Cruelty-Free Gardening

“Why did you move there in the first place?” people often ask when hearing the story of how we accidentaly started a chicken sanctuary in the middle of poultry country. I never can answer the question adequately, but one factor was gardening. When I worked as a tenant organizer in Ann Arbor, I started a small backyard vegetable garden primarily for the purpose of satisfying my craving for the good-tasting tomatoes I remembered from back home but never could find in Michigan. (Adding a little sand to the soil did the trick.) Right away, I noticed that gardening helped me to feel more grounded, which I guess should not have been surprising, since it put me into intimate contact with the actual earth.

Within a few years, I was growing more than a hundred varieties of vegetables, flowers, and herbs in a weedy backyard in the neighboring city of Ypsilanti. I was amazed by how much food I was able to grow in an urban backyard. So, one thing that we were thinking when we moved to the country (not knowing that we would be settling in amid factory farms) was that I would have enough room to grow almost all of our food.

Ironically, I’ve been so busy with the birds and related animal advocacy every spring that I’ve not yet had as good a garden here in the country as I had back in the city. Still, it’s fun to garden with and for birds. Chickens are very curious. There’s always somebody keeping an eye on me to see if I might be doing something interesting. That interest is rewarded when I start digging. Turn over a spadeful of earth and here come the hens, avidly scratching right along with me (and incidentally helping me to aerate the soil). I like knowing that they will be sharing the garden’s bounty, too. Excess vegetables are never a problem here! Already, I am looking forward to the fun of gathering handfuls of cherry tomatoes to toss to the chickens as a surprise morning treat or slicing open a watermelon for their refreshment on a hot afternoon. Of course, protecting tender seedlings from curious chickens takes a bit of ingenuity, but I like the creativity of doing things like making protective sleeves out of soymilk containers.

All of which is a very long way of introducing the fact that I happened to see a sack of so-called “organic fertilizer” yesterday. That got me thinking about the difference between organic and veganic — and about the difference betwee organic and “organic.”

The first year I had a garden, I foolishly bought such a sack of fertilizer, not trusting that the healthy soil of my virgin garden would have the nutrients to sustain the plants. Shocked by the stench when I opened the bag, I looked more closely at the label, learning that “poultry litter” was the primary ingredient. As a vegetarian, I wasn’t very happy about that. Plus, I wondered, what had they fed those chickens? If what they had eaten hadn’t been organic, how could their droppings be?

I didn’t know the half of it! The birds locked up on those factory farms from which all that poultry litter comes are fed antibiotics, hormones, and — believe it or not — arsenic, all of which end up in their waste. So, that “organic” fertilizer isn’t so organic, after all!

Of course, concern for the environment and your own health are not the only reasons to avoid animal-based soil amendments. When you buy blood or bone meal (from slaughterhouses) or poultry litter (from factory farms), you’re helping to keep the cruel “animal agriculture” industry profitable. Moreover, when you buy any of those products, you’re also buying the idea that animals are exploitable resources rather than sentient beings with wishes and projects of their own.

What’s the alternative? Well, first, you might not need any soil amendments at all. Healthy soil with lots of organic matter doesn’t need your help to nourish plants. Keep the soil healthy by rotating crops and composting your garden waste each season. Dig in your composted kitchen scraps too and, in most cases, that’s all you’ll need to do, especially if you’ve used fall leaves as the brown matter when composting your scraps.

How can you tell if your soil is healthy and ready for gardening? One simple test is to put some of your soil into a quart-sized jar of water and let it settle. After several hours, the sand will settle to the bottom, the clay will float to the top, and the silt will sit in the middle. If the three layers are about even, you’ve got good loamy soil. If you’re soil is too heavy in either clay or sand, adding organic matter such as compost or leaf mold can fix the problem, improving the drainage of clay soils or slowing down the drainage of sandy soils.

What about the basic chemicals — primarily nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium (the N-P-K that you see on fertilizer labels) — that plants need to grow? Again, a soil that is healthy and high in organic matter ought to be okay. You can use one of those soil testing kits at the garden store to check, but I never have. If you do discover a problem in the course of the growing season, such as slow growth of greenery due to lack of nitrogen or poor fruiting due to low potassium, there are plenty of soil amendments that do not depend on the exploitation of animals.

