Garden

This year I sort of got to do one of the little things on my bucket list. My bucket list is very small and filled with simple things. This item was looking to be one of the more difficult ones to check off as I live in an apartment and that means no space to do it in. Having always wanting to do it and not having the space is one thing, but add that both sides of my family have it in their genes and I work in a place that caters exclusively to people who do this, it makes my life a little trying at times that I have not done it before this year. When I say I work at a place that caters to such people it means that I get to do the first steps a lot but never get to see the finished product.

I work at a Garden Center and this year I got my first garden.

Now I have to provide pictures, which means doing something I have never done on here. But I am getting ahead of myself. I first found out about the community garden years ago, but I did not think that I could get a space so I never tried. But last year I heard they were accepting applications because they were expanding. I put my application in and sent it with my e-mail address and waited.

I did not hear anything from them for months and as planting time started to sneak up I called them. They had gotten both mine and my co worker's e-mail address wrong and had been sending out letters into the ether. Luckily, though, it was not a early start kind of year; it was a Garden Center's dream kind of year. Our Garden Center starts plants for people not willing to start their own plants, many do, no surprise, but the weather determines what sort of year we have.

This year the weather favoured a late start. Some people believe that you plant early to get the largest and the best crops. We had a late frost and the people who only plant after the May 24, or Victoria Day weekend tsked and told them why you wait until then. Then we had an even later frost and the people who wait until June 1st tsked and told everyone why you wait until after June starts to plant. Then we had another late frost and all the die hard farmers that never buy plants started by others came in and bought their plants for the garden from us. So despite the late start, I was not going to be later than other people.

I was a bit bummed out because of the selection of my plot. On the form they asked questions like what are you growing and is there a friend you want to be beside. They wanted to know how to place people so that other people would not be inconvenienced by other gardeners. I told them I wanted to be near my co-worker and on the north side, so that when I did my Three Sisters garden I would not shade people. So they put me on the south side. I requested that they give me an extra plot, because I did not want to shade anyone out, so the gave me a second south side plot, luckily adjoining my own. So I tried to make due; I planted in the middle of the two plots so the corn would not steal the sun from the other adjoining plot and potentially cause workplace tension. The plot was right near a one-and-a-half story building to the south, so I knew I was going to be screwed, late morning and afternoon sun at best, late afternoon sun at worst.

This was to be an experimental garden. I have this garden running around in my head, it has ever since I first heard about it: Three Sisters Farming. There is probably a myth running around the Internet written down from the original Iroquois or other south of the Great Lakes North American tribe. I might even put a link for one here, if I figure out how. But the Three Sisters farming technique formed the backbone of the agriculture output of the Region East of the Mississippi before the White Man came and wiped them out.

History lesson time. The native people did not have history like everyone else. They had stories passed down to successive generations which were kept alive for the present generation by a quirk of language in that there is no tense. Jumped, jumping, will jump are all the same word. If you listen to any account taken from a native before their language changed to fit our own, you will not be able to establish without additional context whether an event in a story occurred last year, that day or a thousand years ago. An interesting aside, but still relevant as you will see.

I learned about one tribe in school: the Huron Nation, mostly because there were Jesuit missionaries that were staying with them in the mid 1600s until the Nation's destruction two years later. Modern archaeology added a bit more to the account. The native peoples in the Eastern North America, south of the Precambrian Shield, all followed a similar agricultural practise. They had no iron for tools, but still they farmed, but not like we do or did. They had towns, the towns had longhouses, large semi-communal buildings that would house a clan within the tribe and the town would have a large woven wood palisade. Each town would be a tribe within the nation and there would be many tribes close together. The nation settled a very small area. And they were semi-nomadic.

Every seven years or so, the entire nation would pack up its supplies and move, then build a new series of towns. Why they did this comes down to one thing, corn. Corn was the perfect food for North America, developed by the predecessors of the Mayans and Aztecs and moved from Central America to all points north and south where it could grow, and it could grow anywhere because it is a grass, it provided a staple for nearly all of the Americas. The corn was dried, and the kernels removed from the cob and stored in mostly water proof bags in the longhouses, if my memory serves sometimes buried within the floors. The dried corn was easily transported for trade with other tribes who due to poor soil conditions could not grow corn in large quantities for fish, which they did have in larger quantities and other things if they had them. The dried corn could be ground into meal and cooked and eaten.

They did not know that what we know about corn, that you have to fertilise it heavily year after year because it takes so much from the land. Well they did know it, but they did not know that they knew it. You see they did not plant corn alone, they planted it together with two other crops. The three sisters were Corn, that would stand tall, Beans, that would twine up the corn and bind between the corn and Squash, that would grow between the stalks, shading the roots of her sisters with her big leaves from the sun, blocking out the sun for the weeds and whose prickly leaves and stems would discourage corn theft by four footed masked bandits, raccoons. What they did not know was that the beans fixed nitrogen into the soil and that over the years the corn used that additional nitrogen for growth.. They did know that these three crops grew well together and that alone corn, their staple, did not grow well.

