Capítulo 1
Cultivating Self-Sufficiency in an Uncertain Future
The world is on the precipice of profound change, and your garden may soon become more than a hobby-it could be your lifeline. Steve Solomon's "Gardening When It Counts" stands as a clarion call for practical food production amid looming resource constraints. Unlike glossy gardening books promising picture-perfect harvests with minimal effort, Solomon delivers hard-earned wisdom from decades of growing food through both prosperity and hardship. As a former seed company founder who now feeds his household year-round from his Tasmanian garden at age 63, Solomon's approach resonates with increasing urgency as global oil dependency, climate change, and economic instability converge. His methods have gained unexpected validation as celebrities like Nicole Kidman and Mark Ruffalo have embraced self-sufficient gardening during recent global disruptions, recognizing what Solomon foresaw years earlier-that growing your own food isn't just satisfying; it may soon be essential.
Capítulo 2
The Coming Resource Crunch and How Gardens Can Save Us
Our civilization faces an inevitable transition away from oil dependency, with far-reaching implications for everything from transportation to food production. As working people experience declining purchasing power while necessities become increasingly expensive, many will turn to growing their own food-only to discover that popular intensive gardening methods require unsustainable amounts of water, manure, and fertilizer.
This approaching resource crunch demands a fundamental rethinking of how we garden. The postage-stamp raised beds celebrated in contemporary gardening literature simply won't produce enough food when times get tough. History offers instructive examples: during Britain's hard times from 1930-1950s, the government provided "allotments" of at least 2,700 square feet to citizens, making the difference between health and hunger. Similarly, when Cuba faced crisis after the Soviet collapse, urban gardens of one-third acre began producing 60% of the nation's vegetables.
For a family of two adults, approximately 2,000 square feet of growing area can supply roughly half your daily calories year-round. In climates with frozen winter soil, you'll need about 50% more land plus preservation methods. The humble potato emerges as the most efficient crop for hard times, producing far more nutrition per square foot than cereal grains. Originally from South America, the potato's remarkable productivity caused population booms throughout northern Europe after 1700, creating waves of migrants to North America.
Solomon's approach to land management reflects ecological realities often overlooked in gardening literature. In climates where soil doesn't freeze solid to at least 18 inches for several continuous months, you can't grow vegetables on the same land for more than 3-5 years without serious disease and pest problems. His solution is maintaining two garden areas of about 2,000 square feet each-while one grows vegetables, the other rests under grass and clover (a "ley") for 3-5 years, rebuilding organic matter and restoring healthy soil biology.
This rotation system creates noticeably better growth for the first two years after breaking new ground. By the fourth year, disease and slower growth signal it's time to rotate again. Including paths, fruit bushes, trees, and herbs, Solomon's total garden encompasses about 6,500 square feet inside a wildlife-proof fence-a realistic scale for serious food production.
Capítulo 3
Understanding Vegetables as Domesticated Weaklings
Every vegetable began as a barely edible wild plant that humans have transformed into oversized weaklings. While wild plants fiercely compete for light, moisture and space, our vegetables lack these survival skills. Wild plants toughen up during drought; vegetables become inedible. Wild plants adapt to shade and poor soil; vegetables typically die.
Luther Burbank described domestication as a contract: plants agree to change according to human desires, while humans promise to reduce competition and provide better growing conditions. Through this relationship, we've created plants with bigger leaves (lettuce), enlarged flowers (broccoli), fewer but fatter seeds (beans), enlarged root storage (carrots), and better-tasting fruits with thinner skins (tomatoes).
The implications for gardeners are profound-vegetables require more care than wild plants or field crops. They fall into three categories based on their soil needs:
1. Low-demand vegetables (carrots, beets, beans, peas) can cope with ordinary soil if well-loosened, though they become far more productive in fertile conditions.
2. Medium-demand vegetables (lettuce, potatoes, tomatoes, corn) need significantly enriched soil with additions like agricultural lime plus well-rotted manure or quality compost.
3. High-demand vegetables require light, loose, consistently moist, highly nutritious soil to grow rapidly and remain palatable.
