It takes guts to grow your own vegetables
These past three seasons we have been conducting an experiment trying to move towards self-sustenance right here in the city by growing and foraging our own vegetables. The weather had different plans.
When we started our experiment three years ago, we thought technical or infrastructural problems would be our main stumbling blocks. Who would have thought that the biggest challenge would be to handle our own fears and anxieties. It took one rough and unfriendly season to run that point home something fierce.
Of course, back then, when we started our experiment and when we set our goals, we were too optimistic, almost naive. Our goal was to try and grow 80% of our own food, right here in the city. We had lofty plans, unrealistic plans. We hoped to find other people to start a communal chicken coop. For the milk and cheese we wanted to find a farmer, who would lease us a cow in exchange for some work or for a monthly fee. We would call this “Cow sharing”, and we thought this was a catchy name and had huge potential. We had no idea where we would get our grains from, but hoped to think of a solution for this problem as well. Most of the nuts, oils and spices, the tofu, soy milk, plus the lemons, the occasional water melon or avocado were always gonna be impossible to grow here, we simply do not live in the right climate zone - yet, maybe global warming will change it soon, there’s hoping, I’m joking of course - but these food groups we hoped to be able to trade against the honey we produce.
The first two seasons of our experiment went quite well. We grew decent amounts of vegetables on our 150 square meter allotment and on our balconies, and each season we kept seeing room for improvement. The bees started to produce honey. Things were looking great.
Growing vegetables is of course delightful, but also endlessly complex. But it can get pretty stressful, as we were soon to find out. Often it remains unclear why something is not growing well one season, other times there are those pretty obvious duh moments. One year we kept wondering, why all our sweet corn had turned so chewy that we could only eat it in soups, after first grinding and filtering it. A fellow gardener pointed to the corn field right next to us that season and I scratched my head in embarrassment. Of course. The explanation had been so obvious. The sweet corn and the feed corn had cross pollinated.
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If you are growing vegetables you have to keep learning, and that’s fantastic. At times, you just need to accept, that nature knows better. This can be a very humbling experience, and I believe this to be one of the great secondary effects in play here.
It almost feels like you need to unlearn everything you thought you knew. The trick would probably be, to get more experienced, while staying naive and humble enough to keep an open mind to at the same time improve your intuition.
We were both not intuitive gardeners to begin with. While my partner was able to improve her intuitive capabilities a lot, I remain hopeless. My strength lies in research and perseverance. I will keep trying new approaches, until I find the right one.
What makes my learning process difficult is how slow it is. With certain crops, if you make a mistake one season, you will have to wait for the next year to try a new and different approach. This is especially true in our climate, with its short, peaky growing season, where the last frost happens in May, and November can see the first snow.
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We were forced to revise our goals half way through our three year experiment. The eggs and milk turned out to be too complicated to organize alone. And no one we knew seemed interested to participate. The grains, impossible. A realistic goal would be to grow 75% of our vegetables, to focus on the honey, and to forget about everything else for now.
This meant that we would only buy vegetables 3 months out of the year. With the long winters and late frost in Switzerland this was still an ambitious goal. But a more realistic one. If we did our research well and found enough hardy things, that we could harvest well into January, and if our cellar was well stocked with root vegetables and preserved foods, we could last quite far into Winter and would only have to buy vegetables from February to April.
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This plan was not counting on the horrendous weather we had the next season, the third year of our experiment. Spring was so cold and wet, that none of our early crops, the peas and salads and greens, yielded much of anything at all. We kept struggling until almost June to finally stop buying vegetables at the stores. The previous year we had been ready for this a good month and a half earlier. The summer then was very hot and bursty. And in November the first snow and frost came early and killed most of our hardy veggies.
The weather was harsh, and not just for us. Every gardener I know struggled with these strange conditions. Nothing can be done about it.
Nevertheless I was surprised how much this freaked me out emotionally. Often I would lay awake at night, agonizing, trying to come up with new plans, and suddenly I realized, it takes a lot of courage to grow your own food. What if we really depended on it, and then a hail storm just flattens the whole crop? Or blight befalls the potatoes? Or scores of insects infect the greens? So much can and usually will go wrong.
I had underestimated how much anxiety this would produce in me. I got very worried, rushing to the garden every time it rained, to cover our tomatoes. When our potatoes developed black blight I was reminded of the great famine in Ireland, where the same potato disease had forced thousands of Irish farmers to flee the country to move to the USA, and many of them died.
For us this just meant we had to harvest our potatoes a little bit too early, and therefore smaller, and one of our cellar crops would not last us very long. In fact we already ate them all by October. This was no big deal, because we could just run out and buy more at the organic market.
Suddenly our lofty experiment started to piss me off. It meant nothing. This was too easy for us, if we failed, we could just hit the shops, or the farmers market, and buy more vegetables. What if we really depended on growing our own food? Thinking about this gave me huge respect for the people who are in the situation of having to grow their own vegetables. I felt humbled and the experiment suddenly looked rather silly.
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There is nothing more wonderful than going to the garden every morning, deciding what to cook that night, to walk among the plants and harvest fresh what you will eat that very same day. For months and months I have been eating fresh raspberries with my granola. This is the height of luxury. I will not give up on growing my own vegetables. But for now, I will give up on this self-sustenance experiment. I am lacking the coolness it takes.
So our experiment failed, because we didn’t reach our goal. But we gave up, because we questioned the very idea of conducting this as an experiment, which felt artificial and almost arrogant. This does not mean that we did not learn a lot from it. It taught us tons of practical tricks and techniques that would not make sense to share here. But mainly it prepared us for things to come.
Hopefully soon the capitalist system will collapse, and I can’t wait for this to happen or humanity is doomed. In post-capitalistic society we will be forced to get started with self-sustenance for real. One thing this experiment taught me, is not to underestimate the emotional aspects of this. I already know, it takes real guts to grow your own vegetables.
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All photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pieceoplastic/ Creative Commons
