Life in an Eco-Village Part 2

Today we did more work on our hands on project, which so far is probably my favorite part of the course. My group’s hands-on project is in the creek garden, which is on the far side of the property across the creek. It is an area of fertile soil, home to lots of garden beds as well as chickens and ducks. Last week we prepared some garden beds by weeding and loosening the soil.

It was raining pretty hard today (the ducks seemed happy about that as they were quite vocal) but we still managed to amend our soil beds with some great looking compost. We then planted lots of fava bean seeds and green and red lettuce greens. Fava beans are a hardy frost resistant cool weather crop that is good for this area. They are easy to grow and do not need a trellis to grow up like most beans, as they have a sturdy stalk that can stand on its own. They will be ready to harvest in July.

For amending the soil we just added in compost, and also wood ash to reduce the acidity in the soil. The compost was a year old mixture of blackberry bushes, chicken manure, hay, weeds and other green waste, and a bit of other compost to inoculate the pile. The compost looked very healthy and nutrient rich as I ran my hands through it, and I saw several worms crawling through it. A good method of making sure your compost is ready for growing plants is to actually grow a crop on top of the pile; in this case squash and zucchini had been thriving on it. Although the plants do take some nutrients from the compost, it is pretty negligent, and you get a great crop to eat.

We also did some seed saving with over-ripe tomatoes and cucumbers. Both of these seeds require some fermentation in order to germinate, so the process is a little different than regular seed saving. We scooped out the seeds, with a lot of the juice, and then we will let the seeds ferment in their own juice for about a week. This breaks down the gel coating around the seed. This is an adaptation of the plant so that the seeds don’t just grow in the middle of the tomato. After the seeds ferment for a week we will rinse them off and then store them in a cool dry place for planting next season.

Our garden plot project is my favorite part of the course so far, as we are getting our hands dirty and practically applying concepts that we have been learning in the classroom here. I want to develop the skills to help people start their own backyard gardens in urban settings, for example replacing a suburban lawn with vegetable garden beds. I think that a lot of people do want to grow their own food, but they just don’t know how to get it started.

While a lot of people in this course are thinking about starting their own eco-villages and rural farms, my goal is to bring the knowledge that I learn from this course back into the city, where it may be needed the most. It just makes sense to grow food where people already live, and I believe strongly that there are lots of opportunities to make our urban areas greener.