BOOK REVIEW - Permaculture in Pots

Permaculture in Pots – How to grow food in small urban spaces

Juliet Kemp (London, UK – Zone 9)

Beyond some permaculture basics the format is a calendar of container garden activities, each featuring an herb of the month. Is it unconventional to start the calendar in November, though the supplemental information on soil and worm composting makes it as good a place as any to begin. Herbs are thoughtfully chosen to the corresponding month – in respect to the seasonality of both plant & use.

She gets the small right! There’s good advice specific to apartment dwellers and renters in very urban spaces. One good point in this regard is attracting pollinators for plants like tomatoes, squash and blueberries that require bees or other insects to make their fruit. I use containers in a yard in the city with lots of different plants flowering at different times with different sized blooms within and surrounding my yard, along with a good hedgerow along the fence. Thus I have not come across this problem, however her London examples lead me to believe this is likely in such urban jungles. The bees have been successful in keeping me from bumbling around in their stead, spreading fairy dust to make Cinderella’s pumpkins myself...but she outline how you might make this compensation if needed.

How this book makes use of, or speaks to, permaculture specifically…

Bringing the concept of permaculture to the small realm of containers is necessarily difficult. Kemp does manage to do this mostly through multiples references to big picture thinking, concept of "whole in the part", zones away from the house - as containers are fantastic is being in the nearest zone 1, compost/soil fertility as emphasized mainly through worms, importance of site selection and observation, zonal considerations (and how that related to the permie focus on perennials).

Her initial audience may be limited, but a broader application of the core/fundamentals she presents is greatly usable for everyone growing in containers or small spaces. Containers are on the reused/found/cheap/practical side throughout the book (right down to a garbage bag in a good-sized box to address the special peculiarities of growing potatoes). Though this does make for a reliance on plastics (and I question some of the health effects of hot plastic) the antioxidant superiority of fresh veg could cancel out or even greatly exceed the risk. It is for each gardener to decide. At times, Haitian refugees-in-their-own-country due to devastating earthquakes were growing food in tires because it was the reality imposed upon them to make ground to feed themselves.

A great thing she added to a container book, let alone a gardening book was Heat Zones. The mention of it intrigued me, and when I investigated further I found that it is the counterbalance to the USDA Zones you are used to hearing about. Portland and Houston are both in Zone 8 where the excessive minimum temperature is expected to be from 15 to 20 degrees F, however the heat zones are radically different as they represent the average number of days above 86 degrees F (30 degrees C). Portland is in Zone 1, where less than one day above 86 degrees is the norm, whereas Houston is in Zone 9, where on average  a whopping 121 to 150 scorching days can be expected. Check an upcoming post for what that means. A good book should always pique your curiosity to learn further though, and this one definitely did that.

Overall: 4/5

Points for: Seasonal Recipes, Herb of the Month, Foraging Tips, Succinct plans for laying out growing areas on a balcony, numerous how-to’s including self-watering containers and a cold frame.

Garden Interlude

As the days grow longer and the temperatures warmer, I encourage you to pause, breathe in stillness, smell the roses.  The heady perfume of these velvet red wonders caught my attention today; be present in the moment and grateful for the small miracles all around you.

Coming Down to Earth

On this day that we make a point of celebrating the one earth we all call home, take some time out to contemplate her beauties.  Sit in stillness and be awed by the many miracles that abound every day.  And then contemplate too how you can protect, nurture and multiply all that makes life abound on this planet.

Want some concrete examples of how you can honor your connection to earth every day?  Of all the "Top 10" lists out there, the best I've seen so far is by Maryam Henein on Earth Techling.  I've used her list as a jumping off point for some of my own thoughts. Her's is definitely worth a read and contains some startling statistics, especially around recycling.  I've combined and condensed into the five following areas that I think are most important:

1. Buy local and sustainable whenever possible - while Henein uses "organic and local" in relation to food as her top category, I think this can be expanded to include all consumer choices with an emphasis on local and sustainable.  Of course the most local and sustainable food is the stuff you grow yourself!  After that, neighbors, local farms, markets and Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) are the next best ways for you to feed your family and your local economy. A win-win for everyone, including the earth.
2. Be mindful of plastic - plastic really has become insidious, over-used and under-recycled in our consumer culture.  From the huge floating islands of garbage in the oceans, to the fact that less than 80% of plastic water bottles are recycled, there are many reasons to "just say no" to single-use plastic items.  Support companies that use less packaging, and with a greater recycled content - or better yet, no or compostable "packaging". Recycle what you can, but avoiding it in the first place is the most effective (see #5 below).
3. Read labels - in buying products with less packaging, especially when it comes to food, you are also less likely to be ingesting multi-syllabic preservatives, chemicals and other franken-food ingredients.  Checking the label should also be the rule when considering cosmetics, cleaners, and personal care products.  When in doubt, look them up online.  Get out from under the estimated 14,000 man-made chemicals that are added to food alone - and seriously question if that paraben-laden shampoo is really worth it to get luscious locks.
4. Bee the change - reducing the amount of chemicals that you exposure yourself to will also help
   
   the plight numerous other earth inhabitants and support the dynamic interconnectedness of life.  Buying organic does not mean that farmers don't use pesticides, it means that they use OMRI-listed pesticides.  Don't get me wrong, this is a great start as OMRI-listed pesticides are usually more targeted, less toxic and break down faster, but buying plastic clamshells of spinach from organic mega-farms is missing the point a little.  We need to support sustainable, diverse agriculture that is part of a broader ecology.  The effect where this is most obvious is in the decimation of bee populations through Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) - a collection of mutually reinforcing factors including parasites, rampant pesticide use, malnutrition due to monoculture, and low genetic diversity that have come together in a perfect storm of deadly proportions. For more information, a good place to start is my summary of a recent talk by OSU Bee Researcher Ramesh Sagili for the Master Gardeners.
5. The 6 Rs - perhaps the largest way you can "bee the change" is to REDUCE the amount of things you use and/or accumulate.  The average American generates 4.38 pounds of waste per day! according to the Environmental Protection Agency.  This is some 90,000 pounds of trash over one lifetime, or roughly 600 times your body weight.  What other living thing on earth gets away with this skewed a use of resources? I can be just as mindless in this regard as the next guy, but I really try to stop and think "do I want to have a relationship with this (item/object/thing)?".  Is it worth it? Will it really contribute to my life? Otherwise we have to expand the traditional "3 R's" to six:

1. Rethink - collectively we can be a very intelligent, creative, and compassionate species; lets put some brainpower into redesigning packaging/products and the whole system to be better in line with earth-centric values and the reality of a finite planet
2. Reduce (can't stress it enough)
3. Refuse - be it over-packaging, a bag for that single item you purchased, or the disposable cutlery that comes with your take-out; no need to make a big show of it, just say "thanks but no thanks"
4. Rot - nature's ultimate recycling has worked since time-immemorial, we need to increasingly question why we are making "disposable" items that don't rot
5. Repair/Recreate/Repurpose - buy durable, long lasting goods, and find innovative other uses for them once they are damaged or no longer needed
6. Respect - for earth, for self, for the resources that go into making something, for the beauty of being alive, for the interconnectedness of life, for the opportunity to responsible

In whatever way that you choose to acknowledge the connection between your life and that of the planet that supports us all, I hope you find much beauty in contemplation, and many reasons to make today the first step in getting closer to earth.

Happy Earth Day Everyday

Container Basics: GRound Rules

These days of wind and rain (and possibly) snow are a great time to curl up with a gardening book and dream of warmer days to come.  If your future gardening plans might involve a container or two, here is the first in a Series of Container Basics with some things for you to consider to ensure that you have a successful season.

Why Garden "in the Round"?

You might not be thinking of adding containers this year - you might be blessed with a sizable yard or community garden plot.  Even so, there are many reasons you might still want to add a container or two. Containers are especially valuable to the urban gardener, restricted as we often are in the sun and space available to us. Read on for how they can help your garden succeed.

