One Magic Square Vegetable Gardening

The Easy, Organic Way to Grow Your Own Food on a 3-Foot Square

Lolo Houbein

• Publisher: The Experiment
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781615193356
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

This 2nd edition of the classic gardening guide features more than 40 small garden designs for everything from stir-fry vegetables to anti-cancer foods. For decades, Lolo Houbein has cultivated her own organic fruits, vegetables and herbs from small gardens of no more than 3 feet square. Now she shows readers how to reap an abundant harvest from a tiny plot of land. One Magic Square features plot designs geared toward specific themes, like soups, salads, and starchy staples, as well as plots of edible flowers, and antioxidant-rich foods—with encyclopedic information about every crop in every plot. With wisdom and humor, Lolo shares sustainable, cost-effective techniques for using compost, saving water, troubleshooting weeds and pests and more. She also offers tips on drying, freezing, pickling, and other ways to get more value and enjoyment from your homegrown produce. Ever encouraging, often charming, and always practical, this expanded second edition of One Magic Square Vegetable Gardening will help first-time gardeners get started—and help veteran gardeners get results—on a small, easy-to-maintain plot.

The Terrifying Importance of Growing Food

THIS BOOK has been inspired by the chaotic times we live in. It aims to put you in control of the production of at least part of the food you need. Food economists say it is now urgent that consumers start growing some of their own food, before shortages become the norm and prices hit the roof.

The book starts with a 3-foot-square plot of soil to grow your chosen vegetables, providing about one tenth of your food needs. An Australian food producer acknowledged on ABC Radio in 2004 that world food reserves in storage periodically drop to less than one month’s supply. Additionally, supplies are becoming increasingly potential or virtual supplies. Another expert revealed that more fish is fed to fish in aquaculture than comes on the market, and that oceans will get fished out in the foreseeable future. In “first world” countries, more grain is fed to animals—those we eat, those that work, and those that run the races—than is consumed by humans.

Although the world population keeps increasing, food production is decreasing. Only about two percent of Australians, Britons, and Americans are food producers. Countries at war cannot produce sufficient food or invest in agriculture. Their resources are destroyed or used to feed non-productive armies.

Since globalization took hold, the USDA reports that 32 percent of fruits and nuts and 16 percent of vegetables consumed in the United States are imported. Produce is purchased in places where labor is cheap or forced or growers are subsidized. While supermarkets sell imported food, local and small-scale growers are forced out of the industry.

In the United States, along with most other industrialized countries, the number of farms and farmers has steadily decreased since 1934, even as the demand for agricultural products continues to grow.¹ To make up for this discrepancy, farmers have been forced to turn to engineered seed and chemical fertilizers and pesticides to force the most food from tired land. Additionally, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that more than 40 percent of America’s farmers are 55 years or older. The number of acres per farm worker has grown exponentially from 27.5 in 1890 to 740 in 1990. The global farming industry continues to dictate competition by lowering prices in supermarkets and raising shareholders’ profits. All factors combine to increasingly threaten what was once a quintessential American institution: the family farm.

Some people still believe that genetically modified (GM) foods will feed the world. But GM food has not been discussed enough, nor is it supported by long-term testing. Meanwhile, the better policy is to foster food plant diversity, preserve the inherently good qualities of reproducible food plants, and maintain extensive local seed banks in case of regional crop failures due to war, weather, or new space-age weevils. See Useful Addresses for seed sources and seed banks.

Professor Julian Cribb of the University of Technology in Sydney foresees growing populations needing to increase food production by 110 percent over the next four decades while facing decreasing resources of water, farmland, and soil fertility and a global decline in agricultural research.² Even aquaculture—meant to feed us as the oceans get fished out—is in trouble due to contamination from the land. Frequent droughts are to be expected as the norm, and some countries will grow more biofuel crops than food crops. Professor Cribb regards adapting to greenhouse conditions as urgent, but not nearly as urgent as working toward doubling world harvests with fewer resources.

