Subsistence gardening is not just about growing food – it involves getting a whole range of products from the land, including fuel, building materials, and fibre for making cloth – but growing food is the obvious starting point, and, particularly if space is limited, the vegetable garden the obvious starting point for growing food.
Vegetables are not, in fact, the easiest plants to grow; each has its own specific requirements, and success or failure for each crop can depend on quite subtle differences in approach. In part, that is why it is always worth trying to have a vegetable garden, even in exceptionally busy phases of one’s life, and when space is limited: the annual cycle of successes and failures with a range of different vegetables can give a profound insight into how plants work, providing invaluable experience for when you have a chance to manage a larger area of land on which you can produce a larger range of crops.
With this in mind, one should aim to manage the vegetable garden with a minimum of products brought in from outside, and, as far as possible, to create a closed system in which the garden increases in fertility of its own accord. This can involve having to search a little harder for information and advice; it is inevitable that in a world in which the economy is driven by money and profit, the most readily-accessible gardening advice will recommend the purchase of seeds, plants, growing medium, plant food, pots, polytunnels, and various gadgets, but while these products might lead to short-term success in producing some crops for the kitchen, they are not a step in the
direction of creating a self-sustaining subsistence garden.
Feeding the Soil
Vegetables tend to be hungry crops that take a lot out of the soil. In the past, subsistence farmers gave special attention to the vegetable garden (and perhaps other areas close to the house where they grew demanding crops, such as flax), by giving it a large proportion of any animal manure that they had available. If you are in the early stages of subsistence gardening, you are unlikely to be growing enough food to meet your own needs, and will be a long way off from being able to produce enough to feed domestic animals as well, and will not, therefore, have manure that you can use. In our garden we have tackled this problem by using vegetable mulches and compost. Our vegetable garden is probably larger than it needs to be – about six
hundred square metres; it is surrounded by four water meadows, each of which is about seven-hundred square metres in size, which we cut with a scythe once or twice a year. We then use the cut material as a mulch on the vegetable garden, or make it into compost, which we use on the vegetable garden. I am hoping that, in time, the vegetable garden will become more autonomous, but it has been remarkable to see how easily it has been able to digest so much organic material so far. It would have taken a lot of organisation – and skill – to get all the animal manure from the same area of land onto the vegetable garden, which gives an idea of how much land would be needed to fully feed a subsistence garden with manure – and it might be the case that vegetable compost might be more nourishing!
Small is Good
With this in mind, it does no harm to start with a small vegetable plot – just the size that you are able to supply with your own compost. In the same vein, it is much more sensible to start with a small plot that you can easily weed by hand, than to have a larger plot in which the weeds run rampant, and stunt the growth of your crops. Once you gain an understanding of your local weeds, the cultivated area can be increased, without too much difficulty.
Sowing Directly into the Soil
If one of your main aims is to develop your gardening skills, then you should do as much direct sowing as possible. When you put seeds in the ground, and they germinate, and grow into healthy young plants (without being ravaged by slugs), you know that you are getting somewhere in terms of soil fertility, and in your understanding of local conditions. It is obviously disappointing when you sow seeds in the ground, and for one reason or another, they do not grow, but if you largely restrict yourself to traditional varieties of vegetables that have been grown in your area for a long time, then a few plants can be left to flower each year, and the seed collected. When you have a large stock of seed from your own garden, it is not so distressing when a sowing fails, you simply re-sow, and try again. In our area this means growing parsnips, peas, beans, beetroot, leaf beet, carrots, lettuce, chicory, turnip, kale, leeks, and parsley from seed each year – which perhaps does not sound like the most exciting mixture of vegetables, but once you start getting fresh vegetables from your garden, without any external inputs, you are not likely to want anything else.
Gareth Lewis
Any recepiees for how to get along with the slugs? They are ruthless where I am at.
Lotta, Switzerland
Hi Lotta. Slugs are a very serious problem in our garden – worse some years than others, and, then, sometimes, very much worse.
I do not have a magic recipe.
People often come up with ideas – get a duck, put out saucers of beer, put out upside-down plant pots, use organically-approved slug pellets, go out at night and collect the slugs up, etc. – but I never get the impression that people are taking the problem with the seriousness that it deserves.
The best bit of advice that I have received is to delay sowing seeds (and planting plants) in the vegetable garden until as late as possible. When the nights are short, and the surface of the soil dry, and the slug predators most active, the young plants have their best chance of survival.
The long-term aim is to have a balanced ecosystem in the garden, within which slugs can do their work, but which also stops their numbers getting out of control.
It is an interesting subject, and I would like to dedicate a future issue of the newsletter to it. GARETH LEWIS
I rent a parcel of land that has been cut for hay for many years. The hay was sold, and no manure was applied to the land. The soil is now so exhausted that it is no longer worth cutting it for hay. Since last year, the parcel has been used for pasture, and, as a result, its fertility seems to be getting better, little by little (the animals deposit their manure on the land, and thus return most of what they take out).
Have you noticed the same process on the fields that you scythe to supply your vegetable garden?
E. Paniez, France
This is a subject that is deserving of a lot more attention. You can take a certain amount off the land each year, and it will still maintain, or increase, its fertility – but how much? If you take too much, you enter into a downward spiral of declining fertility (which is the situation that global agriculture now finds itself in).
We have two different areas that we cut with a scythe.
One is a series of water meadows that have never been farmed very intensively. We have cut these once or twice a year for over twenty years, and the yield is always about the same. We are now experimenting with channeling the water, as in the old days, to see if we can encourage more Spring growth.
The other area was previously a cereal field, and the ground was completely exhausted. We have cut most of this area each year, for the past twelve years. So far, the yield has increased each year. Different grasses are becoming established, and a more healthy range of other plants (not just weeds that survived from the cereal days). We have made banks and planted them with trees, which, I think, has helped. We see more insects in the fields, and birds are starting to make nests in the trees, so I think that things are going in the right direction.
Having said all that, however, we let very, very little produce leave our land – so the overall fertility of the garden is bound to go up. People ask if this is a feasible model for feeding everyone in the world, but our civilisation has shown itself to be incapable of managing any sort of agricultural system that does not exhaust the soil’s fertility, so a return to subsistence gardening is the only viable option that I am aware of! GARETH LEWIS
Thank you so much for your gifts. You are amazing. It’s so wonderful to find another purist in the World.
R. Murphy, United States