“I’m not living anywhere that doesn’t have sidewalks.”

“I need a garden.”

“Do you smell that?  Is that manure?”

Ah, marital bliss.  After more than a decade living in a large city—one that annually makes a top ten list of shame, alternating between “highest crime” and “worst places to live”—the family has decided to get out of Dodge.  The appearance of one, then two, small children in our lives added weight to this decision, but secretly I’ve been dreaming of this for years.  You see, unlike my hubby, I have a desire to get away from the city, and its attendant crowds and traffic, just so I can find a little patch of Earth where the air is clean and I can see the stars at night.

Yes, the homesteader in me is starting to show.  I try to hide it in another pot of store-bought herbs for the windowsill.  Just when I thought I’d completely repressed my earlier aspirations to grow a few vegetables, have a little herb garden, or raise some chickens for fresh eggs, they raise their heads and howl.

My secret predilection in favor of self-sufficiency goes back to my roots:  I grew up in a small town in England—a village, in fact—located halfway between nowhere much and the frigid North Sea.  My grandparents owned a pig farm and I spent a lot of days collecting eggs, driving a tractor, planting potatoes, and climbing apple trees.  My version of the Easy-Bake Oven was to take a handful of freshly picked wheat, grind it between two stones to make flour, mix with water, and bake under the glare of a magnifying glass.  I grew up with good Lincolnshire loam perpetually wedged under my fingernails.

The other character in this play, on the other hand, grew up in Los Angeles.  The man who would become my husband believed, as a boy, that a single, struggling lemon tree planted in a dirt-hole to one side of a concrete-paved backyard constitutes a garden.  In this reality, a minuscule patch of soil and a couple of potted pansies equals landscaping.  He hit puberty believing that meat came cleanly packaged in plastic, vegetables arrived on trucks and trains from Mexico, and things that grew on trees made good ammunition when chased by gang members.

Despite our disparate roots, we usually see eye to eye on the important things.  However, this time the one and only thing we agree on is that inner-city life is not good for our kids, and that we need to escape before our eldest graduates preschool and has to choose his gang allegiances.  Hubby would prefer a small city, preferably somewhere on the West Coast.  I’m gravitating to North Dakota.

“Seriously, the smell of manure is making me nauseated.  I’m going to wait in the car.”

Cross this town off the list.

Life is compromise, married life doubly so.  A year later, we manage to agree on a small town that’s less than an hour away from a moderately large city, an oasis of urbanity plopped firmly in fly-over country.  Our new house is close enough to a main road that, with a prevailing wind, you can catch the sounds of a metropolis drifting by.  The amount of actual land that comes with the house is surprisingly small, but since it extends from the house on all but the north side (which demarcates our border with our neighbor with a wide gravel path) I’m happy.  I can work with that.  Now I just have to work on de-citifying my family.  This proves to be more difficult than I anticipated.

“Mummy!  There’s a really big dog outside.”

“That’s a deer.”

“Holy crap!  What’s that noise?  Where’s the baseball bat? There’s a raccoon in the yard!”

“Umm.  Can you leave it alone?  Please.”

“Make sure you check there are no coyotes outside before you let the kids out on their own.”

“Riiiiiight.”

Even I have a few moments of adjustment.  My first encounter with a snake (a harmless garter snake, I discovered after the fact) leaves my heart palpitating while I try to maintain airs of outward calm.  I also find that I spend hours nose to nose with a praying mantis, a creature I never saw in either rural England or urban California.

But, we adjust, adapt, and stop diving for cover every time we hear sounds that remind us of gunfire (such as a neighbor whacking two shoes together, trying to dislodge some dirt).  Gradually, our new home starts to feel like, well, home.

Our new home is a fairly conventional suburban detached house, with a traditional perimeter border of grass more perfectly trimmed, springy, and dense than anything you’d find on the links at Pebble Beach.  However, my opinion of any yard is that it should at least give back equal of what you put into it, and I just can’t see myself mowing, fertilizing, and weeding, without harvesting.  No, the grass that’s asphyxiating almost everything else in the garden will have to go.

