It’s that time of year again. Starting last Friday, my yearly throat cold came a-haunting as it normally does with the shift from summer to fall. Usually I make small adjustments to my diet to eliminate “troublemakers” like dairy, but this year I went more on the offensive. I made my medicine. And it sure was good. First I created a nutrient rich chicken broth with lots of garlic, I used that to make a quinoa soup with all sorts of little amendments from the garden, garnished with a selection of greens and topped with some violets, just because. Throughout the day I made a point to make various herbal teas from fresh herbs around the garden: mint, sage, thyme. Occasionally I would throw small amounts of greens, like kale into these teas. Added some honey, and took my medicine. Needless to say, it was a pleasure to do so.

I would love to say that I was cured immediately by the bounty of my garden and my amazing skills of food preparation. But sadly, the symptoms reached their usual level of discomfort and I did get sicker through the weekend. Sunday night I was kept awake by an intense cough.

But.

Now, it could just be coincidence, a one-off event….but….my recovery was much quicker. By late Monday, the cough had pretty much disappeared. In the past, my yearly affliction would usually develop into a lingering cough and sore throat sometimes lasting as long as two weeks.

So sure, it’s purely anecdotal. But this whole year I have been making and taking my medicine and creating a diverse nutrient foundation for my body to draw on in order to operate fluidly and abundantly. Just like creating nutrient-rich living soil is the foundation for garden health, creating a nutrient-rich diet is a foundation for health in the body. And it is so much fun! Processed food has been dropping steadily out of my diet. Not because I am being disciplined, but simply because I don’t find flavored cardboard to be all that appealing anymore. My body has learned (remembered, really) that there is much more to be easily gained from munching on some leaves, than can be scavenged from the wasteland of processed food. In fact, grocery stores are starting to feel like fields of desolation and desperation: a circus of brightly lit packages hell bent on selling salt, sugar, cheap fat, and denuded carbohydrates to the bedazzled shoppers.

Ok, so I wax dramatic. I used to have a curious attraction to grocery stores. There was something meditative about going through the aisles, in looking at the organized arrangements of brightly colored produce, the vast array of foodstuffs. But lately I’ve started to feel like a monkey in a cage when I walk into the glaring arena of food consumerism. I can only eat what’s offered, and most of it is worthless, or at best marginally useful to my body.

I still don’t have a solution to the meat dilemma, but at least I can rely on the bustle of the farmer’s market and the chaos of my own garden to provide me with the fresh produce I need. The interaction with people, the touch of living plants and the smell of rich, healthy soil: these are good healing medicines as well. It is delightful, joyful medicine that I wish more people could experience. Hopefully I can begin to share it more with others, and they can get a glimmer of what they might be missing out on.

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.

If you’re an organic gardener, of course you know the benefits of compost, whose praises have been sung far and wide. The smell of fresh, healthy, finished compost is one of my favorite smells in the world. That earthy aroma in a good compost is the smell of billions of microbes going about their microscopic business as they break down the organic matter and feast on it (and each other!). After reading “Teaming with Microbes” I now have have a vastly new appreciation for the mind blowing, complex ecosystems of microbes that exist in our gardens. They live and die by the trillions within the soil, at the roots of plants (rhizosphere) and on plant leaves (phyllosphere). A well aerated compost is shock full of these guys.

With an actively aerated compost tea, compost is soaked in water and aerated with a commercial aerator or other aerating device like an aquarium pump. The constant movement of the bubbles both provides air to the microbes in the compost and teases them out of the filter and/or soil medium so they can multiply within the tea solution. A good aerated compost tea is like putting compost on steroids (very briefly – and, you know, in a healthy way).  In AACT the bacterial population can explode from a mere 1 billion per tsp to 4 billion per tsp. Since it is aerated, these are still the same kinds of organisms that we encourage when we build an aerated compost pile. Of course, AACT is NOT compost because it doesn’t contain the copious amounts organic matter that compost does and so all these happy microbes living in your AACT need a place to go and eat before they start to eat themselves (yikes!). To feed them, let them go to town in your yard. The authors report that it is virtually impossible to over apply compost tea. Even if you watered your plants ONLY with a AACT, the microbes will adjust to the amount of available nutrients on the leaves and in the soil. It will not burn roots or leaves and they state “it will only help increase the diversity of microbial populations in your soil”. They recommend a twice a year application, but if you really wanted to go crazy you could apply AACT as often as you water.

