The Intelligent Gardener

Growing Nutrient-Dense Food

Steve Solomon, Erica Reinheimer

• Editore: New Society Publishers
• Anno: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781550925135
• Argomento: Technologie et ingénierie
• Categoria: Agronomie

"It is bold, it is courageous, and it challenges many of our preconceptions about food, about soils, about farming, and about health." —Michael Ableman, farmer, author of Farm the City To grow produce of the highest nutritional quality, the essential minerals lacking in our soil from intensive agriculture must be replaced. The Intelligent Gardener is the practical, step-by-step guide for any serious gardener who wants to: · Demystify this process
· Debunk much of the false and misleading information perpetuated by both the conventional and organic agricultural movements
· Re-mineralize our soil. Accompanied with customizable web-based spreadsheets, this toolkit calls for far more attention to detail than the simple addition of composted manure or NPK fertilizers. It conclusively establishes the link between healthy soil, healthy food, and healthy people. Vegetables, fruits, and grains are a major source of vital nutrients, but centuries of intensive agriculture have depleted our soils to historic lows. As a result, the broccoli you consume today may have less than half the vitamins and minerals that the equivalent serving would have contained a hundred years ago. This is a matter of serious concern, since poor nutrition has been linked to myriad health problems including cancer, heart disease, obesity, high blood pressure, and diabetes. For optimum health we must increase the nutrient density of our foods to the levels enjoyed by previous generations. The Intelligent Gardener goes beyond organic—it offers the essential tools for those who care about the quality of the produce they grow. "It's hard to imagine this book not having a significant and lasting impact on the way organic farmers and gardeners grow their crops." —Mark McDonald, West Coast Seeds

Chapter 1

Why Nutrient-Dense Food?

Would you be skeptical if I told you people could normally live past age 100, die with all their original teeth, be in sprightly enjoyment of life up to their final weeks, and all this could happen if only we fertilize all our food crops differently? Skeptical? Most people think I am harmlessly mad.

How to achieve and maintain health is a scary, important topic. People get upset when health opinions they believe to be facts are challenged. I’ve not found it easy to change health-related or disease-curing opinions. Not even with statistics. I’ve got plenty of numbers supporting the case that eating nutrient-dense food produces long life and good health — even extraordinarily long life and unusual good health — but scientists-for-hire can always out-statistic an amateur, and people these days have been made so insensitive to facts and figures, it is pointless using numbers as a tool to convince. When I contemplate that long chain of utterly brilliant people who, since the 1930s, have all failed to convince the world that health equals nutrition divided by calories, well, if they all failed, what chance have I? I am no scientist. I am not a lawyer. If convincing is needed, I think the very best thing for me to do is to relate my own experiences and observations.

I was instantly hooked by my first vegetable garden. The activity itself was calming and centering (these days I’d use the term “balancing”); it made me smile. Gardening still makes my heart sing. I can’t give you a credible explanation for why it does that. But for an incredible one, I’d say it’s a relaxation technique for karmic warriors on long service leave.

After 40 years of serious food growing on five different soils in two quite different North American climates and on two soils on a remote South Pacific island so unique it’s almost a nation unto itself, one thing prominently stands out: my average physical condition went up and down according to the soil I was eating from. The most prominent (and worst) period was nine years of eating mostly my own organically grown vegetables produced on an infertile Oregon Coast Range soil. This period probably cost me my teeth, although I did not lose them all right away.

1973, age 31. My first food garden was entirely and unreasonably over the top. It occupied the rear half of a one-acre house block in the western part of southern California’s San Fernando Valley. This valley is typical of semi-arid regions; it’s a fertile flat of fresh young soils that recently (geologically speaking) washed off the surrounding mountains. The West Valley seemed a near-perfect place to live in the early 1970s. The air was still free of smog. The soil grew things well, and the neighbors did not jump my fence to pinch produce. What more could I want from suburbia? In short order, vegetables became a major part of what we ate; homegrown vegetables largely replaced meat-and-potatoes. I became a confident food gardener, bored with restaurants, and I dreamt about escaping the Los Angeles rat-race.

I have grown a substantial food garden ever since. I can’t imagine living differently. And knowing what I know now about the nutritional qualities of supermarket stuff, if I want to stay healthy, I have little choice but to make my own vegetables most of what I eat. I invented a word to describe my lifestyle: vegetableatarianism. The word does not mean that animal foods are excluded. A vegetableatarian is someone who’s trying to repair the damage caused by harmful food addictions by eating mostly vegetables, cooked and raw.

Prior to vegetableatarianism, I had been visiting a dentist every 12 to 18 months to have a few new cavities filled and my teeth scraped clean of thick, rock-hard deposits; I had already had two root canals and a bridge. A few years after home-garden vegetables became a major part of our total food intake, I noticed that I had developed no new cavities in a good while. The chemistry of my mouth had become inhospitable to decay organisms. Unfortunately tooth decay was not my only dental situation; I had lost a lot of jawbone.