First, though, I have to convince someone else.  I refuse to buy an electric or gas mower:  Too smelly (the gas) and noisy (both).  I opt for a push mower in the hopes that I can use the “too much hard work for no reward” argument to get my way.  However, the sight of his poor wife hefting sixty pounds of sharp machinery while sweating profusely simply has Hubby fetching a couple of cold beers.   Fortunately, his lack of interest allows me to “accidentally forget” to mow one area of lawn and by the end of the summer it’s so overgrown it’s beyond redemption.

But I’m not going to contaminate perfectly adequate growing soil with weedkiller, or render the garden unsafe for children’s feet and fingernails.  No, I have a plan.  Did I mention that it will also kill off all the grass?  Perhaps not.  I’m sure Hubby had a few doubts when he returned home from work one day to be greeted in the driveway by a large pile of of interesting-smelling “mulch”.  But to his credit, he didn’t say a word about the lawn’s demise until I had a good thick layer of newspapers and well-rotted manure … I mean mulch … spread out across the entire lawn area.

“So … Are we going to reseed, then?  Or buy sod?”

“How’d you feel about a couple of trees over there?  And this is such a sunny spot, I think some zucchini plants would do really well.  Maybe tomatoes.”

I receive a noncommittal eye roll and decide I’ll wait until the following spring, when the weeds and overgrown grass will be well and truly dead, to broach the subject of my envisioned veggie and herb garden again.  I also decide to temporarily drop my case in favor of a compost heap—essential if we’re going to grow veggies—which has reached an impasse:

“I don’t think so … What about the smell?  The neighbors will complain.”

“A good heap doesn’t smell.  You bury the green waste, the scraps and trimmings, in the brown.”

“Yeah, right.  What about the raccoons?”

“I’ll build a chicken-wire fence around it.”

“No.”

Stalemate.

Our first winter together outside of California arrives with less of a bang, and more a soft suffocation as an overnight storm dumps eighteen inches of heavy, wet snow.  The next morning, as I slog my way to the supermarket, I contemplate how our ancestors survived winters like this.  On the edge of possible starvation, how could they live without going crazy?  After all, we’re only steps from town, and ten miles from the nearest big-box store—packed to the halogen-lit ceiling with shiny plastic-coated produce from around the globe; luxurious soaps and lotions sold in vats larger than anyone should ever purchase; and every kitchen gadget and time saving device ever conceived, mass produced in China for your convenience and economy.

Two generations ago, if you had a bad season you had to rely on your neighbors and good luck, or starve.  Now, hunger isn’t a result of failed crops, but of failed economics; and poverty means buying food at superstores and feeding our kids the worst kinds of junk.  I am determined to make sure our children know where food comes from, and how to provide for themselves.  I strengthen my resolve to help my family become more self-sustaining, more aware of the seasons and close to the Earth.

Right then and there, I decide that instead of approaching this piecemeal one patch of suburban lawn at a time, I need a  plan.  And I need a spouse who supports me, even if he’s not willing or interested in doing any of the actual work.  It’s not that he’s lazy, but he’s never far from his computer, and the hairs on the back of his neck visibly shift a little when his cell doesn’t get good reception.  He can get behind self-sufficiency, but abhors the act of putting it into real practice.  Even camping is a stretch.  With this in mind, I concoct a scheme that he can get behind.

I spend the winter laying the groundwork.  In the supermarket, I point out the origin of the produce we buy, and make a point of choosing purchases mindfully.  We give holiday gifts of homemade bath salts and lavender pillows filled with flowers collected during the summer.  I pour over websites and books from the library and learn everything I can about native plants and introduce species that will thrive in our climate.

In the spring, I unveil phase two of my plan.  After a quick trip to the local hardware store, and some action with a drill, we have a homemade wormery.  Vermiculture in a plastic storage bin.  It’s an odor-free, discrete, discreet compost area that isn’t messy once we equip it with a large brick to keep the raccoons out.  So, now we had a place to put our kitchen scraps, but we were still a long way from even a modicum of self-sufficiency.

