The Quarter-Acre Farm Page 11

  If that wasn’t bad enough, bindweed doesn’t need to rely on seeds to proliferate. In one laboratory test plot, single bindweed, six months after germination, produced 197 vertical roots for a total count of 788 feet of roots. Add to that 34 horizontal roots on which there were 144 new shoot buds, each of which is capable of becoming a new plant. Weeds are vigorous. They are crafty, doing things like groutweed does, entangling its roots among those of desirable plants. They are pushy, like Broom, which grows so dense it doesn’t allow any other plants to grow with it. They, like myrtle spurge, may be able to project their seeds many feet from the parent plant; or may, like purple loosestrife, produce three million seeds per plant. Weeds are very successful, and they were certainly winning in my garden.

  As I looked around my weed-riven yard, I contemplated how easy it would be to take a quick trip to the hardware store, purchase a gallon of some herbicide labeled with a cheerful picture of a weed-free planet, and eliminate the throttle of noxious plants in my garden, once and for all. I was sorely, sorely tempted. But to steel myself, I took down a book on my shelf that the kids gave me for Christmas one year.

  It is a textbook on weed control written in 1942 by three men at the nascent California Experimental Station here in Davis. It has a wealth of intriguing information within the yellowing pages. Reading it, I learned it takes 368 pounds of water to create one pound of dry corn matter, while it takes 948 pounds of water to create a dry pound of ragweed. (This fact may give you a hint about why your vegetable plants languish in a weedy bed.) Yet the truly sobering information concerns the chemical regulation of weeds.

  The photographs in the book look familiar: the flat dry fields, creek edges, distant hills—there is a picture of a fenced field with an area cleared for planting. The old photograph was taken a few years before our house was built, and it is not beyond conjecture that the photograph is of the land on which our house would eventually be built.

  Underneath the black and white photograph, it says the aridlooking landscape is a sterilization plot seven years after treatment with arsenic trioxide. The vegetation was only just starting to creep back onto the sterilized earth. This image was meant as a celebration of the chemical power deployed on it; a celebration that did not last.

  Today I wonder how deeply the arsenic percolated and if it rises with the tunneling of ants and the reach of deep roots. Likely not, or so I hope. But I know the desire to believe in the easy chemical fix continues. Obviously I shared it myself.

  I decided to leave the herbicides at the store, though every lazy bone in my body moaned at the thought of the hours of weeding ahead of me. There had to be a better way.

  I once had high hopes that the geese would be of some use. Goosteau is of the goose breed called Chinese weeder, and we do call Jeannette the constant gardener due to her penchant for trimming plants. However, she resembles less an English lady shaping privet than Morticia Adams at work with lopping shears. I had a luxuriant four-and-a-half-foot-tall artichoke plant that Jeannette decided to prune. At day’s end, I found her standing next to a naked stalk surrounded by a pile of clipped leaves. It was not an isolated incident. Jeannette will snip snip snip at anything her snake-like neck can hoist her serrated bill up to. She is not so much a weeder as a menace in the garden.

  As for Goosteau, I read that you prime the Chinese weeder goslings to actually weed by feeding them only the weeds you want them to pull from your garden. They supposedly will grow up with a taste for burdock or spurge or bindweed. Did it work? If you had a field full of weeds and turned geese into it, I’m sure they would do a pretty good job in getting rid of the stuff. But if you have a yard full of tender peas, lettuce, and bindweed, and a goose gets loose in it, the peas and lettuce will assuredly not survive.

  Additionally, whatever doesn’t get eaten will likely be mashed by the geese’s big feet. A study on vertebrate herbivores as biological control found that trampling by geese led to a 47 percent spruce seedling mortality. The irony was that the researchers chose spruce seedling as a prototype crop that would be unpalatable to geese. I’ll bet Jeannette would have pruned the other 53 percent anyway.

  With chemicals, geese, and my Tom Sawyeresque get-theneighbors-to-do-it-for-me method all nixed as a reliable method of weed control, and Sam selfishly behaving himself so that I could not punish him with chores, I was left with hand weeding all by myself. I still have not found another solution. I’m sorry. Boy, am I sorry.

