Small Garden News

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food and farming issues

Gardening for the Pandemic

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I harvested the first radishes from my new garden earlier this week. Not everyone loves radishes, but we do, and these are the first crop from a new garden in a new yard, with different soil and in an unfamiliar climate zone. They also are the first organically-grown radishes we’ve seen since the pandemic kicked into action.

First radishes, pulled May 4.

The news is full of stories about problems with the food supply chain that have resulted from the pandemic and lockdowns.

Evidence of the supply-chain problems that all of us can see is in the grocery stores. Their shelves have carried fewer items, and less variety, than they did only a couple of months ago. As my Louisiana sister says, her shopping list has become a wish list.

We are not the only ones, I know, who have decided to enlarge the vegetable garden, to make sure that we will, at least, have some fresh vegetables while the food-supply chain gets unkinked. We also have been growing sprouts and microgreens, to help our groceries stretch a little further.

Sprouts and microgreens

  • Sprouts growing in two mason jars.
    Growing sprouts is one way to provide fresh salad greens without visiting a grocery store.
  • Wood flat with microgreens growing in it
    Microgreens can be grown in a wide variety of shallow containers.
Joe made the microgreens box out of an old fence picket.

We grow sprouts even when there isn’t a pandemic, so we already had jars and the sprouting lids. In the picture above, the large jar is a half-gallon size, and it is growing a mix of sprouts that includes radishes, alfalfa, and some other seeds. The smaller jar has mung bean sprouts.

When sprouts in a jar reach our preferred level of maturity, Joe shakes off as much of the water as he can, puts the dry-ish sprouts in a fresh container in the fridge, and then he starts a new batch of sprouts in the (cleaned) jar. He has observed that if the sprouts are very wet when they go into the fridge, they don’t stay fresh as long.

Joe is especially fond of sprouts, so he makes sure that we have a steady supply and that they are high quality.

We buy seeds for sprouts by the pound; a pound of seeds makes a lot of sprouts and lasts a long time. We did order more seeds a couple of weeks ago, and the selection at that time was limited. I have seen, though, that a supplier for Amazon.com currently has alfalfa seeds for sprouting.

We had seeds for microgreens already, too, but Joe built the box out of a fence-board that he found lying on the ground (with some other fence boards) by the back fence. The “soil” is a mix of compost, sand, and organic potting mix (equal parts), since my supplies of each, except for sand, are low. I have grown microgreens successfully in organic potting mix and in plain compost.

Edibles in Containers

One of the first crops I ever grew — decades ago — was cucumbers, and they were planted in pots on a front porch. The porch was “old-timey”, with metal scrollwork supports holding the roof-overhang in front of the door. The cucumber vines climbed up the scrollwork, and they made a surprisingly large number of cucumbers.

Some new gardeners, or gardeners with limited space, might want to expand their food-growing for the pandemic by planting in containers. Plenty of people grow vegetables in containers with good success. Here are some examples:

Bush bean plants growing in containers, lined up on a concrete-block wall
Bush beans growing in containers.
Three terra cotta pots, with a young pepper plant in each, lined up on a blue bench.
Pepper plants growing in terra cotta pots.
  • Tomato plant in large container.
  • Peppers and basil in bag of potting mix.
  • Boxes lined with plastic as growing containers.
  • Raised beds using wire fence and landscape fabric to hold soil.
Official planting pots are nice, but not necessary, for growing food.

Gardeners who are rigging up their own growing containers should keep some guidelines in mind:

  • Provide drainage holes in the bottom, so the containers don’t fill with water in a big rain and drown the plants.
  • Use a potting mix designed for outdoor plants, or a good compost, to fill the containers. If in a windy area, add some sand to the mix, to make it heavy-enough that the container stays upright.
  • Match the size of the full-grown plant to the container. Minimum size for a tomato plant is a five-gallon bucket, and that is a bit tight. Peppers and eggplants can do well in slightly smaller containers.
  • Container-grown crops will need more watering, more often, than in-ground crops.
  • If growth and production seem to stop, while the plants don’t seem diseased and the weather is not super-hot (which can slow plants down), they may just need some fertilizer to resume growing.
  • If the potting mix used in containers already contains fertilizer — it will say on the bag — don’t add more unless it is needed (see note above). Too much fertilizer can promote spectacular leafy growth, but it can also stop the plant from making things like the tomatoes or peppers that you planted it for.