For nitrogen, seaweed, kelp meal, coffee grounds (shade grown and fair trade, of course!), soybean meal, and alfalfa meal are all good. For potassium, try wood ash, greensand, or seaweed. For phosphorus, you can’t beat rock phosphate. And, of course, compost is a great source of all three! Check out this handy chart of the N-P-K analysis of vegan garden amendments courtesy of the North American Vegetarian Society.

Those of us who shun animal-based amendments and also avoid killing insects call ourselves “veganic” gardeners. For more information on veganic gardening, see this article on plant-based agriculture and this article on cruelty-free agriculture.

I’ll probably have more to say about all of this, along with more tips, as the season continues. In the meantime, if you have some tips or resources to share, please do! One of these days, I’m going to get around to writing a book about veganic agricultural practices from around the world. And of course, like all gardeners, I’m always eager to hear about and try out the creative innovations of other plant fanatics.

Oh, and, please do pass this along to your friends who garden!

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go outside and dig with the chickens…

May 19th, 2007 | Category: Birds, Gardening, Insects, Sanctuary | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL

Deb:
May 19th, 2007 at 10:25 pm

I’ve gotten really into the idea of gardening lately. I have a patio, and I have some stuff growing in containers, but I want to do more. I want to grow as much as possible. It started as a vauge idea that I should grow some herbs, and maybe a tomato plant. Then I saw “Food Not Lawns” on AK Press’ website when I started looking for resources on gardening. I was talking to some friends about it at Bluestockings (actually, I think that was the day you talked about Aftershock, for some ironic coincidence! we had a few hours to hang out there before your talk) and someone sitting nearby overheard me, and was really excited that I was talking about this, because she was very passionate about it. “It” being the idea of growing everything possible in whatever space we find to grow things in urban areas.

Anyway, I recently read “Food Not Lawns” cover to cover, and I simply can’t recommend it strongly enough. The author is not an animal rights person, so there were a couple of things I did find disturbing in it, but overall, if you want to know how to build an entire ecosystem in your backyard, or just how to do organic container gardening in your windowsill, she covers things that it simply wouldn’t occur to me to even think about. She even talks about letting the weeds grow, and never pulling a “weed” until you’ve identified it. Not only might it be a welcome volunteer, but even if it is a plant you don’t want in your garden, identifying it first will give you a clue as to the health of your soil.

She talks about composting, slime monsters, all kinds of things. It was a really exciting book to read. I wrote a review of it for Herbivore - I think it will be in the June online edition. It really got me fired up, and I think it is a really great resource for everyone. If I remember the number correctly, she says that a 25 sq ft garden can grow 100 lbs of food a year! I think we tend to think of gardening as something that people in the “country” can do, but the truth is that it is incredibly important to make use of urban areas to grow as much food as we can, if we’re to care about the earth.

So that would be my recommendation. I’m very new to gardening myself, so I don’t have any experience (other than to say my weeds are growing quite nicely! lol) to add to what you shared. I’m so excited to really get my garden going, to get my composting started, and whenever I walk around my neighborhood I’m looking at areas that might make good spots to do a little guerilla gardening.

pattrice:
May 20th, 2007 at 7:52 am

Thanks for mentioning Food Not Lawns, which I am eager to read. I’ll look for that review in Herbivore Magazine, to which all readers of this blog should subscribe.

I got much of my initial gardening information from a book called Small Space, Big Harvest. While I (obviously) disagree with the author’s endorsement of animal-based soil amendments, I found his tips on making the most out of small space invaluable. Those include growing vertically (up poles, fences, trellises, and make-shift contraptions) and using dynamic plant groupings rather than rows, with the plants closer together than the seed packets recommend. As the plants grow, their foliage eventually shades all of the ground, thereby saving water.

Charlotte:
May 20th, 2007 at 11:04 am

I hate lawns. Chrystos, a (definitely not animal-rights oriented) Native lesbian poet, has a LOT to say about how destructive they are… Wish I could find or remember the exact poem or even a few lines — I don’t have the book accessible though.

Even still, I thought I would just share my hatred of lawns — not only a complete waste of land and space that all SORTS of animals and plants could otherwise be using (including humans), but a way of “managing” nature that is particularly poisonous to everyone.

