Victory Gardens for the Sustainably Minded

It’s February. I’m done with the bliss of the gardening lull in January and am aching to get going. I’ve started tidying garden beds that would be best left alone for a while yet, for the sake of the critters and the plants. And I’ve been eyeing up some pruning that would also best be left till warmer weather. If you are a plant in my garden and you sense me coming you could well be thinking “Please keep walking. Please keep walking.” Luckily for my plant friends, one of my garden projects for 2022 is growing more of my own food and to that end I’ve discovered “winter sewing”. This is the practice of potting up seeds in pots and placing them outside in various greenhouse like conditions. This can be anything as simple as modifying a plastic juice bottle or milk jug, laying glass across a raised bed to create a cold frame, or putting up poly tunnels. Now that I’ve learned about winter sewing there has been no stopping me, but more on that after I figure out what to plant.

One of the main reasons I want to grow my own produce is because it tastes so very good and is far more nutritious than the produce we get from the grocery store. Home grown food also avoids carcinogenic pesticides that are used to grow most foods. The US uses over a billion tons of pesticides a year representing 22% of all pesticides in the world. The EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) estimates 60% herbicides, 30% of insecticides and 90% of fungicides are carcinogenic. Growing my own food also improves my family’s food security, can save money, and is satisfying in numerous ways.

Beyond the personal benefits, growing my own food also reduces my negative impact on the environment. There are various estimates of food’s ecological knock-on effects, including the World Resource Institute’s estimate that global food production is responsible for 25% of all greenhouse gas emissions and 68% of freshwater withdrawals, in addition to destroying wilderness on 27% of the global land surface (excluding Antarctica). While consuming less meat and dairy is the most effective way to reduce these negative impacts, I’m curious which foods I can grow that will effectively reduce my ecological footprint.

Well, it turns out “Which food can I grow to most reduce my ecological footprint?” is an easy problem to pose but not so easy to solve. In the first instance, how should we define our food’s ecological footprint? A common definition is to calculate the land area, the land footprint if you will, that is needed to absorb and nullify all inputs and outputs needed to grow and transport my food. Thus accounting for farming’s carbon emissions, transportation emissions (average grocery store food travels 1500 miles before it reaches the shelves), pesticides, fertilizers, loss of soil, damage to freshwater, oceans and wilderness. I’m not fond of this land metric however as it overemphasizes carbon emissions over other damages, in my opinion, in its allocation of land to absorb all the carbon emitted. The standard ecological footprint is a clever enough technique, reducing all impacts to land area, but it can reinforce the all too common focus on carbon, leaving loss of biodiversity and healthy ecosystems under represented.

Alternatively, we could create an food-impact-index which averages various environmental impacts. For example, we could calculate the impact of getting a pound of broccoli to the grocery store on a scale of zero to one on a set of natural resources. For instance, we might look at land, carbon, and freshwater. Or we might broaden that out to the set of 8 natural resources which I argued in my book, A Drop of Grace, sustain life: clean air, freshwater, healthy soil, robust biodiversity, wilderness, oceans, a stable climate, and a toxicant free environment. Even to numerically keen me, that sounds pretty onerous and impractical. And I have never found much data for these categories for individual foods.

There are data for groups of food, however. These show that beef has the highest greenhouse gas emissions, the highest land use and the highest freshwater use of any food per calorie produce. Even more tellingly, beef also ranks highest of all foods when reported as carbon, land, or water per gram of protein produced. On the other end of the scale, cereals have the lowest impact in these three categories. The story is more murky between these two end members, for instance nuts use a lot of water in relatively water stressed regions, but not so much land or carbon. In other words, it is difficult, if not impossible, to rank commercial foods in order of sustainability beyond beef and cereals. And even if we had ranked data to hand, these kinds of indices don’t address issues like impacts on biodiversity or animal welfare.

Not being able to quantify it all is highly unsatisfactory. But I will endeavor to stay calm and carry on.

A far more practical approach is to simply get on with growing some veg and adapt the practice of growing victory gardens during the two world wars. During WWII it is estimated that small home gardens produced as much food as big farms, improving food security and nutrition, freeing up food for the troops, and relieving stress on the work force. An additional motivation in encouraging victory garden planting was to keep up morale. Gardening makes us feel better both for the sake of being outside and getting exercise, but also by giving people concrete experiences of helping with the war effort. All of these factors, food security, nutrition, keeping up morale, and involvement with practical solutions, are relevant to our battle to save the wilderness.

So after much hemming and hawing, here’s a list thoughts about growing our own food to improve our environmental impact.

