High Spring

It’s the eve of May, a time the pagans in the US call Beltane.

I have written about this before often spelling it Beltaine.  (Which the internet says is the traditional Celtic spelling.)  Whatever the spelling, this is the time of year when everything is bursting into bloom.  It’s high spring. If Samhain, which I’ve written more about, is a time of acknowledging darkness and death, this is a passionate celebration of light and life.

It was a fairly mild winter here in New York City, but it was also cold, raw, damp, and dark.  Spring has been oh so welcoming. As I’ve written, with the collapse of Point A, I had been wondering what to do with myself.  That's not a problem anymore.

Our community, Cotyledon, is connected with a bunch of urban agricultural projects, like Smiling Hogshead Ranch and Hellgate Farm.   There wasn't much to do with them in January and February. Now I need to be careful not to do too much. (See my last post.)

Spring won't last.   One of the reasons I follow the pagan calendar is the reminder that the seasons flow into each other.  Spring will become summer, summer will become fall, and fall will become winter. Beltane is just the opposite pole from Samhain.   Life and death are intimately connected, as are light and dark.

The point is that I am going to enjoy all this while it's here.  Everything is in bloom and it won't last. And I am not getting any younger. I want to enjoy each season fully while I am here to enjoy it.

I hope you are enjoying your spring.

Quote of the Day:  “The most dramatic part of the Beltane celebration was the community bonfire.  People would gather around it, often bringing chairs or stools in order to ‘sit out the wake of winter.’  … The fire was usually lit on May eve - fed by whatever a village could spare - and was kept going until sunset on May 1st.  In general, most people extinguished all fires in their homes on May eve. … In keeping with the old ways, ‘new fire’ had to be brought back into the house from the Beltane flames.” - Bridget Haggerty

Studying Nutrition

Many, many, many, many years ago, I was ever so briefly a nursing student. (Yes, among many things, I am a nursing school drop out.)  I did well in the academics but I was a disaster doing the bedside work. One of the things I enjoyed learning about was nutrition.

And nutrition is still one of the things that I’m interested in. When I think about agriculture, a question arises.  What should we plant? Which leads me to the question of, what foods are better for people? How do we know? And one way of knowing is by studying nutrition.

I have been looking in libraries for a really good nutrition textbook.   I’m not interested in the latest diet or food fad, I want to know what mainstream nutritionists currently think.   (Okay, my nutrition education was from the 1970s, some things have changed since then.) I finally found one that I liked this winter, but then I left town for some traveling and returned the book.   Since I got back, I have been looking for that book, but it's no longer in the library and, stupidly, I didn't write the name of the book down. I went looking in the Queens library system catalog and did find something that looked okay in the catalog but turned out to be some kind of outline rather than a text.  (The book itself has the additional heading, “Student Note-Taking Guide”. Unfortunately, that part wasn't in the catalog.) Rather than just return it and try again, I decided to use it in conjunction with one of those ‘Idiot’s Guide’ books (which generally have decent information, even if the format is very commercialized and silly).  I figured between the two, I should get some halfway decent information. In the future, I may go looking for that good textbook again.

So what did I learn?   Here's some basics. First, there are six categories of nutrients: carbohydrates, fats, proteins, vitamins, minerals, and water.   Yes, water is a nutrient. The first three categories all have calories--as does a seventh non-nutrient, alcohol. Something that I did remember from my nursing years is that carbohydrates and proteins have four calories per gram, alcohol has seven calories per gram, and fats have nine calories per gram. All of the first six categories pay important parts in your diet.

Most of this stuff is common knowledge.   You want to get enough calories to thrive but not much more. Exercise as well as nutrition is important in maintaining your weight as well as your health. You need to get all your vitamins and minerals.  Eat plenty of vegetables. (Really. Probably the best piece of dietary advice I can give.) Drink plenty of water and get plenty of rest.

But a couple of things that aren't so obvious.  Your body needs sodium as well as potassium, but the ratio is important. You need to make sure that you are getting more potassium than sodium.   Fruit is a good source of potassium. Likewise, some fatty acids are essential, but you need to get more omega three than omega six. Fish is a good source of omega three, but for vegetarians like me, nuts and seeds (especially flax seeds and chia seeds) are also a good source.

Not all vegetables are alike.  I am a strong advocate of leafy greens (like kale, collards, spinach, and dandelion greens) and the orange veggies (like carrots, sweet potatoes, winter squashes, and pumpkin).  And, of course, you can never go wrong with broccoli.

Finally, for vegetarians and vegans, make sure that you get enough B12.  Unfortunately, the best way to do this is to take a supplement, since B12 is only found naturally in animal products.

Social change depends on strong, healthy people, and since the society I want to create is one that meets everyone’s needs, knowing what we need nutritionally is important.  And thus I study nutrition.

Quote of the Day: “... nutrition is the science of how the body uses food. In fact, nutrition is life.   All living things, including you, need food and water to live…. If you don't eat and drink, you’ll die. Period.” - Carol Ann Rinzler

Resilient Farm

Ben Falk's book, The Resilient Farm and Homestead, has, like Darrell Frey's book (see Bioshelters, 8/15/14) and Sepp Holzer's (see Permaculture--Austrian Style, 8/5/14), a little bit of everything.  The subtitle hints at how much is in it: 'An Innovative Permaculture and Whole Systems Design Approach'.  In fact the farm that Ben Falk runs is called the Whole Systems Research Farm.

If he has one focus to the book, it's to encourage others to be regenerative and resilient.  In the appendix to the book he includes a test to assess your own resiliency.

While the book covers the gamut of what he does on the farm, including extensive sections on food crops, animals, water, soil, fuel, shelter building, and the design process, one of the things he includes that I found particularly useful was that he listed 72 'Resiliency and Regeneration Principles'.  Some of my favorites include: "Biological Complexity, Technological Simplicity" ("Resilience is greatest when living aspects of a system are complex, diverse, and connected, while the nonliving aspects of the system are simple"), "Two is One, One is None" (things always fail, it's important to have backup systems), and "Solutions = Alignment" (solutions emerge when you are aligned with natural forces),   A lot of the principles seem obvious but are helpful reminders: "Simplest Solution Is the Best Solution", "Increase Diversity, Don't Reduce It", "Good Design Always Empowers", and "Storage Always Runs Out".

A good bit of why I find Ben Falk's book useful is that he's writing about doing permaculture in Vermont--and I've lived my life in New England and came close to being part of a farming community in nearby New York that would operate much like the Whole Systems Research Farm.  Permaculture started in Australia and, while I got the principles and how useful they were, many of the applications that I first saw were for hot or, especially, dry climates.  In New England, there is water everywhere.  If you leave a patch of land alone for more than a few years, a forest will grow out of it.

Falk's book (like Frey's and Holzer's) is permaculture adapted to a cooler, wetter climate.  As I said in my post on Holzer's book: "the application of permaculture be different in each place."  Almost everything in The Resilient Farm and Homestead is applicable to the land that I live in.



Quote of the Day:  "This book is not a rehashing of information found elsewhere but only of direct experience. ... It is written with the hope that people all over the world will find value in it as they take back control over some measure of their own lives, empowering themselves and their families in the pursuit of resilience and regeneration and revel in the health, freedom, and fulfillment that is a natural outgrowth of such a life."   - Ben Falk

Bioshelters

The first half of the book, Bioshelter Market Garden, by Darrell Frey, is your standard tour around a permaculture farm.  (In fact, that's the subtitle, "A Permaculture Farm".)  It isn't that different from  Sepp Holzer's book (see my post, Permaculture--Austrian Style, 8/5/14) or the book by Ben Falk that I hope to review next, except that Sepp Holzer's farm is in Austria and Ben Falk's farm is in Vermont, USA.  Darrell Frey's farm (Three Sisters Farm named after the Native American and permaculture 'guild' of squash, beans, and corn growing together) is also in the US, in what he refers to as "northwestern Pennsylvania".  He seems reluctant to give a more exact address, probably to discourage unwelcome visitors.

