Garden 22 Aug 2006 10:40 am
digging is hard work
Yesterday I put in some time digging out the new bed. I’d dumped some extra compost there when I’d bought several yards, so I carefully lifted up the good stuff and moved it to a prepared bed. Then I started excavating down through the native dirt; Josh wants it down about a foot before he puts the sides up. I got about six square feet dug out before calling it off for the day.
I am always amazed at how tremendously crummy the soil is, if I can even call it soil. It’s many different kinds of crummy at once: a mix of clay and sand, with almost no organic matter, packed down pretty hard and full of rocks. I’m too light to get through it with a shovel. I’ve been out there with a pick-axe, levering out rocks as big as both my fists put together and sifting out gallon after gallon of pebbles. (Fortunately, I have a use for those pebbles, so it’s like I’m going prospecting for rocks.)
Some of you know that I’ve been persuaded by the arguments of Peak Oil proponents. I won’t pretend to forecast the future, but it seems pretty likely to me that trouble is coming; my hunch is that the market economy will produce some small ameliorations, but not swift, complete solutions. If you have any thought of growing a vegetable garden against difficult times, and you have a place to do it, start it now. Do it before the fuel surcharges on delivered bulk compost go high, if for no other reason; if you’re in Puget Sound, you probably have crummy soil too that would do well with a good deal of compost just to get things started. Do it now because unless you are a buffed-out professional landscaper, it takes longer than seems reasonable to turn lawn into vegetables. Much longer. And there are a lot of mistakes to be made.
on 22 Aug 2006 at 11:09 am 1.toadlily said …
Totally sounds like the clay soil in the Des Moines garden that I work on. I have been adding compost and amendments for 5 years and it is FINALLY starting to losen up. But then I work in a bed that I havent spent much time in and bam, rocks and clay>
on 22 Aug 2006 at 11:23 am 2.Cam Sculpin said …
Yeah, exactly. And then there’s a layer of sandy stuff on top that the water flows right through. The longer-established beds are so well worked now that I tend to forget how difficult the rest of the ground is.
I’m digging in a lot of good stuff, and then putting good stuff on top of it. My idea is to try to mimic natural soil horizons a little bit — make that crappy soil more like subsoil.
on 22 Aug 2006 at 11:28 am 3.Mia said …
Have you seen the video about Cuba’s dealings with peak oil? I guess, the combination of the Soviet collapse and therefore the loss of external support, along with U.S. embargos and such led to a peak oil crisis for them in the 90s.
The movie I saw did seem a bit uncritical and one-sided (but then, the article you cite also has it’s non-international/nonglobal blind spots (the blame Venezuela because they don’t like us thing was interesting since it doesn’t examine why that might be … but anyway…)).
Besides the return to organic foods, locally grown, the film showed a greater development of community interdependence. I think, along with people being ready and able to grow their own food and have other urban sustainability survival skills, the U.S. probably needs to get over it’s individuals first tendencies.
Uh, sorry. Wasn’t meaning to turn all preachy.
Reading your posts always reminds me how much I wish I had a yard or balcony with containers to work with again. There’s a yard here, but it feels very much like Al the landlord’s domain. I can’t imagine asking him if I could dig up one of the flowerbeds for some herbs and vegies experiment.
on 22 Aug 2006 at 11:42 am 4.toadlily said …
yeah, I have seen quite a few articles that talk about not actually digging the compost into the soil, just letting it build up. So I have been trying that, building up the beds and if I do dig it in it is just less than a foot when installing plant material, it seems to retain the moisture more and actually soften the clay layer, I think it may have something to do with the worms moving the organic material through the clay layer.
on 22 Aug 2006 at 12:54 pm 5.Cam Sculpin said …
Toadlily: Yay worms! I haven’t seen too many articles on this sort of thing — what sources do you think are good? I’m waiting impatiently for my copy of Gaia’s Garden: a guide to home-scale permaculture from the library, which should give me some clues.
Mia:
I should probably note that I chose to link to that particular article not because I think it’s flawless, but because it has a fairly good bibliography.
