Inner City Farmer

Have you heard about this miracle weed? And, no, I’m not talking about the stuff featured in Pineapple Express. Jatropha curcas contains a seed that when crushed produces a high-quality biofuel capable of powering a standard diesel vehicle. The plant yields four times as much fuel per acre as soybeans and more than ten times more than corn. Even better, it grows almost anywhere, thriving in even the poorest soil. I’ve got plenty of poor soil in my backyard and no desire to buy any more carbon-producing gasoline for my van. Looks like it’s time for me to start planting some jatropha….

With my own garden growing increasingly haggard and brown, I set off early Saturday morning in search of a little inspiration, and I found it (as well as enough veggies to feed an army) on Caswell Avenue just a mile southeast of my house. I had heard all about Suzie and John Warren’s garden; if you live in Austin and have any interest at all in gardening it would be hard not to.

Less than six months old, the garden has become something of a mecca for gardening enthusiasts. John Dromgoole, the organic gardening guru and owner of the Natural Gardener, recently filmed it for his “Backyard Basics” segment on KLRU’s Central Texas Gardener. Garden designers from the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center have stopped by to take a look. Even UT students have taken an interest; one of them took pictures of it for a photo assignment, which was judged to be the best in a class of over 400 students. It is also the first vegetable garden to be given a Green Garden Award by the City of Austin. In all, over 200 people have taken a tour of this garden, and on Saturday I joined their ranks.

What makes this garden so special? Not only is pleasant to look at, it also produces a ridiculous amount of food. Whereas so many gardens in Central Texas are now withering in the heat, the Warrens’ garden is—to use Suzie’s word—“boomin’.” For the past two and a half months, it has supplied enough vegetables to feed Suzie, her husband John, her son, his wife, two other couples in the neighborhood, and an assortment of friends. What’s their secret? How have they succeeded where so many others have failed? That’s what I was hoping to find out.

I was amused to discover that the yard where the garden sits was once riddled with lugustrums and hackberry trees, just as mine is now. With help from some of their neighbors, the Warrens chopped down all of these trees, and then sent a soil sample off to the Soil, Water and Forage Testing Laboratory at Texas A&M. They discovered that, like most lots in Central Texas, their soil was high in phosphorous but otherwise safe for gardening.

Next they had two truckloads of soil from Garden Ville dumped on their yard, which they used to make a raised bed nearly a foot high. (In retrospect, they would have preferred to have purchased the soil from the Natural Gardener as the soil from Garden Ville contained some dreaded ragweed.) To keep the garden well watered, they installed a drip irrigation system hooked up to four 75-gallon rain barrels that collect rain water off their roof. Because the rain barrels are only about two feet off the ground (see picture), they don’t always produce enough water pressure. As a remedy, local permaculture expert Dick Pierce recommended the Warrens buy a “sprinkler hose” from Breed & Co., which at such low pressure would act just like a soaker hose.

This all seemed like fairly standard operating procedure so I pressed Suzie a little harder. Her garden looked like an oasis in a desert. When I visited, it was at the peak of production. There were big, fat, round, healthy fruits and vegetables everywhere I looked, eggplants as purple and shiny as Barney’s forehead, watermelons and cantaloupes begging to be smashed and feasted upon, chard as high as my knee. Carrots? Check. Beans? Check. Only the tomatoes looked a little off because some pesky stink bugs had found them.

I pressed Suzie for the secret to her success. She suggested cottonseed meal, which they had spread liberally throughout the garden. But I knew that wasn’t it because I had done the same. Finally, after retrieving a little boom box from inside the house, she produced an answer that satisfied me: music. Since the garden’s inception in the spring, she has been playing music for her plants every day. She swears they like Wilson Pickett the best.

When I first discovered natural building, I kept hearing the name Ianto. At the Natural Building Colloquium in Kerrville, Texas last fall, it seemed every other conversation started or ended with Ianto-this and Ianto-that. “Who was this guy?” I asked myself. Unfortunately, out of all the celebrated natural builders who attended the Colloquium Ianto Evans was the only who couldn’t make it. My interest was piqued, however, and as soon as I got home I ordered his book The Hand-Sculpted House, which I credit for my desire to remodel my entire homestead using cob.

