Apparently there is an art and, as one might expect, a science to composting.  To be clear, there is no art to my effort.  But I read extensively about the science of composting.  I chose a location that gets sun, but not a full day’s sun because here in San Diego that would most likely dry out the pile — and to function biologically, the pile needs to be about as damp as a wrung out sponge.  I dutifully watered my pile, and while I never checked the moisture content with anything technical, it never started stinking, which is an indicator that the pile is too wet.  I have also been pretty good with the carbon-nitrogen balance, not that I have ever weighed or measured anything I’ve dumped onto my pile.  The idea is, brown, dead plant material, ash, and newspaper are carbon contributors, while green clippings from the yard and animal waste (like chicken manure) are nitrogen contributors.  The C:N ratio is supposed to be 25:1.

I never turned my pile, but there are two schools of thought on that: in one school, you turn it; in the other, you don’t.  The Turning School of Compost Development says the turning evens out the composting process by mixing the less composted surface material with the more composted lower levels, resulting in a finer soil.  The turning also injects a burst of oxygen into the pile, which speeds up the aerobic bacteria and the composting process.  The Leave It School of Compost Engineering says that this very burst of productivity burns out critical components of the composting process, and disturbs basically every level of organism involved in turning stuff into soil.  Leaving it is doing it like nature does it.

But in my yard, nature hasn’t been doing it.

I have picked up a few tips along the way, little “oh, right” moments here and there.  The first came from a former student, Mike, who suggested I not dump oranges and orange peels into the pile because they are too acidic for some of the organisms at work there.  Great tip.  Stopped doing that.  Another good one: I read that two piles is essential because at some point I need to stop putting new stuff into the pile so it can finish.  That one seems kind of common-sense obvious.  I hadn’t been doing this, which might be why my pile still looks like a pile of debris.  I started a second pile last week.

Composting has many sustainable-living perks.  The two most relevant to reducing my wife and I’s impact elsewhere are the reduction in trash we send out and in the soil amendments we bring in.  The average American tosses 1,460 pounds of garbage into landfills every year.  Recycling helps, of course, but organics that won’t recycle will compost.  We throw out maybe one small bag of garbage each week (and it definitely does not weigh 70 pounds).  And even if the amendments we bring in are all organic and chemical-free, there’s still an industrial process behind whatever we add to our yard each season.  We’d rather make our own.

So, I think I’ll turn that pile this weekend.  Soon I should be getting some help stewarding the compost.  Apparently the chickens I just ordered will be a boon to the effort with their scratching and droppings.

The pile could use a boon.

Over the past few days I, and my friends Paul and Charles, built a green-roof chicken coop in preparation for the chicken raising that will be going on in my yard this spring.  I’ll be ordering three or four day-old chicks when they become available in February.  We can hardly wait.

I researched and designed the coop months ago, but had been waiting for classes to let out for winter break to build, then for the holidays to pass.  This left me nothing to do but pour over the designs again and again, staring at them with nothing left to tweak as a poor substitute for construction.  (I have included the plans and materials list I used to build the coop — construction documents they are not, as my wife, skilled in AutoCAD, noted.  I am happy to explain the plans to anyone looking to build from or modify this design.  She has promised to render the plans in AutoCAD for a future post.)

Researching green roof construction proved interesting.  There seems to be some consensus on the layers required to make a functional living roof, but a lot of variation exists in the materials used.  Beyond ensuring the structure can hold the added weight of wet soil and biomass, the concern turns to moisture control and drainage — keeping the water off the wood.  This is where the layers come in.  I started by covering the plywood with 3M Flashing Tape, then covered that with this sticky, tar-backed U.S. Seal Instant Waterproof Tape.  For drainage, I used a Tuftex PVC Panel, which is ribbed and will direct excess water off the roof.  It will also serve as a root barrier keeping the plants from burrowing into the wood.  Atop this I placed two layers of burlap to keep the soil from sloughing off down the drainage channels: Water can easily penetrate this layer, so the plants won’t drown, but the soil should mostly stay in place.

All that’s left is planting.

We chose to incorporate a living roof into the design because it gets so hot here in the summer, and the insulating properties of the roof will help keep our chickens cool.  And it’s more space to grow edibles — for us and the chickens.

The coop took one full day of prep (buying materials, cutting, staining), one full day of building (framing, siding, chicken wire), and a half day of tinkering and fine tuning (hinges, latches, nest boxes, green-roof layers).  Definitely a three-person job, especially when stretching and stapling the chicken wire, which tends to lacerate and stab like dried-out bougainvillea.  But, overall, a smooth build for three suburbanites with zero farm-type construction experience between them.

