When we first moved to Vancouver, we lived in an apartment, just off of Highway 14, Camas Highway. The apartment seemed large to us, but like most other apartments, lacked outdoor space. In summer when the windows were open, the road noise was constant. At this juncture in life, it seemed my farming and homesteading aspirations were largely limited to occasional readings from my then limited collection of books.
Shortly after starting working at Tektronix, I learned that the site where I worked had a community garden program where employees could use garden plots on the east side of the facility. I excitedly signed up to utilize one of those garden plots. The size of the plot was not large, probably 20' X 20'. I thought that was kind of odd that a garden plot would be sized that small, but I decided to not complain. We took advantage of the opportunity we had. We planted tomatoes, potatoes, peas, lettuce, and a few other things. Given that the garden was not right where we lived, it took specific effort to get to the garden and tend to it. The garden was a modest success. We enjoyed the food. We enjoyed being able to take our daughter to the garden. We enjoyed getting out and doing something productive, away from the apartment.
About a year after I started at Tektronix, my boss, John Jonez, decided to take a job with Tektronix in the UK. He asked if we would be interested in renting his house while they were out of the country. We worked on finangling our finances and decided that we could do that. It was nice to move to a nice little three bedroom house with a front and backyard on a quiet street. The backyard backed up to a green space, so no one lived directly behind us. Although tall fir trees were along the east side of the back yard, there was adequate sunlight to grow a few garden vegetables. Our favorite, and our oldest daughter's favorite was peas. Kirsten wasn't walking at the time, but liked to crawl in the grass in the back yard and sit herself down by the pea vines. I would sit with her and pop open the pea pods. We would relish in the deliciousness of the fresh green peas. As a child, I thought of them like candy. Sitting in the back yard of John's house, eating fresh peas, I thought the same thing. They are just like candy, only better.
While living in John's house, I found the Vancouver Library, and checked out a few books, primarily on farming, gardening, and homesteading. One that caught my attention enough to check out and read was Edward Faulkner's Plowman's Folly. Faulkner's book challenged the status quo in agriculture of the heavy iron practice of plowing with a moldboard plow. He argued that not plowing was much better for the soil and would yield higher yields. This struck me as curious, because I had contradictory experience.
When I worked for Rawl, one of the fields where he grew and I irrigated silage corn had the top section of the field sold one year. Rawl plowed and prepared the bottom section of the field for silage corn as usual. Very late in the process, the new owner of the top section asked Rawl if he wanted to farm the part of the field that he had purchased. Rawl said he did. The timing was such that Rawl couldn't logistically plow the field, so he only disked and harrowed it. The seedbed looked much the same. The corn germinated just the same. But as the summer wore on, that top section of the field was clearly stunted compared to the lower portion of the field. As a teen, I thought that was curious, but never really developed a solid idea of why that happened. The treatment throughout the field was exactly the same, except for the plowing.
I wondered why Faulkner's idea contradicted my personal experience. To this day, this is still a conundrum to me. I wondered if Faulkner's idea was purely unscientific speculation. Faulkner's idea has had the chance to ferment in my mind. I have read many other books related to tillage, no-till, fertility associated with aeration of the soil, weed pressures from tillage or not, etc. Overall, I am clear that plowing severely distrupts soil biology, but provides an imediate burst of plant nutrients from the decay of soil biota. Constantly plowed soils degrade over time as the soil biology is exhausted. I wonder if there is a balance that I would call minimum till, or perhaps periodic till. Maybe I will get a chance to experiment with that.
My time in Vancouver created the opportunity to experience the challenges of gardening away from where I lived, and also to begin a more technical journey through soil science, as I took advange of the "internet of the late 80's," the local library.
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