This understanding helps explain why plants may struggle despite your best efforts. The principle of limiting factors applies: if any essential nutrient is deficient, plant growth will be limited to the level permitted by that nutrient, regardless of how abundant other nutrients may be.
To address these needs, Solomon formulated a complete organic fertilizer (COF) based on extensive research. This balanced amendment uses natural substances to provide optimal nutrition without the imbalances that can occur when using local compost or manure from nutrient-deficient soils. The basic formula combines seedmeal with agricultural lime, gypsum, dolomite lime, phosphorus sources, and kelpmeal or basalt dust-creating a dry, odorless fertilizer that won't burn plants if overapplied while significantly improving vegetable quality and nutritional content.
Capítulo 4
The Essential Toolkit for Serious Gardening
Contrary to the garden industry's marketing, successful gardening doesn't require expensive equipment. For managing a garden up to a quarter acre, only four essential tools are needed: an ordinary combination shovel, a common hoe, a bow rake, and a 10-12 inch metal file with handle for keeping the tools sharp.
The revelation that transforms gardening from exhausting labor to satisfying work is proper tool maintenance-specifically, sharpening. A properly sharpened shovel with a 15 bevel will penetrate soil with minimal effort, making gardening accessible even for those of modest strength. Similarly, a sharpened hoe slices through weeds effortlessly rather than requiring exhausting chopping motions.
Quality matters tremendously with garden tools. Commercial hardware stores or landscaper supply companies offer tools worth the investment, as cheap discount store versions prove frustrating and ultimately more costly. Good steel takes effort to sharpen but holds an edge longer, while poor steel dulls quickly but sharpens easily. A quality shovel should last 10-20 years of regular use before wearing thin.
The combination shovel offers the best compromise for most gardening tasks-wide enough to move material but narrow enough to dig effectively. Long handles are essential for most adults to avoid back strain. The common garden hoe with its rectangular blade attached to a swansneck proves the most versatile hoeing tool, efficiently cutting weeds just below the soil surface, loosening crusted soil, making planting furrows, and hilling up crops like potatoes.
Beyond these basics, a few essential items complete the gardener's toolkit: a quality wheelbarrow with wooden handles and pneumatic tire (a 20-year investment if properly maintained), a 5-6 quart sprayer with interchangeable brass nozzle inserts, sharp paring knives for precise seedling thinning, and several buckets for various uses including fertigation.
Tool care remains a forgotten art in our consumer society. After use, wireBrush tools clean and apply a light oil coating. At season's end, coat wooden handles with warmed coconut oil to prevent roughening, splitting, and shrinking. These simple maintenance practices extend tool life dramatically while improving their function.
Capítulo 5
Breaking the Garden Center Cycle
On spring weekends, garden centers overflow with customers making several major mistakes simultaneously. The familiar ritual plays out as people mob these centers to "put in the garden" all at once when the last frost date approaches. They purchase seedlings of tomatoes, cabbage, broccoli, onions, lettuce, and squash, plus a few seed packets, investing considerable money in their hobby gardens.
The folly continues when they buy seedlings for vegetables that grow better directly from seed. What follows is predictable: some seedlings fail and are replaced, while successful ones often mature simultaneously, creating brief gluts rather than steady harvests. After calculating expenses against actual yields, many wonder why they bothered-yet return the following spring to repeat the cycle.
Most seedlings sold at garden centers have serious problems: they're often improperly hardened off, pot-bound or insufficiently rooted, mislabeled, or inappropriate varieties for home gardens. Some vegetables like carrots, beets, and cucurbits shouldn't be transplanted at all-they either fail to develop properly or get so severely set back that direct-seeded plants will catch up and produce just as quickly.
The solution is growing your own seedlings for only those crops that truly benefit from transplanting: tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants. For seedling soil, skip commercial potting mixes (often just decomposed bark with chemical fertilizers) and use your own garden soil mixed with compost or sphagnum moss. Add one cup of complete organic fertilizer per 3-4 gallons of mix. For pots, improvise with milk containers, paper cups, or newspaper cylinders.