It went together like I planned, and it looks like I imagined — success.

So, I guess we better get some chicks.

This leaves the question of the other percent.  We’re shooting for 15 percent from our yard, so for us the other percent is a big 85.  What do we do about that?  The answer to this question is as important as any decision we make about what grows or how it grows on our property.  If we satisfy this big giant number of calories irresponsibly, or without the ideals that we apply to our own home growing in mind — then what’s it all about?  We could easily overshadow the global benefits of our super local effort by satisfying the rest of our calories at McDonald’s or stocking our freezer with CAFO meats from 1,000 miles away or filling our bellies with international fruits and vegetables.  And we’d be missing our own point, which is a decidedly unattractive quality in a person.

So, what do we do?  Support local farmers who share our ideals and the markets that sell their work.  And the restaurants that cook with their foods.

We’ve been enjoying a nearby farmer’s market these past few months, and we intend to make it a regular part of our week.  There is something fundamental in shopping a place where all the food’s not pretty.  In San Diego there are dozens of farmer’s markets we’ve yet to try, but want to, particularly one that we’ve heard specializes in meats in cheeses.  We’re also planning on buying into a CSA with a few friends, which will support growers and give us access to local, seasonal produce — and challenge us to cook with ingredients we’re not used to.  Each of these options eliminates costly intermediaries between food and people, in the same way that growing at home does, and requires a more thoughtful relationship with what’s being eaten, how it’s being grown, and who’s growing it.

In terms of related New Year’s resolutions, I’m resolved to do better with the foods I buy, particularly concerning their place of origin.  I’ve been doing well the past few months in buying organic produce and range-fed meats (and in making meats a side rather than a main dish), and I’ve been shopping and supporting a market that shares some of my philosophy, but I could do better with figuring out how local the food is.  Distance takes some of the responsibility out of responsibly raised.

I’m also resolved to add a little foraging to the menu.  And by a little, I mean one act of foraging.  I’m keeping my effort minimal because this is way beyond my skill level and comfort zone.  But, I’m inspired by the author of Fat of the Land, which is by far the best food blog I’ve read.  And, foraging is a pretty ecologically sound way to go in terms of consumption.  What will I forage?  I have no idea.  I guess we’ll see.

With the other percent in mind, I’ve added two widgets to the blog (see sidebar at right).  One maps out all the farmer’s markets in your area (and there are probably more than you are aware of, with different specialties; this was true for me).  The other helps you find local and responsibly raised foods at a number of different places, including restaurants.  These will be permanent additions and will hopefully help anyone who is interested find a route to better eats — a supplement to the home-raised bit of calories, no matter what percent that adds up to.

Must read.

1. The Ominivore’s Dilemma, by Michael Pollan
2. In Defense of Food, by Michael Pollan
3. The End of the Wild, by Stephen M. Meyer

Should read.

1. When the Rivers Run Dry, by Fred Pearce
2. Citizenship Papers, by Wendell Berry

Could read.

1. Field Notes From a Catastrophe, by Elizabeth Kolbert
2. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, by Barbara Kingsolver

Skip it.

1. The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman
2. Coming Home to Eat, by Gary Paul Nabhan

This last book I’m working my way through now, and it’s a bit wandering and self congratulatory without imparting any real knowledge or sense of experience.  At best.  Which is disappointing because I had high hopes: It recounts a guy’s attempt to consume only what he can get from within 220 miles from his Arizona home (a bit far for “local”, but a great goal).

I have a “to read” stack on my desk that includes The End of Food, by Paul Roberts; Hot, Flat, and Crowded, by Thomas L. Friedman; Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser; and Second Nature, by Michael Pollan.  That’s where I’ll be heading next, trying to read as many as I can before the spring semester starts and my reading turns back to student work.

If there’s anything else I should read, or any of the above that I’ve misread — drop me a note.

It’s hard to predict where this leaves us in terms of our annual goal.  At first glance it seems to project a final achievement well under one percent and far from the 15 percent we envisioned.  But hidden in that fraction of a percent is all the knowledge gained to get there.  Many one-time mistakes exist in so grandly and grossly missing a benchmark (off by about 95 percent).  And knowledge forged in such calamity is a tenacious knowledge.

Besides the pests, we also had something else working against us: fruits and vegetables.  It may seem obvious that the majority if not all of the calories from a typical suburban yard would come from these two food groups.  But before attempting this home-grown effort I failed to ask an even more obvious question: What percent of our total calories come from fruits and vegetables?  The answer is 5.8 (fruits) and 13.2 (vegetables), for a combined total of 19 percent.

