We started our onions recently. Having gardened in northern New England for years, we didn't realize that around here onion seedlings can go into the field during the fall and overwinter there quite satisfactorily.  So we reckon this will be our last January onion-starting, and are happy enough for it, since it means we can shift one early spring task into the fall.  And you can get a little lonesome for baby plants come October.

We are precisionist gardeners (assuming the term's not an oxymoron).  This is due in part to temperament, perhaps--we're both pretty organized and like to have a handle on things, to the extent possible.  But it's also a function of our having adopted intensive bed methodology.  That is, instead of cultivating (plowing up and preparing for planting) large swatches of ground and then growing plants in single rows laid at intervals across that ground, we cultivate beds--3' to 5' wide, and 50' long--and then grow plants in close spacing in those beds.  You can find angles on intensive bed growing under various search terms, e.g. "intensive bed gardening," "square foot gardening," "French intensive," "biointensive," and "biodynamic."  "Permaculture" is kind of different in its emphases, but still well within the philosophical family.  In any case, we aren't particular about terminology at Betsy's Farm.  For us, John Jeavons at Ecology Action illustrates a pinnacle of this type of gardening...but there are surely many others!

The intensive method begins with how we start the seeds in flats.  This slide show tells that tale, and is followed by a few comments about seeds.

So...a bit about seeds.  It's a big topic, and we'll come back to it in later posts.  I'm not given to hyperbole, but feel warranted in considering the seed to be a natural miracle.  I call it that with due apology to David Hume, one of the philosophers I admire most. "Violation of the laws of nature" is fundamental to an event's being a miracle, for Hume--hence a "natural miracle" would be a perfect oxymoron in his view.  Nevertheless, a seed is just that.  Enclosed in all compactness is the information, protection, nutrition, and (as needed) transportation for a new living plant.  Seeds have evolved to drift on the breeze, float on the water, and hitch rides on (or in) passers-by.  They can spring into action or bide their time.  A seed can remain viable for a really long time--note the recent coaxing into planthood of 32,000-year-old seed material in Russia.  They can hide, or they can stand out--whichever serves better.  They are manifestly lacking a brain, but know far better what to do than many a brain-bearing human being.

Seeds come in many kinds.  In gardening circles, a specific distinction in kinds is garnering ever-more intensive discussion: "open-pollinated" versus "hybrid."  You can find a nice explanation of the two types here.  You'll note that, in this particular onion planting session, we were using an F1 (first generation) hybrid seed.  Organic certification requires that one use organic seeds--meaning they came from organically-grown plants--unless the variety you need isn't commercially available in organic.  But it's agnostic with respect to open-pollinated vs. hybrid.  Either can be organically produced.  On our farm, we've tended to be agnostic on that particular as well, although we do save certain seeds ourselves, and that can only be done with open-pollinated varieties.  But there are wonderful folks in the small-farming world who argue pretty vigorously for open-pollinated seeds as the right choice.  Bountiful Gardens (a project of Jeavons's Ecology Action) and Sow True Seed (based up the road in Asheville) are exemplars.  Southern Exposure Seed Exchange handles only a very few hybrids.  Down at the other end of the progressive-seed-selling spectrum, there are great outfits like Seeds of Change, Johnny's Selected Seeds, and Fedco.  While featuring organic seeds cultivated on small farms, they hold hybrids in the same warm, world-saving embrace as open-pollinateds.

On our farm, we've been thinking a bit more about hybrid seeds lately, and wondering if we ought to nudge our way farther toward the open-pollinated purist end of the spectrum.

And, on another spectrum altogether we find genetically-modified seed, currently excluded from organic certification and the good lights of progressive gardeners all over the place.  Currently, that is.  GM seed is well beyond being the way of the future, it is the way of the present in large sectors of world agriculture.  More on the great seed debates in a near-future post.  Right now, it's time to get back to double-digging, lest those onion seedlings have no garden ground to grow in come spring

_ We made our first batch of potting soil this week.  Like lots of small farmers, we start our plants in greenhouses (or windowsills!) to have young plants ready for planting outdoors as soon as frost danger has passed.  This means you need potting soil, and although good quality potting soils suitable for organic production are on the market, we prefer make our own.  It’s a control thing.  We have ideas about how things ought to be, and taking a do-it-yourself approach helps ensure that the farm we make resembles the ideas we have.