During half a lifetime of food gardening, in four locations with different soils and climates, I found that books with illustrations of perfect aspects, lush black earth, plentiful water, and beauty-parlor vegetables did not match my own experience. Hence, illustrations of my own vegetable jungles and cabbages with holey leaves. But I learned that healthy food can be grown anywhere. Food will grow where you are. The best agricultural land is being covered by suburbs; therefore we should grow our food in the suburbs.

Scientists calculate that if food crops are consumed by people instead of being fed to livestock, one person can, in theory, live on the produce of 100 square yards.³ That is 30 × 30 feet per person, intensively cultivated. A family of four would need four such plots, covering 60 × 60 feet (not counting paths) with one rotating plot growing grain, and another peas and beans to dry and freeze.

A 3-foot square garden gives you a fair idea how far you want to go. The labor required is minimal and pleasurable because you don’t start off with a big project only to find you have overreached yourself, throwing the garden fork away and running to the supermarket for half a sprayed cauliflower and two pale tomatoes.

In the year 1500, the globe supported approximately 400 million people of whom some 80 million lived in the Americas. Of these, Mexico had 25 million people who were fed on corn, beans, and squash. In 1999, the populations of the United States (258,233,000), Argentina (33,778,000), Chile (13,813,000), and Puerto Rico (3,620,000) alone totaled just over 400 million.⁴ In 500 years, the world population has risen to approximately 6.3 billion, taking up all arable land for sustenance, and is expected to increase to approximately 10 billion by the middle of the twenty-first century.

Important reasons for growing your own food keep mounting. The same multinational corporations that gave us global warming—by using fossil fuels in industry, cutting forests around the globe, robbing millions of people of self-sufficiency, and causing man-made disasters that force untold millions to lose their land, homes, and belongings (if not their lives) through floods, droughts, and climate change—are now bringing us genetically modified foods because they profess to have a new mission “to feed a hungry world.”

The corporations are as compassionate about hungry humanity as giant pharmaceutical companies are about poor children with AIDS or malaria. These corporations have switched from mining, logging, and manufacturing to seed and food production because these are globally consumed commodities they don’t yet control. Moreover, it’s time to get out of manufacturing cigarettes and logging. They will want to get out of oil before it runs out.

Genetically modified foods are unknown quantities because manufacturers do not want to label them correctly, which would allow consumers to check contents, make informed choices, avoid substances that may cause allergies, or give the foods a miss altogether. Governments buckle at the knees because these food companies are also major investors in raw materials—from mining to wood pulping—and are potential investors in our mining, railways, and armament industries. That’s why they won’t legislate for adequate labeling. No long-term safety trials have been done either, so we don’t even know how GM and genetically engineered (GE) foods will affect our future health.

The best way to feed a hungry world is to return to poor people the security of an average plot of land with a water source and control over their own seeds, enabling them to grow their own food and sell the surplus in local markets. But corporations want to control the world’s seeds in order to insert terminator genes, meaning the next generation of seeds will be unable to germinate. The company can then sell farmers and gardeners new seeds every year, combined with the fertilizer and herbicides needed by these hybrids. Thus, they protect their investment in the “improved” seeds, which came from a farmer in the first place and whose ancestors saved them over centuries. Selling seeds has been identified as having a vast, as yet untapped, global market. See Saving Seed.

You and I are fortunate to have private plots of soil, however small, and should not waste a day to get stuck into these and avail ourselves of earth’s bounty. Nature will surprise us by conducting its own biodiversity maintenance as long as we feed, mulch, and water. It’s that simple. We only play at being conductors of a green symphony composed at the beginning of time on earth. The music starts slowly to end in a crescendo of delectable tones, tastes, and colors.

People who do not currently regard themselves as poor, who can afford to buy fruits and vegetables, are increasingly finding some produce becoming luxury items. Farmers have to pass on their increased costs to the consumer. Corporations are always “improving” seeds and want to be paid handsomely for their efforts—more handsomely than any farmer ever is—and water restrictions, droughts, and climate changes are making food crops scarcer and more expensive.

