Carrots- A Permaculture Teaching Tool

Last summer I was asked to give a presentation about permaculture to the staff at Restaurant Eugene in Atlanta. I wanted to illustrate to them that if they were to teach all their staff, dishwashers, cooks, wait staff, to apply permaculture thinking to their respective tasks every day the business would benefit and they would be making a larger contribution to the greater good. After all, the goals of permaculture are to care for the land, care for the people and ensure everyone has her fair share of nature's abundance. I used the role of the prep cook as an example as follows:

Let's say that the restaurant normally sources carrots from Rabbit Haven Farm where they grow the carrot variety Red Core Chantenay. Red Core Chantenay is a short very pointed carrot. One day Rabbit Haven was out of carrots so the chef ordered carrots from Foggy River Farm where they grow the Bolero variety which is a long cylindrical carrot. When the prep cook diced the Bolero carrots she observed that she got more perfectly shaped carrot cubes with less waste per pound from them than she did from the carrots from Rabbit Haven and it took less time to prep them too. Applying Holmgren's permaculture principle, observe and interact, she said "hey Chef, we should start buying carrots from Foggy River all the time. We can save money and time!" Another permaculture principle comes into thinking process: obtain a yield. The chef says "thanks for sharing that with me. We will start doing that." The Chef eats some of the carrots and notices how sweet they are so he comes up with a new recipe to showcase their sweetness. He is applying the principles of creatively responding to change and applying self-regulation and accepting feedback.

You can see from this example that permaculture thinking can be of benefit in many situations beyond growing food, fiber and craft materials. It is applicable to business, government, and educational systems as well.

We use permaculture thinking to make decisions about the crops we grow. We grow both Red Core Chantenay and Bolero carrots. We have a section in the garden where the soil is a nice deep sandy loam, perfect for growing the longer Bolero carrots. When we rotate carrots to beds with more clay content we switch to the Red Core Chantenay which produce well in the heavier soil. The Red Core Chantenay is an heirloom open pollinated variety sow we save seeds from it.

Carrots are biennial which means they do not flower until the 2nd year after planting. They go through a process called vernalization. Cold temperatures in the winter act as a trigger to turn on the desire to flower in the spring and produce seed. Carrots planted in spring will flower a year later. Fall-planted carrots will begin to flower the following spring. This usually happens here in mid-April to early May depending on the temperature. It is important to keep your eye on them so you will observe when this change starts to take place. When the flower stalk begins to appear you need to pull up all of the carrots and store them in the refrigerator where they will keep for several months. As the flower begins to form the plant extracts the sugars from the roots to have energy to form seeds. The roots quickly become woody and inedible.

We grow carrots in spring and fall so we will have their deliciousness and nutritiousness all year round.

Busy, Busy, Busy

We've been really busy, tilling, planting, pruning, harvesting, selling, learning, teaching and having fun. Where to begin..... Ok, remember that poplar stump we inoculated with oyster mushroom spawn last summer? Well we harvested our first mushrooms from it last week. Put them in an omelet. Yummm!

Speaking of omelets, I went on a tour of urban chicken coops sponsored by Georgia Organics. I saw 8 different coops and lots of different chickens and some goats too. My conclusion was that chicken raising is pretty simple so we should go for it. The hen house is done except for adding a roost and a latch for the door. All I need to do is add some fencing and we're ready for a flock. I think I'll start with 6. That seems like a manageable number.

Speaking of tours, last sunday we went on a tour of Spring Valley Ecofarms in Athens, Georgia. It is a research farm owned and operated by Dr. Carl Jordan. Dr Jordan is doing some interesting research in ecoforestry but what caught my interest was the experiments they are conducting using perennial legume hedgerows interplanted with annual crops. They idea is that the legume ( they were using mimosa and amorpha), if the roots are colonized by nitrogen-fixing bacteria, will share some of the nitrogen with the annual plants. It seems to be working they said. I decided to try it out in our garden. I have interplanted baptisia australis with my tomatoes. I am inoculating the baptisia with alll the different commercial rhizobium bacteria i can find in hopes of finding one that will colonize the roots. This is not a carefully designed experiment. I don't have control plots. How will I know if it works? I won't know for sure. I will examine the roots of the baptisia to determine if they have been colonized but i can't determine if the tomatoes have benefitted from the companion planting. I chose baptisia because their flowers are good cut flowers and the foliage can be used as greenery in arrangements so they have economic value to us. By harvesting the foliage, we will force the plant to slough off roots to compensate for the lost foliage. Those roots will get broken down by the soil microorganisms which should make any nitrogen in the root nodules (assuming they exist) available to the tomatoes. Anyway we know that diversity is good so we're giving it a whirl.

The next step is to figure out a crop rotation that will work with the perennial planting. I'm thinking cucumbers next year, then maybe greens....

One more thing. Michelle and William from the Weather Channel came out to the Funny Farm to shoot a couple of segments for a series they do called Forecast Earth. One of the segments is about growing worms and the benefits of wormcastings. The second one is about Bugscaping, growing specific plants to attract beneficial insects. We released 1500 ladybugs and played with the worms. Of course Penny the cat star had to get in on the action too being such a ham. Michelle asked me if we used natural cat litter which we do. She's also doing a segment on natural pet care so Penny got to pose for the camera and I got to pour corn based litter into her litter box. 

It was a fun time. The segments should start airing in Late June or July.

Wild Fermentation at the Funny Farm

Robin and I attended the Georgia Organics Conference last weekend. It was a great event. Attendance was up 50% from last year with over 600 people attending this year. We are making progress people.

The highlight for me was the presentation by Sandor Katz, author of Wild Fermentation and The Revolution will not be microwaved. He is a very dynamic speaker with a simple but powerful message. He has made sauerkraut making an agent for positive change and revolt against the tyranny of the corporate-industrial food monster. His book Wild Fermentation (haven't read the other one yet) is  a well-researched treatise on the history and politics of the culture of food growing, preparing, preserving and sharing. It is also an instruction manual on how to preserve through fermentation almost anything we can eat.

As winter retreats and spring advances it is time to harvest the last of the winter vegetables before they go to seed. Thanks to Sandor, I now have the skills to preserve the carrots, collards and garlic by chopping them up, putting some sea salt on them and letting those ubiquitous microorganisms go to work on them turning them into a delicious and nutritious fermented delicacy in a week or two.

For me it completed the microbial circle of the soil food web by explaining how the same microbial community that makes turns organic matter into compost, and helps feed plants, also helps us preserve the harvest and make it more nutritious, as well as breaks food down in our bodies into the component nutrients that we require to sustain us.

Its all connected. Long live the microbes.

Never use Anti-bacterial soap. Ever!

Oh Yeah, there is a link to Sandor's website to your right. Wild Fermentation.