But what makes this book stand out is what he focuses on in the middle of the book, the bioshelter of the title.  Bioshelters were developed at the New Alchemy Institute, which ran for twenty-one years on Cape Cod in Massachusetts (1971- 1992).  According to Frey, "A bioshelter is a greenhouse managed as an indoor ecosystem.  ... they represent a synthesis of energy-efficient architecture and ecological design."  The bioshelter is the centerpiece of the farm and book has two chapters devoted to 'Bioshelter Defined and Designed' and 'Bioshelter Management'.  It goes on to chapters on 'Compost and Biothermal Resources' (both within the bioshelter and outside of it) and 'Chickens in the Greenhouse' (a part of their bioshelter ecosystem).  He also includes an interesting chapter on 'Permaculture for Wetlands'. 

There's lots and lots of useful stuff in this book--especially if you want to learn about bioshelters and how they could be helpful for commercial farming.  I'd strongly recommend it.  About my only complaint about this book is that for some reason the author included the exact same picture that he took of the "Composting greenhouse at The New Alchemy Institute in 1988" three times in the book--twice with the exact same caption--something that's odd but doesn't negate anything in the book.


Quote of the Day:  "Biodiversity and environmental quality are not just nice things to learn about on cable TV or in magazines.  The natural world is the foundation upon which we all depend.  Stewardship begins in our yards and gardens, and it extends to the choices  we make in what we consume.  The decade or two ahead are critical.  Humans have managed and impacted bioregions for tens of thousands of years.  But the choices we are making now have a stronger and longer-lasting impact on the planet than at any time in human existence." - Darrell Frey

Permaculture--Austrian Style

Permaculture is from Australia.  Sepp Holzer is a farmer in Austria, halfway around the globe.  He inherited his farm in 1962 and began experimenting and doing his work his own way.  In 1995, he was told that what he was doing was permaculture.  Herr Holzer said that when he then read a bunch of books on permaculture, he agreed with all the principles.  He was surprised to find out that what he had been doing was basically the same as the methods of a world-wide movement, a movement officially begun in 1978, sixteen years after he had started his experiments.

Sepp Holzer's Permaculture is a useful addition to a permaculture library, focusing on how a farmer in Austria independently discovered the same principles that Bill Mollison and David Holmgren came up with.  What's important is that, as Patrick Whitefield points out in his foreward to the book, is that just as each place on Earth has its own ecology, so must the application of permaculture be different in each place.  Whitefield says that "An important part of permaculture is getting to know your own individual place.  Every patch of the Earth has its unique personality and character, just as each person has."

Sepp Holzer developed his own take on permaculture, a version adapted to the Alpine region he lives in.  And he came up with some methods different from what other permaculture farmers were doing.  One thing that he is known for is the development of Hugelkultur, a technique that uses the idea of burying branches or logs to fertilize the soil, add carbon, and retain water.  I found it interesting that the word hugelkultur is not used in the book--I suspect that this is a case of overtranslating the book. (Originally in German, of course.)  However, the concepts behind hugelkultur are clearly spelled out in the section of the book on raised bed gardening.

While the book concentrates on land design, alternative agriculture, and gardening (permaculture mainstays), Holzer devotes one chapter to fruit trees and another to cultivating mushrooms.  There's lots of useful information in this book, especially if you're doing permaculture in a temperate landscape.  It's interesting to me that Holzer's farm, Krameterhof, is another place not included in Birnbaum and Fox's Sustainable [R]evolution (see my last post). Holzer also devotes a chapter to other projects that he's working with in Scotland, Thailand, and in a section of Austria almost two hours north of his farm.  He also mentions consulting on projects in Brazil, Columbia, and Montana (USA), which he says that he talked more about in his previous book The Rebel Farmer.  I think this book is worth reading if you want one more version of what is possible.


Quote of the Day: "You must see and understand this technique as a whole, so that it can be used profitably.  Only those who practice permaculture can also understand it and pass it on to others.  This is why it makes no sense to simply create a permaculture system just like mine.  You must learn it for yourself like learning the alphabet at school." - Sepp Holzer

Worldwide [R]evolution

Charles Reich's The Greening of America was published in 1970.  Marilyn Ferguson's The Aquarian Conspiracy came out in 1980.  Paul Hawken's Blessed Unrest was published in 2007. In my post in 2009 on The Great Turning (11/15/09), I critiqued all of them.  It's easy to see mass social movements--but what becomes of them?

Not quite a year later, I said something that I didn't see connected all of this at the time.  I ended my post entitled From the Ground Up (9/20/10), talking about how various social movements were "pointing us toward something. Something new and radical, something that guides us in an alternative direction, toward a different kind of world. A blueprint, if you will, for building a new way of living. From the ground up." 

For my Quote of the Day, I chose lines from Chellis Glendinning, including:  "This urge to wholeness is with us still; ... Many of the social and cultural movements of the twentieth century are expressions of it: Gandhian nonviolence, the worker's movement of the 1930's, the kibbutz, Martin Luther King, Jr., the anti-war efforts, the hippies and yippies, the women's movement, the human potential movement, back-to-the-land, natural foods, Earth Day, permaculture, bioregionalism, the men's movement, voluntary simplicity. So too is the vast arising of passion for spiritual pursuits: Tibetan Buddhism, drumming circles, wilderness quests. And then there are today's social and psychological uprisings: the call for democracy and environmental justice, ... the rising of indigenous identity and self-empowerment." 

Another way of looking at this is to see Reich's, and Ferguson's, and Hawken's work as ongoing documentation of what Chellis Glendinning is calling that 'urge to wholeness'.  There is something going on outside the mainstream press, with many failures, but continuing on.  I've been documenting some of it in my posts on communities. 

Recently, I've read a bunch of books that look at permaculture related things, some in the form of communities and some as farms or other projects.  My next few posts will review some of these books focusing on attempts to create permaculture stuff around the world.  I want to begin with a book that focuses on these projects all over the globe.  The book is called Sustainable [R]evolution by Juliana Birnbaum and Louis Fox.

It's subtitle is 'Permaculture in Ecovillages, Urban Farms, and Communities Worldwide'.  The most notable thing for me about this book, which covers sixty projects, is how many amazing communities and projects that I know of that it doesn't cover.  None of the projects covered in the next three books that I plan to post on are covered in this book.  Neither is any of the communities in the Federation of Egalitarian Communities  (see my posts on Egalitarian Communities, 10/22/08, and Communities of Communities, 6/9/12) listed.  Nor are what I think of as two of the top eco-villages in the US, Dancing Rabbit (also see my posts on First Week at Dancing Rabbit, 5/28/13, and Thoughts as I Leave Dancing Rabbit, 6/14/13) and Earthaven. And one of the most amazing places outside of the US as far as I'm concerned, Gaviotas  is also not mentioned, although another place in Columbia (the Atlantida Ecovillage) has a listing.    At first I was disgruntled about all that they didn't include, but on second thought, I'm excited.  They have sixty projects and don't even include all the ones I just mentioned.  Maybe there is a ground up, worldwide [r]evolution happening.