It is also, arguably, a sustainability thing.  “Sustainability” is many-splendored, but we can anchor ourselves in the definition of “sustainable development” from the 1987 Brundtland Commission report, entitled “Our Common Future,” and published in 1987: “sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”  Over the interceding 25 years this has been elaborated upon in numerous ways.  Sustainability is now generally recognized as having three pillars—environmental quality, economic vitality, and social equity (this “triple bottom line” often appears as environment, economy, and equity; also as planet, profits, and people).  “Meeting needs” is sometimes re-construed as “flourishing” or “continuing to evolve.”  Metrics and indices have come online.  Sustainability is a rapidly-growing academic specialty.  And so forth.

So here is a look at our potting soil with sustainability in mind.  We began a few years back with Eliot Coleman’s blocking soil mix from The New Organic Grower, and have revised it in light of our experience.  Our recipe has two components: the base, and the fertilizer mix.

    Potting Soil Mix
    30 units peat moss
    20 units sand (or perlite)
    20 units compost (or worm castings)
    10 units garden soil
    1/8 unit limestone
    3/4 unit fertilizer mix

    And here’s the fertilizer mix:
    1 unit feathermeal (or other nitrogen source, e.g. alfalfa meal, cottonseed meal)
    1 unit Tennesse Brown phosphate
    1 unit kelp meal
    1 unit Menefee humates_

_
Let’s start with peat moss.  It is a natural substance, needing no lab synthesis.  Horticulturally, it a light, weed-free medium, making a nice home for germinating seeds and tender young plants.  When seedlings are transplanted into our garden beds the potting soil comes with them; the peat moss leavens the clay, encouraging the bug, worm and microbial life so beneficial to gardening soils.

However, peat moss production entails destruction or degredation of peat bogs.  Peat bogs are slow-developing bits of biota—they lay on about .03” per year, and most in existence today (ranging from 3 to 30+ feet deep) formed over the 15,000 years since the last Ice Age.  A typical harvesting method involves ditching and draining to dry upper layers, milling and loosening of the upper layers, and then vacuuming them off.  How long the ditching and drying takes will vary, but with diesel-powered hydraulic machinery and vacuum harvesters that can suck 4” off 100 acres in a day, rest assured it goes at an astonishing pace relative to the pace of the peat’s production in the first place.  So we see why peat bog harvesting is often called “mining.” 

Peat bogs play locally important roles in biodiversity and water quality and, globally, they sequester enormous amounts of carbon dioxide.  The approximately 5% of global terrestrial surface occupied by peat bogs is estimated to contain about one third of terrestrial carbon.  So, as peat bogs are dessicated and destroyed (as is happening quickly—all natural peat bogs in the Netherlands and Poland are now gone; they are nearly gone in Switzerland, Germany and the U.K.; they are rapidly going in Eastern Europe, etc.) they dump loads of carbon dioxide, a key greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere.

_
Now, our peat moss comes from Canada. Canadian peat moss production is often described as sustainable, because of national and industrial regulations and practices controlling the harvest process.  The Canadian process involves setting bogs aside for preservation and recording their flora and fauna; leaving buffer zones and leaving unharvested layers of peat moss; and post-harvest ecological restoration.  It appears that this does substantially retard the rate of bog loss. 

Or, maybe not.  Once their hydrology and living physiology has been so substantially disrupted, it is unclear whether they can be restored to a substantially similar condition.

And of course rate of bog loss is only one consideration.  Greenhouse emissions and waste production is implicated all along the chain, from harvest to packaging to transport.  As we see in this lively discussion within the gardening community quite a few gardeners figure locally available stuff like compost, leaf mould, and rotted wood chips is preferable.

