gardening

For a free country, we’ve got an awfully tyrannical food chain. Our current system of food production is really founded on a contempt for life; it pummels the planet and exploits migrant farm workers, defying the laws of both nature and man. If we truly are what we eat, I guess that makes us a nation of nature-hating misanthropes.

We’ve shoehorned corn into every corner of Iowa, and shoveled it into every cow--or so it seemed to me as I watched the screening of King Corn that Eating Liberally co-hosted this week at the Tank with our friends from the Green Edge Collaborative. We’ve taken the already fertile soil of our heartland and jacked it up on steroids, to grow a bazillion bushels of a variety of corn you can’t even eat till it’s been processed into some sort of by-product.

We coax an astonishing amount of corn from each monocropped acre by saturating this precious topsoil with fertilizers and herbicides, and then we convert this nutritionally bankrupt bounty into high fructose corn syrup, or feed for cows whose digestive systems literally can’t stomach it (hello, E. coli), or the eco-disaster we call corn-based ethanol.

As King Corn’s food court jesters Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis discovered in their pilgrimage to our feedcorn fiefdom, this ultra-efficient method of growing corn has created ever larger farms run by fewer and fewer farmers, draining the soul of our rural communities even as it depletes the soil (and drives our diabetes epidemic, and fuels global warming, and makes cheap spaghetti sauces sickeningly sweet, and--oh, nevermind.)

And this is the model of agriculture that Wall Street, K Street, and Main Street all celebrate as a shining example of good ol’ American know-how that the rest of the world would do well to emulate. Feedcorn is on the march!

We were fortunate to have Ian Cheney on hand at our screening to do a Q & A, and the questions were pretty much the same ones people peppered Michael Pollan with at an Omnivore’s Dilemma reading I attended in April of 2006 (Pollan, an advisor to the King Corn crew, appears in the film expounding on the evils of industrial agriculture against the backdrop of his own abundant veggie garden, including a suitably monstrous patch of dinosaur kale!)

What folks want to know, after reading Pollan’s books or seeing a film like King Corn, is “What can we do about this awful food system?”

The knee-jerk response is, of course, to endorse community supported agriculture and farmers’ markets, but Cheney noted that we run the risk of creating an alternative food chain that serves only those fortunate enough to live in the more affluent communities where farmers’ markets and upscale stores like Whole Foods thrive.

Living at the Ethicurean epicenter of NYC, it’s easy for me to opt out of our crappy food chain; I can walk to Union Square and shop at the Greenmarket four days a week all year round, and whatever I can’t find there I can get at the Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s that are a stone’s throw from the Greenmarket. There are several mom-and-pop health food stores in our neck of the woods, too.

So it’s easy for me to follow Pollan’s advice to stay out of the supermarkets. But a few miles north of us, in East Harlem, they’ve hardly got any supermarkets left to stay out of. As the New York Times reported last Monday:

To us farmers’ market fanatics, the very notion of a New York supermarket as a source for fresh, healthy food seems laughable; the typical supermarket is a food desert to us, with aisle after aisle of mysterious food-like substances encased in plastic and no grass-fed anything. But when your only sources for food are bodegas and fast food joints, a supermarket that actually sells fresh--though far-traveled--fruits and vegetables is a step up.

No wonder more and more city dwellers are becoming urban farmers, as another New York Times article noted yesterday; communities decried as food deserts are creating their own oases by reclaiming unused lots where they grow fruits and vegetables for themselves and even sell the surplus to others.

The Times article heralds the revival of urban agriculture that’s taking root all around the country, with the help of organizations like Milwaukee’s Growing Power, and NYC’s own GreenThumb and Just Foods, two groups who’ve done so much to support our community gardeners and local farmers. I had the pleasure of hearing Growing Power’s founder, Will Allen, speak at the Food & Society conference in Arizona last week and came away convinced that Growing Power’s one-acre farm represents the future of urban agriculture.

As the Times notes, this “one-acre farm crammed with plastic greenhouses, compost piles, do-it-yourself contraptions, tilapia tanks and pens full of hens, ducks and goats…grossed over $220,000 last year from the sale of lettuces, winter greens, sprouts and fish to local restaurants and consumers.”

Allen’s model demonstrates that city dwellers do have the capacity to produce at least some of their own food in an eco-friendly, socially responsible manner. And as more and more folks become aware of the rampant abuse that’s a hallmark of industrial agriculture, from cruelly confined chickens to Florida’s enslaved migrant farm workers, people are seeking alternative food chains untarnished by institutionalized exploitation and environmental degradation.

For a really comprehensive and inspiring look at the enormous potential of this movement to provide less privileged folks with an abundance of fresh, affordable produce while building community, preserving open space and creating an environmentally beneficial habitat, check out “Vitalizing the Vacant” from Thoughts On The Table blogger Annie Myers, who never ceases to astonish me with her clear, beautiful prose and even clearer observations.

Annie’s one of a dozen or so twenty-somethings I’ve met who blow me away with their commitment to changing our world; I was too cynical and alienated when I was that age to do much more than mouth off about our decaying culture. I’m doing that still, while folks like Annie and the Real Food Challenge students and “Greenhorns” filmmaker Severine Von Tscharner Fleming are running around remaking the world the way they want it to be. Considering how badly we've messed things up, it’s the least we can do to cheer them on.