The reported benefits of aerated compost teas are numerous as the folks at Soil Food Web Inc eagerly demonstrate in this article. Because the tea is so rich in microbes, it is a good for the restoration of soil after chemicals have been used on it. Even synthetic fertilizers can be devastating to the life in your soil, so frequent use of compost tea is great for transitioning to organic gardening. An added benefit of compost teas is that they can be applied to leaves. So while compost can only be used directly to improve the diversity of the rhizosphere (roots), compost tea can be used improve the diversity of the phyllosphere (leaves) as well as the rhizosphere. Aerated compost teas are also reported to help suppress disease, but unfortunately not a ton of study has been done on aerated compost teas. I recently read a crotchety article (pdf) about the “myth” of disease suppression. Something isn’t a myth until proven false, so I prefer “unproven hypothesis” since at this point in time, a thorough study has not been done particularly on the disease suppressing abilities of compost tea. Which means we have to experiment and judge for ourselves at this point. So lets get to it! At the very basic level we know that healthy plants repel insects, and healthy environments promote healthy plants and healthy environments are ones with lots of soil diversity…….ergo……AACT is a good tool in your gardening tool box. With each application of a compost tea is the chance that another lucky beneficial microbe will find their unique place in your garden ecosystem.

A few guidelines for brewing and applying teas:

• For foliar application, apply to both sides of the leaves if possible
• Apply it in the morning or evening as the heat and wind of the day will reduce the microbe’s chance to get a foothold
• Use aerated compost tea immediately after brewing as the populations will begin to die off once aeration stops.
• Brew your tea at room temperature, colder temperatures inhibit growth, hot temperatures fry microbes.
• A good aerated tea should be coffee brown and have a rich earthy smell.
• The height of microbial growth is between 24 and 36 hours.

A simple starting recipe for a five gallon batch is non-chlorinated water, 2 cups compost, 2 tablespoons of molasses, fruit juice, cane syrup or maple syrup (to get the party started). To de-chlorinate water, let your aerator run in the water for about 2 hours before adding tea ingredients. If you have a recipe that you would like to share or have had obvious success with compost tea, please comment below. I am just beginning and would love to know more. When posting a recipe, if you could include a little detail on why you use that particular recipe that would be awesome.

Here is my simple setup: all told it cost me maybe $30 and produces more than enough tea for my 1/4 acre yard. It took me, mmmm, 15 minutes to assemble and get my first brew bubbling.
1 Aquarium pump (Tetra Whisper for 40 gallon aquarium – probably overkill, but hey I want bubbles!)
3 feet of clear 1/4″ tubing
2 feet of 1/4″ soaker hose (for drip systems)
1 3 prong 1/4″ tee for drip systems, used to put the soaker hose in a hoop
1 5 gallon bucket
1 pair of Size Q pantyhose

The supplies. 5 gallon bucket, aquarium pump, 3 feet of clear 1/4" tubing, a circle of 1/4" drip soaker hose, and Size Q pantyhose (not pictured here)

The supplies. 5 gallon bucket, aquarium pump, 3 feet of clear 1/4" tubing, a circle of 1/4" drip soaker hose, and Size Q pantyhose (not pictured here)

The soaker hose ring inside the bucket. Anchored by a brick. Duct tape would work just as well.

The soaker hose ring inside the bucket. Anchored by a brick. Duct tape would work just as well.

de-chlorinating the water, run for a couple hours to prep the water.

de-chlorinating the water, run for a couple hours to prep the water.

