Earth Day and Arbor Day
Starting a Home Garden (Despite new studies suggesting gardening is bad)
Earth Day and Arbor Day are upon us, so of course I’ve been out getting my hands dirty. Last week I was cleaning invasive buckthorn out of a park, but I’ve been a little hesitant about my garden. This is my 7th year gardening on the same land, and many, many more in gardening experiences with pots an other garden sites. While I am only a beginner, I hope to share some inspiration (including with myself) at the start of this garden season. I know our last frost date is upon us in a few weeks, so I could have already put many frost hearty plants in the ground by this point. I could have started many different seeds to get a jumpstart on the short Wisconsin season.
I didn’t do any of that this year though. I’m a little bit anxious about the garden because of the added responsibilities of another baby. I also feel a bit sad about all of the droppings, the holes, the chewed perennials, and other signs of pesky rabbits. But I am not giving up on my garden, even if the mainstream is beginning to turn against home gardening.
Yes, there is at least one new article making the media rounds to further discourage people. The paper’s methods are quite mysterious and are not explained well. The authors apparently used an application to estimate the carbon outputs of the farm/garden in question. While things like transportation, infrastructure fertilizers, and composting are categories in which the overall score of conventional farming nearly always beat small urban agriculture operations. This is nonsense. If authors are going to make such strong claims about what it means to be carbon intensive and carbon emitting (used as a negative), then this should all be explained. Instead, the researchers rely on some software to decide what this all means for them, and there is no explanation of all of the factors being considered or why certain inputs are considered and others are not.
They are also aggregating the data of urban agriculture locations and farms across the globe as if the only distinctions are how many gardeners there are and how serious they are rather than the type of agriculture being practiced. If they choose a hobbyist who has a chemical-intensive unsustainable practice, it might look far worse than the mono-cropper. Hobbyists who use organic permaculture methods and setups that are mostly of free, recycled materials have a very different story. One of the gardening goals is to foster a microbiome of high-intensity life. People working on the small scale have to make the most of their space, so instead of making room for large, fossil fuel powered machinery to come through, our gardens are purposeful down to the square inch with companion plants that draw in pollinators and other critters. Building the soil year after year is vital to these operations, but conventional agriculture under capitalism is about producing the most profit, not producing the healthiest living systems to feed us long-term.
Additionally, they are only choosing a few crops and pitting a mass scale farm of a single crop against gardens that purposely don’t put all of their resources into a single crop. To be fair, they found tomatoes to be less carbon-intensive for home gardeners, but there are problems with the methodology of picking a few crops. These permaculture projects are built for the gardener to eat a wider variety of foods, which is part of the design that is missed by only picking a few of the top-consumed produce items. Certainly if one of these items were squash flowers, the average gardener would win because these flowers are not even an agricultural product of large farms. The idea behind the products they picked were based on those consumed the most, but gardeners have a very different diet than the average consumer. We eat seasonally. Maybe the average person eats loads of strawberries year-round, and hardly any zucchinis. But when the gardener has an excess of zucchini, you can bet we find ways to eat a lot more zucchini than the average consumer. And when we pick fresh from our local plants, there is no fossil fuel used in bringing that produce to our tables. Not only do conventional farms harvest with machines that use fossil fuels, they use other machines to sort the produce, carry it to trucks in fossil-fuel based plastics (which contribute to the garbage islands and microplastics in our food and water), and may have secondary packaging/processing at a different plant across the planet before being shipped back to the grocery stores near you.
So I’m going into this gardening season without any fear that I’m contributing more to climate change per piece of produce than a factory farm. And conversely, being a good steward of a tiny piece of Earth is part of the point.
What I had to do was start. Even after getting out in the garden for a few days, I’m still a bit anxious about it, but less so. After all, even if I get a few bits of produce out of the project, it will have been more successful than if I had not put a single seed into the soil.
So, I tried a soil test for the first time. Apparently I’ve been adding too many ashes over the years because my soil is alkaline. Hopefully adding some compost will bring the pH back down in addition to feeding the soil because it is really too late to lower it as I am planting. I have heard of adding sulfur, but I should have done that already to bring the pH down.
I am trying a technique of burying a core of straw in a few of the plots this year since I got a bunch for free. The main goal of that is to hopefully have to water less, and that straw will break down and feed the soil life as well. In doing that project, I’m happy to report that my soil is full of worms! So that’s a good sign. Seeing the worms was encouraging that I’ve been doing something right.
I planted out a bed of potatoes yesterday using the compost that I turned and two varieties of potatoes. I had whole russet seed potatoes, plus the sprouted eyes I cut off some white potatoes from the farmer’s market.
While I don’t have a full vision for the yard quite yet, getting out in the dirt helped me to make a list of other manageable things I can begin to do right away.
I will be reporting back the kind of momentum a few potatoes has built for me in growing this year. It doesn’t really matter if you have a series of raised beds, or a sunny spot with a few pots. Once you start growing one thing, you are part of something larger. You become a Gardener. A few herbs in a pot lead to tastier, more nutritious dishes. A few old, sprouted potatoes multiply into pounds of good food. The apple tree begins with one tiny seed.
So start with me. Start one seed in one pot. Start one plant in the soil. Start with one banana peel in a new compost pile. And suddenly, miraculously, we are food producers and good stewards of the land. Suddenly, we have food for our families and a return of a healthy ecosystem, full of life in our neighborhoods. Suddenly, we are less reliant on giant food conglomerates, and we have built something beautiful that seems impossible even to envision right now.