<< Back 9/25/02 A sustainable tradition Science backs gardening as most efficient form of food production By Ted Coyle As the crows gradually lose interest in my remaining corn stalks, it seems a bad time to discuss the overflowing harvests possible from home gardening. For many of us, gardening does not even pay. Once you add up the costs of the seeds, fertilizers, mulch, and all those cute little garden gnomes, Wal-mart vegetables look like a better deal. I know; the food tastes better coming fresh out of the garden, and if the garden is organic then that brings an added health benefit. But do you really think that Donald Trump gardens? From a purely economic perspective, it seems to make no sense. So it comes as some surprise to learn that home gardening is the most efficiently productive form of agriculture in the world. Robert Netting discusses this issue in his book Smallholders, Householders: Farm Families and the Ecology of Intensive, Sustainable Agriculture (Stanford University Press, 1987). He compares farms and gardens cross-culturally and finds that although U.S.-style mechanized farms produce a huge amount of food, it takes about seven times more energy to grow each calorie of food on a mechanized farm than in a garden. Even with the much larger energy inputs of large, mechanized farms, gardens still produce twice as much per square foot of land. Moreover, gardens can continue to produce such high yields decade after decade, which can be a problem for farmers who depend on expensive fertilizers, pesticides and hybrids to maintain their output. So we should be proud of gardeners for their thrift, hard work and careful attention to the land, particularly those gardeners who still tend the decades-old gardens that have fed generations here in the mountains. One such garden is tended by Fred and Leola Brown of Cullowhee. They have been gardening the same small plot of land next to their house for 53 years. Through that time they have consistently harvested enough to eat fresh food through the growing season, plus extra to fill two freezers and a canning shed (in addition to the food they give away to family, neighbors and, more recently, a college professor from Western Carolina University who has “adopted” them). So I had to ask, “How do you do it?” Their answers were disarmingly direct. In the past they maintained soil fertility through the use of manure, but their 30 year-old mule died several years ago so they now add 10-10-10 chemical fertilizer. They also put garden and kitchen scraps directly onto their garden without composting them and they lime the soil every year. They plant a winter cover-crop of rye and turn that under with a tiller in the early spring. They spray their tomatoes and apple trees, and also use some pesticide on their beans. “It won’t hurt you,” said Fred Brown of the pesticide, “and you don’t hardly harvest anything at all without it.” Ground hogs have lately become a problem in their garden, because, Brown joked, “no one eats them anymore.” Although Brown finds these animals annoying, he seemed resigned to living with the damage they cause. The Browns do not irrigate in the summer or use any row covers to avoid freezes in the spring or fall: “We depend on the Lord,” they said. They save some of their seed from year-to-year, but otherwise they just buy it from Roberson’s Hardware in Sylva. Having been born and raised in the mountains, both of the Browns are accustomed to hard work. Leola (Hopper) Brown grew up in the Little Canada section of Jackson County and remembered living in a railcar on tracks (now long gone) at the head of Caney Fork Creek when her father worked for Blackwood Lumber Company. Fred Brown worked at the paper mill in Sylva for 32 years. He also served in WWII and worked as a logger, while also helping out on his father’s farm. “I’ve worked all my life,” he said. For both Fred and Leola Brown gardening is a way to keep working like they always have, just as it is a pleasant way to pass the time and be productive. “It doesn’t take too long,” Leola. Brown said, “It’s really not that much.” For her, the canning is much more time-consuming and tiring than gardening, but she does not consider it really strenuous labor. “We work together,” she said. I also talked to the famous Jackson County balladeer Mary Jane Queen, who has successfully gardened the same plot for the past 62 years. Like the Browns, she once depended on manure from the family’s livestock to maintain the fertility of her garden, but since her husband Claude passed away she buys composted sheep manure and puts kitchen scraps directly on her garden. Her son Henry also lightly roto-tills grass clippings and any other garden leftovers right into the soil. “I even put my cornshucks right back on the garden,” she said. “I go out to the garden to shuck my corn. I put my ears of corn in a pan and bring them to the house and I leave the shucks in the garden.” Unlike the Browns, Queen uses no pesticide at all and was unhappy with the results of chemical fertilizer, which in her experience did not adequately break down in the soil. However, she does lime her garden every other year or so. She needs to, she said, “because when these big washing rains come it takes all of the lime and puts it in Tennessee.” Mary Jane Queen’s entire family helps with the garden when they get together. In fact, she used the same words as the Browns in describing her approach to garden chores: “We all work together.” Perhaps not surprisingly coming from a North Carolina Folk Heritage Award-winner, Queen speaks highly of doing things in the old-time way. For example, she believes in planting by the signs: “A lot of people don’t believe in that. But then, I do. Because I was raised that way and I still believe it and it all turned out good for me. That’s all I can say about it. It turned out good for me.” As with the Browns, her sweat and hard work come naturally as part of an enjoyable mountain lifestyle. “People live too fast this day and time. They need to take time to smell the roses. And that’s a pity, because they miss so much.” As with both the Browns and Mary Jane Queen, the key issue for Robert Netting is not whether or not gardeners use pesticides or fertilizers, but whether people find it worth their while to garden at all. As he puts it, “smallholders are anxious for practical knowledge on how to grow more crops within their existing farming system” (pg. 324). Like Fred Brown, many gardeners around the world successfully use chemical fertilizers and pesticides, but they do so not to make a quick profit. Rather, they use chemicals in order to sustain their long-lived garden plots. Others, like Mary Jane Queen, find no benefit in using these chemicals, but still harvest quantities of fresh produce from their old garden plots. Indeed, these old gardens are more similar than they are different. Both use family labor and depend on careful attention to detail. Both are fertilized with abundant organic matter. And both have gardeners who spend a great deal of time just enjoying what they are doing. As Netting (pg. 27) puts it, such old gardens “are economically efficient, environmentally sustainable, and socially integrative.” All the more reason to plant that cover crop and look forward to spring. (Philip E. “Ted” Coyle teaches anthropology at Western Carolina University. He may be reached to discuss old garden spots at 828.227.3900 or at pcoyle@wcu.edu.)