  The only thing to do if you hate weeds and can’t figure out a good way to kill them is to make sure they don’t grow in the first place. That sounds like the advice given on how to get rich: pick wealthy parents. But there is a way, and the way is called mulch. Mulch has proven to be one of the most effective ways to control weeds.

  Just the word mulch makes Louis wince. We so often have a pile of chipped tree trimmings from arborists working in the neighborhood that Louis is almost as famous in his University department for barrowing prodigious amounts of it into the backyard as he is for writing his award-winning books. “Moving any mulch today, professor?” someone will ask jovially, and Louis will give me the look.

  Our neighbor Millicent walked across the street one day, years after we had moved in, and asked to look in our backyard. I said of course and took her back to see the little fruit trees we had planted there. She looked around the yard with an expression of profound disappointment and said, “I’ve watched you take so many chips into the backyard, I thought it would be ten feet deep with it.”

  At any given time in our yard there is between four and eighteen inches of mulch on the ground, in and around our gardening beds, and under the fruit trees. Before you know it, eighteen inches of mulch breaks down into four inches then into two, and then it’s time to add more if you wish the mulch to be an efficient weed barrier.

  Why? Most seeds need light to germinate, and apparently light can filter through dirt and mulch. It usually takes about four inches or more of mulch to keep seeds from germinating. (This is one of the reasons you don’t want to mulch beds with newly planted seeds you want to grow. Save mulching until your plants are tall enough to rise well above the surface of the soil.)

  Those are just the seeds, however. Four inches of mulch isn’t going to keep a strand of Bermuda grass down. In areas with lots of unwanted weedy growth, I put down cardboard first, then top it with mulch. Lots of it. I’m going for eighteen inches of depth at that point and as a result, I find myself riding my bike around the neighborhood listening for the roar of chainsaws and stump grinders that signal a possible mulch haul.

  I have to admit, even with eighteen inches of mulch on my pathways, I still get the dreaded bindweed. However, when bindweed surfaces in mulch, it is so much easier to yank up. Yes, some of it comes back because of the plant’s superpower of regrowth from a tiny section of root, but I keep putting mulch over the top of it, keep yanking it, and I have made great headway in slowing the noxious plant’s colonial fervor.

  Furthermore, the weeds that are not as pernicious as bindweed are easily yanked from mulch, and then much more easily smothered by repeated application of another layer of mulch. If most weeds are absent from your garden, it will make the battle waged on the ones that do remain a little easier to bear.

  Mulching isn’t perfect . . . Louis would be the first to tell anyone that all that shoveling, barrowing, and raking is hard on a guy’s back. And I will warn a prospective mulcher that mulch is a hiding place for voracious sowbugs, snails, and slugs. That said, there are a lot more reasons to mulch than just weed control, which will make muscle aches and snail vigilance seem a small price to pay for the following benefits:

  Mulch reduces moisture loss in soils up to twenty-five percent. (Just the amount of time saved in watering will pay for the time spent spreading mulch!)

  Mulch keeps the soil warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer, allowing plants to put more energy into fruiting than into driving their roots into deeper cooler areas.

  With
the tempering effects of mulch, your vegetables will produce longer. Mulching also impedes some loss of nitrogen because it keeps the direct sun off the soil’s surface. (Making up for some of the nitrogen loss that mulch breakdown can cause.)

  Mulch improves the soil, encouraging microorganisms and earthworms to live in your garden’s dirt. The minerals and organic matter that are gradually released from decaying mulch replace the nutrients used by growing plants.

  Mulch improves water retention by breaking down clay soil and improving the holding capacity of sandy soil. It can help keep water and mud from being splashed on leaf surfaces, which can cause soilborne diseases.

  All in all, mulching is such a good idea, and even Louis has come around to admitting its strengths. He has even, on a sunny day while enjoying a long cold drink (instead of having to weed or to water), offered as a Quarter-Acre Farm credo, “Mulch the planet!”

