Wild Spaces

I want to encourage you to embrace (or create) wild spaces in your garden. What do I mean by ‘wild space’? Well, the garden above was planted on purpose to be a bit messy and out of control. This is one of my pollinator gardens, in which I have strategically placed perennials (which return every year), but I also incorporate lots of annual seed. About four times a year, I pull out anything dead, and seed more stuff for the coming season.

I just pulled a bunch of borage and phacelia out of this space, but the poppies and echium and lupine are still flowering, and I want them to self-seed for next year; I’ll leave them a bit longer. Meanwhile, I mixed some cosmos, zinnia, and tithonia seeds with some rotted manure and scattered this in the bare spaces between the still-flowering spring plants. While I was working, I saw all kinds of life. Butterflies (mostly gulf fritillaries, but also a swallowtail and a painted lady), birds (towhees, chickadees, finches, sparrows, hummingbirds, and wrens) and lizards galore (Western fence lizards and alligator lizards). None of these creatures would stand still for photography. But I also wondered how many insects I would see in the space of ten minutes, so I timed myself and took as many pictures as I could within that time frame, in this particular garden. Here’s what I saw.

Now, you may have looked at some of these insects and said “I don’t want that one, I don’t want that one, I don’t want THAT one,” and of course some of these are insects we would consider ‘bad’ for the garden or home. But nature doesn’t look at things that way. Nature wants balance. Nature wants diversity. All of these creatures have a purpose and if we have them around, we are better off in the long run.

Messy spaces (or wild spaces, as I like to call them, it sounds so much more deliberate) aren’t just good in the obvious ways. Leaf and bark litter also provide habitat for all kinds of beetles and caterpillars. Bare soil underneath plants provides homes for ground-nesting native bees. Holes in old sticks provide more nests for bees and beetles. Dead flowers decompose on the soil, allowing nutrients to be recycled to the plants. Soil creatures feed on detritus, providing that all-important poop loop in the soil. Fungi creeps in the spaces in soil and in litter, forming connections between plants. The soil is shaded by all the biomass, keeping it moist and cool.

I found a scientific study that encourages wild spaces especially in urban gardens, not only to provide habitat for wildlife, but to help with our health and happiness, too. “When designed with nature in mind, urban gardens can support a high level of plant and animal biodiversity that may lure people back into nature…. more vegetatively complex elements of the environment are more intriguing and challenging to understand than simple ones. As such, complex elements can transport people into a new world, lengthen time spent in the garden interacting with nature, and thereby promote lifelong connections to nature.” I think that’s pretty cool. I know it’s true for me, that I’ll go out to add seeds or pick a bouquet for the house, and I end up standing in the garden for an hour, just watching what’s happening there. I’ll be folding laundry in my bedroom, which looks out on this particular garden, and I’ll see walkers/joggers stop at the pollinator garden and just stare. They’ve completely forgotten their walk. It’s mesmerizing, and it’s all from letting the space get a little wild. Stuff HAPPENS there. Life happens there.

If this interests you, you might check out this article by the Nature Conservancy. It details why a messy (read; wild) garden is a boon to wildlife in any season.

Bird News

Interesting item in our local paper, the San Francisco Chronicle, this morning. There is a new, large-scale chicken facility opening up in Arkansas which specializes in meat chickens being raised in a “carbon-friendly” way. Arkansas, as you probably already know, is a major producer of our nation’s chicken. Most birds live in pretty awful conditions, either in the dark and in cages, or in large ‘barns' which support huge amounts of birds ‘free ranging’ - that is, not in cages. I’ve already expressed how I feel that chicken should be raised - on pasture, free to eat bugs and weeds, with plenty of room to stretch wings and dust bathe. Fortunately we have a lot of farms that raise chickens this way, here in California. The chicken is expensive, upwards of $10 per pound, but meat should be expensive. In my opinion, all animals should be raised humanely, on pasture as much as possible, and butchered close to the farm. We recently re-joined a meat CSA called Tara Firma, and are very happy with the variety of cuts, taste of the different meats (chicken, beef, pork), and the fact that we area supporting a small farm that raises its meat sustainably. Not only sustainably, but also in a way that regenerates the land.

