So I pretty much just abandoned my garden for two weeks to fend for itself as I went off to the Permaculture Design Course and certification at OAEC. The course opening was unexpected, forcing me to throw some immature tomato and basil starts into the ground without much hope of their survival. The weather had been heating up and I returned to find much of what I expected, dried and cracking ground in some places (those without mulch or plant cover–go figure!), and most of the starts had indeed died or were eaten. However, out of about ten starts two tomatos remained. I’m pretty positive that those two will go on to do wonderful things because they have proved themselves to be tough characters: resistant to pests and able to handle an early planting. They are great candidates for seed saving.

One of the nice surprises was to find my garden flourishing in most other aspects. I am quite impressed by this wonderful show from my rapini (broccoli raab) plant. It has been going strong like this now for over a month. I’m sure if I keep cutting it back it will continue to flower well into early summer. The funny thing about the rapini is that it is way too bitter for my taste, but I kept it around anyways because I didn’t have anything planned for the area it is in and I enjoyed the first small blooms that it put out. Now I’m quite glad that I chose to let aesthetic win out over functional because it is a blast of color in a garden that is looking kind of drab right now. It requires no care and is providing function beyond the food that I would have liked to enjoy: pollinators have been visiting it, it is providing food for the soil food web and if I wanted to, I could also take advantage of its shade and cover to protect sensitive starts.

While I will still probably do a fair amount of coddling for certain plants, I have been leaning more towards the approach that I see patterned in the natural world. May the best plant win. While this might mean the loss of a lot of plants up front, ultimately I will have a garden that requires significantly less work yet yields roughly the same amount of food. This sounds so obvious when typing it, yet if you read pretty much any how-to-grow guide for vegetables, the coddle effect is in full force: fertilize, weed, pest manage, blah blah blah. This is where burnt-out gardeners and farmers are created, as they seek to serve plants that really probably shouldn’t be alive (did I just say that?). For me, I hope it becomes more of a dialogue as I seek to guide my garden towards being able to handle the semi-arid realities of my region. There will always be a few choice plants that I coddle because I love, but when droughts and water rations threaten, how nice it would be to sit back with the assurance that I will probably still have food because I have plants that survive through a broad range of conditions.

A lot changed for me in 2008. It started innocently enough with the extension of my small herb bed by adding some sage, basil, tarragon and chamomile. I also started a few tomatoes and a couple zucchini plants. My aims were modest and fit in well with my full time school and part time work schedule (working from home is awesome). But then, along came Gaia’s Garden , which I think was given to me around my birthday at the end of March. I devoured it, reading it from cover to cover in less than a week. That week was the beginning of what may well be The Great Transformation of 2008 in the life of Chris Prudhomme. I cannot say enough about Gaia’s Garden. It is an easy read for the hobbyist gardener, but at the same time packed with pertinent, practical and innovative information. It changed the way I saw my garden, changed my place in the garden and the place that my garden had in my world. Within the ecological and permaculture design paradigms I began to see that my garden—and really any space where things can grow—could be a way to start reshape (or avoid entirely) the industrial/capital system that seems at this point in time to be doing more harm than good for almost everyone except a small minority of the world’s population. I knew then that things weren’t quite going to be the same anymore, both in my garden and in my life.

So bit by bit through the year my appetite for all things ecological and horticultural grew and my garden began to change. With each thing I read, the landscape in our backyard underwent another transformation. A compost bin was built and the large patch of bermuda grass (that tries to pass as a lawn) slowly shrunk as the garden began to encroach. I started scavenging and experimenting. In early summer, the small trees that were cut down next door went into a new hugelkultur bed next to the patio. In early fall a double-dug biointensive bed ousted a 100 square foot patch of the ‘lawn’ (ala John Jeavons’ “How to Grow More Vegetables”). Another swath of bermuda grass succumbed to the spading fork and was mulched by the full compost bin as I prepared to harvest the massive amount of leaves about to fall from the pistache trees around our duplex.

Once Upon a Lawn - This was all bermuda grass, at this time the bed had experienced the exuberance of our dog Sam. Amazing the damage such a small rascal can wreak

Now, a month into the new year things look very different compared to January ’08. The lawn has shrunk by 30%, there is now a fenced garden patch with several green manure cover crops growing happily, garlics and onions are knifing up at various places in the yard, and wildflower seedlings are poking their heads out of the soil.

My career focus has shifted as well. I am convinced that our world is in for some drastic shifts and changes within the next decade; the possibilities range from moderate global disruptions to outright collapse of many centralized/globalized infrastructures, severe hardship, and widespread disorder. I am convinced that food production lies at the center of it, so my energies are starting to focus in that direction. I am volunteering at Full Circle Farm and am a farming intern with Veggielution (a fledgling urban farming project). I would love to put my SJSU Computer Science studies to work in some dedicated way, but I am still trying to figure out where that fits in the whole equation. Which is all to say that 2009 is shaping up to be full of surprises.

Accomplishments and good experiences:

A flourishing, sheet mulched, hugelkultur bed
Tomatoes, Basils and Zucchini’s (oh my!)
Smaller lawn, bigger garden
A multi-functional raspberry/strawberry bed (eagerly awaiting February shipment)
Let Nature do the talkin’
TONs of reading (the book list is quite long thanks to Emily’s library sleuthing)
Water Wizard’s (greywater and water harvesting) workshop with Art Ludwig, Brock Dolman and the folks from the Regenerative Design Institute
Bioneers Conference (wow!) Highlights: Paul Stamets, Seed Exchange, Alexandra Cousteau, Ray Anderson, Janine Benyus and so many others

Failures and frustrations:

Almost anything I tried to do with bamboo (dog fence, path liner, trellis) failed miserably
Repeated invasions of our two rascal dogs and subsequent unsuccessful attempts at keeping them out of the garden they love and eagerly destroy with hearty romps and digging
Unhappy native plants (as I type the wildflower seedlings are probably being devoured – sigh)
Stupid carrots (I think I planted them at a bad time and too deeply)
Leggy seedlings in general (I need a cold frame or tiny greenhouse)
Haphazard design and layout (not always the best idea to “design as you go”)
Compost that refuses to heat up (I think I need a bigger pile and more green material)
What happened to the tarragon?!