All dressed up and nowhere to go! Finished compost is put in the legs of the pantyhose(Size Q).

All dressed up and nowhere to go! Finished compost is put in the legs of the pantyhose(Size Q).

24 hours later, finished tea. 30 seconds ago, the foam was at the rim (a good sign!)

24 hours later, finished tea. 30 seconds ago, the foam was at the rim (a good sign!)

The tea pictured above is my first mix, called Kablooey! tea. I used fresh stinging nettle, worm castings, finished compost and orange juice.

The method above is a filtered application for use as a foliar spray and topical soil drench. There are other methods that include a lot of organic matter and could be a beneficial soil additive. For some more ideas, check this article out.

Here is an interesting post of someone using a couple different compost tea methods to try and get weakened plants to buck up.

I’d like to introduce you to my favorite plant in the garden at the moment. It is Bronze Arrow lettuce grown from seed that I received in a seed swap at the 2008 Bioneers conference. A California heirloom variety, it is my first step towards bringing in heritage varieties into my garden. While at the Bioneers conference, I also had the pleasure of listening to a local foodshed panel with Gary Nabhan, Michael Dimock and Jo Ann Baumgartner . It was there that I was introduced to the concept of a foodshed and the need to strengthen local foodsheds as a way to work towards more sustainable communities.

That was just a few months ago and the issues like food security and diversity were inspiring but didn’t feel extremely urgent. Yet as drought continues to hammer us, the federal water supply is planned to be cut off to California farms in March and the fragility of our food system starts to show through. Suddenly local resilience has an obvious and pressing appeal. Especially when staring at the fact that California produces over half of the nations vegetables, fruits, and nuts. If our drought persists, the prices for produce will creep up, further aggravate the current economic quagmire and push people deeper into the cheaper, less healthy processed foods that already dominate our diet.

It doesn’t have to be that way though, our gardens and community spaces provide so many answers as we gaze down the road at the continued drought and further in the distance (probably much closer than we would like) at declining soil, increased competition for oil, an uncertain climate and a finite global water supply. As a way to spread out safety nets and mitigate these tough challenges, we have to grow more food locally. A huge part of that involves growing varieties local or adapted to our area. Local heritage varieties have stood the test of time and thrive in the local growing conditions while resisting local diseases and pests. They bring great resilience to our food supply. I personally can’t wait to get the rest of my seed swap goodies into the ground so that I can do my part to carry on the tradition, and keep our seed supply flowing.

For those interested, here are a few great ways to find local and national heritage varieties:

Local seed swaps are an excellent place to start, as the seeds that are being exchanged have stood the test of your bioregion, and were deemed worthy of exchange by the person who brought them and you may be able to glean growing tips as well. If you can, be sure to bring your own seed successes to share when you go and keep the cross pollination going!

Check out the Ark of Taste! The wonderful people at Slow Food USA have drawn up a list of foods that are US heritage foods with superb flavor. There is a list of foods by region so see what pops up for your state.

For those of you in California, be sure to check out this publication of California RAFT foods (pdf) to discover California foods that are at risk. Since they are “at risk”, these may be difficult to find. If you are growing ANY of the plants on this list, please, please, please let me know!!! (Email me: chris at porchsideecology dot com). I am trying to find people who have these varieties. For more information on Renewing America’s Food Traditions (RAFT) you can check out their website.

If you are looking for Monsanto-free, organic, non-GMO, heirloom seeds: a good resource is Freedom Seeds . The Dervaes down in SoCal have put a lot of hard work to compile and package a catalog of seeds that promote seed sovereignty.The website is still in the works, but they are currently taking seed orders. I’ve been a big fan of the Dervaes for a while now and when I found out about their seed project, I ordered a few packets of seeds to support the cause and try out some new things. Their service was fast and my seeds are sprouting away.