I’d never given much thought to vegetable seeds before, but once I started to take gardening seriously, I realized how important seed selection is. Seed DNA plays a big role in the taste, hardiness, and appearance of the plants. Hybrid seeds, which come from artificially cross-pollinated plants, have been bred for high yields, disease resistance, and long shelf life. The seeds hybrid plants produce aren’t identical to the ones they grew from, and the vegetables they produce are usually inferior in taste or size. In other words, you have to buy new hybrid seeds every year.
On the other hand, heirloom seeds (the term heirloom was popularized in 1981 by Kent Whealy of the Seed Savers Exchange) produce fruit with seeds that are just like the seeds that grew them. As the name suggests, heirloom seeds have been passed from generation to generation, farmer to farmer, and gardener to gardener, because they’re tasty or have other desirable traits.
The Seed Savers Exchange sells seeds for vegetables I’ve never seen. If a grocery store is a suburban-mall pet shop, the Seed Savers Exchange is an exotic-animal bazaar. The melons shown on its Web site look like alien food props from an episode of the original Star Trek. I ordered a packet of Banana Melon seeds (twenty-five for $2.75) based on the fruit’s unusual shape and color. From the catalogue description: According to the Cucurbits of New York, this variety has been listed as a novelty for as long as American seed catalogs have been in print. Long banana-shaped melon tapered at both ends, 16-24” by 4” diameter. Smooth yellow skin, salmon-pink flesh. Good sweet spicy flavor.
In addition to the Banana Melons, I bought seeds for several kinds of tomatoes—Cream Sausage, Bloody Butcher, Hillbilly Potato Leaf, Cherokee Purple, Crnkovic Yugoslavian—plus Miniature Chocolate bell peppers, sunberries, Aunt Molly’s ground cherries, summer crookneck squash, A & C pickling cucumbers, Chioggia beets, Dragon carrots, Empress beans. I also bought a mixture of lettuces: Amish Deer Tongue, Australian Yellow-leaf, Bronze Arrowhead, Forellenschuss, Lolla Rossa, Pablo, Red Velvet, and Reine des Glaces. (I confess, I bought most of these seeds based more on their whimsical names than on their physical attributes.)
Even though the Home Depot tomatoes had been a bust, other vegetable plants (from seeds bought at the supermarket) were supplying us with a tidy harvest of cayenne peppers, figs, basil, squash, tomatoes, and watermelon. By midsummer, the average weekly haul was about ten or fifteen pounds of produce (not including oranges and grapefruits).
My garden produce looked so good that I often picked it and ate it without first going inside to wash it off. One afternoon I ate several figs, tomatoes, and basil leaves right off the plants, cleaning them by wiping them on my T-shirt.
That evening, as we were getting ready for bed, my stomach was feeling bloated and rumbly. I asked Carla how she felt, and she said she was fine. I figured my stomach discomfort was from eating three large bowls of the delicious homegrown-squash soup I’d made that afternoon. After falling into a light, restless sleep, I woke up at one-thirty in the morning with a sharp pain that started in the pit of my stomach and went all the way up to my esophagus. The pain rose and fell in waves, never going away completely, just cycling between “bad” and “excruciating.” I felt hot and nauseated, and my abdomen was swollen. I got up and started walking around the house to alleviate my suffering (moving around felt better than lying in bed). I stayed up most of the night.
At around 5 a.m. I crawled into bed, feeling more miserable than before. For the entire day, I lay motionless, not eating or drinking, getting out of bed only to throw up or deal with a bout of diarrhea. I’d been cocky about the recent E. coli and salmonella breakouts in commercially grown produce, boasting to everyone within earshot that homegrown produce wasn’t contaminated with pathogens. But my pesticide-free produce was undoubtedly crawling with microbes.
Fortunately it was just a twenty-four-hour bug, and by that evening the gastrointestinal distress had passed. But it had lasted long enough to teach me to always wash my produce before eating it.