Comfrey Attracting Bees

Minimize

There are some edibles that are exceedingly vigorous and so are often better off being grown in containers.  If you've ever planted mint, sunchokes (Jerusalem artichokes), lemon balm, comfrey, or bamboo in the ground you might be regretting that decision.  So traditional garden or not, you will be much happier with these plants in a large pot, half-barrel, or upcycled horse trough.

Maximize

By the same token, containers can help you to maximize the

amount of land, light or heat available to you for growing plants. Maybe the best sun you get is on your front porch or driveway edge - containers allow you to "move the soil to the sun" and exploit an otherwise unplantable area for growing sun or heat-loving plants.  The reverse is also true, if you have a very sunny yard but want to grow ferns, hostas or other shade-dwellers and have a suitable patch on a shady back patio.

Microclimate

Say you want to grow blueberries in your traditional veggie garden.  This creates a conflict between the neutral-to-basic-loving vegetables, and the acid-loving blueberries.  A great solution to this could be containers, which allow you to make a soil-less mix with a lower pH (more acidic) while still having your blueberries near to the garden for efficient picking and watering.  More acidic soils are just the start - the microclimate of the container could be adapted to the specific needs of the plant, be they for pH, organic matter, nutrients, or heat.

Speaking of heat (which we are often lacking in the Pacific Northwest), you can also affect the microclimate by putting the pot on or against a surface that retains and reflects warmth, such as a concrete patio or a stucco wall. This is one way to encourage peppers to set fruit and ripen fruit. Containers also warm up faster in the spring and are better-draining than our native clayey soils (in Portland at least), giving you a jump start on planing. However they are also more sensitive to the cold, which can create some challenges for overwintering (we'll get to that in a future post).

Mobility

Microclimate and mobility go hand-in-hand, as containers can be moved as the temperatures drop to protected them from freezing.  Their movable nature can also be an advantage in chasing the sun throughout the day or season, to change up a design grouping, or even move them to a friends house for watering while you're on vacation!  I use the rolling platform at right to move containerized, heat-loving veggies from one side of the back deck to the other during the day as the sun and shadows change.  This effectively gives them "full sun" even though the whole deck is not in full sun all day.

Some Container Caveats

While there are very few hard & fast rules when it comes to growing in containers (depending on who you ask) there are come caveats that you should be aware of to be successful.

NUMBER 1 RULE!

You. Must. Have. Holes. Period.  Without holes, plant roots drown.  Perhaps surprisingly (or not) they need oxygen too!  In fact, in container 'soils' the optimum capacity is about 50% water, 20% air, and 30% solids. So you must give the water somewhere to go in order to let the roots "breathe".  And don't put gravel in the pot bottom to increase drainage, because it doesn't.  It simply gives you less room to plant in.  This will be the topic of a separate post, so you'll just have to trust me for now.

Meet Your New Puppy

YOU - and whomever you rope in to help you - are solely responsible for the growth & success of containerized plants! Being segregated from the native soil, containerized plants rely on you for regular water and soil nutrients.  You will also need to protect these plants from extremes of weather & temperature - heat as well as cold.  If you were planning on bringing home a new puppy you'd have done a bunch of research on the breed, what kinds of problems they are prone to, what makes a good diet, and likely even have a name picked out - so get reading and researching just what will help Julio the Jalapeno or Lucy the Lemon Tree grow and thrive.

Reduce Expectations

Constriction of the plant roots by the container can mean smaller size and/or reduced yields.  This is especially true when growing sun-lovers in areas of marginal sun (less than 6 hours), or when you forget the point above about you being the one responsible for the food and water.  However, you can use this feature to your advantage, for example the root constriction will also dwarf fruit trees, thus making them more manageable in height and spread.

Roots Are Sensitive

Roots are more sensitive and more crucial than above-ground parts - if the top freezes back, it can re-grow as long as the roots are alive, but the reverse is not true.  Remember: containers lower the USDA hardiness zone by 1 – 2 categories, so plants that might be hardy in the ground can be vulnerable in a container.  Roots are more sensitive to heat as well as cold, so dark-colored pots exposed to full sun in the heat of summer might also need protection.