You might be hearing or reading that going vegetarian is the best thing to do for the climate. Eating less meat can certainly help, and our personal choices matter, but at this point, we’ll need some large-scale carbon reductions in order to halt the onward march of climate change. I think we can make the choice to eat meat that improves the land, rather than depletes it. Because that meat is more expensive, we’ll eat less of it; it’s a win all around, with us making better choices, supporting small regenerative farmers, and eating much less of the meat raised in CAFO’s.

Let me here recommend a book called Grass, Soil, Hope, by Courtney White. It details the Marin Carbon Project, which is a local movement to help farmers increase the carbon sequestration in their soil. Farmers can be huge improvers of our atmosphere by following certain steps to improve the carbon footprint of their operations. It would be great if this became a nation-wide movement, and this chicken farm I read about, in Arkansas, is following right in the footsteps of the MCP.

Major poultry producers like Tyson, Cargill, and Pilgrim’s Pride are located in Arkansas. So think what a message it sends when this new farm, Cooks Venture, dedicates its 800 acres to pastured poultry. Not only is this farm going to produce meat using best carbon sequestering practices, but also produce an affordable pastured chicken for mass production. This model can be followed all over the country. They are even working with local farmers to produce grain to feed the chickens, using regenerative practices. This is so fabulous.

Now I still advocate eating locally and it’s best to support the farmers who are doing the right thing near you. But this operation gives me hope that other farmers (who I believe want to make a living AND do the right thing for the planet) will see that it can be done. Another book you might be interested in is Growing a Revolution by David Montgomery. This book details the work of farmers all over the country who are practicing regeneration of soils instead of depletion (which is the conventional way of farming).

image credit: allaboutbirds

In other bird news: Goldfinches. A neighbor asked me over to look at her garden - she had several questions about holes in her leaves and what would be causing them. Now, I’m no expert, but I gotta say, the goldfinches this time of year are simply crazy for leaves, and leaves of all types. I’ve researched this behavior before and not found much in the way of satisfying answers. What most IPM programs tell you is yes, goldfinches strip leaves, and netting is the best way to deter them. But it’s the WHY I’m missing. Why do goldfinches feed on the leaves of certain plants? I notice them in my sunflowers every year, but this year they are also stripping the leaves of yacon, and pumpkins. They are also apparently voracious feeders of chard and beets. Sparrows also will eat seedlings of lettuces. Birds can be a real problem in the vegetable garden.

I found a study done in the 1960’s by Ellen L. Coutlee titled “Maintenance Behavior of the American Goldfinch.” In it, she covers grooming, feeding, locomotion, and posturing. She does mention the tearing of the leaves: “Pecking was always directed to the margin of leaves and small pieces were broken off and swallowed in rapid succession.” She suggests that it is less for nutritional needs and more for the “compulsion to twist, pry, and bite at objects.” But she doesn’t say anymore about it, which is frustrating.

I found a blog by someone who said that their grandmother always called goldfinches ‘salad birds,’ which is charming. Apparently these birds nest in July, much later than most birds who lay eggs in early spring, and this is because seeds are more available in July. Their primary food source is plant seeds. They tend not to eat insects unless they are handy near the seed source, and then they’ll add those to their diet. And, as we all have observed, leaves. Lots and lots of leaves.