When I related my experience to a coworker via e-mail, she told me about a friend, an industrial hygienist who diagnoses “sick buildings” for fungus infestation and has become something of a germophobe: She was picking raspberries from my yard and dropped some on the ground—she took them home and washed them with a (very) mild bleach solution before she ate them. She poohpoohs (heh) a lot of mold concerns, but she says the ground is crawling with E. coli type stuff. From raccoon and possum and rodent poo. Ew.
That seemed like overkill to me. But I still carefully wash my homegrown produce (without bleach).
“WE HAVE GOPHER NEUROMANCERS”
My small garden was producing a fair amount of vegetables. By September I was the proud owner of a sizable plot of land formerly known as a lawn, and I was ready to take my gardening to the next level. First, though, I needed advice from someone who was already doing what I was thinking about doing, so I visited the home of Julian Darley and Celine Rich in Sebastopol, California. They’re the founders of the Post Carbon Institute, a nonprofit organization established to figure out how people might be able to live reasonably well in a world without cheap energy.
When I arrived at their house at about ten o’clock in the morning, Julian, a sandy-haired Englishman around fifty, was standing in his driveway inspecting a new scratch in one of his “solar share” vehicles—pickups run on batteries charged by the rows of photovoltaic cells on the roof of the house.
Running his finger over the scratch, Julian asked out loud to no one in particular, “I wonder if this was intentional?” He called his wife, Celine, a pretty blond Canadian, to have a look. She shrugged noncommittally.
As Julian continued to examine the scratch, my eyes wandered to the enormous variety of fruits, vegetables, herbs, and grains growing on every square foot of the one-third-acre property. I saw an explosion of squash, sorghum, buckwheat, beans, corn, amaranth, mustard, soybeans, sunflowers, pumpkins, watermelons, lettuces, tomatoes, flax, hops, peppers, eggplants, okra, green peppers, basil, onions, and kiwi fruit. An irrigation system built from conduits and tiny ponds wound through the yard. Eighteenth-century farm implements were lined up against a shack. I was overwhelmed by how much stuff was growing, and by the thought of how much planning and work must have gone into making a garden this productive.
Julian noticed me staring at the garden. “It’s gone a bit wild,” he said. “There are a lot of ideas in here. We’re not expecting anybody to do this but to take some of the ideas that you find appropriate and then turn them into your own garden for the minimum spend—minimum petroleum, minimum money.”
Forgetting about the scratch on his car, Julian led me around the yard. “We’ve tried many different things that you can see, and now we’re really homing in on”—and here his voice dropped to an urgent whisper—“how you can do it cheaply.”
“I’m interested in learning how to garden more cheaply,” I said. “I paid a lot for my mulch. Is all this hay you’re using for mulch cheaper?”
“That is straw,” Julian said. “Hay is a feedstuff and would attract unwelcome critters. Besides, straw is cheaper.”
The problem, though, he said, is that straw must be delivered by truck, and that just won’t be practical in the post-carbon world, where gasoline costs a hundred dollars or more a gallon.
“Where does the straw come from?” he asked rhetorically. “It comes from the Midwest. It’s a complete energy loser. It’s crazy.”
I quickly learned that, to Julian and Celine, DIY is a matter of mankind’s survival, because they are certain we will be living in a post-carbon world in a couple of decades. But they don’t rule out the personal-fulfillment angle—Julian describes his work as “serious with a smile.”
Everything that takes place in the Post Carbon Institute’s experimental garden and workshop is entered into an EROEI—energy return on energy invested—equation. In other words, how much energy (food calories, electric watts, thermal BTUs, etc.) are you getting out of an activity relat
ive to how much energy it takes?
Julian brushed aside some of the straw with one foot to show me the white plastic conduits hiding beneath it. The water pipes led to green plastic boxes buried in the ground. Inside these boxes were the valves and filters for the irrigation system. Julian lifted the lid on a box to show me, but it was filled with so much dirt that I couldn’t see much of anything.
“This is what the gophers do,” he said of the mess. The gophers even ate through a plastic bag to get to the printed instructions stored in one of the boxes. “The little devils!” Julian said, holding the dirty plastic bag at eye level so he could get a better look. “The instructions are all going moldy.”