There are debates to be had about other components of the base, such as the sand and limestone.  While their source materials are quite abundant, significant mining, refinement (including combustion) and transportation is necessary to get bags of them into our Vanagon.  Any of those processes, depending on how they happen, is subject to critique as causing environmental damage or social inequity

_
The fertilizer mix component of our potting soil raises further questions.  Like most folks who grow produce for sale, we add nitrogen to our soils.  The nitrogen sources for our potting soil have varied over time, but tend to be byproducts of already-extant agricultural/industrial processes.  So, on the one hand, using feathermeal (as we did this year) helps to recover a byproduct (feathers) of the poultry industry (billions of chickens every year!) that would otherwise be wasted.  Unlike petroleum (or, maybe, peat moss) the feathers are not mined—they are a renewable resource. 

But on the other hand, getting from feather to feathermeal is a fairly intense process, with cooking and grinding, boxing and bagging, and transport.  And the poultry industry itself is, well, not exactly a poster child for sustainability.  Issues ranging animal cruelty to antiobiotic overuse to environmental dumping to dessimation of genetic diversity spatter the record. 

But, then again, the meat industry is hardly sitting on the sustainability sidelines, with various sectors of it changing practices, sometimes radically.  Maybe knowing that they've got some small organic growers buying in will encourage more progress in the sustainability direction.  And we are very careful in maintaining healthy nutrient balances, as well as overall soil management.  This is about as far a cry from the kind of agricultural fertilizer application implicated in such travesties as soil poisoning, massive marine dead zones, or drinking water contamination and acid rain as one might imagine.  But, still, we are importing fertility, which according to sustainable ag superstars like Ecology Action is a no-no.

_
One of the more interesting ingredients in our fertilizer mix is the Menefee Humates, a pre-coal product of the Cretaceous ooze found in the Menefee Formation in northwest New Mexico.  Horticulturally, it is good stuff—natural, carbon-rich material that increases availability of nutrients to plants and injects intense “organic matter” into the soil, encouraging the life of the dirt so important for organic/sustainable agriculture. 

But the humates are—like the peat (perhaps)—being mined.  The Menefee Formation in northwestern New Mexico is the exclusive source of Menefee Humates, and once they’re all dug up and gone…well, it took the Cretaceous swamps plus millions of years to get them there in the first place.  It appears to be mostly surface mining, but it is mining nevertheless.  When getting the humates gets harder, mining techniques will presumably become more intense and invasive, as we’ve seen with fossil fuels.  As it happens the Menefee Formation is also a key source for the North American fossil record—the specific site of the current humate mining may not be important, fossil-wise, but it’s hard to know.  To top it off, the Menefee Mining Corporation (source of the humates brand popular with small growers like us) had to cough up $100,000 to the state of NM in 2009 for violating the state’s air quality laws.

I could go on, and am sure you are glad that I won’t but will instead return to the question: is our potting soil sustainable?  Economically, it surely makes sense for us.  We made ours for about $0.15 per quart, whereas purchasing a comparable product would run around $0.85 per quart plus shipping.  And we had fun doing it.

Environmentally, our potting soil is part of a larger picture--a small family farm using practices that exceed USDA National Organic Program standards, while incorporating additional sustainable agricultural (e.g., biointensive) practices.  We provide a source of good produce that doesn't have to travel hundreds, or even dozens, of miles to make its market.  Isn't that a pretty picture, sustainably speaking?

Is it good for social equity?  Well…it does certain sectors of certain industries that are arguably on the wrong side of that equation--note comments about peat moss and feathermeal above.  But it also supports sectors on the right side.  Several companies retailing these products, such as Fedco, are leading the entrepreneurial front of sustainable ag.  And, perhaps more importantly, it supports us, and we’re on the good side, right?!?  I mean, if an enterprise such as ours isn’t on the brighter side of sustainability…then what  is?