What does this mean?  Well, if I’m trying to eat 15 percent of my calories from my yard, and those calories only take the form of fruits and vegetables, then what I’m really doing is trying to grow 79 percent of my annual fruits and vegetables at home.  Since 81 percent of our daily calories come from something other than fruits and vegetables, getting to the 15 percent goal would be a lot easier if I could diversify and get some of that “something other” from the yard, too.

Let’s just be honest and say that milking and meat off the bone probably aren’t going to happen.  But grains are a possibility, and we are zoned for up to 25 chickens.

The tiny .25 also hides what we have accomplished.  It suggests we’ve pulled little from the yard, when in fact we’ve eaten Cherry and Beefsteak Tomatoes, Strawberries, Grapes, Asparagus, Garlic, Basil, Mint, Purple Viking Potatoes, Gala Apples, Carrots, Chard, Mesclun, Butterhead Lettuce, Snow Peas, Straight Neck Squash, Peanuts (only four, but still), Broccoli, and Oranges.  And with some of these we’ve only begun to harvest what’s there.  In the next few weeks we’ll add Romaine Lettuce, Bull’s Blood Beets, Tangelos, Delicata Squash (fingers crossed), and Spinach to that list.

And it’s all so good.  And it comes with learning, which I appreciate.

So we celebrate our .25 percent.  There’s a lot going on in that little number.

Before the trimming, the 14-foot shoots of this Bougainvillea arced toward our pool and tangled in our redwood tree.  The stalks can easily put on a foot or more of growth each day.  Over time, the soft vines thicken and turn tough and woody like a tree.  But unlike most trees, the branch-like shoots of this vine wield inch-and-a-quarter, hooked thorns tipped in a mild toxin.

I came away from the work with my arms and legs utterly lacerated and a decent slash across my face.  I came away bloodied, the spikes having cut, and caught, and torn, and punctured through leather glove and rubber-soled boot.  In short, they did exactly what they were supposed to: They tried to protect the plant from me.  Despite my hedge trimmer and chainsaw, this South American native wouldn’t stay hit.

Getting close enough to a plant to cut it can provide a unique perspective: The menacing thorn that protects new growth, the specialized leaves, called bracts, that evolved to attract pollinators to an otherwise unassuming flower, and that carry the mature seed in the wind like a paper-mache glider.  This vine can be pared back from full, lush green to brown, dead stubble and in a week be resiliently sprouting away.  It can grow to 36-feet tall.  It can opt to be deciduous to survive a drought.

And it’s no passive resister, leaving cuts that redden and itch like a rash on account of the poison barbs.

A strange intimacy exists in becoming the victim of a plant’s natural defenses.  It provides an immediate ecological context that is often missing from our lives.  For most people, a plant’s defenses are easily avoided.  The reason for this disconnect exists largely in our no longer having to look at plants and decide if they are safe to eat, and if so, how best to harvest their edible parts.  Choosing produce from the market that is ripe or unspoiled hardly compares to making decisions in the wild.  And, frankly, some vetting has gone on before we get the opportunity to use our finely tuned senses to pick an orange out of the pile of oranges.  We are not the deciders.

When was the last time most consumers had to get around a thorn to eat a blackberry?  Or decide if that mushroom is the Amanita lanei they are after, or the Amanita phalloides that would kill them?

Or even simpler, when’s the last time most Americans had to put any effort into peeling an orange?  I can’t buy San Diego-grown oranges in San Diego, despite the excellent taste and superior quality of the fruit, because San Diegans refuse to be burdened by the struggle the peel entails.  Apparently it’s also not orange enough.  So San Diego County sends most of its oranges to Japan and India (where they’re quite popular), and San Diegans buy fruit that unzips easily from Chile and South Africa.

These are the kinds of frivolous carbon expenditures that encourage climate change and waste resources.

We’d be better for getting pricked by plants a little more often.

Put another way, I could have grown 400 White Lisbon Bunching Onions, 300 Yellow Sweet Spanish Onions, and 300 Carantan Leeks.

I could have grown 1,200 Autumn King Carrots.

Or maybe not.  Even taking into consideration pests, disease, thinning, and successive plantings on some of those crops, I just don’t have the space.  Most people don’t.  And what if I did get 1,200 carrots?  I like carrots, but come on.  That’s carrots every day for a year even if I give away two thirds of that yield to — who?  The couple hundred people I know who trust me enough to eat something from my yard?  (For you regular readers, you’re probably thinking I don’t have to worry much about that kind of return, but I’m getting better — and some of these crops are easy.)