For mother’s day, my family cedes to my wishes, buying me zucchini and tomato plants for my vegetable patch.  I also plant a variety of herbs I’ve started from seed on a sunny windowsill.  After a winter buried under newspaper and mulch, the soil is still a sad-looking gray, but the grass and weeds have not just biodegraded but mysteriously vanished, utterly consumed by some sort of lawn-munching subterranean critter.  As I turn and amend the damp, dense clay soil, I cross my fingers.  If the tomatoes are a dismal failure, next year I’ll lose the argument, and we might end up with a concrete patio.

Over the winter, I had decided that the area around the mature ash tree in the yard, heavily shaded and clotted with a thick root system, should remain untouched, but we’ll plant fragrant perennials around the perimeter in the sunny areas.  Long term, we’ll grow plants like lavender, rosemary, calendula, lemon balm, and mint to make hydrosols and essential oils.

I propose a pumpkin patch in a warm, south-facing spot next to our driveway.  Because I propose it to our four-year-old, the idea is received with enthusiasm and excitement.

Chickens are on the list, and although our town will only allow four hens (no rooster) they’ll easily produce more than enough eggs every week for our family.  I start to stockpile ideas for recipes that will preserve the excess—I imagine jars of lemon curd, and frozen lemon meringue pies and lemon poppy seed bread.  Again, these ideas are received with leaps of joy:  who can argue with pies and cakes?

Unfortunately, the town draws the line at livestock.  But, I don’t mind; I have enough on my plate as it is.  Maybe we can revisit this when we can leave the city limits.  For now, our kids’ access to good schools keeps us shackled to suburbia.

As I gradually roll-out my plans to my family, my winter of seeding ideas of self-sufficiency and reduced dependence on unreliable food sources like Mexico and China, pay off.  My family’s desire to get outside and help me in the garden ripens at the same rate as our tomatoes.  Our pumpkins swell until the squirrels find them simply too tempting, and consume them still attached to the vine.  But even this is a learning experience, and as we contemplate ways to keep the squirrels from eating next year’s crop (chicken wire? laser-guided lightsabers? a monster-filled moat?), I realize we are planning another season.  And as we eat the last of the season’s zucchini, sitting under a clear starry sky, I hear the words I’ve dreamed of:

“This is really great.  I’m really glad we moved here.  And these zucchinis are fantastic!  I can’t believe we grew them ourselves …”

Clare Brandt is a freelance writer based in Colorado. A transplant to the U.S. from England, she’s still trying to figure out if there’s a connection between her latent homesteading tendencies, and genetic northern England thriftiness and proclivity to be self-reliant.

The post The Homesteader in Denial — How to Convince Your Partner You’re Not Crazy appeared first on Homestead.org.

I’m a scientist at heart, and I spent the better part of three years sitting in lectures and labs learning all about horticulture and landscape design.  I know which plants attract the same pests and which will suck the ground dry of water or nutrients.  I know how to identify and treat verticillium wilt, and what to do with a slug/caterpillar/aphid infestation.

But now, here I was being told by an older neighbor—someone who I’ll be the first to admit has more than five times my experience at growing veggies, even if he is a know-it-all—that I shouldn’t have planted my tomatoes anywhere near the sunflowers standing sentry against the back fence.

“Why?” I ask, which is a big mistake because forty-five minutes later I’m none the wiser and my head is swimming with age-old adages.  A Google search doesn’t help either, on the contrary: I’m left to believe that sunflowers would make a rather good support for my tomatoes, but not my beans.  Plus, now I have a long list of veggies, herbs, and flowering plants (and a few trees) that I should or shouldn’t plant together.

Are these all just old wives’ tales, beliefs passed down through the oral tradition from my gritty, old, farmer neighbor and great Aunt Mabel to me?  Or is there some scientific fact hidden here somewhere?  Many scientists, like me, have questioned these adages over the years and have uncovered some truths and some pure hokum.

