This is going to be an interesting project for us here at
The Cabin on Huckleberry Hill.
It is a project packed full of challenges.
The challenges aren’t anything like landing people on the
moon and bringing them back alive. These challenges are more in line with
discovering the essential elements that create balance and harmony between that
layer of earth, the plants growing in it, and these bodies that will eat the
plants that are grown in that layer of earth.
The earth here at the cabin is not the same as the earth
down at the other place. The topsoil here has a lot more sand content. Sandy
soil is not a bad thing. Sandy soil drains well during wet weather. It also
dries out faster during dry weather.
Healthy soil
produces healthy plants that lend
their healthiness to us to help produce healthy bodies. There is a definite relationship where these three are concerned.
It’s pretty simple arithmetic. 1 + 1 = 2.
The problem isn’t the simple equation.
The first challenge is discovering all the small assorted percentages
involved in the first 1 to make it a whole number. There is a lot more to
healthy soil than dirt. The second
challenge is to meet and overcome the assailants that will chew or waste away
at the second 1 before we have an opportunity to chew on the second 1.
It took several years of careful attendance to develop our
gardens at the place down south.
The first bed that was hand-dug was an utter disappointment.
The earth was far from anything that could be considered healthy soil. Its life
had been literally sucked out of it by decades of traditional row-crop
agriculture followed by decades of sod covering. We basically started with
something that resembled a growing medium
… one that wouldn’t grow a patch of turnip greens … and went from there.
Those beds, after a few years of focusing on building soil, started producing
abundantly. They kept producing abundantly until the honeybee die-off. After the die-off, we pretty
much gave up on trying to grow anything that needed the activity of
pollinators. We could, without the honeybees, grow beautiful plants. But,
without the bees, the beautiful plants wouldn’t produce fruit. Before the
die-off, we grew all we could eat, can and freeze, give away, and more than that.
We aren’t talking about acres of garden.
At one point, we had 2,000 square feet of garden in 3 plots.
These were all done traditional row
fashion. We eventually cut it back to 400 square feet in raised beds following something of the style used by Jon Jeavons in
his bio-intensive methods. The 9 raised beds were much more manageable and user
friendly than our 3 original garden plots. Each of the 9 became a micro-garden that was easily maintained without the use of a noisy tiller. They also made
it a lot easier to practice crop rotation and successive plantings. Those 400
square feet kept us in fresh seasonal garden produce before the honeybee
die-off.
What happened to our wild honeybees?
We are convinced that the honeybee die-off is related to the
introduction of neonicotinoid based pesticides sprayed on the surrounding
agricultural fields. Those are some really bad players when you read up on
them. We talked about putting in a hive or two to help with our pollinating but
decided against it. Our bees would
also visit those nearby fields and end up dead.
More than that?
Very few people ever accepted our invitation to come pick. Even though the picking was free of charge.
It seems most folks these days don’t want to be bothered by
this sort of simple pleasure. We would leave the extra to decompose in the
garden where it returned its health to the soil to help feed the next crop that
would feed us.
The physical dimension of growing food crops is an integral
aspect of this business called self-reliance.
One of the aspects of gardening in this mild winter climate
is that it is possible to have something growing in the garden year-round. This
is a lower-coast perk that we remind ourselves of when the dense humidity and searing
heat of summer set in. We do get an occasional winter blast that is cold enough
to kill cool weather loving plants. We had one of those blasts a couple weeks back
that put an end to our lettuce and burned the tops off our carrots. The collards
stood up to it though.
There is more to this integral aspect than the physical
dimension.
A lot more.
Our gardens satisfy more than our physical beings. Delving
into this more might seem too foofoo
or metaphysical for a lot of folks.
So we’ll just mention the more and leave it at that.