Well, there are good bugs, and there are bad bugs, to paraphrase Camper Van Beethoven. And the bad bugs mounted a surge in our garden while we were away these past few weeks. Japanese beetles have ravaged our roses, cherry trees, hazelnuts, wisteria, and porcelain vine, leaving ghostly skeletonized leaves waving woefully.

This Asian invasion’s been the bane of gardeners ever since Japanese beetle larvae apparently snuck into New Jersey in a shipment of iris bulbs sometime before 1912, when we started inspecting imports.

The beetles aren’t much of a problem in their native Japan, where a natural predator, the winsomely named winsome fly, keeps them in check. But here in the U.S., the Japanese beetle is a pervasive pest with few enemies and one very big best friend: the ubiquitous American lawn. Japanese beetle grubs thrive on grass roots, so wherever there are lawns, you’ll find these copper-colored creeps decimating your greenery.

The old-school way to deal with Japanese beetles relied on pherome-scented traps which employed the same strategy that Donald Rumsfeld tried in Iraq—luring every beetle in the region to descend on your yard so you could do battle with them. Interestingly, gardeners found this method totally counter-productive, and now prefer to wage biological warfare by applying a bacterium called milky spore to their soil.

Our neighbors whose lawn laid out a welcome mat for these pesky beetles have, thankfully, saturated their grass with milky spore, but it may take several years for the bacterium to become established and destroy the evil-doers. In the meantime, our foliage falls victim to these voracious invaders, and we find ourselves tempted to commit Spectracide.

Blueberries are almost unbearably good for you—they’re one of the finest sources of antioxidants known to man (and beast.) That’s because anthocyanins, the phytochemicals that give blueberries their deep, beautiful purple-blue pigment, also do wonders for our bodies and brains, helping us fight heart disease, cancer, and aging, among other ills.

So most of us know that berries are one of the best—and tastiest—fruits we can eat. But nobody seems to realize that they’re also one of the easiest and most rewarding shrubs to grow. There’s even a dwarf variety called Tophat that’s so small you can grow it in a window box, and it’s self-pollinating, too, unlike most blueberries, which require a second variety for cross-pollination. We planted four different kinds, so they ripen a few at a time over the course of the summer, giving the birds—and sometimes us, if we’re lucky—a steady source of delicious berries.

Blueberries are a near-zero maintenance plant, and they’re ultra-ornamental; they give you something to look forward to three seasons out of four. In spring there are delicate little flowers that look like lilies of the valley, which turn into tasty berries in the summer, and then in fall the leaves go all autumnal.

Those weary rhododendrons and azaleas standing sentry in suburbia just make me sad--I say yank ‘em out and replace ‘em with blueberries. It’s a no-brainer, which people would realize if only they ate more brain cell-boosting blueberries.

Farmer Kitty’s all in favor of promoting a plant-based diet, despite being an unapologetic carnivore. But, like most felines, she devotes the lion’s share of her waking hours to catnapping. Her less than rigorous routine goes something like this; plant a few seeds, catch a few z’s.

And once the seeds are sown, she tends to forget to tend them, thanks to all that mercury-tainted tuna she’s eaten over the years. So we insisted that she start her seeds in our self-watering germination trays this spring. The seedlings never dry out or get overwatered, because they sit on top of a strip of capillary matting which wicks water from a reservoir underneath on a need-to-grow basis. And the lid helps keep the soil temperature even so the seeds germinate faster.

All you have to do is remember to refill the reservoir every now and then and remove the lid once the seeds sprout. It’s the most painless form of propagation short of just throwing seeds on the ground and crossing your fingers, which is my other preferred method.

I’ve never seen these trays in a store but you can find them online at Gardener’s Supply and Lee Valley. If you’ve always wanted to try your hand at growing your own herbs or salad greens but hesitated because you’re not a natural nurturer, these trays are for you; they’ll give the brownest of thumbs a greener patina.

Scaredy Cat was afraid this pumpkin wouldn’t turn orange in time for Halloween, and it didn’t, because it’s actually a Queensland Blue Winter Squash. We planted three different heirloom squash vines this year, but this exotic Australian was the sole progeny of our pumpkin patch—ah, the vagaries of vegetable gardening (pumpkins and winter squash are the same thing, BTW, if you’re wondering.)

On the bright side, if your yard’s only going to yield a single squash, this is a great one to have, according to Elizabeth Schneider, author of Vegetables from Amaranth to Zucchini. Queensland Blue is what’s known as a “good keeper,” with an excellent storage life:

Sounds amazing; I can hardly wait to try it. But it’s such a perfect specimen with its deeply ribbed blue-green-grey skin, we may just leave it on the mantle for a month or two so we can show it off. After all, it’s truly one-of-a-kind.

This fiery shrub is one of three hazelbert trees we planted in our front yard. The hazelbert is a transatlantic tree, bred to offer the best traits of the American hazelnut and European Filbert. It grows just 8 to 12 feet tall, so it fits nicely into even the smallest garden (i.e., ours) and yet manages to produce an abundance of tasty nuts.

Our hazelberts, planted three years ago, yielded a bumper crop this year. Sadly, most of the nuts were squirreled away by bushy-tailed thieves who beat us to the harvest.

We’ll have to take solace in the hazelbert’s other fine attributes: catkins in the winter and spring, stunning foliage in the fall. I was inspired to plant them by The Complete Book of Edible Landscaping, Rosalind Creasy’s classic guide and still one of the best books on the subject. Read it and reap!