This post was contributed by a community member. The views expressed here are the author's own.

Health & Fitness

When it Counts: Don't be Afraid of Gardening

A review of Steve Solomon's latest book Gardening When it Counts

Years ago when I read Steve Solomon's seminal book Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades, I was wowed by his expertise, I was floored by all the nuances to growing food, building compost, irrigating, and I didn't start my first garden until a couple years later. In the meantime, I was working on building up my own confidence to begin such a perceived-to-be-difficult task. 

Fast forward to the present. Now I'm a much more experienced gardener, and I've spent countless hours touring and talking about many different types of gardening; I'm what you would call a geek, right? So this time around I found it hard to even finish Solomon's latest book Gardening When it Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times. (I did want to finish when my frustration called to make a blog post out of the situation).

The title, of course, freaking rocks. Wow, we need to have a highly available book about gardening in hard times, I'd been chomping at the bit to read a book like this. But I found that many of the techniques I'm familiar with in Permaculture go way beyond what Solomon was talking about. And at many points my own experience countered his expertise, which caused me to raise a skeptical eyebrow, or just get bored. 

Find out what's happening in Bonney Lake-Sumnerwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

First of all, if we're in hard times and needing to grow food, then the average person needs to feel like its achievable. For this I highly recommend the book/pamphlet Maritime Northwest Garden Guide that is put out by Seattle Tilth, is only $15, and has very simple listings of what tasks to do month-by-month in this climate. First time gardeners will be relieved by its simplicity. But not only is it user friendly, it's packed with info; farmers who have been at this craft for 20 years still consult the Garden Guide like clockwork. 

I appreciate that as Solomon himself says, "I'm not a Pollyana gardener." Instead, he dives into the details of food-growing that point out the careful math, planning, adjustments, and tools all needed for the highest-producing, most-nutritious foods. But I feel like the format and the personal rants are not helpful to a new gardener, and I would not recommend this book to them.  As my gardening mentors told me "Vegetables just grow. If you want to get specific about it there are a million different ways to do it, but in general, just let them grow." That kind of attitude has been invaluable to me and I don't feel like Solomon's works are able to convey that. 

Find out what's happening in Bonney Lake-Sumnerwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

Additionally, Solomon recommends a whole slate of things based on how he thinks most gardens work. There's a quote that says something like this (I can't find the exact quote right now) "In the spring, when nature covers herself with plants, we like bare soil that warms up to plant our desirable crops. And in the fall when this biomass would naturally replenish the soil, we clean the garden up leaving it devoid of nutrients." But as someone trained in permaculture and whole-systems thinking, my gardens have always been year-round, mulched, moist, fertile places for any creature who happens by. 

Specifically:

Irrigation. I agree that we want to plan gardens that don't need to be watered. His approach is to dry farm, to plant things far enough apart so that each plant has its own little water zone that it alone can tap into. I don't refute that dry farming works, but my experience leads me to wonder if it's necessary in Western Washington.

I've done quite the opposite in this climate, planted things close enough to shade the soil, and planted different types of things to be tapping into different moisture zones, and lo and behold, I also hardly ever need to water. (The 'hardly' being that I'll spot water seedlings occasionally).

To illustrate, in 2009 that really hot summer, I worked over at Mother Earth Farm. During the first strong hot spell in May we were busy at the farm dragging drip lines to all the beds because the new transplants were in the middle of this bare soil desert and quite parched. I was so exhausted that I didn't visit my own garden for two weeks, and assumed that everything had died. But when I did have a chance to bushwack through knee-high weeds to find the clearing where I'd planted things in March and April, I found that everything was green, lush, and happy. The soil had hardly lost moisture because the garden + the surrounding area was all green and alive. 

So additionally in this climate, I've had a lot of success just, oh, making sure to sow or transplant in the rainy season. (I planted about four months before the Community Garden across the street. Raised beds allow that). Then by the time it stops raining in the summer, the plant is big enough to cope. I also use lots of permaculture techniques for land-shaping, doing beds on contour, sowing/transplanting in swales or furrows, having lots of organic matter mulching the bed, etc.

There's also a permaculture technique called 'hugelkulture' which is a huge fertile mound that never needs watering. I've built many, but none in my personal gardens, yet, so can't personally attest to its low water needs.

Solomon also advocates for row gardens instead of raised bed gardens, asserting that raised bed gardens need more water and fertility than be easily supplied. Water I talked about already, so I'll move to fertility. 

Fertility. I readily admit that my experience doesn't even come close to Solomon's on this topic. And yet, I felt like there was a missing part to his analysis. As mentioned above, plants in his system are planted far apart, and as shown by the quote he has a 'putting-in' and a 'cleaning-up' phase to his gardens every season. What if plants were just growing with each other (polyculture) and there were always fertility plants (called 'dynamic accumulators') nearby? 

A polyculture is a handful of different plants growing, rather than just one. Sometimes I do whole beds polyculture style, but usually I just have 'helper' plants growing on the edge of beds surrounding the main crop, or in the pathway. A helper plant can be attracting beneficial insects (yarrow, calendula, flowering parsley), one that fixes nitrogen (clover, fava beans, lupine), or one that pulls up useful minerals (dandelion, dock, horsetail). 

How do I manage all this craziness so to still produce food? It's easy, I just cut back helper plants when they get in the way. They're dying roots, or the leaves laid down directly atop, flush nutrients into the system. And if you see the list above, all of them are adept at coming back. And a handful even grow through the winter. I've also learned in the last few years how to make things look 'neat' even with an approach that would cause some more-perfectionist gardeners shiver. I maintain clear pathways and there are always lots of flowers. Bare soil makes me shiver. 

Granted, there is more than this that's needed to keep lots of nutrients in the soil. I am of course, taking food out of the system and those nutrients need to be replaced. I have a whole slew of composting strategies, and am not adverse to Solomon's tips on that matter. I just wish that the Polyculture strategy had warranted some time in his book. 

Perennials and Self-Seeders. In addition to all of Solomon's topics, I found it hard to take a book called Gardening When it Counts seriously if it avoided such huge topics as the Plants That Take Care of Themselves. If I'm hard up, and hard up for time, I want these all-stars in my garden. We can start off with well-known perennials like Artichokes, Asparagus, Berries, Fruit Trees, Nut Trees. And then I also encourage Sunchokes, Alexanders, Perennial Onions, Perennial Brassicas, Lovage, Chervil. And then there are self-seeders (let some plants seed and never sow it again): Arugula, Spinach, Corn Salad/Mache, Radish, Parsnips, Leeks, Carrots, Lettuce, Kale, Nasturtium, Calendula, etc. Why bother studying the specifics of seed-starting for these plants? It is more helpful is to give lists of these kinds of plants to hard-times gardeners.  

In closing though, I would like to acknowledge that for someone who's already been gardening and wants to learn more, Solomon's book does have some gems. For me, I learned from his seed-starting, seed-saving, and 'Complete Organic Fertilizer' topics. But I found that most of the book was not true to my experience, might startle a newbie, and was disappointing considering it's stellar title. 

We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here

The views expressed in this post are the author's own. Want to post on Patch?

More from Bonney Lake-Sumner