There are a bunch of projects that I know of listed, although I wouldn't think of some of them as top tier.  Some of the better known include The Farm (in Tennessee), the Lama Foundation (in New Mexico), the LA Ecovillage (in California), the Ecovillage at Ithaca, New York, Growing Power (in Wisconsin), Findhorn (in Scotland), Tamera (Portugal), Damanhur (Italy), the Dead Sea Valley Permaculture Project (Jordan), Auroville (India), the Ladakh Project (India), and Melliodora (Australia), which is the farm run by David Holmgren, one of the founders of Permaculture.  I had also heard of most of the other North American projects, which included OUR Ecovillage (in British Columbia), the Bullock Homestead (in Washington state), City Repair (in Oregon), the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center (in California), and the Greater World Earthship Community (in New Mexico).  (Actually, I'd heard of the Earthships more than the community on that one.)  However, the entry that really surprised me was for The People's Grocery in California.    I've been there and blogged about it (see my post entitled Update 4: Eco-Oakland, Riveting Richmond, and Groovy SF, 10/18/12).  It's a great place and doing really important work, but I didn't think of it as being well known at all.

The book also includes a useful introductory section that goes into basic permaculture concepts and some points about how the book is organized.  I got it out of the library, but if you want to get a taste of what seems to be a growing worldwide movement, this is a good book to get.


Quote of the Day:  "At the time of this writing, hundreds of thousands of people worldwide have completed permaculture design courses, and the network continues to expand on the original ideas through thousands of related trainings, publications, garden projects, and internet forums.  There are projects in at least seventy-five countries in the world, and during the period we were doing the research for and writing this book, the number of these projects grew exponentially.  The approach is being used to design new sites, both urban and rural.  It is being applied by individuals and communities in existing towns and cities on every scale.  Permaculture design initiatives have achieved inspiring results, restoring degraded landscapes, reversing desertification, and creating self-sustaining food systems.  It includes hundreds of strategies that together begin to mitigate climate change, some directly drawing carbon out of the atmosphere through healthy soil-building cycles, no-plow farming methods, and tree planting." - Juliana Birnbaum

Soil Science

Now for a three part digression back to Science World. 

When I was at Dancing Rabbit, I discovered that they had a pretty good library.  I spent quite a bit of time there reading various books.  One thing they had a lot of were books on soil science.  (Which make a lot of sense since many people there were into growing food.)

As I was looking through the books, I realized that a lot of the things I'm interested in (composting--see my post Thinking in Circles, 1/6/13, humanure--see Humanure, 1/10/13, and growing food--see Gardening as Social Change, 5/7/10) were related to soil and that soil science was a very complex discipline involving the sciences of geology, botany, microbiology, ecology, and a lot of chemistry. (I will write more about chemistry in my next post.)   I've also written about extensively about soil and my interest in it before--see Food (Soil and Seeds), 5/13/09, and especially The Story of Soil, 3/13/10.  This post will be a recap of a lot of that.

Soil science begins with rock. Due to water and wind the rock is broken down or weathered.  The fractured rock becomes boulders, stones, cobble, and gravel.  This collection of loose mineral material is called 'regolith'.  This is the 'parent material' from which soil is born.

As even the gravel is pulverized, it's broken into the grains which become soil: sand, silt, and clay, each finer than the one before.  A soil of mostly clay won't drain water very well, a soil of mostly sand won't hold water and drains too quickly.  Loam, the best soil for growing things is 40% sand, 40% silt, and 20% clay.  (A little clay goes a long way.)

The most important element in the soil, both to hold water and for plant growth, is the organic matter, also known as humus.  This is the endpoint of things like compost and humanure.

About half of typical soil is solid material (sand, silt, clay, and humus) and half is air and water, which is also very important to the health of plants, since roots need to breath and take in water.  Pores in the soil (the spaces between soil particles) is where the water and air reside.

"Good structure allows the soil to retain adequate water as well as drain excess water; promotes ease of seedling emergence, root penetration, and tuber growth; air movement; and erosion control."  (from Eash, Green, Razvi, and Bennett, Soil Science Simplified, Fifth Edition--this is a good reference book on soil science that I got out of the public library and have been reading since I got back from Dancing Rabbit. It's not one of the books I read while I was there.)

There are also a lot of creatures that live in the soil, ranging from microorganisms such as bacteria, actinomycetes, algae, fungi, mycorrhizae (fungi that live in or around the roots of plants and provide nutrients and water for the plants), protozoa, and nematodes,  (a really good book about all of this is Teaming with Microbes by Jeff Lowenfels and Wayne Lewis, a book I did read while I was at Dancing Rabbit) to larger organisms such as earthworms, springtails, mites, pill bugs, sow bugs, ants, and even larger animals like mice, shrews, rabbits, and moles.

There's a lot more I'm learning about soil chemistry (see my next post), erosion, and types of soil, but this is the basics.  If we are going to focus on the needs of people (which I think any radical social change is going to need to do), we have to realize that plants provide our food and air and basically keep us alive.  Soil is what keeps plants alive.


Quote of the Day:  "The soil is the lifeblood of your land and, therefore, you." - Nicole Faires

Sandhill Farm

There once was a small village in northeast Missouri called Sandhill.  In
the 1960s it disappeared as it was incorporated in the town of Rutledge.
In the 1970s, four people (two couples) were searching for land to start a
commune and purchased a plot in Rutledge very near the Sandhill Cemetery
(which is still there).  They named the place Sandhill Farm.

It's still there nearly forty years later.  On Tuesday night last week,
there was a 'tri-community' dinner at Sandhill Farm and along with that,
we visitors to Dancing Rabbit, got a tour of the Sandhill community.  Of
the three communities here in Rutledge, this is the only one that's an
income sharing community.  Unlike Twin Oaks or Acorn, it sounds like the
income sharing procedure at Sandhill is rather informal.

Sandhill makes its income on what our tour guide called 'value-added
products'.   He mentioned honey and salsa and other products like that but
their biggest money maker is sorghum--which is used to make Sorghum Syrup, a natural sweetener popular in the midwest.  They produce about 800 gallons of the syrup a year  and sell it in Missouri, Illinois, Iowa,
Kansas, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.

The Sandhill community has never gotten very large.  They currently have
around six adults (and one child) and have had at most twelve adult
members.  They also (like the other two communities here) have a bunch of
interns and work exchangers.  Sandhill also participates in a lot of
interactions with Dancing Rabbit and Red Earth Farms.  To give one small
example, there are a bunch of maple trees at Dancing Rabbit and last year
someone tapped some of them and collected the sap.  Since there wasn't a
facility at DR to boil it down, they brought it to Sandhill which has a
'sugar shack' which they use mainly for the sorghum, but they also boil
down maple syrup.  Sandhill was glad to boil the syrup down for DR (and
they got paid in a small amount of the maple syrup).

A bigger example is that the very reason Dancing Rabbit is in Rutledge is
because Sandhill was here.  It's fascinating to watch the interactions of
the three communities and see how much they depend on each other. There's another way of living going on in Rutledge, MO, and Louisa County, VA.


Quote of the Day: "We envision Sandhill Farm as a stable, progressive,
fluid and vibrant community thriving in abundance. We prioritize building
and maintaining the health of our members, systems and facilities. We hope
to integrate more alternative energy, natural building, empowered health
care and self sufficiency in our lives. Sandhill Farm, in cooperation with
our friends and neighbors, will continue to expand and network a culture
of sustainable living in northeastern Missouri." - Sandhill's Vision
Statement

Update 3: Life on the Farm

I'm now finishing up my time at Acorn. (See my last post, Update 2: The Acorn Community, for more about Acorn.) Here I want to focus on what it's been like living here.

I'm a city boy. For example, I always thought of morning glory as a pretty flower that grows on people's fences. Here at Acorn I've been trying to wipe it out because the vines were taking over and strangling the melons and squash that are being grown. And onions have always been just onions to me and garlic just garlic. Here I have been packaging 'Alliums' and I've been learning about many different varieties of onions, garlic, shallots, and leeks. (My favorite are 'Egyptian Walking Onion' and a variety of garlic called 'Music'.) And packaging seeds has taught me about many heirloom varieties of vegetables, beans, and grains.

