Traditional vegetable gardens require an enormous amount of hard
work and attention - weeding, feeding and strict planting schedules.
There is also the problem of seasonality, allowing beds to rest during
the cooler months producing nothing at all. Then we are told to plant
green manure crops, add inorganic fertilizers and chemicals to adjust
imbalanced soils. It takes a lot of time, dedication and a year-round
commitment to grow your own food the traditional way.
But does it really need to be that difficult?
Let me ask you this question. Does a forest need to think how to
grow? Does its soil need to be turned every season? Does someone
come along every so often and plant seeds or take pH tests? Does it
get weeded or sprayed with toxic chemicals?
Of course not!
Traditional vegetable gardening techniques are focused on
problems. Have you noticed that gardening books are full of ways to
fix problems? I was a traditional gardener for many years and I found
that the solution to most problems simply caused a new set of problems.
In other words, the problem with problems is that problems create more problems.
Let’s take a look at a common traditional gardening practice
and I will show you how a single problem can escalate into a whole host
of problems.
Imagine a traditional vegetable garden, planted with rows of
various vegetables. There are fairly large bare patches between the
vegetables. To a traditional gardener, a bare patch is just a bare
patch. But to an ecologist, a bare patch is an empty niche space. An
empty niche space is simply an invitation for new life forms to take up
residency. Nature does not tolerate empty niche spaces and the most
successful niche space fillers are weeds. That’s what a weed is in
ecological terms - a niche space filler. Weeds are very good
colonizing plants. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t be called weeds.
Now back to our story. Weeds will grow in the empty niche
spaces. Quite often there are too many weeds to pick out individually,
so the traditional gardener uses a hoe to turn them into the soil. I
have read in many gardening books, even organic gardening books, that
your hoe is your best friend. So the message we are getting is that
using a hoe is the solution to a problem.
However, I would like to show you how using a hoe actually
creates a new set of problems. Firstly, turning soil excites weed
seeds, creating a new explosion of weeds. And secondly, turning soil
upsets the soil ecology. The top layer of soil is generally dry and
structureless. By turning it, you are placing deeper structured soil
on the surface and putting the structureless soil underneath. Over
time, the band of structureless soil widens. Structureless soil has
far less moisture holding capacity, so the garden now needs more water
to keep the plants alive.
In addition to this problem, structureless soil cannot pass its
nutrients onto the plants as effectively. The garden now also needs
the addition of fertilisers. Many fertilisers kill the soil biology
which is very important in building soil structure and plant nutrient
availability. The soil will eventually turn into a dead substance that
doesn’t have the correct balance of nutrients to grow fully developed
foods. The foods will actually lack vitamins and minerals. This
problem has already occurred in modern-day agriculture. Dr Tim
Lobstein, Director of the Food Commission said. "… today's agriculture
does not allow the soil to enrich itself, but depends on chemical
fertilisers that don't replace the wide variety of nutrients plants and
humans need." Over the past 60 years commercially grown foods have
experienced a significant reduction in nutrient and mineral content.
Can you see how we started with the problem of weeds, but ended
up with the new problems of lower water-holding capacity and infertile
soils. And eventually, we have the potentially serious problem of
growing food with low nutrient content. Traditional gardening
techniques only ever strive to fix the symptom and not the cause.
However, there is a solution! We must use a technique that
combines pest ecology, plant ecology, soil ecology and crop management
into a method that addresses the causes of these problems. This
technique must be efficient enough to be economically viable. It also
needs to be able to produce enough food, per given area, to compete
against traditional techniques.
I have been testing an ecologically-based method of growing
food for several years. This method uses zero tillage, zero chemicals,
has minimal weeds and requires a fraction of the physical attention
(when compared to traditional vegetable gardening). It also produces
several times more, per given area, and provides food every single day
of the year.
My ecologically-based garden mimics nature in such a way that
the garden looks and acts like a natural ecosystem. Succession layering
of plants (just as we see in natural ecosystems) offers natural pest
management. It also naturally eliminates the need for crop rotation,
resting beds or green manure crops. Soil management is addressed in a
natural way, and the result is that the soil’s structure and fertility
get richer and richer, year after year. Another benefit of this
method is automatic regeneration through self-seeding. This occurs
naturally as dormant seeds germinate; filling empty niche spaces with
desirable plants, and not weeds.
Unfortunately, the biggest challenge this method faces is
convincing traditional gardeners of its benefits. Like many industries,
the gardening industry gets stuck in doing things a certain way. The
ecologically-based method requires such little human intervention
that, in my opinion, many people will get frustrated with the lack of
needing to control what’s happening. Naturally people love to take
control of their lives, but with this method you are allowing nature to
take the reins. It’s a test of faith in very simple natural laws.
However, in my experience these natural laws are 100% reliable.
Another reason that traditional gardeners may not like this
method is that it takes away all the mysticism of being an expert. You
see, this method is so simple that any person, anywhere in the world,
under any conditions, can do it. And for a veteran gardener it can
actually be quite threatening when an embarrassingly simple solution
comes along.
I have no doubt that this is the way we will be growing food in
the future. It’s just commonsense. Why wouldn’t we use a method
that produces many times more food with a fraction of the effort? I
know it will take a little while to convince people that growing food
is actually very instinctual and straightforward, but with persistence
and proper explanation, people will embrace this method.
Why? Because sanity always prevails…