 | |||
| Volunteer grape-sized tomatoes that grow abundantly with no human help at Wild Roots. |
Gardening
Wild Roots was logged to oblivion about 15 years ago, just before it was purchased by the woman who now owns it and lets us live there as we do (thanks!). I've seen aerial photos of it from the time, full of mud slides on steep rocky cliffs.It's still quite steep and rocky, full of rhododendron and mountain laurel and dog hobble that hold soil in place so the tulip poplars, oaks, and others could get established over time. I can tell where gardeners have been and what they have done and not done, and it's taught me a lot.
My gardening
Here's some garlic drying which I planted end-November 2016
Here's what I did to harvest the garlic:
- Late November 2016:
- brought up 2 buckets of soil from compost space and laid them over a terraced garden bed
- placed garlic into soil
- covered with leaves
- hauled 8 gallons of water up the hill, watered the bed
- Early June 2016:
- harvested the garlic scapes
- Late June 2016:
- harvested the garlic in great abundance
I planted a few more beds in late August 2017, and had mixed results. Squash grew abundantly but didn't fruit before the frost; I got some daikon radishes; only one onion sprouted - the bulbs I planted had been too exposed to the weather for 2 years between purchase and planting. The radishes didn't do great; I think I didn't mulch them sufficiently, especially given the erosion challenges of gardening on a hillside (and I didn't want to redo the terracing half-way into the fall gardening season - another lesson). Plus Wild Roots is very high in the mountains, so planting recommendations based on expectations of hours-of-sun-per-day, date of first frost, etc don't apply to us the same as they do to lower-elevation places just a few dozen miles away.
We also had a period of drought in September/October that hit the gardened and wild plants pretty hard. For weeks, I took water from the rain barrels and dutifully watered all the beds, and when the rain barrels went dry, I had a decision: I could haul water up a steep, long, windy trail from the stream every day, or I could let the plants fare as they will.
Many locals believe the conservative politics about climate change (it supposedly ain't happening) but they also believe what they see with their eyes: they tell me that streams are about 1/3 as wide as they were in living memory. We're simply getting less water in this region, and I decided I want to learn to garden with resilient plants that don't need much human help, that can fend through droughts and floods and hot and cold and still produce food I can count on. Furthermore, I want to be able to leave for months or years and return to an abundantly food-producing space.
On a larger scale, when I die, I want to leave an abundant food space to whoever follows, whether they recognize it or knew me or not.
So I now recognize three kinds of gardening. When you're dead and gone, or just gone, you...
- Leave the earth worse than you found it. Possibilities: make the land less bio-diverse, harder to garden, more toxic, etc
- Leave things neutral (2 years later, no one will know you'd been there)
- Leave things better than you found it. Possibilities: leave it more bio-diverse, more food-producing, less toxic, more drought-resistent, etc.
I'd like to show you some examples:
Gardening - Neutral
In neutral gardening, you work hard and do a lot, and maybe you even get lots of food, but if you totally disengage with the land for a year or two, you leave no sign that you were ever there:
The pictures above and below show some gardening spaces that have gotten so overgrown in the last 2 years, you wouldn't know they'd been garden spaces unless someone told you. Other garden spaces aren't quite so overgrown.
Certainly, there may still be positive long-term effects: the neutral gardener may still enrich the soil (though she may withdraw the nutrients when harvesting the crop, so this may equal out). If this was how all humans related to the earth, it'd still be a huge step up!
Gardening - Negative
I don't see any signs that previous gardeners used toxic chemicals or soil supplements. The worst actions I saw were wanton tree girdling:
When you remove the inner bark, you kill the tree, as the tree moves nutrients through this bark and not the inner wood. All girdled trees that remain are at risk of falling at anytime, making them a safety hazard we have to keep an eye on.
We felled some of the trees T girdled before she left, but some still stand - and as far as I know, there's no reason for them to be girdled unless there's an urgent need to take them down. So this is an example of negative gardening - leaving a space worse off after your absence than if you hadn't been there.