Netting IS the best way to deter them, or you can follow my lead and just plant an awful lot of whatever they are eating, so that there’s plenty for both you and them. This is true of almost any pest. If you have a lot of it, and it’s scattered about the garden, chances are you’ll get some of it. Maybe that’s the best we can hope for. :)

New Garlic and Shallot Hanging Racks

This year, I planted two 4x8 beds each of garlic and shallots, hoping to get a really good crop after last year’s failure. It was a successful growing year; we have scads of Spanish Roja garlic, German Red garlic, and Red Shallots. We have two Shaker peg rails to hang cured alliums, but I knew that would not be enough this year. So I crossed my fingers and asked Dad to make me a couple ‘pot rack’ thingys for this purpose. At first he just couldn’t figure out a way to make them that would provide him a new learning experience. As Tom says, my dad is such a brilliant and accomplished woodworker that he is now in the Evel Knievel phase of it all, making things purely to prove he can (a dresser without any right angles? check. Veneer, banding, and inlay? check). Unless I can come up with an idea that presents a challenge, Dad won’t take it on. No boring furniture for this daredevil!

Dad spent some time mulling it over, and then one day while weeding his back hill, he got a brilliant idea. Why not take the wood from the French Broom that he was removing from the hillside? French Broom is a highly invasive woody plant here in the Bay Area. Beautiful, but a nightmare to get rid of, and it crowds out all the natives.

Turns out, it’s beautiful wood - extremely strong and perfect for this purpose. How handy that Dad had just built himself a new shaving horse; two garlic hanging racks were in my possession post-haste.

Good thing, because the shallots had finished curing on top of the chicken coop, and the second bed of garlic was ready to harvest and put up there to cure (and melon seeds to plant in the vacated bed). So we did the big switcheroo and then Tom put up our new hanging racks.

They join the Spanish Roja Garlic that I already hung on the peg rail there. The German garlic will go over on the canning shelf peg rail, which at the moment is holding the last of the dried hot peppers from last summer. These racks can also hold bunches of drying herbs, too. They are multi-purpose!

Adam watched Tom tie up the shallots and said, “I love how we decorate our house with food.” We won’t be featured in Architectural Digest any time soon, but we don’t mind. Our dinners will be delicious.

Comfrey - the miracle plant?

If you have any interest in permaculture or regenerative farming/gardening, chances are you’ve heard many miraculous things about Comfrey. For instance: The deep roots ‘mine’ for nutrients and collect them in the leaves/it’s a biodynamic accumulator! It is a fabulous forage plants for livestock/chickens love it! You can brew a nutrient-dense/though extremely smelly compost tea with it! It can be used to cure cuts and bruises! … and many more. Go ahead, search ‘comfrey permaculture’ on Google and see whatcha get. I’ll wait.

Whenever something has these kinds of inflated claims, I am suspicious. It happens regularly in the gardening world (coffee grounds and eggshells, anyone?). Let's get one thing straight: plants are miraculous, period. Take a carrot seed. It’s unbelievably tiny. Within its microscopic proportions, it has everything it needs to send down roots and produce cotyledon leaves, which provide enough photosynthate to make those huge feathery fronds and develop a long, fat, juicy, orange, delicious tap root. This is simply crazy. Or how about the tomato flower, which is self-pollinating? It has everything it needs, both male and female parts, to produce fruit by itself - it doesn’t need the services of a pollinator. Or the humble bean, which allows a bacteria in the soil to colonize on its roots in order to take nitrogen from the air and provide it to the plant. Or the hormone in all plants called auxin, which is produced in the stem and root tips that cause the elongation of the plant? I mean. You can’t look at plants and not see how miraculous they are, doing things that we didn’t engineer them to do; they’ve simply evolved to do them over millions of years. Comfrey is no different.

Comfrey is in the Borage family, and we’ve already sung the praises of the flowers in this family. They are very attractive to bees (carpenter bees in particular), though I have also noticed hummingbirds love the bell-shaped comfrey flowers too. And they are lovely little inflorescences, in a curled shape called a ‘cyme.’ A cyme is a curved stalk of flowers; the terminal bud flowers first, and the others further down and underneath flower afterwards. The leaves are winged, with the wings going down a large part of the petiole, or stem, of the leaf. As you can see, the leaves can get quite large, up to two feet long.