The natives moved their village, burning down larger trees to make posts for their village and palisade. They wove smaller trees in between the posts to create the walls and bent the tops together to create the roofs of the longhouses. The fields were cleared with fire. The ash was used to fertilise the crops, bigger chunks would rot over the years adding to the soil. But despite this the corn stole from the land and after five years of contestant farming the land would begin to produce less and less. They would add more farmland to cultivation every year but eventually they would have to move. When they moved they dug up the bones of their dead, and build a deep pit and inter the bones there together and bury them. The locations of these old towns and ossuaries would be added to the oral history of the people. The Huron Nation was not that big, by today's standards but their stories laid claim to burial sites stretching from Lake Huron south of the Precambrian Shield down to near where Toronto lies and over to where the present city Kingston lies. This large territory contained only one group of people, the Hurons, who numbered a little over fifty thousand, all of whom lived close together in the mid 1600s. There is more in my head about the native people's ask I might indulge you.

Anyways, I was growing a Three Sisters garden, a bit of an experiment because it goes against the common conception how gardens look, rows devoted to one crop separated, exclusive of everything else. Which is how people think their ancestors grew things from time immemorial. FALSE. Actually, at the same time that the Hurons were planting their multi crop farms, Europeans were doing the same, their grass crops, wheat oats, and barley, not to mention millet, rye and many others were all planted together and harvest was a hodgepodge of what ever survived the weather conditions of the year. I digress.

Anyways it was an experimental garden for a second reason. I wanted to try older crops. I wanted to try multi coloured carrots, like they were before the Dutch bred them orange in honour of William of Orange. I wanted to try the heritage Tomatoes that we had been selling, but did not know what they were like to tell our customers. I mean how can you sell a product and not know what it is like?

Also, to make it a true triple threat, I had to try another experimental product: Myke. I learned about this one in school too. My education was not as scattered as it seems from this posting, it was just a little multidisciplinary, mostly Geography, Biology and History. Myke is a product that came out a little while ago and as soon as I saw it, I told my boss we needed to get it. And then the next year I told him again. And then the next year. Then the next year I asked someone else to slip it on to the purchasing order.

I had one Mycology Course in school. It was super hard and I sucked hard, but I was enthusiastic in the lab work and the class work and they must have given me a barely passing 51%, but I still am very interested in fungus. You see, humanity owes its existence to Fungus. Really.

Back in the ancient past, a little after the Cambrian Explosion, actually a long time afterwards, plants started to creep out onto the land, the dry land, before that there was just land and most of the life was in the water. Bacteria came first of course. After that algae. Then lichens, which are symbiotic Cyanobacteria living within a fungus shell, take note, that is fungus in a symbiotic relationship. After that mosses crept across the lands. Except for the lichens, all of these life forms needed lots of water to live and grow. The moss could dry out, but they would not grow unless they were wet. After they lived and died, for generations, they started creating soil.

Soil is a mix of four things. It has parent material, clay, silt and sand, together or without and in different proportions. It has spaces between the particles filled with water and air. Water logged material is not good soil and neither is desiccated totally dry, so air and water. The last component for good soils is organic matter. Organic matter holds nutrients from dead plants and holds water really well too.

Once soil started to be created things that used soil started to fill that niche. Which is to say, so that those people from Intelligent Design don't get their hopes up, random mutations occurred resulting in root networks that as it turned out helped the plant grow bigger if they were in a place where soil existed. Moss that grew roots without soil died and did not survive to produce offspring, while those in soil grew better and had more offspring. I have to be careful what I say. Soon the land was dotted with oasis of green life on the land, depressions filled with water, then filled with mosses and later with ferns. Then everything stopped. The lichens worked on the rocks and the mosses soon covered the land. Later the land was covered by ferns, but there was an impasse. Some of the ferns grew taller but there was a road block. The mutation that developed roots was great but not perfect.

About four hundred million years ago, animals first started coming on land and these first amphibians brought with them their parasites, fungal infections. Amphibians make a very fertile host, there skin is always wet and they contain lots of nutrients and proteins. Amphibians fought back through random mutations some of which toxified their skin, which killed the parasite and others did not and they did not have offspring and evolution occurred. Sometime around the emergence, the fungal infections migrated to the plants and the soil. And that plants benefited from this infection.