Charlotte

Deb:
May 20th, 2007 at 12:45 pm

I’ll have to look for that book as well. It sounds like it will have some great info for me trying to get started. I was shopping at mom’s today (my organic market, a local organic store) and was interested to note that they’re selling … I think they called it soil “tea”. Something like that. I know it was talked about in Food Not Lawns as well, where you make a “tea” out of mature compost. There is still a question of what their compost is made of that they’re using to make the tea, but it reminded me that in general there are many things you can do (as FNL and Small Space, Big Harvest obviously both talk about) to improve the health of the soil without adding in animal stuff or chemical stuff.

Charlotte, Food Not Lawns really opened my eyes to how destructive and wasteful lawns are. I just never thought about it before, I guess. But I definitely agree - lawns are really obvious symbols of some pretty ugly things.

Gary:
May 20th, 2007 at 11:34 pm

Pattrice, I started gardening in the suburbs many years ago for the same reason as you: tomatoes. Which seem to thrive in the DC area. I never had a garden as wondrous or diverse as yours, though!

I’ve become very interested in veganic gardening lately and have been browsing the web off and on the last several weeks for information.

I’ll have to read Food Not Lawns as well as Deb’s review. We let our lawn become overrun by “weeds” such as crabgrass, clover, dandelions, and wild onions long ago, but I still wonder about - and have to contend with - the social pressure to have a “manicured” lawn-looking thing in front of the house. It seems so arbitrary. Perhaps Food Not Lawns sheds some light on this.

Side note: You ever see commercial grounds crews spraying herbicides on tufts of weeds that grow through the cracks of the sidewalk? How many things are wrong with that picture? For one thing, it makes me sad.

pattrice:
May 21st, 2007 at 8:36 am

Gary, as I’ve written about in my article Truth Against Trash, I have been subjected to — and have given in to — intense pressure to mow down the hardy herbs that people call weeds.

And then there was the time, shortly after we moved to the property on which we would eventually start the Eastern Shore Sanctuary, when the nice neighbor lady sent her nephew over on a monstrous riding mower even though we had repeatedly said “no thank you” to offers of help with our “lawn.” He mowed down everything, including the culinary and medicinal herbs I had tucked among the wild things. That was a very bad day.

Like beef-eating and TB, lawns are a colonial legacy of deforested Europe. Does “Food Not Lawns” talk about that history, I wonder? I know that I read about it somewhere.

Deb:
May 21st, 2007 at 10:51 am

Food Not Lawns does touch on that, pattrice. She doesn’t go into it in any real depth, but definitely enough that it was (for me) eye-opening. And I’m not sure she talks about it from the perspective of colonization as much as .. I’m not sure, class issues? Control of the ability to grow food, and an obscene in-your-face show of wealth, both emphatically not growing food in fertile land, and also not allowing anyone else to. (and thus letting them potentially starve to death)

I went on a tour last fall of a park on long island with “wild steve brill”, who does these educational tours to show you and help you learn to identify edible “weeds” and mushrooms and tree fruit and stuff like that, which grow naturally, and are all around us, if only we knew how to see it. It was pretty cool. He’s been arrested for picking “weeds” in central park and eating them, if you can believe it.

Gary:
May 21st, 2007 at 1:52 pm

Although this may not be a *root* cause of the popularity of lawns, I sense that at this point, pressure to conform is one factor that sustains them. For as much as we pride ourselves as being individuals, it sure seems to me that most people are really afraid of anything that is too different than what they’re used to. (”Yuck, that has tofu?” as they’re eating a toxic and hormone-filled product of torture.) A front yard of native ground covers looks better IMHO than a grass lawn and is much better ecologically. But it’s *different.*

A monocultural expanse of fescue grass, engineered in government-subsidized and for-profit laboratories, marketed heavily, crowding out the indigenous plants, perpetuated through exterminating the native flora - often though chemicals, bordered on all sides by nearly identical monocultures, touted as something which we should desire…seems like an analogy or microcosm for so many things…

SuperWeed » Blog Archive » Veganic Gardening, Part 2:
June 11th, 2007 at 6:13 pm

[...] blog while looking for tips on veganic gardening, so I guess I’d better follow up my post oncruelty-free gardening with a few more helpful hints. In that post, I focused on soil amendments, giving suggestions for [...]

SuperWeed » Blog Archive » Becoming More Vegan:
January 19th, 2008 at 12:41 pm

[...] like to think of veganism as a process rather than a destination. Even organic vegetables are produced using herbicides and trucked to their destinations in insect-spattered, CO2-spewing vehicles. All any of us can do [...]

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