Favorites - It goes without saying, you’d think, that the first priority in choosing what foods to grow is to choose fruit and veg that your family likes. I am living proof that it needs to be said, however, as I have jars and jars of hot peppers in my fridge and I rarely cook with them. Even worse, this is the second year running that the fridge has been stuffed with peppers.

Doers - “Doers” is what we gardeners call plants that just get on with it, they don’t need painstaking care and they produce loads of flowers or veg. Native fruit and veg often fall into this category because they will be suited to the local environment. For instance, I’m lucky enough to have a wet spot in my garden that gets quite a bit of sun so I’ve planted several of the native Paw Paw fruit trees which thrive under these conditions. I am not a dedicated food grower, the flowers get my attention, and I often forget to water or weed or feed, but beans, peas, and zucchini all withstand my abuse and give me loads to eat. I also find that Mediterranean herbs like sage, rosemary and oregano just get on with it without any pampering so these all fall into the doer category.

High Fliers - One of the most impactful foods we can grow is to replace those that we’d buy from the grocery store, which are flown in from distant farms. Most berries, green beans and asparagus, and incidentally fresh fish, are high fliers because they have a short shelf life. So if you like these and can grow them, they are worth a try. Beans have several further advantages: they are one of the few plants which fix nitrogen into the soil - perhaps the most important nutrient for plants, they are doers, and if you harvest them regularly they have a long productive season.

Trees - Next, I suggest growing plants which stay alive for many years such as fruit and nut trees. I enjoy that my fruit and nut trees don’t need much work from me, but will yield masses of delicious treats in years to come. Not only will they feed people and animals into the future, but the tree will also absorb carbon, clean the air and water, and provide habitats for all kinds of critters. The gold standard here is a native fruit or nut tree.

Easy care plants - if you are uninspired by gardening (the horror), you could try growing figs, grapes or artichokes. They are all relatively self reliant once established and will produce for years to come. The fig and the grape will need a structure to support them and will need annual pruning. Artichokes, I’m delighted to find, are deer resistant.

Year rounders - I grow salad greens and fresh herbs like basil and cilantro in containers inside during the colder months. I prefer the cut and come again lettuces that I can harvest more than once, though I also grow some red lettuce leaves and arugula for its peppery accents in the salad. I’ll sew several batches of basil and lettuce as the year progresses as I like to have these fresh as often as possible and have a batch on the go right now in my sunniest window.

Which brings me right around to why I started this newsletter. What am I doing now, in February, for food production? Every day I check on my lettuce and basil of course, perhaps giving them a ruffling to strengthen their root systems. On dry days, I’m reconstructing my tomato and bean supports, putting well rotted manure on the veg beds, and rearranging planting beds. Last year, I put kitchen compost on the veg beds. In the hot summer of Maryland this was a bit of a disaster as there were tomato, cucumber, and sunflower plants coming up absolutely everywhere. I let them grow, and though the sunflowers were magnificent, the tomatoes and cucumbers were not tasty and they crowded out the produce I’d intented to grow in those beds. So it is manure for my veg beds this year.

I’m also trying proper winter sewing. Last year, I tried a make it up as you go along version of winter sewing - putting seeds into little pots filled with and then placing them all together in an empty raised bed for a bit of mutual protection. All of my labels washed off and I didn’t know what any of the seedlings were. Many of the pots produced nothing, others were a mishmash of weeds and who knows what.

This year will be different. Ever hopeful. I’ve built a really simple cold frame out of an unused raised bed frame and some windows I found in the garage. I’m filling the cold frame with little pots filled with compost and seeds of of dill, celery, coriander, fennel, garlic, kale, shallots, brassica, root veg, chard and spinach. I am also trying a few plastic bottle mini-greenhouses. I cut around the bottle about 4 inches from the bottom on 3 sides, leaving one side attached to act as a hinge. I put in about 2 inches of soil, moistened it, then sewed the seed, closed the bottle back up, and duct taped it shut. I left the bottle screw top off, so rain can get in, and have placed these bottles next to the house where they can get sun and rain. I’m trying onion seeds, peas and various annual native flowers in these bottle greenhouses. In both instances, I’ve made plant labels with a new permanent pen, and a seed chart identifying the kind of pot each seed went into just incase the labels aren’t permanent. I’m hoping the extra warmth in the cold frame and bottle greenhouses, as well as the exclusion of volunteer seeds, will improve the outcome of the winter sewing this year.

So although there are many variables to consider I’d say there are a few clear eco-friendly food crop winners. Here are my picks. For indoor sewing in winter, I favor lettuce, basil, and spinach. My top three for sewing in the cold frame now are peas, onions, and garlic, alongside native annual flowers like lobelias and phlox. My all time top three for eco-friendly food planting are native fruit trees, beans, and a berry patch which can be planted up as soon as the ground thaws. Happy playing in the mud.