Week 3 – Co-Curricular Community Gardens Stewardship

Collaborative Community Garden

“In my tribe in old times, some men helped their wives in their gardens. Others didn’t. Those who did not help their wives talked against those who did, saying, ‘That man’s wife makes him a servant.’

And the others retorted, ‘Look, that man puts all the hard work on his wife!’ Men were not alike: some did not like to work in the garden at all, and cared for nothing but to go around visiting or to be off on a hunt.

My father, Small Ankle, liked to garden and often helped his wives. He told me that that was the best way to do. ‘Whatever you do,’ he said, ‘help your wife in all things!’ He taught me to clean the garden, to help gather the corn to hoe, and to rake.

My father said that that man lived best and had plenty to eat who helped his wife; he who did not help his wife was likely to have scanty stores of food.”–WOLF CHIEF (told in 1910).

Gilbert L. Wilson: Buffalo Bird Woman’s Garden, Page 115

“Real men carry a small fork.”

Dr. Steve Scheurell

After preparing our first beds, we are excited to start planting this week. Caleb arrived with pre-soaked legume seeds and explained that soaking seeds will swell and soften them, as well as prepare them by instigating the first roots. Big, wrinkled, and hard-coated seeds make excellent candidates for soaking; smaller seeds like carrot and lettuce are hard to handle after soaking and don’t need it anyway. Caleb recommend soaking seeds for 8-12 hours and no more than 24 hours. Too much soaking can cause decomposition, so it is important to plant the seeds as soon as possible.

Before planting, we inoculated our peas with Guard-N, an OMRI listed additive that contains several strains of rhizobia, symbiotic nitrogen-fixing bacteria which help legumes capture more nitrogen.

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On either side of the peas we have planted spinach and turnips, and around the scarlet runner beans we’ve broadcast sown white clover as a cover crop. White clover is a top choice for “living mulch” systems planted between rows of vegetables, fruit bushes or trees. They are persistent, widely adapted perennial nitrogen producers with tough stems and a dense shallow root structures that protect soil from erosion and suppress weeds.

Caleb produced a compost tea from Rohini Reddy’s book, Cho’s Global Natural Farming, called fermented plant juice, or FPJ. FPJ is a fermented extract of a plant’s sap and chlorophyll. It is a rich, enzyme-filled solution full of microorganisms such as lactic acid, bacteria, and yeast that invigorates plants. I’m excited to see how it looks next week when we siphon-off the liquid from our jar and dilute it for fertilizer.

We will have water next week! Something that I’m learning from experience, both in the POF program and the community garden, is that efficiency is key to creating functional growing spaces for plants. Having a means to water our seedlings without having to carry it from a distance will create the opportunity to spend our time on other things and ensure everything stays hydrated as it warms-up.

Do’patsa Makihi’kě: Four-Vegetables-Mixed

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This week Ashley and I focused on observing our space and thinking about possible planting patterns for our Four Sisters garden. We measured our plot to be 10′ x 28′ and used the week to study traditional planting patterns which we intend to adapt for our garden. Our plot is in the extreme Northwest corner of the community garden space, right next to the greenhouse, which is a wonderful arrangement: we won’t have to worry about our sunflowers, planted along the northern edge of the plot, shading anyone’s vegetables and their shade might help keep the greenhouse a bit cooler in the summer heat.

Wampanoag Circular Garden

The first shape I explored was the Wampanoag circular garden. Planted without plowing or tilling, this traditional Wampanoag garden includes corn, beans, squash, and sunflowers. The corn and beans are planted in mounds, with squash planted between the mounds. The sunflowers are planted along the north edge of the garden, so that they do not throw shade on the other crops.

It was these Wampanoag gardens that enabled the early settlers of Jamestown to survive and thrive in the New World. Squanto was a Wampanoag who taught the colonizers to plant maize in little hills and fertilize each mound with an alewife, a species of fish. With this efficient and intensive gardening style, each family could sustain their needs on about one acre of land. Many of the tribes of the Northeast, including the Iroquois, used the Wampanoag garden design.

Hidatsa Garden

In the northern plains, the Hidatsa, Mandan, and Arikara peoples gardened along the floodplain of the Missouri River in what is now called North Dakota. Most of the tribes in this region used the Hidatsa garden design. Hidatsa gardens are designed to have alternating, staggered rows of corn and beans, with sunflowers growing along the north edge of the garden. Squash is planted after every fourth row of corn and beans and around the east, south, and west edges of the garden.

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Zuni Waffle Garden

Wampanoag and Hidatsa garden designs use raised mounds to keep the root systems from being waterlogged. In contrast, the focus of the Zuni waffle garden is water conservation. The waffles are about 12 feet by 12 feet. Each individual square is indented and surrounded by a high rim. In each square, a single crop or combinations of crops may be planted. This garden design will work anywhere in the country where dry summer conditions are experienced.

Traditionally, the crops are planted intensively with five to eight corn seeds in each hole to create clumps of corn similar to those in the Hidatsa garden. Corn seeds are planted 4-8 inches deep in light sandy soils and about 4 inches deep or less in heavier clay soil. Beans and squash have the same planting depths and spacing requirements as corn. The same number of beans (4-8 seeds) are planted around each clump of corn, one seed per hole. Only one or two squash plantings (4-8 seeds in each hole) are added to each waffle. As with the other two designs, sunflowers may also be planted along the edges of the Zuni Waffle garden.

In exploring these garden designs the first thing I noticed was the observation of climate. Each three sisters garden offered something a little bit different in terms of climate mitigation: water retention, intercropping intensity, and fertilization. I look forward to next week when I can begin designing a functional layout for our bed.