During my first 30 years, and especially during my childhood, I was malnourished. I’d been bottle fed (on doctor’s advice, infant formulas were at that time considered scientific — far superior to breast milk). That was not a good start. I recall eating Velveeta (cheap syntha-cheese) melted on macaroni (devitalized semolina) and Velveeta cheese and mayonnaise sandwiches on white bread with one iceberg lettuce leaf included. Or else peanut butter and jam on white bread. These were typical take-to-school lunches. Cream of Wheat (devitalized semolina) cereal for breakfast, lots of pasteurized homogenized milk (which I was allergic to and suffered greatly from drinking, but no one, including my drug-pushing pediatrician, made the connection), meat-and-a-starch dinners, and not much in the way of vegetables. There was rarely anything that these days I would consider a proper salad. Instead, I was offered a bit of watery iceberg lettuce and a thick slice of tasteless tomato with prepared mayonnaise dressing thick atop. Is it any wonder I didn’t like tomatoes? I remember my mother did bake tinned green beans in a casserole with creamy onion cheesey stuff and crispy bits on top. Oh, and there were snacks, lots of snacks, especially when watching TV after school; in the evening, there were salty snacks, like potato chips dipped in mayonnaise, and sweet snacks, like ice cream or cookies dipped in pasteurized homogenized milk.

Consequently, my growing body received inadequate minerals and, in its wisdom, to prevent loss of my ability for fight-or-flight (which requires big skeletal bones), my body had to short-change non-essential bones. As a result, my face was long, narrow, and angular, even though my genetics called for it to be broad and flat; some of my teeth came in crooked because my jaw (a non-essential bone) never grew large enough. My body had been forced to steal construction materials (calcium and phosphorus) from its own jawbone to use for other essential purposes.

1978, age 36. My wife and I left Los Angeles to homestead in the Oregon Coast Ranges. Having eaten for some years from well-mineralized soil that was not too far out of balance, I was in quite “good nick:” Fit. Energetic. Happy. Full of interest. Our main goal was to be free and clear after getting set up. Our dream property was 20 to 40 acres, about half of it sunny, cleared land, and half a healthy woodlot. And, of course, I dreamed the homesteader’s dream of having a strong-flowing, year-round spring that would nurture it all. As it turned out, we could only afford five acres of worn-out hillside that had once grown winter wheat. Decades of autumn plowing followed by heavy winter rains had resulted in loss of all the topsoil. Descendants of those responsible for that crime still lived across the road, fattening calves on unerodable bottomland that was fast losing its drainage. Note that they fattened, but weren’t breeding their herd — the reason being that cattle failed to reproduce successfully on their exhausted fields. On my side of the road there remained two feet of infertile, acidic silty-clay subsoil down to bedrock on the gently sloping parts; even less soil was left on the steeper parts of my hillside.

I was confident that if we completely avoided debt I could create some kind of part-time small business that would pay the taxes, keep us driving an old beater, and let us clothe ourselves. And that was my main intention: a self-sufficient lifestyle in which I did not have to sacrifice my best hours and energies to making money. Besides, I was supremely, stupidly confident I could quickly convert any old clay pit or gravel heap into a veritable Garden of Eatin’ by putting in plenty of organic matter and lime. Organic Gardening magazine had repeatedly asserted I could do that, and the several dozens of veggie growing books I had closely studied — many of them published by Rodale Press — reinforced the idea.

The garden fence enclosed the largest area I could defend against deer. I used two 100-yard-long rolls of field fencing topped with two strands of barbed wire — thereby enclosing a square that was 74 feet on each side and 7 feet tall. The first winter, we ate a lot of dried vegetables and cooked beans, which was eating like we were homesteading in Ohio, not Oregon. But then, most of my neighbors ate that way, too. In the second year, I learned how to grow cold-tolerant greens all winter and how to hold mature root crops in the ground from autumn until spring. The garden was supplying about half our calories for about eight months a year and about a third of them for the remaining four months. I was certain that as I gained more skill at winter growing, I’d increase that percentage.

In late 1979, I went into the mail-order vegetable seed business. To do that business ethically and responsibly, I had to conduct variety trials to evaluate suitability for a family kitchen, organic gardening (in rather poor soil) and Oregon’s climate. The trials garden was one-half acre — this was in addition to the family garden. In the beginning, I did not intend to eat much from the trials. I certainly did not have the time to harvest, pack and sell the surplus; the trials were grown for information only. I intended to toss the cucumbers and zucchini into the paths to rot or let my employees take home however much of the surplus they wanted.

But that is not quite how it worked out. Financing the business required investing every remaining cent of my savings. For my first two years as The Seedman, I could not support myself in the modest style to which I had already become accustomed. So I stopped spending money, ate even more from the trials garden and did not feel hard-done-by for having this chance to improve my health.

After a few years eating mostly my own vegetables, I found I was losing energy. And my teeth were worsening. The teeth did not decay; I started having what my dentist called “wobblers,” loose teeth that eventually fell out by themselves if they didn’t get too painfully infected first. My body again had to rob non-essential bones of the calcium and phosphorus it wasn’t getting from the vegetables I was eating. By 1983, the seed business could support us at about the official poverty line. By its fourth year, 1984, Territorial Seed Company had become nicely profitable; we felt economically secure — at least it was security as we thought of it in our early 40s. But managing a fast-growing business was getting tiresome; I’d been making major efforts for six straight years and could now afford to relax a bit. So in mid-June, 1984, immediately after the trials garden had been established for the summer, I took myself, my new wife Isabelle and her 12-year-old daughter to the English-speaking tropical South Pacific island of Viti Levu (Fiji) for a sabbatical. There, we rented an inexpensive furnished apartment in the capital city of Suva. Isabelle’s daughter went to the International School while we hung out, intending to relax for up to six months while I polished up the third incarnation of Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades.

