The Learning Garden Leads The Way

The Learning Garden has been at the forefront of a new movement on how are foods are produced. Borrowing heavily on some fine agricultural traditions (One Straw Revolution; essays by Wendell Berry; several books on soil and biota of the soil) combined with some 50 years of gardening experience, The Learning Garden moved to planting without straight rows from the beginning. The discouragement of straight rows was done on purpose to change perspectives on the plants themselves. A break with the past was needed and we wanted to show everyone, we were not making the old mistakes.

This type of gardening might be called messy, but that is a response to what we grew up knowing of raising food. We thought those straight lines were done for the plants but they no, they suit a human paradigm. Today in the garden, we like how the breaking of straight lines leads us toward breaking up our old ideas about agriculture. The straight lines of the past were done to increase production and the ease of work for the farmer – but that was always predicated on tilling the soil. We don't till the soil (and we strongly urge you not to as well) and automatically, we are free to plant our plants anyway we want and not using rows allows us to fit more plants in per square feet.  The increase in plants helps shade the soil and make the immediate microclimate more forgiving.  

We aren't into a clean field – meaning, weeds are tolerated. In fact, in fallow beds we let them grow with impunity. There is nothing worse than bare soil and so we would rather have weeds growing up until the time we plant it.  Furthermore, many of those "weeds" are fantastic forage for insects - and we want more insects not less.  Leaving the weeds to flower - along with our crop plants to flower - provides sustenance for a bee population declining in free fall and for butterflies and birds.  The idea is to have a large insect population to reach homeostasis in the soil.

Instead of tilling the soil, we put out 3 inches of compost in Fall and three more in Spring. This feeds the critters in the soil and they "plow" this material into the soil. Thousands of trips of worms and other critters mix our compost with the soil, feeding themselves in the process and causing vast multiplication of their kin. From this, we get soft loamy soil that absorbs up to 40% more water than unamended soil, with less loss of topsoil. Furthermore, the soil is pliable, soft and easy to plant. The critters in the soil increase the fertility of our soil without adding costly petroleum-based fertilizers and we get the compost for free!

We import large quantities of this material – turning waste products from other households into rich, fertile soil instead of being dumped into land fills. This composted material without tilling actually sequesters carbon in the soil. If farming were to do this kind of agriculture, we would be over 50% on our way to ameliorating the excess carbon in the atmosphere.  (Put another way, the old style of agriculture - that is to say the agriculture from the 1950's to today - is the largest contributor of carbon in our atmosphere! Our little garden does not sequester that much carbon - but it shows the way.)

So, while we don't look like a conventional garden, our way offers a number of benefits:

1. There is no need for tilling and all that expense of energy, mechanical as well as human.
2. Plants are grown without the addition of expensive fertilizers and in the complete absence of pesticides. (These two points and one above are all reduction of our dependency on fossil fuels!)
3. What was once a waste product going into our ever fuller landfills now becomes an integral part of food production – nothing is really wasted.
4. The lack of tilling the soil means our garden is a carbon sink removing carbon from our atmosphere and sequestering it in the soil, where it once was before modern farming released it into the atmosphere at such an alarming rate.
5. Allowing weeds to persist in unplanted areas helps keep insect populations high and in homeostasis.
6. Permitting some plants in our garden to go to seed further supports our insect populations and allows us to save seed for next year's crops - increasing the number of locally adapted seeds that will produce in the LA Basin with its soil, water, and Mediterranean climate - all different from the rest of the country.

The benefits we create for ourselves and the world are too important to ignore. In the future, this is what gardening and farming will look like, not so far away. The expense of fossil fuels and their lack of availability is going to increase the price of fertilizers and pesticides to the point that they will no longer be efficient enough to be worthwhile. We will let the insects reach a point of homeostasis where there are no significant losses from insects as they take care of one another. Tilling with fossil fuels will become as rare as hand-writing letters are today. Food will be grown locally and the food miles will be measured in steps.

And carbon will be sequestered in the soil and the soil will once again hold water for a much larger space of time.

We can take a little mess for all this good. 

david

Fresh Mulch Daily!

Well, not daily, but we did have fresh compost/mulch delivered today (21 October) and expect another load next Wednesday!

We get this from the city of Los Angeles. Though it smells as though it ought to have manure in it, that's just the smell of decomposition - this is nothing more than Los Angeles green can waste, sorted to remove trash and non-compostable items, ground up to a finer texture and set to compost for an interval of time (depending on temperature etc the amount of time can vary considerably). The compost is turned at least once in this process and may be sifted again as well.

When it arrives here, the pieces are still somewhat discernible - you can tell the bits that were leaves although it can be hard to identify species of tree a given leaf is from. I like chunks like this - it will take longer to break down and the way I use this stuff is to spread it on top of my soil as a mulch, to feed the soil biota; because it is chunkier, it will take longer to break down. So this is perfect stuff for me. I like to see it go on 4" deep or more, depending on the plant.

In my experimental plots, I've not used any fertilizer in about six years and we are still getting super yields. We have mulched and mulched - this compost and wood chips have been used by the barrow full and the soil is as lovely as any garden could hope for. We are moving this experience out into the rest of the Garden and getting beyond the cycle of fertilizer leading to low fertility necessitating more fertilizer ad nauseum. Our fertility stays in our Garden (rather than being washed away) because it is a natural biological process and not something added as a powder or a liquid. Our fertility is in the bodies of the critters of the soil and doesn't become run off that pollutes our waterways or ground water.

I was thinking this morning how wonderful this life is when I can make a phone call and 48 hours later, a big truck pulls up and dumps 30 cubic yards of compost for my garden for free and they'll do it again next week! Truly this is a precious resource from the Los Angeles Department of Sanitation. One reason The Learning Garden continues to get such quantities of this stuff is because we give it away to other sites(i.e. local residents, schools, shelters and half-way houses with gardens) that don't have a storage area like our little alley. You can pick up this material from us, or from one of several yards around the LA area for free - as much as you want as often as you can!

I am very grateful to Pete Robinson and the Los Angeles Department of Sanitation and this compost project! Without this material, The Learning Garden wouldn't be half of what it is today.

david