This approach eliminates the need for greenhouses, heat mats, and expensive equipment while producing hardier plants already adapted to your garden's conditions. The ideal transplant should have roots just reaching the edges of its container, allowing it to grow immediately after planting, rather than being stunted for 7-10 days recovering from transplant shock.
Even more problematic than garden center transplants are their seed racks. Since the 1970s, "WalMartization" has degraded seed quality as retail chains squeeze seedrack companies' profits, forcing them to demand ever-lower prices from their suppliers. Primary growers, faced with demands for lower prices, must sacrifice quality-neglecting genetic uniformity and vigor. The result is seed that may germinate poorly or produce plants that don't match variety descriptions.
Capítulo 6
Finding Seeds Worth Growing
For serious gardeners, especially those depending on their garden for sustenance during hard times, quality seeds are essential. Each crop has limited "windows of opportunity" for planting, and poor seeds can waste these critical periods. The worst disappointment comes when seeds germinate but yield poorly, or grow weakly without giving gardeners time to resow.
An ethical vegetable seed business aims to help people become self-sufficient, healthier, and economically secure by providing seeds with high germination rates, varieties adapted to the buyer's climate, varieties suitable for homestead lifestyles rather than industrial agriculture, and honest descriptions of plant performance. This requires conducting variety trials, maintaining high germination standards, and ensuring regional adaptation.
No single catalog can ethically sell varieties that grow well everywhere. Seeds perform best when the supplier's trials grounds are in roughly the same climate zone as your garden. Major climate zones include: short-season (northern US/southern Canada), moderate (middle American states, east coast Australia south of Sydney, North Island NZ), warm (southern US states, coastal Australia north of Sydney), and maritime (west of Cascades, England, Tasmania, South Island NZ).
When buying seeds, look for companies that maintain in-house minimum germination standards significantly higher than legal requirements, perform germination tests twice yearly on all seed lots, and discard weak seed even though it's costly. Companies serving market gardeners and farmers typically maintain higher standards than those selling only to home gardeners, as commercial growers require more reliable performance.
Saving money on seeds requires understanding seed longevity and proper storage. Seeds consume their internal food reserves during dormancy-if stored too long, seedlings may emerge but die before establishing true leaves. Seed longevity follows a simple rule: every 10F increase in temperature plus 1% increase in seed moisture cuts storage life in half, while every 10F decrease plus 1% moisture reduction doubles it. For home storage, use silica gel desiccant in airtight containers like canning jars, kept refrigerated or in a cool, stable environment.
Capítulo 7
Watering Wisely in an Era of Scarcity
Before the 1930s, most vegetable gardens were grown without running water, as few farms had electricity. Our ancestors relied on natural rainfall patterns, careful crop timing, and moisture-conserving techniques passed down through generations. Today's intensive gardening methods have adapted to abundant piped water but may become impractical as water shortages increase with growing populations, climate change, and rising energy costs. This shift necessitates a return to more sustainable watering practices.
The key insight is that spacing dramatically affects water needs. The spacing table in Solomon's book presents four different approaches to plant spacing: from intensive beds requiring almost daily watering to widely-spaced drought-resistant configurations. For example, lettuce planted at 6-inch spacing needs frequent watering, while 12-inch spacing allows for weekly watering. Tomatoes at 18 inches require daily summer water, but at 4 feet apart can thrive on rainfall alone in many climates. While yields per square foot decrease slightly with wider spacing, the vegetables grow larger and more succulent, requiring less harvesting and cleaning time. A head of cabbage grown with wide spacing might weigh 8 pounds versus 3 pounds in intensive spacing.
A more pessimistic approach-spacing plants as if every year would be dry-provides security without sacrificing too much yield, as plants given more room grow larger. During unexpected drought, a gardener can reduce damage by bravely removing every second plant in each row, instantly reducing moisture consumption while providing double the capillary moisture to remaining plants. This technique works particularly well with root crops like carrots and beets, where thinning provides an early harvest while improving conditions for remaining plants.
The fertigation bucket offers a remarkably efficient way to deliver both moisture and nutrition below growing plants. This system combines fertilizer with irrigation water, typically using a 5-gallon bucket with small holes drilled near the bottom, buried between plants. In Oregon dry-gardening experiments, winter squash vines given just 20 gallons of fertigation water (applied in four 5-gallon doses between summer solstice and equinox) yielded 50 pounds each compared to 20 pounds from unfertigated plants. This technique is especially valuable for large plants like tomatoes, melons, cucumbers, squash, Brussels sprouts, cabbages, broccoli and peppers. The system works by delivering nutrients directly to the root zone while minimizing surface evaporation.
Understanding your soil's clay content through a simple jar test helps determine optimal watering frequency and volume. To perform the test, fill a quart jar one-third full with soil, add water, shake vigorously, and let settle for 24 hours. Sandy soil has less than 10% silt or clay; loam has 20-35% clay; and clayey soil has more than 35% clay. Sandy soils need frequent light watering, while clay soils benefit from deeper, less frequent irrigation. This knowledge helps prevent both underwatering and overwatering-both of which significantly reduce vegetable quality and yield. For example, tomatoes in sandy soil might need water every three days, while those in clay soil could go 7-10 days between waterings.
Capítulo 8
Composting for Self-Reliance
As resource competition increases, the real cost of soil amendments will likely rise substantially. Composting allows small-scale food growers to make their own fertilizer without livestock, mimicking nature's recycling process.
Despite organic gardening propaganda suggesting all compost is equally beneficial, quality varies dramatically. Good compost needs nitrogen content above 1.5%, proper mineral balance, and a C/N ratio below 15:1. Municipal compost (C/N around 25:1) generally lacks potency for vegetables. Low-grade compost (1.5% N, 20:1 C/N) barely feeds low-demand vegetables, medium-quality (2% N, 15:1 C/N) supports medium-demand crops, while high-quality compost (3%+ N, 12:1 C/N) can grow high-demand vegetables.
For gardens under 3,000-4,000 square feet without livestock, building one large compost heap annually in early autumn yields the best results. Solomon accumulates plant wastes and kitchen garbage throughout the year, allowing them to dry out in a pile. He builds the heap in layers: 8 inches of vegetation, a half-inch of soil, then manure or seedmeal, thoroughly watered. The finished heap should be 5-7 feet wide, at least 5 feet long, and 4-6 feet high.
A properly managed heap should heat to 125-135F within days-hot but not scorching-and begin to sag as fermentation progresses. After about five weeks, turn the heap, moving outside materials to the core and core materials to the outside. A finished heap should be dark brown, crumbly, pleasant-smelling, and show no recognizable original materials.
The hard truth is that no vegetable garden can operate as a closed system that generates enough organic matter to maintain itself-unless it's cover-cropped at every opportunity and every bit of organic material is recycled, including humanure. While farms can slowly increase soil organic matter levels, gardens cannot be self-sustaining without importing materials. This reality underscores the importance of developing local networks for organic materials before resource constraints make them difficult to obtain.
Capítulo 9
A New Approach to Garden Pests
Solomon approaches garden pests as guides to becoming a more skillful grower rather than enemies to battle. This paradigm shift transforms pest management from warfare to wisdom. Instead of planting exactly what you need, plant twice as much so pests could wipe out a third without affecting your harvest. This "abundance planning" strategy accounts for nature's unpredictability. Some years are simply difficult-insufficient sun, too much or too little rain, various diseases and pests-but planning for abundance ensures you'll still have enough to meet your needs.
Before rushing to pesticides, consider if the plant simply needs better nutrition. Pest attacks often indicate underlying nutrient deficiencies or stress. Often a foliar spray of fish emulsion and liquid kelp works better than "killer" solutions, providing immediate nutrients while strengthening the plant's natural defenses. When weather conditions are unfavorable, sow more seeds than needed as insurance-let nature thin the weaklings. This mimics natural selection processes and ensures the strongest plants survive.