How important is it to grow vegetables right now?

We are living in a weird time, and some of that weirdness has caused losses in the global food supply. An example in the Southeastern US was described by Florida’s Agriculture Commissioner Nicole “Nikki” Fried in a Covid-19 crop assessment report, which listed crop losses for her state. These include:

  • 75% of the lettuce crop
  • 50-75% of the green bean crop
  • almost 100% of the cabbage crop
  • possibly 20-25% of the pepper crop
  • potentially the entire cucumber crop

The losses are not from pests or diseases, but are from crops being plowed under rather than harvested. The usual buyers are not buying, and there is no profit in the harvest.

Florida is not the entire world, but Fried’s report provides a snapshot of the kinds of losses that can occur elsewhere. Most of these lost vegetables in Florida would have ended up in restaurants, schools, and other parts of the food service industry; they would not have been sent to grocery stores.

Shifting the destinations, from food processors to grocery stores, for instance, for all of these vegetables is not easy, apparently, which means that if we want to enjoy plenty of fresh vegetables, foods that support our good health, then we might want to grow a few of them ourselves.

How much can we grow?

Most of us can’t grow a whole lot, certainly not even all of our own family’s vegetables. I saw a recent article about an examination of the food-growing potential for Sheffield, England, and it determined that Sheffield could, if it used all the available gardens and greenspace, provide the recommended five-servings of vegetables per day for 15% of its people.

In other words, the food-growing potential is large, but it isn’t enough to feed everyone in Sheffield all of the vegetables they need to support good health. Many of our cities in the US may face a similar shortage of growing space. However, that doesn’t mean we should give up on growing good food.

In my own home, the sprouts and microgreens add up to a few servings of fresh greens each week. We have radishes to add our meals over the next few weeks, and then there will be green beans, cucumbers, zucchini, and more, but all in home-garden-sized amounts. For example, when we harvest green beans, it will probably be one cup at a time. Even this, though, contributes to the whole.

Any food from our garden reduces the amount we need to buy from other sources. This leaves more for others who might not be gardening. Growing some our own vegetables also makes it easy to share with our neighbors when a crop does really well.

Considering the losses on US farms, the waywardness of the food delivery system, and the randomness of supplies in grocery stores, my handful of radishes is currently a bright spot in my own food supply.

Georgia Organics Conference, Part 2

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Really, the very best parts of attending something like the Georgia Organics conference are meeting new people and hearing those peoples’ thoughts about food and our food system. This is probably an example of what is called “confirmation bias,” where we seek out and bend information in ways that support our own world view, but I did leave the conference with an upbeat feeling about local food production in Georgia.

Cover of our conference schedule. It is actually green. PHOTO/amygwh

After my friend Electa and I arrived on Saturday morning, we signed in, then went through the breakfast line and looked for a place at a table.

We wound our way through the big breakfast area to a table that had only one woman and her young son seated there. Over breakfast we learned that they both had completed a growers bootcamp put on by Habesha Atlanta (but held in Augusta), and they were starting their own small food-growing operation.

While we ate and talked, more people who had participated in the same bootcamp, and who had begun working to grow some good food, joined us. This was a GREAT way to start the conference!

Throughout the day, we met and spoke with other people who had established small (1/2 acre or less) orchards and veggie farms and small chicken production operations in urban and suburban areas throughout Georgia.

Then one speaker (could have been GA’s Ag commissioner Gary Black; my notes are sketchy here), in talking about Georgia’s food system, listed big farms, medium farms, small farms, and home gardens as all contributing to our food system.

Home gardens! It was so great to hear these recognized as an important element of food production in the state.

My dream, of course, is that everyone finds a way to grow at least a little food. Our individual production may be small, but it all adds together.

Can You Dig This? – The Movie

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On Tuesday evening, Joe and I went to see the movie Can You Dig This at a one-time-only screening. The movie, set in LA and featuring Ron Finley and other area residents, shows how the simple, basic act of growing food can transform lives.

