From Gene Logsdon
Garden Farm Skills

[Gene's long-awaited, and much-anticipated 2nd Edition of Small-Scale Grain Raising: An Organic Guide to Growing, Processing, and Using Nutritious Whole Grains, for Home Gardeners and Local Farmers is now available.]

The only raised bed I’ve ever found useful in sixty years of gardening is the one in my bedroom. And after I quit double-digging, I didn’t have to spend as much time there either. Or if I did, it was for reasons other than resting.

I must be wrong, but I don’t understand the modern enchantment with raised beds. Yes, if you are a market gardener, you will no doubt feel obliged to plant on raised beds to get the earliest possible crops but you can get early vegetables in unraised beds too. I have a very disgusting sister who plants peas in March here in northern Ohio, and often gets away with it, without raised beds.

If you want to plant a garden on an old parking lot (I have a hunch there will be many abandoned ones in the future) then by all means you will need a raised bed.  (It should give us all pause, however,  to realize that plants can come right up through cracks in pavement and grow vigorously— so what’s that say about all our dearly held beliefs about gardening?) And definitely, if you want to plant a garden on something akin to swampland, you will surely want a raised bed. But the poorly-drained  soil under it will still “lay wet” and give you problems when your plants put down deep roots.

Other than those situations, raised beds guarantee only one result as far as I can see. You will have to irrigate more when dry weather comes and it comes quicker on raised beds. All of us gardeners pride ourselves in being eco-friendly. What is so ecological  about using water (and the power to pump it) when you can avoid doing so? Also, if you are bound and determined to make raised beds, a veteran market gardener just told me that you should be sure to mulch the paths heavily around the raised beds. Otherwise moisture will be drawn out of the bed even faster. So why not just go with unraised beds and mulch them?

My disgusting sister who gloats about having peas two weeks before I do without raised beds has been fertilizing her garden heavily with composted manure every year for at least half a century. Her soil is so rich you could stick a broom handle in it and it would grow. When you make soil like that, who needs raised beds?  Even she still has to replant some years because peas  have a tendency to rot rather than sprout  if it snows too hard after planting. Needless to say, that would also be true on raised beds.

I have almost the same kind of bias about double-digging. To turn compacted soils into a productive garden, double-digging makes sense the first year or two, I suppose. But I will bet a bushel of surplus tomatoes (from soil never double-dug), that if you have that kind of compaction problem, it will take quite a few years of mulch, compost and avoidance of unnecessary tillage to change it, and double-digging won’t speed up the time.

Please tell me how you increase the fertility of your soil, if you bury  unfertile soil on top with the unfertile soil underneath it. Or if the soil on top is fertile, why bury it under the less fertile soil underneath. If both the topsoil and the soil under it are fertile, is it not just loony to risk throwing your back out of whack by double-digging?   If compaction is the problem, shouldn’t you be attacking the cause?  Usually compaction comes when a clay soil needs underlying tile drainage. The impatient gardener roto-tills too deeply before the soil is sufficiently dried out and that happens on raised beds too.

Okay, so I’m being a little facetious here. Correct double-digging is not exactly the way I describe. It is even loonier. You dig up a spade’s worth of soil across the garden plot that you are about to desecrate. You put it in a wheelbarrow. Then you loosen up a spade’s depth below that. Then you dig up the next trench’s worth and put it where the dirt in the wheelbarrow had been, being careful to keep the topmost soil on top even though, and I just watched a gardener doing this, there is absolutely no difference between the soil on top and the soil four inches below it. And so you proceed until you have moved the top layer of soil over about six inches.  Then, if you have not yet slipped a disc or two, you put the wheelbarrow load in the last trench. Never in the entire process is the cause of the compaction, real or imagined, addressed and so the suffering double-diggers figure they must move the top layer of their garden over another six inches next year, until knee surgery do us part.

