Last Harvest - December Salad

In my earlier post, I lamented the meager harvest for all my organic urban gardening efforts and hoped for better times next year (don't we all, gardeners or not?). Weeds had overtaken everything; harvest was pitiful.

Well here's a little update. A month ago I harvested 15 pounds of sweet potatoes, just before the annual scourge of the leaves. Ordinarily I spend over two months raking, moving the piles to the front for DC leaf pickup, a total of leaves at least 5 feet high, 5 feet wide, and maybe 25 feet long. A huge mess. This year I found a way to make lemonade out of the leaf lemons. Instead of using a leaf blower to blow them, I raked them into easy small piles every few feet. I then used the "reverse switch" and a pouch on my blower and mulched the leaves. This divide-and-conqueor strategy was so much easier to deal with, and instead of piling them up for the city to truck away, i've made beautiful layers of mulch, a winter blanket over the perennials, raised beds, asparagas, and everything else.

And one immediate benefit: the salad you see above. I think this must be a DC gardener's record, harvesting a fresh organic salad on the 10th of December. I'd picked the last of my tomatoes a couple weeks ago and let it ripen on a sill. I'd planted the lettuce in August, but mulched it with the leaves and covered them whenever a frost was forecast.

Tonight I picked enough lettuce for two bowls, and have covered the plants back over with leaf mulch to see if they can survive the below 20 degree F predicted temperature this evening. (Where is global warming when you need it? Can't help asking that.)

So did I transform the leaf scourge to leaf blessing by living without oil? Not completely. Pepco burned something (or used Nuclear power) to generate the electricity. Still, the city trucks didn't have to cart my 600 or so cubic feet of leaves to who-knows-where. I'll bet my net energy use was less than the city would have spent carting them all away, and I've now got a great layer of mulch for next year's garden.

Urban Micro Gardening

Lifelong Gardener – New Challenges

If you consider life after easily accessible oil and products such as artificial fertilizer derived from petroleum products, the thought occurs: "How will people cope?" Especially in an urban setting, you cannot be self sufficient. Still, can we become a bit less attached to modern food systems and even pass along urban gardening knowledge to those who follow? As a life long gardener I thought this would be easy. It isn't. That's what this post is about.

I have gardened all my life, starting in my teens with a quarter acre of land in northern NH, then on a third acre house lot in central Massachusetts. I like growing almost everything: herbs, flowers, vegetables, fruits (I’ve even tried mushrooms). Now I am living in northern Washington DC literally 6 miles from the White House. To quote Jefferson “Though an old man, I am yet a young gardener.” This garden has no more than 1/10th of an acre growing space surrounded by oak trees and on a downslope. My gardening efforts have grown beyond mere hobby with two new directions: An experiment to see how much can be produced on this little patch of earth, and a living lesson to my grandkids and others what is involved in approaching sustainable gardening. I’ve learn just how hard it is to garden in an urban setting even with significant sustainability investments.

Apart from the small space, there are other challenges: animals and barely adequate sunshine. Yes, animals: I built a 6’ fence to keep out the deer, rabbits and foxes, but I still lose produce to birds, squirrels, raccoons and who knows what all else. The neighbors love (and DC protects) its trees; I compromised and cut down enough to get me perhaps 6 hours daily sunshine.

Garden Strategy

My gardening strategy has several elements, each with a sustainability theme. First, pack quite a bit into a small space without overcrowding, and plant many small things in small numbers. Secondly, favor heirloom varieties since they require less fertilizer and you can harvest their seeds. Third, although aesthetics are important, think creatively and landscape with edibles. Strawberries and sweet potatoes are a pretty ground cover; blueberries are beautiful shrubs. Finally, diversity is important, since you never know what will succeed from year to year. I plant perennials, annuals, and dwarf trees.

I’ve emphasized sustainability with 3 rain barrels (185 gallons total capacity), an upward migration worm farm, tumbling composter, raised beds, and electric tiller. In fact, I've given away all my gasoline-powered tools in favor of electric and battery-based alternatives. (How well they work is also another post for another day.) We recycle essentially all table scraps, garden waste, and even some newsprint; our goal is to throw away no more than one garbage bag of waste each week, continuously looking for ways to reduce waste further.

That picture of a rain barrel? That's one of three that I own. Beautiful, functional, and if you're lucky lots of free unchlorinated water easily dripped into your garden. What could go wrong? Lots of things... but that's a post for another day.


