s you pull into Cindy Conners driveway, three structures in her backyard immediately draw attention: a waist-high box painted cobalt blue with yellow swirls; a tall rectangle like a giant birdhouse with a slide; an old typewriter case outfitted with shiny silver wings. Poised on patio stones in the midst of herbs and zinnias, they turn out to be two solar food dryers and a cooker. Conner, a biointensive gardener and teacher, is testing them in her effort to minimize fossil fuel use and better inform her students and blog readers about sustainable living. Having built the dryers herself, she laments that she had to purchase her Sunoven cooker from a retailer. Id really like to build one thats bigger, that can stay outside all the time, and I will, she says. Conner aims to live lightly on the land. As a biointensive gardener, she focuses on the sustainability of the whole system, using techniques like crop rotation, cover cropping, and green manure to ensure the health of her soil and plants. In doing so, she produces some amazing results. She uses only hand tools (no tiller!), and she doesnt need manure to keep the nitrogen levels up. As the world population explodes and questions about feeding the world abound, Conner shows how small spaces can produce large amounts of food, even without off-farm inputs or manure. Her results are applicable not only to traditional rural spaces, but also suburban and urban settings, while they are low-cost and self-reliant. Im studying a closed-circle garden, watching what happens if I limit outside inputs, she explains. In the ideal system, my familys humanure would be put back on the garden. Her garden paths are now planted in white clover or mulched with oak leaves from the yard, rather than with cardboard or newsprint, so she doesnt bring in outside materials. She does have goats and sometimes chickens, and
uses their manure for compost in some beds, but shes also researching a diet plan that doesnt include meatso for much of her garden, she uses compost made from only plant materials. What Ive discovered is that I can make terrific compost without adding manure, she notes. Pragmatism, organization, and thoughtful observation are hallmarks of her style, both as a teacher and gardening expert. She was a market gardener for 10 years, selling to restaurants and at farmers markets, had a community-supported agriculture program, and taught at her local community college for 11 years and continues to lead workshops. Conners meticulous record-keeping and note-taking, including weighing biomass, allow her to accurately calculate key information like yields, seed requirements, and profits. This data collection may seem over the top for some, but it helps her to teach so effectively. All these traits and skills contribute to Conners amazingly organized yet lush garden, with 4,000 square feet of total growing area. Thirty-six rectangular plots, each 4 feet by 20 feet, are a feast to the eyes as well as the stomach: some beds reach for the sky with tall crops like corn, while others grow lower cowpeas or host baking compost piles. Up and down, up and down the beds gosprawling squash, frilly carrot seedlings, sorghum, peanuts, purple sweet potatoes, and more. Grapevines, young apple trees, and filbert bushes fill in the margins. Prickly magenta castor beans and their large burgundy star-shaped leaves (meant to deter voles) shoot up here and there. No plot is static. Shoots rise anew out of just-finished crops. The artwork of family and friends adorns both Conners garden and farmhouse paintings, drawings, photos, metalwork, wood carving, and pottery, as if her fertile soil grows ideas along with food. Intense but not intimidating, Conner, who just turned 60, pulls this off without being heavy-handed. Greeting a visitor, she wears her diversity vest, a symbolic garment she made
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with no two pieces alike. Now a grandmother who had four children of her own, shes seen enough to know that you cant set anything in stone, either in the garden or in life. I planted buckwheat there, but the birds ate it, she notes dryly, walking by a bed in transition. Conner has a gift for adapting agricultural techniques like crop rotation and cover cropping, typically used on farms, to gardens, a subject often glossed-over in gardening literature. Shes also adept at simplifying what can seem daunting to the beginner while offering plenty of substance for more advanced folks as well, such as in her late-summer blog entry on Choosing Which Cover Crop to Plant Where. Giving a garden tour, she explains why you would want to grow rye only to chop it down with a sickle, leaving it as a weed-suppressing mulch and slow-release fertilizer. The rye soaks up all the goodness to give it back to the corn next year, says Conner. Asked about difficulties that can arise when planting seeds into stubble, she gently points out that you need to prepare transplants if youre going to plant into certain stubble (like rye), wait longer for the root clumps to decompose, or prepare the ground using a less bulky crop like buckwheat. She shows off her compost piles located right in the garden beds, worked into the rotationgood for the soil but also time-efficient and easy on the back, since material doesnt have to be schlepped out of the garden for decomposition only to be hauled back into it for fertilizing. To spread the word about her methods, Conner recently produced two instructional DVDs with the help of her son Luke Connera filmmaker who trains, works, and shows his oxen team when not behind a camera. Offering detailed instructions on Cover Crops and Compost Crops IN Your Garden, her first DVD fills a void in the marketplace for folks seeking more than a conceptual overview, going the extra mile to offer details on implementation. The second, entitled Develop a Sustainable Vegetable Garden Plan is equally instructional, again using Conners own garden as an example, but also sharing the tales of nine other people following her methods. It includes fun footage of their families and gardens in their real-world yards from urban to rural, and comes with a companion CD packed full of useful worksheets and forms as well. Originally from Ohio and an alumna of Ohio State, Conner credits fellow Ohioan Gene Logsdonwell-known Farming Magazine contributoras a big influence. I got Two Acre Eden at our library, she says over a lunch of home-