There’s another name that keeps appearing in my life, and it’s Masanobu Fukuoka. While reading books and articles about different philosophies of gardening, I keep seeing references to this man. Curious to find out more about him, I checked out his book The One-Straw Revolution from the library. For anyone with an interest in permaculture and organic gardening, it should be required reading.

Here’s Fukuoka’s life story and philosophy of farming in brief: As a 25 year old in Japan, he was working as a plant pathologist for the Plant Inspection Division of the Yokohama Customs Bureau when he had an exhaustion-induced epiphany that modern agriculture was FUBAR. He promptly quit his job and returned to his family’s farm where he practiced “do-nothing farming,” which didn’t require plowing, fertilizing, adding insecticides, or even making compost. His philosophy of farming mirrored his philosophy of life, that human beings, full of ego and arrogance, are prone to meddling where they shouldn’t, that if left to its own devices the natural order will be just fine, thank you very much.

As basic as this idea is, it was revolutionary at the time. It was also effective. Fukuoka’s farm produced just as much rice as ones of equal size that used modern practices, and it did so with only a fraction of the inputs and labor. He let nature do all the work and provide all the nutrients, and he used the time he freed up to write books and further develop his philosophy. “There is no time in modern agriculture for a farmer to write a poem or compose a song,” he writes in The One-Straw Revolution.

In the 1970s the world finally discovered this man and anointed him one of the pioneers of the organic farming movement along with Sir Albert Howard and J.I. Rodale. But Fukuoka was never in it for the fame. He wrote several books and lectured on occasion but slowly dropped out of the public light. At 95, he is still alive today, living somewhere in Tokyo, but he no longer farms and even his fan website has no direct contact with him. Who is Masanobu Fukuoka?

It rained hard last night. Finally. We had gone months without a significant downpour so it sure felt good to wake up to the smell of damp earth. The plants and shrubs in my yard were especially pleased. My garden is pretty much done for the summer except for a hardy watermelon vine and the cucumber vines you see pictured above. As if in gratitude to the rain, the flowers appeared this morning. Could cucumbers be on the way? I sure hope so. I want to learn how to make pickles.

While my garden dies a slow and painful death, it’s nice to know that some vegetable-producing plants in Austin are doing well. Earlier in the week, a member of the Austin Permaculture listserv I belong to spotted “several tomato and pepper plants growing among the perennials at the foot of the pedestrian bridge [that spans Lady Bird Lake] on the northwest side.” There was immediate speculation as to the origins of the plants.

One member thought they were part of a demonstration garden for the Green Corn Project, a local nonprofit whose mission is “to educate and assist Central Texans in growing organic food gardens.” This seems likely—on the website they do mention having a garden on Lady Bird Lake.

But the revolutionary in me loved the speculation that it might have been planted by a guerrilla gardener. If you’re not familiar with this movement, guerrilla gardening entails planting vegetation on abandoned or unoccupied tracts of land generally under cover of night. The more brazen do it right in the middle of the day. The goals of these stealth plantings are as varied as the personalities of those performing them. Some do it to grow crops they might one day eat. Some do it to beautify a scarred piece of land. Many are making a statement about land ownership, questioning its legitimacy.

In America the movement has a long, if not glorious, history dating as far back as the first decade of the 19th Century when John “Appleseed” Chapman started planting apple orchards all across the Midwest. The modern origins of the movement have been traced to Liz Christy and her Green Guerrilla group, who in 1973 transformed a neglected lot in the Bowery Houston area of New York into a beautiful garden.

I find it telling that one of the greatest acts of subversion one can commit nowadays is planting some seeds on someone else’s land. If you’re brave enough to do it and keep it up despite public pressure not to, you just might become as famous as Richard Reynolds. I applaud all those who are willing to try.