What’s growing in this small space? I have a dozen asparagus plants, six rhubarb plants, strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, horseradish, two super-dwarf peach trees, a fig tree, a dwarf pear tree (picked since it doesn’t require another for cross-pollination). I grow herbs in pots and in the ground. We are experimenting with both culinary and medicinal uses for the 20 or so varieties.

I have tilled a circular area roughly 15’ in diameter for flowers, and another 100 square feet to see if I can grow sweet potatoes (these have become a groundcover extension of the flower garden). I have five plastic “Earthboxes,” essentially sealed containers of potting mix that require very little watering, fertilizing, and no weeding. Each can grow two tomato plants or 6 peppers, for example. These also are on wheels so I can move them to the brightest areas of the yard depending on the season. Lastly, I have two raised beds, each 8’ x 20’.

I run drip hoses from each rain barrel to different gardens. Worm compost and tea go into the gardens, as does the regular compost (supplemented with numerous pages from the Washington Post).

What have I achieved?

A more important question though, is “what are you harvesting from all these plantings?” Simple answer: Do you remember the book titled “The $64 Tomato”? I’d be happy if mine were that cheap. Perhaps it’s the difficulty of the Urban Garden paradigm, but this garden has been the most disappointing and difficult of any I’ve had through the decades. And I’ve spent in the 5 digits to set it up and make it work. If I were the quitting kind, I’d quit.

Some things like the peach, pear and fig trees may eventually bear fruit. Trees take time. But so far is not so good, primarily because of the extraordinarily low yields generally.


Lessons Learned

Urban gardening constraints are far less forgiving than growing in larger rural gardens. Oddly, the problem with animals is MORE severe in the city than in the country. For example, I suspect the deer in northern NH have learned that people eat venison, while they’ve also learned they have no natural predators in D.C.

Larger gardens provide more room for experimenting and more produce even when yields per plant are lower. This forces urban gardeners to react quickly to problems, measure everything, and document ongoing “lessons learned” to apply with each new season.

There are many advantages to growing heritage varieties. They provide a hedge against varying climate conditions (since they’ve learned to adapt). You can re-use the seeds. The produce is generally tastier (even if less pretty). They also require less fertilizer, perhaps growing with just compost and worm dirt. However, heritage varieties do yield a lot less than hybrids and often require longer growing seasons. It’s probably a good idea to grow both heritage and hybrid varieties. The little fertilizer needed for the hybrids is a better use of scarce resources than many other uses we can all name (think SUVs).

Be flexible, very flexible. If something doesn’t work out, and the reasons are beyond your control, then forget how much time, money and effort you put into it, and do something different. Find fast growing or shade-tolerant things to grow where there is the least sun. Decide which is more important for the best areas: mint or rhubarb, for example. I’m digging up the mint (it seems to grow nicely anywhere) and putting in more rhubarb where the original plants did very well.

Test your gardening area for moisture, sun, PH, and nutrients. Use an all-in-one tester (which unfortunately does not measure Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potash separately) or test individually.

And remember, there’s always next year.

Taleb, Noonan, and a Supermarket Conversation

In her WSJ editorial dated March 13, 2009, There's no Pill For This Kind of Depression, Peggy Noonan described a phenomenon that I noticed recently in a supermarket checkout line. We all seem, pretty much simultaneously, to have come to believe that the world is not only worse off than anybody would have said a year ago, but that it will be bad for a long time.

Noonan credits this to the idea that

“The writer and philosopher Laurens van der Post, in his memoir of his friendship with Carl Jung, said, 'We live not only our own lives but, whether we know it or not, also the life of our time.'"

“Of our time,” meaning that we have come to a concurrent conclusion that we are all witnessing a Black Swan event. The concept of such a thing was popularized by Nassim Taleb in his book of that name: Once in a while something totally unforeseen happens. Taleb elaborates on that idea on his website, Fooled by Randomness. Taleb asserts that there are some kinds of events (Black Swan events) that you essentially cannot foresee, even when the warnings are there.

Noonan says that we have a collective unintended common belief shaped by our time (that Black Swan event). Today, the event is the serious near-Depression and the common belief is that it won’t get better very soon at all. Noonan describes a “wall street titan” she interviewed five weeks ago, asking him what people should do next. He said: “Everyone should try to own a house, he said, no matter how big or small, but it has to have some land, on which you should learn how to grow things.”