During 2001, the hottest summer in 95 years in the part of Australia where I make my home, zucchinis and cucumbers doubled in price, tomatoes and celery almost doubled, and potatoes went up by a third. Only onions, lettuce, cauliflower, and broccoli remained the same price, but were smaller and fewer. Patty pan squash, prolific in the garden, went from $5.00 to $7.00 a kilogram (in Australian dollars); by 2006, it was $9.50, and garlic stood at $10.00. By 2015, our hottest year on record, I have given up comparing prices.

In the recent past, people grew their own vegetables to avoid toxic sprays on their food, to get that lovely freshness and superb taste of a sun-ripened tomato, and because it saved a little money. Now, it’s becoming more serious.

In 1996, the USDA reported that a “conventionally grown” apple could test positive for up to 14 different pesticides and that 73 percent of all conventional produce showed significant pesticide residues. The Australian Government Analytical Laboratory reported organically grown vegetables can contain an average of up to ten times more nutrients than chemically fertilized vegetables.⁵ These facts are disturbing, but pale compared with other major forces that threaten our food supplies. We must start taking responsibility for producing some of our daily food.

Hunger is caused less by failure of food production than by failure of distribution, interruption from wars and regional conflicts, political chicanery, robbery, or plain apathy. Now distribution is being interrupted by the withholding of viable, reproducible seeds and exacerbated by years of drought. It would be foolish to think that a famine periodically happens somewhere else and could not happen where we live.

Even though the world has space, much is not arable. Underground water resources are being overused, and rivers have stopped flowing. Alarmingly, our wildernesses have shrunk and our forests are still being axed.

However, there is one place that can still be a biodiverse wilderness. That is our garden. Not just the backyard—that utility area for bins, barbecues, dogs, kids, and the washing—but the front yard, side yard, and the strip along the driveway: all are private domains. Privacy and wilderness are important to you. To almost walk into a giant spider web hung with dew on a path between two shrubs, to see brilliantly colored beetles at work, to find stick insects, lizards, frogs, and tiny birds skating between plants you have given the freedom to reach for the sun, is hugely satisfying and elevates the spirit. The only wilderness you can access daily, whose gates do not keep you out or charge a fee, is your garden. Make it beautiful. Make it a place of increase. Your own wilderness can feed your body and soul.

As urban food growing becomes a necessity instead of a hobby, it’s good to know there are millions upon millions of backyards in North America. Imagine squares of green edibles in every backyard that doesn’t grow vegetables yet! Globally, more than half of all people now live in urban areas, and urban food farming is bound to increase.

Naturalist Sir David Attenborough said in his television series State of the Planet that the decisions we humans make in the next fifty to 100 years will determine what happens to all life on earth thereafter. Sadly, what happens to all life on earth hereafter may have little to do with decisions you and I make and more with decisions by our and other people’s governments.

For decades, small producers have gone out of business due to competition from government-subsidized agribusiness. Agribusiness, in the language of the World Trade Organization (WTO), concerns soy bean, corn, rice, wheat, and canola, some of which go into processed foods that sit on supermarket shelves for years without going bad, but most of which feeds animals raised for meat to feed the humans who can afford to buy it.

Moreover, just one company, Monsanto, is responsible for 94 percent of all GM seeds planted across the globe. To have the world’s staple food crops narrowed to so few varieties, and to have ownership of practically all commercial seed for these major crops in the hands of one corporation, is an unprecedented and frightening situation—especially when you know that this company is also developing the technology for terminator seeds. The company wants the 1999 United Nations moratorium on this technology lifted. So do the US, Australian, New Zealand, and Canadian governments. Can they all be wrong? You bet they can.

Crops can fail. When they are big crops, they are big fai...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Praise for One Magic Square
• Also by Lolo Houbein
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Abbreviations
• Part 1: Towards Sustainable and Self-Sufficient Food Growing
• Part 2: Tips and Tricks
• Part 3: The Magic Square Plots
• Part 4: Descriptions of Food Plants
• Notes
• References and Further Reading
• Useful Addresses
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• About the Author