You start comfrey from a root cutting. No special treatment is needed. Just cut some of the root out (which doesn’t hurt the existing plant at all), and bury it. Soon you’ll have a plant. By its second year of life, it’s ready to be ‘harvested,’ if you want to go that route. If not, the plant’s leaves will slowly sort of keel over to the sides, like flowers in a vase, and new leaves will come up from the center. It tends to die back in frost or cold, and re-sprouts reliably every year.

The added benefit of comfrey lies in its ability to be ‘chopped’ down several times a season, and it will come right back. Why would you want to do this? There’s value in the leaves. Like all leaves, comfrey’s have a lot of nutrients in them. After all, that is how trees (and many other plants) fertilize themselves; they drop their leaves to the ground to decompose and provide nutrients over time. Comfrey leaves have a pleasant nutrient ratio of about 3-1-5. That means it’s a pretty good fertilizer. You can add them to your compost, especially if you have a lot of ‘brown’ in your pile like dead leaves or bark; the nitrogen in the leaves will help the compost break down faster (just like grass clippings will). You can feed them to your chickens (apparently they also have a lot of calcium, so that is nice for your egg-producing birds), but they will likely snack on them rather indifferently, not inhale them like they do kale. Comfrey leaves are fuzzy, like borage, and kind of hurt your hands and, I imagine, livestock mouths. You can also use them as a mulch, which is what I did with my latest batch - I put them around a bed of tomatoes.

As for the claim that the deep taproot of comfrey ‘mines’ the soil for minerals: That’s kind of a fallacy. Taproots are generally formed to help anchor the large up-top biomass of the plant. Only really large plants get them, and sometimes not even then. It’s also used as a place to store the sugar and carbohydrate that the plant gains from photosynthesis (that’s what makes carrots so delicious!). Most plants get their water and nutrients from surface roots, which are in the top 3-8 inches of soil, pretty shallow.

And please, for the love of God, do not make the kind of comfrey compost tea everyone suggests on the forums. They tell you to put comfrey leaves in a bucket, weigh them down with a brick, fill the bucket with water, cover it, then let it sit for 3-6 weeks! There’s a reason it smells so bad when you open the bucket, and it’s called anaerobic bacteria! Anything anaerobic is not going to be healthy on your soil or your plants. One reason compost is successful is because it’s aerobic and full of oxygen!

There is some evidence that comfrey is a good plant to have around for bee stings, cuts, inflammation, and muscle soreness. To quote the NCBI: “Comfrey has a centuries-old tradition as a medicinal plant. Today, multiple randomized controlled trials have demonstrated the efficacy and safety of comfrey preparations for the topical treatment of pain, inflammation and swelling of muscles and joints in degenerative arthritis, acute myalgia in the back, sprains, contusions and strains after sports injuries and accidents, also in children aged 3 or 4 and over.” You can see their paper for more information about the clinical trials that have been conducted.

So grow comfrey for its beauty and its value for pollinators, and use it for mulch or compost if you feel so inclined. It can’t hurt to have it around for topical pain relief or to ease swelling. And it is a great plant to put under fruit trees and in neglected parts of your garden. It will spread easily, so be warned that if you dig it up and cut the roots, you could have plants everywhere (and it reseeds - another particularly borage-like trait). But it’s a pretty plant, so that might not be a bad thing!

Fertilizer/Comments

I had a question from a new gardener; she wanted to know if I use fertilizer on my plants. The short answer is yes. The larger answer is, sometimes and in some places. The super-large answer is, mostly we shouldn’t need to use fertilizer. And the ecological answer is, using fertilizer is a tricky business, both in the way they are made and the way they interact with our environment, so less is better.