It was one of the most awesome developments that had ever occurred in the history of the Earth, right up there with Cyanobacteria, both of which created the world we have today. So is not a plant, and actually it is more closely related to animals than plants, but it is neither. Bacteria, Viruses and the two types of Protozoa are all single celled organisms. Plants and Animals are multicellular with many layers of cells, with an inside and an outside. Fungus is in between or actually both. The natural form of fungus is that of long multicellular strings joined end to end called mycelia. They are nearly invisible, because they are one cell thick. Each cell is haploid, which is another difference, plants and animals are diploid, meaning we have two sets of genes, one from each parent. Haploid means only one set of genes. When fungus wish to reproduce, two fungi of the same species get together, become diploid, and produce a large multicellular structure often called a mushroom, toadstool, puffball, truffle, bracken or any other thing that most people think of when they think of fungus. Essentially they are the reverse of plants and animals, diploid only for sex, where plants and animals are only haploid for sex.

Anyways, pick up any well made chunk of soil, say a cubic centimeter. You will find the it contains a few roots, maybe a five to ten centimeters of roots stretched end to end and hundreds of meters of hyphae which together create the mycelium of the fungus. You see roots are multicellular constructs of plants, they have to grow out from the plant and they are big. They contain an outside that collects the water and nutrients and an inside that contains transportation up and down the plant, water and nutrients up and food down. It contains the food stores for the plant and each cell is big and squarish, as they all have a cell wall made of cellulose. By comparison hyphae are tiny they are long and thin. Each cell is long and thin and hollow. The cell wall is made of chitin and is super thin. Each cell more resembles a line than a box and attached together they form threads that go everywhere.

Some how, at one time, the parasite affecting early Amphibians crossed over and infected plants and soil with a different effect. The mycorrhizal infection allowed the roots to become much more efficient. The fungus became symbiotic, in exchange for food which the plant produced, the fungus gathered up more water and more nutrients than the roots could ever acquire. plant roots only interact with the solid right beside them, they can only get the easy water and the easy nutrients. The water that is close to the soil particle is hard to acquire because it is bound to it hydrostatically, which means as you get closer to the partial the more energy you need to draw it away, unless you are in direct contact with it and the nutrients are dissolved in the water. So the fungal hyphae which more densely cover the soil than the plant could ever hope to be, aids the plant when it forms this symbiotic relationship.

Plants become more efficient and develop larger structures, denser root structures and much larger sizes and allow for mutations that were always occurring, but were never viable to become viable and the first tree like plants began to develop. Eventually, plants modified their environment enough and became efficient enough to survive without the symbiotic relationship. Some plants evolved with denser root structures, hairy roots, that are equal to the benefit of having the symbiotic infection, but the other plants always benefit from the infection, even if they can survive without it.

So I wanted to experiment with Myke, so i could accurately report to people its effectiveness. I did and so did my co-worker, a veteran of many vegetable gardens. She, GardenGuru, tells me that she noticed an effect. The plants were more vigorous than other gardens in the past, they were unstressed between waterings, she watered every day, but still said that between watering most gardens suffer stress that was not present this year. People were amazed by my garden, the leaves of the squash, which I Myked, were much larger and vigorous than other people's squash, they were more vigorous than the plants I did not Myke.

The Three Sisters garden experiment will have to be redone, not that it was a failure, it is just a multi year experiment. I made mistakes that can be attributed to it being my first garden. I planted too much corn in each hill and did not thin them out. The beans were not very good pole climbers, I will have to switch to something else perhaps. I tried a bunch of squashes some I like some I don't. Why did I plant cucumber, I don't like cucumber. I will have to plant less squash, I planted three per hill, I will have to cut that down to one. The carrots I did not put enough space between them, I got impatient when planting them. The tomatoes I planted too close together and I was super shocked how big they got. GardenGuru was shocked too though, so it might have been the Myke. But they were too closely planted anyways and the tomato cages I got were crushed by the weight of the plants, I will have to try a different staking method. One thing I noticed was that watering the plants was difficult. The natives when they planted crops did not irrigate, they let nature do the watering, but where I live the soil is crap and that is a recipe for disaster; there is no organic matter. But the problem with the garden was that it was too overgrown for me to enter it and water, but luckily we received more rain than average this year, so I did not have to water much. I was thinking that I might develop and irrigation system so I can water inside such a dense jungle of vegetables like I had this year. I am dreaming up what it looks like right now, I have been thinking about it all summer, but this one is the best so far .

Heirloom Tomatoes? Excellent! The one I tried, Black Krim had great taste, I don't really like tomatoes. I liked these a lot. I liked the Old Germans that my friend grew too. I like all the fresh tomatoes. But it was said, by my friend and people I gave them too that they were less harsh and ever so slightly salty. I really liked that they were coloured differently more green so that they appeared purplish