It's been late fall, which means it's been time to plant garlic. Since we continue our low-mechanization ways (read: not ready to plunk down all that cash on a tractor, yet) we're prepping beds by hand. There's a post about double-digging the garlic bed from last fall...as is the way with garlic, what grew in one bed will need three for planting the next year. So I've been digging the beds by hand. There's a blow-by-blow in the slide show beneath. But what is, for me, the prominent feature of double-digging a bed doesn't come across in the slides: slowness. I have spent the last several years in fast work. Maybe most "knowledge" work tends to be fast-paced these days, having traded in our slide rules for laptops. And as have so many others, I've adapted well to it. Shifting attention among several substantial undertakings in the course of one day, talking back and forth with tens of individuals about tens of issues and coming swiftly to tens of conclusions--one gets used to it.

So looking down a 4' by 50' span of hayfield with a square-nose shovel in one's hand can be a little off-putting, 'cause you are in for some slow work. I've completed three beds now, over several weeks. Each bed required moving about 365 cubic feet of clay soil. Each of those cubic feet weighed between 120 and 150 pounds (depending on how wet things were). The average grave, by comparison, involves moving about 150 cubic feet. At first, I was fidgety and easily frustrated. The labor itself was enjoyable, but the strong feeling that I just wasn't getting anything done drove me to distraction. And while reasoning through to the fact that I was indeed getting something done--that only its increments of progress were different--was mildly useful, I think in the end it was just keeping at it that regulated my mind. It may have felt like coming off a drug. The average 21st century knowledge worker lives with a habit-inducing surfeit of accomplishment, after all.

I remember "home economics" from high school, but since I didn't take any of the classes I never really learned what it was. I had vague impressions about cooking and bank account balancing. There is, in fact, quite a lot that goes into home-making. Along the way one learns about washing machine cycles, the difference between yeast and baking soda, how to stop the toilet from running, the many uses of phone books. But how the learning comes is unclear, and apparently pretty variable, as suggested by complaints I hear from the parents of college students. "She can't go grocery shopping without calling me!" "He's not sure how to hang his pictures." In the NC move our first test in home-making was the decision not to arrive and start building our house immediately, but instead to buy a house to put on the property. In other words, the MOBILE HOME DECISION.

The mobile home--or "manufactured home" as the industry prefers to call it--that we bought is a 14' x 70' 1995 Skyline 303 Limited Special. This is a single-wide, for mobile home neophytes out there. There's something amusing about shopping for a house by its dimensions. We ruled out double-wides right off, the additional expense and set-up challenges (e.g. bolting up the "marriage wall" between the two long-side units) weren't worth it. Single-wides are typically 14' wide, but length varies. Would 50' be enough? After walking one we determined it would not be. But 80' seemed excessive. Did we need central air conditioning (which, in the south, is a key distinction)? Having lived in northern New England for so long, we couldn't quite see it--a blindness for which we might pay in summer 2012. What shape did the thing need to be in? "Up to date" appliances, which seemed to mean tiny mobile-home sized dishwashers? "New" carpet? That one at least was easy, since we are inflexible carpet-haters. The less carpet the better, whatever its vintage.  

_Manufactured homes are a big business. Warren Buffett, among others, has a considerable stake, there's a manufactured home caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives, and about 20 million folks in the U.S. call a mobile home home. With a few strokes of pens and the exchange of $9500 we joined the ranks. That amounts to $9.70 per square foot--not bad when compared to the roughly $85 per square foot one might expect to pay for a new site-built house, or even the $36 per foot for a new single-wide. Unfortunately, much of our square footage was covered in cat-urine impregnated carpet, which I suppose matched the grease-coated kitchen and variegated smog-colored walls. Ed, his daughter Isabel, and I spent $1500 and around 250 person-hours cleaning from floor to ceiling, patching holes, ripping carpet, de-stinkifying corners, scraping grease, re-flooring, calking, painting, and so forth. All that labor begins to make a house a home, wheels or no wheels. Below are three images from one corner, to give a sense of the renovation. We were instructed to leave the towing tongue on, lest the house become "permanent" and the property tax rate jump accordingly. So the hitch sits at the house's west end.