Maybe you have arguments in favor of raised beds and/or double-digging that I don’t appreciate. I’ll bow to your expertise if that is so. But since I get gobs more food from my garden than I can ever eat without these tortures,  why would I want to torment myself and end my gardening life too early?  I would rather spend that time in another kind of raised bed I highly recommend. A hammock.
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See also Small farm web services and ecommerce for small farmers→
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Gene and Carol Logsdon have a small-scale experimental farm in Wyandot County, Ohio.
Gene is author ofThe Mother of All Arts: Agrarianism and the Creative Impulse (Culture of the Land)
and The Last of the Husbandmen: A Novel of Farming Life
OrganicToBe.org | OrganicToGo.com
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From Gene Logsdon
Garden Farm Skills

[Gene's long-awaited, and much-anticipated 2nd Edition of Small-Scale Grain Raising: An Organic Guide to Growing, Processing, and Using Nutritious Whole Grains, for Home Gardeners and Local Farmers is now available. -DS]

No sooner had the news come out that rice stocks worldwide were at an all time modern low, and that the price of wheat had hit historic highs, when I started getting calls and letters from all over. Modern homesteaders wanted to know where they could get a copy of my old book, Small Scale Grain Raising.

It is gratifying to know there are still Americans who, instead of wringing their hands at a possible problem headed their way, start figuring what to do about it. I only wish I had some copies of that book left. It was published in 1977 and was as high as $300 a crack on the Internet. But I am happy to report that a new edition is now available.

I don’t really know if the high grain prices have anything to do with renewed interest in that book. What seems to me more likely is that self-reliant people are taking a look at what is happening in our financial world and wondering if it is time to plow up the backyard or that old horse lot and plant some food.

In my little world of writing books about rural life and culture, this is all the talk right now, as it was in 1973, 1982, and 1995 when the economy did “readjustments” like it is doing now, only not quite so profoundly. (In an economy ruled by interest on “pretend” money, as I call it, about every ten years there has to be a shakeup to bring the dreamers of riches, floating around in their bubbles, back down to earth again.) The idea of growing and threshing out several bushels of wheat (a bushel makes about 50-60 loaves of bread) in the backyard makes sense to self-reliant people. It isn’t really that difficult to do.

My wife and I first tried it in the late 1960s when living in the suburbs of Philadelphia, just for fun. We scythed the wheat we grew in our backyard, made bundles of it, shocked up the bundles and when the grain was dry we beat the bundles on a bed sheet with plastic ball bats, threshing out the grain. The kids thought it was great fun. We winnowed out the chaff by pouring the grain slowly from one bucket to another in front of a window fan.

That experience became the genesis of the book mentioned above, though at the time that wasn’t in my plans. I grew the wheat in the first place to feed to our chickens. I would just throw a bundle into the henhouse every day and the chickens would do the threshing, leaving the straw for bedding. It was only as a sort of afterthought that Carol decided to try to bake bread with it. She milled the grain in her blender, but that was very slow, so eventually, we got a hand-cranked mill which we still use today. I haven’t grown wheat for a few years now, having kindly farm neighbors who will sell us a few bushels out of their combine harvester.

A fellow small-scale farmer, Tim Moreland in Oregon, recently sent me a picture of his amazing way to harvest oats for his livestock. When it is nearly ripe, he cuts and windrows it like hay, then when it is suitably dry, forks it into huge sacks he found locally, suspending the sacks, one at a time, from the prongs of his front end loader (see photo). His whole family helps in the forking, which is another reason why we small-scale farmers do such crazy things. They involve the whole family. He then hauls the oat “hay” to the barn and feeds it to the livestock in winter or when pastures are short. The animals eat the grain and most of the straw as roughage.

I can remember when wheat was still ground into flour in mills in our county. It just beats me that in places burgeoning with grain like this area, that those local mills could not remain profitable. Did people just quit baking at home in the 1950s? Looks to me like home bread-making is on the rise (oh those puns) again, especially now with all the new kitchen flour mills and bread-makers available.