grown veggiesincluding tasty potatoes boiled in the solar cookerwith pickles and freshly baked bread. I would take it out regularly and reread it. Ducking into a back room of her farmhouse, Conner emerges, grinning, with a copy of Gene Logsdons Practical Skills: A Revival of Forgotten Crafts, Techniques, and Traditions. Theres so much good information in here! she says, noting she likes that he talks from experience but isnt afraid to change his mind. Later, Conner became interested in John Jeavons method of biointensive farming, in which natures patterns are mimicked in an effort to grow soil rapidly rather than deplete it. Growing enough carbon crops for the compost has been the key, she says. If you grow the right things, magic happens! Conner is certified by Jeavons research and educational organization Ecology Action as a GROW BIOINTENSIVE Sustainable Mini-farming instructor, and she grows according to his principles. Jeavons method involves eight specific aspects: deep soil preparation (also called double digging), composting, close plant spacing, open-pollinated seeds, the use of carbon/calorie crops (such as corn for both calories and compost carbon), special calorie root crops (such as potatoes and sweet potatoes), companion planting, and a focus on the whole system. Jeavons had that trademarked so that when you saw GROW BIOINTENSIVE written in all caps, it would mean that the eight aspects were being followed, since people tend to throw the word biointensive around like everything else, Conner explains. Both Conner and her mentor aim to help people everywhere feed themselves. His work extends to many countries with impoverished areas where large equipment is out of the question, she notes. Conner doesnt even talk about pesticides or chemical fertilizers. Although I dont use the chemicals, I never say I avoid them since I never really think about them. They arent part of my life at all, she says. Everything I do can be summed up in feed the soil, build the ecosystem. Although she could be certified organic, she chooses to focus on the sustainability of her system, noting that its possible to be certified organic without being sustainablefor example, by bringing in compost or feed, or using hybrid seeds. Increasingly, Conner is also writing and teaching about cooking and sustainable living. Her next project will focus on getting the food to the table, explaining the experimental dryers and cooker in her garden. On a sweltering July day, her house outside Richmond, Virginia, is remarkably cool,
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Conners Favorite Tools: Collinear hoe: I use the standard 7 collinear hoe now, but I also have a narrow one that is quite useful, when the handle isnt broken. They are both good for working around plants with close spacing. Johnnys has them at www.johnnyseeds.com. Cobra head tool: Great for weeding! Spade: I use my spade for edging the beds and shoveling compost. It is most helpful in double digging, but I dont have to do that anymore. I double dug years ago and the roots of the cover crops do my digging now. Mattock: This is great for taking off sod in a new area and clearing paths that may have been overgrown. Trowel: Always good for any small digging task. Soil knife/Lesche digging tool: Helpful especially for transplanting into cereal rye stubble, available from www.waycooltools.com. Trake: Use this for cultivating and weed scratching; if you lean on it, it also helps you get up! Sickle: Cut down cover crops with the sickle. My favorite is the Japanese one with a 6-inch blade from www. hidatool.com. Machete: Use it on the cornstalks before composting them. It was fun when (my son) Luke had friends over and mom was walking around the garden with a machete. Garden fork: It has flat tines and is used when double digging, forking compost, and loosening beds.
given shade trees and cross ventilation. Topics of discussion over lunch range from her foray into sustainable black locust fence posts to compost toilets to her daughters near-zero waste wedding. (They produced only one bag of garbage for more than a hundred people.) Conner even aims to produce her own cloth by growing fiber. I would like to grow cotton, learn to spin it, and eventually make a vest out of it. In sharing her knowledge and methods, Conner says she teaches what she knows to be true. Perhaps paradoxically, one of those things is that each persons creativity is key. Dont ever get too locked in, she says. Keep an open mind. Try things. See how it works for you. For more information, including on ordering Conners DVDs, check out her website at www.homeplaceearth.com.
Kristi Bahrenburg Janzen is a freelance writer covering local and organic food and agriculture. She lives in Maryland with her husband, children, and dogs.
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