Gophers are a big problem for gardeners everywhere, but in this hippy-dippy northern California town, the solutions tend to be idiosyncratic. “People meditate to get rid of gophers,” said Julian. “We have gopher neuromancers. Everybody has a story or a solution. The stories are interesting, and the solutions don’t work.”
“We have a big gopher problem,” agreed Celine. She handed me an eight-inch-long black plastic cylinder with a pointed tip. It looked like some kind of dangerous sex toy. “You put this in the ground, and it makes noise to scare the gophers away.” She turned it on, and it emitted an abrasive tone, like a digital alarm clock. “The problem is, it doesn’t last. It runs a week or two, making that sound every minute or so, but once you put it in the ground, it stops working. I put it in strategic spots I know they like—the onion and cabbage patch and the watermelons. Then they all stopped working and the gophers all came back.”
Julian said the batteries were fine, but he suspects the problem comes from bad contacts. “This stuff has to be much more robust,” he said. Anything not robust in the post-carbon age is going to be useless.
Julian showed me the computer that controls the irrigation system. It’s about the size of a paperback book, with buttons to program the watering schedule. The gophers haven’t gotten to it yet. It uses expensive, nonrechargeable eighteen-volt batteries. “Rechargeable batteries aren’t practical,” said Julian, “unless you are willing to change them out once a week.” Julian and Celine’s goal is to power the system with solar energy, which is “the trick with all this stuff.”
They’re also growing castor beans, which they are thinking about using to poison the gophers. (Castor beans contain ricin, a poisonous protein. A spy in London carried a James Bond-like umbrella that surreptitiously and fatally shot a tiny ricin-filled pellet into the leg of a journalist in 1978.) “We are trying to figure out if we can grind up the pods and then put them down the gopher holes,” said Celine. “Or maybe we grow them in different places in the garden, because the roots are poisonous as well, but I’m not sure. Harvesting them will be my next challenge.”
Julian nodded at the word challenge. “We find that at some stage in the process you get stuck. You get short of knowledge, short of time, you don’t know what to do with it, you’re missing the tools, blah blah blah. When you do a garden this complex, there are a lot of things to go wrong.” It was nice to hear that other people experienced problems with their gardens, too.
Celine started picking vegetables for our lunch. She came across some sorghum and handed me a sprig. A couple of days before my visit, they had harvested their sorghum crop, which had grown to a height of twelve feet, and were able to extract five gallons of the sweet, calorie-rich juice using a hundred-year-old cast-iron sorghum press.
The more time I spent with Julian and Celine, the more I respected them. They weren’t blindly optimistic about going back to the land. Instead, they approached the problem as amateur scientists, using their garden and workshop as a laboratory to test tools and technologies that might help people live in a world without cheap energy. They are hopeful about solar and wind energy, but their outlook on biofuels, which many green-energy enthusiasts promote, is gloomy. Celine and Julian have tried extracting oil from energy crops such as sunflower, flax, and canola seeds without success. They’ve used a variety of hand presses (because a gas or electric press would be cheating), and none are strong enough to squeeze oil from the tiny seeds. “We haven’t managed to squish anything,” said Julian. He held out some canola seeds, and I was surprised to see how minuscule and hard-shelled they looked. Julian said he brings canola seeds with him when he goes to conventions to show them to biodiesel boosters, “and their jaws literally drop.”
“A lot of what we try to do,” he said, “is explore this food-versus-fuel debate, and the crude conclusion is that liquid fuels are very hard to make, so you should treat them very preciously.” In fact, according to Post Carbon Institute fellow Rob Hopkins, a liter of petroleum “contains the energy equivalent of about five weeks hard human manual labor.” At $3 a gallon, Julian pointed out, gasoline is an unbelievable bargain. When we run out of gasoline and can’t use gas-powered farm equipment, we’ll need other sources of fuel to produce the food we eat. Julian and Celine built this garden to try as many different human-, wind-, and solar-powered methods as they could think of before the oil runs out.
