Basket Feb. 11. 2010 – Organizing the veggie system

Ai Seud prepares a multi-purpose small pond. This is the point where each of the three rice paddies recieve and drain irrigation water. It is also the place where we plan to feed -- and catch -- the fish that we'll raise in the paddies.

The mornings in Chiang Mai lately have been wonderfully cool, but the searing heat of noon suggests that the earth is still doing its solar-orbit thing. That means we’re heading inexorably toward what is known around the world as the equinox, which is a cause for rejoicing by the frozen hordes of the northern temperate zone as they head toward spring. Here in northern Thailand, this change of seasons is perhaps less welcome, as we trudge toward the Hot Dry, or the burning season. I’m not trying to complain about the weather, actually; this blog will report a little bit about the development of our veggie beds for the dry season.

This week:

• Brown rice
• Snow peas
• Edible chrysanthemum
• Mustard greens
• Bananas
• Cassava
• Thurbingia detox tea

Before we talk about how and what to grow for the CSA from March through May – when the rains begin again – let me say a thing or two about this week’s CSA basket. We’ve discussed before the edible chrysanthemum and the mustard greens, and ways to cook them. And we’ve talked about rice, of course. And bananas, bananas, bananas; not the most riveting topic in the world, but you know what they say about a banana a day and the doctor, right?

Snow peas are a nice addition to the basket; you can eat the shoots as well as the pods, and you can see here Ai Seud building their climbing frames in fast motion. And please enjoy the snow peas, because they’re a cool-season crop. The mornings in Chiang Mai continue to be cool even into mid-February, but I’m afraid we’re about done with that happy time.

I’ll mention the detox tea before getting into cassava, a staple root crop that is one of the principal crops of the “food forest fringe” that we’re trying to grow around the borders of the farm. The detox tea is made from the leaves of a weed plant known locally as rang jeut, a climber known to science as Thurbingia.  It’s known locally as an indigenous hangover cure.

Hangover cure?!!?  Got your attention now?

The leaves of the thurbingia are reputed locally to prevent and lessen the symptoms of the common hangover. The neighbors suggest eating three fresh leaves before heading to the pub or karaoke lounge or dry goods-cum-watering hole or wherever. Or you can boil up dried leaves the next morning and drink the tea. I’m relatively new to this plant and can’t speak to its effectiveness in this regard, so further research is required. But I can tell you what it is generally prescribed for in these parts: detoxification from prolonged exposure to agro-chemicals.

Ms. Somsri, the head of the local health center, encourages the local farmers to drink the tea every day. She is concerned by dangerous levels of chemicals found during blood tests of farmers. One neighbor, Gla, knows his blood is messed up; the doctors have tested him and given him a warning. He keeps spraying because he doesn’t know what else to do (that’s where we’re trying to come in), but he drinks the detox tea every day to try to balance things out.

A cassava plant before harvesting.

Okay, cassava. A reported 500 million people depend on cassava as a staple crop. It’s also known as manioc, yucca and tapioca. I love it because you can poke a small stick into the ground, wait a few months, and you get an armload full of carbs. Actually, it’s not a stick, but rather a section of stem from a mature cassava plant. The cassava grows a couple meters high as a short-lived perennial (or a so-called biennial), forming a bunch of tubers underground. After you dig up the tubers, you cut the stems into stakes 30 cm. to a meter, then stick them back into the ground. If you get some rain, or have some irrigation, then you come back in a few months and get your food.

The downside is that cassava contains cyanide, so you have to cook it before eating it. The upside is that cassava contains cyanide, and doesn’t have many pests. (We’re the only species clever enough to know to cook it.) Cassava root is also fairly deplete in vitamins, but the leaves aren’t, and they can be eaten too. Sarah boils up the root into a really nice dessert, adding dried longan and other fruit. We’ve found that cassava makes a nice pancake when mixed with brown rice and bananas. There are a lot of ways to cook cassava, and we haven’t scratched the surface. And the leaves are reportedly good as fish food, but I’m not sure how to use it that way, given the cyanide business. But we’ll learn.

And cassava root after harvest. All this from a stick popped into the ground!

Anyway, don’t leave it to me to sing cassava’s praise. During the Nigerian civil war, Flora Nwapa, a Nigerian novelist and poet, put it this way:

We thank the almighty God
For giving us cassava

We hail thee cassava
The great cassava

You grow in poor soils
You grow in rich soils
You grow in gardens
You grow in farms

You are easy to grow
Children can plant you
Women can plant you
Everybody can plant you

And we grow ours in a mixed system in the perennial strips bordering the farm. The last one I excavated came up with a bunch of white and red turmeric, a couple taro corms and some peanuts. It’d be fun to play around with planting systems in which you dig up a cassava root every week, and then eat everything else that comes up with it. And speaking of planting systems … .