  Indeed.

  Recipe

  Purslane Salad

  More often than not, purslane is considered a weed. As such, it is often overlooked as both a culinary delight and a nutritional powerhouse (rich in fiber, vitamins, minerals, and more omega-3 fatty acids than many fish oils). Purslane has a sprightly taste, grows like crazy in the hottest part of the year, and is a lovely bright-green color—all of which make it a perfect salad base, especially when tossed with equal amounts tomato.

  Ingredients: • 2 cups de-stemmed purslane

  • 2 cups deseeded and diced tomatoes

  • 1 cup sorrel

  • ½ red onion

  • extra-virgin olive oil

  • 2 TB lemon juice

  • 1 cup crumbled feta

  • salt and pepper to taste

  The combination of the sweet-tasting tomatoes and the peppery purslane can only be made better by adding lemony sorrel that is de-stemmed and cut into thin strips, which is also growing great guns at the same time as the purslane and tomatoes. (It doesn’t take much brainpower to figure this salad out. Mother Nature is doing it for us.) The only thing missing now is perhaps a spicy crunch—which is perfectly fulfilled by adding half an onion cut into thin rings. Toss it with a drizzle of really good extra-virgin olive oil, fresh-squeezed lemon juice, and crumbled feta, then sprinkle with salt and pepper to taste, and serve.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  WHEN GOOD BUGS GO BAD

  “Big fleas have little fleas

  Upon their back to bite ’em;

  Little fleas have smaller fleas,

  And so on, ad infinitum.”

  —ANONYMOUS

  Once upon a time (late 1930s), there was a Swiss scientist named Paul Muller, the son of a railway man and a future Nobel Prize winner, who discovered the insecticidal properties of a substance known as DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane). This discovery, along with that of the insecticidal properties of organophosphates by German and Allied scientists who were actually trying to create new and improved nerve gasses, birthed the pesticide era.

  No matter that DDT had a disastrous effect on not only insects but also fish and (most famously) birds of prey due to the bioamplification of the substance, DDT supporters believed so strongly in its low toxicity to humans that they publicly ate the powder and showed no harmful effects. The nerve poisons, on the other hand, were not only effective insect killers, but they were also virtually as nasty to humans as originally intended. In spite of this, these chemicals were thought to herald a golden era free from the quadrillion insects that plagued humans by spreading disease, consuming crops, and otherwise irritating us on picnics.

  Pesticides did make inroads along those lines, saving millions of lives from the ravages of mosquito-borne malaria, for one. Summer parties were protected from creepy crawlies with applications of Knox-Out, and fruit maintained unblemished skin after being dusted with Sevin to deter pests (which wasn’t so good for the orchard workers either, to put it mildly).

  But we do worry, if over the wrong things. The more we fought back bugs, the less tolerance we had for them—an intolerance that is nurtured today by chemical and extermination companies, to amazing effect. Pesticide use has increased fifty-fold since 1950, and it is likely to continue. Look at Pestworld.com, the National Pest Management Association website, where you will find fun facts for kids such as that a cockroach can run 30 mph, 14,000 people a year are bitten by rats, termites eat nonstop 24/7, and fleas have killed more people than all world wars combined. Who wouldn’t be afraid of such a speedy, hungry, vicious, deadly horde?

  It seems a pretty transparent bid for extermination contracts, but I am the last person to pretend I don’t understand the panic that insects can cause in people.

  When I was four years old, I slept more often on the carpet outside my parents’ bedroom than in my own bed, beset with nightmares about bugs in my room. At five I fell down the stairs because I panicked over a beetle on my skirt, and in first grade I froze in terror when a wasp landed on my cheek and crawled up my nose. Luckily, the wasp backed out (literally), and I was famous at Sundance Elementary—but not in a good way.

  And so it went until I was a teenager picking blackberries at the ranch when what I had taken for the tickle of branches on my leg was actually a spider the size of a cantaloupe clinging to my bare thigh. It was then that I squandered the remainder of my lifetime allotment of insect terror in one terrific scream.

