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Only once people realized, some 4,000 years ago, that they could harvest seeds and plant them, did civilization begin. Hunter-gatherers became agriculturalists, camps became cities, and social, military and economic strata arose. Early farmers were selecting for plants and animals that were bigger, tastier, stronger and faster growing. In the Middle East wheat proved to be the grain of choice. Halfway across the world in ancient Mexico corn began development. And in the Far East rice cultivation arose. Crops were selected for specific qualities suited to a specific area. These crops-known to some as “landraces”-fostered a genetic diversity.
With the advent of modern agriculture, this diversity shrank to the vanishing point. The Green Revolution of the 1950’s stressed, among other dubious ideas, genetic conformity and monocultural farming practices.
This in turn meant that many of the staples of our existence-wheat, corn, rice potatoes, bananas-had very little genetic depth and a very high chance of failure should a pest or disease get a foothold.
At the same time Robert Rodale was starting a revolution of his own in Pennsylvania. He was the father of modern organic gardening, which stressed building the soil and discarding the many poisonous chemicals associated with modern farming.
His methods stressed sustainability and the incorporation of natural methods of fighting off pests and diseases.
Since the first publishing of his book in 1947, organic gardening has become gospel among health-conscious gardeners, for good and occasionally ill.
Just as a point of understanding, the term “organic” in chemistry refers only to the presence of a carbon atom in a molecule. Hence it confers no real meaning in terms of gardening. Some very bad chemicals can have carbon atoms in them, yet technically they’re still organic.
Like the world “natural”, “organic” has largely been a term of art until the last decade when strict guidelines were laid down-and not without debate-on which gardening practices were embraced and which were proscribed.
Out went the vast arsenal of agricultural chemicals. In their place was a combination of minimally poisonous insecticides, herbicides and fungicides, crop rotation, cover cropping and green manures, use of natural predators and manual removal of insect pests.
Rather than being an “either-or” proposition-organic or not-gardeners should understand that they have a spectrum of options available to them, some better than others in terms of the health of the planet. Perhaps the best injunction is “First, do no harm, but for God’s sake be effective.”
This approach to gardening could have saved us from much of the hippie silliness like companion planting, the thought that plants like music and the sound of the human voice, that they have auras, that planting is affected by different phases of the moon, that burying rams’ horns can increase production, ad infinitum, ad nauseum.
Some of the more recent thinking on how we garden does make sense. On the horizon are foods that are regionally and seasonally appropriate, not flown in out of season from another continent. Another is a turning away from processed foods, which make a lot of money for their manufacturers but result in illness and obesity. Michael Pollan’s advice is simple-don’t eat anything that your grandmother wouldn’t recognize.
With economic troubles all around us, it may be incumbent upon more and more of us to grow some of our food. During the Great Depression, 80% of the American population was rural, with access to food and the ability to grow more. Today at least 80% of the population is urban and suburban, the vast majority of whom have never grown their own food.
Your grandmother would know just what to do: she’d grow vegetables with long shelf lives, such as onions, potatoes, cabbage, carrots, winter squash. She would know to store foods, can foods, pickle and smoke foods. She would also know to raise and slaughter animals and tend to fruit and nut trees. Once again, our salvation may lie in understanding how little we currently know.
To read all of Todd’s Avant Gardening posts, see the Avant Gardening Series category.