(Incidentally, correction from my last post. I was told by another Acorn member that we don't actually buy produce from local farmers--almost every vegetable served here is grown here--or dumpster dived. They spend very little money on food here--at least according to someone who works in the gardens.)

The land here is beautiful--fields and woods and old farm buildings. At night I go out and look at all the stars (many more than you can see in Boston). I've been living in a tent for over three weeks and it's been fine--it's been kind of nice to be outdoors so much. (Although I suspect I'll enjoy being indoors in a real bed once again.) I've also been making friends with the dogs and the goats that live here--and and harvesting beans and okra and watermelons. Pretty heady stuff for someone who has never really lived on a farm before.

Today a group of us went out to Living Energy Farm, a community that's starting up about ten miles from here--it's really wild and green out there. The land is recovering from being clear-cut and they've started building some simple structures on it, as well as growing lots of vegetables there. They have been very slowly building on the land since they bought it about two years ago and the buildings are still pretty primitive. I'm not sure anyone lives there full time and the LEF community is really only a couple of people and a bunch of volunteer help. Very much a work in progress. I intend to visit them again when I'm at Twin Oaks in November.

 And I don't think I've flushed a toilet since I've been out in Virginia. We're encouraged to pee in the woods here and they have composting toilets for creating 'humanure'. When I have used a regular toilet, I've followed the 'mellow yellow' rule. Truly we can live fairly simply here on the farm.


Quote of the Day: "Acorn Community is a rural community of people living on the same plot of land and managing business together. ... We will share our land, labor, income, and other resources equally or according to need. ... The members of Acorn Community will strive to live our lives in a way that supports the basic human rights of people here and in the rest of the world. ... The members of Acorn Community will attempt to live in a way that is gentle on the environment, attempting to show an example of how this can practically be done." - from Acorn's Mission Statement

Biology 101: Photosynthesis

Biologists define us humans, as well as almost all other animals, fungi, and even many bacteria as heterotrophs--which means we can't make our own food. Plants, algae, and cyanobacteria, on the other hand, are defined as autotrophs, or more specifically, photoautotrophs, which means that they make their own food from carbon dioxide, water, and sunlight.

We get our nutrition from plants. Even extreme carnivores who might eat nothing but meat really get their nutrition from plants--it's just that they get it by eating animals who eat plants, or even animals who eat animals who eat plants. This is what's meant by eating lower on the food chain. At the base of that chain is plants (and algae, etc).

In my last post (Cellular Respiration, 5/10/12), I talked about why we need oxygen and ended with the question: 'where does the oxygen come from?' From plants, of course. Plants and algae and cyanobacteria.

It's believed that Earth's original atmosphere was mostly methane, and the first organisms were anaerobic. Cynobacteria came along and began giving off oxygen, which triggered what is sometimes called the 'Great Oxygenation Event' or the 'Oxygen Catastrophe'--where some of the oxygen caused rust and mineral formation, some of the oxygen combined with the methane to form carbon dioxide, and some of the oxygen stayed in free form. This killed off much of the aerobic population and allowed the formation of oxygen breathing creatures.

Plants (etc) keep oxygen in the atmosphere and, as I said, feed us as well. In my last post I gave the formula: C6H12O6 + 6 O2 → 6 CO2 + 6 H2O, which means we take in glucose (and other carbohydrates) and oxygen and break them down into carbon dioxide and water. Photosynthesis allows plants to do the opposite, to take carbon dioxide and water and using the energy from sunlight, make them into glucose and oxygen. The formula for photosynthesis is the reverse: 6 CO2 + 6 H2O → C6H12O6 + 6 O2.

Photosynthesis is a two part operation. First the plant collects light using the 'light-dependent reactions', then it feeds the generated energy into what's called the Calvin cycle or even the 'dark reactions' (because light isn't needed for this).

So here's another question, similar to why do we need oxygen and where does the oxygen come from: Why are plants green?

Light, as you may know, is made of a spectrum of colors. We see black when something absorbs the entire spectrum of light, and we see white when something rejects (or reflects) the full spectrum. The spectrum goes from red to blue and purple--and apparently the colors at either end have the most useful energy for the plants. The plants look green to us because that's what's in the middle and what the plants can't use. The chloroplasts of the plants are filled with pigments that pull in the red and the blue and reflect back green (chlorophyll), as well as pigments that pull in other parts of the spectrum and reflect back yellow (xanthophyll) or orange (carotene)--this is why, when the chlorophyll disappears in the fall, leaves turn yellow or orange.

All of these pigments collect photons from the light and pass them to a 'Reaction Center' which uses the energy to excite electrons from the hydrogen in water (H2O) to send along an electron transport chain (similar to what I talked about in my last post). The protons are sent through various pumps and the oxygen is given off as a waste product. (Yes, this is the oxygen we breathe.) It also uses the energy from the electron transport and the proton powered pumps to create ATP and NADPH--which, as I explained in my last post, are just ways of storing energy.
The Calvin Cycle is sort of like the Krebs cycle in reverse. It takes in carbon dioxide and the reconstituted hydrogen from the electron transport system (and the energy from the ATP and NADPH created by the system) and uses them all to form sugars.

All this happens in the chloroplasts of plants. It also happens in the chloroplasts of algae. Something similar happens in cyanobacteria, but they don't have chloroplasts--in fact, the theory is that cyanobacteria were absorbed by the ancestors of plants and algae and became the chloroplasts.

Again, plants take in carbon dioxide and water and give off oxygen as well as creating sugars, starches, proteins, etc. We breathe in the oxygen and eat the nutrients from plants and breathe out carbon dioxide and pee out water--which is what the plants can use. Photosynthesis and cellular respiration are connected in a cycle that basically keeps the whole planet alive. This is why I think learning this stuff is important. As I heard someone once say, every time you breathe, you should thank a plant.

Quote of the Day: "On a global scale, the collective productivity of the minute chloroplasts is prodigious; it is estimated that photosynthesis makes about 160 billion metric tons of carbohydrates per year... No other chemical process on the planet can match the output of photosynthesis. And no other process is more important than photosynthesis for the welfare of life on Earth." - Neil Campbell and Jane Reece

Biology 101: Cellular Respiration

Take a deep breath. Now what just happened?

Okay, you took in air and the oxygen in it was absorbed by your lungs and travelled through your bloodstream to your cells. Now what? What do your cells want oxygen for?

Cells (as I put in my last post) are complex organisms, always in motion, always working. That work is powered by the mitochondia (also called 'the powerhouses of the cell'). The process of energy production that they do is called cellular respiration.

Cellular respiration is a process that converts a molecule of sugar (glucose)--or some other energy source: carbohydrate, protein, or fat--and six molecules of oxygen into six molecules of carbon dioxide and six molecules of water. (The chemical formula is C6H12O6 + 6 O2 → 6 CO2 + 6 H2O.) It actually consists of three processes: glycolysis, the citric acid cycle (aka the Krebs cycle), and something called oxidative phosphorylation (aka the electron transport chain).
Glycolysis is the process where glucose (or some other carbohydrate/protein/fat) is broken down into the chemical pyruvate. It takes place in the fluid of the cell (which is called the cytosol). This is done as a first step and is in itself a complex process that creates a small amount of energy in the form of molecules of ATP and NADH. Basically the cell uses these molecules as ways to store energy, sort of like little batteries that can be plugged in and used when energy is needed. Once glycolysis is complete a couple of things can happen.

The most likely (in our bodies, anyway) thing to happen next is that the pyruvate enters the citric acid cycle. This is a really complex circle of reactions that take the pyruvate and break it down into carbon dioxide and water. It takes place in the mitochondria in our cells and whether it happens or not is decided by whether there is oxygen available or not.