Gardening - Positive
This is where it's at! In positive gardening, you encourage plants that will continue to live happily without intense human support. These are often the weeds gardening books warn against, the ones that spread aggressively, tolerate wide ranges of heat and cold and moisture and dry, and don't fit into conventional diets and recipes. They're the plants you find in wild-food foraging books! T was also instrumental in introducing and encouraging these plants.
My favorite leafy green at Wild Roots is stinging nettle:
 |
| Stinging Nettle: Mega-nutritional, and gentle enough that many herbalists recommended even for pregnant women. Also a source of fiber/cordage material, and the seeds are edible too. |
Here're some volunteer grape tomatoes:
The tomatoes fruits are hidden in this photo, but all the foreground greens are tomatoes, and they're just a small fraction of all the tomato plants at Wild Roots that grow abundantly with zero human effort.
The background green to the left of the cob chicken coop in the above picture is lambs-quarter, another volunteer and source of edible greens and seeds.
| |||
| Look closer, and the plants are full of these lovely tomatos! |
 |
| A major horseradish patch next to the stinging nettles! Leaves are spicy, and the roots delicious in fall-time krauts. This also gets no tending except a yearly mulching. |
Above is a che-fruit tree. I don't think it even gets mulched. Maybe we'd be wise to do that. Below is a close-up of the fruits.
 |
| Che-fruits close up. Another abundant-producer with no human labor needed. It's a happy tree. |
So the gardener T left Wild Roots, and what happened? A few tea herbs remain, the nettles remain producing abundantly, tomatoes, horseradish, che-fruit, and some others remain producing abundantly - a true gift to the future residents, even ones like me she never met.
That's how I want to garden, leaving behind a richer world for whomever comes. Generosity towards the soil and plants and people, all at once - and if we're wise, we needn't work farmer-hard doing it, from sun-up to sun-down keeping nature from taking over our little plot. Instead I want to encourage nature to take over, and I'll just give a little nudge to the particular plant and mushroom and animal and microbe communities I most value.
I learned that the natives who lived in western North Carolina pre-Cherokee relied especially on lambs-quarters, a close relative of quinoa, and jerusalem artichoke, a plant similar to a sunflower that produces edible roots in massive abundance: the farmers I know want it uprooted at all costs so it won't spread, and the foragers I know lust to find it in unpoisoned areas. Some friends who know it well, and who are considering what to plant in their garden, considered planting it but discussed how to firewall it from the rest of their land. They even discussed putting metal sheets 3-4 feet into the ground to keep this incredible food plant from spreading too aggressively.
That's how I want to relate to my food garden - "Hold up food! Don't spread so fast. That's the herb patch you're gunning for, and I want room for them too." And then I want to extend that to whole forests, too, encouraging abundant food producing plants to spread and live happily without constant human effort tending and weeding and worrying and spending and plastic-covering...
And when I leave, or die, those mushroom-plant-animal-microbe communities will happily carry on, and any people who come later will benefit - no legal action, no written word, no human awareness at all will be needed for the beneficial results to remain, and perhaps even spread.
I feel grateful to the Cherokee for demonstrating this attitude in their tending of the wild blueberries. As I mentioned in my post on wild food this fall, they tended many many square acres (square miles?) of blueberries that grew so happily that they continue to grow abundantly today, centuries after the Europeans evicted Cherokees from those spaces.
Next Year
This fall and winter I'm gathering resources to continue this garden-positive relationship next year. I'm going to spread lambs quarters and jerusalem artichoke, as well as a few others like amaranth that many people consider aggressive weeds, and then I'll just keep feeding the soil and help them establish. Then I'll observe how they do! Between the wild food-producing plants within a mile walk of Wild Roots (like wood nettle) and these plants I want to introduce, I hope to be able to harvest many gallons of grain and carbohydrate-root crop someday, a complement to the fruit, dried greens, and meat/broth/fat we already gather each fall.
And someday I'll leave and perhaps come back years later, or perhaps others will come, and the only thing we'll have to do to enjoy abundant, nutritious, free, non-toxic food is recognize it!
This is part of a series of posts describing my living situation (Wild Roots) and projects this summer and fall 2017:
