Canthook

Ploughman's Folly was a controversial book. It still is.

Edward Faulkner's farm was near Toledo, not too far from our family farm. When this book came out, my folks drove over and took a look. The crops looked terrible. Instead of the weedless, pestless fields of vigorous crops described in the book, the fields had scrawny plants, dying, overgrown by weeds.

And yet... It's not what a field looks like that matters. It's how much you're able to deliver to the elevator, and how much you have to spend to raise the crop.

Spurred on by the 22% interest rates and 13% inflation of the Carter administration (or was it 13% interest and 22% inflation?), young farmers started to question the assumptions under which farmers had been operating for the better part of a century. They started experimenting with no-till, with ridge-till, and other LISA (Low-Input, Sustainable Agriculture) practices, and what's more, the county extension services encouraged this.

About this same time, Mel Bartholemew published Square Foot Gardening and produced a television show of the same name on PBS. It was mostly an adaptation of the Faulkner idea to vegetable gardens.

Blondie and I moved from the country to the city in 1983. Our new home was on a lot smaller than our old vegetable garden, with the home itself taking up much of the lot, and a neighbor's tree shading much of the rest. We determined to make the best of it, and hauled in three pickup loads of extremely old goat manure, then we built long heaped beds. Bartholemew wants you to frame four-foot square gardens in railroad ties, but we set up beds 30" wide and 15' long, and instead of framing the beds, we simply heaped up the dirt, so that the paths were lower, and we hoped.

We may have cheaped out on the lumber, but we bought some sprinklers, and we used a lot of expensive city water. The results were phenomenal. We got more food out of each 15' bed than in previous years, we'd harvested from our entire garden. Instead of buying tomato cages, we drove 2x2 posts into the ground, and surrounded our tomato plants with livestock fencing. Our tomatoes were 30" in diameter, and 4' tall! Our broccoli was 3' tall, lush, dark green.

We loosely fastened a hurricane fence to the garage for support, and planted pickles. We had a huge crop! (Note to cucumber & pickle fans: you get MORE POUNDS of cucumbers overall, if you pick the cukes early, because larger fruits send out a hormone that prevents the plant from blossoming. What's more, the cucumbers don't have all those seeds.)

I would advise you to read Ploughman's Folly with a grain of salt, or perhaps with a pound of salt. Faulkner wasn't regarded as a wingnut by his neighbors for nothing. On the other hand, I do recommend that you read it.