The Helpful Gardener
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Toward a Do-Nothing Farming

So we flash forward thirty years...

Poor story telling on F-san's part? :wink:

Really, he just gives away the chapter in the first sentence, right? :lol:
For thirty years I lived only in my farming and had little contact with people outside my community.
Oh the story in between, all the trees, all the roof tiles... the humanity, oh the humanity...

We seem to have rejected doing nothing, but we have not rejected doing less. Sensei rejects pruning entirely, a leap I am not ready to make yet. Who gets hurt? Me? The tree? Who loses? Both of us? What say does the tree have in this exchange, and which of us knows trees better? Trees or baka?

Moo.

The best bonsai in a show I once went to (a crabapple collected from a hedgerow), had the following under the line for Training...

"Owner, 2 years. Cows 120 years"

Moo.

HG

Dixana
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Aha, I understand something now!! I had been perturbed upon hearing people speak about this book and F-sans nonbelief in compost.
I am comforted now in that it was his belief his fields did not need the compost, not that he shunned composting.
I feel if F-san were to see the wastefulness of American society he would almost certainly agree compost is a way to cut it back while in turn giving back to nature.
IMO compost and bokashi are a must for our future. If every household and every school composted their food waste, and yard waste, and most of their paper, how much LESS trash would there be?
Fukuoka sensei was just smart enough to see he could skip this step by laying the waste down on top of the field and letting nature take its course :)

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rainbowgardener
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He asks two very important questions, which could be central to the whole philosophy:

What happens if we don't do [whatever] ?

What is the natural pattern?

I do think there are developmental stages in becoming a "do-nothing" gardener. People moving from being chemical gardeners with Miracle Gro, herbicides, pesticides are used to taking the easy way out - whatever is wrong reach for a bag/bottle of something.

When they become organic gardeners, they may start fussing more - developing an arsenal of organic cures, making aerated compost teas, double digging, adding vermiculite and peat moss, composting, mulching, etc etc. Not saying that any of those are bad things to be doing, just that sometimes people get into fussing all the time.

When people become ecological gardeners, working with the natural systems, then a lot of that can fade away... Once you get a system going with diverse ecology of many different plants, insects, birds, spiders, etc etc all intermingled, inter-cropped, with companion plants and trap crops, then it fends for itself a lot more and we can start approaching the "do-nothing" garden. Of course he explains that doesn't literally mean we are doing no work, but that we are INTERFERING as little as possible in the natural system.

muland
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For the composting, Dix, Fukuoka's main problem with it is that it is too darn much work. Of course he sees the crucial value of returning everything back to the soil and actively encouraging soil improvement. His wife, Ayako, maintained a traditional Japanese organic garden right next to the house. All the kitchen scraps, nearby leaves, some chicken poop from the neighbor a few doors down and some straw were composted and turned into the garden soil. But that's a pretty small area. For larger areas, like the rice fields or the orchard, he liked to let plants do the work. All he has to do is spread some seeds and mow the groundcover. In the rice fields he spreads the straw back over the surface. The plants provide the carbon source and nitrogen in their roots and nutrients wash down from the surface with the rain. The roots die, the plants die and decompose (while new plants grow up in their place, of course). What he is really doing is making compost right in the ground without having to do anything...well, almost nothing. :idea:

muland
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I was thinking about that, too, Rainbow, when I first went to Fukuoka's farm. I had been living with a group of idealistic young people (known in those days as "hippies") in the mountains north of Kyoto. We were doing organic farming similar to the way the Japanese farmed until after WWII. So I asked him, "Is it encouraging to you to see so much recent interest in organic farming?" He surprised me with his answer. Of course I hadn't read the book yet and was still pretty clueless about what was going on there. I think I was hoping somehow that he would validate what we were doing on the farm near Kyoto by saying something like , well, organic farming is fine as far as it goes, that it can form a bridge between conventional farming and natural farming or something like that. Instead, he said, "As far as I'm concerned modern chemical farming is the right hand and organic farming is the left." :cry:

He went on to say that both methods arise from the same place. How can we use this land most efficiently for human purposes. The industrial farmers think chemicals will lead to the best results. The organic farmer thinks using organic methods is the best. They both plow eliminating entirely what nature was doing there before it was demolished by people's activity. Both want to use nature strictly for human benefit. Neither gives a damn about nature, they don't even notice it. Natural farming is completely different. :? That was a real eye opener for me.

The Helpful Gardener
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Thanks for that Larry...

It is the crux of natural farming, the ability to determine when to intervene or not. As long time gardeners we tend to tend; we are loathe to allow Nature her head, as we have been brianwashed into tilling and weeding as the only possible answers to the question "How does your garden grow?"

I tried to step away from that this year, and it has been a learning experience, with triumphs and disasters along the way. I mostly let my tomatoes sprawl this year as F-sensei recommended, and while it has been great for the tomatoes the squash in between suffered from the shading. Peppers do not seem to be as big or fruitful as last years; just the little shade from letuces early on was enough to set them back it seems. I am learning to garden all over again, and Nature is teaching me...

Really the tomatoes love the rough and tumble; more than I have ever had. The kale is a total winner in the wilder garden, as is the chard. Lettuces let go have many beautiful flowers; who knew? The sunflowers are beyond words and in my prolonged absence the lambsquarters have gotten to be six footers; the asparagus look mildly threatened but are holding their own.

Some vegetable crops might not make the cut next year; the Three Sisters garden will get more corn and less squash next time. Scarlet Runner beans are here to stay; the hummers love them to pieces and they are indeed yummy.

Not doing nothing, but certainly doing less. But I wonder, if the cows are doing the pruning, is it natural farming? Frost, insects, hail, deer and bunnies; nature has ways to prune all her own. I know if I shear a mum, flower points (fruit) increase. Should I not increase my fruiting points in food crops, maximizing space? Are we excluding Man from Nature?

Or has he done a fine job of that himself already?

HG

gershon
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"mostly let my tomatoes sprawl this year as F-sensei recommended, and while it has been great for the tomatoes the squash in between suffered from the shading. Peppers do not seem to be as big or fruitful as last years; just the little shade from letuces early on was enough to set them back it seems. I am learning to garden all over again, and Nature is teaching me..."

I've also learned to let my tomatoes sprawl. They do great.

Another thing I learned from an old gardening book over 2,000 years old is to not do companion planting. At the time it was forbidden to let the leaves of different plants touch in a garden. They had a masterful layout for a square foot garden which allows for planting 5 varieties in a 4 foot square. A little too complicated for me as it involves a circular raised bed in the middle, but the concept seems to work. The design was for planting in city gardens.

Instead of companion planting, I plant in 9 square foot sections which means about 200 sections in my garden. Say I have 10 things I want to plant in a day and I need 27 sq. ft of space for each one. Instead of planting 9 feet in one continuous bed 3 feet wide, I plant 3 feet of each and then repeat the pattern someplace else a few days later. This method also helps me stagger my planting dates so there is always something ready to harvest once harvest starts.

Last year, I lost some due to flea beetles which I was too lazy to do anything about. They left after awhile. Guess they got bored with the lack of attention. At least I didn't lose all of a single type of vegetable. They only attacked a 100 sq. feet or so of the garden.



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