in healthy soil and plants grown in maltreated soil.

Several women were always working in that soil-rich farm I visited with my father, their wide-brimmed basket hats dipping as they weeded. Today I know they must have been indentured labourers, but to a child they looked lovely in their commitment, and I admired them. For a while that prolific little ten-acre farm produced most of the summer lettuce for the city of Vancouver. Then cadmium and other heavy metals from the city dump across the highway leached under the road, and they had to shut the farm down because its priceless soil had become toxic—so they put a subdivision over it.

Those women flowed, yakking, down the rows of lambent mustards, lettuce, and choi, their fingers flicking like scissors as they plucked weeds with unrelenting energy. After watching them in action I had no trouble understanding Voltaire’s famous phrase when I encountered it years later:
Il faut cultiver notre jardin.
“We must cultivate our garden.” A cultivated garden produces more and costs less labour. If you leave the weeds too long, they become difficult to remove and stunt your cultivars. All gardeners eventually learn this unusual natural law—the more often you weed, the less you have to weed.

When we weed at Trauma Farm, we throw the weeds in the rows between the beds and then cover them with canary grass or straw, which won’t reseed. Big stuff might go into the compost dump, but everything else goes into the rows, except for dangerous, stem-or-root-reproducing weeds like morning glories or quack grass, which are thrown into a big empty plant pot to dry up and die. In autumn, preparing the soil for our winter-crop greens (along with garlic, shallots, and fava beans), we heap the now composted material from the paths onto the harvested bed and dig everything in with ashes from our wood stove to supply the necessary potassium. We often also lay down several bags of slow-releasing rock phosphorous and dolomite lime, and include any extra compost, horse manure, and seaweed we can scavenge— mixing this mélange with our chicken manure, which we “cure” in a pile at the end of the garden.

Chicken manure—like a select few manures such as llama and rabbit—is the richest shit, far more nutritious than cow or horse manure. It’s the gold that enriches our garden, providing ample phosphorus and more potassium and nitrogen. We still collect the horse and sheep manure, but that’s mainly for texture and colloids to sweeten the soil. As you may imagine with a regime like this, the garden grows wealthier every year and even more abundant, especially since we rotate our crops of peas and beans to fix the nitrogen in the soil. A surprising number of gardeners aren’t aware that if they don’t manure but use only chemical fertilizers, they can lose up to an inch of soil a year; their gardens turn to sand and dust. Farmers have destroyed some of the great soils of the world with bad practices that led directly to erosion and salinization. The plow can be a weapon of mass destruction, depending on how it is used.

Over the years I’ve met a few gardeners who seem to irrationally believe that seeds contain everything necessary to grow the entire plant. I like to think of the seed as a trigger for a process that thrives on water and minerals, millions of organisms, and organic matter, all powered by sunlight. Gardening is a technique for turning sunlight into carrots, and once you eliminate a participant in the process you begin the inevitable destruction of your garden. Bad irrigation practices are the main reason why the Garden of Eden (which became the green fields that once surrounded Baghdad) is now a salinized wasteland that will take thirty thousand years to recover. We are working toward the same fate in factory farms around the world.

LIFE IS COMPOST
—
A PROCESS
that goes back to ages before the first mutant child now called
Homo sapiens
squirted out of the womb. Yet we obviously caught on to compost long ago in the history of the garden. Most impressively, our mothers even discovered their placentas will feed not only the child in the womb but the garden after the birth, and thus began another time-honoured fertility rite—the burial of the placenta.

As soon as our hunter-gatherer ancestors stopped moving, they had to think about compost. In the beginning, it was natural gaps in the forest—burn-downs, decayed wind-blasts— that could be used a few times before exhaustion. Then some genius discovered that you didn’t have to wait for lightning. You could “slash and burn” the forest or the grasslands yourself, and the soil was temporarily rich. Shortly afterwards, an old corral or coop sprouted richer greenery than the land surrounding it, and we discovered manure.

This year I noticed unusual size patterns among our garlic. We make our beds about twenty feet long. One of these beds contained three circles of enormous garlic heads. Early in the fall, I had dumped my wheelbarrow loads of chicken manure on those spots and then got distracted (small farming is all about distraction). I never managed to dig it in until planting time. I rushed the job and did a poor tilling before we planted. The nutrients remained in a cluster, creating my prizewinning garlic bulbs. Those fat bulbs, and their runty neighbours, were a lesson in nutrition. Like Thomas Jefferson, I might be growing into an old man, but I’m still a young gardener.

HISTORY
—
IF WE ARE NOT approaching the end of it—will remember our era as the Oil Age. It’s a short era among the many eras of our species. It began around 1850 and it should last until 2050, two hundred years. After that, all bets are off. Maybe before then. These hydrocarbons took more than 500 million years of creation in the long song of the earth. Currently, we are consuming them about 2 million times faster than they were produced.

The polyculture and permaculture we naturally practise at Trauma Farm have been displaced by industrial mono-culture. Vast amounts of energy are now spent on both the production and the ingredients of oil-based fertilizers and pesticides and their distribution. It’s so strange when you realize this frenzy of energy and labour is merely a dangerous, complicated replacement for old-fashioned livestock manure and good garden management.

During the early days of the garden our species needed only human energy and common-sense husbandry to grow food. In what we think of as the small farm’s historic garden, it’s been estimated that 100 calories of food were returned for every energy calorie that went into producing it. Now in the globalized greenhouse production of plants such as iceberg lettuce, the process has been reversed, and it takes as much as 127 calories of energy to produce a single food calorie. The system has become so insane that lettuce produced thousands of miles away can be sold in our local market for less than it costs Sharon and me to grow lettuce four miles from the market. The purchaser pays for the real, hidden costs with government subsidies to factory farms, increasingly toxic environments, and less nutritious and often unhealthy food.