Let’s start with the easy stuff first: Yes, I do fertilize. Plants in pots must be fertilized, because they can’t form connections with a larger soil community. About once a month, I use a liquid, organic fish emulsion on my potted flowers, fruits, herbs, and vegetables. The product I use is Neptune’s Harvest. It has an NPK of 2-4-1. This is a good, low ratio; the amount of Nitrogen won’t hurt the plant, and it has slightly more Phosphorus which is good for developing roots and fruits (or blooms). The thing you want to look for on the package is, how much of the Nitrogen is soluble? Soluble/insoluble is an important thing to know. If it’s soluble, it’s available to the plant right away; it will enter the soil solution and be taken up by the roots. Whatever is not used immediately will not be stored, it will run out with your water. Generally organic products have a low NPK ratio, most of the nutrients are insoluble, and they take some time to work, as the biology in the soil has to incorporate them into their bodies, then poop them out, before they are available to the plants. In soil biology, this is known as the poop-loop. This is an important cycle and is the best way to feed plants. It’s like micro-manure.

I also fertilize the rest of my garden, but maybe not in the way you’d think. I add organic matter regularly. Good quality compost, two inches on each planting bed, is added every fall. Compost is added to the pollinator gardens when I add seeds. And every time I put a new ornamental plant in the ground, I mulch with compost. This way, organic matter is constantly being returned to the soil, and that is the very best way to fertilize your plants. The roots form connections to everything around via fungi, and there is a constant exchange of nutrients going on. We also add wood chips every year or so to all the paths and around large plants and trees. These break down over time and add nutrients, as well as providing habitat for soil creatures. We also incorporate cover crops, which add different nutrients and soil-aggregating qualities. Having a living root inside the ground at all times is the best way to ensure your soil has plenty of food - the microbiology lives on and near roots; the plant pumps out food for the biology, and the biology in turn feeds the plants. So yes, in these ways we also fertilize.

And, when I plant summer crops in the raised beds, I add a granular organic vegetable fertilizer such as Jobe’s Vegetable Fertilizer which is 2-5-3. This breaks down slowly over the course of the season. I do this for summer crops because they are heavy feeders (meaning they need a lot of nutrition to produce big fruit, like tomatoes, peppers, or melons) and I am planting them very closely spaced.

Another thing to consider is your soil type. I tend to have clay soil, which has the ability to hang on to nutrients (this has to do with its chemical composition, cation exchange of electrons, and the minerals that make up clay, factors too large to get in to here). If you have a sandy soil, you’ll have less nutrients available. If you have ‘fill,’ then you have very little soil life, and you’ll need to feed it in order for it to thrive. The best way to do this is through the addition of organic matter.

All fertilizers have an ecological cost. Rock phosphorus is mined in a horrible system that wreaks havoc on the earth. Peat moss is an element that takes hundreds of thousands of years to form, and we are stripping it far faster than it can be replenished. Synthetic nitrogen is applied at enormous amounts in conventional agriculture because soils are depleted; much of it runs off and has caused all kinds of problems downstream. lt’s easy to add cover crops that have the ability to form associations with bacteria that fix nitrogen - the pea family does this of course. The thing is, you have to cut down the cover crop before the fruit is produced - and don’t pull up the roots, let them rot in the ground. Some large-scale farmers have found ways to supply 90% of their nutrient needs with cover crops alone.

I’d like to refer you, once again, to a great movie called Symphony of the Soil. In it, several scientists and farmers explain how soil is formed and how we can hold on to it, and farm with best practices to retain nutrients. I’d also like to suggest the book Growing a Revolution by David Montgomery. You can also find his lectures online. He and Elaine Ingham are my soil mentors.

I loved getting this question from this new gardener, and I love getting questions and comments generally. I know that leaving a comment here on the blog has been difficult. A while ago, we disabled anonymous comments because we were getting some advertisements for porn (!), but we’ve enabled them again in the hopes that perhaps we will get a community going in the comments section (well, a community that doesn’t involve porn, at least). If you are unable to ask a question here, please feel free to email me using the contact page - I love getting your questions.

It’s heating up here - summer might finally be on the way!