In Suva, we ate more or less our usual vegetable-and-fruit diet with some delightful substitutions, such as a local form of raw-fish ceviche and local papayas and mangos. After a few months, our health began to improve. My wobbly teeth tightened up by themselves. Isabelle’s fingernails got hard again. We recovered our energy and enjoyed an ongoing sense of well-being. Why, we asked? Was it lack of stress? The climate? The food? Life was certainly less stressful living in a tropical climate during its cool season, but I couldn’t say for sure if that was the source of our better health. But when I did a little investigation into the food we were eating, I discovered that almost all the produce in the Suva public market came from one place, the Sigatoka River Valley, less than a 90-minute drive from Suva. So I rented a car for the day and booked a visit at its agricultural experiment station.

Fiji has a two-season climate much like the Big Island of Hawaii. Sigatoka farmers raise temperate-climate vegetable crops during the cool season. In May, temperatures moderate, the rains stop, and the gentle, constant trade winds resume. For the next six months, Fiji’s climate is like summer in Oregon, but with balmy nights. Vegetables grow excellently. In November, days turn hot, humid and less windy. By December, the trade winds stop completely; the stagnant air feels heavy. Sweat drips from your body even when you are sitting quietly in the shade dressed as the locals are, with only a bit of thin cotton cloth wrapped around your middle. We became lethargic. By December, the temperate vegetable crops in the Sigatoka had all died of heat- and moisture-induced diseases; our diet became much less interesting. Next came the cyclone season. Even if there are no major cyclones (what Americans call hurricanes) in a particular year, there are still many heavy thunderstorms; most of the year’s rain falls from December through April. This can be the “starving time” in traditional Fijian life, especially so for several months after a cyclone strips gardens bare.

Even if there is no cyclone, the crops still die of heat and humidity, and the fields are taken over by weeds and rank grasses. If it does prove to be a year when a cyclone comes, the river floods the entire valley, depositing silt and sand. Once the rains stop, the new soil particles and the chest-high growth of grasses and weeds are plowed in. These weeds serve as the major source of soil organic matter, and the freshly ground rock deposited from the floods restocks the soil’s mineral nutrients. A research bloke working there asserted that farmers in the Sigatoka Valley use no fertilizer; frequent additions of silt suffice. The vegetables coming from that valley are sprayed because no matter how well-nourished the plant, temperate-climate species cannot handle some tropical insects. But fertilized? Never. Given compost or animal manure? Never. It was on these poison-sprayed, unfertilized never-given-compost-or-manure vegetables that my wobbly teeth tightened and our health swiftly improved. This contradicted everything I thought I knew about growing good food. So, as soon as we got back to Suva, I dove into geological surveys and discovered that the watershed of the Sigatoka River was mainly ultrabasic igneous rock. Eureka! And thank Serendipity for anticipating this moment, having put me through an inspiring university-level geology class.

Igneous rocks come from liquid magma — volcanism. Geologists classify igneous rock into three general types: acidic, basic and ultra-basic. The distinction has to do with the mineral composition of the magma that made them. Acidic igneous rocks are usually light in color, contain large quantities of silicon (quartz), potassium and sodium, but not much else, and they are less dense (lighter weight) than basic or ultrabasic rocks. The best known sort of acidic igneous rock is granite. Soil forming out of acidic igneous rock has an acid pH; it is not particularly rich in plant-growth nutrients. When I think of the effect of eating from granitic soils, what comes to mind is the narrow, pinched faces of upper New England.

Basic igneous rocks are darker in color and weigh more. They contain less silicon (quartz), less potassium and less sodium than acidic rocks, but hold large amounts of calcium and magnesium and higher overall levels of plant-nutrient elements like phosphorus and sulfur. Basic igneous rocks usually develop into effective agricultural soils that — in humid climates — are only mildly acidic. The best known basic igneous rock is basalt. The biggest exposure of this sort of rock I have experienced personally is the Old Cascades. The roots of this ancient chain of volcanoes can still be seen in a few spots in western Oregon; the flows from these volcanoes cover most of eastern Oregon and Washington.

Ultrabasic igneous rocks are rare. They are quite dark in color, heavy and dense; they are rich in metallic plant nutrients like iron, manganese and copper, as well as carrying a lot of calcium and magnesium. The richest upland agricultural soils derive from this sort of parent material. The richest alluvial soils are those that derive almost exclusively from ultrabasic igneous rocks. Because there are no extensive regions covered by ultrabasic rocks, no large river systems carry a load of only ultrabasic silt, but the Sigatoka River does. The Sigatoka Valley probably has better soils than Egypt had before the Aswan Dam was built. It may h...