There is no question that plants influence one another.  Both Varro (a Roman agriculturist) and Pliny the Elder (a naturalist, also Roman) are credited with noting, around two thousand years ago, that nothing likes to grow around the root zone of a Walnut tree.  Walnuts and some other members of the genus Juglans produce an allelopathic toxin—a chemical that inhibits the growth of other plants—called juglone.  But through scientific research, we’ve also discovered that only some plants are susceptible, while others are unaffected by the chemical.

Even further back in history, while domesticating corn, beans, and squash, Native Americans discovered that these three crops grow better when planted together.  According to Iroquois legend, corn, beans, and squash are three inseparable sisters.  The Iroquois believe each of these three crops are precious gifts from the Great Spirit and are watched over by one of three sisters’ spirits, called the De-o-ha-ko.  Iroquois ceremonies to honor the De-o-ha-ko mark the planting season and the first harvest.

Even without the scientific awareness to understand why these companions thrived, the tribes passed on the knowledge—through stories and annual rituals—that corn, beans, and squash should always be planted together.  And this makes sound environmental sense: The beans and corn have a symbiotic relationship in which the corn provides a support for the beans to grow up.  In return, the beans provide extra support for the corn in strong winds.  The squash adds to this partnership by providing ground cover to both conserve water and repress weeds.  In addition, although corn is a hungry feeder, beans (as all legumes do) take nitrogen from the air rather than the soil during the growing season, and so don’t compete for nutrients.

Whether the Native Americans tried to grow their beans up sunflowers, which also were domesticated and grown by tribes more than four thousand years ago, we’ll never know, but according to my Google list, that’s not a combination that would achieve great success.

Sunflowers, notably Helianthus annuus species (annual sunflowers) produce an allelopathic phytotoxin that inhibits seedling germination and seedling growth in some plants.  Scientific studies have shown that extract from sunflowers are effective in suppressing the germination and growth of certain weeds, namely littleseed canarygrass (Phalaris minor), lambsquarters (Chenopodium albun), lesser swinecress (Coronopis didymus), toothed dock (Rumex dentatus), and burclover (Medicago polymorpha).  Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem there is anything but anecdotal evidence (and about 10,000 Google hits) to indicate that sunflowers stunt the growth of plants like beans and potatoes.

So where did this list of companion plants come from, and how reliable is it, anyway?

Linda Chalker-Scott, Ph.D., extension horticulturist and associate professor at Washington State University, writes in her article “The Myth of Companion Plantings”, that, “the problem with using the phrase ‘companion plants’ is that it is broadly used to describe plant interactions in the realms of science, pseudoscience, and the occult… claims that companion plants can be determined by ‘sensitive crystallization’ of their extracts (i.e. to discover which plants ‘love’ each other), or through the study of a plant’s rhythm, its vibration, its music, and its note.”

Robert Beyfuss and Marvin Pritts from the Cornell University Department of Horticulture agree that “companion planting is based upon some very bad science,” in particular the sensitive crystallization method, which was created by Dr. Ehrenfried E. Pfeiffer in the 1930s.

Dr. Pfeiffer used chromatography—a method of separating things into smaller chemical components and displaying them in a visual way—to make chromatograms of different plant combinations.  He concluded that those forming bright or clear chromatograms were beneficial, while combinations that made cloudy or dull chromatograms were antagonistic.  Beyfuss and Pritts note that “the notion that carrots love tomatoes but beans dislike fennel is based upon an analytical laboratory procedure and not on direct observation of the plants in nature.  No legitimate scientist believes that this method can determine compatibility among plant species.”

So, if we can’t rely on the observations of Romans, Old Farmer’s companion plant lists, or our great aunt Mabel, what can we rely on to help our garden and veggie plot thrive?

Scientists agree that there are benefits to planting and maintaining diversity, especially with crops.  There’s a certain amount of security in being diverse:  After all, losing an entire season is far, far worse than losing just one crop.  In addition, interspersing crops within the same area, rather than growing in blocks or rows of the same crop has been shown to confuse—if not deter—pests.  Several species in one area can seemingly disrupt the ability of many herbivorous insects to use visual and olfactory (smell) cues to find their host plants.