The movie, in addition, was a powerful reminder that not everyone has access to health-giving produce, straight from the garden, and I know I am very fortunate in being able to grow food in my front yard.

We saw the movie at a theater inside the perimeter, and after the movie, people who are very involved in urban farming and the Atlanta local-foods movement stood up to say a few words about urban farming in the metro area.

One of the speakers was Eugene Cooke, of Grow Where You Are. I love this guy’s vision of integrating farming more fully into communities, but he seemed to be having trouble containing some of his frustration as he spoke at the screening. He is hoping that more growers step into leadership in the urban-ag arena, but right now there are many other players who are poking their fingers into his pie (I know – mixed metaphors, but I am hoping the point comes across). Since Eugene follows agro-ecological principles and uses Veganics as his guide, it is likely that a lot of people who visit his farm don’t really understand how much of his work goes into building and maintaining the soil.

Some of our Asian persimmons – Ichi Ki Ke Jiro.

Other speakers included someone from the Georgia Farmers Market Association,  Dr. Ruby Thomas who is a pediatrician promoting veganism for her patients (her website is called The Plant-Based Pediatrician), a representative from Truly Living Well who said that the group would be increasing its outreach to children and families in the upcoming year, someone from the Georgia Food Bank (I think … my notes are getting more sketchy as I go along) who mentioned the work of Georgia Food Oasis,  Robby Astrove who has headed up the planting of many, many fruit trees in the metro-area, and last of all, Cashawn Myers of Habesha, whose chance to speak was cut short by the beginning of the next movie. I had hoped, actually, to hear what Cashawn would say, since two of my friends have been through his farmer training program, but I will have to wait for another opportunity.

The refrain that ran through the movie and ended the evening was “Just plant some shit!”, and there already is a planned “Plant some shit day of action” on December 15,  from 2-4 p.m., in Edgewood at the corner of Whitefoord and Hardee. The flyer I picked up on the way out of the theater specifies “Dress to get dirty, bring gloves, water, & garden tools.”

Meanwhile, at home, I am reaping some of the rewards of having “planted some shit” already. Joe brought out a ladder today to harvest the rest of our persimmons, and we have plenty of cool-season vegetables from the garden still adding to our meals.  Feeling very blessed…

Urban Farming Produces a Huge Amount of Food

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I was reading today a on blog that I occasionally visit, the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog, that Food First had an article up that mentioned urban farming, so I clicked on over to the article “What place for urban farmers in the International Year of Family Farming?”  to read it.

Although the article focused on actual farms, rather than gardens like mine, and on the relative lack of focus on problems of urban farmers in the IYFF, it contained a quote that really shined a bright light on urban food production:

“…15 to 20 percent of the world’s food is produced through urban farming, involving an estimated 800 million people.  Producing food in cities significantly reduces energy and resources needed for packaging, storage and transportation, and can recycle sewage and organic waste.“

It seems a not-unreasonable step to think that urban food gardening adds an additional non-trivial percentage of food and produces less waste and recycles more, even when taking into account the number of plastic bags involved in bringing most soil amendments home from the garden store. My experience is that home gardeners in general are great gleaners of their neighborhood yard waste that they then compost for use in the garden.

Today, I’ve made a small contribution to the future of the urban food total: I planted the tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants that I had started earlier this year. I have more plants than space in the garden, so some will be bumped up to the next size of pot, to have on hand in case anything damages the planted-out veggies in the next few weeks.

If it hadn’t started thundering and pouring down rain, I would have planted more seeds, too, but those can wait. Meanwhile out in the garden beds, the peas have begun to flower, the shallots are sending up seed-heads, and the Kennebec potatoes that I planted early also have begun to flower. The earliest-planted lettuces and the spinach are pretty much at peak flavor, and seedlings of beans, cucumbers, popcorn, and more radishes are popping up.

Right about now, when the days are getting warmer, the rain is working its magic, and the crops are promising to give us their all, is a totally wondrous moment in the garden. It amazes me that this shining instant in the farming and gardening year is such a practical time, too, in terms of the future of good food for us all.