Jeff Marchand

Can't argue with you there.

gustibus non disputandum!  Which is Latin for lets stop arguing and eat!  


p.s.  its not

I just asked Google what the life expectancy in Europe was a thousand years ago when no one there ate corn

"In the 11th century, the average life expectancy at birth in Europe was roughly 20 to 35 years. However, this historically low number is heavily skewed by high infant and childhood mortality rates, where up to half of all children died before reaching adulthood "

So the same.   By same logic  wheat, rye,  brassicas, beef , pork, and fish are best avoided.   I think we are starting to run out of foods safe to eat.

Of course modern medical science , sanitation, the rule of law and the historically peaceful era we live in have played a significant role in allowing you and I to live well beyond what was expected at birth a thousand years ago.

 It would seem that many people (including you) think corn is healthy.  And many people (including me, mark and several doctors) think corn is not healthy.  You say "hard to argue" but ...

No doubt that a person subsisting on corn alone would become very ill. But surely the same can be said for any food crop.  Most corn today is grown today for animal feed, ethanol and high fructose corn syrup.  All very unhealthy uses but surely the blame for that falls on the growers not the crop.  Our current corn growing practices and uses are contributing factors in our current obesity epidemic.  

Context, it seems to me , is king.  If eating corn as part of a varied diet is detrimental to a person's health how on earth did the Meso-Americans survive and flourish for millennia?  They ate corn , with beans and squash, sunflowers, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, and amaranth amongst many other crops.  Corn was the cornerstone of their diet just as wheat was for Europeans. That is why I find it hard to argue that it must always be unhealthy, especially when grown as part of a diverse garden to provide diverse nutrients to the gardner .   Permaculture is a design science and in science, when a hypothesis is proposed and there is a proven counterfactual  the hypothesis  is either rejected or modified. To me the pre-Columbian history of America refutes the claim that corn is always unhealthy.

I have read Mark Shephard's book with great interest.  I seem to recall his complaint about corn is when its grown in massive industrial hundred acre plantations and the GMO varieties bred to maximize sucre content for cattle feed and ethanol production. Those corn plants are not food. Humans would die trying to survive on just that corn. But those are not the corn I am growing and I not growing just corn!

I am talking about open pollinated heritage corn with much higher protein grown on a garden scale with beans , squash and sunflowers.  Those four sisters sustained meso-america for millennia before the Spanish came.  So its hard to argue that they are not food or unhealthy.

We need carbohydrates for energy.  Yes we can grow potatoes and I do but the Irish found out the hard way what happens when you rely on potatoes too much.  Corn is easier to store than potatoes or squashes too .  Variety is the spice of life and diversity is safety.

paul wheaton wrote:Crop rotation has been proven, over and over, to be an excellent strategy ...    for monocrop systems.

A few positions I think about in this space (and the "you" is "me"):

  - if you are thinking of crop rotation, you are doing it wrong

  - if you are thinking of a block of monocrop, you are doing it wrong

  - corn it out

  - wheat is out

Move to a system that will pump out food without any seeding, fertilizing, irrigation ....   without any care at all ... the only effort is on harvesting.  That is the permaculture goal.  To design a system so well that years can pass with zero care.  And with zero care it grows more food and is spreading.

Geeze I dunno I have seen videos of Geoff Lawton's Zatuna Farm's kitchen garden and he seems to grow in blocks and certainly his interns seem to weed and water and do plenty of work. Is that not permaculture?

Why would corn be out if a person does a three or four sister's garden?

I believe a for a person to grow their own calories with varied crops (who wants to live off of just potatoes?) they would need a fairly substantial size garden say 1/8th of acre per person if it were space efficient and weeded to maximize production.  Many people are not lucky enough to have that much space to allocate to a garden.  A weed infested higely pigely garden with zero maintance would have to be much much larger no?

I know what you propose worked for Master Fukuoka but for how many others? Is that how you are getting your calories?

There are millions of small scale gardens who rotate crops to break pest cycles and to not deplete soil nutrients who leave the soil richer than when they found it. Elliot Coleman describes a garden rotation in his books where each preceding crop benefits the next proceeding crop in a virtuous circle . A management system that can be done on the land indefinitely while improving soil health and the local micro and macro fauna seems to me to be the very definition of a permanent culture.  

Finally a well managed vegetable garden can be a thing of beauty and peaceful place for a hardworking gardener to  bask in the glory of his or her hard labours at the end of the day. For me if my permaculture farm and garden is neither beautiful nor peaceful I am doing something wrong.  Of course beauty is in the eye of the beholder so other's  mileage may vary.

Just my two cents.  

Sounds lovely Oliver.   I had to re-read "usual spring drought" twice.  Where I live in Eastern Ontario spring means rain.  Spring drought just did not compute!

problem with the fallow approach is you have no hope of ever controlling  weeds.  One approach I want to pursue once I have chickens next year is the 'dueling gardens' technique.  Keep chickens where last years garden was and where it will be again next year.

I found this thread today on a break from building mounds for a three sisters garden.  As I was digging up soil to make the mounds I was thinking "This sure is a lot of work, I dunno if want to do this every year as I rotate through my garden!"

I think where it's easy to rotate crops then why not? But if you need to make special infrastructure  like mounds or supports for vining plants etc then don't bother and research landrace cropping and seed saving to evolve past any local pathogens.

just my 2 cents and for what's it's worth I'm no master gardner😀

That is an awesome observation Christopher! After my last post I did some more research on the St-Hubert pea and they need a long growing season. In a 3 sisters garden you need to wait a few weeks before planting the vining plant so the corn can get a head start. I dont have that kinda time so my idea wont work.  Back to beans it is.  Enough with the over thinking things Im just gonna plant the beans with the painted mountain and see what happens .  Experiments=science=learning!  Ill report back.

I'm also growing St-Hubert soup peas (traditional variety my French Canadian ancestors used for pork and pea soup) and maybe I could substitute them for beans?