Similarly, scientists have begun to study the idea of trap cropping, a method where a plant that is known to be attractive to a certain pest is planted nearby the main crop.  The theory is that the pest enjoys the “trap” plant and leaves the main crop alone.  However, Professors Anthony M. Shelton and Brian A. Nault from the Department of Entomology at Cornell University found that in a commercial application, using collards as a trap crop to control the diamondback moth in a field of cabbage “was unsuccessful because it neither reduced the number of larvae on cabbage nor concentrated the insects on collards.”  They did, however, have some success in a controlled environment tempting the moth away from cabbage and broccoli using garden yellowrocket  (Barbarea vulgaris), a common biennial weed.

It’s also been scientifically proven that some plants produce chemicals that seem to repel herbivorous pests.  Common tansy (Tanacetum vulgare) planted alongside potatoes is said to repel the Colorado potato beetle, although tansy itself is listed as a noxious weed in many states.  This ability to repel could be due to the presence of the chemical thujone, which is also found in arborvitae (Thuja spp.), mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris), oregano (Oregano spp.), common sage (Salvia spp.) and wormwood (Artemisia absinthium).

Marigolds (Tagetes spp.) contain varying amounts of thiophene in their roots and leaves.  This chemical gives the marigold the distinctive smell we all know, and some love.  Apparently carrot root fly and aphids hate them, but not as much as do the soil parasites, nematodes.  Scientists are currently working on perfecting anti-nematode chemicals based on marigold extracts.  But does it work to plant marigolds near your veggies?  Authors Thomas C. Fuller and Elizabeth May McClintock in their book Poisonous Plants of California write: “Different species of Tagetes have been demonstrated to contain substances in the roots that are toxic to some but not all species of root-knot nematodes and root-legion nematodes.  Marigold plants do not actually secrete substances into the soil to kill nematodes; they are killed only in the roots of the plants.”   So it seems like a good planting of marigolds might catch and kill some of your nematodes, and probably would be worth trying if you had a problem with them.

Scientifically significant amounts of thiophene also are found in common yarrow (Achillea millefolium), wolf’s bane (Arnica montana), yarrow/wormwood (Artemisia spp.), bachelor buttons (Centaurea cyanus), pyrethrum daisy (Chrysanthemum cinerariaefolium), sunflower (Helianthus annuus) and tansy (Tanacetum vulgare).  However, contrary to popular companion planting websites, there is none found in pot marigolds, which are a completely different species (Calendula spp.) to Tagetes, putting to rest the age-old argument about which is better, French marigolds or pot marigolds, at deterring nematodes.

One chemical that is found in pot marigolds, however, and in some chrysanthemums (mainly Chrysanthemum cinerariifolium and C. coccineum) is pyrethrum. Synthetic pyrethroid insecticides are based on the naturally-occurring pyrethrins, and are extremely toxic to most insects.  Of course, synthesized pyrethrins are a lot more concentrated than a plant, but that doesn’t mean pests—especially aphids, cabbage worms, leafhoppers, harlequin bugs, pickleworms, spider mites, and others—aren’t deterred by a slight whiff of a chemical that’s toxic, just that you might need quite a few to have any effect.

In addition to using companion plants that may produce a small amount of natural pesticide, what about trying to attract the right kind of insects and other pest-predators?  This seems like the best companion planting method so far.  The trick is to provide the perfect environment for beneficial bugs, especially predatory species—like ladybugs, lacewings, hover flies, mantids, robber flies, spiders, and predatory mites—and parasitic species including tachinid flies, and trichogramma and ichneumonid wasps. Plants that are notoriously good at attracting beneficial species are nasturtium (Tropaeolum majus), yarrow (Achillea millefolium), lovage (Levisticum officinale), fennel (Foeniculum vulgare), dill (Anethum graveolens), chamomile (Matricaria recutita), caraway (Carum carvi), and borage (Borago officinalis), but generally any plants that produce copious nectar and pollen are a good way to encourage beneficial critters into your man-made environment.