If there isn't oxygen available (either because this is happening in a muscle that can't get oxygen quickly enough or because we're talking about yeast or bacteria), alternatively cells can use fermentation, which creates a lot of waste products--lactic acid in the case of your muscles, and which is why they become sore after hard work, as well as what happens from the bacteria in yogurt, and alcohol in the case of yeast, and people drink the waste products.

Assuming that the citric acid cycle happens, a few more energy molecules (ATP, NADH, and FADH2) are created. But the real energy pay-off is from the third part of the respiration process. This is called oxidative phosphorylation which breaks down the hydrogen from the glucose (or whatever) into electrons and protons (which is all hydrogen is, an electron and a proton) and sends the electrons along an electron transport chain in the membrane of the mitochondrion (the singular of mitochonria) and pumps the protons back and forth through the membrane. The whole process of the electrons travelling along the transport system reminds me of electricity (ie, electrons flowing through a wire). And the process creates a whole lot of ATP, which is what powers all the work your cells do.

Now here's what keeps it going. At the end of that transport chain is a molecule of oxygen. Oxygen is, in this case, the electron acceptor--it's what attracts the electrons and keeps them flowing through the transport chain. I think of it almost like a magnet--it strongly attracts the electrons and keeps the whole thing running. When the electrons and protons arrive, they combine back to hydrogen and then combine with the oxygen to form water (H2O). Then you pee out the extra water (and breathe out the carbon dioxide created in the citric acid cycle).

I've quoted a couple of times the line that "you can only live 3 minutes without air, you can live 3 days without water, and you can live 3 weeks without food." (See Air, 5/7/09, and Water, 5/10/09.) We need water to keep everything fluid in our bodies. Here is why we need food and air. We need food for those molecules of glucose (etc) to start the process of cellular respiration. And we need air to supply the oxygen to finish the process of cellular respiration. And, as you can tell by the fact that we can make it three weeks without food, but only three minutes without air, we really need that oxygen.

So, now that you know why we need oxygen, another question is, where does the oxygen come from? That's the topic of my next post.

Quote of the Day: "...When your muscles are doing lots of work, they need lots of ATP. Your cells make ATP by doing cellular respiration. In order to make ATP, you need oxygen to accept electrons at your electron transport chain. So, as you use up your ATP in your muscles, you breathe faster to bring in more oxygen, so you can have more oxygen in you mitochondia to accept more electrons, to make more ATP. This is why you breathe.
"Everything you already knew about breathing, such as bringing oxygen to your lungs and having your red blood cells carry it around your body, is all true, but that's really more about how you get oxygen to your cells, not why your cells need it. The why is all about electron transport chains. Really. And if you're denied oxygen for some reason, you die because no oxygen = no final electron acceptor = no ATP = no cellular work = cells cease to function = death." - René Fester Kratz

Mycelium

At this point, what's going onto this blog is a mishmash of stuff I'm thinking about, stuff I've wanted to post for a while, stuff that just occurs to me, and random stuff I think might be useful. Among other things, I'm going through stuff I meant to put in the blog but somehow never did. This is a book review I wrote a long time ago and never posted.

Mycelium Running by Paul Stamets bears the subtitle "How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World". He isn't kidding; Paul Stamets believes that mushrooms and mycelium are the best means of saving the planet. I'm not quite as much of a fanatic about mushrooms (or any single 'solution') but reading this book has made me believe that mushrooms and mycelium should be an important part of rebuilding the world.

Mushrooms come from mycelia (the plural of mycelium) which are long, white, underground, threadlike cellular structures that run through the soil. The mycelia form a network through the earth that can grow as large as 2,400 acres, as was found in Oregon and dubbed the largest organism in the world.

These mycelial networks help explain things like 'fairy circles' where a perfect circle of mushrooms will grow in the woods. The explanation is that they are all interconnected by their mycelia. Mushrooms are often described as 'the fruiting bodies', (that is, the reproductive organs) of mycelia--they contain the spores that can be carried off by animals enjoying the mushrooms, thus helping to spread the mycelia.

The first chapter in the book is devoted to mycelial networks, comparing them to the connections in the brain and in the internet, and even dark matter in the universe. It seems a bit much but the accompanying photographs show how similar the patterns of these various things are. From there Stamets goes into the life cycle of mushrooms and the various types of mushrooms. He discusses the medicinal use of mushrooms and devotes an entire section to what he terms 'Mycorestoration', using mushrooms and mycelia to restore the world through filtering out toxins, remediation of poisoned soil, helping to grow back forests, and even to develop natural pesticides. The final section of the book concentrates on how to grow mycelia and mushrooms--with a last chapter of the book on 'Nutritional Properties of Mushrooms'.

Like I said, this book didn't convert me to mycofanaticism but it did make me aware of the contributions that mycelia make to the ecosystem. If you want to enrich your ecological awareness or perhaps just want to know how to grow mushrooms, this is a great book to look through.

Quote of the Day: "There are more species of fungi, bacteria, and protozoa in a single scoop of soil than there are species of plants and vertebrate animals in all of North America. And of these, fungi are the great recyclers of our planet, the mycomagicians disassembling large organic molecules into simpler forms, which in turn nourish other members of the ecological community. ...
"Since most insects are fungus loving and are excited by spores, they appear as mushrooms ripen and overmature. Vertebrates from squirrels to bears to people seek mushrooms as food. Bacteria use rotting mushrooms as a rich base for growth, further freeing nutrients and releasing a cascade of microbes that destroy the structure of mushrooms as they melt into the soil. This bacterial influx predisposes habitats for the emergence of plant communities. Ultimately, nature fosters complex partnerships of interdependence...
"Nature loves communities." - Paul Stamets

Survival Resources 4: Foraging

The way most people know to get food is by shopping. A step more basic, and one that certainly will help with survival, is to grow food yourself. But, even more basic than that, and more useful in a crisis, is the ability to find edible plants in the wild--or even on your own lawn.

Ironically, it turns out that many of the weeds we dig out of our gardens are not only edible, but very nutritious. Dandelions, lamb's quarters, and purslane, for example, have a higher nutrition content than many of the garden vegetables.

If food becomes scarce, knowing how to forage could be lifesaving. Other useful plants to know include burdock root, groundnuts (apparently groundnuts kept the Pilgrims alive through their first winter in North America--although I've also heard that this wasn't through foraging; they may have stolen a supply the natives had harvested), watercress, chickweed, and curled/curly dock. Cattails and bulrushes, found in swamps, have edible parts. Most seaweed (for those who live near the ocean) is also edible. A lot of unusual things are also edible--the shoots of Japanese knotweed, the leaves of linden trees, and even parts of Stinging Nettle (but be careful while harvesting!).

Some useful books on foraging (at least if you live in North America):

Roger Tory Peterson and Lee Peterson, Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants: Eastern and Central North America

Gregory Tilford, Edible and Medicinal Plants of the West

Thomas Elias and Peter Dykeman, Edible Wild Plants: A North American Field Guide

Steve Brill with Evelyn Dean, Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants in Wild (and Not So Wild) Places

Sam Thayer, A Forager's Harvest: A Guide to Identifying, Harvesting and Preparing Edible Wild Plants

and, of course, the Euell Gibbons books, starting with Stalking the Wild Asparagus

Your local library may have many of these books. I also want to single out two very local Boston area/New England books that I have found useful: Russ Cohen, Wild Plants I Have Known... and Eaten, and David Craft, Urban Foraging.

Matthew Stein, When Technology Fails (see my post, SR2: When Technology Fails, 12/13/10), has a couple of nice little sections on foraging. (It was also my source for many of the books listed above.) And Toby Hemenway, Gaia's Garden (featured in my post on Gardens, 11/19/09), has a bit of information on edible weeds.

