
MIRACULOUS ABUNDANCE
I am reading a most amazing book by a husband and wife team who began a small farm, La Ferme du Bec Hellouin, in 2004 in Normandy.
This small organic farm was deliberately and mindfully built as an alternative to the big industrialized agricultural farming complexes that take lots of expensive equipment and chemical compounds to produce food for the masses.
The farmers, Perrine and Charles Hervé-Gruyers, wanted to make a real family farm, one that produced good food and nourished their family and their neighbors. They wanted the farm to be the work of their own hands and they wanted it to be a viable business model that would be self-sustaining.
Over the years they brought together in one comparatively small place a collection of sustainable, bio-intensive small-farming methods and techniques which produces a mountain of food in a small place over and over again.
They’re still working on their last objective, turning the farm into a sustainable business, but it is starting to come together very well indeed.
FARM AS POEM
In the process they created a beautiful poem of a garden that supplies food for a number of local restaurants and is also an incubator of ideas and a resource and school that attracts students from around the world.
You can read about their work, their mistakes, and their triumphs in their book, MIRACULOUS ABUNDANCE: One Quarter Acre, Two French Farmers and Enough Food to Feed the World.
MARKET GARDENERS OF FRANCE
The first, foundational bio-intensive gardening idea the Hervé-Gruyers incorporated into their own gardens was la culture maraîchère, market gardening. This form of gardening developed in the heart of Paris during the second half of the 19th century and was pretty much the direct descendant of the gardeners who provided the raw materials to the chefs and cooks who fed the kings and nobility of France.
The success of the market gardeners of France from the late 1600’s though the early 1900’s established urban gardening practices that have lasted well into the 21st century and have spawned other methods of growing that are also remarkable ways to produce a lot of good-quality food.
The French urban gardeners evolved intensive soil-building techniques and developed extraordinary methods for extending the growing season.
Prince Peter Kropotkin, a Russian anarchist writer of the late 19th century, was very impressed by the Parisian market gardeners. He pointed to them as an example of how local communities could become thriving, self-sufficient communities and used them as working models that showed how his ideas of strong local economies and self-determination could work.
Eliot Coleman, author of THE WINTER HARVEST HANDBOOK: : Year Round Vegetable Production Using Deep-Organic Techniques and Unheated Greenhouses, tells us,
“The cultivated land of the Parisian growers covered up to one-sixteenth (6 percent) of all the land within the city limits of Paris. And the produce selection was remarkable.” Coleman continues, “This system fed Paris all year round with the widest variety of both in-season and out-of-season fruits and vegetables. Hotbeds heated with decomposing horse manure and covered with glass frames allowed the growers to defy the cold and produce fresh salads in January and early cucumbers and melons in May and June.”
The market gardeners were the early forerunners of the post-modern idea of “eating as local as you can.” They made it real more than 150 years ago.
“French intensive gardening,” as it was called in English, was designed to grow the maximum amount of vegetables on the minimum area possible. Urban plots used for this way of gardening were invariably small and noncontinuous, after all.
The average Parisian market garden was between one and two acres in size. The plants were grown on eighteen-inch beds of combined straw and horse manure from the stables. Crops were planted so close together that when the plants were mature, their leaves would barely touch.
This close spacing provided a mini-climate and a living mulch that reduced weed growth and helped hold moisture in the soil.
Companion planting — growing certain plants together that enhance each other – was used. For example, strawberries and green beans produce better when grown together; whereas onions stunt the growth of green beans.
In addition to companion planting, gardeners developed an elaborate schedule of succession planting to get the most from the land throughout the growing season. Timing was key. An early spring hotbed would be sown with radish and carrot seed broadcast and then transplanted with lettuces at the same time.
First, the radishes would be harvested, making more room for the carrots growing between the lettuces. The carrot tops would stick out from around the lettuces until the lettuces were harvested, which gave the carrots enough light and space to complete their growth.
But, as soon as the lettuces were harvested, young cauliflower transplants would be set out among the carrots. Once the carrots were pulled the cauliflowers had the frame to themselves until they were harvested and the ground was prepared for the next crops.
Gardeners grew up to nine crops each year and could even grow melon plants during the winter.
The goal of the market gardener was always to “tend the smallest amount of land possible, but tend it exceptionally well.” The work was non-stop. The care given to each individual plant was highly detailed-oriented and labor-intensive. Soil-building became almost a cult.
Among the garden marketers who rented land to make their gardens, it was a condition of the standard renting contract that the gardener could carry his soil away down to a certain depth when his tenancy ends.
The reasoning went that because he made soil himself, it belonged to him and when he moved to another plot he could carry his soil away, together with his frames, water pipes and other belongings.
Pesticides and chemicals were avoided. (Kropotkin called them “pompously labelled and unworthy drugs.”) Large amounts of compost, crop rotation, diversity, companion planting and plant protection were enough to prevent most diseases and pest outbreaks.
It was felt that pests attacked only sick and weak plants; healthy plants in healthy soil would not need extraordinary measures. Also, small plots with diverse plantings have a tendency to keep pests from multiplying as they do in monoculture plantings where one pest infestation can wipe out entire fields.
The techniques of season-extension for which the gardeners were especially celebrated began at the royal potager gardens at Versailles under the celebrated head gardener La Quintiie in the 1670s and 80s.
These practices were extended and enhanced so much that the established urban gardens of the late 19th century could provide fresh vegetables for much of the year in Paris.
Potager du Roi, Versailles by Joy Weese Moll via Flickr [CC BY-NC 2.0]
Even more impressive, one source says, “A great number of the Paris maraîchèrs, even of those who have their gardens within the walls of the city and whose main crop consists of vegetables in season, export the whole of their produce to England.”
Market gardening was introduced to England by C. M. McKay, a Fellow of the Royal Horticultural Society, who led an expedition to Paris to see the techniques in 1905. A number of how-to books were published for English audiences, including a popular one by McKay himself.
The techniques became quite popular, although they never quite achieved the level of sophistication seen in Paris.
In the 1920s and 1930s, English gardener and dramatist Alan Chadwick experimented extensively with the French intensive techniques, combining them with techniques from Austrian Rudolf Steiner’s biodynamic method to form the “French Intensive-Biodynamic” method of gardening.
After the First World War, la culture maraîchère began to wane in France and England. Land values soared, and empty lots were developed or became too valuable for gardens. More importantly, cars replaced horses on city streets, and the straw and manure that had been so important disappeared.
In the 1960s, Alan Chadwick brought his techniques to America on a 4-acre organic student garden at the University of California’s Santa Cruz campus. Starting with a hilly area of poor, clayey soil, Chadwick was able to eventually produce healthy topsoil and yields four times that of conventional agricultural methods.
Chadwick grew his crops on rounded raised mounds and used the “double dig” method – removing the top soil layer, exposing the subsoil or hardpan beneath, breaking it up, adding organic matter, and replacing the topsoil that was initially removed. This provided greater drainage and aeration.
Paul A. Lee’s book, THERE IS A GARDEN IN THE MIND: A Memoir of Alan Chadwick and the Organic Movement in California, tells the story.
The techniques developed by Chadwick and the movement he spawned were studied by John Jeavons of Ecology Action, who wrote a popular book promoting these methods under the name GROW-BIOINTENSIVE. Jeavons’ book, HOW TO GROW MORE VEGETABLES THAN YOU EVER THOUGHT POSSIBLE ON LESS LAND THAN YOU CAN IMAGINE (usually abbreviated to just the first five words), was first published in 1974. An organic gardening classic, it helped to revive and extend the French Intensive Methods for a new generation in a new country.
Even at the height of market gardening, the people who were most impressed with the results did have some reservations.
Kropotkin, for example, pointed out, “And yet the Paris gardener is not our ideal of an agriculturist…. He toils, with but a short interruption, from three in the morning till late in the night. He knows no leisure; he has no time to live the life of a human being; the commonwealth does not exist for him; his world is his garden, more than his family.”
On the other hand, there is all that beautiful, beautiful food…..
Ron Finley, in this TED talk, tells about his efforts to grow food for himself and his neighbors in his community in South Central Los Angeles. The poem continues….
Here’s another poem:
MOON IN TAURUS
The moon grows full
A planting moon.
Time it is to sow
The seeds for anything
You want to grow
Strong and fertile.
Stability enfolds you
In its wide warmth,
A sensual touch that
Grounds you deep and solid…
So solid that you may not
Want to move the way
The world says you must,
The way your heart says you must.
And what is it that
Nurtures you, Moon Child?
What is it that deepens you
And makes you stronger?
It is calling you,
Your comfort and your strength.
It is waiting to embrace you.
Do not be afraid.
Go to it.
By Netta Kanoho
Picture credits: Scenes From An Urban Garden by Travis Ford via Flickr [CC BY 2.0]; all book covers via Amazon.com
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28 thoughts on “MIRACULOUS ABUNDANCE”
Your site is very intriguing. I like very much how your poem connected to the sowing and growing. Thank you for sharing.
I love gardening!! I like the ideas of the Parisian gardeners. I have always wanted to do more of a year-round garden. It requires time and effort here in the midwestern US.
What is really inviting about it is the staggering of crops getting more production. This does require a lot of planning. I learn bet my doing perhaps if there was some type of trial garden I would try it.
Hey Jan:
Thanks for the visit and your comments. The bio-intensive garden thing really does work, but it is also very labor-intensive and nitpicky.
However, all the “intensive-ness” and labor is the result of having LOTS of beds to tend.
if you just start with one (small) planter and make the soil all good then do like a salad garden with some lettuce or other leafy green and a root crop and some other add-on (like maybe an herb or tasty treat) then slowly add one more planter then another one and then another, pretty soon you’ll have a wonderment of food production.
You could maybe grow stuff for one salad recipe, then start a second one with the ingredients for a different sort of salad….and so on. Eventually it could take over your life, of course, so you have to watch that.
Coming from a country where agriculture is important, i could really appreciate this content. It makes me wondr what techniques our farmers are using to keep up with demand, especially since we are always being encouraged to ‘buy local’. Despite this we’re import-driven…but perhaps if we adapted to utilise some of these methods we could increase yields and feed our population more efficiently. Definite food for thought. Thanks for sharing Netta.
Hey Joshua: The bio-intensive methods have been around for many years now and there are people who are doing it…more and more of them all the time. This is a really good thing! Thanks for your visit and your comments. Please do come again….
Thanks for letting me know on Flickr that you used my Potager du Roi photo, which brought me to this post. I loved learning all about Parisian market gardens. How cool!
My trip to France was a garden tour. We visited three places with substantial potagers. Here are my blog posts about them:
Potager du Roi
Chateau de Valmer
Villandry
Moon in Taurus is a lovely poem.
Hey Joy: Thank you again for sharing your image. It added so much to the post. I am glad you liked it. Please come again!
I have always wanted to start an organic gardens for myself and my children. The book “how to grow more vegetables than you ever thoughts possible” looks amazing. Do you have a vegetable garden? and have these books helped you increase your yield? I would really like to get my garden up and running but I do not have a lot of space. Perhaps this is the book for me
Hey Keith:
Thanks for your visit and your comments. Yes, we do have several gardens. Each one is different. The Light of My Life has been a life-long gardener and for a long while we had an organic vegetable garden that used a lot of the same permaculture/grow-your-own soil kind of thinking in these books. It produced a lot of food…enough for us, the neighbors, a passel of friends, and the assorted wild birds and other critters in the area. This was despite living in the middle of a rain-forest with severe root competition from banyans and eucalpytus trees, with the occasional incursions by wild pigs that live in the forest.
Our problem now is that we’ve got a herd of cattle (about 30+ head) from a neighboring pasture that keeps invading the forest and the property and it’s put paid to the veggy garden effort. One (or more) of the leaders of the bovine gang is expert at escaping their confines and the darned herd roams all over the place, trampling and munching stuff. (Sigh!)
The next plan is to build an enclosed organic garden in raised beds….Sheesh!
Netta
Thank you for a very informed article on the small gardens that fed Paris and seems to be making somewhat of a comeback in the Community Gardens some areas have. We would do well to continue yhese and to have more local grown produce available.
I have heard of a program that encourages schools to purchase local grown produce. Have you heard of it?
Thanks for a great post.
Sanders
Hey Sanders:
Thank you for the visit and for sharing your thoughts. Even better than the program that encourages schools to buy locally grown produce, there’s one (on Maui, at least) that encourages the surrounding community to help elementary school kids grow a garden. One of the biggest of these gardens is at Haiku School in East Maui.
Every year, the school also puts together a “Ho’olaulea,” a festival celebrating agriculture, the local history of the small community and local culture in general. It’s a grand effort that benefits assorted school programs including a fairly large vegetable garden that the kids tend with help from their elders. We just attended the Ho’olaulea this past weekend.
Local crafters have booths. Musicians play live at the all-day event. Local growers sell all kinds of ornamental and tropical plants. The PTA puts together a bake sale and a silent auction. There are lots of games for the kids. People have a very good time talking story with neighbors and other folks. It’s all good.
Please do come again….
Hi There!
Thanks for this article! As an aspiring creator a sustainable farming operation myself, I’m very interested in this topic.
I love the idea of “Farm as Poem” and now think I’ll incorporate something of the sort into my future vision. I had also never heard of the “double-dig” method, but it makes a ton of sense.
Have you heard of Singing Frogs Farm up near Sonoma, CA? This farm is utilizing a technique called “no-till agriculture” and has seen dramatic returns.
Overall, thank you for this informative article! I especially appreciated your poem at the conclusion!
Hey Tucker:
Thanks for your visit and for sharing your thoughts. Thanks for the heads-up about Singing Frog Farms. Cool!
Please do come again!
I am all for organic foods and I agree with some point about the books in this article. I feel once we can get back to growing our foods individually, the better, hoping to see a future where Pesticides and chemicals are avoided and organic farming is highly supported and organic farmers are appreciated for their input to help save the earth. About time to start encouraging quality food just as mother nature designed it.
Funmi, thanks for your visit and for sharing your thoughts. I do agree with you, of course.
Please do come again.
Beautiful poem. My son runs a produce farm. A legal business on only a quarter of an acre, and does exactly what you talk about here. He produced thousands of pounds of produce last year, and this year will be even bigger. He sells his produce at a local farmer’s market. Of course, I steal quite a bit of it for our own uses and freeze enough for the winter. We live in Michigan where we do have long cold seasons, but he does a lot of beets, radishes, cold planting. Then the summer stuff comes gets planted next turn. Thus, he’s not having to till every year because the ground is nice and broken up from the previous crop. He is also conscious that what he plants replaces nutrients from the last harvest as well. He also incorporates what is called a three sister garden. Where the three sisters help each other grow and utilizes the limited space.
I highly recommend your readers to check out the books you offered and look in on doing this kind of gardening as well if they have a small piece of land. The food is so much better for than what is massed produce and you may make friends with the neighbors at the same time. Thank you for your lovely article.
Thanks for your visit and for sharing your story, Sara. It’s wonderful that your son has put together his system of producing so much food. Lovely!
Please do come again….
Hey
I love gardening too. I have my small farm and I am searching for ways to improve my production and diversify more. So thanks for this great article.
I know that according to seasons, we can cultivate different product. But being able to mix different products is really a good idea, I have never tried it. But is it safe? Because some products can be affected by insects, so when they are all together will it not affect everything?
Thanks for sharing!
Hey Adyns68, thanks for your visit and your thoughts. I am glad the post is a help to you.
My own understanding is that mono-culture crops — where you just grow one thing at a time in a field — tend to fall victim to bugs and diseases of one type or another and your whole field can get wiped out. (Most famous of these was the Irish potato famine, when all the potatoes rotted in the fields and everybody starved.) .
We tend to do mixed plantings for our salad vegetables and herbs in our raised-bed gardens. If you get really good at it, you might be able to do companion plantings where one type of plant actually nurtures and nourishes the ones around them or serves as sacrificial bug-bait so that the other plants can thrive.)
Now if we could only figure out why the stupid bufo toads like burrowing down into the arugula patch….
Hey Netta,
This is an unique and informative article I must say. The story of the couple of Normandy motivated me a lot. My hobby is gardening and I wanted to do something big with my hobby. I am thinking it might be better to change my hobby into business as I see a lot of opportunities. Moreover I liked your poem very much as it’s so connected with farming.
Thank you very much for this helpful article.
Thanks for your visit and for sharing your story, Extrovert1. I had to smile about the thing of turning your hobby into a business.
Watching friends who do just that has taught me that growing crops for business can be a lot hairy. You have to be able to guarantee that you will always have the kinds of produce your customers need when they need it. It’s a brave and bold move.
Please do come again.
Wow! This is very intriguing and interesting to read. Your blog just ranked atop on my list of worthy contents. Coming from the background where agriculture and gardening was placed so high and given prominence, I couldn’t help than to commend this post. The book How to grow more vegetables than you ever thoughts possible seemed to me like a worthy possession which is really capable of guiding to set up a garden. Though I have knowledge about gardening owing to my background but work related tasks has taken it all from me, maybe this would serve as a ginger to get me back on track. Maybe starting up with the Parisian gardening..just maybe.
altogether, thanks for sharing this knowledge based post
I do appreciate your visit and you sharing your thoughts. I am pleased that you liked the post and I do hope that you’ll get back to the garden. Everybody needs a tomato to smile at, I say.
Please do come again….
I love reading, I know that the earth loves the natural and returns what you give multiplied, so it is possible that people are fed with products from your area, avoid both the transport and the speculation of basic foods.
It is truly inspiring to have a natural garden, in the book “The Instant Millionaire” by Mark Fisher, the Protagonist in his advanced age takes care of his roses with so much love that I fell in love with the idea of having a garden and
spending long hours taking care of him, Regards- Antonia
Thanks for your visit and for sharing your thoughts Antonia. The love you put into a garden is multiplied ten-fold, I think. It is, for me, an abiding pleasure. I hope it will be one for you as well.
Please do come again.
How fascinating about the sustainable vegetable growing in Paris I never knew the history and was amazed as to how much they could produce on a quarter acre. It amuses me that we are now coming full circle back to eating local and need to better understand these techniques.
Thanks for a great factual and informative article.
Lily, thank you for the visit and for sharing your thoughts. I’m glad you enjoyed the post.
Please do come again.
Wow, Hi there,
Finally, I have just read something different for a change. Nature and the ground never lies.
Definitely reading books that talk only about success stories never really changes the mind. Books that talk about mistakes, errors and failures and success are a great read. I have bookmarked “Miraculous Abundance” for a definite read
What a great article full of inspiration. I am definitely starting a small garden around my house today. Feeding just my family will be making a difference.
Thank you so much. I will be sharing this article with friends and family
Akumendoh, your comment makes me smile. I am so glad that the post got you excited about gardening. I do agree with your thought that “Nature and the ground never lies,” and I hope you have fun in your garden-to-be.
Please do come again….