And while we’re considering environments, a good companion plant is one that also provides the perfect environment for another.  Tall, sun-loving plants provide shelter for low-growing shade-lovers, or trellis support, or a wind barrier; and the best companions make the best use of your growing space, providing maximum yield per square foot.

Frequently, companion plants are noted to have the ability to improve not only the yield, but also the flavor of the crops surrounding them.  This is up to your taste buds to decide, but one thing is for sure, some aphorisms (like plant basil with tomatoes) may be true for a reason other than increasing fruit yield: they taste great when eaten together.  As a side benefit, this one seems to be true in the garden too. Michael K. Bomford, while at West Virginia University, found in his doctoral dissertation that actually “tomato plants grown with basil produced more fruits per plant.”

So maybe companion planting has more to do with our stomachs than with pure science.  The Native Americans knew the Three Sisters provided everything they’d need to supplement the food they hunted and gathered:  The beans provide the essential amino acids, riboflavin, and niacin; the squash provides vitamins A and C, and vegetable fat from their seeds; and the corn nearly anything else you need to get you through a long, hard winter.  The added benefit being that each of the Three Sisters provided a harvest that would keep and sustain them for months.

Scientifically speaking, the Native Americans got it spot on:  They cultivated a group of crops that used the space they had to the best advantage.  They planted tall, sun-loving corn that provided the perfect companion to shade-tolerant squash.  The beans provide support, while using the corn as a trellis.  It’s possible that they practiced a little environmental pest control since the diverse canopy also is thought to disorient the adult squash vine borer.  In turn, the presence of the prickly vines is said to discourage raccoons from ravaging the sweet corn and beans growing around it.  The diversity of the species guaranteed that they wouldn’t lose an entire season’s worth of food due to poor conditions since beans can thrive in a wet, cool summer even though corn or squash will not.  Plus, they planted things that they could store, and tasted good together.