But now it's winter, here in New England. This is a challenge--what can you forage now? A friend of mine called Russ Cohen with this question and his basic answer was, not much. His big recommendation was cattails--the sprouts near the base of the stalk are available all year round and the roots pack quite a bit of starch in them during the winter. Matthew Stein advises pine needles (which have a lot of vitamin C) and the inner bark of trees--especially aspens, birch, willows, slippery elm, tamarack, maples, spruces, pines, and hemlocks.

Okay, so here's a question. It's the middle of a snowy New England winter, and you want to find a maple to check out the inner bark. How do you know which tree is a maple?

That's what I'll look at in my next post.


Quote of the Day: "Foraging will greatly sharpen your observational skills as you begin to take note of factors that influence when and where the wild edibles can be found. You will learn to keep closer track of the seasons of the year, weather forecasts and patterns, and plants that share similar habitats. After a while, you may develop a sort of 'sixth sense' for foraging. One day, while walking a trail, you will pick up clues that an edible plant you are looking for is likely to be nearby. You'll go around a bend in the trail and, sure enough, there it is." - Russ Cohen

Going Organic

With all I've written about food and growing things, it's a bit strange that I haven't written specifically about organic agriculture until now.

For some reason, growing food organically is generally perceived as a bit exotic. It's often differentiated from 'conventionally grown' produce, a name that makes it sound like using tons of pesticides and chemical fertilizer was the way things had always been grown. In fact, organic gardening is really the most basic way of growing anything, and the way that food was always grown until recently. It's probably the way that you would grow vegetables in your yard if you were just starting out. It's generally about planting seeds, watering, and occasion weeding or other simple plant care.

There are lots of problems with 'conventional agriculture'. First of all, pesticides and chemical fertilizers are made from oil. And with a future where oil might be harder to come by (see my posts on Peak Oil, 7/18/08, Peak Everything, 7/20/08, and Collapse, 7/5/10), I think organic gardening is more than just a tradition from the past; it's likely to be the wave of the future as well.

Also, pesticides are dangerous. A recent study linked pesticide exposure in mothers to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in their children. There have also been studies about the harmful effects of pesticides on children and farmworkers. In addition there is an enormous impact on the environment.

And chemical fertilizers don't help the environment either. They have been been implicated in eutrophication and can actually damage the plants if too much fertilizer is added.

While apparently there hasn't been a lot of difference found between conventional and organic produce in term of nutritional quality, there is a lot of difference in terms of its effect on the environment and farmworkers.

Occasionally there's a choice that needs to be made between buying organic food trucked in from far away and buying locally, grown non-organic food. If I really have to make a choice, I'd probably go with the local but not organic. But buying food that's local and organic is so much better. And if oil supplies get tight, we may not have much choice anyway. We might as well eat local and organic as much as we can now and prepare for how we'll be eating tomorrow.


Quote of the Day: "The foundation of the chemical agriculture and chemical fertilizer industry rests on the assumption that what a plant removes from the soil can be analyzed and replaced in chemical form. Though this would seem to be a logical assumption, it fails to take into account the complex biological processes and mechanisms through which the chemical transactions are performed, processes and mechanisms aided by finely tuned and highly specialized living organisms whose operations cannot be duplicated or even completely understood. In general, the use of synthetic fertilizers short-term rapid growth for long-term gain in structure and soundness." - Deborah Martin and Grace Gershuny

Scarcity and Abundance

In my last post (Win/Win), I wrote about needing an Abundance Mentality and quoted Stephen Covey on the difference between 'the Scarcity Mentality' and 'the Abundance Mentality'. Yet I was aware as I wrote it that six posts earlier I wrote about impending collapse. (See Collapse, 7/5/10, for more on this.) How can I talk about having an Abundance Mentality when I've just said that affluence is over, we've passed not only 'peak oil' but 'peak everything' (for more on this, see my posts on Peak Oil, 7/18/08, and Peak Everything, 7/20/08), and the economy is slowly collapsing?

I think that the big question is what kind of 'abundance' and what kind of 'scarcity' are we talking about? In my post on Peak Everything I mentioned that Richard Heinberg sees declines in not only oil, and coal, and uranium, but "population, grain production, arable land, wild fish harvests, fresh water, climate stability, and yearly extraction of copper, zinc, platinum, silver, and gold". But he also points out that there are things that aren't going to peak, such as "community, cooperation, ingenuity, artistry, ... intergenerational solidarity, personal autonomy, leisure time, happiness..." In fact, some of these things may increase, if having less material goods means we decide spend less time trying to accumulate stuff and social status, and more time building relationships. What I referred to as 'the Four Gardeners of the Great Turning' (Love, Compassion, Joy, and Serenity) and 'Their Four Offspring' (Patience, Forgiveness, Generosity, and Healing) will not be affected by peak oil, climate change, or economic crisis. (See my posts The Four Gardeners, 2/14/10, and And Their Four Offspring, 2/24/10.) An Abundance Mentality sees all these things as overflowing.

And why not? In some ways these are more important than many material things and we really won't run out of them.

This is not to say that there aren't material things that we do need. I spent months last year trying to enumerate our real needs. (See my series of posts on Needs, beginning with Looking at Needs, 5/4/09, and ending with Our Needs: One Last Look, 9/19/09.) Take food for example. Many writers see food shortages coming as the oil that fuels our transportation system (not to mention the fertilizers, pesticides, and tractors many farmers use to grow the food) begins getting more and more expensive. Yet we could prioritize growing food and there are lots of possible ways we could make sure everyone gets fed. (See for example my posts on Feeding Ourselves in the Future, 7/24/08, Food (Soil and Seeds), 5/13/09, and Biointensive, 2/10/10.)

Gandhi claimed that, “Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed.” And this may be the real point. Having an Abundance Mentality isn't the same as trying to get more, more, more. Having an Abundance Mentality is really more about being satisfied with what we have and what we really need, and working to make sure that everybody gets what they need. Love isn't going to run out--in fact, as Malvina Reynolds puts it: "Love is something if you give it away, You end up having more." And we can have an abundance of material things as well, if we make our needs few and we are willing to share. And much of what is going to become scarce is things we don't really need anyway: McMansions, SUVs, giant screen TVs and home entertainment centers, etc.

I think that cultivating an Abundance Mentality begins when you realize what real abundance is.


Quote of the Day: "Our terrible affluence is at the root of your current crisis. Somehow most people in the rich world have gotten the impression that we're not here to care about others or do good work but to get 'ahead' and accumulate stuff. Most of our energy use goes to make us a bit more comfortable, not to meet essential needs. Perhaps the most important work we can do is to distinguish between wants and needs, and to find something besides consumption to value and put at the center of our lives. My suggestion is that we put our hope for the future there, and begin to live our lives as though we hold the world--and our particular piece of it--in trust for future generations." - Sharon Astyk

RUST

This past weekend I took the Radical Urban Sustainability Training (also known as RUST) offered at the Radix Ecological Sustainability Center in Albany, New York, by Scott Kellogg, Stacy Pettigrew, and Juniper Lauren Ross. It was an amazing educational experience, almost too much to take in during one weekend.

We looked at food systems, including 'urban agro-forestry' where I learned about fruits and nuts I'd never heard of that Scott said would grow in the northeast US: pawpaws, hardy kiwi, gooseberries, and hazelberts; 'aquaculture'; and urban chickens and goats; water systems, including an overview of global fresh water issues; rainwater harvesting; and greywater and constructed wetlands; and waste treatment issues, including 'humanure' and composting toilets; bioremediation by low-tech methods using plants, compost, compost tea, etc; and several types of composting, including cold composting, hot composting, worm composting, and using soldier flies. I took miniworkshops on testing water and soil, and alternative sources of power, including wind turbines, passive solar, rocket stoves, and biofuels. A man named Travis also came by to discuss gentrification with us, and offered some useful insights.

As I said, a bit much. I am going to be digesting all that I learned for a while. I'm hoping to get to use some of what I learned over the next little while as well. Still, I think that I might take the Training again--there's an unbelievable amount of information in it.