As for blaming Venezuela, I don’t see that he’s dumping blame on them. I do think he’d say (rightly or wrongly) that those details of global social justice are outside the scope of a forward-looking Peak Oil primer. And I do not see him saying, for instance, that it is not Venezuela’s right to control its petrochemical resources. There is a persistent belief in the U.S. that other countries will not or should not act in their own interests, but I don’t see Rapier espousing that belief. I think it’s quite the opposite.
Some people would like to believe that as Middle East oil declines, we who live outside Venezuela can just go ahead and ramp up our consumption of Venezuelan oil; they talk about “nonconventional sources” without mentioning that they are somebody else’s nonconventional sources. Venezuela aside, I think we’re also going to have to think twice about statements about how Canadian supplies of natural gas and tar sands are going to rescue the U.S. “easy-motoring utopia” from oil depletion.
Incidentally, if you’d like to write an article about Peak Oil from a global justice perspective, I think it’d be well-received.
You’re the second person who’s mentioned that film about Cuba to me in the last few days. I’d like to see it. It sounds like it reiterates the sorts of things that were written in an article in Harper’s a few years ago.
Something interesting to me about the Peak Oil crowd is how almost entirely absent the isolationist survivalists appear to be from the discussion. (I don’t think this is just because isolationists are isolated; I think if there were more of them, we’d see them show up to gloat.) The main stream is fairly communitarian. I suspect that a lot of this came out of the experiences of people in the Voluntary Simplicity community, in which people find out mighty fast that they do well to share with their neighbors.
Urban sustainability skills like growing food, in my experience, lead pretty directly and naturally to the beginnings of community interdependence. The gardeners in this neighborhood have things that are easy to share with each other — extra seed, seed starts, divisions, fruits and vegetables — and through sharing those things, we’re building a nucleus of a neighborhood social network that can be built on by everybody. In fact, I’m planning to convert the front yard to more vegetable beds in part to meet more gardeners and thus to help foster community in the immediate neighborhood.
First, I think, we start by knowing each other’s names; then by gifting each other; then by working together; and finally by relying on each other. My friend Julie McGalliard is right: the revolution starts with tea parties.
And then there’s the non-immediate neighborhood, but I have fewer ideas about that. As someone who grew up on the poverty line, though, I’m sharply aware that, ceteris paribus, being middle-class makes preparation a hell of a lot easier.
An awful lot of on-the-ground Peak Oil preparation looks like a mixture of voluntary simplicity (debt reduction and old-timey skills-building) and emergency preparation (especially for blackouts). That’s actually, I think, part of the beauty of trying to ready a household for a post-peak world: pretty much anything I do for that is also going to have value in itself.
on 22 Aug 2006 at 2:56 pm 6.Mia said …
Cam:
Fair enough. I could very well have been reading more into the Venezuela comments than were there. (Also, I agree it was an impressive bibliography.)
Admittedly, it’s probably because I’m shoulder deep in looking at a bunch of this in a systemic context, so I find it very difficult to separate out political and cultural issues from other discussions.
When I get my brain back — I’m assured it will happen eventually — I may try writing something about the intersections of social justice, sociopolitics and peak oil.
Meanwhile, you really should see that Cuba movie. I can see if I can borrow it from school for you maybe. (That’s where I saw it.)
on 22 Aug 2006 at 3:22 pm 7.Cam Sculpin said …
I’d love to see it. What’s the title?
We may have talked about this already, but have you thought about getting on the waitlist for a spot in the P-Patch next to the University District farmers market? Gardening is fun, at least when it doesn’t involve a pickaxe.
on 22 Aug 2006 at 4:17 pm 8.Mia said …
It’s “The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil” at http://www.communitysolution.org/cuba.html
Gardening (without rocks) really is fun. I had a pretty decent container garden on the balcony of my apartment on Capitol Hill. (I’d grown strawberries and some edible flowers, and fought with the birds over the various lettuces and herbs I had going.) The irony is that, although I’d taken sun exposure on the balcony into account as one of the factors when I bought the Bellevue condo, I didn’t grow anything useful out there when I was there.
I never checked on the one near the Farmers’ Market, but the Peapatch about a block-and-a-half from me had a waiting list of over a year last time I checked.
I really should check again, though.