If you type “local flour mills” into your search engine. I think you will be surprised. There’s quite a few of them all over the U.S. and Canada. While the political pundits and the banking bandits wring their hands and steal our money and then promote rather tasteless mass-produced bread at over two dollars a loaf, there’s still a “grain” of contrariness in many Americans. That’s how we’ve survived so far.
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See also Greg’s Making Organic Sourdough Bread Recipe
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Gene and Carol Logsdon have a small-scale experimental farm in Wyandot County, Ohio.
Gene is author ofThe Mother of All Arts: Agrarianism and the Creative Impulse (Culture of the Land)
and The Last of the Husbandmen: A Novel of Farming Life
Photo Credit: Katherine Moreland
OrganicToBe.org | OrganicToGo.com
Gene’s Posts
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From Jeff Cox

The first farmers’ markets are opening up in the warmer parts of the country, and soon they’ll be opening everywhere. You can find the markets nearest you by visiting www.localharvest.org.

But when you do go to a farmers’ market, some questions arise.

The seller may say he or she is organic, but how do you know for sure? Many small farmers and truck patch operators may very well be organic but don’t want to go through the paperwork and expense of getting organic certification. Some unscrupulous sellers may tell customers what the customers want to hear and claim their produce is organic when it isn’t.

First, ask the seller is he’s certified organic. Here in California, the certifying agency is CCOF (California Certified Organic Farmers) and the seller may have a CCOF sign displayed. That’s your guarantee that the food is raised organically. There are certifying agencies across America. If there’s no certification but the seller claims his produce is organic, here are some questions you can ask to make sure the food is organic.

Ask how he controls cabbage worms. Any organic grower will know right away that Bacillus thuringiensis, called Bt, is the sure-fire organic control for those little green worms that chew on the leaves of cole crops (cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, turnips, rutabagas, kohlrabi, bok choy, and many other vegetables). If he says that he doesn’t have a problem with cabbage worms, be skeptical. White cabbage moths, the adult form of the green caterpillars, are ubiquitous.

Ask how he controls corn earworms. Most organic growers will tell you that the worms don’t eat much, and to just break off the tip of the ear where the worm has set up shop. There are some organic controls like twist-tying the tip and putting a drop or two of mineral oil on the tip, but they are impractical for anyone growing a farm-sized amount of corn. A few earworms, by the way, are a good guarantee that the corn is indeed organic, and the farmer may tell you that.

Ask his soil pH. Any organic farmer will know his soil pH. In a good organic soil, it will be between 6.0 and 7.0, ideally about 6.5, or slightly acid. At 6.5, most soil nutrients are most available to most crops. If the soil is more acidic or alkaline—that is, out of the 6.0 to 7.0 range—certain nutrients become locked up and unavailable to crops. So a real organic farmer knows his pH and strives to keep it as close to 6.5 as possible. Conventional farmers are more concerned with the amount of chemical nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium they’re putting down than with soil pH.

Keep in mind that there are two kinds of sellers at farmers’ markets—actual farmers who grew their fruits or produce, and purveyors who buy wholesale and sell retail from stands at the farmers’ markets. It’s easy to tell which is which by asking this question:

Which variety is this? A farmer will always know the variety names of all his fruits and vegetables, or his breed of hen if he’s selling eggs. After all, he had to buy the seed, the woody plants, or the chicks, and he’s carefully raised them. Choosing the varieties he likes best and that have the highest quality is a big part of organic farming. A purveyor may know the variety names of the fruit or vegetables he’s selling, but often may not. If he doesn’t know, that’s as close to a guarantee that he’s a purveyor as you’ll get.

The clincher, of course, is to ask, “Where’s your farm?” The farmer will know, the purveyor won’t, or he’ll name someplace far away. Remember, the best way to eat is organic, local, and in season. Don’t be afraid to ask questions at the farmers’ market. Real organic farmers are proud of their efforts and will communicate that to you.
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Jeff Cox is author of The Organic Cook’s Bible and The Organic Food Shopper’s Guide and lives in Sonoma County, California.
Image Credit: © Matt Ragen | Dreamstime.com
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