According to social contract theory, humanity turned its back on unfettered liberty and placed itself under the rule of a common authority for good reason. And we of Betsy's Farm agree that governmental regulation often advances the general welfare. Whether the county inspector's ruling that the sixteen magnificent holes intended as the beginnings of our pole barn foundation were not up to snuff is an example of such advancement is unclear. It was to do with water, and to be fair water is the inveterate enemy of structural foundations. But the water was transient, and anyhow concrete sets up just fine underwater. Think about all those bridge pillars! In fact, since hydration is critical to the chemical reaction that gives concrete its strength, concrete that cures while submerged is arguably stronger for it. Nevertheless, our plan required a cure of its own, according to Haywood County, which would have to be provided by an engineer. And although we're not Do It Yourself absolutists, the idea of hiring an engineering gave us pause. During this pause, Dale Green of Pigeon Valley Septic and Grading, who lives on our road and installed our septic, stopped by. He's a smart guy and his line of work involves engineering-think. So we asked him about the sixteen holes. After giving the matter a considered tilt of the head, he suggested we bulldoze and regrade the works, then put in a straight footer and block foundation. It would be as efficient as bringing the sixteen holes in line with code, while also permitting installation of an insulated slab all the sooner.

Deep in our prevailing cultural paradigm is belief in progress--its importance, its very necessity, and its attainment through work. Work, work work. According to one of our stories this tiresome state of affairs is a punishment:

    "Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life.
    It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field.
    By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken;
    for dust you are and to dust you will return." (Genesis 3:17-19, New Int'l Version)

It is hard to undo work one has done. Frustration, annoyance at oneself and others, a kind of illness with the whole enterprise (how stupid to even think of making a farm!), flower up. But there are other stories, alternatives to the "progress or die" worldview. I suppose the creation and destruction of sand mandalas (10 days condensed into 3 minutes here) practiced by Tibetan monks is an apt reminder of an alternative, since we're on the topic of building (or trying to build) a barn. All is fleeting when looked at from the right perspective. Investment in accomplishment, even in something as paltry as a few holes in the ground, is bound to lead to suffering. So...might as well take a gander at the pigeons heading home for their evening roost, then hire the guy to plow in your holes, and start over. Which is what we did.

That's me sitting on a barn, in March 2011. The barn hasn't moved since--or at least the pile of lumber that constitutes the barn-ish part of the barn hasn't. The barn's location, on the other hand, had already moved once by the time I perched on this pile for a picture, and was to move once more. In an earlier post I described disinterring the old barn foundation from its encasement of weeds and ash. According to our neighbor, it was arson that brought the barn down just a few years ago. Arson motivated by excruciating envy. But the police never pressed the case. The foundation left behind, that we laboriously liberated by hand in November 2010, turned out to have ill-placed cracks. And so our new barn-to-be got moved a few yards northward. It was to be a pole barn on piers (columns of concrete poured into holes in the ground), built during spring break 2011. So, here I am at that time, surveying the situation.

Here we see the pole-barn footprint outlined by white batter boards, and the just-abandoned burnt-down barn foundation in the right foreground. The batter-boards were set over the course of a long slow afternoon using, among other things, the 3,4,5 rule. It's an application of the Pythagorean theorem. Ed is very good at getting things square, level and plumb. I am good at imagining such things--order and symmetry have powerful appeal. But the actual placement of a straight structure on the the earth's curvy, bumpy surface isn't at the top of my skill set. So I hang the plumb bob where instructed, and otherwise wait until time to shovel something. His theorem is awfully useful, but Pythagoras's purported belief in transmigration of souls is more interesting, hence useful in its way while waiting to shovel. Much depends upon what one takes the soul to be. The robust, whole-personality infused-at-birth (or conception?) soul typical of Christian belief wasn't afoot in the sixth century B.C. A rather more glimmery thing, housing perhaps the emotional nature, or basic vivifying force, was more like it. Taken so, the soul's movement from one living thing to another is a little more plausible. 