The next training is going to be the weekend of October 2nd & 3rd. That's too soon for me, but I'd recommend it--especially if you read the Toolbox for Sustainable City Living book first. Then you might have some sense of what all the stuff that is thrown at you is all about.

Quote of the Day: "We need to build a society ... that can meet human needs while simultaneously increasing ecosystem health." - Scott Kellogg

Feeding Each Other

Last week, one of my housemates had a guest at dinner, a young woman who lives and works down south. She was involved with lots of social justice projects, many involving food. At the end of the meal, she made a comment (which I saw as both a reference to the meal and a reference to her work) about how nice it was that we got to 'feed each other'.

Last Friday, I got to be part of helping with a meal prepared by Hearty Meals for All, a group in Somerville, MA, that serves nutritious meals to whomever comes in. Earlier this month, I also helped with a meal prepared by some of the local co-ops for a homeless coalition. I've talked a lot about food as one of our most basic needs. (See for example my posts on Feeding Ourselves in the Future, 7/24/08, and Food (Soil and Seeds), 5/13/09.) Most of my post have been about growing food (most recently Kale, Carrots, and Chard, 3/17/10, and Gardening as Social Change, 5/7/10) but there is something to the idea of just feeding people, particularly those who need it.

When I lived up in Brattleboro a few years ago, I was part of their annual tradition of preparing a Thanksgiving dinner for everyone in the town who wanted to come. Homeless folks wandered in and I've heard that former Bratt residents drove in from New York in their Volvos and Saabs. Volunteers brought meals to housebound folks as well as people (like police and firefighters) who needed to work that day. I enjoyed every minute of it.

I have been inspired by two groups that combine a radical (pretty much anarchist) analysis of society with the work of serving others: Food Not Bombs (the Boston Chapter is having its 30th anniversary celebration soon) and the Catholic Worker Movement (our local affiliate is Haley House). Few people would lump these two groups together but I see them as very similar in spite of the fact that one is a secular group and the other is very spiritually oriented.

I believe that we need to make sure that everyone is getting their real needs met and one of the most basic of those needs is food. Growing food is essential, but feeding each other is wonderful.


Quote of the Day: "There is a lot that happens around the world we cannot control. We cannot stop earthquakes, we cannot prevent droughts, and we cannot prevent all conflict, but when we know where the hungry, the homeless and the sick exist, then we can help." - Jan Schakowsky

Gardening as Social Change

One bored day last month, I did something that I haven't done in a long time. I opened the paper and read the comics page. And I almost dropped it. I'm talking about The Boston Globe, a fairly mainstream paper. And there on the comics page is a character trudging water to his garden, muttering "No more fast food! No more processed junk! No more factory farming! No more corporate monopoly!" (Jimmy Johnson, Arlo & Janis, 4/13/10) I couldn't have put it better myself.

When most people think about gardening, they hardly see it as a radical activity. It's often viewed as a harmless way to get a little fresh food. But it is also a direct counter to the food industry, a way to move from supporting Agribusiness to growing our own and taking care of ourselves. And, if the peak oil folks are anywhere near correct, it's preparation for a future where we will all be growing our own food.

Richard Heinberg predicts that there will be 'fifty million farmers' in the future. (See my post on Peak Everything, 7/20/08.) Sharon Astyk and Aaron Newton have written a book called A Nation of Farmers that argues the only way we will be able to keep our families from going hungry as food crises continue will be by growing food. They further argue that any real equality can only come about when we live simply, and that means (among other things) growing our own food.

This is why I have been writing posts on Permaculture (see my posts of 7/22/08, 11/19/09, and 12/24/09 for more on Permaculture), Biointensive Gardening (see my post, Biointensive, 2/10/10), Soil (in my posts of 5/13/09 and 3/13/10), and even Kale, Carrots, and Chard (3/17/10). Food is one of the most basic of our needs. Someone needs to grow the food, since we need food to live, and the question is--will it be Agribusiness or you? I strongly believe in supporting farmers, in CSAs and Farmer's Markets and Food Cooperatives, but I think that soon we will all need to contribute to feeding ourselves--and others. It can start with a little plot in the backyard (if you have a backyard), or at a community garden, or even doing container gardening, but we might as well all get started gardening now. This is a small but important step toward a future where we feed each other. And, I think it would be good to begin learning now, because if there is a food crisis coming, that is not going to be a good time for learning.


Quote of the Day: "...most rich world denizens would prefer not to live in a society with a high degree of equity, since this means a major shift in their wealth. Most Americans, quite reasonably have no desire to live on $2-$5 per day with 9 billion other similarly poor people. Now that $2 a day figure is a bit misleading—it can cover a surprising range of life situations, from the hellaceous to the pretty comfortable. ...if you live on a small farm and grow almost all the food you eat, produce the heating and cooking fuel you need and need just a little money, you might not have such a tough time." - Aaron Newton and Sharon Astyk

Kale, Carrots, and Chard

My attempts last year at gardening were less than successful. A housemate nutured some kale and chard plants that I wanted until they were seedlings and we planted them outside. I watered and weeded them, but the chard died and the kale never grew. Like some sort of Peter Pan plant, these little green things didn't grow up. In fact, contrary to everything I understood about biology, the tiny kale plants never grew or died but just stayed same size they were when we transplanted it. Eventually, as the weather got colder, I transplanted them again and brought the kale inside. I would have thought they were plastic or some other type of artificial plants, but they did orient themselves to the sun whenever I turned them. Finally, I harvested the little things and ate them as part of a salad.

This year I am resolving to learn everything about the three plants I want to grow. I am limiting it to three, figuring that I need to really learn how to grow just three plants, and grow them well, before expanding my repetoire. So this year I am concentrating on meeting the needs of kale, carrots, and chard.

Because it would be useful for me to have this information stored this way, and because, who knows, someone may want to raise kale or carrots or chard or all three, I'm going to write down what I have learned so far about each vegetable. (All three are, as it turns out, frost hardy biennials.)

Kale: a member of the Cabbage/Brassica family. A heavy feeder. Likes 'fertile, fine-textured soil'--pH 6.5-7.0; develops best in 'deeply prepared, loamy soil'. Prepare soil with manure, compost, mulch. Prefers cool weather and doesn't like hot weather--taste improves with frost. Can do multiple plantings (planting season around Boston: March 20-April 10 & July 1st thru August 1st). It can follow any other vegetable except another Brassica. You can keep harvesting it by pulling off just the outer leaves.

Carrots: a member of the Parsley family. Wants full sun but can stand partial shade. A light feeder. Likes light soil, a 'sandy loam free from lumps and stones'. One source claims carrots need pH 5.5-7.0; another suggests a pH>6.5; develops best in 'loose friable deeply dug soil free from stones and dirt clods'. (Stones, etc, cause mishapen carrots but one source suggests that halfsized carrots can be grown in rocky soil.) Don't start indoors--carrots don't transplant well. (Although another book suggests that they can be sprouted like any sprout--see my post of 2/26/10 on 'Sprouts!'--and then sprinkle sprouts over bed and cover.) Seed to harvest in 10 weeks. Planting season in Boston: April 1st-July 20th. Seeds can be sown every 3 weeks from early spring until two and a half months before the first frost. Water frequently and keep ground moist at all times--especially in hot weather. Need constant moisture until almost fully mature, then slow up so they don't split. They like phosphate and potassium but not too much nitrogen. Final harvest mid to late autumn.

