Community Garden
From GreenQuadWiki
Contents |
History
The Beginning
This was our first Tree Guild which consisted of these plants.
Michael Drennan's Experimental Box Garden
Helpful People
Tommy Fallaw, In charge of campus landscaping -- 803-413-6623
Mathew Kip -- 255-0834
Jason Craig --- 777-1994
Mathew's Account
A brief History of Food Production and Conventional Farming
The Green Quad Community Garden began during the summer of 2007. There was ongoing conversation the semester before on how to address the food aspect of sustainability. We explored flaws in our industrial food system, and in our virtually total dependence on it.
Food is often left out of discussions about “green living”, which tend to center around recycling, using alternative energy, biking, etc. Few elements of our lives (perhaps only water and shelter) affect us so universally and immediately as food. In a generation or two most of us have lost any connection with where our food comes from. We don’t know who is growing it, what the quality of life is for those harvesting it, or what impact the growing and shipping of it is having on our global environment. Modern conventional agriculture produced surpluses of food never before seen. Fertilizer from modified nerve gas and pesticides and herbicides derived from petroleum industry byproducts formed the basis of a new chemically intensive agriculture. Processed food entered the market as excess grains such as corn and soy were converted to the basis for a multitude of plastic wrapped and indefinitely preserved “foods”. Grazing animals were switched over to grain diets, allowing them to be raised in confinement under medication of antibiotics. The continuing consolidation of seed companies leaves the world’s food supply in the hands of fewer and fewer transnational corporations. With the advent of the patenting of life, the biotech industry has introduced genetically altered plants and animals into the food chain without any labeling required, removing much of our ability to have real choices about what we eat. Buying organic vegetables and meats, which still are required to be free of genetic modification and must be grown using more sustainable methods, gives us some confidence in what we’re eating. But there are other troubling issues associated with food that is industrially produced at a distance from consumers.
Much of our food travels across continents or across the world, relying on an infrastructure based on cheap oil that is problematic politically and environmentally. Many of us have come to identify a food crisis in the works, and it originates with our general disconnection from the means of our sustenance. All of these concerns led us to the understanding that food production needs to again be localized, grown within miles of those consuming it, by growers saving their own seed and growing food with methods that are sound ecologically.
But as a community exploring all facets of sustainability, rather than solely relying on local farmers, we might relearn some of the art of growing food ourselves in the soil under our feet. Urban and community gardens are on the rise everywhere- the city of Hong Kong for example grows 45% of its food within city limits- so there are models to guide us.
Permaculture as Design Strategy
I was specifically hired to design and help implement the Green Quad garden from the perspective of permaculture. Permaculture is a design strategy emulating natural systems to create human managed systems that are stable, self-regulating, and regenerative. One of my teachers, Patricia Allison, defined it further as a methodology for establishing sustainable human culture in all of its aspects. It encompasses a broad field, but has valuable ideas for cultivation of food particularly.
Permaculture imitates nature in food production through emphasizing the use of polycultures and guilds, which are planned communities of plants, animals and insects that form mutual aid networks. Other principles derived from ecology are used to benefit these systems, such as covering soil with mulch or edible cover crops to conserve moisture and feed soil microorganisms. Permaculture systems tend to mimic some of the disordered look of nature but, like nature, are stable and resilient because of their diversity.
Other Design Considerations
At the Green Quad I was designing a garden to be managed by a community which will evolve with the comings and goings of students. There needed to be space to experiment for each new community member getting involved. There also needed to be more permanent and low maintenance perennial systems that could take care of themselves when students thinned out in the summers. I was taking into account the conventional aesthetics of the school as well. In introducing such a new idea on the campus landscape I thought we should avoid to some extent both the boxy look of typical row gardens and the chaotic look of some permaculture gardens. I was going for artistic but functional. Along with these objectives I was taking into account winter solar access for the first floor of the adjacent dorm building, stability in heavy storms and location relative to alternative forms of irrigation such as roof-harvested rainwater.