There was plenty of dirt removal to do, only some of which involved shoveling. The holes--sixteen of them--needed to range from about 30" to about 50" inches deep, depending on their location along the gently sloping site. They ran about 12" in diameter. We're talking about 2.5 cubic feet of damp-to-wet dirt per hole, give or take, with each cubic foot weighing 80-110 pounds. So a fair bit was done with a generator-driven power auger, supplemented by a pump to remove the water that kept running into the holes as they deepened. Something about digging in North Carolina clay in a spring rain perhaps? But the work had to be finished off with post hole diggers and shovels. Field shrews took a liking to the holes, and considering that they might after all bear the souls of dead family members, Ed and I were at pains to liberate them from their deep, round, erstwhile graves. Once completed, the holes were a thing to behold. Each was expected to embrace a column of concrete, upon which a key fixture of our future was to be erected. Expected, that is, until the county foundation inspector came around to look them over....

It is now 21 October 2011. From late November 2010 we find an entry about clearing out the burnt-down barn's foundation. The post concluded with this sanguine prognostication:  "[The foundation] will support another barn.  We plan to build it in March 2011." We might re-phrase it this way: "by April 2011 a new barn will be sitting on that old foundation."

Upon what was this sunny belief based, nearly a year ago? Or, to pose a different but perhaps better question: why did I believe it?

The first question assumes a particular view of how knowledge works, known as foundationalism. When wondering about the justifiability of a belief, the foundationalist wonders what other beliefs lie "beneath" it, giving it basis. If we find, at the bottom of the heap, a belief that stands on its own legs--such as a "self-evident" belief--then the believer is justified in holding that belief way up on top. (Whether that belief happens to be "true" is a related, but different, question from whether it is "justified.") So take this belief: "today is 21 October 2011." Holding it up are beliefs about one's grasp on the passage of days, and about the accuracy of the calendar. Supporting those are beliefs about the reliability of those in charge of determining what day and time it indeed is (I favor the National Institute of Standards and Technology time service hosted at the University of Colorado-Boulder), and of one's own senses...etc. If one eventually arrives at some self-justifying belief...well, then there you have it.

Foundationalism has issues. Is there really a bottom to the stack, or are we instead stuck with "turtles all the way down"? And one person's self-justifying belief ("I think therefore I am") is another's self-delusion (crankily proposed by dear Neitzsche in the opening salvos of a late work). Well, some philosophical problems are solved, and others are just gotten over, so let's get over this one and consider the second question-why did I believe a new barn would be sitting there come April? Did I believe it because I thought it justified? Or true? Or did I believe it for other reasons? If you'd found yourself in the clear cool light of a late November evening, auguring a new barn...why would you have done so?

Let's move on to this important fact: IT'S OCTOBER 2011 AND THERE IS NO BARN, either on that old foundation or elsewhere here at 149 Murray Road. So...what about that belief of 11 months ago? Would I have been better off without it?

So, last November we planted garlic, with help from family.  It's up now (we were down there again in March), so clearly it's time to finally get the November garlic-planting post up, huh.  Here goes.  Garlic, Allium sativum, is closely related to onions and to Allium tricoccum, the ramp or "wild onion" so popular where I grew up in western NC.  Ramp festivals continue to be a favored spring and summer pastime thereabouts.  Garlic is a little less closely to amaryllis and lillies.  Like all of these, garlic has bulbs--a meaty base for the leaves, that provides food for the leaves during dormancy.  When you pull a mature plant, the bulb--which neatly divides into 6-12 cloves--provides the planting stock for next year's crop.  We hauled a box of garlic cloves with us on to our Canton land, in November 2010, and got help from our cousins and their kids to plant them.  The bed we double-dug was lightly amended with some minerals, marked to set cloves at 6" intervals throughout the bed, and then planted with garlic.  600 tamped-in cloves later, the bed is tucked in for the winter!  In keeping with our generally favorable view of child labor, our 2.5 and 4.5 year-old first cousins once removed were readily pressed into service...except when they were playing with that big ball or clambering all over their garlic-planting parents.