Chard: a member of the Goosefoot family (related to beets). Does best in full sun, but can grow in partial shade. A light feeder. Does well with almost any soil but likes lots of humus. Again, one source says it needs a pH>6.5 while another says it will grow in pH 6.0 to 7.5 (not that they are that different). Apparently chard is a very deep rooted plant so it's useful where the subsoil requires aeration. Can be started indoors; keep soil warm (70F) until sprouted. Move to full sun as soon as first shoots appear. Seed to harvest in 8 weeks. Planting season in Boston: April 1st-July 20th. Will produce greens through the summer and into winter (but cover with a deep layer of straw or mulch). Three different books give three different advice on harvesting: 1) Carefully cut off outer leaves at stem by plant base with sharp knife when leaves are 6-9 inches tall; small, inner leaves will continue to grow. 2) Pull leaves off the plant, cutting causes bleeding; take just a few leaves from the outside of the plant, leaving remainder to grow. 3) Harvest by cutting to an inch above the ground and fertilize after harvesting; they will quickly regrow. The majority of the sources suggest pulling off the outer leaves so that's probably what I'll do.

I should report at some point later on how the plants actually do. Maybe if I do better growing kale, chard, and carrots this year, I will try raising a few more vegetables next year.

There is a church near me that has a corner flower garden with a plaque that reads: "We come from the earth, we return to the earth, and in between we garden." It's a good reminder.

Sources:
Mel Bartholomew, Square Foot Gardening
James Crockett, Crockett's Victory Garden
Geoff Hamilton, DK Pocket Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening
Organic Gardening Magazine,Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening
Dick Raymond, Garden Way's Joy of Gardening

Quote of the Day: "My philosophy is that a garden should be in production for as long as possible, from early spring into the winter. This means working all year long, preparing the soil in the fall, ordering the seeds and planning the garden in the winter, getting the seedlings started in January, and planting and harvesting all through the growing season." - Jim Crockett

The Story of Soil

As winter becomes spring, I am thinking more about growing food. One of the things I have been studying is soil. Last spring, I wrote a post on 'Food (Soil and Seeds)' (5/13/09). In some respects, this post is a continuation of that one. Here I am going to concentrate on soil science.

The story of soil is the story of the earth, so I will begin with the cosmic view. After the big bang, the universe slowly formed into lots of space with giant 'clouds' of hydrogen (and a little bit of helium) floating about. As the hydrogen atoms began attracting each other, they began condensing and getting denser and denser, until the atoms in the center got so squished that they began fusing and giving off massive amounts of heat and forming stars. All elements we know, other than hydrogen and helium, have been formed in the fiery furnace at a star's core, and thus Joni Mitchell is right, we are all 'stardust'--and so is almost everything else on earth. When these stars went nova, they flung their contents out into space in giant explosions. Slowly these fragments formed new stars and planets (including earth).

Earth cooled to a huge mass of rock, with an atmosphere, and lots of water. Life emerged, and modified the atmosphere and the rock. (See my post on 'Gaia', 1/3/10, for more on how life modified the atmosphere.) The atmosphere and water also modified the rock, breaking it down into pebbles, and then sand and dust. The surface of the moon, and many of the planets, is like this.

But life crawled out of the oceans, and died. And more life crawled out, and died. And this happened again and again and again. And as more life crawled onto the shore, it began feeding on the remains of earlier life, and transforming it. Slowly, the debris of life became humus, the main component of soil.

Soil science is truly an interdisciplinary venture. It combines geology, chemistry, and many branches of biology: botany, zoology, microbiology, and ecology. The rock of the earth is buried in most places under the soil and called bedrock. Above that is a section of loose rock called 'regolith' or the 'parent material'. Above that is the subsoil and the topsoil. Soil is a mixture of three types of rock particle (in order of decreasing size: sand, silt, and clay) and humus which is the decomposed remains of plants and animals, now an amorphous, almost gell-like, substance. Sand, silt, and clay in the right proportions is called loam and loam plus humus create a healthy soil structure called tilth.

The chemistry of soil is where things get interesting. Rocks are made up of many elements combined into minerals. The earth's crust contains roughly 47% oxygen, 28% silicon, 8% aluminum, 5% iron, 4% calcium, 3% sodium, 3% potassium, 2% magnesium, and less than 2% everything else (combined). The chemical needs of plants (and really most living things) are (in roughly decending order): carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, potassium, nitrogen, sulfur, calcium, iron, magnesium, boron, manganese, copper, zinc, molybdenum, chlorine, nickel, and cobalt.

The first thing that seems to join these two lists is high placement of oxygen--but, as it turns out, plants don't get much of their oxygen from the soil. It's also obvious that although much of the rock, and indeed the soil, consists of what is called aluminosilicates (minerals made of silicon, oxygen, and aluminum), living things don't use silicon or aluminum (except in reconstructive surgery). (Okay, I take that back--I just found out that corn, as well as some other plants, benefit from silicon.)

Plants get their carbon from the carbon dioxide in the air, the hydrogen and oxygen from water, and the nitrogen from the atmosphere--but indirectly. It's everything else on the plant list that comes from the rock via the soil. The minerals--calcium, iron, potassium, phosphorus, sulfur, magnesium, etc--come from the breakdown of rock due to weathering. This releases ions which are attracted to the clay and humus and passed on from there to the plant via its root system. For example, phosphorus comes from a mineral called apatite and magnesium comes from minerals like serpentine and dolomite--all part of the rocks.

But, as I mentioned in my previous post on soil, soil is more than just rocks and chemicals. It is more than even sand, silt, clay, and humus. It is a living entity, filled with living creatures. Take for example how plants get nitrogen. Unlike carbon dioxide and oxygen, which it can breath in directly, all the nitrogen in the atmosphere is not in a state that can be used by plants. However there are bacteria that can take nitrogen from the air and use it directly. Some of these bacteria (called rhizobia) live in a symbiotic relationship to certain plants, particularly the legumes, as part of their roots. Other bacteria change the nitrogen from protein to ammonia which other bacteria change to nitrite ions and still other bacteria change to nitrate ions. It's the nitrate ions that are absorbed by the plants after all the work of the bacteria.

Soil is just teaming with life, some of it microscopic (besides bacteria, there are algae, a specialized bacteria called actinomycetes, protozoa, and fungi with its microscopic mycelia), some of it worm-like (including the earthworms and the nematodes), some of it arthopod (including springtails, mites, and insects such as ants and termites), and some of it is full fledged mammals (like moles and mice and groundhogs).

At the end of my post 'Food (Soil and Seeds)', I closed with a quote from Elaine Ingham which I will repeat here: "Agricultural soil should have 600 million bacteria in a teaspoon. There should be approximately three miles of fungal hyphae in a teaspoon of soil. There should be 10,000 protozoa and 20 to 30 beneficial nematodes in a teaspoon of soil. ...
"There should be roughly 200,000 microarthopods in a square meter of soil to a 10-inch depth. All these organisms should be there in a healthy soil." When I used this quote, I had no idea who Elaine Ingham was. Elaine Ingham runs a group called Soil Foodweb Inc that may be the premier group looking at life in the soil. She wrote the Soil Biology Primer, which is an incredibly detailed overview of soil life and is available to read for free on the web courtesy of the Natural Resources Conservation Service. She also wrote the The Compost Tea Brewing Manual, a classic about how to add life to the soil.

This is just a tidbit of what soil is all about. Think of all that complexity the next time you garden--or even just walk on the earth.


Sources:
Milo Harpstead, Francis Hole, and William Bennett, Soil Science Simplified
David Lambert and the Diagram Group, The Field Guide to Geology
James Nardi, Life in the Soil
Elizabeth Stell, Secrets to Great Soil
and, of course, Wikipedia

Quote of the Day: "I've never outgrown a child's simple love of dirt. It has continued to fascinate me since those early days of mud pies and simple earthworks. After studying it at the university level I learned to respect its complexity and call it soil. Years of gardening work have taught me how resilient it is. The more I learn about soil, the more marvelous and magical it seems." - Elizabeth Stell