Now to my supermarket checkout line conversation. A middle-aged woman ahead of me was buying a bunch of pussy willows, and we got to talking. She said that once she’d stuck a branch in the grown and it rooted, almost damaging her plumbing with its growth. I mentioned I’d done something similar by cutting some tomato branches last October before the first frost – I’d put them in water, they’d rooted, and I expect to plant these now 2’ tall tomato plants in a few weeks.

She responded that she didn’t have much land in the back of her house, but was seriously thinking of digging up the front lawn to grow some vegetables. In Northwest D.C. you just don’t do that. It hurts property values, and neighbors complain. (Unless you are a wealthy heir of a food company, then you dig up all you want and plant sunflowers and potatoes out front… I’ve
seen that too.)

Taleb and Noonan are both right. The Black Swan event happened, and we were all caught by surprise. Noonan was right that we are all gripped with the same kind of pandemic fear, sharing the life of our time.

Maybe good will come of this. We’ll all get down to our roots, back to basics, and that will be part of our shared recovery. And we’ll collectively stop our blind consumption of resources of all kinds, including fossil fuels, buying some time to figure out sustainable alternatives.

I hope so.

Peak Lithium? Why Should You Care?

What the heck is lithium and why should you care? First things first; what is lithium?
My first encounter with lithium was as a surreptitious high school participant in a science experiment. My teen buddies and I got a small piece of lithium and dropped it into a toilet to let it fizz.

That was exciting. But beyond the plop-fizz thing, what else should you know about lithium?

Here is an excerpt from Wikipedia:
“According to theory, lithium was one of the very few elements synthesized in the Big Bang, although its quantity has vastly decreased since that time. The reasons for its disappearance, and the processes by which new lithium is created, continue to be active matters of study in astronomy. Though very light, lithium is nevertheless less common in the universe than any of the first 20 elements.”
To learn more, go to Wikipedia.

All this is mildly interesting, but it doesn’t answer the question “why should I care?”

Here’s why.

President Obama’s and others’ hoped for transformation of our transportation systems –including your car—from petroleum based to electric, depends on rechargeable batteries. The best chemical bet at this time seems to be lithium batteries. Lithium ion batteries are the majority choice, although lithium phosphate batteries are less apt to catch on fire – but they too depend on stable and abundant supplies of lithium. Click here for more on lithium phosphate alternative rechargeable batteries.

The common thread is easy to see: Lithium. Note this phrase in the above Wikipedia quote: …less common in the universe than any of the first 20 elements. And that leads to the next point.

Where in the world do you find lithium? Not at Home Depot. Here is a quote from Peak Oil Review from its February 9 2009 newsletter (ask me how to receive this if you’re interested).
In the rush to build the next generation of hybrid or electric cars, a sobering fact confronts both automakers and governments seeking to lower their reliance on foreign oil: almost half of the world’s lithium, the mineral needed to power the vehicles, is found in Bolivia — a country that may not be willing to allow much access to the mineral. (Peak Oil Review, 09 Feb 2009).
Recently Simon Romero wrote about this in the NY Times. Here is a quote:

“We know that Bolivia can become the Saudi Arabia of lithium,” said Francisco Quisbert, 64, the leader of Frutcas, a group of salt gatherers and quinoa farmers on the edge of Salar de Uyuni, the world’s largest salt flat. “We are poor, but we are not stupid peasants. The lithium may be Bolivia’s, but it is also our property.”

How much lithium is in Bolivia and elsewhere? The article goes on to say that “The United States Geological Survey says 5.4 million tons of lithium could potentially be extracted in Bolivia, compared with 3 million in Chile, 1.1 million in China and just 410,000 in the United States. And beyond the current use of lithium in cell phones and laptops, what will be the impact of plug-in hybrid automobiles on the supply of lithium? Here’s what Mitsubishi spokesman said on the BBC News, November 9, 2008: “Mitsubishi, which plans to release its own electric car soon, estimates that the demand for lithium will outstrip supply in less than 10 years unless new sources are found.”

Now technology optimists will always say, and sometimes be right in saying, that we can always find alternatives. Still, the time is short for alternatives; GM is pinning its hopes for survival on the Volt, to be available in 2010. Not sure
Google “peak lithium” and you’ll find this WSJ blog. http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2009/02/03/peak-lithium-will-supply-fears-drive-alternative-batteries/
This blog describes alternatives such as zinc-air batteries. However, one very large obstacle: they aren’t rechargable and have a short lifespan. That’s akin to saying “except for that Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?”

So are plug-in hybrid automobiles truly a climate-friendly, peak-oil mitigating alternative to the internal combustion engine?