Annual vegetable system

The vegetable system we are developing is not necessarily original, though it certainly is unique in the neighborhood. Our system turns a lot of local practices on their head. We don’t use a hoe. We don’t use pesticides. We don’t water directly from the irrigation canal. And we aim for diversity in space and time, rather than planting large plots of the same plant over and over again. Here are a few of the rules we’re trying to establish and get Ai Seud, the farm foreman, to follow:

1. Don’t turn the soil. Mulch it.
2. Don’t plant seeds into cow manure. Plant into compost.
3. Big seeds go directly into the soil or into compost plugs in mulch beds. Small seeds (like cabbage or tomato) are germinated into seed trays and then transplanted.
4. Alternate crops over area.
5. Don’t follow one crop with seeds of the same crop. Stagger crops over time.

Let’s go through these rules one by one.

Mulch, don’t hoe. People talk about rice planting as if it were terribly hard work. Certainly, if you’re a Shan immigrant laborer transplanting rice day after day in someone else’s field for lousy pay, it is hard work. But look at our neighbors, Oon, Oon and Roon. They each farm about one or two rai of land (1/6 to 1/3 of a hectare), which is about enough rice for their families to eat. They generally eat their rainy-season rice and sell their dry-season rice. While transplanting is hard on the lower back, each family only needs to do it about 4 days per year.

What they seem to spend a lot more time doing is hoeing their flower and vegetable beds. And it usually seems to be older women who do that job. It’s a common and, for me, disturbing scene to see these middle-aged women swinging the hoe against thick clay soil in the blazing sun. The idea of sheet mulching that we’ve learned from Les, similar to techniques of biodynamic farming, makes life a lot easier. And because cultivating the soil is the farming equivalent of disturbance in ecology, which invites pioneer plant species commonly known as weeds, sheet mulching cuts down on the herbicide bill. (In our case, there is no herbicide bill.) Furthermore, pulling weeds out of loose mulch – to the extent that it’s necessary – is much easier and more effective than trying to pull weeds out of an exposed bed of soil.

Compost, not manure. We use a lot of manure on the farm, most of it sourced from a small feedlot near Mae Jo University, 4 km away, for 15 baht per sack. The mid-term plan is to raise a couple of sheep and do a better job of concentrating the duck and chicken coop, moving towards poo self sufficiency. But for now, the big off-farm input is cow manure. We use the manure for composting and mulching. We used to incorporate it into the soil, but learned that this was not a good practice. For one thing, it’s better to avoid turning the soil when possible. Second, the manure carries a lot of grass seed, which can be broken down by composting or suppressed by mulch. Third, manure takes a while to break down and is not available for a plant’s immediate needs. Finally, it just seems kind of nasty to grow stuff into cow manure.

Instead, we dig small holes into the mulch beds by hand and fill the holes with compost. The seeds go straight into this. These facts and this rule didn’t stop Ai Seud from filling the mulch holes with manure the other day, but we’re working on that. He has a lot of weird stuff to learn, Ai Seud, and he’s doing pretty well at learning it.

Big seeds into the ground (or mulch), small seeds start in seed trays. One of the things that drives me a bit crazy is to find that Ai Seud has broadcast a bed of mustard seed for later transplant. He knows how to do seed trays, and he’s done it before with success, but old habits die hard. The pukey little seedlings struggle up out of the hard sunburnt seedbed, appalled at their mistreatment. Then their roots are abused in the transplanting. The poor things never really have a chance to grow. And then the seedbed fills up with weeds.

Anyway, have a look at Les’ comment below about why it’s better to plant larger seeds (corn, pumpkin, beans) into the ground directly, or into compost plugs in mulch beds.

Alternate crops over an area. If something works well, why not just go for broke? Just plant all of Illinois to corn and soybeans. Why the heck not? Because monocultures invite a host of problems, that’s why. Planting bed after bed of cabbage makes sense if you don’t mind spraying systemic poisons on food you plan to eat or sell. But it doesn’t make sense if you’re growing organically. One must account for the height of plants and the shade they cast, but that’s easy enough to do. In general, rather than four or five beds of snow peas or tomato side by side, it’s better to have a bed of peas next to a bed of tomato next to a bed of mustard next to a patch of watermelon, and so on. Les can explain better the relationship between diversity and pest management.

Stagger crops over time. Our local inspiration for farming, Kru Pratum, follows an approach common in permaculture, staggering plantings over time like this: leaf crops or grain (like corn), followed by root crops like turnips or potato followed by beans. The leaf crops or grain access surface nutrients, while the root crops reach deeper into the soil for nutrients. The beans largely fix their own nitrogen, and some of this is returned into the soil when you mulch the senile plants. Ai Seud does an okay job of growing mustard and okra (who wouldn’t, with okra?), so he’s tempted to grow them over and over again to prove his worth. From now on, he’ll do that over my dead and mulched body.

More later about veggies, and the plan for the dry season.