Good Gardening Practices Still Apply

Right Plant - Right Place - Right Pot

Choosing plants, look for the following phrases that can lead you to more appropriate varieties: dwarf, compact, patio, small, mini, and early.  In general go small over big, bush over pole, and multiuse/season over mature crops such as lettuce that you can harvest while young versus cabbage that must form a full head. Additionally, unless you have lots of time or space, avoid anything that takes 85 days or more to mature; this includes winter squash, melons, corn, cabbage, storage onions, beefsteak tomatoes, mammoth sunflowers.

Choosing a place be aware of the amount of sun; access to water, the front/back door, or the place

you are most likely to use & care for the plant; and how the site might be affected by reflected heat, shade from the neighbors tree or house, or the prevailing wind; and the likelihood of being knocked over by kids, mowers, and/or dogs (or for that matter, peed on!).

Choosing a pot can affect how much you have to water, as well as how much heat reaches the soil.  More porous materials such as coil & moss (often founds as hanging basket liners), along with terracotta and wood are more porous, and will loose water more quickly.  Plastic, metal, stone and glazed pottery are less porous and this retain more water.  Dark colored containers, metal ones, and those with a dull finish conduct heat faster than those those with light or reflective surfaces.  Keep in mind too, that smaller pots will loose water and heat up more quickly than larger pots.  Thus bigger pots are better until they become a weight issue to move them.

Integrated Pest Management

Known as IPM for short, this is a pest management philosophy that uses a diverse hierarchy of methods and holistic approach to best gardening practices.  The hierarchy to control pests and disease is:

• Cultural - growing disease-resistant plants, crop rotation, pruning for air circulation, fertilization & watering schedules, and removing downed or fallen leaves & limbs (aka sanitation)
• Physical - using hand labor or machinery i.e. picking slugs of leave or spraying aphids off plants with a hard stream of water from the hose
• Biological - encouraging natural predators, parasites and microbes by planting a diverse landscape - providing food, shelter and protection for 'good bugs', also you can purchase predators such lacewings.
• Chemical - preventing and controlling pests and diseases with the least toxic but effective dose of pesticides. Those pesticides that are OMRI listed are approved for use in organic operations. Remember that even OMRI-listed pesticides are still by definition designed to kill.  As such, practice good pesticide application, including choosing a narrow-spectrum product, not applying on breezy days to avoid drift, and not spraying blooming plants to avoid catching pollinators in the crossfire. 

The Oregon State Extension publication Growing Your Own has a wealth of information on how to manage pests in your garden, as well as alternatives to chemicals, and a wealth of veggie growing information including a section on containers.

For pest management handbooks specific to the Pacific Northwest, you can beat what are collectively known as the PNW Guides that address Plant Disease, Insects, and Weeds respectively.  Bonus - they are all searchable online.

For guides specific to your region, check with your local state extension service - search for yours here.

Stay tuned for the next installment: Picking & Placing Pots

The Garden As (In)Dependence

I recently came across a couple of articles that extol the virtues of the garden, as both a means to

our becoming more independent and self-reliant, and the reverse - understanding our dependence on farms and the natural world as a whole to supply our food. Taken together they offer two complementary angles on the complex web that is the 'food economy'.

First was Robert Rodale's 1976 editorial about personal independence from a past issue of Organic Gardening & Farming. Click here to read the whole article. What he wrote nearly 30 years ago is just as pertinent today: that by regaining some of our independence - be it through cultivation, energy, transportation or thought - we become more self-reliant and resilient, as individuals and as a nation. (Emphasis throughout is mine).

The garden is the best place to start looking for ways to help people become more independent. A garden is both the symbol and reality of self-sufficiency — especially an organic garden, which recycles organic wastes of the yard and household, permits the production of significant amounts of food with only minimal reliance on outside resources. Any campaign to boost personal independence should start by helping people become gardeners — teaching, motivating, and making land available. p.2

Through the garden we are able to do more with our own resources, and promote our independence from one of the largest areas of (potential) corporate influence in our lives -

agribusiness.