The "American Sanitary System" that demands cosmetically perfect produce has created unrealistic expectations and unnecessary chemical interventions. A few holes in spinach leaves or scars on rutabaga skin don't affect nutrition or flavor. Research shows plants can lose about 10% of leaf area before production decreases, and aphids aren't problematic until they cover about 5% of the plant. Understanding these thresholds helps gardeners make informed decisions about when intervention is truly necessary.
For specific pest problems, Solomon offers practical solutions that minimize environmental impact while maintaining garden productivity. For aphids, try spraying them off with a strong stream of water from a hose or using insecticidal soaps made from natural fatty acids. For cabbageworms, handpicking works well in small gardens, while Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) provides targeted control without harming beneficial insects like bees and ladybugs. For root maggots, simple sawdust collars around plant stems create an effective barrier preventing flies from laying eggs on the soil. Companion planting with aromatic herbs like dill, basil, and marigolds can also deter many common pests.
The most effective pest prevention comes from healthy soil that produces resilient plants. Sir Albert Howard, founder of the organic farming movement, believed that plants become vulnerable to attack only after becoming unhealthy through poor nutrition or environmental stress. Solomon has observed this principle repeatedly in his decades of gardening experience-in variety trials, only poorly adapted Brussels sprouts get aphid damage while other varieties remain untouched, and even when disease attacks one tomato plant, others of the same variety touching it remain unaffected. This demonstrates that plant health, rather than pesticides, is the foundation of effective pest management.
Building soil fertility through organic matter, maintaining proper pH, ensuring adequate minerals, and choosing locally adapted varieties creates a robust garden ecosystem where plants can naturally resist most pest pressures. Regular soil testing, crop rotation, and observation of plant health indicators help gardeners address problems before pests become established.
Capítulo 10
Starting with Success: Easy Crops for New Gardeners
New gardeners should focus on easier vegetables rather than betting on more demanding crops. Kale stands as perhaps the most reliable vegetable for beginners-the most vigorous and cold-hardy of all brassicas, producing even when other cole crops fail. It can resume growing after thawing from temperatures as low as 6F (-14C), making it ideal for challenging climates.
Potatoes offer unparalleled food security, containing up to 11% protein (matching human breast milk) depending on variety and soil fertility. For planting, use "seed" consisting of two-ounce chunks cut from larger potatoes or whole small potatoes, each with at least two eyes. Space seed pieces 8-12 inches apart in rows about 36 inches apart, gradually hilling up soil around plants as they grow to prevent green potatoes while eliminating weeds.
Tomatoes, despite their reputation for difficulty, can thrive when given ample space (at least 4-foot spacing) and fertility. Their roots extend 5 feet from center and penetrate 42 inches deep-far more extensive than most gardeners realize. Indeterminate varieties grow continuously and need support; determinates are compact but have less flavor.
Beets and Swiss chard derive from the same wild Beta plant but were bred for different purposes-beets for sweet roots and chard for large leaves. Their deep root systems and moisture reservoirs make them excellent drought-tolerant vegetables that don't require highly fertile topsoil. With proper spacing, most varieties continue enlarging without becoming woody-Solomon has dry-gardened beets spaced one foot apart in rows four feet apart that grew to volleyball size and remained delicious after five rainless months.
Sweet corn benefits from more growing space than typically recommended-each plant should control at least 212 square feet of soil. This extra room allows for tillering (additional ear-bearing stalks) and helps plants withstand drought. Always plant corn in blocks rather than single rows to ensure proper pollination, as wind-carried pollen is heavy and doesn't travel far.
Legumes (beans and peas) are low-demand crops that leave soil in excellent condition. Bush varieties mature quickly while climbing types produce longer harvests with superior flavor. Peas tolerate frost and can be succession-planted in spring for continuous harvests. Beans require warmer soil and come in many specialized forms: snap beans, runner beans, dry beans, vegetable soybeans, lima beans, and southern peas.
These easier crops provide the foundation for a successful garden while building the skills needed to tackle more challenging vegetables like lettuce, carrots, onions, and celery-each with their own specific requirements for soil, timing, and care. By starting with these resilient crops and gradually expanding your repertoire, you'll develop the knowledge and confidence to grow a truly productive garden capable of sustaining your household through uncertain times.
