Wild Cultivation Journal: 4th of July ‘17
Experiments with naturalistic edible meadow gardening
My wild cultivation experiment is going better than I expected.
After seeing how strong of a start the grass got off to at the beginning of the season, I had little hope for the roto-tilling we had an extended family member come in and do.
But my game of stocking the soil seed bank seems to be going really well. I don’t know exactly what I expected as the outcome, but I think the results I’m seeing so far, as of July 4th, 2017 are pretty much in line with what I’d hoped — if not been able to quite visualize play out in the patterns which it is.
It’s a challenge to document this well in photographs, a better sense of the plant species diversity that is emerging. It’s a combination of what was latent in the soil, and what I added over a few successive sowings.
Even though the photos just look like a bundle of green, a trained eye might be able to pick out some familiars. In the above images, I can see a sampling of at least:
- Kale, mustard and other brassicas
- Sunflower
- Field bindweed (I think, the heart-shaped ones)
- What they call ‘petard’ here — I think in the Silene genus (edible leaves). [It’s bladder campion, in English.]
- Oats and/or barley
- Bunch of wildflowers I can’t identify, but which I bought from Vermont
- Borage
- Various peas
- Possibly timothy — I’m not sure about that long puffy grass in foreground in bottom pic… I did sow some millets, idk.
- Nasturtium
Establishing shot
I want to get a sense of scale in these, but I’m not sure I’m succeeding.
You can see easily the, I think, brown mustards climbing rapidly up. They seem to be really quick, aggressive colonizers. When they go, they go.
Good news, re: what seem like grasses
If you look out across the field, your heart — like mine — might sink a little seeing how strong the grasses appear to be in certain areas:
But if you actually get in and look more closely, I think a lot of what we’re seeing as “grasses” above are cereals/pseudo-cereals like oats & barley, which I sowed in profusion as aggressive colonizers exactly for this reason — to out-compete the grass rhizomes.
I’m thinking — knock on wood — it’s working, but I don’t want to speak too soon. This is an evolving project.
Oats (and I’m assuming barley, probably) are easily pulled out, and will just get rolled, scythed or winter-killed down at some point during the season. They don’t spread laterally, via perennial rhizomes like those “pesky” grasses.
Mustard flower close-up
Fat hen close-up
I don’t *think* I put any in this garden (can’t be sure, tbh), but this fat hen (Chenopodium album) is most definitely veering in the direction of what I did purchase somewhere, at some point: “magenta spreen.”
Johnny’s sells theirs as Chenopodium gigantium (which this may be, idk), but I’d be surprised it it wasn’t all the same species, really. The lines around species are not quite so clear as we like to think…
Possible underground water flows
We strongly suspect there is an underground flow of water on at least one part of our property. Partly because there is a “hole which cannot be filled” according to an old tenant and now neighbor. And partly because there is kind of a band of what I would call ‘exceptional plant growth’ of which the following pictures show some close-ups from.
Plants in this area of the field are showing greater species richness, more vibrant growth and more rapid development than in other parts of the field.
The picture below shows some kind of brassica at bottom right developing its “broccoli”-type flower head before any of the other areas which I spot checked.
Bonus: chicken coop alchemy
There is a small cluster of burdock growing quite happily in this area, which is fine for now, but that I don’t want to have reproduce in this field. I cut the leaves and added it into the chicken coop, which I use as a kind of “biodigester”:
The brown paper comes from a more or less failed experiment I did a few weeks back of suppressing weed growth in another area of the garden. It did slow the weed growth, but due to the width of the paper roll I’m using, the underlying weeds were able to burst through and soak up some sunlight to power up again. I had to go through, remove the paper, stack the logs using as weights and hoe it out. I planted in some late season $1 lavender specials from Walmart (which were in great shape) into part of that area, and oversowed with oats and buckwheat, which I was happy to be able to pick up from my local coop for about $40 for 25kg.
In any event, I’ve already harvested one “funky salad” from the ‘edible meadow’ depicted in this post, and could if I wanted to do many many more. But I’m mostly interested right now in seeing how it develops and doing very small scale progressive harvesting for family use. So far, so good!