They also grew flax seeds, which they were initially excited about because the seeds provide omega-3 oil and the plant is the source of linen. But it turns out that making linen requires a number of skills and machines. Flax has to be retted, scutched, hackled, spun, reeled, woven, bleached, and dyed to become linen. For the self-sufficiency purist, flax isn’t practical. But, as Julian pointed out, a local community composed of skilled tradespeople could convert flax into linen. Flax, it turns out, is a DIO—do-it-ourselves—material.
Julian had just started telling me about last year’s basil harvest (“a sea of green and purple leaves”) when an older woman walking on the sidewalk stopped in front of the gate leading to their house and shouted to Julian and Celine, “Guys, is it no on seven?”
She was asking about California Proposition 7, a state measure that had been heavily advertised as an alternative-energy plan that would cut the state’s reliance on fossil fuels.
“No on 7,” said Julian. “No on 7, no on 10, yes on 1A—that’s the railway.”
“Why no on 7?” asked the woman. “To me, it’s—”
Julian cut her off. “Because it’s another fiddle. It’s two Arizona billionaires trying to foist basically Big Solar, which won’t help Small Solar. The Small Solar people hate it.”
Julian and Celine are against the big guy and for the little guy, not because they have some kind of ideological dislike of large corporations but simply because they don’t think large, centralized suppliers of food, energy, and manufactured goods will be viable when the oil runs out. (In a 2009 talk at the annual TED conference, Rob Hopkins explained that for every four barrels of oil we use, only one new barrel is discovered.) When the pumps go dry, the people who survive will be the ones who are parts of local communities that have figured out how to generate their own electricity and share it with their neighbors. “Our motto,” said Julian, “is reduce consumption and produce locally.”
I press Julian on why Big Solar is bad. Isn’t it better than coal?
“Big Solar means long transmission lines, to Los Angeles, San Diego, and so forth,” he explained. “They are expensive, and you have losses, and so our theme is ‘Shorten the supply chains.’ Do it as locally as you can. Try to trim your consumption to match your local supply. No doubt we’ll need big sources, but that’s not what we try to promote. We promote what ordinary people can do, what towns can do, what regions can do.”
I also learned that coffee and tea won’t be around in the post-carbon world. “If you look at the embedded energy of the things people eat and drink,” said Celine, “coffee and tea are really big. And even if it’s fair trade, those people are concentrating on growing things for the export market rather than helping to make their families self-reliant and growing the staple crops of their community. Now if you’re a Somalian, I could see that growing coffee would be a staple crop, but I don’t think that’s a traditional Vietnamese staple crop
. They need to be growing crops that will be feeding their communities, and we need to be growing crops that will feed our communities.”
To show me an example of what she means by feeding her community, Celine led me to the front porch, where there was a table with a weighing scale and a notebook and pen. There was also a chalkboard with produce prices written on it. This is Celine’s “you pick” program for selling the produce grown in the energy garden. Four or five families in the neighborhood come over and pick fruits, vegetables, and eggs from the garden. They weigh the fruit on a scale on the front porch and write down the type of produce they picked and how much it weighed in a notebook. Later, Celine collects the money. She charges the same prices that the farmers’ market in town charges: Basil is $2 a bunch, squash cost 50 cents each, tomatoes are $2 a handful, and eggs are $4 a dozen.
I asked Julian and Celine which activity yields the highest energy return on energy invested. Celine pointed to the fifteen hens scratching around in the straw mulch, looking for bugs to eat.
“We looked at the energy output of the garden, and we figured out that most of it is coming from eggs,” she said.
“About ten chickens equals one human in terms of calorie needs,” added Julian. “They need about two hundred calories per day, and they output about one hundred calories in eggs in the summer. That’s pretty generous.”
“If you compost a lot,” said Celine, “that builds up the insects, and you get even better eggs. They make the eggs really high in the right kind of omega-3 fatty acids as opposed to eggs from hens fed a corn diet.”
Julian added that the neighbors have been bringing food scraps over to feed the hens. For now, the neighbors give them the scraps out of the kindness of their hearts, but Julian plans on eventually paying them in solars (rhymes with dollars), a local currency backed up by units of solar energy. “We haven’t done it yet,” he said, “because we want to make sure the mechanism’s right.”
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