Our first idea was to site the garden on the slope between the two existing wetlands south of building “C” of the Green Quad. The thought was that irrigation needs would be reduced by a steady percolation of moisture through the subsoil. But the upper wetland had become unstable, having surpassed its planned water capacity. So until the situation was addressed, we decided to begin the garden just west of the wetlands, higher on the slope and closer to the dorm. This put it in a great location for irrigation with rain water collected in barrels attached to existing gutters. Since we were starting with a lawn containing pop-up sprinklers and electrical lines running under it, mapping those on the landscape was a first priority. It’s important that knowledge of these is passed on to each succeeding group of gardeners over the years. The soil under the turf was in wretched condition. It was compacted by bulldozers during construction and much of it was heavy clay with bad drainage.
Permaculture is generally anti-tilling. Tillage brings great short-term results by mechanically mimicking the loosening of soil done in nature by worms, insects, and bacteria. But soil ecology studies show a long-term effect of soil impoverishment through constant interruption of oxygen-ethylene cycles carried out by microorganisms. So it’s generally not the approach I take in gardening, but here some mechanical break-up of the soil was necessary to undo the mechanical compaction. With electrical and water lines marked, I tilled shallowly a circle with an 18 foot radius. Tilling was difficult at best, and due to the electrical and water lines crossing under our garden, I recommend that the garden be “no till” from here on out as a matter of safety. With the Bermuda grass chopped up, I began to build raised beds. These aren’t the best idea for drought conditions like we had this summer, but the existing soil is too poor to be workable with any success. I put down cardboard to block access to light for the chunks of turned-over lawn, and to feed the soil with organic matter.
In working with the soil I found it to be almost void of visible life. A fire ant colony was all I encountered. As the cardboard breaks down it will attract worms and bacteria and begin to restore biology to the ground. I marked with flags contour lines at regular intervals that I planned to make into garden beds. Contour lines are level lines in the landscape. They can be found with a simple and very ancient instrument called an A-frame level. If you dig a trench along these lines (called a “swale”), or build up “water bars” (as I did with our raised beds), you slow surface flow of rainwater and cause it to stop and absorb into the ground. This makes garden soil more stable in heavy storms and recharges groundwater. After I found several contour lines within my circle, I started shoveling USC compost (broken-down leaves mostly) to form garden beds along them.
Rather than using conventional rows I decided to snake a path through the garden along contour lines. This satisfied the need for the design to be somewhat artistic, but also was an experiment to see if bringing people through the whole garden on a winding path would lead to everyone keeping a closer eye on the entire garden. Maybe we’d catch an insect infestation or nutrition deficiency quicker if we couldn’t bypass a neglected end of the garden but had to walk through it to get to where we were going. I’m interested to see whether this stands in practice as a good idea or whether we’ll find it inconvenient and push new paths out of the sides of the circle. I topped the USC compost with locally distributed mushroom compost. I followed that with locally produced “Dixie Dirt”, a nutritionally balanced organic compost. These imports of rich soil were necessary if we are to grow food anytime soon at this site. Any soil can be rehabilitated, but we’d be waiting a long time with our compressed clay. The beds were then covered in a layer of wheat straw to shade the soil and jumpstart biological activity as it breaks down. Some compost bins were set up next to the garden so that we can make garden soil on site. I envision the annual beds to be eventually surrounded in tree guilds. These would be fruit trees skirted by fruiting shrubs, perennial flowers, climbing fruiting vines, etc.
The idea is to emulate a natural system by planting in layers. We can plant species that benefit each other through fertility enhancement, pollinator attracting and shading, to name a few. We’ll especially benefit the garden by including native plants. For instance, I’d like to plant a couple of native paw paw trees. These are the sole host plant of the zebra swallowtail butterfly. It feeds on paw paw leaves in its caterpillar stage, then returns as a butterfly to lay eggs. The paw paw yields us a delicious fruit, the largest native fruit in North America. If we surround our paw paws with butterfly nectary plants that are also edible or useful to us, and include a small wetland in the garden, we create ideal habitat for this native butterfly. You can never go wrong attracting pollinators such as butterflies and bees to your garden. It’s this kind of “system thinking” that is distinctive about permaculture. We can quickly rebuild the health of our world through understanding relationships. Ecology has found that stable natural systems are founded on cooperation rather than competition. This statement dovetails into the human component of our garden. So far the model we are working with is a kind of food cooperative. We all grow food and we all share the harvest. There’s also space for people to take on a plot of their own. These two approaches can coexist, or one may prove to work better than another. What system works best will likely compose the longer story of our garden.