Here we can turn to the second article to see how promoting independence through the garden can help us to connect more directly with the food on our plate. Wendell Barry states in Pleasures of Eating: 

Most urban shoppers would tell you that food is produced on farms. But most of them do not know what farms, or what kinds of farms, or where the farms are, or what knowledge or skills are involved in farming. They apparently have little doubt that farms will continue to produce, but they do not know how or over what obstacles. For them, then, food is pretty much an abstract idea —something they do not know or imagine — until it appears on the grocery shelf or on the table. p.1

By engaging directly with our food through growing it, we establish a personal relationship with the seasons, the cycles, the reality of food and feeding ourselves. We are less likely to mindlessly shovel food into our mouths if we have used a shovel to procure it.

For most it is not desirable or feasible to grow all one's own (or one's family's) food, however the simple act of growing some food - be it a pot of thyme on the windowsill or thirteen barrels of tomatoes - helps us to get in touch with the miracle of life and the complex web that sustains us. This conscious eating is in contrast to what Berry observes as a an exile of eater and eaten from biological reality.

When food, in the minds of eaters, is no longer associated with farming and with the land, then the eaters are suffering a kind of cultural amnesia that is misleading and dangerous. The passive American consumer, sitting down to a meal of pre-prepared or fast food, confronts a platter covered with inert, anonymous substances that have been processed, dyed, breaded, sauced, gravied, ground, pulped, strained, blended, prettified, and sanitized beyond resemblance to any part of any creature that ever lived. The products of nature and agriculture have been made, to all appearances, the products of industry. Both eater and eaten are thus in exile from biological reality. And the result is a kind of solitude, unprecedented in human experience, in which the eater may think of eating as, first, a purely commercial transaction between him and a supplier and then as a purely appetitive transaction between him and his food. p.2

Both authors advocate returning at least some aspects of food production to a smaller scale - ideally erasing many or most of the steps on the trajectory from farmer to eater. Consider Rodale's (27-year-old) statement:

Eating bread in America today is an act of faith in the smooth functioning of one of the most complex food-supply systems ever conceived. p.1

Contemplate, as Rodale does, the network of farmers, grain suppliers, food chemical plants, machine shops, trucking firms, advertising firms, and plastics manufacturers that are required to make one loaf of bread. As he states, "not everything is done most efficiently in big, complex ways". With complexity is more vulnerability to the slings and arrows of fate - climate change, oil prices, inflation, labor strikes, war, business failure, and so on. Compare this with the simple act of making bread at home.

Berry echos this sentiment that bigger isn't necessarily better, but from a health and ecology standpoint; "... as scale increases, diversity declines; as diversity declines, so does health; as health declines, the dependence on drugs and chemicals necessarily increases". This dependence on drugs and chemicals is all too apparent in the conventional food systems that relies on feedlots and overcrowding to achieve 'economies of scale' in the production of animals for meat, eggs, and dairy. Not to mention the chemicals needed to maintain huge monocultures of food crops for humans and livestock.

By maintaining a close connection to the food that sustains us and our local economies, we are not only asserting our independence, we are more able to connect too with the awe-some force of life at work in each mouthful. And in this way we are most able to truly be grateful for the gifts from farm and garden. Some food of thought from Mr. Berry:

Eating with the fullest pleasure — pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance — is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend. p.3

May your eating be filled with pleasure.

Sources

Berry, W. 1990. Wendell Berry: The Pleasure of Eating. In: What Are People For? Reprinted at http://www.organicgardening.com/living/wendell-berry-pleasure-eating?page=0,1

Rodale, R. 1976. It’s Time for a New Declaration of Independence. Organic Gardening and Farming. Reprinted at http://www.organicgardening.com/living/new-declaration-of-independence?page=0,0

THE DIRT ON THE ROUND

Join me on a three-part journey: to grow an array of edibles, mostly in containers, on an urban lot in Portland, Oregon; to capture life in the garden through the lens; and to 'close the loop' through greater practice of sustainable, low-input living & gardening. 

Read more on the plants, the containers, and the loop in the "About" section here.