These enormous, space-consuming yields come from one, $1.89 packet of seeds for each crop.  That’s just the way seeds come.  For me and my space, that leaves a lot left over after I’ve planted my fill.  Typically I save them just in case of a crop disaster, but often by the time whatever ails my plants fells them, it’s too late in the season to start again from scratch.  Besides, that’s some pretty pessimistic seed hording going on.

Instead, we should plant with optimism and give away our remaining seeds as soon as the ones we’ve used hit the ground.  I tried this in the spring, a bit, and have done better with the practice this cool season.  In the spring I shared ground nuts and watermelon with friends and fellow amateur growers Paul and Amy Reams (who operate a fabulous wedding and portrait photography business out of San Diego).  Between us, I pulled six peanuts out of the ground and we all ate store-bought watermelon this summer.  But there was camaraderie in our lack of success.  I gave my parents tomato and pepper plants I’d started indoors, and while mine got eaten by pests, theirs made it to fruit.  This fall I shared all the cool crops mentioned above with my sister, Anna, and just this week she, her husband, and our grandpa ate salads fixed from her bursting raised bed (pictured above).

My sister never gardened before this season, and she’s doing great.  And in the coming seasons we’ll grow more edibles we’ve never grown before with Paul, Amy, and Anna, experimenting in good company.  And my folks will grow stuff, too.

Typically when people have a hand in producing some of their own food, when they see that it’s possible to step into their yard, pick something, and eat it — something they had no choice but to go to a supermarket for in the past, that they’ve only seen piled in a produce section — they tend to plant and grow something every season after that, even if they’re not gardeners by nature.  Because it’s so possible.  And so good.

Sometimes all someone needs is a handful of seeds and an encouraging word.  Every homegrown tomato is one that hasn’t been chemically raised and shipped and preserved and irradiated, that hasn’t been part of an industrial food system that devastates the environment and results in massive waste.

Yeah, you can save your seeds for coming seasons.  Some seeds last longer than others.  It all depends on how you store them.  But how frugal do you need to be?  Hundreds of seeds for $1.89, or so.

Didn’t your mother teach you to share?

However, by having a clear idea of what we mean when we mean it, we can better determine for ourselves whether some product meets our standards, rather than being wholly at the mercy of some company’s label, the criteria for which they have defined in their interests, not the consumer’s.

I’ve been thinking about such things while trying to create a context for the food growing in my yard.  Below are links to two articles that have helped me better understand what I mean by sustainable eating.  Check them out.

“Twinkies Are Not Real”

“The Movement for a Sustainable Food System”

I like the idea of fewer intermediaries between my food and I.  This preference has many reasons behind it, but for the most part it boils down to a concern and a belief: the earth cannot sustain 6 billion (let alone 9 billion by 2040) people living a business-as-usual lifestyle; the actions of one person are not in vain, but significant, in dealing with global issues.

Business as usual includes consuming outside of seasons (a New Yorker buying summer oranges and winter asparagus) and regions (that same individual buying an avocado any time of year), and blindly supporting a massive industrial food machine that manufactures everything from McDonald’s to Wheat Thins to corn with little transparency and against which consumers have little recourse.  More on all of this down the line.

We’re coming up on something fast and the effectiveness of a single person’s actions in mitigating that something cannot be ruled out.  The degradation of the environment and the decline in the quality of life that accompanies it is a global problem that seems to require a coordinated, global solution.  But what is apparent is that people think in terms of themselves most often because that is a rational, practical way to get through the day.  Big solutions become daunting, hard to imagine and relate to, and can be defensively forgotten.  What is needed, then, is 6 billion individual decisions to live differently, to consume differently.  In this, the individual act is essential, and all hope and responsibility for the future is not diffused within the crowd of a city, state, country, or hemisphere, but instead rests about a foot above the shoulders of every person, where real decisions are made.

So, where do we go from here?  Where I go is toward producing a significant portion of my wife and I’s daily calories at home.  I’ve set 15 percent as my first benchmark, which seems low and high at the same time.  Looking at that number I can’t help but think of all the scenarios where such an achievement would be pathetic.  I can’t help but think about the other 85 percent of my food (a far more robust number) and where it might come from.  I wince at the usual channels that are most likely.  Some who stumble across this effort might wonder why I don’t shoot higher, try for 50 percent or 100, even.  Those numbers almost certainly start getting into grains and meats.  I have every intention of growing some grain — look forward to it, in fact — but it takes up a lot of space, and I just don’t have the room for a subsistence-level effort.  As for the meats, honestly, I can’t really see myself butchering anything — at this point — and I’m not sure I’m zoned for slaughter.

However, I do hope that the 15 turns into 20 or 25 percent.  But that’s getting ahead of the now.  Just hitting that first mark is going to be a challenge.