It seems that, for the most part, oral history and old-wives’ tales are doing what they do best, teaching us some common sense things, like if we have a problem with aphids, we should plant something that attracts ladybugs.  But with anything passed from one generation to the next, the real proof of the pudding is to test and trial; continue what works and ignore what does not.  If you have great success growing your tomatoes next to sunflowers, then good for you.  And if you can’t get your cucumbers bigger than a pickle, you could always try planting them with dill, and if that doesn’t work, just make some dill pickles.  Yummy.

~~~~~

Clare Brandt is a freelance writer based in Colorado.  In researching this article, one of the things she was most excited to see listed on the internet was basil’s ability to repel mosquitoes.  However, although she’s now succeeded in growing basil to near tree-like stature, she’s still plagued with the contemptible insect and therefore assumes that mosquitoes haven’t checked the internet lately.

The post The Three Sisters Legacy: The Science Behind Companion Planting appeared first on Homestead.org.

Apples, figs, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, squash, basil, beans, lemons, turnips, kohlrabi, parsley, onions, asparagus, rutabaga, fava beans, potatoes, tomatillos, sage, marjoram, thyme, oregano, and zucchini are just a few of the things she’s grown—and learned to cook and preserve over the years.

“I’ve really been inspired by Joan Dye Gussow, and her life,” explains Birgitt.  Often called the mother of the sustainable food movement, Gussow has been promoting locally grown food for decades.  From her home in Piermont, New York, she’s demonstrated that year-round eating from 1,000 square feet in a suburban riverfront village is possible, life-sustaining, and delicious; and has written about it.  “I’ve always grown a lot,” says Birgitt, “but Gussow’s work has really invigorated me to rethink a number of things, including what I can grow that I can store for use to use in the winter time, and what I should be planting in the fall for winter and early spring harvest.”

In an essay for the 2005 book, Farm Aid: A Song for America, Gussow wrote: “while there continues to be pain and grief and loss on farmlands across the nation, there is also hope and determination to make a different system, one where vibrant local economies are based on thriving family farms, small-scale business enterprises, and markets featuring fresh local food year-round—economies that will make farming once again a desirable lifestyle, so that handing down the farm to one’s children will no longer seem like a punishment but a privilege.  If we level the playing field for producers by taking away the policies that support the present industrial food system—cheap fuel and water, public funding of high-tech agricultural research, massive public investments in infrastructure (including overbuilt highways to handle giant truckloads of traveling food)—we can invest the money saved in a food system that conserves soil, water, air, and human resources, and produces reasonably priced food.”

Birgitt concurs, heartily:  “Our entire food system is dependent on fossil fuels, so prices are rising.  Small farmers, who cannot compete with large enterprises, have been driven out of the system, and now food is being shipped incredibly long distances.  It doesn’t help that consumers want summer produce like grapes, strawberries, and watermelon in the middle of winter, so these are shipped from places like Chile to meet our demand.  But as the price of transportation makes this less economically viable, at a certain point only the wealthy will be able to afford imported food.  At some point in the near future, we are going to have to learn to eat seasonally and locally, and grow our food and put it up for the winter.”

With this on her mind, Birgitt got involved with the Alameda Backyard Growers, a group that encourages members to grow food in their backyards and donate their extra fruits and vegetables to organizations that serve low-income and food-insecure residents such as the Alameda Food Bank.  “The group was on just getting up and running then, but it still had more than forty people show up to the first meeting,” she says.

The fact that so many people showed up is a testament to how interested people are in growing food for themselves and others, but on Alameda—a compact island comprising sandy drained marshland and, in places, bay fill—there is very little community garden space, and many of the home lots like Birgitt’s are small.

“We’re on a pretty densely populated island where good land is at premium.  I’ve wanted more space for a really long time,” explains Birgitt.  “I can grow enough for two people to eat during the summer, but to grow enough to get us through the winter, I needed more land.”

Fortunately for Birgitt, one of the people who showed up at the meeting was Gladys, who unlike Birgitt, had lots of land, but not the time, energy, or knowledge to garden it in the way her mother had years before.

“Gladys’ mother was Mandarin Chinese, and had grown fruits and vegetables in their backyard.  When her mother passed away, the vegetable garden became neglected, since Gladys and her husband didn’t have the time to keep it up,” says Birgitt. “But she did have an emotional resonance with the idea of the land being used for something productive.”

Gladys’ garden is located in an older neighborhood of Alameda where the lots are comparatively large.  After visiting Birgitt’s home garden for ideas, they planned one large bed that encompasses about 550 square feet of Gladys’ land, which includes some mature fruit trees.  “I wanted to make sure she understood that a productive garden doesn’t always look pretty,” Birgitt adds, “And I was really hoping that this wasn’t an idea she had because of sentimentality for her mother.”  She laughs as she remembers she knew Gladys was committed when they mutually agreed on the perfect spot for a compost heap.

