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The Perennial Garden project
By Fred McColly
The Perennial Garden Project grew out of a series of conversations between Dr. Kathleen Forgey, a Physical Anthropologist on the faculty of Indiana University Northwest, and myself that stretched from the spring of 2008 until the actual creation of the garden in the autumn of 2009. We were discussing the dependence of the food system in the United States on petrochemicals, not only as a basis for agricultural inputs such as fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides, but also in the transport system that ships produce and processed food from across the continent and from around the world. This food on demand system has divorced the population from the concept of eating what is in season locally and has so bloated the industrial food system's use of energy that it now takes multiple calories of energy to produce and deliver one calorie of food.
I had been reading books by Paul Roberts, Wendell Berry, Michael Pollan, Stephen Brush, Albert Howard, and Richard Heinberg on the subjects of food and energy. Through them ( specifically from Richard Heinberg) I learned of the work Wes Jackson and his associates were doing at the Land Institute in Kansas on breeding strains of perennial cereal grains. Perennial grains would eliminate a sizable percentage of petrochemical use in agriculture and the idea got us to wondering about why perennials had been abandoned in the first place. Were they more work than annuals? Fewer calories per unit of work in the fields? Was group mobility an issue in the switch to annuals? We decided to ask the university if we could grow a test garden to explore some of these ideas. We are growing annual and perennial grasses (including Eastern Gamagrass and a few strains of Teosinte, both possible ancestors of corn, as well as Intermediate Wheatgrass) to compare seed production in an effort to answer some of our questions about domestication. We are also working with perennial tubers. This season we are growing Red Nordland potatoes, Chinese Yams, and Jerusalem Artichokes trying to establish a rotation of tubers that will produce a supply of staples throughout a growing season. We have far more questions than answers and the garden will be an open-ended project. Next season we are looking at adding the Andean tubers Oca and Yacon to expand our tuber population's diversity. "Green manures" such as Cowpeas and Velvet beans are another area we are exploring as we try to add to compost and manure as methods of keeping our garden organically fertile.
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