  Historically, that scream for the pesticide era was Rachel Carson and her 1962 book, Silent Spring (ha ha, how ironic!), in which she revealed that pesticides were causing environmental catastrophe. Monsanto reacted by publishing a response to Carson’s book that described a world laid to waste by insects, famine, and disease because pesticides had been banned. DDT could be purchased at the local hardware store until 1972, and we are now more likely to call the exterminator at the summer hum of insects than we are to consider it music.

  When our kids were young, I made up for my early distaste for the bug world with a vengeance—carefully ferrying beetles that blundered into the house back to the yard, scanning firewood for earwigs before throwing it into the fire. When the kids went through their bug-collecting stage, I helped them save drowned insects in pool filters rather than kill live ones, explaining that all insects had their place in the world. Even wasps, much like the one that crawled up Mama’s nose, were the sole pollinators of one of our favorite foods—figs.

  Further, I am now very spider-friendly. (You would guess this if you came to the house and looked into the cobwebby corners.) Louis, Sam, Jesse, and I watched one wolf spider for months, in the window, at the ceiling, between bookshelf and wall, capturing gnats and even laying an egg case that looked as though it had been upholstered in a Q-tip. When the eggs hatched we were shocked to find thousands of spiders the size of punctuation points all over the white walls. Within half an hour, however, they had all, eerily, disappeared. But when I lifted the edge of a painting from the wall, dozens peeked out from underneath. The day after that they were not even to be seen in corners. I suspect cannibalism.

  However, I am not fully enlightened. I recognize there are reasons that DDT was such a hit. Mosquitoes and the threat of West Nile disease worry me, cockroaches make me shudder, and when the ants try to move inside when the rains come each year, I lose all sympathy. When I began competing with insects for food crops in my own garden, it added another layer of complexity to my feelings toward bugs.

  Around the world, insects are responsible for eating 10 percent of our food crops each year (though I would like to see a statistic on how much of our fruits and vegetables are wasted, rotting in the crisper section of our refrigerators or shriveling on the counter, before I get too bent out of shape about that). Insects, in any case, were certainly taking their share of my personal crop at the Quarter-Acre farm.

  I didn’t want to use pesticides in the garden. I liked eating things off the vine too much for that, and I envisioned myself in Sleeping Beauty mode tra-la-la-ing a duet with bluebirds and butterflies as I danced lightly through natu
re. I would foreswear any but organic means to convince the insects to leave my yard in peace. If I couldn’t use Sevin or Raid, however, I wasn’t sure what those means would be.

  It was second nature for our parents, even grandparents, to put 100 percent trust in pesticides and to reach for the Killmaster when problems with bugs arose. (Actually, chlorpyrifos was the most widely used household pesticide in America until the EPA required the Dow Chemical Corporation to severely limit its use on crops and prohibited its use where children could be exposed. Dow, however, yet markets the stuff for home use in developing countries.) The knowledge of years past when organic practice didn’t even know it was organic practice was not taught to me. I would have to wing it.

  The first thing I did was go to the hardware store and buy a strip of yellow plastic covered with really sticky stuff that said it was environmentally friendly and would kill whitefly, fungus gnats, winged aphids, cucumber beetles, fruit flies, leafminers, and leaf hoppers. Heck, I didn’t even know what some of those things were, but I could guess I didn’t want them in my garden, and if I could send them off in an environmentally friendly way, I would jump at the chance.

  I hung a couple of strips in the garden. A few days later I checked them. The trap did indeed capture a slew of whiteflies and a raft of gnats. However, it also caught two ladybird beetles. Not only did I feel bad about the ladybirds (it was bad enough that their houses were continually on fire while their children were home), but just one ladybird beetle will eat a hundred aphids a day, maybe five thousand in the course of its lifetime, and a ladybug larva will eat one hundred aphids an hour. In one fell sticky swoop I had put myself deeply in the hole on the pest-accounting sheet.