GROW BIOINTENSIVE

April 25, 2011

I am geeking on a new gardening book I was gifted this winter:  "How to Grow More Vegetables".  The title sounds innocuous enough, but the agenda of the book is really about building soil in order to maximize the output of the home gardener.

This book might be the most pragmatic reference I have ever read on gardening. It contains a wealth of information that is new to me.  My step-mother, Nancy, gave me this book and it is a GOLD MINE. I am so impressed with it I am adopting its methods this year. My faith is justified, I think, because the advice boils down to effort: How much effort to expend on preparing beds, to plan, to compost, and to record. Frankly, when a book tries to sell me great results with minimal effort I run away from the snake oil salesmen.

The GROW BIOINTENSIVE method is adovated by Ecology Action. They have some very real-world concerns about the current state of the worlds farmable land:

• Because of population growth, pollution of water sources, and greater use of water for industry, by 2050 each person on the Earth will have only 25% of the water that was available in 1950. Current agricultural practices use 80% of the Earth’s available water.
• There may be as little as 40 years of farmable soil remaining globally. For every pound of food eaten, 6 to 24 pounds of soil are lost due to water and wind erosion, as the result of agricultural practices,
• 95% of the seed varieties ever grown in agriculture are now virtually extinct. Much of this is due to the growing of relatively few crops, and the frequent use of hybrid seeds for the crops that are grown. Seeds that are no longer used soon lose their viability and are rarely available.
• Global warming may cut agricultural production in half within as little as 20 years. In February, 2004, the Observer in the United Kingdom reported that climate change is a greater threat to the world than terrorism.
• With supplies of petroleum and natural gas running out, conventional agriculture—heavily dependent on these resources—will become more expensive, raising food prices accordingly. As natural gas to make inexpensive nitrogen fertilizer is depleted, it may take significantly more land to grow the same amount of food, when conventional agricultural practices are used.
• The number of farmers globally keeps decreasing. In the US, only 2/5 of 1% of the population now farm. Many people would like to farm but are unable to afford the land and equipment current wisdom says is necessary for a farm to be economically viable. Other farmers have been forced off their land due to heavy competition from globalization and subsidized food. As farmers go out of business, their skills—often passed down through millennia—are also lost to the world. Once thriving communities that served rural populations deteriorate and die as farmers leave.

The main points of the GROW BIOINTENSIVE method focus on:

• Double-Dug, Raised Beds
• Composting
• Intensive Planting
• Companion Planting
• Carbon Farming
• Calorie Farming
• The Use of Open-Pollinated Seeds
• A Whole-System Farming Method

So I am in Stage 1: Double-digging my beds. Its alot of work. But my labor is free. In short, the method means that a first-time bed preparation involves mixing 1 inch of compost into the top 12" of soil and mixing another 12" of compost into the 12"-24" of topsoil. How do you do that? Well, that's for the next post where I will scan a page or two from the book and show the method. The bottom line is that you sweat.