The idea of sharecropping—where a landowner allows a tenant to use the land in return for a share of the crop—has been around for thousands of years, although it’s considered controversial since it often benefits the landowner, while the sharecropper remains in poverty with little or no access to social or cultural development or growth.  A contract for métayage, a type of sharecropping, dating back to about 533 BCE is on display in the Louvre in Paris.

Sharecropping in the United States became widespread during the post-Civil War period of reconstruction (1865–1877).  Then the mass influx of immigrants in the 1900s again increased its popularity during the First World War. Being a sharecropper was one of few options for penniless freedmen and immigrants with no other trade to support themselves and their families.

Croppers were assigned a plot of land to work, and in exchange owed the landowner a share of the crop at the end of the season.  Though the arrangement protected sharecroppers from the negative effects of a bad crop, many sharecroppers were economically confined to serf-like conditions of poverty.  Annual contracts often allowed the sharecropper to keep less than half of the crop, and the sale price was usually set by the landowner.  Because the landowner wielded so much control, there was little or no profit for the sharecropper.

Unlike the circa 1900s sharecropper arrangement, the new millennium understanding is that there has to be benefit on both sides.  “We’re both sufficiently generous and dedicated to having this be a viable operation,” Birgitt says.  “We didn’t set out to set up any formal arrangement; we’re inventing the relationship as we go.”

“My advice is to be flexible and have a mutual understanding of your needs and expectations,” she adds.

In February 2010, Birgitt began clearing the weeds from the soil, building a new compost pile as she went.  It took her about eight hours to clear an area that’s roughly 18×30 feet.  She worked on her hands and knees, pulling by hand so she could get to know every inch of the soil, a process that she describes as indispensable when starting a new garden from scratch.  She then marked out her three-foot-wide beds with 18-inch paths between and spread about an inch-and-a-half of purchased compost across the surface.  The beds run east to west to maximize sunlight to all the plants.  Turning the compost, several boxes of organic 5-5-5 fertilizer, plus Brix Mix foliar feed (which had solidified into an unusable brick) that is a 1-1-22 + trace elements into the beds, again by hand, took a couple of weeks.  At the east end of each bed, Birgitt planted herbs or flowers to attract bees and other pollinators as well as beneficial insects.

“Gladys paid for the compost and helped me layout the pathways; in addition, her brother set up the irrigation system with a timer.  I do all the growing,” Birgitt says.  “I leave crops for her on the porch, but we don’t have any set agreement.  I’ve asked Gladys if she wants me to grow anything in particular, and she suggested some Asian vegetables.  I don’t know if it’s because the soil is not as rich as it needs to be, or that they need more heat, but we didn’t have much success.  It’s a learning process, but we’ll keep trying.”

Birgitt believes one of the keys to success here is that both she and Gladys love to cook.  “If you’re going to put lots of energy, time, and money into a garden, you’ve got to love to cook,” she emphasizes.  “If nobody eats what you grow, you’re throwing that energy, time, and money away on a nice idea.”  Last year, Birgitt, Gladys, and their families and friends harvested and ate winter squash, sugar pie pumpkins, Tomboncino summer squash, potatoes, black turtle soup beans, popcorn, tomatoes, Romano beans, basil, zucchini, bok choy, and arugula.

When asked if there’s anything she grows that she doesn’t like to eat, Birgitt laughs:  “Well, my husband doesn’t like green beans very much, so I have to disguise them when I cook.” She then explains why she also plants drought-tolerant ornamentals and herbs.  “All vegetable gardens need to have flowers to attract pollinators.  And studies have proven that you need permanent habitat and food sources for all beneficials.  The more natural and diverse you can keep your ecosystem, the more beneficial insects you’ll attract.  Along one edge of her garden, rosemary, lavender, borage, cosmos, and oregano are swarmed with bees to prove her point.

However, she also admits that gardening can be frustrating.  “The birds pick the peas to pieces, the bitter melon failed, and my carrots have been completely eaten by slugs six times in a row.  There’s just no such thing as a perfect garden environment.  But we adapt and learn.  And with the changing environment, who knows: our seasons could be extended or contract.  Things we previously grew won’t do as well, and other new things will grow.”

“We have to change where we grow our food and buy locally-grown produce,” she adds.  “It scares me that our food security is in the hands of a few corporations that only have profits in mind.” According to the USDA, farmers get less than 20 cents for every dollar spent by consumers. The rest is spent on processing, wholesaling, distribution, retailing, and marketing.  “For all their work and for their huge investments in seeds and equipment, farmers get practically no reward, so their options are limited by economy.  Affordable choices of certain seeds are rapidly disappearing, which is scary, because if the seed fails, for whatever reason, people will starve to death.”

According to researchers at the University of Michigan’s Center for Sustainable Agriculture, on average more than seven calories of fossil fuel is burned up for every calorie of energy we get from our food.  “We have to start asking ourselves where our food is going to come from in twenty or thirty years,” Birgitt says, “Local food, eaten in season, is the only way we are going to become food secure, and I hope I’m pioneering that in my small corner of the planet.”

“Although I’m still buying onions, but I’ve planted about twenty plants, so we’ll see,” she adds, “and those peas …”

To find out how the peas fared, you can visit Birgitt’s gardens online.

The post Inside a Sharecropper’s Garden: Growing Food in the Inner-city appeared first on Homestead.org.